Card Sorting: helping figure out your ‘best fit’ site taxonomy

By peter.stilgoe









Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. With so many of us using the technique, why would we need to write an article on it?

While card sorting is described in a few texts and a number of sites, most descriptions are brief. There is not a definitive article that describes the technique and its variants and explains the issues to watch out for. Given the number of questions posted to discussion groups, and discussions we have had at conferences, we thought it was time to get all of the issues in one place.

This article provides a detailed description of the basic technique, with some focus on using the technique for more complex sites. This article does not cover some issues such as the use of online tools, which will be covered in a future article.

Read more…….

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

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Converting a Sharepoint List into XML

By peter.stilgoe









This easiest way is to use the URL below & insert your list GUID

http://servername/site/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Display&List=*YOURUNIQUELISTID*&XMLDATA=TRUE

To get the GUID of the list you need to go into the list & click ‘Settings’ -> ‘List Settings’. Now if you look at your URL you will see something like:

/_layouts/listedit.aspx?List=%7B7B476F98%2D1075%2D4A6D%2D8F63%2D4C754B3F41FC%7D

The URL is encoded so you will need to replace “%7B” with “{” and “%7D” with “}” and “%2D” with “-” so the end result would look something like: {7B476F98-1075-4A6D-8F63-4C754B3F41FC}

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Records Management v Document Management

By peter.stilgoe









Records Management:

- Management of the record is more important than the content of the record

- The record never changes (although its properties might)

- Records require access controls, lots of them

Document Management/Collaboration:

- Without content there is no document

- The document changes a lot, that’s the whole point of collaboration

- Access controls restrict and impede collaboration, the fewer there are the better

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One of the better ways of implementing Jquery in your Sharepoint environment

By peter.stilgoe









1. Open up SharePoint Portal and click on Site Actions -> Site Settings -> All Site Settings option

2. Under “Site Administration“group option, Click on “Content and Structure” link

3. From top menu Click “New” List option to create a list of type “Document Library”.

4. Let’s Configure document library further…. Let’s name it as “JavaLib”
[ Note: The name of the document library could be any name you like, I like the name JavaLib as we will use this library to organize all JavaScript’s related resources]

5. (Best Practices) Now, We can configure the JavaLib with additional columns, Versioning and Security so that it can return us a favors like versioning and auto advancing to new versions (if needed).

5.1. Add a column “Script Version” as Single Line of Text to JavaLib

Having “Script version” column becomes very informative when one has lots of developers.

5.2. Configure versioning with 10 Major & 10 Minor Versions

Versioning will allow you to rollback to previous version if there is a bug/known defects without having all other pages needing a modification.

5.3. Set Library security as Read Only to Everyone and Contribute to DevGroup

Limiting who can upload new items (scripts) will help establish controlled processes and release changes using major versions.

6. Let’s download most current JQuery version 1.3.2 from http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js to the desktop

7. Now, Let’s upload jquery.1.3.2.min.js file from our desktop to our JavaLib library.

Note: After uploading the file, Please make sure you change the Name from Jquery-1.3.2.min.js to Jquery and Title as Jquery-1.3.2.min.js and Script version as 1.3.2. This will help us in future if other revisions are available then you do not have to update all webparts with new framework urls.

8. Now we have JQuery available in our environment, with correct control security & versioning in place.

Thanks to Hemendra Patel over @ http://hemsoft.blogspot.com/2009/06/first-look-at-jquery-sharepoint.html

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Create a survey that can be filled out by all anonymous users, but they cannot see each others entries

By peter.stilgoe









Once youve created your survey:

Set advanced settings

On this screen, we set ‘Read Access’ to ‘All Responses’, ‘Edit Access’ to ‘Only their own’ and ‘Allow items from this survey to appear in search results’ to ‘No’. Setting read access to ‘All Responses’ seems a bit weird. After all, you will normally not want your anonymous users to see the responses of all other users. We will change this back later, but for some reason, it is necessary to select this option here.

Set Permissions

Next we go to the permissions screen:

The survey by default inherits the permissions from the site, but for anonymous surveys this will not do. By selecting ‘Edit Permissions’ from the ‘Actions’ menu, you can specify specific permissions for this survey.

The Setting menu has now appeared and from it, we choose ‘Anonymous Access’.

In this screen, make sure that the check boxes for ‘Add’ and ‘View’ are selected.

Set advanced settings again

If this is alright, we can go back to the ‘Advanced settings’ screen to set Read Access back to ‘Only their own’.

There, you’re set. The survey can be filled out by all anonymous users, but they cannot see each others entries. The information entered in these forms will be stored in the survey’s library and you can inspect each entry or view aggregated graphs of all entries. So what happened here? We first set the ‘Read Access’ to ‘All Responses’, because only then can we set the Anonymous Access settings (all check boxes will be greyed out otherwise). But after setting the permissions, we can safely turn access to all responses off again. This procedure is a bit odd, but it works.

NOTE: This solution does not work if your survey includes branching logic.

http://www.getsharepoint.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=17

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categoriaSharepoint Surveys commento1 Comment dataNovember 3rd, 2009
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Import data from CSV and SQL to a SharePoint list

By peter.stilgoe









This SharePoint feature allows you to quickly import data from a CSV file or a SQL stored procedure to any custom SharePoint list.

Once you have added the solution to your farm and activated it on your site collection an additional menu option will be available on the Action menu of each custom list that will take you to the import CSV or SQL page.

Simply select which option you want – either import from a CSV file or import from a SQL stored procedure. Next, browse to the CSV file or enter the SQL connection and name of the stored procedure and hit the Import button.

There is a check box option to delete all items from the list before doing the import which is not selected by default.

Click Here

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