What process do you use to provide new SharePoint site collections to your users?

A better way to create SharePoint sites is a topic that has been around as long as SharePoint itself.  There are many pain points to the process that any SharePoint administrator, and user for that matter, go through.  Let’s just start off by making the assumption that you want a little more control than what self-service site creation offers.  Some SharePoint experts have commented that self-service site creation in SharePoint is not an enterprise ready solution.  My next my post will go into more details on that topic and offer a solution that is enterprise ready, but in this post I’d like to share some of the problems from my experience and give our readers a chance to chime in. 

So let’s discuss what you do based on the above assumption that you require something better than SharePoint’s out-of-the-box self-service site creation.  

Customizing SharePoint Log in For ExCM - Part 2 HTML Edits

In the first part of this series, we showed you how to make a copy of the default SignIn.aspx and copy it into a new folder for editing purposes. We also showed you how to change the text from "Sign in using Windows Authentication" to "ACME Employees Click Here To Sign In." We have many customers that would like to further customize the screen to more closely match their companies' branding. Using this guide, you too should be able to customize the sign-in screen with graphics, links and finishing touches to truly personalize your sign-in page.

Customizing the SharePoint Sign-in Page For ExCM in SharePoint 2013 - Part 1

There are products you buy and they are perfect just the way they come. Then, a SharePoint Admin gets their hands on it and makes it more perfect (yes, I said more perfect) by adding their personal touches to it. For an example of this, let me introduce you to the default SharePoint Sign In page:

SharePoint Extranet on Office 365, Part 2 - Building an Extranet with Azure

I won’t be discussing using Office 365 and SharePoint online for your extranet in this post. This article will focus on an alternative if your management is pushing for a solid extranet and is pushing for it to be in the cloud.  

In larger companies there can often be a fairly wide chasm between IT management and the IT Pros on the frontline.  Bridging that gap isn’t always easy.  I am seeing more and more large companies looking to move as many services as possible to the cloud.  This can be a good decision in many cases but each technology needs to be evaluated to determine the fit for your specific needs.  Whether a large or small company, some services might make sense to be in the cloud and some on premise.

In part 1 of this series I explained why Office 365 isn’t a great solution for an extranet if you have many requirements around security, user management, and flexibility (among other reasons).  But what if you want the management that ExCM provides for a robust extranet solution, but have the edict to host it off site?  

Advanced SharePoint Extranet Management: (ExCM) 2013 Advanced Features - User Automation

A couple of problems that SharePoint Server Administrators regularly encounter are:
(1) How can I know when an extranet user from a partner company leaves the company, and
(2) How can I avoid accumulating inactive accounts for users that no longer exist, which are just "sitting out there?"

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to keep up with the "comings and goings" of extranet users who are employees of partner companies.

But Extranet Collaboration Manager 2013 (ExCM) contains within it the capability of helping our clients with specific extranet user security needs like this.

The ExCM User Automation (UA) feature can be used to apply recurring policies to accounts residing in the ExCM user database. These policies are applied by a SharePoint Timer Job, which periodically inspects each account. UA can be used to expire user accounts based on attributes such as periods of inactivity or failure to update their password within a specified period, solving the problem of user "housekeeping."

Configuration

You first need to enable the SharePoint Service object, which is used to provide farm-wide services and configuration data. To activate the service, open the SharePoint Management Shell and typed the following command:

How to Filter SharePoint People Picker to Increase Extranet Security

You have successfully configured your secure extranet (using Extranet CollaborationManager (ExCM)) ensuring that all permissions were set correctly and even configuring separate "roles" to keep your external users from being added to SharePoint Groups. Now, there is no way that an external user can gain access to anything they are not supposed to see, right? Wrong!

 If Samantha from your Human Resources Department needs to add Bobby Jones, from her Marketing Department, to a document and she uses the SharePoint People Picker to find the name, that external user could still show up and be given  permissions to the "internal eyes only" report. See the image below displaying both the intended internal Bobby Jones and the external Bobby@acme.com

SharePoint Extranet on Office 365 – Part 1

So you want to use SharePoint for an Extranet.  First, let’s briefly consider reasons you would want an extranet in case you are still on the fence.  Simply put, if you have a need to collaborate with people external to your company, such as clients, vendors, and/or customers, you need an extranet.  A surprising number of businesses still “collaborate” and share documents by emailing back and forth.  
 

I recently purchased a new home and the number of documents that had to be shared (and re-shared) via email was astounding.  What if they had a website we could just post the documents to, and track what was left for me to send, and have a calendar of all the important dates?  You get the idea.  SharePoint works great for collaborating and sharing information with non-employees of any kind.  It’s not just documents, it’s tasks, calendars, and so many more of those out of the box SharePoint features you can take for granted.

I can’t get the date for [Today] in SharePoint 2013

In my SharePoint 2013 Power User Fast Track class last week, a student asked if she could make a column display today’s date in SharePoint 2013.

This seemed simple enough using a calculated column, but then I discovered there is a restriction on calculated columns that forbids the use of the [Today] and [me] functions.  There are whole discussions on why this is the case, similar to this one. 

The simple explanation is that calculated columns don’t update until the individual item is updated. 

So what is the solution to this problem?  Well, the answer to that relies more on what your end goal really is.  If you want to be able to see items within a certain date range, then a view can work around this by using a simple filter like “deadline is less than [Today] +3”. This will show everything with a deadline of 3 days from now or less.

Automatically Assign Users to SharePoint Roles or Groups - Set Up Security Policies in ExCM

Frequently, an organization would like to be able to automatically assign extranet users to an Extranet Role as part of the ExCM invitation and self-service registration process.  ExCM includes a feature named “Security Policies” that is designed to make this possible.

Follow the steps below to take advantage of this capability:

1.       From Site Settings, click on Extranet Settings from the Extranet Management group:

SharePoint Conference 2014 - Site Provisioning and Governance Always Hot Topic

At the recent SharePoint Conference, held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, there were several sessions on site provisioning and governance.  These sessions were highly attended, which shows that these remain hot topics and have been since the beginning of SharePoint really.


Why after all these years is there still such an interest in these topics?  The fact is, if there were a universally great way to provision sites and enforce governance, there wouldn't be the interest in these sessions.  My theory is that this is something everyone wants, but most have simply not found a way to achieve adequately.  Even those who have some subset of this in place, realize there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

The problem: Self-service site creation is simply not an option if you care at all about governance.  That leaves provisioning new site collections up to IT, via Central Administration.  Creating uniform sites, with proper approvals, appropriate controls, and proper logging is quite cumbersome.  It involves many people and manual work, which leaves a lot of room for human error, and takes a considerable amount of time.