SHARE Conference 2013 Recap and Slides #share4biz

I attended SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users in Atlanta on April 10-12.  Once again it was an excellent conference.  Last year three colleagues and I attended as attendees and we brought a lot of ideas and valuable information back to our organization.  This year it was my pleasure to actually co-present a session with my coworker Kristi Chambers (@kristichambers) called Enabling Your SharePoint Champions for User Adoption Success.

I had all intentions of writing a nice long recap of the conference, but time seems to have gotten away from me! For complete conference highlights, I would suggest taking a look at the following articles by Bamboo Solutions:

Product Review: harmon.ie 4 - Bringing Office 365 to the Mobile Enterprise

With more organizations adopting Yammer or moving their SharePoint offering to the cloud, users need a way to seamlessly interact with colleagues and work with their SharePoint documents without going to disparate locations to perform their day-to-day tasks.  This was one of the cool new capabilities that harmon.ie has implemented into their latest product release - harmon.ie 4.0 - which was released earlier today.

Among the many new features in harmon.ie Version 4.0 include:

• Office 365 and SharePoint app for the Blackberry 10
• Mobile security enhancements
• Yammer support (Outlook and OWA only)
• Document preview (Outlook only)
• SkyDrive Pro integration with offline capability and synchronization 
• Native office web apps support on iOS (Android coming soon)
• Support for Office 365 file sharing

Product Review: MetaVis Power User Edition - Empower Your Users

MetaVis Technologies has created an arsenal of tools in a single platform to make the lives of SharePoint architects, admins, and power users easier.  Their initial modules were primarily targeted to those in the information architect role, offering tools to assist with metadata design and classification of data in SharePoint.  In fact, their name comes from the terms "Metadata Visualization."

MetaVis recently launched Power User Edition which was created as an entry level SharePoint Migration Toolset that includes support for uploading files and moving or copying content within SharePoint including Office 365.  With a completely agentless install, it is designed for site owners and information workers who don't need all the fancy information architecture and security features of the Enterprise MetaVis Platform; but for those who simply want to move their files around and reclassify their data.

Community reviewers needed for upcoming jQuery, JavaScript, and SharePoint book

I'm very excited to be one of nine great authors contributing to a new book on jQuery, JavaScript, and the SharePoint interface (we haven't chosen a title for the book yet).  The idea is that these solutions should be so simple to implement that even your dog could do it.

OK, maybe not quite that easy.  But most of the solutions will be targeted towards site owners who have no advanced coding knowledge or access to Visual Studio.  If you have the proper permissions on a SharePoint site, you should be able to implement these solutions directly through the user interface.

Clever use of the Search Box web part in SharePoint 2010

This is something I stumbled on completely by accident, however it turns out that it's a cool use of the Search Box web part.  Did you know that you could direct the Search Box web part to any page you wish, and it doesn't have to be a standard SharePoint search results page?  In this post I will show you how I configured it to send the search query to a page containing a Business Connectivity Services (BCS) list as the target results page.

We have a search area at the top of our Intranet home page that allows users to search for site content, people, and dealers (see figure 1). 

SharePoint 2010 Usability Report Card

Many people complain about the usability and lack of user-friendliness of SharePoint, so I thought I'd examine the interface against standard website usability principles and see how it stacks up.

Before I get started, I want to highlight a great book on website usability titled "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.  Krug's number one rule is so important that he named his entire book after it.  Basically he is saying that websites should be self-evident, obvious, and self-explanatory.  Users should not have to think about what they are doing because they should just know what to do; it should be that obvious.  And every time they have to think it sways their confidence and trust in your website just a little bit more.  So if you want to learn more about website usability in general, I highly recommend reading his book.  It's a light, easy, funny read and does not go into a lot of usability theory or other boring stuff.  It's just a lot of common sense things that you probably already know but never really thought about before.

SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users

I want to do a quick shout out to the SHARE Conference in Atlanta! They will be back in the beautiful Marriott Marquis hotel again this year on April 10-12.

I've been to several SharePoint conferences and SHARE is one of my favorites. The unique thing about the SHARE Conference is that it's built for the business community, by the business community.  You won't see any developer or admin sessions there; it specifically targets the business users of SharePoint.

10 Ways to Make a Splash in the SharePoint Community

The end of the year is here, so it seems appropriate to publish some kind of "10 things" list.  This year I'll share ten things you can do that can help you stand out in the SharePoint global community.

I went from a virtual unknown in the SharePoint community to a prominent contributor in just over a year's time.  I joined Twitter in August of 2010; however I didn't really start actively tweeting until summer of 2011.  I started my blog in August of 2011, and I posted my first article to NothingButSharePoint.com in December of the same year, just over a year ago.  Since then I've amassed over 4,500 followers on Twitter, more than doubled my LinkedIn connections, contributed more than 15 articles to NothingButSharePoint.com and NothingButBranding.com, and have either spoken at or made plans to speak in the future at various user group meetings, SharePoint Saturdays, and SharePoint conferences.

I'm speaking at the SHARE Conference in Atlanta

SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users will be back in Atlanta in 2013 at the Marriott Marquis hotel on April 10-12. The SHARE Conference is built for the business community, by the business community. It specifically targets business users rather than the technical users (admins and developers) of SharePoint. Conference organizers have spent a substantial amount of time conducting round table discussions and interviews with business users across the country over the past year, and they came up with their Hot Topics list. It is essentially a summation of all the topics that business users are struggling with on a day-to-day basis and hope to learn more about. All sessions have been formulated around these topics.

My Slide Decks from SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities #SPSTC

SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities was held on Saturday, November 3, 2012 in Bloomington, Minnesota.  There was a huge turnout once again; I haven't heard the final tally but I believe there were over 450 attendees.

I had the privilege of presenting two sessions, one solo and the other one with my friend Kerri Abraham (@KerriAbraham).  As a first time speaker at SharePoint Saturday, I must say that it was an amazing experience.  Both sessions were very well-attended and I had a total blast.  Thanks to everyone who attended both sessions!