Tag: SharePoint

OneDrive for Business

Last week, Microsoft announced the availability of OneDrive for Business. It is actually the “professional” version of SkyDrive (now also called OneDrive) that was already available in the different Office 365 subscriptions.

OneDrive

From April 1 on, OneDrive for Business will also available as a stand-alone service. An ideal way for the individual professional to have reliable and accessible storage in the cloud.

There are some small improvements to the UI that make really a big difference if you are using your OneDrive in the browser:

  • Search function now supports “type-ahead”
  • You can access your OneDrive directly via http://<your tenant>.onedrive.com

And as a Mac user, you will be happy to know that an iOS client is already available, and that an OS X sync client will be available later this year, so that we can finally get rid of DropBox šŸ™‚

How to publish a Captivate project to a SharePoint site

Microsoft SharePoint is an interesting platform if you quickly want to publish your e-learning content. These are the steps to publish an Adobe Captivate project to a SharePoint site:

1. Publish your Captivate project as Flash(SWF), and make sure that you have the option Export to htmlĀ checked. This will produce a set of files: a .html file, a .swf file and a .js file.

2. Upload these files into a document library on a SharePoint site. You can start your project by clicking on the .html file.
If you are running SharePoint 2010 and the file does not open, you might need to change a security setting in SharePoint. Also, SharePoint has a default file size limit of 50 MB. Your system administrator can increase this limit.

3. Optional, but recommended: to make it easier for your users to start your course, you can include a link to the .html file on the home page of your site.

Watch the demonstration below for more detailed instructions:

 

Office 365 – first impressions

This week, I migrated all of our personal mailboxes to the Office 365 for Professionals and Small Businesses program (also called the “Plan P1”). These are my first impressions:

  • pricing is very good; I already had some Exchange mailboxes, and for about the same price I get more storage (25 GB mailbox!), SharePoint and Lync;
  • there is a one month trial program; however, in the trial, you cannot link your own domain to Office 365;
  • you can add multiple domains to the same account; the fact that you have to point the name servers of your domain to Microsoft was a surprise to me. I expected that it would be enough to point the mx records to Office 365, but apparently in this plan this is not the case. There are some rumours that it works, but it is not supported;
  • you can configure A and CNAME records in the Office 365 DNS manager; it took me a while to figure out that you can use an @ to create a record for your root domain (http://mylearning.be)
  • the Office web apps are included in the package, and are very useful, e.g. if you need to edit Office documents on a mac and have no Office installed;
  • the primary support channel is the Office 365 community; content is relatively good, but sometimes it is difficult to filter issues from the beta program or from the enterprise subscription if you are looking for a specific issue; I filed a service request and got a response within 24 hours.

I’ll post more experiences once I explore the possibilities of the SharePoint part of Office 365, but for the moment I am very happy with it.

More info and trial on http://www.office365.com.

Prompt to save HTML pages in SharePoint 2010 document libraries

Today, we discovered that the out-of-the-box experience for working with html-pages in SharePoint 2010 document libraries is quite different from the 2007 version.

We uploaded an e-learning course to a document library, made a link to the index.html page of the course, but when we clicked the link we were prompted to download the html page instead of opening it in the browser.

It appears to be a new security setting in SharePoint 2010. This is the procedure how to change the default behaviour:

  1. Go to Central Administration
  2. Select Manage web applications
  3. Select the web application you want to modify
  4. In the Ribbon, click the General Settings button and select General Settings from the drop down menu
  5. In the section Browser file handling, select Permissive instead of Strict.

If you are using SharePoint 2010 for learning purposes, this is something you want to modify, otherwise all web content will be blocked. You need farm administrator rights to change this setting.

The ribbon in SharePoint 2010 – tutorial

I have been getting a lot of questions about tutorials on how to use the ribbon in SharePoint 2010. Of course, creating a “general” tutorial about this is not so obvious, because the ribbon is context-sensitive, and what you need to know about it, actually depends on the functionalities you use in SharePoint. But I think the movie below (by Lynda.com) gives you a good overview.

Users who are familiar with SharePoint 2007 and are looking for a familiar command in the ribbon, can download the SharePoint Server Ribbon Reference on the Microsoft Office website. This isĀ an Excel spreadsheet that lists the new locations of SharePoint commands in the 2010 version.