Mastering SharePoint Day 2

Welcome to Day two into my Classroom Journey into “Mastering SharePoint “ led by Bob Mixon. The notes from today may be a little more jumbled over yesterday. There were also lots of other things going on, including some labs.

Sites and Navigation Structures

What is a SharePoint Site? Make sure when you are thinking about it you separate content from visual representation. They are very different. Content is rendered on pages using HTML, controls and web parts.

Important: once a site is created the Site cannot be changed to use a different site Definition.

Site Template VS Site Definition

· Definition sitting on the file system…

· Template is what’s in the content db.

There was a ton more on this obviously. Bob walked through how all this works in moving from the file system, to the content db etc. But if you want a detailed explanation of that, I guess you will have to take the class J

This whole process is still a tad confusing. I need to learn more about the differences. I guess that will take some post class researching.

Be aware that Modifying Site Definitions = bad

You used to have to work a great deal with these in the 2003 days. However now you have features. Now you can deploy a new site “blank” and then activate the feature to it. Now you don't have to work with site stuff. This is a very Interesting idea to me. I like it. You can Staple features to a site…I hope we learn that. Google “Feature Stapling” for more info. Or once again “Take the class”

Take note: It also appears that Bob is going to be coming out with a new branding class that will be available online that will help you with this as well as doing the other stuff necessary. I am signing up…

I love features. You can activate a feature that creates a bunch of lists and libraries, then de-activate it and have it remove them again. That’s just awesome job MS. (Was that out loud?)

So what site template do you choose when creating a new site? Bob says start with a publishing site. He is the 3^rd MOSS “Expert” that has told me that or a variety of that. So it must be a good way to go. However be aware that if you start with a publishing site and later you want to save it as a template you will not be able to. You would be forced to do the Features Stapling. Keep that in mind.

Next we broke down every site template and went through their purpose and what was in them a valuable exercise. It does help you understand why you would use each one. Too much content to post here but if I can get the spreadsheet I will.

Important NOTE: Deploy an Enterprise Site Directory in Every Site Collection it will be valuable to you. You can only have 1 per site collection.

Site Navigation:

A very interesting topic, we talked a lot about how site structure affects content, and navigation and how the 3 can be very inter-related. Make sure that you think about this. If you customize navigation too much to make it fit within the content you can get into a situation where you are bypassing a great feature of MOSS called Security Trimming.

Personal Sites:

Not something I have used heavily and he stressed that these are very good at letting the human and or social aspects of SharePoint. People can create their own persona. They can talk about themselves, and have skills advertised and work with each other based on that. There are a lot of good options with Personal Sites, document sharing and even the possibility of having people share most of the documents on there. I think it is an Interesting idea. One thing to remember from an architecture perspective A personal Site collection is a Site Collection in itself, and should be thought of as such.

Talking about My Sites..We got into a discussion of global deployments, I found it very surprising the amount of disinformation out there on the bad parts of a global deployments. It was a heated discussion, the person who started the conversation is going to post a thread to www.masteringsharepoint.com so check it out and follow it there.

Planning for Sites and Navigation

Your SharePoint environment will GROW. Keep this in mind when planning. It will probably grow more than you think. If you don't wrap governance around it and control (hopefully with some K2) it will definitely grow probably grow out of control.

Some Q’s

· Are you going to use Single Site Collections or Multiple

· Who will administer each Site Collection

The good thing with one site collection is that a lot of out of the box tools and web parts is that they are usually scoped to a site collection so not a lot of custom dev work is required. But if you create multiple there are other good parts but there may be some custom dev work to be done since you need to do some things that go outside the site collection bounds.

I advise you to Do some research on these choices or (start broken record) take the class.

So how do you plan for site collections? Ask yourself some questions and have answers to the following

· What is the purpose

· Who is the owner

· Who can access it from a visitor or read perspective

· Who can participate or contribute. (Who needs write access)

· What type of template is needed

· How will it be surfaced in search?

What about sites and information architecture…

· How to structure

· How will data be presented

· How will people navigate

· How will you target the information in this site to people

· How will search be optimized?

Planning for Sites and its contributors

Remember If ITS NOT EASY THEY WONT USE IT..

I cannot emphasize this enough. IT IS HUGE. This is true for just about everything in IT, building an application, a process, a SharePoint site etc.

· Eliminate time consuming steps

· Make sure you keep things to the minimum. Do not expect people go through hurdles to get information in.

· People should easily know where to put something.

· They should have a small subset of sites they go to. Do not make them navigate a huge structure just to participate.

So what about the CONSUMERS?

If it is not EASY to locate it won’t be found and thus not be used.

Consider thinking about this from a user’s perspective. Imagine yourself as a new employee, and think where would I find x or y or z? Maybe a good idea here is to ask a friend or spouse to help you. I am sure they would be oh so willing.

Thinking about stuff like this is very difficult and we need to break out of our habits and try to eliminate the "curse of knowledge". If you don't know what that is I suggest you do some reading. It will help you in many areas for planning and communicating. Google that term and you will find some great resources.

Some good ones I just found by googling

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=F0612A

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-curse-of-knowledge-why-communication-at-work-is-sometimes-difficult/

It is also gone over in a GREAT book

http://www.madetostick.com/

Its good reading for lots of reasons

A good point was raised here. Kind of out of place but good none the less. If you are in a situation were politically you have to make someone an administrator of a site, here are 2 important rights to remove. (Rights to create sites, rights to set security perms) remove these 2 and it is much more palatable to give all others and call them administrators…Good political move.

Some other good planning tools

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73282&clcid=0409

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73148&clcid=0x409

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73138&clcid=0409

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73146&clcid=0409

These are starters, just to give you an idea of what to do. However these docs may not work well for larger projects as they layout and space is not that conducive. Maybe take these and use a SharePoint site in DEV to manage it and use it for reference.

Then you can EAT YOUR OWN DOG FOOD. If you find it hard to use, your users will too.

AHHH Its LUNCH TIME. I am impressed with the food. Good job Bob…

And then it’s LAB TIME!!! We are going to start creating some sites and site structure

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Content Classification and Categorization

· Content Types (A form of Classification)

· Sites (A form of categorization)

Content types you can think of as a way to define your objects. These can be such things as metadata, different behaviors, and policies

Sites are basically a container for grouping content, and they also provide you a means to provide a security context around that content.

I really think that overall Content types are going to be one of the most important aspects of your SharePoint design, how you create these and the relationships you use for your data, files etc. Content types are going to dramatically affect the results of the ending product. It will affect how you find, and create your data along the way. Make sure you understand them

Content Types directly relate to business data entities

An interesting point about content types and using them, the Content Type is typically scoped to a site collection but Bob says you can wrap a content type into a feature and deploy to a farm. I must find out more about that…..

I love the idea of content types and associating behaviors with it. Polices, expirations, workflows etc. Good that if you want to associate a workflow with content type you cannot do it in OOB workflow or SPD. However with K2, wammo no problem. J

How do you know when to create content types?

Determine the goals for why you would do it. Remember that 30% of your info is classified? If it is not going to be an item that will be needing to be easily surfaced, searched and sliced and diced up. If you do not need to do this then you do not need to classify it as such and thus not need it to be a content type. So for example if you are going to be storing lots of customer contracts either in a single place or multiple places, and you are going to want to quickly and easily get at this info, filter it, search it or other. Then you have to apply some taxonomy and the best way to do that is Content Types.

Good TIPS

· Never have the same name of the content type in different places with a different meaning. Has nothing to do with SharePoint but rather the ease of use and ability for rollup and taxonomy. Good Tip.

· 99% of all content types should be created at the highest level. If you walk through rollups, and cascading of content types where they keep building on each other through inheritance if makes a ton of sense.

Lists and List content types.

This is pretty interesting stuff. When you create a new Announcement list it automatically creates a list and associates a announcements content type with it. Is each list just a raw list with a content type applied? That is kind of neat. Good architecture.

Go to any list and change it to be allowing management of content types, when you do that you will see the content types associated with it. This really helps you understand the whole list thing. Even a blank list will have a content type of Item.

I recommend you go through the site content types and look through how they are arranged and what ones are there. Some interesting things you can learn and this will help you plan yours

Site Content Types and List Content types:

Site content types are the actual definition. The schema, the core. Yet it has not been used.

The second you associate a site content type with a List or library it is copied and become a List content type. There is a loose coupling there, so if you make changes to the site content type it will propagate to the list. You can break this by modifying the list content type. But this will break that link.

MAJOR POINT. DO NOT MODIFY THE DEFAULT CONTENT TYPES!!!

ALSO NEVER CHANGE A DEFAULT SITE COLUMN

There is soooo much with regards to all the little differences behind the scenes with Content Types, Fields, Columns etc. The great thing is how inter-related they actually all are. And its all done for some very good architecture purposes and how SharePoint is built. When you really dig in and learn its actually quite well done. It’s also a good idea on a very structured site, to never just go into a list or library to create an ad-hoc column. It then will be broken from the Site Content type template. You should go to that content type at the site level and add the column. I wish I had done this a few time in my environment

Information Management Policies.

Did you know that with any content type you can also setup information management policies to be associated with that content type? Makes it much easier to manage don't you think?

Some additional info on Management policies

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms499244.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms549876.aspx

Planning content types

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287765.aspx

A cool codeplex tool on content types

http://www.codeplex.com/moss2k7ctypesviewer

Have I said much lately how much I love CodePlex?

Obviously Check out Bobs Blog and the Mastering SharePoint site

www.masteringsharepoint.com

www.bobmixon.com/blog

Well let’s call it a day. More to come tomorrow I am sure.