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Enterprise social communities have enormous potential for sharing knowledge, discovering new innovations, and boosting productivity. But without proper governance, they can start strong and end in a confusing and overly-complex mess! In this article I explore some practical tips for social community governance.
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When working with SharePoint, what is the difference between blogs, discussion boards and announcements - and when do I use each of these to improve communication and collaboration
Like many of you that have Dynamics 365 organizations online, we received our “Scheduling Your Dynamics 365 Organization for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 (online) version 9.0 Update” notice recently. If you have not scrambled to get your update scheduled you still have time.
As of today I’ve been consulting on SharePoint for almost 8 years, and I get asked a lot of questions. A lot of our clients already have SharePoint and we’re either engaging on rescue projects, migrations or break/fix type support. But then there are some clients we speak with who don’t use SharePoint at all, and are potentially looking to evaluate SharePoint or other collaboration platforms. It’s in those times I get reminded that not all folks already know what SharePoint is!
My aim with this 3-part series is to help answer this question and give some context of how SharePoint can benefit organizations. In this initial post I will set the stage and give you some context for our discussions.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 now has two different versions of Outlook integration available:
Yes, those names are confusing. But choosing which one to use, and the right time to make the change, can be even trickier. Read on to understand the options and make a good decision about the best timing for your organization.
Have you ever thought to yourself “I need an anchor tag in my SharePoint navigation and that must be easy”. But instead you're met with frustration! I’m going to show you a little trick I stumbled across that is SUPER simple and it works with no code! Did I mention this works in Office 365?
Most goals are doomed to fail. Here’s why - and how you transform struggles into successes.
Large businesses pump billions of dollars into technology to become more customer and employee centric. But smaller businesses are using these same technologies to run circles around their larger competitors.
Here's how they're doing it, and some lessons that businesses of all sizes can learn:
When you work with SharePoint permissions, you quickly figure out that you want to touch them as little as possible. With a lot of things in SharePoint, permissions inherit top down. So this means that it’s a best practice to always use that inheritance as much as possible. But in today's post, I'll show you how to use PowerShell to change those permissions for all libraries, folders and files in the site!
I’ve had this come up multiple times lately, and I thought I’d put up a post to help get the information all in one place. Now that we’re moving away from SharePoint 2010 and dealing with SharePoint 2013/2016/Online more often, folks still want SharePoint Designer but are confused which version they need. You want to be sure to get the latest and most patched version, which requires more than one download.
Who would have guessed the frustration that the tiny little QUALIFY button on the Lead form in Dynamics 365 could cause! In this post, we take a look at a better solution for qualifying and converting leads in Dynamics 365 for Sales.
One of the things that I think most companies struggle with is governance, specifically in context of an intranet. If you read my blog you know I talk about mostly SharePoint, but good governance can and should apply to really to any platform.
We actually devote a whole section of our Building a Better Intranet workshop to governance because it’s that important, and yet so many companies don’t even think about it. In today’s post I wanted to pull out 3 tips that are important aspects of balanced governance.
We get that question a lot. "Hey C5, it's great that we can track emails in our CRM solution with just the click of a button instead of the old copy/paste method that our legacy CRM software required. But I get a ton of email. Which emails should I track in CRM?" It's a simple question that isn't as easy to answer as you may think. Most people think, "if in doubt ... track it." PLEASE. DO. NOT. DO. THAT.
Read on for some simple rules and examples to help you decide which emails you should and (perhaps more importantly) should not, track.
Instead of another blog about PowerShell, I wanted to share a quick trick with CSS. It’s quite common in a SharePoint branding design to include a breadcrumb navigation. In SharePoint 2007 there was a simple horizontal breadcrumb separated by arrows, and SharePoint 2010 incorporated a tree-style drop down breadcrumb. The site to site breadcrumbs were removed starting in SharePoint 2013.
There are many blogs on how to bring either the “up-folder” or simple horizontal breadcrumb back. But sometimes, you want to hide the root node and the separator. In today’s post I’ll show you how to do that with just CSS.
Sooner or later it would likely be nice to have some weather in SharePoint. There are many ways to do this, and the ideal solution would be something that is global above the page that detects where you are and changes the weather for you.
That’s great, but it’s custom and certainly not free. But sometimes you want something easy and free to embed something on your SharePoint page. And if you’re favorite weather app is Dark Sky, you’re in luck! I’ll show you the tiny amount of code you need. It’s not a no-code solution, but low-code.
I was working with a client recently and they use a lot of audio files, like when they record customer service calls for quality assurance. When things go great, they wanted to highlight these cases of awesome customer support in audio clips in blog posts.
They found the default SharePoint audio player less than appealing and wanted something better. In today’s post I’ll show you something maybe you didn’t know about your web browser, and how to use it to make this experience better.
On a recent client project, we’re working to implement a task-based tracking solution in SharePoint 2010. There is a parent Project, and that Project has a template set of tasks the workflow creates with due dates. Then the requirement came up where if the Project due date changed, all of the task due dates needed to be updated to. Read on to see how I show you an easy and simple no-code way using workflow to tell if a field changed.
I've been working with SharePoint for over 8 years now, and worked with a lot of different clients and types of users. I've seen that there's one area that a lot of people either struggle with, or get flat out wrong. That is what they create in SharePoint to store content.
In today's post I'm going to give four questions to answer that should help drive what kind of content needs to be created. Why is this so important? Keep reading to find out ...
Finally the low tech "alerts in the code" method was employed in an attempt to figure out where the choke point was.
I’ve been working with a client recently on a project where we are using a BDC connection. Things have been going fine when we were using the external item picker in an InfoPath form but we ran into a problem. We are using an external column in the same library. Due to issues I will explain, I need to set this external column with PowerShell.
I’ve seen a lot of online folks have trouble with this, so I thought that I would share how to properly set this column with PowerShell as there is a little trick to it.
Whether you have full-time or contractors, it’s important to ensure that developers are properly checking in their code. So how can you get a report of all of the files that are checked out in your solutions?
There are two quick and easy ways to get a report of all the files checked out from your TFS server. Now the title says TFS 2010, but this applies to newer versions as well.
In today's post featuring PowerShell, I'm going to show you how to use a script with a few functions and some handy tricks to quickly reset permissions with multiple libraries, folders and files. This can be very difficult to handle manually, especially when there are many many libraries with many folders and files with broken permissions.
This 3 minute video demo shows how customer care teams can use the power of business intelligence to constantly improve the customer experience. The demo uses Microsoft's solutions for business intelligence (Power BI) and customer relationship management (Dynamics CRM).
You've been there, we all have. At one point or another, we loved InfoPath and were disappointed at the news it would be discontinued. We waited with anticipation to see what was going to replace it. It's been quite the gray unknown for a long time, and in part the Ignite conference this year didn't make any overwhelm anyone with any big announcements in this regard. But that doesn’t mean there wasn't one.
Keep reading to get my thoughts and what was announced and where the planned future of InfoPath is going.
If you have a field service delivery team, Microsoft Dynamics CRM field service management has a lot to offer. This article and one minute video provides a rapid overview.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
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This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.