Survival Skills for the Site Collection Administrator and Site Owner Scott Shearer SharePoint Evangelist/Developer FlexPoint Technology sshearer@flexpointtech.com

Thanks to Our Sponsors!

Housekeeping Please remember to turn in your filled out bingo cards and event evaluations for prizes. SharePint is sponsored by Slalom at Whiskey Trader (Between 55th and 56th on 6th Avenue). Follow SharePoint Saturday New York City on Twitter @spsnyc and hashtag #spsnyc

Who is Scott? SharePoint Evangelist and Consultant for FlexPoint Technology Based in Reston, VA Done everything from System Administration to C# development to helpdesk CPA Former Stock Broker Former Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Past Certifications Held: MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, MCT, CNE Conference Speaker

How to Find Me @ScottJShearer on Twitter http://spconcierge.wordpress.com sshearer@flexpointtech.com

FlexPoint Technology (They paid for me to be here) IT Consulting firm based in Reston, VA Cloud Technologies SharePoint consulting, development, training US Government and commercial customers

Disclaimer My presentation today is based on my experience and research It’s just my opinion….

Todays Agenda Discuss as much as we can about SharePoint security model Dealing with end users Promoting user adoption Tips, tricks, etc… Focus is on team sites and other internal collaborative sites

SharePoint Security The top priority of the SCA is to secure the site collection Its all about inheritance “Trickle Down Theory” of permissions By default, all objects inherit permissions from their parent It doesn’t have to be complicated Manage SharePoint Groups – not people Leverage Active Directory Groups Use Members, Owners and Visitors groups Don’t assign permissions directly to users Keep the top level site open to members of subsites, if possible SharePoint doesn’t offer column level security

Rows of data/documents SharePoint Structure Top Level Site Lists/Libraries Rows of data/documents Folders Subsite Lists/libraries

SharePoint Security Don’t make decisions on who should have site access It’s not your data (usually) – data owner should make that decision Have an access request and approval process with a “paper trail” (CYA) Avoid the issue by using Active Directory groups Plan and document your security structure Keep it as simple as possible If it starts getting complicated, think about another site collection It’s OK to break inheritance, but think it through The more you break inheritance, the harder it is to maintain your site Permission Levels vs Custom Permission Levels Site Owners group should own any group that you create Don’t give users full control unless they know what they are doing You’ll have to fix what they mess-up SCA vs Site Owner

Governance Have a written policy approved by management for creating site collections and subsites Archive and/or delete site collections that are inactive for a specified period of time Don’t keep project oriented sites around when the project is through Never create a site when a list, library or page will meet the requirement When a user asks for a new site, ask some questions Keep the site structure wide rather than deep

Site Customization Keep your sites as “Out of the Box” as possible Time to deployment is accelerated Much easier to maintain Avoid upgrade issues Don’t use Designer until you have exhausted what you can do through the browser Don’t make changes to your master page for Team Sites unless you really really need to The audience for your Team Site is your team It doesn’t need to have “rounded corners”

Understand Content Types and Site Columns What is a Content Type Template for collecting data in a list or library Made up of site columns All Content types inherit from another content type When to use custom content types Need or want to re-use Need for consistency in how data is stored Need to store slightly different data in a single list Allows for movement from dev to test to production Requires Visual Studio NEVER NEVER NEVER ALTER OUT OF THE BOX CONTENT TYPES OR SITE COLUMNS

End User Adoption Users don’t care about SharePoint They care about solutions that help them get their job done “What’s in it for me?” Give users a reason to care Save them time Save them hassles Streamline processes Get Management Buy-in Big Bang Theory Not what they needed delivered too late Roll-out SharePoint one app at a time

End User Training Identify the power users in each office and spend your time with them Show users what they need to know when they need to know it “Just in Time Training” If you use “out of the box” solutions, need for training is minimized Make use of online resources

Learn to Love jQuery and SPServices Easy customizations to your site Selectively show/hide columns Easy to find lots of examples SPServices is your friend jQuery library Cascading dropdowns Filter lookup columns Retrieve list data Mark Rackley has some great blog posts that will help get you started http://www.sharepointhillbilly.com

MS Access as a SharePoint “Swiss Army Knife” Import data into SharePoint Clean-up data prior to import Export data from SharePoint Combine SharePoint data with data from other data sources Bulk updates of SharePoint data Reporting

Miscellaneous Thoughts Not all data belongs in SharePoint Why move data out of Excel? Relational data belongs in a relational database Delete or export web parts, but DON’T CLOSE them Slows down page load time ?Contents=1 (Web Part Page Maintenance) Don’t enable any feature unless you know what it does and you need it Not all features “roll-back” cleanly when deactivated Use Choice instead of Lookup Columns whenever possible

More Miscellaneous Thoughts Never put spaces in the names of SharePoint objects when creating them Create with no spaces Add spaces to create “friendly names” after creation Keeps URLs much shorter Makes working with jQuery and JavaScript easier Don’t replicate a share drive folder structure in a document library Minimize the use of folders Use managed metadata