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.

Hello, I’m Lane Letson, Marketing Coordinator for Summit 7 Systems. My largest pet project since joining this group of solution adventures was to design a website that combined beauty + function for a complete digital snapshot of our company.

After many weeks of planning and design refreshes, we are excited to launch an all new version of the website that delivers a better experience on every device – from phones to tablets to desktops and more.

Clear navigation of our service and solution offerings, easy registration for upcoming events, innovative thinking in our blogs and the latest information are now available from www.summit7systems.com. Visit our site to connect, discover and explore!

We have expanded on community! We enhanced features that allow subscribing to our events calendar, following our innovative consultants and real-time partner twitter feeds directly on our site! We have also launched a YouTube Channel featuring videos from our events, partners, and webinars to share our passions.

We aren’t finished yet! While we may have launched our new design, we would love to hear your feedback. After all, we created this experience for YOU!

We are finally ready to launch our Governance, Risk, and Compliance solutions!

We've partnered with AvePoint and are showcasing their Compliance Guardian product. With our QuickStart SharePoint Compliance solution you'll get both the professional expertise around SharePoint and compliance, and also the software from AvePoint. If you haven't looked at Compliance Guardian, it's a powerful rule-based software that allows us to detect, decide, and act on SharePoint content that isn't correctly tagged and secured. We can quarantine, move, delete, and more automatically.

We start these engagements with a unique discovery method that will assess and compare your current state with your compliance and governance strategy. At the heart of this engagement we'll help you identify and measure the risk within your SharePoint environment. I think a lot of people make risk management too complicated - few clients are actually under GLBA, FDA, etc compliance.

During my tenure with NASA, I had the privilege of working with some of the nation's greatest minds and working with a broad spectrum of information including business data, propulsion engineering designs, and flight and telemetry data. My role eventually evolved into systems engineering and data architecture for manned space flight programs and managing complex datasets across multiple NASA projects and vendors.

Information handling requirements for these datasets were unique from project to project and vendor to vendor. Program and business analysts were concerned with reporting clear and accurate financials, manpower levels, and scheduling. Project engineers were concerned about defining clear system requirements and designing hardware to meet those requirements. Quality engineers and test engineers were responsible for developing testing methods and carrying out those tests on hardware and software components.

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).

Summit 7 was founded on the principle that doing things right makes it easy to do the right thing. This begins with an honest appraisal of a client's situation and commitment to solve a problem or enable opportunity for them. Will we implement systems based on requirements we didn't gather? No.

At a minimum, we'll have a phase that reviews the clients' requirements for stakeholder and change leadership validation. Many times change leaders are overlooked in requirements gathering. See, at Summit 7 our discovery is our "magic sauce" and part of this is a proprietary method for identifying change leaders. We know how to ask non-technical questions to business folks and get very good technical requirements. This isn't easy and requires a mentorship process that happens with every consultant that on boards to Summit 7. Let me give you a real world example of how Summit 7 is different:

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.

Woohoo!! I'll be back teaching classes in 2013 along with other Summit 7 Systems consultants, like Jay Simcox and Jim Curry. This offers students some of the best training options available for SharePoint Server 2013. You'll get to learn from instructors who do this for a living and see hundreds of solutions and problems with the product. The first class I'm teaching is in Huntsville, Feb 20-22. This will be a 2013 Administrator's class for those upgrading from 2010. It will be a deep dive, so bring some Red Bull and protein bars :-)  (I guess we could order in pizza...we'll see)

Sitecore provides wonderfully flexible options for creating public-facing renderings of web content. With a little planning, “one-off” solutions can become powerful, reusable components that clients use over and over again – and users need never know of the content's boring, strategically sound double life.

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.

Not a cautionary tale about that kind of RWD antics – the rear wheel drive, V8-powered, rubber-shredding, pony car shenanigans kind – but some thoughts about the increasing power (and pitfalls) of responsive web design.

In this post, I describe two current mobile optimization projects: one where we used RWD, and one where we didn’t walk but ran away from it.

Is SharePoint a business critical platform for your organization? Why?

• Is it a front-end for a critical business process?
• Is it the BPM engine for a critical business process?
• Is it a content repository/silo for a business critical process?
• Does your CxO know SharePoint exists and use it regularly?

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

Sup. Hope all is well in SharePoint land for you. There's only 15 more minutes left in this Monday, so I'll take this opportunity to let you know...

…I WROTE A WHITEPAPER!

YayayayayYAyayAyayaYA!

Okie, silliness aside, I was asked by Quest Software to share some of our secret sauce on migrating an on-premises SharePoint installation.

Well, looks like I’m finally biting the bullet and jumping into PowerShell. I’ve not had much use for it in the past because none of my previous clients requirements necessitated the use of PowerShell, however I am working on a new project that I believe PowerShell is a great answer for.

Our client’s analytics proved that Mobile traffic was on the increase.  Traffic to their sites actually tripled over a 9 month span with 1 in every 20 visits coming from a mobile device.  So the decision to create a mobile optimized site was easy, but where to start?

Start with the analytics.  Knowing that mobile traffic has increased isn’t enough, but instead look a little deeper into your analytics to see what mobile users are looking for when they come to your site.  

I’ve often been asked by different people, “What is SharePoint?” Usually I’m asked this in response to: “What do you do?” and I’ve learned sometimes it’s best to just say something along the lines of “I work with computers.” However, sometimes I go further and tell people that I am a SharePoint administrator or consultant and then have to figure out how to answer their follow up question.  When that happens, my answer usually is dependent on a few other things. Yes, I know, I just said “It depends” but really the product doesn’t change, but how I answer the question.

Let’s face it, if you are part of a project you are part of change.  Change is inevitable, but why is it so hard for people to cope with things changing?  Fear.  Fear of what?  Of the unknown.  Uncertainty brings fear, but you can help your project team cope with change and become fearless by doing a few simple things.

There seems to be a recurring theme so far this year.  Everyone wants to up their game and increase their value through marketing and a redesign of something.  As I work in each of these areas I find this trend intriguing. I have always had a curiosity about what drives people to want to make a change.

As we start off 2012, and I delve deeper into this world of magic and sparkles, (yes I said sparkles because I keep getting asked for pop, and bling in design) I wonder where does the line between what you need and what you desire blur.

The Lord of the Rings…If you are like me every time they play the trilogy on TV I watch again like I am watching it for the first time.  I am sure you remember the main characters..Frodo..Gandalf…The places..middle-earth..Mount Doom…the Shire…but for me my favorite character was Samwise Gamgee or Sam for short.  Every project needs a Sam so let’s go to the movies….

By definition, a project is something that is temporary.  Ever heard the phrase “All good things must come to an end”?  They must have been talking about projects, right?  To some of you that deal with projects every day you might have just laughed a little because some projects don’t seem “good”.  We have to deal with constraints (time, cost, scope, resources, quality, and risks) and those can sometimes make our projects seem “bad” or at least add strain when certain contraints are placed on the project.  Managing those constraints can make the difference in a successful project completion.

The question with Sitecore is, most often, not “can we do this?” but “how can we do this?” Admittedly the “how” is sometimes a major development project, but on occasion the high-level functionality we’re looking for is already available, either as standard or via one of the powerful Sitecore Modules. These are the occasions we can be found excitedly sharing our discovery with the rest of the team…and wondering what else we’ve been missing all this time!

HELLO. MY NAME IS JASON MILLER AND I AM A TECHNOLOGY ADDICT.

The first step is admitting you have a problem, right?

It is that time of year again …The Holidays … I love this time year and I mean love it … the lights, the music, my family, presents and the holiday movies. One of my favorite movies of all time is “A Christmas Story” you know the one … it is played for 24 hours straight starting Christmas Eve night … the one where Ralphie has to convince his parents, teacher and Santa that an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle is the perfect gift for him and he will not shoot his eye out.  Of course this blog is about project management so how in the world can “A Christmas Story” teach us anything about managing projects?  Let’s go to the movies…

Or, rather, to paraphrase the 42nd President of the United States, the answer is it depends on what your definition of “app” is.

Across the board, the number of users accessing the KCTCS sites via mobile devices has more than doubled year-on-year. In several cases the increase has been even more dramatic. More than a third of these visitors are using an iPhone or iPad; a little under a third are using an Android device; and the rest use Windows phones, Blackberries, and any number of more-or-less weird or wonderful alternatives.

Have you ever felt like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark when it comes to projects and their project plans?  You think you have planned for everything: all risks are defined, your timeline is in place and things are proceeding as planned - what could go wrong?  You have the treasure in your hand; you take a deep breath, relieved …. and then it happens just like in any good action movie … tarantulas, gaping pits, lethal spikes, arrows, and a huge rolling boulder to name a few of the dangers that Indiana has to overcome, only to now realize a seemingly impossible scope, with few resources, a ridiculous timeline  and sponsorship issues.  So let’s go to the movies…

I am your Project Manager not your babysitter … As Project
Managers, if we were truthful with ourselves, at times we feel we are in the
movie “Adventures in Babysitting” (ok I know I am showing my age by just
mentioning this movie) when we deal with certain project team members.

Over the next year, Amy, Jason and I will burst out of our design and development comfort zones (probably). For the first time, we’re going mobile, and if/when we do, all sixteen of Kentucky’s community colleges  are coming with us.

I came upon an interesting (meaning frustrating) new facet of Workflow in Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

I was recreating a simple workflow to prototype part of a design for a customer. It was purposefully as simple a workflow as possible. Basically it created a task using CreateTaskWithContentType waited for the task to complete and then sent an email.

Yeah, I know… I’m nothing like the Old Spice guy, but I still think that is a great commercial. No, the title has nothing to do with the content of this post, and I’m not really looking to make it fit, it just happens to be what popped into my head when I started writing this.