Storytelling With Analytics

Here are the essential documents you need to complete… Initiation Business Case: To justify the financial investment in your SharePoint Project, you need to write a Business Case. It lists the costs and benefits, so everyone knows what the return on investment will be. Feasibility Study: Before you kick-off your SharePoint Project, you need to determine whether your project is feasible, using a Feasibility Study. SharePoint Project Charter: You then need to document the objectives, scope, team, timeframes and deliverables in a SharePoint Project Charter. Planning SharePoint Project Plan: You need to create a Project Plan listing all of the tasks required to undertake your SharePoint Project from start to finish. Every task must be scheduled, so you know what needs to be done and when. Resource Plan: Next, you need to plan your resources by documenting the money, equipment and materials needed for your SharePoint Project. Quality Plan: You then need to set quality targets, so that the S...

Happy New Year All, I stumbled into an error "The search application for 'SharedServices' on server [SERVERNAME] is not provisioned. Confirm that the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service and Windows SharePoint Services Administration service are running on the server" when I tried to open search settings from my SSP site. After some little reasearch on the Internet, I came to find that most likely the config database cache was corrupt, and to resolve this, I had to clear the cache. So here is how I went about it: 1. Central Administration > Operations > Global Configuration > Timer job definitions > Application Server Administration Service Timer Job > Disable. 2. Then open windows administrative services (services.msc), stop Windows SharePoint Services Timer (aka OWSTIMER) 3. Navigate to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID and delete only the XML files from the directory, then open the cache.ini and change the number in it to 1. 4. Sta...

Let me save someone some time. So I was trying to run SharePoint Products and Technology Configuration Wizard for MOSS 2007, and during the course, I faced the error message, as seen from the screen dump above, "One or more types failed to load. Please refer to the upgrade log for more details". After alot of research, I came to learn that this was being caused by Office 2010 which was installed on the same machine as MOSS 2007. Therefore, the error went when I uninstalled Office 2010. Happy holidays ;)

The "SharePoint project scope" is all of the things that must be produced to complete a SharePoint project. These 'things' are called deliverables and you need to describe them in depth as early in the SharePoint project as possible, so everyone knows what needs to be produced. Take these 5 Steps to scope your SharePoint projects: Step 1: Set the Direction Start off by setting the direction for the SharePoint project. Do you have an agreed SharePoint project Vision, Objectives and Timeframes? Are they specified in depth and has your customer agreed to them? Does everyone in the SharePoint project team truly understand them and why they are important? Only by fixing the SharePoint project direction can you truly fix the SharePoint project scope. Step 2: Scope Workshops The best way to get buy-in to your SharePoint project scope is to get all of the relevant stakeholders to help you define it. So get your SharePoint project sponsor, customer and other stakeholders in a ...

While everyone else right now seems to be blogging about SharePoint 2010, I decided to blog a little bit about the previous product, SharePoint 2007. Recently, I had to develop a webpart that shows Tags from either a Site collection level or subsite level. I will give you the code but firstly, here is how it works: Assumining that you already have a library/list that has a choice field called Category(it can have any name), the webpart will search the site collection/subsite(depending on the scope you choose) for all columns that are named 'Category', and when found, will pull out the selected choices for display. Remember that this is a choice column, meaning that the choices will be repeatitive, and therefore, the more repeative the choices are, the bigger the font size of the Tag name will appear on the webpart. Secondly, the tags will get random colors on page load, while at the same time will be hyperlinked, and when you click on a tag, it will be passed to the Search and ...

As part of my Code|Influence projects, I embarked on developing and copyrighted an SMS powered application, that would receive text messages in form of SMS perform various types of functions based on the SMS content, and reply back to the sender the results via SMS. With the SharePoint passion in me, I then went further to see how this would work with SharePoint. With a proof-of-concept done, I finally can perform various SharePoint functions e.g create list items, kick off workflows, search etc...all via SMS. The good thing to note is that this SMS application's various operations that it can perform are so unlimited , including those outside the SharePoint world. For now, I will end here. Enjoy!

Not so much from the technical point of view, SharePoint Change Management is the process of monitoring and controlling changes within a SharePoint project. By managing the implementation of change, you can: • Reduce the impact of changes to the SharePoint project • Identify new issues and risks as a result of changes raised • Ensure that changes do not affect the SharePoint project's ability to achieve its desired objectives • Control the cost of change within the SharePoint project Change Management is comprised of the following processes: Step 1: Identify Change: The first step in the change process is to identify the need for change. Any team member can suggest a change to the SharePoint project, if he or she believes it is needed to keep the SharePoint project producing deliverables to the customer's specified requirements. After identifying a need for change, the team member records relevant information on a Change Request Form (commonly called a CRF), describing the chan...