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SharePoint for IT management: The therapy, not the medicine - Part 7 - The Documents

By Euricom on 7/15/2009 9:54 AM

Previous Chapter: Part 6 - The Knowledge Base

Every department in every company in the world is going to have to deal with documents. Where a long time ago, this was all done on paper – and yes I know that in some types of companies this is still the case – now most companies use digital documents. The big idea behind the digitalization of documents was that it would be a lot easier to share documents, work on them simultaneously with more than one person and store and archive them more easily.

The problems with the document digitalization quite rapidly followed the actual introduction. Because it was so easy to share, store, etc. all of a sudden a lot more documents popped up. Then came the version issues. Who was working on what version of the document? And then it was time for the storage issues. Where could you store all of these documents, and all of their versions, so that people could actually find them when they needed them?

Throughout the years there have been quite a lot of document management systems that tried to provide answers to these problems. All had their strengths, all had their faults. The biggest issues were that they focused solely on documents and where/are notoriously hard to integrate with other systems. Besides providing the standard document management answers, SharePoint now tries to provide an answer to the DMS problems too.

By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect

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SharePoint for IT management: The therapy, not the medicine - Part 6 - The Knowledge Base

By Euricom on 6/22/2009 3:27 PM

Previous Chapter: Part 5 - The Reporting

One of the biggest challenges in an IT (or any other) department is to have the knowledge that lives within the department combined in one place that is accessible to everyone. Creating a knowledge base is difficult; keeping it up-to-date is even more difficult.

As we discussed in the chapter about People management, the whole idea behind people management in SharePoint is to create a community within the department. The success of a knowledge base will depend greatly on this community. If everybody works on his or her island, a knowledge base will almost never succeed, simply because the people have no sense of sharing information with people they know nothing about. Within a community however, people get more and more sensitive to the needs of others and therefore are much more willing to share information.

SharePoint is a perfect platform for not only a community, but also a knowledge base for that community. In the next sections, we will go through the possibilities of knowledge base. Starting at the basics and ending with a more advanced kind of knowledge base for departments that are completely integrated in SharePoint.

By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect

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SharePoint for IT management: The therapy, not the medicine - Part 5 - The Reporting

By Euricom on 6/22/2009 9:32 AM

Previous chapter: Part 4 - The People

The most likely answer to the question “What does a manager need?” is reporting. Reporting is vital for managing anything. Without reports most forms of management fail. This is not only because without reports, it’s very easy to lose track of what’s going on, but also because most managers have to also report to their managers.

In previous chapters, we have already touched on what SharePoint can bring to the table when it comes to people and project management. But making projects run more smoothly and getting people communicating is one thing. You will want to see what benefits you get out of it. You still want to keep track of how things are working out on one project and on all projects combined. Furthermore, you will also want to keep track of the productivity of your people. Since your people and project management are already integrated in SharePoint, why not use SharePoint to get reports on them?

Of course, we don’t want managers to have to part with their complicated Excel sheets or other reporting applications. What it comes down to is that SharePoint can help you with day-to-day reporting (keeping track of) and provide you with the information to build the heavy managerial reports for monthly or annual reporting.

By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect

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Data binding RIA Entities in Silverlight 3: Tips and tricks: Part 3

By Euricom on 6/21/2009 8:04 PM

Next I will show you how to bind properties of a DataGrid row to a property of an entity. The commonest situation where you would want to do this is when you want to vary the background color of a row by the value in one of the fields, for example a status field.

By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect

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Data binding RIA Entities in Silverlight 3: Tips and tricks: Part 2

By Euricom on 6/15/2009 11:57 PM

As promised here’s the way to use RIA entities as ItemSource on DataFormComboBoxFields. The first things we need to keep in mind is that all RIA calls are asynchronous and that once the ItemSource is set, ComboBoxFields do not automatically refresh their itemlists. This means that we can only set the ItemSource once our RIA call has finished getting the items we want in the list.

By Nick Verschueren, .Net Solutions Architect

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