Just because you have an intranet site built on SharePoint and you are using team sites to manage projects, does not mean that you are reaping the full benefits of the platform.  In this month’s Tip of the Month, we will provide a list of creative business solutions that take advantage of the power of the platform.

So what’s next?

Now that you have your basic SharePoint implementation up and running, what is next for your organization?  How can you best take advantage of the SharePoint platform and third party tools?

If you’ve been reading these SharePoint Tips for a while, you know about SharePoint’s Four Promises:

• Enable Collaboration
• Find and Use Knowledge
• Streamline Processes
• Manage Business Performance

Let’s look at #3: Streamline Processes.  Sometimes it is hard to understand the full potential of SharePoint, here is the matrix of solutions we developed in the past year or so that highlight the process improvement capabilities of SharePoint.  The implementation of third party tools such as Nintex and KnowledgeLake super-charges the process improvement impact.

Now, take a look at the solutions below.  Those solutions with detailed case studies are underlined. By what others have done, you will better understand the potential value of the platform.

Three Things You Should Do Next

1. First, realize that SharePoint is more than a collaboration platform.  SharePoint is an even more compelling process improvement enabler with the addition of the Nintex toolset.  How do you know what can be done?  Review the examples of what other companies have done.Also, whenever a challenge within your organization arises, consider SharePoint as a possible solution. As head of an IT for an international company, I had such an occasion when the VP of manufacturing said the he needed to quickly develop a customer feedback system. We looked at our ERP and CRM systems, but quickly realized that we could develop and implement the system within our SharePoint environment more quickly and with less effort.
2. Next, realize that the true payback in a tool such as SharePoint is when it is used to enable business improvement. It is all about the business value that is created. Identify potential areas of improvement and garner the business’s support.
3. Often times the IT department is aware of the potential, but need the support of the business to move a project forward. For one of our clients, we knew the potential of dramatically improving contract document processing, using the KnowledgeLake imaging solution. It took a partnership of the IT department and the business to ensure the project was not only approved but successfully implemented.
4. Prioritize and pick the opportunities that:
   1. Have the needed business support including the budget AND the commitment of personnel resources.
   2. Meet a true business need and provide the most visible and impactful business solution.
   3. Can be implemented quickly and with the least effort.

It is more and more important to realize the business value as soon as possible. No longer is it viable to have year-long projects. Try breaking down your project into successive increments of functionality. Remember that the success of a project diminishes with increasing complexity and scope.

NOW, go forth and take advantage of the true potential of the powerful platform in which you have already invested, and in the end you will be saying: “I knew SharePoint could do that!”

• Office Web Apps has evolved into a separate server product, Office Web Apps Server, that allows users to view and edit documents across multiple SharePoint farms and to view documents across data stores.
• More than a half-dozen Service Apps, including Business Data Connectivity, Search and Word Automation Service now have their own databases.

Several new Service Apps join SharePoint with the release of 2013, as well. These include:

App Management

The new App Management Service streamlines managing applications, permissions and licensing, making apps easier to deploy and manage.

Machine Translation Services

Translation of content in SharePoint for files and sites is a major new feature of SharePoint 2013. Machine Translation Services is the engine that drives this feature; it supports both automatic and manual (user initiated) translation of content into other languages.

Work Management Service

The new Work Management Service enables aggregation of action-based events across Microsoft server products, including Microsoft Exchange Server, Lync Server, Project Server and SharePoint Server 2013. For example, users can edit tasks from Microsoft Exchange Server on a mobile phone, and the Work Management Service aggregates tasks from Exchange Server in the My Tasks SharePoint list.

PowerPoint Automation Service

Similar in function to SharePoint 2010’s Word Automation Service, the PowerPoint Automation Service can automatically convert Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into a variety of formats, such as newer Office formats, web pages and PDFs. The PowerPoint Automation Service supports older versions of PowerPoint (as the originating document), as well.

So, if Incremental Crawls were set for every 15 minutes, but it took a full day for the Incremental Crawl to retrieve and index a specific set of updated data, all subsequent crawls during that interim would be cancelled. An entire day would therefore elapse before the next crawl started, and users would not have access to any more updated information during that period. And, of course, the one day without a crawl could result in another large block of updated data to be crawled and indexed, resulting in more missed schedule windows, and so on.

With Continuous Crawls, Incremental Crawls are non-blocking, which means the next scheduled crawl can start even though the previous one is still running. No matter how long it takes for a single crawl to complete retrieval and indexing, the next crawl starts on time.

SharePoint 2010                                           SharePoint 2013

The upside is that users have near immediate access to updated data as soon as it is crawled and indexed. The downside is that multiple crawl processes running at once can affect system resources for the server running the crawlers. However, Continuous Crawls do obey crawler impact rules. For example, if a limit for crawlers is set to 16 threads, those threads will be shared among all ongoing crawls. This may slow down the crawls themselves but it will not overload SharePoint with crawl access. Note that Continuous Crawling only works for content on SharePoint sites.

• When you add a list item you would like to prevent the user from saving the item until they meet specific validation requirements.
• Synchronize content between sites, for example copy an announcement made on a department site to the company root site.
• Prevent certain sites or content from being deleted.
• Create your own custom logging when a specific type of content is added to the system.
• Automatically add metadata to your content based which library or site it is added to.
• Call a service to another application

These scenarios, and many more, can be handled by Event Receivers in SharePoint. When an event occurs, such as an item is added to a list, an event is triggered. Custom code can be associated with the event, and this code will run when the event is triggered, allowing us to do anything we want with that content during or after the event occurs.

There are also two types of events that can occur. “After” events occur after the event completes while “Before” events occur before the event completes. The “Before” events allow us to do validation and even prevent the event from occurring if necessary.

SharePoint 2010 Event Receivers

Here is a list of operations that can trigger Event Receivers in SharePoint 2010​

SharePoint 2013 Event Receivers

In addition to supporting all of the Event Receivers provided by SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has added many new Event Receivers in SharePoint 2013 including:

Remove Event Receivers

These scenarios, and many more, can be handled by Event Receivers in SharePoint. When an event occurs, such as an item is added to a list, an event is triggered. Custom code can be associated with the event, and this code will run when the event is triggered, allowing us to do anything we want with that content during or after the event occurs.

• Share an overview of the KnowledgeLake suite of products.
• Present demonstrations of how SharePoint and KnowledgeLake address such key business use cases as HR employee records processing and the Accounts Payable function.
• Hear from one of our key customers as they present their case study, a real ECM business solution built on SharePoint and KnowledgeLake.
• Go “under the covers” and learn how Abel Solutions designed and built this case study solution.
• Join in a discussion about other business use cases that are great targets for the SharePoint and KnowledgeLake.

We’re giving away a Microsoft Surface tablet to one lucky attendee. You won’t want to miss this educational and engaging event. Please register today as seating is limited.

Click here to register or learn more.

SharePoint 2010 took a step toward achieving this goal by sending only incremental changes to files (BLOB) over a network from the client to the Web server, thereby reducing bandwidth utilization between the client and the server. However, the Web server would read the original file from the database server and merge the changes with that file, resulting in the entire changed file being written back to the database server.

SharePoint 2013 allows content, such as a file, to broken down into smaller independent BLOBs that it stores in various places. These independent BLOBs are assigned unique IDs that associate them with that file and enable reconstruction in the correct order when the file is requested by a user. All file BLOBs are stored in a new database table, DocStreams, which is a component of the SQL database.

Because of this feature, when a client updates a file, only the shredded BLOB(s) affected by the change need to be updated, and the update occurs on the database server rather than the Web server. So, whereas before if a user made 10 minor changes to the same section of data in a 10 MB file and saved each one independently, the result would consume 100 MB of storage, now only the one BLOB affected by the change will be updated, consuming only 10 MB (or possibly slightly more) storage. Furthermore, the reduction in read-write activities puts less strain on system resources, as well. Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 is enabled by default with no configuration required.

The reality is many organizations have a legitimate need to share restricted information outside their organizations. Documents need to be shared with contractors, legal representatives and customers. We already use SSL certificates to prevent prying eyes on the internet but what prevents these documents from being downloaded, forwarded or printed? Information Rights Management to the rescue!

The key to IRM is encryption. When IRM is applied to a document, one part of a security certificate is attached to the document and the other is stored in Active Directory Rights Management Services. Microsoft Office and Office Web Apps can read this certificate and then connect back to the Information Rights provider. Once your credentials are verified, the document is then decrypted for view. That same certificate that gives you the right to view a document can also restrict how you use it. This matrix lists all the levels you can set on a file:

In order to add an IRM infrastructure to your existing Active Directory, you will need a few things (step by step instructions are beyond the scope of this post and can be found here).

• Windows Server 2008 or above (It can be done in Windows Server 2003 but it’s much more difficult) with the Active Directory Rights Management Services feature activated.
• SQL Server 2008 or above to store the RMS database.
• Microsoft Office or Office Web Apps.

Once these components are configured we can configure SharePoint to use IRM. SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and on premises SharePoint 2013 have very similar options for configuring IRM.

• First, open Central Admin and locate the link for Information Rights Management.
• In SharePoint 2007 open Operations, then Security Configuration and select Information Rights Management
• In SharePoint 2010 and 2013 open Security, then Information Policy and select Configure Information Rights Management.
• In SharePoint 2007, 2010 and on premise 2013, you will select the radio button “Use the default RMS server specified in Active Directory”.
• In the Document Library settings of the library to be protected, click the Information Rights link. Here you will define and name a new Rights Template. This template gives you the ability to assign specific rights to SharePoint groups or users.

Once the template is saved all the Microsoft Office documents in the library will be connected to a digital certificate. That’s all there is to it.

SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 add new options for IRM. Office 365 uses Windows Azure AD Right Management (AADRM). This is an add-on to your Office 365 Enterprise Plan. Click into your SharePoint admin center and choose the radio button labeled “Use the IRM service specified in your configuration.” In the Document Library Settings of the library you want to protect, click on the Information Rights Management link. Here you will find some new options that aren’t available in 2007 or 2010 templates.

• Libraries can have restrictions automatically expire at a specified time.
• Documents can be set not to open in the browser.
• Printing and Saving on Office Web Apps can be restricted.
• Downloaded documents can be set to expire in a certain number of days.
• Prevent users from uploading documents that cannot have IRM attached to them.
• Require users to enter their credentials each time they open a document.

There is a saying that “Locks keep good people out” and that holds true with IRM. Some of the things to remember if you use any Information Rights Service are:

• Cameras and screen capture programs can still capture data displayed on a screen.
• If you are sharing documents externally, your Information Rights Management server must be exposed to the internet.
• Microsoft Office documents are supported out of the box but third party tools may be needed to protect other types of documents.

This month’s tip contributed by James Cragle, Abel Solutions SharePoint Consultant.

A How-To Webinar from Abel Solutions

SharePoint, with its complex structure and wealth of customizable elements, has never been efficient, out of the box, in this regard. Often, pages reloaded in their entirety for each and every action, no matter how inconsequential the change it generated.

With the release of SharePoint 2013, a new feature called the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) facilitates dynamic refresh of only the page elements that change based on a user action. This enables users to work within the framework of a rich, complex SharePoint interface without performance bottlenecks due to page refreshes.

The feature uses an application page /_layouts/15/start.aspx (start.aspx) which has a specific JavaScript object that parses a URL and locates the presence of a # sign, which connotes the existence of new content. MDS then dynamically updates only the content relating to the portion of the page path that is different from the previously loaded URL.

Some SharePoint 2013 Site Templates (e.g., App, Blog, Community, Projects, Team and Wiki) have this feature built in, but site developers and administrators can easily turn it off (and back on). Additionally, specific controls, when present and set to the appropriate value, can enable MDS or prohibit it from running.

At the core level, the enabling of MDS is handled by a specific attribute, MdsCompliantAttribute, that is set by default on the entire Microsoft.SharePoint.dll assembly. However, it is not set on the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll assembly that controls publishing sites. As a result, MDS on publishing sites is not possible out of the box at the present time.

Authentication is the process by which the identity of a user who requests access to a SharePoint web application is verified.  This is not to be confused with Authorization, which is the process by which a user is granted access to specific resources within a SharePoint site.  These two terms are similar, both phonetically and in definition, and are often incorrectly used interchangeably.  However, they are not the same.  Simply put, Authentication controls whether or not a user has permission to access sites on a SharePoint web application.  Authorization controls what documents, lists, libraries, etc. a user can access on a SharePoint site once they have been successfully authenticated.

SharePoint 2013 supports the following authentication types:

• Windows authentication
• Forms-based authentication
• SAML token-based authentication

Windows Authentication

Windows Authentication is the simplest because it takes advantage of a company’s existing authentication provider (i.e. Active Directory) to validate a user’s credentials and, consequently, grant or deny access to SharePoint sites.  Windows authentication provides the most seamless user experience for users who already have access to Windows-based network resources because once the user has logged onto the domain, they are not required to provide their credentials again to access SharePoint.  The two most common types of Windows authentication are NTLM and Kerberos.

Forms-based authentication

Forms-based authentication is a claims-based identity management system that validates users based on credentials that the user provides via a login form on a web page. When the user submits the form, the username and password that were provided are validated against credentials that are stored in a membership provider such as a SQL Server database.

Forms-based authentication allows for credentials to be created and stored for non-domain users who are external to an organization. Forms-based authentication can be used against credentials that are stored in an authentication provider such as the following:

• Active Directory Domain Services
• A database such as a SQL Server database
• An Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) data store such as Novell eDirectory, Novell Directory Services (NDS), or Sun ONE

SAML token-based authentication

A SAML token-based authentication environment relies on at least one identity provider security token service (IP-STS) to handle the actual authentication of users.  Moreover, SAML token-based authentication allows for the authentication of users from multiple attribute stores.

The available types of authentication providers for SAML token-based authentication depends on the IP-STS being used in an environment. If Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 is used, authentication providers (known as attribute stores for AD FS 2.0) can include the following:

• Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and AD DS in Windows Server 2008
• All editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008
• Custom attribute stores

SharePoint 2013 also supports multiple authentication providers for a single web application.  If there is only one zone for a web application and multiple authentication methods are configured, users will be presented with a dropdown box prompting them to choose which authentication provider they wish to use.

Another point to consider is that the SharePoint crawl component requires NTLM to access content. Therefore, at least one zone on a web application must be configured to use NTLM authentication. If NTLM authentication is not configured on the default zone, the crawl component can use a different zone that is configured to use NTLM authentication.

This tip contributed by Rob Aycock, an Abel Solutions SharePoint Consultant.