Case Study: Plante Moran is saving $260,000 By Automating Creation of New Sites

Approving new SharePoint site requests and creating and provisioning these sites, while struggling to maintain the uniformity of your taxonomy, look-and-feel, and governance standards, can quickly eat up your IT department's time and resources. Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 (SPGA) is a tool from SharePoint Solutions which can completely automate this process from request right through to provisioning, saving your IT department countless hours of labor.  A completely automated “set it and forget it” site creation solution! In our new Case Study, read how Plante Moran, one of the nation’s largest CPA and business advisory firms, has saved more than $260,000 and in excess of 3,500 man hours –so far—using this remarkable product.

Customizing Mail Messages in Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM)

by Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM), a comprehensive solution to manage and streamline the use of SharePoint 2010 extranets, uses a template-based mail messaging system. We provide four messages “out of the box:”

Working with Registration Receivers in Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM) – Part 2 – The “MembershipProfile” Receiver

By Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM) contains a framework called Registration Receivers that can be used to inject custom programming activities into the ExCM registration pipeline. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the “SPUser” receiver and its function.

In this part, we will discuss the “MembershipProfile” receiver which is used to update the membership profile fields with the values provided by the user at the time of registration. Similar to the “SPUser” receiver, this feature modifies the behavior of your SharePoint Extranet site so that external users’ experience is more consistent with that of your internal users.

First, let’s take a look at what happens when the receiver is not used. I have simply commented out the RegistrationReceiver section of the web.config file:

SPGA Now Provides Site Lifecycle Management for SharePoint 2010

by Tony Bierman

Today we’ve released a significant update to our Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 product. Prior to this release, SPGA was already a great tool for managing the process of requesting and creating new SharePoint 2010 sites. With the addition of these new site lifecycle management features, SPGA users can now manage the entire SharePoint 2010 site lifecycle from creation to expiration and decommissioning.

Working with Registration Receivers in Extranet Collaboration Manager ExCM 2010 – Part 1 – The “SPUser” Receiver

By Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010 contains a framework called Registration Receivers that can be used to inject custom programming activities into the ExCM registration pipeline. In Part 1 of this series, I will discuss the “SPUser” receiver.

Registration Receivers are configured at the web.config level, so they are global to the Web Application on which they are configured. By default, we provide two different receiver examples:

Activating and Configuring the Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010 Feature Using PowerShell

by Matthew McBride

Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM) 2010 is activated at the Site Collection level. This is easily done in the Site Settings area of the User Interface (UI) for a single site:

But what if you were running ExCM on multiple Site Collections? Since it is licensed at the Web Frond End (WFE) level, you can install ExCM on as many Site Collections as you want. It would be very time consuming to go to each site, activate the feature, and then configure it. In a scenario like this, you can save time by using PowerShell to activate ExCM on each site and also setting some options (such as registration fields) at the global level in the web.config file. In addition, by using one of our custom scripts for ExCM we can activate Invitation Registrations and set their expiration length.

Configuring Forms Based Authentication in SharePoint 2013

by Matthew McBride

April 2016 Update:  This article explains all of the manual configuration steps you would work through for setting up Forms Based Authentication for a web application in SharePoint 2013 (primarily for an extranet, but would be similar for an intranet).    

For an extranet web application, a new automated solution is now available as well - the Extranet Setup Wizard of Extranet Collaboration Manager 2013 R2.

In this article, I will give a step-by-step walk through of the process for configuring SharePoint Forms Based Authentication “out of the box” without an add-on such as Extranet Collaboration Manager (ExCM). Doing this will allow us to see both the similarities and differences between SharePoint 2010 and 2013 as well as highlight the limitations of a “basic” SharePoint FBA web application that can be overcome with a professional-grade add-on like ExCM.

Unable to Sign Out of a Site that is not “Shared” to you in SharePoint 2013

by Matthew McBride

In my early testing of SharePoint 2013, I ran across an extremely annoying “bug.” If you attempt to log into a site that has not been “shared” to you by a Site Collection Administrator (SCA), you receive the following error message:

(Click on pictures for expanded view)

Customizing the Sign-in Page in Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2010 (ExCM)

By Matthew McBride

One of the more common questions we receive about Extranet Collaboration Manager is how to change the wording on the Sign In page for using Windows Authentication:

Secret Sauce or Special Sauce?

by Randy Moody

A couple of weeks ago the McDonald’s fast food chain, purportedly in response to a question from a curious customer, revealed the recipe for the “special sauce” in its double-decker Big Mac hamburger in a You Tube video done by its executive chef. The revelation became a media event, which, I’m sure, is a big part of why it was done. The recipe was interesting, to be sure, but the biggest surprise for me was this:

McDonald’s has an executive chef?  Really?