Category Archives: sharepoint_1

Working with Master Pages in SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013 with SharePoint Designer 2013

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In an article on MSDN, How to: Create a Master Page Preview File in SharePoint 2013 the instructions, “Create a master page preview file” include

  1. Make a copy of a master page preview. SharePoint 2013 includes oslo.preview and seattle.preview

The preferred method of working with these pages is with SharePoint Designer 2013. As a preliminary step, be sure to activate the SharePoint Server Publishing features both at the Site Collection and Site levels. The SharePoint Server Publishing Feature is activated with a click on “Site Setting” (located in the drop down menu accessed with a click of the mouse on the gear symbol on the upper right of a site page), and, then, a click on “Manage site features” in the “Site Actions” menu.

Once the publishing feature is correctly activated, “Master Page” will also be added to the “Look and Feel” section of the “Site Settings” screen. Once you’ve created a preview file for the master page you wish to use, and have added it to SharePoint Online, you will then have an option to use the “Master Page” screen to configure the page defaults for your site as either “seattle” or “oslo” master pages.

From SharePoint Designer, 2013, we clicked on “Master Pages” from the left hand Navigation for the Site Collection we selected.

We located “oslo.preview” and “seattle.preview” on the lower section of the Master Pages list. We easily copied the preview file we chose to work with (oslo.preview) and pasted it into a new file we could safely edit.

Once we opened the editable version of the preview file, we found the color palette setting following the “pre” tag just below the “head” section of the file. We located the font setting immediately below the color palette setting, set off from the rest of the file by a pair of [SECTION] tags, one above the font setting, and one immediately below. By replacing the color and font settings with custom files for your specific organization, you can rapidly create a new .preview file that meets your needs.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Master Page Preview Files, SharePoint Online, Office 365

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Most organizations with shared tenant accounts on SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013, will want to brand their site pages. The correct method of accessing the page design features is the “Change the Look” page, which is accessed with a click on the gear symbol on the right hand side of the top right of a page for a site collection. As noted in Microsoft’s How to: Create a master page preview file in SharePoint 2013, “The Change the look wizard is the entry point to the SharePoint theming experience. The design gallery is the first page in the Change the look wizard and shows a thumbnail view of available designs. Users select a design for their site and then continue to the next page where they can customize the design. Users can then preview the site before applying the design to their site. The master page preview file is used to generate the thumbnail and preview images. If a master page does not have a corresponding preview file, it cannot be used in the theming experience.” (quoted from this article on MSDN. We’ve provided a link to the entire article, above, in this paragraph).

As we noted in prior posts to this blog, “Themes”, “Composed Looks” and, with the quote we’ve reprinted, above, “Designs” are nearly synonymous in the terminology of SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013. A “Master Page”, therefore, is a site page, which exposes a “theme”, “composed look”, or “design” to site users and visitors.

What’s new to the 2013 version of SharePoint is the Master Page Preview File Feature. As the above quoted MSDN reference explains, “[m]aster page preview files (.preview files) are specially formatted files that have sections for default color palette, default font scheme, tokenized CSS, and tokenized HTML. The master page preview file must use the same name (excluding the extension) as the corresponding master page. For example, if you have a master page named article.master, the corresponding master page preview file is named article.preview. Master pages and master page previews are stored in the Master Page Gallery.” (ibid).

Master Page preview files can be built with any of the master pages included in out of the box SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Build a Custom “Composed Look” for a SharePoint Online, Office 365 Team Site

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SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013 has been equipped with an entirely new theming engine. Custom themes built for SharePoint Server 2010 won’t work. But the theming engine is, nevertheless, highly flexible.

One method of customizing the look of an out of the box team site is to build a custom “Composed Look”, and apply it to the site. As noted in Themes Overview for SharePoint 2013, A “composed look, or design, is the color palette, font scheme, background image, and master page that determine the look and feel of a site. Design and theme can be used interchangeably to describe the overall look of a site.” The set of “Composed Looks” already available can be accessed from ” . . . the Site Settings page, under Web Designer Galleries, [and then] choose Composed looks.”

Custom font and color sets can be added to the http://your-site-collection/_catalogs/theme/15/ folder. While the syntax of the URL for the settings images can be seen from the Composed Look menu, it is not possible to add images directly from the images folder. So the safest way to add a new, custom Composed Look is by adding a new item to the “Composed Looks” list. Click on “new item”. On the following screen you will provide:

  • Title
  • Name
  • Master Page URL
  • Theme URL
  • Image URL
  • Font Scheme URL
  • Display Order

It is possible to add a description for the Master Page, Theme, Image, and Font Scheme settings. We recommend using these options to add metadata for search purposes.

Another article available on MSDN on this subject, How to: Deploy a custom theme in SharePoint 2013 is worth reading. This article defines “Theme URL” as the web page location of the color palette for one’s custom theme. The image and font sheme are optional components of the new Composed Look. The “Title”, “Name”, “Master Page” and “Display Order” are each mandatory fields. The “Display Order” ” . . . determines where the design appears in the design gallery.”

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Customizing the Look of a SharePoint Online Team Site from the Change the Look Page

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The theme engine for SharePoint Online has been changed, substantially, from SharePoint Server 2010. Site owners should develop a familiarity with the new theme methods to make the process of making superficial changes to site appearance comparatively easy.

It’s helpful, as noted in Show Off Your Style With SharePoint Theming, by Lionel Robinson, Program Manager, SharePoint Engineering Team at Microsoft, to conceptualize the important features of the new SharePoint Online theming engine as:

  1. Colors
  2. Site Layout
  3. Fonts
  4. and Background Image

Themes, or “Composed Looks” are built with each of the above noted four components. Numbers 1), and 3) are .xml files, which, as Lionel Robinson explains in his article, replace the old THMX file format. Color files, referred to as “SPColor” files in Lionel Robinson’s article, reside in the http://your site collection/_catalogs/theme/15 folder along with the “SPfont” files. The SPColor files are named “Pallette[number or custom designation]“. The SPfont files are named “fontscheme[number or custom designation]“.

We downloaded one of the Pallette files and edited it easily with our text editor. There were 91 settings in the file. The text string for each line was completely consistent as per below:

s:color name=”ContentAccent1″ value=”0072C6″

The “name” in the string should be self explanatory. The “value” is the RGB color value. Using any tool capable of modifying text color based on RGB values, you can experiment and build your own color schemes for text.

In his article, Lionel Robinson refers to a drag and drop process to quickly change the background image on any of the out of the box themes provided with SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online, Office 365. This “drop an image” capability must be accessed by first clicking on any of the themes listed on the “Change the Look” page. It won’t work correctly on the “Change the Look” page, itself.

Site owners can also quickly change the colors of any of the themes by simply moving their mouse over any of the color schemes exposed in the “Colors” section of the “Change the Look” page.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

End User Optimized Video Tutorials for SharePoint 2013 Help Hasten SharePoint Adoption

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Organizations planning either an implementation of SharePoint 2013, or a migration to SharePoint 2013, may want to plan on offering optimized, on-demand, task specific training resources to end users, including site owners. Usually this planning makes sense for organizations looking to reduce the cost of SharePoint development and support by training end users to “self manage.”

It’s important to define “optimized.” SharePoint end users benefit most from short video presentations of specific computer procedures. Keeping these tutorials focused on specific tasks, and short in length, encourages viewers to view them again and again until correct procedures are assimilated. By no means should viewers be expected to bookmark specific sections of lengthy videos. It’s unlikely they will repeatedly review these sections. It’s also possible they will not bookmark the correct sections, which substantially diminishes the value of the video tutorial and necessitates more direct involvement on the part of the support team.

So “optimized” video tutorials for end users are usually very short in length, limited to one computing topic, and composed of recorded mouse clicks, a human audio narrative and text boxes. There is little or no abstraction in the presentation, nor are there any “bobbing heads” presenting the information.

We’re pleased to announce the publication of the first 11 end user video tutorials for SharePoint 2013 on our web site. Any subscriber to SharePoint-Videos.com can access these videos. By the end of June of this year we plan on publishing approximately 100 of these optimized video tutorials on SharePoint 2013. Once the set is complete, we will have covered all of the list and library and administration topics covered in our set of end user video tutorials for SharePoint 2010.

If your organization is planning to implement SharePoint 2013 and you understand the imperative of providing end users with the type of training resources we’ve described, please contact us. We can schedule an online presentation where we show you these videos.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

A Different Set of Methods are Required to Successfully Brand SharePoint Online, 2013, Sites

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The CSS architecture of SharePoint Online, 2013, is very different from the same architecture for SharePoint 2010. In an article titled Branding issues that may occur when upgrading to SharePoint 2013, Microsoft alerts organizations supported with branded SharePoint Server 2010 sites to do some extensive testing before migrating to a live SharePoint Online, 2013, platform.

We thought as much. We tried to export a PowerPoint theme to our SharePoint Online, 2013, Enterprise platform, but couldn’t find a way to build a theme with it.

Another article on the Office web site, How to: Deploy a custom theme in SharePoint 2013, which is also accurate for Office 365, explains the role of the SharePoint Online, 2013 “Theme Gallery”, as well as how to upload custom themes to it.

As is the case with most of these articles, they are nested, so be prepared to click through them as you dive deeper into the steps you will need to take to implement a branded look for your SharePoint Online site.

Lots of information is included in a post to the SharePoint Blog, Show Off Your Style with SharePoint Theming. A note of caution, we found the presentation in this post to be hard to follow, but reading about the drag and drop features of the “Change the Look” feature look very interesting and worth the effort to absorb. Even better, the post promises readers an opportunity to ” . . . customize your site in minutes by playing with four basic levers: colors, site layout, fonts, and background image. By changing these, you can get a look that is truly unique.” We definitely plan on checking out the steps in this post.

Branding is an important capability for most organizations. We’re tinkering around with the design of our SharePoint Online presence and will share tips on successful methods of quickly customizing the look and feel of our site. One of the customization methods we plan on exploring is customizing the out of the box .xml files: SPColor.xml and SPFont.xml.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Adding Dashboards to a Dashboard Library in SharePoint Online

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Before we get down to the specifics of building a dashboard library inside our SharePoint Online, Enterprise E3 Business Intelligence Center (BIC) site collection, we need to note an important point. PerformancePoint Services Dashboard Designer is NOT available to SharePoint Online users. So plan on building any of the dashboards you require locally, with, for example, Excel 2013.

Once you’ve collected a set of dashboards you’ll want to add them to a library in your BIC site collection. In SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013, any custom lists or libraries will need to be built as “Apps”. You will add your dashboard library in the BIC site collection by clicking on the “site contents” link at the bottom of the left hand Quick Launch panel. As to the type of library App you will require for your dashboards? The best answer can be found in reference materials provided by Microsoft.

To take a step back, we think businesses should first globally plan content and matching library and list types for SharePoint Online prior to actually migrating users to the platform. Microsoft provides a reference article Plan content on sites. This article is step 3 of a set of articles designed to provide businesses with the planning information required for a smooth migration to the SharePoint Online computing platform. So reading this article first is recommended.

A second article, Introduction to libraries categorizes a dashboards library as one “Contain[ing] Web Part pages, Web Part Pages with Status Lists, and PerformancePoint deployed dashboards”.

We opted to simply add a library app titled “Our Dashboards” to store our locally created dashboards to our BIC site collection and set the default template to “Web Part Page”.

If you plan on exposing dashboards to your business users via SharePoint Online and need assistance planning a successful implementation, please contact us. A subject matter expert from our colleagues may be able to provide you with some useful information, while saving you time and otherwise unnecessary expense.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

BI Center Site Collection SharePoint Online Library and List Types

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The following screen is produced with SharePoint Online, Enterprise Edition, once a Business Intelligence Center (BIC) site collection has been successfully added:
BIC_Center_SP_Online
The three prompts in the center of the screen are simple and right to the point:

Explore and Analyze Data

Create powerful data mash-ups of millions of rows of data from various sources using PowerPivot

Design Interactive Reports

Create presentation ready reports that tell a compelling story using Excel and Power View

Share Dashboards

Publish dashboards that users can interact with Excel Services

But there is no specific mention, for line of business (LoB) users otherwise unfamiliar with SharePoint, of a core function of any site collection, which is to host a set of lists and library which can be shared among teams of users. The last bullet we just listed, “Share Dashboards” requires a shared document library within which dashboards can be saved and accessed. The first bullet, “Explore and Analyze Data” requires SharePoint Online lists to expose the “millions of rows of data”, from which “powerful data mash-ups” (?) will be created, to users. But there is no more detail on just how to build these libraries and lists.

For readers who may not be familiar with the term “mash-up”, the web site WhatIs.com defines “[a] mash-up [as] a Web page or application that integrates complementary elements from two or more sources. Mash-ups are often created by using a development approach called Ajax”.

If the definition is still elusive, let it suffice to say the three prompts on the screen are clearly designed for a highly technical audience of administrators, developers and/or architects who will need to build the libraries and lists for the this BIC site collection. But the reason for building these components of SharePoint Online is to provide LoB users with access to the graphical dashboards usually required to manage projects, and even the overall performance of a business unit. So it makes sense for LoB users to pay attention to the BIC site collection component of SharePoint Online and to learn further about it. In the next post we will look further at a Dashboard Library as one option for shared document libraries for a BIC site collection.

If your organization has a serious commitment to SharePoint Online, but you can use help distilling a useful opinion about the features you ought to be implementing, please let us know. You can contact us, we’re eager to learn more about what you’re after.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Adding a Business Intelligence Site Collection to SharePoint Online, Office 365 2013

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We planned to add a status list to the top level site collection of our Office 365, SharePoint Online account. But we quickly learned about the removal of this out of the box type of list from an article, Discontinued features and modified functionality in Microsoft SharePoint 2013, which was published on the Microsoft® Office web site.

The reason for the removal of this feature? “Similar features can be used with other applications, such as Excel Services”. The workaround is as follows:

  1. “If you used SharePoint Status Indicators in SharePoint Server 2010, you can continue to use them in SharePoint Server 2013.”
  2. or, ” If you did not use SharePoint Status Indicators and Status Lists in SharePoint Server 2010 you can use other SharePoint functionality such as Excel Services to create key performance indicators (KPIs).”

(all quotes have been extracted from the Office article. We’ve provided a link to the entire article above)

Before you attempt to follow 2), keep in mind the following:

  • You must have an Office 365 Enterprise Service Plan in order to activate Excel Services
  • SharePoint Online is a multi tenancy computing environment. As a tenant, you cannot access central administration
  • You will need to make sure “SharePoint Server Enterprise Features”, including “Features such as Visio Services, Access Services, and Excel Services Application, included in the SharePoint Server Enterprise License”, is enabled (quotes are extracted from the SharePoint Online, 2013 user interface) for each and every site collection for which you decide to implement Excel Services to produce the color coded status feature
  • This administrative control at the site collection level can be extended to the site level within each of your site collections. You can choose, at any time, to activate the “SharePoint Server Enterprise Features” at the site level

You must first have a site collection before you can access the site collection features we’ve just noted. We chose to set up a Business Intelligence Center (BIC) site collection for the list. SharePoint Online includes an Enterprise Site Template for a BIC Site Collection. In the next post to this blog we’ll discuss the BIC site collection in further detail.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Creating and Using Site Columns and Content Types Applied to SharePoint Online, Office 365 2013

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In this post we apply the steps Asif Rehmani demonstrates in a video titled Creating and using Site Columns and Content Types to configure site columns for a document library created in our SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013 environment. Asif Rehmani is a SharePoint MVP and MCT. A subscription to SharePoint-Videos.com is required to view the video tutorial.

Asif notes at the start of this 11 min tutorial, “[site columns and content types] are both extremely powerful functionality”. The capabilities of these two features contribute substantially to the usefulness of SharePoint Search, ease of access to data for SharePoint users, and, particularly for heavily regulated businesses, to the task of gathering business intelligence about data stored in SharePoint.

The left hand access to both the “Site Columns and Content Types” features from SharePoint Designer 2010 has been kept entirely as is in SharePoint 2013. SharePoint Designer 2013 is the preferred tool to use to set up these features (they can be set up with a browser). Set up is much faster with SharePoint Designer 2013.

As Asif points out midway through this video tutorial, SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013, out of the box, offers a comprehensive set of content types which may, in fact, be entirely useful to the needs of an organization. If it makes sense to create a new content type, then certainly it is an easy process to add one, as required.

The SharePoint Designer 2010 procedures demonstrated in this video are entirely consistent with SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013 up until Asif demonstrates how to “Edit content type columns.” When we clicked on the same button with SharePoint Designer 2013, we were presented with only “Name” and “Title” column choices. None of the Taxonomy and Metadata Keyword options visible in our video are available with SharePoint Designer 2013. There are options to add an “Enterprise Keywords” column, or a “Meta Description” of “Meta Keywords” “Publishing” column, but, to repeat, the Taxonomy choices are not present.

We only experienced one additional anomaly. When we followed the instructions in this video tutorial to modify the default view of our shared documents library in SharePoint Online, Office 365, 2013, we received an initial error message when we added our custom column “Budgets”. But this error corrected itself fine.

Ira Michael Blonder

© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved