This presentation goes into the role of the SharePoint 2013 Power User and how things have changed for them since SharePoint 2010. This was presented at the Chicago Developers SharePoint User Group in July 2013
6. Seriously, Where Did Design View Go?
"Use SharePoint as an out-of-box application whenever possible…”
- Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President SharePoint
"We’d like to see all of our customers move to the cloud…”
- Kirk DelBene, President, Microsoft Office
“Investing heavily in SharePoint Designer does not make financial sense and
does not fully comply with Microsoft’s overall strategy for SharePoint”
- Patrick O’Toole
Upgrading the tool will take time an money
7.
8. Who Are Power Users?
Middle Tier Developer
No-Code Specialist
SharePoint
Designer/InfoPath Developer
Site or Site Collection Admin
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Business
Users
Developers
Architects
IT Pros
Power Users
9. What the Power User Does
Site/Site Collection admins (Boring! Not covering this)
Create SharePoint functionality through savvy use of out of
the box components & light development
Three main types of functionality
Look & feel / branding
Data presentation / business intelligence
Business process integration and data collection
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10. Why Do I Care?
Some topics will directly impact your work
Understanding the changes in the role of the Power User
help with:
Planning & Project Management
Creating Governance
Training
Support
Adoption
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11.
12. Comparison of SharePoint 2010/2013
Look & Feel / Branding
Data Presentation / Business Intelligence
Business Process Integration and Data
Collection
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15. Creating Page Layouts
SharePoint 2010
Copy & paste existing Page Layout (at Site Collection level)
Drag controls around, delete controls, etc.
SharePoint 2013 – More difficult without design view
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Conclusion: Only devs will work with Page Layouts
16. Creating & Applying Themes
SharePoint 2010
Edit colors/fonts from an out of the box Theme
Create .thmx file from PowerPoint and upload to Theme Gallery
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17. Creating & Applying Themes
SharePoint 2013
Themes are now part of “Composed Looks”
Composed Looks combine any combination of
MasterPages
CSS file(s)
Color pallets
Font schemes (optional)
Background image (optional)
Editing of Composed Looks is simple but lacks functionality*
Custom Composed Looks too difficult?
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18. Creating & Applying Themes
Editing Out of Box SharePoint 2013 Composed Look
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Very simple
Can’t edit individual colors in
browser
19. Creating & Applying Themes
Custom Composed Look in
SharePoint 2013
.spcolor file
.spfont file (optional)
Master Page & CSS
Background image (optional)
Associate Composed Look to
masterpage, spcolor file, etc.
.spcolor file – the hard way.spfont fileMasterPage/CSS
21. Creating & Applying Themes
Conclusion
Power Users might create .spcolor files the easy way
Developers likely needed to help with everything else
Governance needed
22. Data View Web Parts
Quick List Modifications
Search & Content Query Web Part
23. Data View Web Parts
SharePoint 2010/2013
Create DVWPs
Create Related Data
Sources
Edit XSL to change
formatting
29. Search & Query – SharePoint 2010
Content Query Web Part
Scope: Site Collection
Can filter/sort by Site Columns
Can show up URL, image, title & description
Several OOB styles, can create custom ones
30. Search & Query – SharePoint 2010
Search Results Web Part
Scope: Anything crawled
Can enhance with clever URL query strings (&a=sts_web)
Can style with XSL
31. Search & Query – SharePoint 2013
Content Search Web Part
Scope: anything crawled
Lots of options for queries
Display Templates & Item Display Templates (HTML)
Enterprise feature
Office 365 Availability*
32. Search & Query – SharePoint 2013
Content Search Web Part – Query
Basics
Refiners
Sorting
Settings
Test
33. Search & Query – SharePoint 2013
Content Search Web Part – Examples
35. SharePoint Designer Workflows
SharePoint 2010
Very valuable tool for Power Users
SharePoint 2013
Amazing!
Covered in detail in prior ChDevSPUG
Loops & Stages
Need to call SP2010 workflows
38. Access
Access Apps and SharePoint 2013
App-Web / Host-Web concept
Integrate with other data
“Simple” forms with Autocomplete
Macros (by devs or power users)
42. Access
When to use Access Apps
Migrate & Manage existing Access Apps on SharePoint
Small or temporary applications with relational data
When Access & InfoPath can solve a business problem –
consider Access first
An option to avoid 5000 item limit in SharePoint list
43. Access
When NOT to use Access Apps
If you ask a B.I. consultant:
But seriously
When a SharePoint list works
Large company / business critical
(Potentially) When handling millions of records
For instance SharePoint Designer needs to render designs involving new web standards (HTML5, CSS3). Upgrading it to do so will cost time and money.
SharePoint should be used first. SharePoint Designer (or other customizations) are NOT encouraged by Microsoft. Good move for them.
Microsoft putting huge investment into Office 365 and the cloud
Some SharePoint Designer solutions can be taxing on the server. Microsoft is okay with seeing these solutions disappear (or only built be more savvy developers)
I’m using the term very liberally in this presentation. I’m referring to anyone between the typical Business User, and the seasoned Developer/IT Pro.
NOTE: In other contexts I will refer to Power Users differently. For the case of this presentation talking about this group made the most sense
Another way to think of this type of functionality is something that a SharePoint Developer or Consultant can teach a member of an IT staff so that they can repeat and extend this functionality.
A lot of developers bounce between hard-core Visual Studio development and Middle-Tier Development, so some of this content is directly applicable to your development work
Understanding the changes in the role of the Power User (or any role for that matter) help with:
Planning & Project Management
Creating Governance
Training
Support
Adoption
These 4 core areas of functionality can be simplified to
How it Looks
Find Stuff
Data
Forms & Workflow
Savvier folks would edit content in Notepad++ and paste it back later.
SharePoint 2013 offers tabbed Divs and Table elements when editing the HTML source of rich text.
Overall this is a mild improvement – nothing too significant
Editing Out of the Box theme is shown in the image
Creating a them from PowerPoint includes
Creating a theme from any PowerPoint Presentation
Uploading it to the Theme Gallery of a Site Collection
Applying it to any Site
Benefits of this include:
Super easy – applies simple branding to any site/application
Allows companies to re-use branding work done by marketing/communications (or whomever created the PowerPoint template)
This is an easy way for the IT staff to work with another business function, helps create symbiotic relationship
* Theme Slots Tool can add functionality back - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38182
Can select:
Background Image
Color Scheme (cannot edit the color shemes)*
Site Layout (aka Master Page). There are 2 Out of Box ones from which to choose
Fonts. Several Out of Box options available
*Theme Slots Tool - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38182
Special things to note:
Governance!
Will you allow users to create their own composed looks using predefined Master Pages, Color Schemes, etc?
Will you enforce the same composed look throughout?
Detailed Steps
Create and upload an .spcolor file (Easy with SharePoint Color Palette Tool)
Create and upload an .spfont file (fairly complicated, but optional)
Create or use an Out of the Box Master Page & CSS file
Upload a background image (optional)
Create a Composed Look and associate it to a masterpage, .spcolor file (and optionally background image and .spfont file)
SharePoint Color Picker (aka Theme Slots Tool)
Detailed Steps
SharePoint Color Palette Tool
Can even select color Hex, RGB, HSL or color picker\
Save As (saves an .spcolor file)
Upload .spcolor file
More info on using Color Palette Tool: http://en.share-gate.com/blog/create-sharepoint2013-theme-using-color-palette-tool
Story is similar for SharePoint 2010 & 2013
Can still add DVWPs as in SharePoint Designer & can still use
Single Item View
Multiple Item View (list)
Single Item Form
Multiple Item Form
New Item Form
Create Related Sources
Allows you to show different Lists side by side or intertwined
Complicated to edit any further in code
Three Tasks lists pulled as data sources
Light formatting done within XSL of DVWP
Filtering ability may be new with 2013
Easy to accomplish for Middle Tier Developers
Can still change individual column widths with XSL of Data View Web part
Needs to be done with a Data View Web Part. Will not be possible if you add a list in the browser, and then edit the page in SharePoint Designer
Simple instructions
Add a list to a page
Open the page in SharePoint Designer
Click on the list, and in the ribbon click Conditional formatting
After adding a DVWP you could select it and use a conditional formatting wizard. Now when working within the code view, the “Conditional Formatting” option is not even available
Also missing (and not nearly as important) is the ability to turn Inline Editing on
CQWP Examples show all documents within the Site Collection in which Name contains “test”
You can edit the XSL of a search web part to (in this case) hide the description. You would then paste this code into the web part properties
Display Templates will not be created by power users. Developers will appreciate creating them more as they are HTML based
*“Content Search is not available on Office 365 right now, but we are working on enabling it in the future.” http://blogs.office.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2013/01/08/introducing-the-content-search-web-part.aspx
Details on Search Crawl in SharePoint Online:
“Search crawls happen continuously to ensure that content changes are available via search results as soon as possible. Recently uploaded documents may not immediately show up in search results due to the time it takes to process them. SharePoint Online targets between 15 minutes and an hour for the time between upload and availability in search results (also referred to as ‘index freshness’). In cases of heavy environment use, this time can grow to up to six hours.”
Basics allows to narrow down your search by almost anything
Can refine by people, content OR conversations
Refiners
Is contextual. It changes depending on what you put in the Basics tab
In general, refines by content type, author, site template, hashtag (again may not be useful if using Yammer) and other
Sorting
In SharePoint 2010 sorting was only available be relevance or by date
Can literally sort by anything (including all time views), amount of posts (for community sites), FileName (alphabetical order)
Settings
A few settings - nothing too worthwhile
Test
Gives you the final query that was generated
Could help as a starting point for custom built queries – in case this web part does not suit your needs
First screenshot
Search for the keyword “Test.” Each item is being displayed differently depending on which item it is
Second screenshot
All items are being displays as a “Best Bet” item for a simpler presentation of results. Items are being displayed be “Lifetime Views” but that can be changed via a dropdown at the top of the web part
Third screenshot
List of all “Discussions” which can be filtered too
Will be great if you stick with SharePoint social (over Yammer)
SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow examples
From simple to more complex:
Kick off custom email upon creating item
Create unique item-level permissions for documents based on metadata
Change the out of the box approval workflow to meet your needs (additional steps/approvers, custom emails)
Workflow Actions in SharePoint Designer 2013: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj164026.aspx
Workflow Actions that are deprecated in SharePoint Designer 2013 (you’ll need to create a SharePoint 2010 workflow and reference it): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163929.aspx
Includes List item permissions and using “if current item field equals value” condition
App Model
Easy to integrate with
Lists from Host-Web
Other Access DBs
SQL
Forms not as robust as InfoPath but come with a neat autocomplete feature
Macros can be created through a Macro designer or by developer
Also easy to connect to Excel Tables or even SQL or other ODBC (open database connectivity) Data
Easy way to manage customers and attributes for them (products, orders, etc)
Great for smaller teams or companies, but a eventually a robust reporting tool may be needed
Steps to create simple system like this
Open app
Choose default Access Table
Create Other Tables and link to original table
There are so many options. When should you use Access over say:
SharePoint List
InfoPath Form
Excel Services
Other system?
Always go with OOB List when possible
There becomes a point when you should invest in a robust BI tool or CRM system. Access can certainly tide you over until then
Excel is getting better at handling large amounts of data