Author: Robert Everatt

SharePoint, HTML5, Mobile Web & More

Robert Everatt / / Mobile

At this stage in the project, the appearance of SharePoint 2010 is not a high priority, however, I seem to have stumbled upon a great couple of blog posts buy a SharePoint blogger called Kyle Schaeffer (http://kyleschaeffer.com). He has created a SharePoint 2010 HTML 5 masterpage to replace the default masterpage, with the aim to dramatically improve SharePoint responsive web design. Kyle provided all the files to give this a go ourselves, so we thought we’d give it a crack in SharePoint Online, here was the result:

This is a massive change from our default SharePoint 2010 masterpage which can be seen here:

Aside from the fact that it looks like something straight out of  wordpress, it does improve the sites visual appeal (you don’t have agree with me), it even creates a great mobile view of the website (something that currently looks painfully boring). The site has been created to be extremely responsive, the content on the site is programmed to rearrange itself depending on the size of the screen, this allows it to be easily viewable on a mobile phone screen without sacrificing any content or style.

Of course, what you see in the first screen shot isn’t what we have to have our portal like, this merely proves that we can use Common Web Design within SharePoint 2010 in the future. This find will help us greatly in the future when we start to look at themeing SharePoint 2010, but for now we return to the PID.

If you would like to read the blog post for yourselves you can find it right here: http://kyleschaeffer.com/sharepoint/v5-responsive-html5-master-page/

There are a couple of other useful reads on his site dealing with mobile SharePoint and responsive design here http://kyleschaeffer.com/best-practices/responsive-layouts-using-css-media-queries/ and here http://kyleschaeffer.com/events/html5-css3-mobile-strategy/

An article for creating custom CSS and masterpages in SharePoint 2010 just appeared on Nothing But SharePoint: https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/Create-Custom-CSS-and-Master-Page-in-SharePoint-2010.aspx

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SharePoint 2010 PDF iFilter

Robert Everatt / / 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

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The Next 6 Months

Robert Everatt / / Project Updates

Michael, myself, Dave and Tim had a meeting last Friday discussing the future of the project. In this meeting we made a basic plan for the next six months of the project.

Firstly, we need to complete the Project Initiation Document (PID) to the best of our abilities within the next two weeks before our meeting with the Projects team, so they can go through it with us, fill in any gaps that we weren’t able to fill and correct any mistakes that we may have made.

To acquire the servers that are needed for the project, we will have to fill in a ‘Work Package’ form, detailing the specifications of the servers that we require, this will need to be done fairly soon so we can get started on the project as soon as possible. When we have the servers, Tim will help us in setting them up and configuring them for our and the universities needs.

First step for Michael and I will be to create a sandbox area for ourselves to create a ‘demo’ of SharePoint 2010’s capabilities. This will be to show users essentially what SharePoint 2010 is and what it can do. While we are doing this we will be working with Project Services to acquire Registry’s requirements within SharePoint 2010. As the Registry department is the first department we will be setting SharePoint 2010 up for, we will need to know what they need from it, so we can create the appropriate space and workflows for them within the service. We will at some point be holding some presentation and training sessions for members of the registry department, this will be to show them what can be done with SharePoint 2010 and give them some idea of what they can get out of SharePoint. The training sessions will most likely be held later on in the project, to teach people how easy it is to make a WorkFlow.

SharePoint 2010 Migration Project

Robert Everatt / / Project Updates

The next part of our project begins here. For those of you who are unfamiliar with out project, Michael and I have been researching the possibility of migrating the University’s current SharePoint 2003 Portal to SharePoint 2010. As the project progresses we will continue to update the blog to document our work and to inform you of the development of the project.

We have been in the research stage of the project for the last 9 months and are about ready to move onto the implementation stage. Over the next few weeks we will be working on the Project Initiation Document, this will detail the steps that we will be carrying out throughout the project.

If you are interested in the SharePoint project, feel free to subscribe to the project blog to find out how the project is going.