After working as a SharePoint Consultant within Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) for a number of years, I have decided to leave to become an independent SharePoint Contractor. Martin Kearn will now lead this MSDN Blog for The SharePoint Guys. I can...

The Content Organizer in SharePoint 2010 is a Feature that enables the routing of content to defined destinations such as SharePoint libraries, folders or other Content Organizer managed sites. It achieves this by analysing the items content type/metadata...

This article aims to help anyone creating a Disaster Recovery (DR) design/strategy for SharePoint Server 2010. This advice will be based on my experience of designing a DR model and after conversations with experts such as Spencer Harbar, Microsoft IT...

This is the third in a series of posts that uses the analogy of looking after a garden to explain why you should exercise governance over your SharePoint environment. Without some form of control over it, it will quickly deteriorate and end up as something...

Since the emergence of the cloud, more specifically ‘Software as a Service’ or SAAS, applications which may once have been deployed locally in the corporate data centre are now being delivered via an externally managed shared infrastructure...

The latest episode of Talking Office 365 podcast has an interview with Rob Finney from the MCS UK SharePoint team. During the interview Marlon Marescia the host of the Talking Office 365 podcast and Rob discuss the following: An overview of the...

This blog article aims to: Highlight some of the Offline Working functionality provided by Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010, including which Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 lists and libraries can and cannot be synchronised Highlight the...

This is the second in a series of posts that plays around with the idea that looking after SharePoint in your organization is a little like looking after a garden. Without some form of control over it, it will quickly deteriorate and end up as something...

Objective : Include an additional search control adjacent to the standard search box on a Meeting Workspace site, but not show any search controls on system pages (as is the default). Problem : The Meeting Workspace masterpage MWSDefaultv4.master...

Following on from my recent post ( Provisioning Web Parts to a Page ), I had a question asking how to do this for List Views. Below is a code sample showing how to do this… 1: <? xml version ="1.0" encoding ="utf-8" ? > ...

I’ve recently been working on a project where a Silverlight App sitting on a separate url calls through to a WCF service hosted in SharePoint. For this to work, a “clientaccesspolicy.xml” file is required at the root of the SharePoint web application...

Lots of customers I work with establish a requirement that files must be 'checked out' from SharePoint before they can be edited. This prevents multiple users from overwriting one another’s changes to files. The "check-out and check-in" functionality...

When deploying a page to SharePoint through a Modules feature, there are several options adding web parts to this. These are as follows: Add the web parts to the page programmatically via a feature receiver. This approach can be done quickly and...

Just as a garden needs continual maintenance in order to maintain its appearance, so also SharePoint deployments need continual governance in order to maintain their effectiveness.

Rather than explain the "what" of SharePoint Governance, this series of blog posts looks at the "why" and the "how".

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If you've ever worked with a client that has tens of thousands of users and millions of files to index, putting your neck on the line and recommending a SharePoint 2010 infrastructure that will scale to meet their requirements can at first be daunting...

Permissions within SharePoint provide a great way of controlling access to SharePoint sites and content. These permissions also allow for the User Interface to be trimmed so users only see the links and the content that they have access to. Back in...

I recently spent a while trying to integrate the Office Communicator presence pawn into a custom web part and found it a little tricky so wanted to share my learning's. With SharePoint 2010's new social capabilities, I see this integration as being a...

Those of you that have spent some time looking at SharePoint 2010, may have noticed that the Site Directory has been largely dropped. On account of this, myself and several other writers on this blog have been working on a custom solution called ‘Site...

This blog post aims to provide an overview of some of the Social Computing Features available in SharePoint 2010. This will include discussions of: New User Interface Social Feedback Social Networking New User Interface The UI in...

One of the feature in SharePoint 2010 which has received one of the bigger facelifts is Business Connectivity Services (BCS) – what we used to call Business Data Catalogue (BDC) in SharePoint 2007. This is a really powerful set of tools for connecting...

When SharePoint 2007 was in beta, I wrote a blog article about how to install it on a single machine. This was one of my most popular articles so I thought I’d repeat the process for SharePoint Server 2010 Beta 2. This article should be read in addition...

Recently, James Kemp and James Daniel , both contributors of this blog, showcased freely available SharePoint software and guidance that has been designed to help Healthcare organisations address common business challenges. A video from this event has...

This is the fourth and final post in a series on Records Management using SharePoint Server 2007: 1. Introduction to Records Management, and Definition of Terms 2. Records Management using Standard SharePoint Features 3. Using t he DoD 5015.2...

With SharePoint 2010 around the corner, I thought I’d provide a brief overview of the NEW Shared Service model. That is, how the Shared Service Provider (SSP) from SharePoint 2007 has fundamentally changed for SharePoint 2010. So, what’s...

The public beta of SharePoint 2010 was announced in Jeff Teper's speech yesterday. Sign up for it now! Register : http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx