I think many would agree with me that one of the best things to ever happen to SharePoint 2007 in terms of an improved user experience was Christophe’s EasyTabs over at Path To SharePoint.  This script turned several web parts that were stacked on top of each other into a much more elegant tabbed view.

And there was much rejoicing.

Christophe updated this script to work for SharePoint 2010 as well. I know countless people who have used it with great success.  However, recently I needed to use EasyTabs for a SharePoint 2013 site and discovered that there was not a 2013 version and the 2010 version did not appear to work. So, what’s a jQuery hack to do but write my own solution? Although not quite as eloquent as Christophe’s solution, it gets the job done. The remainder of this blog walks you through what I did and how you can do it as well.

To this day, my most popular blog posts continue to be my posts on how to set up a parent/child list relationship in SharePoint. These blog posts show you how to automatically set the ID of a Lookup field for a “child” list for different versions of SharePoint using various methods:

• Creating a SharePoint List Parent / Child Relationship - Out of the Box (yes, I know the videos are dead on this one. The VIDEO REMIX post is better anyway)
• Passing Multiple Query String Variables Using SPD – Follow Up on Creating Parent / Child List Relationships
• Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX
• Creating A SharePoint Parent/Child List Relationship– SharePoint 2010 Edition
• Creating a SharePoint Parent/Child List Relationship–No SPD Version
• Creating a Parent/Child List Relationship in SharePoint 2013

As helpful as many have found these solutions, they only worked for lists and not for document libraries.

Definitely one of my highlights from 2012 was presenting a session at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Vegas with my cohort Eric Harlan. In our session we built a Windows 8 application using HTML and CSOM to retrieve and post information for SharePoint 2013’s Social features.

We got a lot of great feedback on the session and actually scored fairly well tell too. I think what resonated with the audience is that we built the application step-by-step and even allowed the application to throw many of the errors I ran into when writing the application. I wanted to bring some “real world” to the demos and help people overcome these common errors when they were writing their own applications. I’ve been meaning to blog about this as well but have been so busy / burned out that I just have not gotten around to it.  Well… thanks to insomnia, I’m finally getting around to it.

Okay.. okay.. enough rambling back story… Let’s step through the process of building your first JavaScript Windows 8 application that uses SharePoint 2013’s CSOM (Client Side Object Model).

According to TripIt I traveled over 120 days last year. That may sound like a lot, but the bright side is that when I’m not traveling, I’m likely sitting at home in my pj’s with a big cup of coffee. So, 120+ days of travel really doesn’t bother me at all. However, that means that around 240 days a year I’m at home, and when I’m working, it’s just me in my office sitting in front of my computer. This allows me to get a LOT more work done than going into the office every morning, fighting traffic on the way to work, getting interrupted by office talk and people stopping by, and fighting traffic on the way home. However, this somewhat disconnected state of work existence makes one skill completely critical to every aspect of what I do… Communication… (I’m guessing the title of the blog gave that away). So, any hiccup in communication can have an amplified affect.

SharePoint is becoming all about content. Business critical content.  In fact, many still don't know that SharePoint Server is in the Gartner magic quadrant for ECM and has been for a while. There are three essential ways that SP can be seen as Business Critical:

This blog post is actually being posted on behalf of the very awesome Jay Simcox, who discovered the issue last night. In our morning meeting today, Jay brought this issue up after he wrestled with it last night.

If you're running Exchange 2010 in your environment today you need to be aware of an interesting situation.

Top Down/Bottom Up…Balanced Scorecard…BPM…ECM…Information Architecture…SLA…Start Big/Start Small…Thought Leadership…Back Office Integration…BCSP...Case Management...

By far one of the most simple jQuery demos I show during one of my sessions that also seems to get the best reaction is a demo where I show how quickly you can integrate SharePoint and Bing Maps. Using jQuery you can easily make an address from a SharePoint list appear in Bing Maps using the Bing Maps API.

Recently we experienced a bit of an issue with Lync Online (Office 365). Some of the users could not log in to the service while others appeared to be fine. This seemed to be occurring on a per-user basis. The users affected would be impacted on Mac or Windows, no matter which of the clients they were using.

Last week, I came across a couple of blog posts that talked about the TouchTouch Gallery which is a jQuery based image viewer that is optimized for touch screen devices. After checking it out, I figured it would be a good thing to throw into SharePoint 2010 (more specifically, my Cribtoso sandbox site) and see how it worked.

Yesterday, Microsoft released Office for Mac 2011 SP2. It contains a number of important fixes and compatibility updates. I'm happy to report that I've installed it on two Macs so far and have not encountered any difficulties.

It's a rainy morning here in Huntsville, AL in March of 2012. It's been 2 years and 2 months since this blog article, but it's still true:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-reasons-why-you-should-begin-phasing-out-exchange-public-folders/1312

The gist? Exchange public folders are old, crusty and going away.

Here’s a real quick update for you today – Microsoft released a Lync 2010 client for iOS today. This means you can now have a Lync-native connection on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

The client requires an Office365 or on-premises Lync 2010 server to work. It will not function against BPOS. BPOS still uses OCS 2007 R2.

Have you ever had a moment where you have stumbled upon a site that peeks your curiosity? A site design where you get to totally geek out, open firebug and look at all the DIVs and CSS? Or have you ever experienced a proud moment when you have looked at a mockup and thought “this might be one of my best”? The graphics is the fun part of design; it is the reasons a lot of us do what we do.

Developing solutions within SharePoint can be a daunting task when just starting out. I’ve worked with a number of colleagues, both junior level and seasoned professionals, who have developed with Microsoft technologies in the past. In each instance, there has always been a need to sit down with the developer and do a one on one walk through of their environment and explain the reasoning and benefits of properly laying out the environment before ever starting to put together a solution.

Office 365 is well into its Beta timeline now and we are looking at General Availability rapidly approaching with rumors swirling about a release date of July 1, 2011.

I put together the presentation that is linked below for the Rocket City SharePoint User Group (Twitter: #rcspug) .  It is a conglomerate of information from the Microsoft Partner site as well as TechNet.  Additioally, Mark Eichenberger from Microsoft provided significant assistance.  Thanks Mark!