Six Mobile Features for the Enterprise

Let’s face it, mobility should absolutely be on your radar if you’re an IT executive or decision maker. Whether your firm has a substantial investment in mobile devices for the workforce or you’ve adopted modern BYOD policies, you cannot ignore the impact of mobile devices on how we do business. Microsoft knows this, and has been hard at work to upgrade SharePoint’s plumbing in relation to the mobile experience.

The below list comprises some of the notable, new features Microsoft has developed for SharePoint 2013. This isn’t really a list for any particular type of user; it’s just a general overview of how Microsoft is adding to the feature set. The list is ranked based on my opinion of relevance and value to the organization.

1. Contemporary View

The first feature that will grab everyone’s eye is the new HTML5 view that is best suited for mobile devices. Think of it as a mix between the boring and lifeless classic view from SharePoint 2010 and the new metro look and feel for SharePoint 2013.

What you get is a clean and highly compatible UI that should work on just about any device supporting HTML5. A new site feature handles whether or not mobile devices are automatically routed to this view or not, so it couldn’t be easier to deploy for IT pros. (Figure 1)

Figure 1

Figure 2

2. Device Channels

Here’s a gem for site managers and devs. You now have the ability to render content for the appropriate device without having to duplicate the content itself. This functionality lets you serve up the same content with multiple master pages, page layouts and style sheets. If all goes well, you should be able to support most of the mobile devices in your firm with a lot less overhead than with 2010. The current list of compatible mobile browsers is available on the Microsoft Technet site.

3. Better Office Web Apps UX with Touch Support on Tablets

Working with Office Web Apps on a mobile device in SharePoint 2010 left a lot to be desired. Editing documents was not really possible on many devices and browsers (without a hack), which left users with the ability to basically view only.

Fig. 3

Flash forward three years, and the dominance of information workers working on the go has caused Microsoft to revamp their offerings. Unless you were living under a rock, you should already be familiar with the big push Microsoft is making for the new web-based versions of the popular Office apps. (Fig. 3)








The new UI sports bigger buttons, gesture support, context menus (rejoice!), support for touch, mouse and keyboard input, and many more cool features. I don’t expect the experience to be any different coupled with SharePoint 2013, so you can test drive the experience now with SkyDrive or Office 365.

4. Push Notification Support for Mobile Applications

Push notifications have become staple features for mobile applications and the devices that support them, so it’s not shocking that Microsoft is now supporting this with SharePoint 2013. This feature requires adoption though from 3rd party developers or internal custom development.

The end result is that your device will be able to receive notifications from SharePoint lists and sites. For instance, a new document is uploaded in a library that you’re following, and the notification service sends your device a notification. Simple, yet necessary for today’s mobile devices

5. Support for PerformancePoint & Excel Services Reports on iPads

This is probably the least impressive new feature, because Microsoft only suggests that “certain kinds” of reports will be viewable on mobile devices. Since we don’t have an RTM build yet, I can’t say really what those reports will be. To further limit the exposure of this new feature, it’s apparently only available for iOS 5 iPads. To even further confuse you, Microsoft says on another page that “PerformancePoint dashboards can now be viewed and interacted with on iPad devices using the Safari web browser.” That seems to suggest that all PP dashboards can be viewed in Safari.

Regardless of what functionality actually makes it to RTM and beyond, it’s nice to know that we should be able to start interacting with dashboards, scorecards and maybe even some Excel BI/PowerPivot data on our iPads.

6. Geolocation Field Type Support

Although this is another “under the hood” feature of SharePoint 2013, it should have an interesting effect on using SharePoint with mobile devices in the future. Microsoft has added native support to geolocation fields which can be exposed through Visual Studio. By adding a geolocation field to a list, you can embed coordinates, which can then be rendered with Bing Maps. The obvious benefit here is the ability to use your GPS-enabled mobile device to plot your location in a SharePoint list.

Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud

Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises
or In the Cloud

Fresh from my first developer session at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, "Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud," I'm here to share a few of presenters Randy Drisgill and John Ross's tips for building a branded website in SharePoint 2013.

I was afraid entering the session that it would be code heavy, but was assured early on that there wasn't much code involved.
Agenda:

• Intro Branding On Premises and Online
• Low Effort branding
• Medium Effort branding
• High Effort branding
• SharePoint Online

Introduction

The talk begins with examples of branding, showing Microsoft logos that have changed over the years. Branding applies to all of your company's marketing and websites and can involve images, logos, CSS, etc.
Microsoft offers two plans, each with separate branding capabilities: small business plan and enterprise plan. It is interesting to see that Microsoft has different abilities on branding in the different plans.

The approach to branding is Low, Medium, High and apparently there is a fair amount of change beginning with the Medium Effort. When you reach the medium effort, it's time to bring in design manager.

Low Effort Branding

Page editor in SharePoint 2013 is pretty much the same as it was in SharePoint 2010: it still has the ribbon where you can add video, images, web parts, etc. I usually think that content publishing is important to get branding to look nice and create a good user experience.

Some of the new capabilities include composed looks — the themes have evolved and enable you to create themes with custom images and colors, master pages, etc.

My observation is that the default themes are pretty ugly. They actually looks a bit like editing a WordPress theme, but with less functionality, you choose your theme location, image url’s, master page url, and more. You can choose which fonts can be available in the editor, not sure that it's useful, but it's an option.

Medium Effort Branding

Medium effort branding brings the design manager into play. The design manager can be found in the site actions, but you need to have publishing activated on the site in order to locate it.

Basically you get your HTML and CSS uploaded to the design manager, then apply SharePoint objects like search. SharePoint designer is optional when using design manager, you are free to use whatever web tool to create your branding: notepad, Coda etc.
  
 Both the master page and the page layouts can be edited with your web tools.

You can use the snippets gallery to get your navigation, breadcrumbs, search boxes, title, logo, etc. into the HTML design by copying the snippet code from the snippet gallery into the HTML code, then adding your own CSS and branding to it.

All of this can be done in a sandbox solution before publishing.

In your master page gallery folder you can create a subfolder to store all of your branding assets. Keep it nice and simple so that it is easy to understand and manage. A good practice is to document what you do as well; you may need it if your servers crash.

Before you start adding snippets, publish a version of the HTML file, this will give you a master page in the theme folder. When you've done this, you can go into the snippets gallery and change the options on the snippets you want, copy the snippets code and add to the HTML file in the place you want it. When you click save the HTML file will update the master file automatically. Pretty sweet!

Important to remember here is that you need to brand all of your site templates that you use, if you don’t you will get an unbranded page when you search or similar.


CSS can be applied with a script editor web part, or added to your master page. The design manager also applies the CSS automatically.

Randy and John showed us some CSS tools, like F12 developer, Firebug for Firefox and more. I usually use them all to make sure the site works in all browsers. What is nice with Firebug and other tools is that you can change the CSS on the live site and see what the effect will be. When you have it right you can just copy it into the CSS file.

Full Effort Branding

Planning for full branding is more about governance of branding: you need to have vision, documentation, test specifications and a strategy for branding.

You need to remember that SharePoint foundation doesn’t have design manager. Also remember that when you brand collaboration sites, then MDS (Minimal Download Strategy) is on. But when you edit with design manager it turns that off. So if you want MDS to get up the speed then you need to create you brand the traditional way.

The content search web part can now be branded with HTML/CSS/java scripts.

SharePoint Online

Public facing websites in SharePoint Online is different, they have added ribbon tools to speed things like change the footer text and more to speed website loading times, but this is a discussion for another article.

SharePoint 2013 Extranet Collaboration Manager by SharePoint Solutions Released as Beta

The Extranet Collaboration Manager beta for SharePoint 2013 has just been announced by SharePoint Solutions, and as the SharePoint Conference 2012 gathers steam, the tool is ready to download for deploying and managing SharePoint extranets.

ExCM Updates

As with so many software updates, the issue here isn't new features, simply compatibility. With the release of something as huge as SharePoint 2013, many organizations will be looking for ways to upgrade in as painless a way as possible. For those eager to set up extranets for their partners and vendors in a SharePoint 2013 environment, the Extranet Collaboration Manager beta is the latest option for bridging the functionality gap left by Microsoft.

To build an extranet in SharePoint 2013, there is some heavy lifting to be done. SharePoint Solutions is offering a simpler way to do this, and its ExCM for SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Foundation 2013 offers features like helping solve login issues and facilitate simpler admin actions. (Fig 1)

Figure 1.
Manage extranets with the ribbon toolbar interface, and easily add a new user.

 

SharePoint Solutions has released new ExCM versions with each of the last two previous SharePoint upgrades. However, unlike when SharePoint 2010 debuted, SharePoint Solutions has not added any new features this time around.
ExCM for SharePoint 2013 offers the ability to deploy, secure and manage extranets, and also delegate routine admin tasks, register new users and support services to assist with set up.

SharePoint Conference 2012 Rundown

Day two of this year's Las Vegas based event is underway, and so far we've heard a bit about Microsoft's Yammer roadmap and an important new release from Webtrends analytics. We've also got some news from Axcelor on the Yammer front, and some special insights from SharePoint MVP Jennifer Mason.
The SharePoint Conference goes through Nov. 15, and there are still highlights to come this week from CMSWire. If you are at the event or if you need keynote highlights, we've got you covered.

Planning a Search Strategy

Planning a Search Strategy

 
The Olympic Games and US Presidential Elections come around every four years but SharePoint upgrades come on a three year cycle. There are still organizations using SharePoint 2007 and in the process of migrating to SharePoint 2010 and now we have SharePoint 2013 in all its glory.

Microsoft also seems to be hinting that in future there could be more frequent upgrades. Before long you will probably be able to major in Microsoft Upgrade and Migration Planning at most major universities.

My particular interest is in enterprise search and here I have to congratulate Microsoft on the progress it has made since the fairly terrible search functionality in SharePoint 2007. The company was also smart enough to go out and buy FAST Search and Transfer in 2008, but not quite smart enough about financial due diligence and building a sensible search technology strategy for itself and for SharePoint.

The Technology Story So Far

The immediate result was the arrival of FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010, abbreviated to FS4SP. This took a lot of the components of FAST ESP 5.3, suitably modified to SharePoint 2010, and offered a substantial enhancement to SharePoint Search 2010 which itself was a significant leap forward from the search offering in SharePoint 2007.

Two issues immediately became obvious. First, many companies were convinced that they now had a licence for FAST ESP 5.3 and had no idea of the real state of affairs. Second, no one in the Microsoft partner community had any idea of how to get the best (or indeed anything at all!) out of FS4SP. My experience says that not that much has changed since launch unless the company has brought in external implementation expertise.

In 2010 Wrox published "Professional Microsoft Search" by Mark Bennett and his colleagues that covered all the Microsoft search products (including FAST ESP 5.3) in 450 pages. It is an excellent book because of the substantial amount of guidance it gives on the skills and management attention needed to get the best out of any search application.

It was not until earlier this year that Microsoft itself published "Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint," which runs to 450 pages just on FS4SP. There are so many omissions from this book that it would take me the rest of this column to list them, but the most notable are no references at all to using search logs to manage search performance and a total absence of any indications of the staffing requirements to support the product. It creates the impression that search implementation is a project, when at the minimum it is a program and in reality it is a journey without end.

The other significant problem is that (unlike the Wrox book) the book does not tell you what FS4SP does not do. A good example is document thumbnails, which out of the box are only supported for Word documents and Powerpoint files. Certainly there are some good third-party solutions (Documill comes to mind) but that misses the point.

Fortunately there are many excellent search implementation companies (Comperio, Findwise, Raytion and Search Technologies for example) that can really make FS4SP sing and dance but that inevitably adds to the implementation cost. Even then, any company running FS4SP probably needs a search support team of at least 3-4 people full time. A look at Sadie van Buren’s invaluable SharePoint benchmarking service shows search way down the list in maturity of implementation.

Planning for 2013

Now comes FAST Search Server for 2013. Why Microsoft retains the FAST branding defeats me, especially as ESP has now gone out of mainstream support. Oracle bought BEA in 2008 but does not still use the brand name!

There are quite a number of enhancements, some of which are going to need careful attention in the upgrade from SP2010 to SP2013. Nicki Borell is in the middle of a good set of blog posts on the changes.

Remember that the search integration partners are going to need to get up to speed. It doesn’t matter how much support they get from Microsoft, they need to get hands-on experience from an initial set of customers willing to let them establish good implementation practice. Microsoft might not get round to publishing the book of the product until 2015.

As with all search technologies, it is not a case of making the best use of what SharePoint 2013 offers, but whether these features are of value to users given the content being searched and the use that they will make of the search application. A Ferrari F12berlinetta is a very high performance sports car but where do you put the suitcase for even a weekend away? Maybe you should stick with your Aston Martin DB9.

Even if you are not immediately thinking of a migration to SharePoint 2013, starting work on a search strategy should be a very high priority.