When You Get Into SharePoint, You Get Into Bacon

#k2con is gone...but not forgotten!

Hopefully you've read my previous post #k2 con is on! If not, you'll want to do that before you read this one.

OK, now that you're all caught up, let's recap day 2 of the first K2 User Conference.

Day 2 started with a disappointment. There was no bacon at breakfast. The rest of the choices were about the same as day 1, but we had sausage patties instead of bacon. After tweeting my disappointment, I was informed, through Twitter, that there was bacon on the muffins in the hall. While I never investigated for myself, I was happy to have my faith in bacon at SharePoint related events renewed.

At the beginning of the keynote, emcee/comedian Baratunde Thurston had some quotes from various people from day 1. He said he was up early, checking out social media to see what we attendees were saying about the conference. While he expected there to be tweets, he did not expect to find a lengthy blog post recapping day 1 written early on the morning of day 2. Yes, it was my blog post #k2con is on!

Just for fun, Baratunde brought me up on stage, where I got to do some shameless self-promotion. Then, Baratunde performed a dramatic reading of my entire blog post. He would read a little and then stop and ask me a question. My answers generally seemed to surprise him and make him laugh. I'd like to thank the audience for laughing along (LOL). I may have also interjected once or twice, which almost made Baratunde regret his decision. All in all, it was a fun start to the morning. Because of my new fame (notoriety?), I had the opportunity to meet many people who otherwise would have remained strangers.

The best quote, which actually came from me...an original thought!... was "When you get into SharePoint, you get into bacon." Thank you to those who tweeted what is now my personal slogan. I've added it to my Twitter profile, too.

As a SharePoint enthusiast for more than 5 years, I have always thought of K2 as a third party add-on for SharePoint. During the conference, though, I saw many examples of how K2 is used as a standalone platform or in conjunction with non-SharePoint platforms and systems.

At the next K2 User Conference, I'd like to see more entry-level sessions. The ones I attended assumed that you were a current K2 customer and that you had built workflows, forms, and/or solutions already. I feel that this alienated new customers or employees who were new to their companies using K2.

If you're still in Vegas and attending the SharePoint Conference, remember this one thing:

What happens in Vegas stays ...on social media to live on forever and ever!

#K2Con Is On!

Greetings from Las Vegas!

Since I'm awake way too early (but an hour later than yesterday), I thought I'd update you on how the first K2 User Conference is going.

The morning kicked off with registration and breakfast at 7am. The K2 staff was ready and checking people in even before 7am. I appreciate that they were able to accommodate us early birds. While I waited for breakfast to open, I browsed the vendor/sponsor halls. Typically, I see the same companies at SharePoint events, but there were some new ones this time. Later in the day, I had the opportunity to speak with 5th Method. I asked them what the first 4methods were. I'm not sure they appreciated my humor, but they were good sports about it. Back to breakfast...it was your typical conference breakfast with some carbs, some fruit, and of course BACON! I'm not a huge fan of bacon, but you can't have a SharePoint related conference without bacon. While I ate, I met some nice people from Massachusetts. It turns out that they are clients of my friends from Atrion. It's a small world after all...

The keynote included some technical folks from K2, Microsoft, and Clarity Consulting. Marketform was the winner of the FWD Thinker award and demonstrated their K2 solution called Alfred for us. Since a few of my co-workers recently completed a SharePoint front-end solution similar to Alfred, I was intrigued and impressed by Alfred. The emcee for the morning was Baratunde Thurston, author of How To Be Black. He's also a comedian and entrepreneur. His presentation was entertaining, insightful, and down right funny. I liked how he told a bunch of stories that were so well linked together it felt like a personal conversation.

After lunch, the breakout sessions began. First, K2 demonstrated their new product K2 for SharePoint. They implemented K2 for SharePoint in under 5 minutes. I have not implemented, configured, or used K2 yet myself, but I've heard that it can be quite difficult. Needless to say, the live demo was a huge success. K2 for SharePoint is expected to be available to blackpearl customers in April.

Then there were three more sessions: Fast Data, Using K2 to build K2 for SharePoint, and Fast Forms. As a non-developer and not-yet-a-K2-user, I found the first 2 sessions to be more technical and more advanced than I would have liked. In the Fast Forms session, the speaker introduced us to K2D2, a robot who can be controlled through K2 and who can post to Yammer when his head is removed. That was really cool and fun!

In the evening, I attended the K2 attendee party at the Vanity nightclub in the Hard Hotel & Casino. The booths in the club had a 70s feel to them, which I really enjoyed. Our booth was right by the dance floor. When "Thriller" by Michael Jackson played, about a dozen zombies came out and danced in, with, and among the crowd. They even stuck around for most of the night. After the zombie attack, I had a photo op with Adriaan Van Wyck, the CEO of K2. He was a very down to earth guy, and I enjoyed the chance to meet him.

When the party finally ended an hour later than scheduled, I returned to my room for some much needed sleep. I've got another full day of K2 sessions, followed by the SharePoint Conference welcome reception tonight. If you're at either conference, I'd love to meet you! If you're not here, follow #k2con and #spc14 to be virtually here.

I'll leave you with this quote from Marketform's presentation yesterday. Since tweeting it, this quote has received 7 retweets and 2 favorites, so it must be important. :)

"The difference between good solutions and great solutions is the user experience."

Viva La SPC14!

In a few days, I'll be heading to Las Vegas for two conferences. First, I'll be attending the K2 User Conference at the Hard Rock Hotel on March 1 and 2. Then, I'll head over to the Venetian for the SharePoint Conference 2014. Both conferences will provide more knowledge than my brain can handle, but here's a brief look at what I'm looking forward to the most.
 
The K2 user conference is sold out. Thus, I expect to meet a lot of K2 users. Since I have not personally used K2 yet, I hope to learn how they are using K2, as well as picking up some general tips and best practices. I'm most excited about the Fast Forms session on Saturday, where I'll see how to build forms using K2. On Sunday, I'm looking forward to the Fast Workflow session, where I'll see, for the second time ever, how to build a K2 workflow. I don't expect to be a K2 expert at the end of the K2 user conference, but I do hope that I'll have a broader knowledge of K2 products.

The SharePoint Conference kicks off Sunday evening with a welcome reception. I anticipate that I'll see quite a few people I met at various SharePoint Saturday events last year. Many of them are SPC14 speakers, and I wish them well!

Monday begins with the keynote speeches, most notably (or infamously?) the Bill Clinton keynote. If Al Gore invented the Internet, then Bill Clinton invented SharePoint, right? I'll be sure to NOT wear a blue dress.

Once the breakout sessions start Monday afternoon, I'm going to be torn between the business (end) user track and the IT Pro track. To temporarily satisfy my dual personalities (I'm a Gemini), I have added two tracks to most time slots. When it's time to go to a session, I'll decide which one strikes my fancy at that particular moment. If I change my mind 10 minutes into the session, I'll know what my alternate choice was. Let's just hope they're located in close proximity. (If they're not, then I'll be breaking in my new shoes and gaining additional Fitbit steps.)

Are you going to the session on the retirement of InfoPath? I predict that this will be the most attended session of the entire conference (excluding keynotes). I'm thinking about going to a different session for a couple of reasons. First, everyone will be talking about what was announced during the session. Therefore, I can get all of the information second hand. Additionally, the session materials (and probably a recording of the session) will be available online after the conference. So I will have yet another opportunity to find out what the replacement for InfoPath is...first hand this time!

One way I plan to meet new people is to attend the two Women in SharePoint events. First, there will be an informal gathering at Sunday night's welcome reception. Then, on Wednesday, is the official Women in SharePoint lunch. (On MySPC, it's called Women in Technology Lunch.) The all-star panel includes Cathy Dew, Lori Gowin, Naomi Moneypenny, Laura Rogers, and Jennifer Mason. These ladies are sure to have some great stories and encouraging advice. If you're a woman in SharePoint, you should join us! Just put the session on your schedule. There's no extra fee to attend.

Another networking opportunity that isn't on the official schedule is the Netcast Hooligans breakfast on Wednesday. This is your chance to meet and dine with Todd Klindt, author, Netcast host, and SharePoint administrator extraordinaire. (Don't let his session on load testing with Visual Studio fool you into thinking he's a developer!)

If you're staying in Vegas Thursday night, be sure to register for and attend #ShareHofbrau. This is an annual, unofficial post-SPC dinner held at Hofbrau and organized by Corey Roth. I'll unfortunately miss this fantastic event because I'll be on a plane headed back to Houston.

For more ideas on what to expect at the SharePoint Conference, check out these blogs.

• SPC14 Survival and Readiness Guide
• SPC14 Readiness Checklist
• Your #SPC14 Survival Guide

If you have a Twitter account, I suggest you save a search for #spc14 and follow @spconf, @spcpartypatrol, and @SharePointMadam. Yes, that last one is me. I'll be tweeting my SharePoint Conference experience throughout the days...and nights.

Those are my thoughts on SharePoint Conference 2014. Now it's time to pack. Wish me luck!

Integrating Yammer with SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 has a Yammer app that can be installed to integrate the two products. If you are using a non-Microsoft supported app, such as Chrome or Firefox, typically you just need to sign into the Yammer app to make it work. However, if you are using Internet Explorer, especially IE11, you may need to make a few modifications to the Trusted Sites. Just follow these steps.

1.    In Internet Explorer, open Internet Options.

2.    Click on the Security tab.

3.    Click on Trusted Sites and then click Sites.

4.    Add the following four URLs:

·        https://*.assets-yammer.com

·         https://*.sharepoint.com

·         https://*.yammer.com

·         https://login.microsoftonline.com

5.    After adding the last URL, click Close.

6.    Click Close.

You should now be able to log into the Yammer app for SharePoint 2013.

Using Office 2010 with SharePoint 2013

If you are using Office 2010 with SharePoint 2013, you may have noticed two issues. First, “drag files here” is missing from your document libraries. Second, you may not be able to open Microsoft Office files from inside SharePoint because “some content or files on this webpage require a program that you don’t have installed.” Let’s examine and resolve each of these issues.

 

 

The ability to drag and drop files into a SharePoint 2013 document library is a new feature that requires some Office 2013 files to be installed on your computer. To obtain these files, you can install any Office 2013 program. If your organization is not ready to roll out Office 2013 enterprise wide, you can install Lync 2013 or SharePoint Designer 2013. Because SharePoint Designer is a powerful tool, only power users with appropriate training should use it to modify SharePoint sites. Through Central Administration, farm administrators who are worried about the unauthorized use of SharePoint Designer can control—at the web application level—which users are allowed to use the tool.
 

After installing an Office 2013 program to enable the drag and drop to a document library feature, users may not be able to open Office files—such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint—in the client or desktop application. This is a known issue that is resolved by installing Service Pack 2 for Office 2010. Click here for the 32-bit version or click here for the 64-bit version of the Office 2010 Service Pack 2.

MDS Caused Error After Modifying List View

Should I deactivate Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) on a Team site that has Publishing features enabled? The answer is yes.
 
On October 15, I posted this question on SPYAM. Although I only received 3 responses, no one objected to the idea. I thus went into my client's SharePoint 2013 environment and deactivated MDS on all of the sites...or so I thought.
 
Minimal Download Strategy is a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that reloads only the parts of the page that have changed. MDS works well with Team sites and is automatically activated when you create a Team site. Unfortunately, it can cause the page to load twice on Publishing sites.

The reason we had Publishing features activated on Team sites was to make use of an app that we had downloaded from the SharePoint store. It worked fine on Team sites but gave us a 503 error on Publishing sites. Because we had a custom master page with custom CSS, we had built the main web app using the Publishing site template. To quickly get around the 503 error, we rebuilt the web app with the Team site template and manually activated the Publishing features.

A few weeks later, we noticed that some sites were throwing an error after changing the view in a list. The error always started with a number, but that number varied. The rest of the error was always the same, as seen in the example below.
 
86|pageRedirect|owssvr|http://webapp.clientname.com/dept/finance/acctg/Lists/icontacts/AllItems.aspx 

After much research and testing, my co-worker and I discovered the problem. The list view error was only occurring on the sites where MDS was (unintentionally) still enabled. By deactivating MDS on those sites, we eliminated the list view error. My co-worker's full explanation is below.

"The OWSSVR.dll is a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) component of SharePoint. It’s part of a web service, that among several other things, accesses list and library functions through CAML queries. In this case the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) Feature uses this web service like an AJAX call to only refresh page level elements rather than the whole page itself. This is a way Microsoft tries to increase perceived page load performance.

"I found if we disable this feature the OWSSRV.dll 6500 error no longer occurs when saving List Views and I have not found any additional impact on disabling this feature."

 

Local Columns Not Associated with Custom Content Types

Recently, I was working with a client who just went live on SharePoint 2013. On a subsite of the home page, there is a document library containing forms and policies. To visually organize the library, I added a choice column called DocType. As you guessed, the choice types were Form and Policy. When I edited the properties of one of the documents, I noticed that the new column was not visible.

Further investigation revealed that the local column was associated with the original content type, Document, but not associated with the default (custom) content type, Client Document. The client is on the March 2013 Public Update. So I tested this functionality in a SharePoint 2013 RTM environment, and the local column did associate with the default (custom) content type as well as the original content type.

I had two friends test using the same steps. The friend who is also on SharePoint 2013 RTM had success in the local column associating with the default (custom) content type as well as the original content type. However, the friend who is on the August 2013 Cumulative Update did not have success. In her environment, the local column associated only with the original content type and not the default (custom) content type.

 

If you have a SharePoint 2013 environment that is on the October 2013 CU, I encourage you to test this functionality using the steps below and report your results in the comments section. The more attention we give this scenario, the more hope there is that it will be resolved in an upcoming hotfix or cumulative update.

 

Steps to Test in Your SharePoint 2013 Environment

1. In a document library, add a custom content type and make it the default content type. The original content type should still be associated with the library but not visible.

2. In the same document library, add a choice column to be used as local metadata. When creating the column, ensure that the checkbox for "Add to all content types" is marked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. In the Columns section of the Document Library Settings, notice that the local column is associated with the original content type but not the default (custom) content type.

4. Upload a document to the library.

5. Edit the properties of the document. Notice that the newly added column does not display.