September, 2006

Andrew Connell wrote an article while ago– now Ben Schmitlin (PM on the MOSS WCM team) has written the definitive article on how to upgrade and what has changed between MOSS B2 and MOSS B2TR master pages.

About a week ago Rasool from Metalogix did a demo of Metalogix Migration Manager for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The recording of the live meeting is now available from here.

Nothing is more effective in a "pitch" (aka demo) than showing organisations you can rebrand their website in your software (hopefully MOSS 2007) in < 1 day.

I've completely rebranded MOSS several times using a Minimal Master Page and borrowing CSS files and images from customer's external website or their corporate intranet.

To rebuild an intranet/internet site for a demo/proof of concept these are the steps I go through:

• Analyse the existing website.
  • Is there a consistent look and feel for this? i.e. Navigation up to; nav on left; content in middle?
  • Global
    • How does the primary navigation work?
    • How does the secondary navigation work?
    • Is there a bread crumb
    • What is the footer?
  • Home Page
    • Is there content roll ups?
    • Is there content aggregation from external sites?
  • Detail page
    • What does the page structure look like?
    • Is there a common structure for this?
    • Are these basic pages or complex pages (i.e. are there applications being embedded etc.)
  • Grab a dump of their existing site
    • Browse to the site and do a SAFE AS from Internet Explorer
      • This will give you the CSS, the HTML and the graphics.
• Create the artefacts
  • Create a master page (you may require 2 master pages (1 for Home Page and 1 for other pages which includes a left nav)
    • Copy the navigation controls from the default.master or the other master pages.
  • Create a custom CSS file
    • Get the navigation styling right.
    • Get the overall font-family and font-size right – this will make a huge difference.
  • Include the Custom CSS on the master page(s).
  • Look and feel pictures - Upload the images for structure into the /Images/ library
  • Create a page layout for the home page (if none of the OOB ones are suitable)
  • Create a page layout for the detail pages (if none of the OOB ones are suitable).
    • Configure the left navigation for the site.
• Create the Content – this is the key thing! You want the customer to identify with the site.
  • Upload "content images" into the Site Collection Images library.
  • Create the home page
    • Populate the home page
    • Configure the roll ups from other parts of the site.
  • Create the detail pages
    • Create a sub site
      • Create the pages and populate them with content from the customer's site
      • If you don't want to do this manually you could look at www.metalogix.net – I'll be posting a link to a demo live meeting shortly.
• Additional things which are awesome
  • Content Query Web Part
    • Show rolling content up from other areas of the site based on some meta data.
  • Search
    • WCM and Search go hand in hand. If you can show easily searching the content from the site this will be an advantage.
  • Standard WCM Features – sometimes as MOSS professionals we forget about the basics.
    • Versioning
    • Workflow
    • Auditing
    • Scheduling

For a customer to see you have rebuilt their intranet/internet in less than 1 day showing them that MOSS allows you to build usable websites and development time can be less than other solutions they have used.

I'll have a chat with the customers and see if I'm allowed to post my Legacy Website vs MOSS rebuild in < 8 hours – watch this space.

If you have rebranded some websites i'd love to see them – leave a comment and send it to me.

MOSS Champions is a great blogging site that OBS are running.

Lots of the OBS guys are blogging and there is some great content up there.

Go and check it out.

When I got WSS 3.0 & Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh I went through and screenshotted most of the screens.

Spot the difference :)

The SharePoint Team Blog has links to all the Beta 2 Technical Refresh installers and guidance on What you need to know before you click Update.exe.

Beta 2 Technical Refresh for both the client and server technologies is AMAZING!

MOSS 2007 especially is now lightening fast even in a virtualised environment and the client tools are super stable.

It looks like another revision of the Hedkandi website is up and running utilising the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) Web Content Management capabilities.

This is a great example of how far you can push the MOSS 2007 User Interface to create an excellent User Experience.

Check out www.hedkandi.com which is a satellite site of the Ministry of Sound and the Ministry of Sound Shop.

Metalogix have a very cool tool for migration of any website into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Rasool Rayani from Metalogix is going to run a Live Meeting for ASIA PACIFIC on:

Wednesday 13^th 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (EASTERN STANDARD TIME)

To Join the meeting click here.

You can also dial in to the conference call at +61 2 9870 2922 or 1800 202 713 participant code 533 5975

I had to rebrand some of the OOB WSS 3.0 Navigation last week. Here is how I hacked it out (Based on Beta 2, build 4017)

• Copy the Navigation provider & Navigation Control from the default.master into your own master page
• The styles in the Navigation Control will have styles like ms-topnavselected. I prefixed these with custom so they ended up being Custom-ms-topnavselect.
• Go copy the styles below (topNav) from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\STYLES\core.css and prefix them with Custom.

   

  .Custom-ms-topnavContainer{

  border:none;

  border-right:solid 1px #c2dcff;

  background-color: #003366;

  color: #FFFFFF;

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topnav{

  border-left: 1px solid #FFFFFF;

  border-right: 1px solid #FFFFFF;

  border-bottom:none;

  border-right:none;

  /*background-image:url("/_layouts/images/topnavunselected.gif"); BE SURE TO DISABLE THIS LINE OR YOUR COLOURS WONT APPEAR (or they will flick on and then disappear again) */

  background-repeat:repeat-x;

  font-family:Verdana;

  font-size:8pt;

  background-color: #003366;

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topnav a{

  display:block;

  white-space:nowrap;

  padding:1px 8px 0px 8px;

  height:18px;

  color: #FFFFFF;

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topnavselected{

  color:#003399;

  /*background:url("/_layouts/images/topnavselected.gif");*/

  background-repeat:repeat-x;

  font-weight:bold;

  /*border:solid 1px #79a7e3;*/

  border-bottom:none;

  /*background-color:#79a7e3;*/

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topNavHover{

  /*background-image:url("/_layouts/images/topnavhover.gif");*/

  background-color: Orange;

  color: #003366;

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topnav img{

  position:relative;

  left:-6px;

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topNavFlyOutsContainer

  {

  border: solid 1px #003366;

  }

   

  .Custom-ms-topNavFlyOuts{

  background-color: #99ccff;

  font-family:Verdana;

  font-size:8pt;

  }

  .Custom-ms-topNavFlyOuts a{

  display:block;

  *width:120px;

  min-width:120px;

  color:#003366;

  padding:4px 8px 4px 8px;

  }

  .Custom-ms-topNavFlyOutsHover{

  background-color: orange;

  color: #003366;

  }

• Add the styles to your own CSS and change the styles in the master on the navigation.
• You now have sexy new navigation with only changing some styles!    

Lots of organisations use Hummingbird Enterprise™ Document Management and also use SharePoint Products & Technologies (WSS / SPS) for Collaboration/Search/Portals/platform etc.

How can you get these two to play together? Easily & Out of the Box.

Why?

On the 21^st August 2006 Hummingbird announced general availability of "Hummingbird Enterprise™ eDOCS for SharePoint".

Check out the press release here.

There is also a neat white paper called Hummingbird Enterprise™ & Microsoft SharePoint: A Strategy for ECM Success available too.