Information technology think tank, IDC, has made its annual technology predictions for 2012. I’m not surprised that they’re predicting that cloud services will begin to take leadership in the enterprise technology mix.

IDC anticipates that “the strategic focus [will shift] from building infrastructure to the creation of application platforms and ecosystems,” and notes that “the battle for enterprise platform dominance is just getting underway with established players like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle facing serious challenges from Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and VMware.”

Cloud services – whereby IT infrastructure and business applications are delivered from a centralized location rather than from a server farm at your premise (much the way we receive electricity service) – represent a major opportunity for small- and mid-size organizations:

• They make enterprise-level applications and products more accessible to organizations >500 users
• They reduce capital expenditure and minimize physical infrastructure (and the specialized human resources needed to maintain it)
• They support on-demand provisioning of new applications as you need them

As you plan out your business for 2012 and beyond, cloud-based services should absolutely be considered as part of your business (not just your technology) mix. Consider how you can leverage cloud-based applications to improve sales and marketing productivity; to reduce operating costs; to support the rapid roll-out of new products, services and promotions on demand.

Here are just a few examples of how some Tango Technology Group SMB clients are benefitting from cloud-based services:

• Implementing professional contact relationship management (CRM) without deploying new servers
• Collaborating enterprise-wide and effectively managing documents without additional capex
• Communicating more productively through company-wide contact and schedule management without an Exchange server

You can read IDC’s complete technology predictions here – then talk to me about what it all means to your company. I’m always excited to talk to small- and mid-size businesses about how technology should be deployed to deliver serious BUSINESS value. dtremblay(at)tangotechnologygroup.com

If you’ve poked around the SharePoint 2010 styles a little bit, you’ll notice that most of the styles are derived from a file called “corev4.css”. Do not modify this file directly! First of all, this file is packed with thousands of lines of CSS rules, so trying to figure out what you’ve changed so far is a logistical nightmare. Second of all, once you add a theme to your site all of the styles in this file get transferred to a “themed” version of the corev4 file which is generated dynamically and is overwritten as soon as the user changes the theme settings again. The best way that I’ve found to override the built-in CSS rules is to do it within your own master page. Chances are, if you’re re-branding your SharePoint site you’re going to be moving things around so you should have your own custom master page to work with. To start overriding CSS styles you simply need to add a style element in the head block of your master page. Whenever you see a rule in the corev4 file that you want to override, simply go back to your master page, copy that same rule, and modify the attributes that you would like to change. If you have your master page as the current site default, then saving your file and refreshing the page in the browser will show you the changes you’ve made.

In order to facilitate the hunt for the right CSS rules to override in your Master Page, one essential tool to have is FireBug. This tool was originally developed as a FireFox plugin, and (among other things) allows you to debug CSS and HTML on the fly, for any site. Not only can you view all of the CSS rules that are applied to a particular page element, but you can also change the CSS rules and see the effects of your changes right away. Since FireFox and Internet Explorer don’t always interpret CSS rules the same way, there is also a “lite” version of FireBug that can be used in virtually any browser. This makes it an invaluable tool to have when you’re re-branding your SharePoint site.

Now that you have created your theme, and setup the master page that you will be adding your CSS to, you are ready to start re-designing your SharePoint site.

Get FireBug

• FireBug for FireFox
• FireBug Lite

Designing a Theme

The easiest way to design your theme is to create the theme through your SharePoint site. The reason for this is that you can see the effects of your changes almost immediately with the click of a button. This is essential when you’re doing the fine tuning of your theme.

To access the theme editor through the browser simply go to Site Actions –> Site Settings and then under the Look and Feel section click on Site theme. This will bring you to the page shown in the image below:

On this page you’ll find your most useful tools are the “Select a Theme”, “Customize Theme”, and “Preview Theme” sections. In the “Select a Theme” section you can choose from a wide array of built-in themes that come out-of-the-box. If you’re lucky, there may be a theme there that is already close enough to your desired theme, so you can take it as your starting point. In the “Customize Theme” section you can edit the specific colours within the chosen theme. This section will be covered in detail in the next paragraph. Finally, in the “Preview Theme” section you can see your theme applied to your site without actually fully applying it. What the Preview button does is open a popup that shows an exact copy of your site so that you can see how your site would look like if you applied the theme as it is right now. Granted, it only allows you to see the homepage of your site, however this is usually enough to yay or nay your current design.

In the “Customize Theme” section you can pick and choose all of the colours that you wish to have in your theme. After some experimentation, I found that the most prominent colours are contained in the first 5 settings of this section. The biggest problem with using this designer is that the colour categories are completely vague. It is impossible to know what rules apply to what. A good way to get around this problem is to pick 5 completely different colours for the first 5 settings in this section. For example, pick red, blue, green, and yellow for the “Text/Background” sections, and pick pink for the “Accent 1” section. After applying this theme to your site you will get something that looks like this:

Although this is not too easy on the eyes, it gives you a clear division of which settings are applied to which components. Once you have this as your starting point you can simply change the colours one by one, and you can be sure about which components you are customizing with your colour choices.

Once you have defined what your theme colours are you will have a good platform to start your SharePoint design. In the next blog posts I will start to explain how to customize the individual parts of a SharePoint page.

Useful Links

• Saving and applying a custom theme
  http://www.spdavid.com/post/2010/01/16/Custom-SharePoint-2010-Themes.aspx
• Deploying Theme as a Feature
  http://howtosharepoint.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-to-deploy-new-theme-as-feature.html

Research In Motion provides phone emulators for nearly all possible configurations of their phones. You can find these simulators at:
RIM Developer Zone
If you find that your client has configuration options missing on their phone, it is probably because the carrier has locked down the phone. With a quick call to the carrier, you can usually get these configuration options unlocked. (Sometimes there is an additional fee to unlock these settings.)

On that note, this blog (and the next few blogs) will be targeted around re-designing SharePoint while maintaining all of the functionality that comes with it. The first step to accomplishing this is to know what you’re dealing with. In the image below I’ve blocked out the various components that are standard for almost every page that you’ll see in SharePoint. Each block represents a component that can be moved around and styled, but cannot be torn to pieces. Below the image I will go in to a little more detail about what can be done to style and customize the component. This should be enough to give you ideas about what is possible with SharePoint design.

1 – Main Content
This is where all of the content is rendered. This block can contain lists, libraries, calendars, custom web parts, tasks… anything you create. As such, styling this area needs to be considered on a per-content-type basis rather than simply on a master page basis. For example, if you start changing the styles for the root container, you then need to go through and test how different SharePoint content renders within the newly styled container. Different content will behave differently in this container so it is not exactly trivial to style this section. In the blogs to come I will give you some tips and tricks to styling this area, and describe how the standard content (document libraries, lists, web part pages, etc.) will behave in this container.

2 – Quick Links Sidebar
This is where all of your Quick Links will appear. SharePoint allows users to completely customize what goes in to this block, so you don’t have much control over the layout of the content from a master page perspective. What you can define are the CSS rules for how you want the headers to look, how you want the items to look, as well as how you want the selected item to look. Again, customizing this component is worthy of its own blog post, so I will certainly cover this in a future blog.

3 – Top Link Navigation
This is the block that contains the global navigation links for your SharePoint site. Similarly to the Quick Links Sidebar, SharePoint allows the user to define what these links are, so again you are limited to CSS rules when customizing this component. The two main things that you have control over is the style of the selected link, and the style of the unselected links.

4 – Page Breadcrumb
This is the block that will contain the title of the current site, as well as a dynamic breadcrumb that provides links that lead you from the current page to the site root. This is actually one component that can be ripped apart in to two parts: The root site title, and the current page title. Both these parts can be moved around and themed separately, so you can make this part look however you want. You can even style the separating arrow in between the different titles.

5 – Page Description
This is the block that contains the description of the current page. The content of this block will always be text, so it is completely customizable with CSS.

6 – Site Icon
This is the icon that is used across the site. It is customized by the user through SharePoint, and does not have any size restrictions. However, since the whole point of “branding” a SharePoint site is to make it have the look and feel of your company, this logo will most likely always stay relatively static. So you can keep this in mind when you decide where it should go.

7 – Search Area
This block contains the search box that allows your users to search all of the content of the site. The search box and button are pretty static (as they are contained in a delegate control), but the container can be styled with CSS. It is also not an inconceivable task to create a custom search box and deploy it as a feature. However, this task will be out of the scope of any future SharePoint branding blog entries.

8 – Social Tags (Delegate Control)
In the master page this block is actually just a Delegate Control. As such, it could technically contain anything, so in general your styling of this area is limited to CSS. By default it is populated with a few buttons that allow the user to tag a page, or add notes that everyone can see.

9 – The Ribbon
This block contains the heart and soul of SharePoint 2010: The Ribbon. This block is shipped in one single piece that cannot be ripped apart. On top of this, it is by far the most dynamic component of SharePoint (besides maybe the content itself). The content of the ribbon changes depending on what type of component the user is currently focusing on. As such, it is any designer’s nightmare to style it. On top of this, the ribbon is not affected at all by Site Themes… so it is completely up to you to get it to fit with the theme of the site. Styling this part will most definitely be the topic of a future blog post.

The first step to re-designing any site is to understand what you have to work with… and SharePoint is no exception. I hope the above diagram will give you a good high level view of the different parts that go in to a SharePoint page, so that you can make informed design decisions during the initial phases of your re-branding journey.

On the SharePoint side:
Try different configuration options in SharePoint. This is done through the SharePoint Central Administration website:

• Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Web Applications
• Choose a Web Application and click the Authentication Providers button.
• Try switching the IIS Authentication setting from Kerberos to NTLM – both are capable of working, but Kerberos may require additional IIS configuration.

On the client side:

1. Make SharePoint a Trusted Site
2. Modify Windows Vista and Windows 7 registry settings
3. Set Local Security Policy to allow NTLM response

Make SharePoint a Trusted Site

Internet security settings may prevent Windows from passing credentials to the SharePoint site. To properly configure this setting:

• Go to Internet Options
• Go to the Security tab and select the Trusted Sites zone, then click the Sites button
• Add the URL for SharePoint to this list and click OK to get back to the Security tab
• Click the Custom Level button
• Scroll to the bottom of the list of settings and make sure that User Authentication->Logon is set to Automatic Logon with Current Username and Password
• Click OK

Modify Windows Vista and Windows 7 registry settings

Windows Vista and Windows 7 have trouble authenticating with WebDAV, which effects SharePoint’s document library explorer view and also effects opening Sharepoint files dirrectly into MS Office applications.
Windows Vista may require a hotfix to be installed as well as following the steps below to edit the registry. See the link at the bottom of the article for the hotfix.

• Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
• If there is no parameter called AuthForwardServerList, you will have to create it, otherwise you can just add SharePoint to the list of URLs already there.
• On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
• Type AuthForwardServerList, and then press ENTER.
• On the Edit menu, click Modify.
• In the Value data box, type all of the URLS used by the SharePoint server, and then click OK.
• Exit Registry Editor.

Set Local Security Policy to allow NTLM response

A default local security policy in Windows 7 prevents LM and NTLM responses. This may cause credentials to fail and retry because Windows is unable to see the response. To check this setting:

• Go to Local Security Policy > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options
• Select Network security: LAN Manager Authentication level
• Change security setting to Send LM & NTLM responses

Links

• How to enable Windows 7 single sign on for a website using Windows authentication
• Windows 7 Registry Fix for WebDAV Authentication

BEFORE

AFTER

The biggest changes to look for are the look and feel of the Quick Links, the overall centered content, and the top navigation bar. Getting this overall look and feel took some trial and error, and some hard lessons. As such, over the next while, I will be posting some blogs that are focused around SharePoint branding in general, and some tips and tricks that we found throughout our re-branding journey.

1. Property promotion sometimes occurs after you automatically set the field value, overwriting your value with a blank or whatever value was set in the document.
2. Property demotion doesn’t include your auto-setting value.

I have only found one solution that works in all cases:

//Global variables to store values for the worker thread
private Guid ListID;
private Guid ItemID;
private Guid SiteID;
private String FieldValue;

public override void ItemUpdated(SPItemEventProperties properties){
    DisableEventFiring();

    try{
        //Store the values our thread is going to need to get a
        //handle on this list item.
        FieldValue = GetColumnValueForItem(properties.ListItem);
        ListID = properties.ListId;
        ItemID = properties.ListItem.UniqueId;
        SiteID = properties.SiteId;

        //Only start the new thread if it has NOT been set.
        if (uFieldValue != (string)properties.ListItem[COLUMN_NAME]){
             //Create the worker process
             Thread workerThread = new Thread(SetCustomValue);
             workerThread.Start();
        }
    }catch(){
        //Log error message.
    }

    EnableEventFiring();
}

public override void ItemAdded(SPItemEventProperties properties){
    DisableEventFiring();

    try(){
        //Store the values our thread is going to need to get a
        //handle on this list item.
        FieldValue = GetColumnValueForItem(properties.ListItem);
        ListID = properties.ListId;
        ItemID = properties.ListItem.UniqueId;
        SiteID = properties.SiteId;

        //Create the worker process
        Thread workerThread = new Thread(SetCustomValue);
        workerThread.Start();
    }catch(){
        //Log information about the error.
    }

    EnableEventFiring();
}

private void SetCustomValue(){
    try{
        //Wait for 5 seconds to allow all of the SharePoint
        //events to finish working.
        Thread.Sleep(5000);
        using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SiteID)){
            using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()){
                //Get the list item using the global variables
                SPList list = web.Lists[ListID];
                SPListItem item = list.GetItemByUniqueId(ItemID);

                //Set the custom field to the proper value
                item[COLUMN_NAME] = uFieldValue;
                //Perform a SystemUpdate on the item to save
                //the changes to the field.
                item.SystemUpdate(false);
            }
        }
    }catch (Exception ee){
        //Log information about the error.
    }
}

The logic is fairly simple. Just spin up a thread that waits for SharePoint to be finished modifying the file and list item, then sets the auto field value. When this tactic is used, the auto value gets set in SharePoint and in the document for all reasonable test cases.  (i.e. when you copy using Word SaveAs to add a new document, when you use the Windows Explorer View, or when you use the standard SharePoint Web UI to Add or Edit the document.)  

One thing to keep in mind is that you can’t determine how many times the code will be run.  ItemAdded and Item Updating may each be called once, multiple times, or not at all, depending on what method was used to update the document.  So when the value of the custom field is calculated, you must use a formula that gives you the same result every time.

For more information, see the other posts in this series:

• SharePoint Event Handling – When do events fire?
• SharePoint Events – Setting a Column Value in the ItemUpdating Event

Activating the Feature

Since the document ID feature is scoped for an entire site collection you need to be the site collection administrator. If you go to any site in the site collection and go to the Site Settings, you should see a Site Collection Administration section. Under this section click on Site Collection Features. In there, you will see the Document ID Service feature.

This is the service that you need to activate to enable this feature. Once this feature is activated you can edit the view of any document library (through the Library Settings) to include the new Document ID column. When you first activate the feature, you will notice that there are no document IDs assigned to the documents that were already in your document libraries. This is because the task of assigning document IDs to existing documents is performed by a timer job on the server. I will explain how this timer job works later in this post. First, I will explain how to configure the document ID prefix settings.

Setting the Document ID Prefix

Once you’ve activated the Document ID Service, you will see a new entry under the Site Collection Administration section called Document ID Settings. This is where you can configure your document ID prefix.

By default, SharePoint will assign a non-sensical hash as the Document ID prefix, so for usability purposes I would highly suggest changing this value before applying document IDs to all of your existing documents. The settings contained in this page are pretty self-explanatory… the “Assign Document IDs” checkbox is used to turn the document ID assignment ON and OFF, the text box just below that is used to set the prefix for all of your document IDs, and the checkbox just below that is used when you wish to propagate the changes you made to the prefix to all existing documents in your site collection.

One important thing to note (as is indicated by the red text) is that any changes made to these settings will not be applied to existing documents until the timer job on the server is run. This brings me to the next step in activating the Document ID feature: Running the timer jobs.

Running the Timer Jobs

Any changes you make to the prefix, in the settings above, will be applied immediately to any new document that is uploaded to your document library. However, changing the document ID of existing documents is done by a timer job on the server. In fact, there are two timer jobs that are set to automatically apply your configuration settings for the Document ID feature: the Document ID assignment job and the Document ID enable/disable job. You can find these timer jobs on the Review Job Definitions settings page in Central Administration, under Monitoring –> Timer Jobs. Once here, look for the jobs that are registered to your web application.

The “Document ID assignment job” is the job that takes your configured prefix, and assigns a document ID to all of your existing documents. By default, this job is run daily between 10:00PM and 10:30PM. If you checked the checkbox in the Document ID settings named “Reset all Document IDs in this Site Collection to begin with these characters”, then this job will go to all of your existing documents and change their prefix to the new one that you have set. The “Document ID enable/disable job” is the job that essentially “saves” any newly configured settings for the Document ID feature across all sites. By default, this job is run daily between 9:30PM and 9:45PM. Sometimes, it may be necessary to see your changes immediately. In order to do this, you simply need to click the link in the Job Definitions settings page and then click the Run Now button.

* * * * *
Important: If you have made changes to the Document ID prefix, you may need to run the “Document ID enable/disable job” first before you run the “Document ID assignment job” in order to see your changes.
* * * * *

Once you have run these two jobs, you should now see the Document ID column filled out with your newly configured Document ID:

Accessing Documents

Once all of your documents have IDs assigned to them, you can then reap the benefits of the Document ID feature. There are two ways that you can access documents using their Document ID: (1) Through a well-formed URL, or (2) through the “Find by Document ID” web part.

To access Documents through a well-formed URL, you simply need to type a URL in to the address box of your browser that is of the form: http://<Server_Name>/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=<Document_ID> . Or alternatively, you can copy a document’s URL directly from the Document Library by right-clicking on the link under the Document ID column and clicking “Copy Shortcut” (in IE).

In order to use the “Find by Document ID” web part, you simply need to go to any editable page in your site, and add the web part to the page. The web part can be added through the Insert –> Web Part ribbon menu, under the Search category. Once the web part is on a page, you can simply enter a Document ID in to the text box and click on the arrow button. This will find the document you are looking for and automatically download it for you.

By using the Document ID to access your documents, you are ensuring that your users can always access frequently used documents through a single URL, even when a document is moved to another location. This can save a lot of time and questions whenever your document libraries are undergoing some refactoring. If you are using the Foundation edition of SharePoint 2010, unfortunately you do not have access to this feature… however, if you are using the Standard or Enterprise editions of SharePoint 2010, then you can (and should) take full advantage of this new feature.

There are a lot of actions a user could take that should trigger my code.  See my previous post SharePoint Event Handling - When do events fire?  I needed my code to be triggered no matter which action the user took.  The best approach I found was to use the ItemUpdating event and then force ItemUpdating to be called by triggering an update in the ItemAdded event.

My first attempt at the code looked like this:

public override void ItemAdded(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
    base.ItemAdded(properties);
    //Make sure the ItemUpdating method gets called even when using SaveAs from MSWord.
    properties.ListItem.SystemUpdate(false);
}

public override void ItemUpdating(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
	try
	{
		string newFieldValue = GetNewFieldValue();
		object oldFieldValue = properties.AfterProperties[COLUMN_NAME];
		if (oldFieldValue == null || oldFieldValue.ToString() != newFieldValue)
		{
			properties.AfterProperties[COLUMN_NAME] = newFieldValue;
		}
	}
	catch
	{
	    //Log the error, or take another appropriate action.
	}
	finally
	{
		base.ItemUpdating(properties);
	}
}

I found that there were circumstances when the column value would not get set or would be cleared and I would get the default value for the column instead.  After hours of debugging and testing, I discovered that it was only clearing my column when ItemUpdating was triggered and the value of my column had already been set properly and hadn’t changed.  So I made the obvious change and removed the piece of my code that skips explicitly setting the column value if it has already been set.

public override void ItemUpdating(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
	try
	{
		string newFieldValue = GetNewFieldValue();
		object oldFieldValue = properties.AfterProperties[COLUMN_NAME];
		//if (oldFieldValue == null || oldFieldValue.ToString() != newFieldValue)
		//{
			properties.AfterProperties[COLUMN_NAME] = newFieldValue;
		//}
	}
	catch
	{
	    //Log the error, or take another appropriate action.
	}
	finally
	{
		base.ItemUpdating(properties);
	}
}

This fixed the problem … Now I needed to figure out why.  I stepped through the code with the VS debugger and found that the properties.AfterProperties[COLUMN_NAME] had the correct value for the entire method, but some time after the ItemUpdating method finished  the value was cleared, unless I had explicitly set the value during that pass.  I did some research, but wasn’t able to find a reasonable explanation for this behaviour.  I will add to this post once I find one.  In the meantime, I hope this quick fix will help some of you avoid the same type of problem.