SharePoint Summit Toronto 2013

I’ll be speaking at the Toronto SharePoint Summit 2013 again this year. My topic is “A No-Hype Approach to Choosing and Using Cloud Services with SharePoint”.

I’ll be doing a really-practical deep-dive into SharePoint and related cloud services. I’ll talk about best practices, issues, opportunities and risks for using cloud-hosted business and infrastructure services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Yammer, CloudShare, and other popular offerings, with SharePoint. I am putting together a lot of real-world examples and facts that we have found at StoneShare. It’s going to be wide-ranging and cover compliance issues, branding and user experience, popular service offerings, integration and platform decisions, up-front and hidden costs, and business and IT benefits. Phew!

The good folks at Toronto SharePoint Summit also want to get the word out – so if you are interested in attending the conference, come to SharePoint Summit 2013 – Toronto.

Here’s a blurb on the event:

This year in Toronto, there is an exceptional speaker lineup with some of the top industry known SharePoint influencers and MVPs including Andrew Connell as the keynote speaker.

Benefits for your organization include:

- Learning about the SharePoint 2013 platform and its new features

- Understanding the power and potential of SharePoint

- Discovering and exploring the options for deploying SharePoint in the Cloud

- Improving your understanding of information architecture

- Understanding key SharePoint modules and how they can support solving your business problems

- Cases studies of companies that have implemented SharePoint solutions

- Discovering the best development approaches when dealing with SharePoint

You can register here. Hope to see you there!

How To: In Place Record Views in SharePoint 2010

One of the great new features in SharePoint 2010 is the In Place Record declaration. This allows a user to apply Records management to any file in a document library.

To enable this feature, you must first activate the In Place Records feature in your site collection. Next, for a given library, go to its settings and choose “Record Declaration Settings”. Choose “Always allow the manual declaration of records”.

 

This will allow the Declare Record button to appear in the ribbon.

Now that you have a collection of records and documents in the library, you will probably wish to sort them using views. I like to create two extra views: Active (which means all active documents or “non-records” and All Records (which means anything declared as a record).

It is easy to create the views once you know the steps. The following steps come from my colleague Hoking:

To make the views, you need to first enable in-place records management in the library settings.  Then you need to actually declare 1 document as a record manually - this is in order to get the "Declared Record" field visible in the create/modify view pages.  For the Active view, filter on Declared Record equal to [blank], as in don't enter a value for the field.  For the All Records view, set the filter on Declared Record not equal to [blank].

Hope that helps!

I've been working a bit with one of my colleagues, Slava, developing web parts and deploying them using Features. One issue that cropped up was how to remove the custom web parts from the Web Part gallery and any websites if the feature was subsequently deactivated. This kind of feature cleanup isn't something that can be done without custom code.

The solution Microsoft has provided is to create an event receiver called a Feature Receiver class for the feature. When tiggered, custom code can do any kind of setup, cleanup, or other job that might be required.

There are four events in the Feature life-cycle that can be triggered:

1. FeatureInstalled
2. FeatureUninstalling
3. FeatureActivated
4. FeatureDeactivating

At a high level the steps needed to create a Feature Receiver are:

1. Create a strongly-named feature receiver assembly containing a class inheriting from SPFeatureReceiver
2. Add custom code to the appropriate feature receiver methods
3. Deploy the assembly to the GAC on the SharePoint server(s) where the feature is deployed
4. Add a reference to the Feature Receiver assembly and class in the Feature.xml file
5. Deploy the feature
   

The Microsoft SDK explains Features and feature receivers in detail. In the particular case that we ran into, Zac Smith has a great example explaining how to deprovision the web parts.