SharePoint + Office365 for Oil & Gas

Is Your SharePoint Farm Ready for Kim Jong Un?

If you play a part in managing or administering SharePoint at your company, the Sony hack might be more frightening to you than any movie released this year. The hackers looted Sony’s network and released sensitive employee information, confidential intellectual property, and even embarrassing emails. You don’t have any of these on your servers, do you?

Sure, your firm might not attract the ire of a rogue nation, but corporate cyberattacks are commonplace, and most malware isn’t directed at a specific target, but instead sweeps the internet for network vulnerabilities.
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SharePoint Trends for 2014

SharePoint is an application platform that allows you to take control of the content and documents that you put on the Internet. Though the capabilities are present in SharePoint for use with external websites (like the kinds that your customers use to find out more information about your business), most companies have been using SharePoint for internal intranets.

SharePoint is great for tasks like collaboration on projects, document sharing and more. There are several trends with regards to SharePoint that you should definitely be paying attention to in 2014. Read More

SharePoint Consulting: Solutions to Common BCS Errors

Solving BCS Errors with SharePoint Consulting

My recent SharePoint consulting work has involved working through a few BCS errors. Programmatically accessing BCS External Lists in SharePoint is a bit like working in a parallel universe.  Most list access rules will continue to apply, however there are some very special caveats that one must remember.

For the reader’s findability convenience, I am organizing this guide in terms of the errors that the user will most likely encounter. Read More

SharePoint 2013 and Large Lookup Lists

SharePoint 2013 and an Unexpected Cost of Large Lookup Lists

SharePoint 2013 can handle very large lists (given a very restrictive set of requirements). There is however one error that slipped through the cracks from the Microsoft SharePoint development team. When the total number of items in a list exceed 20,000 items (mileage may vary); you may lose the ability to use the list as a Lookup Column while maintaining the ability to edit the list item via the default edit form. Read More

SharePoint Consulting: Gamification and ROI

The Return on Investment for SharePoint Consulting

In our SharePoint consulting engagements, we often come across interesting problems that can be solved by some amount of customization. This was exactly the case when a change manager from one Upstream client came to Entrance with concerns over educating employees on a new system transition.

Pipeline controllers at this company needed to understand the changes and how they affected their jobs. After some consideration of the business problem, Entrance recommended that our client try SharePoint gamification.

We shared some of the steps we went through for this SharePoint consulting engagement when we first started the project a few months ago. Now that the gamification customizations are live on the customer’s SharePoint site, it has been exciting to see how they are using it and what employees think.

Incentivizing SharePoint Participation

SharePoint Consulting: GamificationA common problem in the SharePoint consulting world is when sites are developed and implemented, but afterwards stakeholders have no idea who is using it or if it is serving the purpose for which it was developed. As a result, calculating ROI or any sort of value for the project is not possible.

In the case of this implementation, the site was launched with incentives (like gift cards and t-shirts) for people to participate and build up points. The addition of fun and competition immediately encouraged employees to use the site and become engaged.

Similar to a computer game, each user starts out at a basic level and moves up as they score points. Each level is named after something relevant to the oil and gas industry.

There is also a leaderboard where employees can see monthly and lifetime high scores. This helps the change management team to check in on who has been staying up-to-date on system migration changes, and who has not.

Another major benefit of our SharePoint consulting work is that the gaming system has been set up so it can be managed internally. After the customization was complete, Entrance trained the team on how to administer it, thus empowering the team to use the system as necessary.

Since the launch of gaming system, reports back from the client are all positive. Employees report that they love playing, and the client is thrilled that so many people are engaging with the content they need.

For more on how the oil and gas industry can use SharePoint to improve collaboration and engagement, check out this post…

Who Moved My SharePoint: Four New 2013 Features for Business Users

I recently presented at SharePoint Saturday in Atlanta with the topic, “Who Moved My SharePoint (to 2013),” where I shared with attendees some of things that business users need to know about upgrading to SharePoint 2013. I will presenting on this topic again at the Baton Rouge SQL Saturday/Tech Day, where I will be the only female SharePoint presenter!

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SharePoint 2013 – Task App (List)

What to Love and What to Hate (Or at least be annoyed at)

Ok, I’m a big fan of SharePoint. I’ve been drinking the cool aid for years and have been super excited to be deploying SharePoint 2013 both internally and for our early adopting clients. As I’ve started using the solution I have noticed things that I love and things that make me a little annoyed at Microsoft. Let me start with the positive improvements with the SharePoint Task App (List).

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SharePoint 2013 Application Almost Complete

For the past few months I have been working on and blogging about SharePoint 2013 and new functionality that allows safer code development as a result of client-side code and SharePoint applications. To prove out this functionality, we decided to put some time into developing an app for performance evaluations that we will both use internally and post for download at the SharePoint store.

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SharePoint 2013 Yammer Integration and Enabling Internal Social Networks

I’ve been reading “Exploring Microsoft SharePoint 2013” these past few weeks to get an idea of the many new features in SharePoint. One thing that caught my interest today is how to get more social within your company. The author of the book states that making social behavior work with SharePoint isn’t about any one technology. Just installing something and expecting everyone to figure it out just isn’t realistic. This is true both for social tools or SharePoint as a whole, which I discusse a while back in a previous post about SharePoint utilization and ROI.

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