On Thursday, Oct. 3rd from 9– 10 am PDT / 12– 1 pm EDT, we will host a tweet jam to discuss trending issues and questions regarding SharePoint Workflows. In attendance will be Chris Beckett – certified SharePoint expert, author, trainer, and consultant. Chris has over a decade of experience building workflow solutions with SharePoint and will be there to contribute to discussions, provide answers to your questions and share some helpful tips! What Exactly Is a Tweet Jam?  A tweet jam is a one-hour discussion hosted on Twitter. The purpose of a tweet jam is to share knowledge and answer questions on an issue relevant to […]

I recently got a chance to touch base with Caroline Marwitz of SharePoint Pro magazine. Caroline provided a few very though provoking questions in an interview format that was then posted to SharePoint Pro Mag here: http://www.sharepointpromag.com/blog/sharepoint-pro-by-admins-devs-industry-observers-23/sharepoint-2013/sharepoint-designer—144254 It covers some of my thoughts on the current and future versions of SharePoint Designer. Check it out and provide some comments and your own thoughts if you have a few minutes.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 by itself is a great platform upon which a project manager can manage the projects. SharePoint offers several list types that, on their own are simple, powerful ways to track information and when you connect these lists together, you can product a project management hub. All you need to do this are the two free products: SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010. Complete Project Management course available here Check it out here: Project Management in SharePoint

The Edit Control Button (ECB) aka the context drop-down menu that appears for lists and libraries, as shown in the image below, is the way you can execute built in and custom actions on list and library items. A question that many people wonder about is: how can I move this menu so it appears on a different field instead of the default one? Well, wonder no more! Watch the video below to see how it’s done. One catch though: you will need SharePoint Designer 2010 (available for free) to make the change. Enabling and Disabling ECB menu on list/library […]

The Design View no longer exists in SharePoint Designer 2013. This changes the way we work with (or used to work with) all sorts of visual elements in SharePoint. I have been meaning to write this post for a very long time, but there is so much I want to say, I couldn’t find the time until now to hunker down and say it all (or at least most of it). So here we go. Note:  I have always been a visual kind of guy and I like to show things instead of just describing them. This post will be […]

MSDN article on Customizing SharePoint Online using SharePoint Designer 2010: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh428136.aspx Why use SharePoint Designer to customize SharePoint Online? In a nutshell, you only have 3 choices: Browser – limited amount of solutions can be created directly through the browser (can’t do things such as powerful workflows, BCS, data views to database data etc.) Visual Studio – within the enterprise, this is a very powerful tool for developers. However, in SharePoint online space, you can only use VS to create sandbox solutions or use the client object model. No farm based solutions SharePoint Designer – This is where the story […]

The much anticipated Office 365 was finally made available at the end of June 2011. It provides a great turn-key solution for organizations to provide all sorts of services like messaging, collaboration, online conferencing and document management to their personnel at an amazingly low price. Take a quick tour around the Office 365 interfaces by watching this video. The collaboration piece of the Office 365 pie is SharePoint Online. It’s basically SharePoint 2010 trimmed down to run ‘in the cloud’. Within your SharePoint Online environment, you can create multiple site collections for projects, departments, regions, business units or areas delegated […]

Do you learn best by watching examples/demonstrations? Do you want the ability to be able to watch the videos anywhere you are regardless of presence of an internet connection? If the answers to these are yes and yes then you might find that our DVD-ROM based video tutorials are just what you need! We are dedicating this newsletter to highlight our top DVDs and provide you with some more information on what you should expect to find inside of each video tutorial package.   SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is one of the Most powerful features […]

One of the main things that many of us ‘SharePoint people’ are responsible for is to display and manipulate data on SharePoint pages, right? All sorts of data – not just data from within SharePoint such as List and Library data, but data from databases, through web services, xml files and all other sorts of places. So how are you currently providing access to data to your end users? or I guess the better question to ask is ‘Are you the one doing this?’. Usually the answer is: ‘Our developers are taking care of it. It is not something that […]

We just released the new SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows DVD. The complete information on this DVD package is available here: https://www.visualsp.com/sharepoint-designer-2010-workflows-training-dvd/ There are four ways to implement workflows in your SharePoint sites: 1) Use the browser and built in workflow templates – A great way to start making simple workflows. Doesn’t require any other tools other than the browser. 2) Use SharePoint Designer 2010 – SharePoint Designer 2010 is free and lets you create powerful and robust workflows using a variety of built in activities (such as sending an email, creating list items, copying documents and a whole lot more). […]