Author: Jan Van Belle

A gold mine, not a coal mine

I came across an interesting article that discusses the results of a survey about the satisfaction of business users with their company intranet. As a SharePoint site owner, it is good to have a look a the top 5 of things people want on their intranet:

  1. people information
  2. procedures, policies…
  3. forms
  4. employee benefits
  5. organisation news

Also interesting is the list of improvements:

  1. better content organisation
  2. easier to find information
  3. better search
  4. clear intranet strategy
  5. getting rid of outdated content

If you keep these in mind, you make your intranet a gold mine, not a coal mine.

Reference: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/intranets-what-staff-really-want

 

Custom activities in SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer is a great tool for developing workflows, because it brings the workflow development to the business owner, power user or information manager. You can quickly create a simple workflow without having to go through a often painful development process.

There are some limitations, of course. On a recent project, I really missed an action that would set the security of an item in a list, so that e.g. users could only see the documents they submitted.

Google to the rescue: this blog post explains how a developer could create a custom activity and make it available to the SharePoint designer users. Best of both worlds, isn’t it? Ease of use and extensibility?

Reference: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/CustomActivity.asp

Colligo Contributor and content type templates

Colligo Contributor 2.1 currently has difficulties synchonizing document libraries that have content types with “Linked” templates. We use this on the intranet, the templates are stored in a separate library on a separate site, and every content type has a reference to the library.

colligo_contenttypes.png

This is the response of Colligo tech support:

Hi Jan,

Yes indeed, a template situated in outside URL will cause a synchronization error in Contributor. In order to avoid this issue, you will need to use a URL that refers to the same site as the library with the content type. You can setup a document library with templates in it and content type on the same site can have these templates referenced as a URL.

Not a solution in our case… We will probably change the way our templates are stored (upload them directly with the content type) so that we can still use Contributor. A great tool!