SharePoint 2010 Research – SharePoint 2010

Breadcrumbs

Michael Bratley / May 1, 2013 / SharePoint 2010 Research

The current University portal uses a common method of navigation, the breadcrumb trail. In SharePoint 2010, the OOB breadcrumb only shows links within its own site, and does not show higher level sites. With some slight modification to the root master page this can be changed to display links right from the root site.

To start you should open Microsoft SharePoint designer, and check out the Master Page that your site is using. You should then add the code below to show a full breadcrumb trail.

If you do not want to have the trail to show all links right up to the root, you can change “-1” (default to show all), to what ever you wish.

<asp:SiteMapPath runat=”server” PathSeparatorStyle-CssClass=”breadcrumbdivider” PathSeparator=”” ParentLevelsDisplayed=”-1″ RenderCurrentNodeAsLink=”true”/>

You will need to either remove or comment out (if you like to play things safe) a line of code to avoid repetition in your breadcrumb trail.

<SharePoint:SPLinkButton runat=”server” NavigateUrl=”~site/” id=”onetidProjectPropertyTitle”><SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property=”Title” runat=”server”/></SharePoint:SPLinkButton>

You will finally need to add some custom CSS to style your breadcrumb separators. You should create a CSS class to provide space for the background image to be displayed.

.breadcrumbdivider {

backgound-image:url(”www.example.com/image.png’);

background-repeat:no-repeat;

background-position:1px 8px;

margin-left:4px;

margin-right:4px;

padding:5px;

}

You will need to host your chosen image on the server, and then specify the url in the CSS. Once you have done this, you will have something similar to this.

Modified SharePoint 2010 Breadcrumb Trail

My Sites are not for everyone

Robert Everatt / April 11, 2012April 12, 2012 / SharePoint 2010 Migration, SharePoint 2010 Research

My Sites is a feature that was introduced in SharePoint 2007, this feature has also been carried in to SharePoint 2010. My Sites is SharePoint’s answer to social networking, the ‘Facebook’ for SharePoint. They proved a user with their own personal profile which can be viewed by other users on the SharePoint network. this profile can store public and private documents and information, users can friend other users and view status updates from them. It will even show what documents the user has ‘liked’ on the portal.

My Sites could be a useful feature for the university, but we might not want everyone to use it, like students as they have no need for it. So today I set out to see if we could choose who gets a My Site and who doesn’t. Turns out it’s pretty easy.

From Central Administration you go to ‘Manage service applications’ then in the ribbon bar click ‘Manage’ then ‘User Profile Service Application’, finally in the ‘People’ menu, click ‘Manage User Permissions’. A window will then pop up where you will be able to select groups and un-check the ‘Create Personal Site’ box. Once you have done this, this user will no longer be able to use My Sites.

To get to the same option in SharePoint Online, simply go to the administration area, click ‘Manage SharePoint’, ‘Manage User Profiles’ and then ‘Manage User Permissions’. Simple.

Out of the Box SharePoint Server 2010 Workflows

Michael Bratley / March 13, 2012 / SharePoint 2010 Research

SharePoint 2010 offers the following workflows out of the box, ready to be used.

Workflow	Description
Approval	Routes a document for approval. Approvers can approve or reject the document, reassign the approval task, or request changes to the document.
Three State	Track the status of a list item through three states (phases). It can be used to manage business processes that require organisations to track a high volume of issues or items, such as customer support issues, sales leads, or project tasks. For example, the three states for a project task could be, Not Started, In Progress, and Finished.
Collect Feedback	Routes a document for review. Reviewers can provide feedback, which is compiled and sent to the document owner when the workflow has completed.
Collect Signatures	Gathers signatures needed to complete an Office document. This workflow can be started only from within an Office client.
Disposition Approval	Manages document expiration and retention by allowing participants to decide whether to retain or delete expired documents.
Group Approval	Similar to the Approval workflow, but uses a designated document library and offers a personalised view of the approval process(es) in which a user is participating. This workflow provides a hierarchical organisation chart from which to select the approvers and allows the approvers to use a stamp control instead of a signature. This solution was designed specifically for East Asian Markets.
Transition Management	Manages document translation by creating copies of the document to be translated and assigning translation tasks to translators.
Issue Tracking	Manages the issue tracking process by creating tasks for Active issues assigned to users who own to a given issue. When the task related to an issue is complete hence resolving the issue, the creator of the issue is assigned a review task so that the issue can be closed.

* Information currently varies over which workflows are available out of the box in SharePoint Server 2010. As development progresses this table will be updated.

SharePoint 2010 PDF iFilter

Robert Everatt / March 9, 2012 / SharePoint 2010 Migration, SharePoint 2010 Research

I’ve recently learnt that SharePoint 2010 surprisingly does not crawl the contents of PDF files (Does not search through the contents of PDF files). It seems odd that SharePoint is not capable this as PDFs will be the desired document format on SharePoint 2010.

Fortunately for us this can be fixed. Adobe have released a tool that can be installed into the SharePoint 2010 server, called iFilter. one this is installed the search function will be able to crawl the contents of PDFs. This is a server side installation so it will not require the user to do anything at all and it will be one of the first features that we will be installing, just to get it out of the way.

Install instructions can be found at https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/itpro/Pages/Install-Adobe-PDF-iFilter-for-SharePoint-2010.aspx