US based SharePoint Solution provider Techsol (MS Gold Certified Partner) has made a series of SharePoint 2010 templates available for free download. These templates are focused on the Government and Health industries.

http://www.techsolutions.net/SharePointSolutions/Health.aspx

http://www.techsolutions.net/SharePointSolutions/Government.aspx

In their own words:

These templates are provided “as is”. The templates demonstrate the application building power of SharePoint as a potential starting point for larger, more robust applications. Although these templates are fully functional and usable out-of-the-box, we expect that you will tailor them to suit your particular needs.

From this positioning I view these free templates in a similar vein to the Fab 40 Templates that Microsoft provided for WSS3.0/MOSS 2007. They give you some starting point and good ideas for building a solution in SharePoint but they will probably need some customizing and tweaking to fit your exact requirements.

HEALTHCARE WORKFLOW

Case Management

The Case Management application template helps case managers track the status and tasks required to complete their work. When a case is created, standard tasks and documents are created which are modified based on the work each case manager has completed..

Clinical Trial Initiation and Management

For those who work in Academic Medical Centers, the Clinical Trial Initiation and Management application template helps teams manage the process of tracking clinical trial protocols, objective setting, subject selection and budget activities.

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Employee Activities Site

The Employee Activities Site application template helps departments, such as HR and Marketing, manage the creation and attendance of events for employees.

Employee Training Scheduling and Materials

The Employee Training Scheduling and Materials application template helps Instructors add new courses and organize course materials. Employees use the site to schedule attendance at a course, track courses they’ve attended and to provide feedback.

Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management

The Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management application template helps provider departments manage requests for out of office days and provides dashboards showing which users are signed up for a set of responsibilities

Event Planning

The Event Planning application template helps teams organize events efficiently through the use online registration, schedules, communication and feedback.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Discussion Database

The Discussion Database application template provides a location where team members can create and reply to discussion topics.

Team Work Site

The Team Work Site application template provides a place where clinical and business teams, can upload background documents, track scheduled calendar events and submit action items that result from team meetings.

Document Library and Review

The Document Library and Review application template helps people to manage the review cycle common to processes like publication, knowledge management and project plan development.

Knowledgebase

The Knowledgebase application template helps teams manage the information that is resident within their organization. The template enables team members to upload/create documents using Web-based tools and tag them with relevant identifying information.

Policies and Procedures Solution Accelerator

The Policies and Procedures Solution Accelerator assists healthcare organizations create, maintain, publish and easily access policy and procedure information. It also provides the ability to upload documents, maintain a version history and manage tasks.

MANAGEMENT AND FINANCE

Board of Directors

The Board of Directors application template provides a single location for an external group of members to store and locate common documents such as quarterly reviews, shareholder meeting notes and annual strategy documents.

Business Performance Reporting

The Business Performance Reporting application template helps health organization managers track the satisfaction of internal customers/patients through a combination of surveys and discussions.

Request for Proposal

The Request for Proposal application template helps manage the process of creating and releasing an initial RFP, collecting submissions of proposals and formally accepting the selected proposal from amongst those submitted.

Compliance Process Support Site

The Compliance Process Support Site application template helps both teams and executive sponsors to manage compliance implementation endeavors, such as HIPAA.

Expense Reimbursement and Approval

The Expense Reimbursement and Approval application template helps manage elements of the expense approval process, including creation and approval. Users can monitor the status of their reimbursement request through a filtered view listing.

Scorecards Solution Accelerator

The Scorecards solution accelerator acts as a template for configuring a management dashboard to track organizational metrics. It contains four example dashboards ranging from a primary care practice to a healthcare organization’s CEO dashboard.

OPERATIONS

Call Center

The Call Center application template helps departments manage the process of handling customer service requests. The application template helps teams manage service requests from issue identification to cause analysis and resolution.

Help Desk

The Help Desk application template helps departments manage the process of handling service requests. Team members use the application template to identify a service request, manage identification of the root cause and track solution status.

Physical Asset Tracking and Management

The Physical Asset Tracking and Management application template helps departments, such as Facilities, BioMedical, Surgery, etc. manage requests and the tracking of physical assets.

Inventory Tracking

The Inventory Tracking application template helps organizations track elements associated with inventory, including creation of inventory. Users are notified when each part reaches the reorder quantity and helps manage customer and supplier information.

Cafeteria Menu Management

The Cafeteria Menu Management application template helps hospital Food & Nutrition staff easily communicate daily menu choices to hospital staff and visitors. It allows staff to develop/schedule menus and provide related nutritional information.

PROJECT TRACKING

Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects

The Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects application template helps project teams track and budget multiple, interrelated sets of activities. Management tools such as assignment of new tasks, Gantt Charts and common status designators.

Change Request Management

The Change Request Management application template helps users track risks associated with a design change. Team members can submit a change request, notifying stakeholders of the risks involved with the change.

IT Team Workspace

The IT Team Workspace application template helps teams manage the development, deployment and support of software projects. It also includes help desk functionality, allowing team members to guide service requests from initiation to resolution.

Project Tracking Workspace

The Project Tracking Workspace application template helps small team projects manage project information in a single location. The application template provides a place where a team can list and view project issues and tasks.

In a recent blog post Dan Theobald (Business Analyst, HP Information Management team) details the use case of OnePlaceMail in a SharePoint/HP TRIM environment for achieving records management of email records.

Dan continues to explain in detail how HP are internally using OnePlaceMail in a collaborative Help Desk solution built on SharePoint. In this solution OnePlaceMail delivers the front line interface to Help Desk personnel for capturing initial Help Desk tickets, follow up correspondence and also provides access to the information stored in the Help Desk system (SharePoint) directly from within Outlook.

It’s great to hear of these real world scenarios where OnePlaceMail is adding real value, and users are compelled enough to blog about their great experiences with the product! It drives us to make it even better.

Learn more about OnePlaceMail

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 has introduced a new concept called Site Mailboxes to help bring together Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange content within Microsoft Outlook 2013.

SharePoint Site Mailboxes provide many benefits and also have their limitations. This White Paper: SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes – Overcome their Limitations looks at Site Mailboxes and how they can be extended to implement broader solutions on the SharePoint platform.

The White Paper addresses how to enhance Site Mailboxes to:

• Capture email attributes when saving to Site Mailboxes
• Tag Content with custom metadata
• Save to Site Mailboxes from Windows Explorer & Office applications
• Access SharePoint capabilities from Site Mailboxes
• Manage email attachments with Site Mailboxes

What are SharePoint Site Mailboxes?

The SharePoint Site Mailbox concept is aimed at bringing Exchange emails and SharePoint documents together. So how does it do this?

The SharePoint Interface

A site mailbox can be created at a site level (maximum of 1 mailbox per site). From a navigation point of view the mailbox appears just as though it is another list or library in the SharePoint site.

When you click on the Mailbox link things aren’t as nice and integrated as you would hope. Instead of showing the content of the mailbox within the SharePoint site, as you would the content from a Document Library or List, rather the link simply opens the Site Mailbox in Outlook Web Access. You are taken away from SharePoint to see the content of the Site Mailbox.

This now starts to give you an understanding of what’s happening under the covers. When you add a Site Mailbox to a SharePoint site, you are effectively creating a mailbox on the Exchange server and then your site gets a link placed on it.

What is nice, is that the security of the mailbox is tied to the security permissions of your SharePoint site. So if you add or remove a user from your SharePoint site, the appropriate permissions are granted/revoked from the mailbox in Exchange as well.

Unfortunately this is about the extent of the integration of email and documents that you get through the SharePoint user interface, fortunately things will get a lot nicer when we look at things from the Outlook client…

The Outlook Interface

Outlook 2013 has been enhanced to support SharePoint Site Mailboxes. A really nice integration point is the automated rollout of Site Mailboxes directly to your Outlook profile based on your permissions to the SharePoint site. What this means is that if you are an owner or member of a SharePoint site and a Site Mailbox is created, that Site Mailbox will automatically get added to Outlook (even while Outlook is running). If your membership to the site is removed then the mailbox is automatically removed from Outlook as well. The Site Mailbox is represented in Outlook as a new store per site. All this talk of Site Mailboxes is a bit misleading though, because what you are actually getting in Outlook is the Document Libraries from the SharePoint site, not just the mailbox. What do I mean? lets have a look graphically at what you are getting:

When viewing the content of a Site Mailbox, the view presented is the same format and appearance as any other mail folder as shown below:

When viewing SharePoint Document Libraries you see an Outlook view of all the items in the document library as shown below:

This is pretty cool. Exchange and SharePoint perform a synchronization to make this possible and stubs (not the actual file content) is stored in Exchange to make this view possible. Clicking on these items in the Outlook view to open them up then communicates directly to SharePoint to download and open the file.

Subfolders, both within the mailbox and within document libraries are supported.

Read more about what Microsoft has to say on SharePoint Site Mailboxes.

Pros and Cons

So now you have a basic grounding in what this integration looks like, what are the benefits and limitations of Site Mailboxes.

Pros

• Site Mailboxes provide a consolidated view of site content stored within SharePoint and Exchange from within Microsoft Outlook
• Minimal change with a familiar drag & drop process to the left navigation of Outlook. Allowing the capture of emails or email attachments into SharePoint and Exchange
• Convenient access to SharePoint content from within Microsoft Outlook using a familiar metaphor of folders on the left navigation of Outlook.
• Ability to include a Site Mailbox as an email recipient (e.g. cc’d) for saving emails into a Site Mailbox – Inbox
• Ability to ‘Forward’ a link to a document within a Site Mailbox or drag/drop multiple documents into an email message.
• Lifecycle Retention policies can be applied at a Site Mailbox level behind the scenes
  Management and Compliance: Site Mailboxes can be part of eDiscovery Search Scopes.
• Minimal change for the end users and therefore greater user adoption and promotion of enterprise content management best practices
• Less reliance on the IT Department once the SharePoint and Exchange environment have been configured for Site Mailboxes
• More efficient means to support the business with records management initiatives
• Streamlined provisioning and deployment of Site Mailboxes to end users based on security permissions within a SharePoint Site
• Email content is retained within Microsoft Exchange while documents are retained within SharePoint

Cons

• Setting up the environment to support Site Mailboxes involves installing and configuring software on both the Exchange and SharePoint servers and setting up trust relationships and having all communication over SSL.
• Probably the biggest drawback is that you are not actually getting email into SharePoint. The email is stored in Exchange. This means you can’t treat it as a SharePoint object and include it as part of a business process. E.g. include it a part of a workflow, add metadata columns to email and build a SharePoint business process around it. I will add quickly that you can drag/drop email directly to a Document Library and this will get the email into SharePoint as an msg file.
• You must be running SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Outlook 2013 to get access to Site Mailbox functionality
• Very limited features on drag/drop of attachments to SharePoint document libraries – basically no support for metadata of any kind (no content type selection, no columns to complete, no validation of mandatory column, can’t rename files on upload, no support for versioning)
• Viewing of SharePoint content is very limited. You are provided more with a file type view of content rather than a SharePoint view. You can’t show SharePoint columns in the Outlook view, you just get the filename, last modified, size, and checkout status.
• Maximum of 10 Site Mailboxes can be added to Outlook

Further Reading

For a more in-depth look at SharePoint Site Mailboxes, and how to overcome some of the limitations I suggest reading the article White Paper – SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

Site Mailboxes Aren’t for You – Need a Different Option?

For alternate methods of getting email into SharePoint please refer to my article (written based on SharePoint 2010 options) Five out-of-the-box ways to get Email into SharePoint.

As OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview hits the streets I wanted to speak about why we believe 6.4 is such a pivotal release. Last year in the lead up to the release of Exchange 2013, Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 we immersed ourselves in the new technologies and the features, functions, and integration points that they brought to the table. We didn’t just want to deliver a OnePlaceMail release that worked the way it always had and ignored the architectural changes that had been made in the 2013 Microsoft stack. So we invested the time, we put down the tools, and really took a step back to look at the new options; How could this benefit the way people are working today and tomorrow? What new business cases could be solved? How could this technology be best applied to solve the issues we are currently solving with OnePlaceMail today? This really forced us to re-evaluate the position that OnePlaceMail has under the new technologies (Outlook 2013, SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013).

One of the most interesting new features of Outlook 2013/SharePoint 2013 was the concept of SharePoint Site Mailboxes. Microsoft has taken a great step forward (finally) with Site Mailboxes in an attempt to address the integration problem that has always existed between Outlook and SharePoint. Please see this blog post for more details on SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes.

After spending quite a bit of time with SharePoint Site Mailboxes we found they satisfied some use cases really well, and others not so well. While Site Mailboxes provided some great out-of-the-box benefits, there were always going to be some limitations as well. If you want to find out more about the benefits and limitations I suggest taking a look at the free whitepaper we published SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes – Overcome the limitations.

It came to decision time, and we had a couple of options:

· Option 1 – We could continue enhancing OnePlaceMail as an industry leading product directly integrating Outlook and SharePoint without any dependency on the new Site Mailbox framework. This broadly equated to ignoring Site Mailboxes due to their limitations and positioning OnePlaceMail as an alternate (competitive) solution – you would either use Site Mailboxes or you would use OnePlaceMail

· Option 2 – We could re-architect OnePlaceMail to use Site Mailboxes as a framework and build enhanced functionality on top to overcome the limitations

We concluded that there would be use cases where Site Mailboxes were the logical solution, and other use cases where Site Mailboxes would not work at all, so rather than committing to option 1 or option 2 we decided we needed to do both! We wanted to provide enterprises with a solution that would be consistent and work for them across all their business cases, both those using Site Mailboxes and those that don’t.

This strategic decision gave us focus for the OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview release. We wanted to deliver the robust enterprise class OnePlaceMail with all its bells and whistles that you know and love, and if you happen to be using Site Mailboxes (now or in future) then we will ‘light up’ a whole set of Site Mailbox specific features and enhancements designed to overcome the limitations that exist with Site Mailboxes out of the box. Even more than that, we also wanted to deliver a seamless and consistent user experience, to the user it shouldn’t matter if they are dragging and dropping an email (or attachment) to a Site Mailbox or another SharePoint location via OnePlaceMail. The decision where and when to use Site Mailboxes will often be an architectural decision, but to the end user (through the Outlook interface) they really just want to capture, classify and access information in SharePoint and don’t care too much whether that is done via an enhanced Site Mailbox framework or OnePlaceMail without Site Mailboxes – we needed to deliver a user interface where both scenarios used the same metaphors, same workflow, same behaviors so that the user intuitively knows how to use it without need for training.

The results of all the hard work are ready for you now. The OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview release is a free download which we made publically available last week.

There is also a series of short videos showing the new OnePlaceMail Site Mailbox features in action, so if you want to quickly check out what it looks like I’d suggest taking 5 minutes to go through these.

In this previous blog post SharePoint Site Mailbox integration with Outlook – A new way to get email into SharePoint, I introduced the new SharePoint Site Mailbox concept introduced in SharePoint/Exchange/Outlook 2013 and took a look the pros and cons of using this new feature.

The following short videos show how OnePlaceMail 6.4 builds on the SharePoint Site Mailbox concept to deliver an enhanced user experience that overcomes many of the limitations or short comings of Site Mailboxes.

1) Capture Email attributes when saving to Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to extend Site Mailboxes in SharePoint 2013 to capture email attributes when saving email messages or email attachments.

2) Tag Content with custom metadata when saving to Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to tag content with custom metadata when saving email or email attachments to SharePoint Site Mailboxes from Outlook 2013.

3) Save to Site Mailboxes from Windows Explorer and Office Applications

This video demonstrates saving from Windows File Explorer and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) into SharePoint Site Mailboxes.

4) Access SharePoint capabilities from Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to access SharePoint from within an Outlook 2013 Site Mailbox. The demonstration also shows toggling between the Site Mailbox Exchange Style view and SharePoint View of the current location.

5) Manage Email Attachments with Site Mailboxes

This video demonstrates how to replace email attachments with links to items in SharePoint. The video also demonstrates searching SharePoint, include Site Mailboxes to insert or add.

Related Posts

Future-proofing your Email/SharePoint Integration Strategy – OnePlaceMail 6.4 Preview

SharePoint Site Mailbox integration with Outlook – A new way to get email into SharePoint

White Paper – SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

Let’s face it, if you are tasked with setting up the new SharePoint Site Mailboxes for a proof of concept, or in your production environment it’s not a 5 minute exercise and the official documentation provided by Microsoft at this stage is lacking somewhat in detail.

Chances are that you’ve been tasked with setting this up because you are either:

• The SharePoint Guru
• The Exchange Guru
• Someone pretending to be (or forced to be) one of the above

The difficulty I can see with this is that you have to have a decent understanding of both SharePoint and Exchange in order to perform the setup. The setup requires installations and configuration on both the SharePoint Server and the Exchange Server.

With that in mind, the OnePlaceMail team have published a step-by-step guide to setting up SharePoint Site Mailboxes with screenshots every step of the way. The guide takes you from a default SharePoint 2013 server and Exchange 2013 server and goes through the entire process to get them talking to together so that you can start provisioning SharePoint Site Mailboxes.

Abstract

This article provides step by step instructions for setting up site mailboxes on-premise.
If you are using Office 365, please skip this article and move to the “Provisioning of a Site Mailbox” article as Office 365 environments have the Exchange and SharePoint pre-requisite configuration described in this article setup already.
This article will be useful for both SharePoint and Exchange administrators as the configuration process involves both environments.
In addition to the original Microsoft article (you can find the reference below) this article provides detailed steps regarding creating self-signed certificates and establishing trust relationships between SharePoint and Exchange with these certificates.

Thanks to everyone who came and visited us at the OnePlaceMail booth. It’s great to hear from our existing customers and how our recent updates have been making your lives easier! A big thank you to all those brave people that came and introduced themselves, I hope we were able to answer your questions and ensure you left the conference with some valuable knowledge and a pathway forward.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to see how OnePlaceMail has been making SharePoint users grin from ear-to-ear then I have great news. In addition to the awesome resources available on the OnePlaceMail website, the OnePlaceMail Team are now running free webinars to help you get the most out of your investment in SharePoint and most importantly get your users on side by making SharePoint a joy to use from the desktop.

The next webinar is scheduled for Wed 5 June (4-5pm EDT) and topics covered include:

- Bringing SharePoint to the desktop
- Seamless capture of content
- Streamline content classification
- SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes

Don’t miss out, register now for the free webinar.

For those struggling with user adoption of SharePoint, this is what happy users look like…

I often find myself testing different SharePoint access methods to determine which provides the best performance and also need to test how solutions scale with massive amounts of data and the behaviour when SharePoint throttling kicks in. I find the following PowerShell script useful for populating SharePoint document libraries with files from a local drive path. This simple script will loop through all files in a given local folder and upload them to SharePoint. Note this example doesn’t handle folders within folders.

1. Create a folder containing the files to upload to SharePoint

2. Locate the SharePoint library that you want to upload the files to, take note of the:

• Web URL
• Document library URL
• Document library name

3. Copy the following script to be run in a PowerShell window

if((Get-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell") -eq $null)
{
    Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
}

#Script settings

$webUrl = "http://vs-server12"

$docLibraryName = "Documents"
$docLibraryUrlName = "Shared%20Documents"

$localFolderPath = "C:\temp\Docs4SharePoint"

#Open web and library

$web = Get-SPWeb $webUrl

$docLibrary = $web.Lists[$docLibraryName]

$files = ([System.IO.DirectoryInfo] (Get-Item $localFolderPath)).GetFiles()

ForEach($file in $files)
{

    #Open file
    $fileStream = ([System.IO.FileInfo] (Get-Item $file.FullName)).OpenRead()

    #Add file
    $folder =  $web.getfolder($docLibraryUrlName)

    write-host "Copying file " $file.Name " to " $folder.ServerRelativeUrl "..."
    $spFile = $folder.Files.Add($folder.Url + "/" + $file.Name, [System.IO.Stream]$fileStream, $true)
    write-host "Success"

    #Close file stream
    $fileStream.Close();
}

#Dispose web

$web.Dispose()

4. Change the PowerShell variables at the top of the script to match your SharePoint upload destination and the location of the folder of files to upload

5. Run the PowerShell script, you should see progress of the uploaded files as shown below

6. After the script completes you should see all of the imported files in your SharePoint document library

Release 6.4 of OnePlaceMail is now publically available for download (both Enterprise Edition and the free Express Edition). I’m very happy to have this release now available to everyone as a lot of effort and changes led by customer feedback has gone into this release. It also represents a longer than normal release cycle for the OnePlaceMail product with almost 6 months going into this release.

This release has already been warmly accepted and rather than me filling you in on what’s new, here’s some of the news stories already out there:

Official OnePlaceMail 6.4 Release Article

Future proof your SharePoint solution with OnePlaceMail R6.4 (ready for download)

OnePlaceMail R6.4 sees a significant focus placed on the speed of access to content stored within SharePoint from desktop applications. The existing Insert from SharePoint, Open from SharePoint and Save to SharePoint windows have seen significant enhancements with support for SharePoint views and column rendering.

Release 6.4 is the first in the world to provided full support for both extending and co-existing with SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes. Therefore, allowing you to future-proof solutions you build today.

Many other fantastic enhancements for the capture, classification and access to SharePoint content from desktop applications have also been delivered with a smaller memory footprint and greater overall performance.

Wall Street Journal

New SharePoint Solution Addresses Site Mailboxes Limitations

IT departments worldwide still grapple with SharePoint user adoption and question how best to achieve true collaboration and content management. In particular, one of the biggest sticking points seems to be email, which is still a primary business communication tool and one which people use to share, store and search for documents. Microsoft recently attempted to address this challenge with the addition of Site Mailboxes but it falls short. But OnePlaceMail 6.4 dually enhances SharePoint 2013′s best attributes and fills the gaps.

Image and Data Manager (IDM)

Many views of SharePoint with OnePlaceMail 6.4

Scinaptic Communications promises speedier access to content from desktop applications with the latest update to OnePlaceMail, the company’s solution for improving connections between SharePoint and Outlook, Microsoft Office and Windows Explorer.

To support this in Release 6.4, OnePlaceMail’s existing “Insert from SharePoint”, “Open from SharePoint” and “Save to SharePoint” windows have been enhanced with support for SharePoint Views and Column rendering.

Release 6.4 also adds some significant enhancements to the “Insert from SharePoint” Window that multiply the range of ways that content can be viewed and accessed.

TMCNET

OnePlaceMail Helps SharePoint Remove Limitations
As useful a tool as e-mail is, it still has its limits. There are just some things that simply aren’t programmed into it, so there’s nothing that can be done, right? Well, Scinaptic Communications has improved its OnePlaceMail product, helping users bring Microsoft SharePoint to their email and Office environments.
This is a nice step up from the current capabilities of Outlook, Office, and Explorer, helping better link them together and remove many of their limitations. Those who constantly find themselves having to use all of the above will greatly benefit from OnePlaceMail 6.4. This will also help improve adoption of all of them, for those who use one will now be able to benefit further from the others. It’s a situation that should go well for all involved, from the IT Department and on.

CFO World

Local developers target end user adoption issues with world first software

OnePlaceMail 6.4 is the first and only product worldwide that both complements and extends the new SharePoint 2013 Site Mailboxes functionality to overcome critical limitations, such as the inability to capture email attributes when saving emails or their attachments; minimal Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) integration; inability to tag content with custom metadata; and no intuitive File Explorer integration.

It’s always exciting to read reviews about your own product and hear feedback from users. So today I sat down with my morning coffee to read through Joel Oleson’s analysis and review of OnePlaceMail Release 6.4. I have to admit I was a little bit nervous having someone as well known to the SharePoint community as Joel Oleson analysing OnePlaceMail and publishing his thoughts and comments to the world. Would he like it? Would he get the business messages behind what OnePlaceMail is trying to achieve? My fears were soon quashed as I could see Joel had picked up on our vision of bringing SharePoint to the user in the applications they work with every day, making SharePoint feel like it is part of these applications and not some extra “system” that they have to go to a browser to access. Here’s some extracts from the review that brought a smile to my face:

OnePlaceMail team has focused on getting real ROI out of SharePoint by focusing on adoption challenges, compliance, and records management capabilities right where the users "live."

The real focus of OnePlaceMail 6.4 is to deliver broader adoption of solutions on the SharePoint platform. SharePoint is deployed in over 88% of Fortune 500 companies according to recent AIIM research, and unfortunately, broader adoption beyond basic file sharing and collaboration hold it back.

It can definitely be considered part of any adoption strategy to help those business users who are looking for a step that brings SharePoint to a familiar tool like Outlook, Office and File Explorer. Want users to save their content into SharePoint? Need to encourage better classification of content? Want to provide fast access to SharePoint content from Outlook? Now there’s a tool that makes it that much easier.

OnePlaceMail lives up to its name of trying to unite collaboration. It brings the richness of document management into Outlook and helps encourage users to do the right thing.

Enterprises that are having adoption issues and trying to address compliance and records management issues will find that SharePoint drag-and-drop does lose out on a lot of the metadata that enterprise content management strategies will be attempting to enforce. OnePlaceMail provides an interface that will capture this content as it comes in from various places including file shares, network drives, office applications, and from email. With SkyDrive Pro and the SharePoint Site Mailbox many will look again at moving public folders and file shares into SharePoint, and OnePlaceMail can be part of that enterprise strategy to eliminate the inefficient sources for document storage.

I was very impressed with the OnePlaceMail Express Edition and everything it includes for FREE. What a great way to encourage business folks to try it out for themselves to see if it lives up to its name!

Read the full review at SharePoint Joel’s SharePoint Land website

Thanks for the kind words Joel and for highlighting the business value and proposition that OnePlaceMail provides for those organisations having already deployed or looking to deploy SharePoint.

In this article you will learn how to create a custom list definition (not a list instance) using the Visual Studio 2012 visual designer with step-by-step with screenshots.

In Visual Studio 2012 select File | New Project

Select Templates | Visual C# | Office/SharePoint | SharePoint 2013 – Empty Project

If you don’t see this type of project available then you may need to download and install the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012

Provide a name and location for the project/solution and OK

In the SharePoint Customization Wizard Prompt, configure the server to use for developing/debugging. If possible you will want to try and achieve a Sandboxed solution over a Farm Solution due to it’s ability to be able to be reused in more scenarios requiring less permission is the SharePoint environment.

Once the new solution has been created, we can use the new Visual Designer to create the List Definition. Right click the project in the solution explorer and select Add | New Item

Select Visual C# Items | Office/SharePoint | List, provide a name and click OK

Provide a display name for the list. We just want to create a list definition, not an instance of the list; This isn’t an option so what we do instead is go with the “Create a customizable list template and a list instance of it” and we will make some mods to the generated project files to remove the list instance so we are just left with the definition.

You should now see the list instance and definition files in solution explorer.

If you select the SettingsProfile in the solution explorer you will get the new List Visual Designer. Notice the “List” tab, this represents the instance of the list.

Since we only want the list definition, we are going to delete the list instance files from solution explorer. Select SettingProfileInstance, right-click and Delete.

You should now be left with just the list definition, the “List” tab will now be greyed out.

We can now get on with creating the list definition and there are plenty of articles out there on the finer points of doing this. Here are some for reference:

http://roykimsharepoint.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/visual-studio-2012-list-and-content-type-designer-hands-on-observations/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231593.aspx

http://www.skylinetechnologies.com/Blog/Article/76/Creating-Lists-in-SharePoint-Using-Visual-Studio-2012.aspx

Just for completeness if you are following this through I’ve added a couple of columns to my definition.

Now lets deploy it to SharePoint to make sure it works

Double click the Feature in solution explorer to bring up the feature visual designer and package explorer

Here you can set options such as how the feature appears and it’s scope. For our purposes just confirm the items in the feature include just the list definition files.

Now select the project, right-click and Deploy

Once the solution has been deployed I’m going to navigate to my site in a browser and verify that the new solution has been deployed and the feature activated (by default the solution is deployed and activated, and the feature is scoped at a web level and activated). You should see messages in the Visual Studio status bar to this effect during the deployment.

Everything is now is place for us to create an instance of the list from the definition, so I’ll create a new app and select our Widget Settings Profile app (list definition).

Provide a name for the new list instance based on our custom list definition.

We can now create items in the list and we see our columns coming through that were defined in the custom list definition.

Job complete, in this article we went through creating a list definition using the Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint 2013 List project template. We manually deleted the default list instance files so that we were just left with the list definition in our solution.

OnePlaceMail 6.5 went into public release last week and represents the biggest user experience overhaul we have ever done to the product. This is no light statement, given that OnePlaceMail is already known in the market for it’s seamless, intuitive, and slick user interface.

We heard your pains in deploying SharePoint in your organization; Getting users to save content from their desktops into SharePoint and work on files in SharePoint was the main reason SharePoint deployments were failing or not succeeding as well as hoped.

Our major goal for the release was to drive better user adoption of SharePoint by delivering SharePoint content into Outlook in such a tightly integrated way that users could work with SharePoint content as quickly and easily as they could within their inbox or any other Outlook folder. We also wanted SharePoint content to just “feel” like Outlook content so that user’s stopped thinking about SharePoint as a system that was “out there in the browser” and rather think of it just as content that is “here and available on my desktop”.

So how have we delivered on such an ambitious goal?

Outlook Style View of SharePoint Locations

When a SharePoint location (Library, List, Folder, Document Set or Site) is selected on the left navigation of Outlook, the SharePoint content is presented in an ‘Outlook Style Interface’. This provides for a familiar Outlook experience for the end user when interacting with SharePoint.

This interface provides access to both SharePoint public and private views for the selected location. This includes all SharePoint view capabilities such as:

• Columns – including Managed Metadata, Enterprise keywords, External Data columns, Lookup Columns and all the standard column types
• Grouping
• Sorting

Find SharePoint Content Quickly – Filtering, Sorting, Searching

When viewing SharePoint content you can instantly filter (per character filtering as you type), advanced filtering operations, instant sort on columns.

Searching SharePoint content quick and easy, search within a library or across whole site collections directly within Outlook with hit highlighting and embedded preview.

Preview of SharePoint Content Embedded within Outlook

Providing SharePoint content in an “Outlook Style” that allows user to locate content quickly is awesome, but how do I know I’ve found the right file? PREVIEW. Yes, it’s worth shouting about.OnePlaceMail delivers Email and Document Previews within the ‘Outlook Style Interface’. Where available, OnePlaceMail utilises the Office Web Application Server preview capabilities provided by SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 environments to deliver highly efficient previews. Where Office Web Apps are not available OnePlaceMail will perform local preview of files.

SharePoint Content Ribbon Actions

Access to the selected document Items Properties is available using the ‘View Properties’ action on the ribbon or by performing a ‘right-click’ on an item. The View Item Properties page allows you to further edit the item and initiate workflows.

The ‘Email as Link’ provides the ability to insert links direct to the document(s) or to the Item Properties. If the ‘Document ID’ feature has been enabled on SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013, the links will be generated using the Document ID. This will minimise broken links in the event of a SharePoint restructure or items being moved as part of a records management solution.

There are circumstances where sending content from SharePoint as an attachment is required. OnePlaceMail allows you to use the ‘Email as Attachment’ for one or more selected items.

What about SharePoint/Outlook 2010 and 2007?

It takes time to upgrade to the latest and greatest so not only have we managed to deliver this awesome integration in Outlook 2013, but it is also available to Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007. We’ve also made it compatible with Office 365, SharePoint 2013, 2010, and 2007 (hosted, on-premise, or hybrid)

My experience of using it over the last few weeks

The impact this release has on SharePoint usability is simply massive. At this start of this release, and even a long way into the development cycle, I was looking at each of the individual features in relative isolation. I underestimated the impact that the combination of all the features would bring to the user once they were delivered in a single package.

I now find it just as easy (and sometimes easier and faster) to work with files in SharePoint than I do with files on my local drive – seriously. I’m finding it’s faster to click through a few files and have Office Web Apps provide the preview embedded in Outlook than it is to fire up Word on my desktop.

Finding content in SharePoint is now simple and fast, I just start the search from the most specific container I think the file might be in (e.g. a site, sub site or library) enter a few keywords and I get hit highlighted results back immediately from the SharePoint search index. I can then do client side type ahead search within the search results as well as sorting and filtering on file type and size. With live preview happening on search results finding content is easy.

During a manual testing session I was trying out opening content from SharePoint (e.g. email messages) and continuing working on them (forwarding, replying etc). I’d run through about 20 minutes of test script when I realized I was in a folder under my inbox and not a OnePlaceMail SharePoint folder. To me, this was a moment of clarity, we had gone a long way to achieving our goal. For the user experience to be so integrated and seamless that you forget whether you are working with content in SharePoint or content in your local mail folders is a fantastic result.  As a user I’m not overly fussed about where the content is stored (that’s an IT/Governance decision), as long as it’s easy and intuitive to get to and work with, the back-end storage is somewhat irrelevant.

Downloads

Release 6.5 is available to download immediately from the OnePlaceMail website.

Other Resources

Official OnePlaceMail Release 6.5 news article

Official OnePlaceMail Release 6.5 highlights document (PDF)

SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 had a series of Web Parts dedicated to surfacing and interacting with an Exchange mail account directly from a page in SharePoint.

Overview of the Outlook Web Access Web Parts (for SharePoint 2007 and 2010)

If you are not familiar with the functionality here’s a quick overview (this info is taken from the official Microsoft help documentation http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/working-with-outlook-web-access-web-parts-HA101810215.aspx)

There are five Outlook Web Access Web Parts. These can be used with Microsoft Exchange Server version 2003 to 2007:

• My Calendar
• My Contacts
• My Tasks
• My Inbox
• My Mail Folder

These Web Parts are most useful for your My Site, because only you (or someone who can log into your Exchange e-mail account) will be able to see the information from your folders. If you put one of these Web Parts on a shared site, other users will see the Outlook Web Access logon screen in the Web Part.

Each Web Part displays the information from a folder in your email account, so you can choose the information you want to show on your site. The Web Parts make it easy to show specific information, such as tasks, without showing all of your Outlook information. If you want to have full Outlook functionality on your SharePoint site, you can use a Page View Web Part linked to the URL for your Outlook Web Access server.

All of the Outlook Web Access Web Parts provide two-way communication with your Exchange Server e-mail account: Changes you make in a Web Part appear in Outlook.

What’s the Story with OWA integration in SharePoint 2013?

I was somewhat surprised when SharePoint 2013 arrived and all the Outlook Web Access web parts were missing. Had this been an oversight by Microsoft and they would reappear again in a cumulative update for SharePoint? It appears not.

On further digging Microsoft actually dropped support for the OWA web parts (in SharePoint 2010) if your mail was hosted in Exchange Online (Office 365). From the Exchange Online Service Description document:

Exchange Online supports Outlook Web App Web Parts via the PageViewer control in Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft SharePoint Server, or via manually configured URLs. Built-in SharePoint OWA Web Part controls will not work against Exchange Online

The statement above alludes to an alternate method using the Page Viewer control (which to be honest I’d prefer to the OWA web parts which didn’t have the full functionality of the OWA interface). The idea behind using the Page Viewer web part is that OWA is just a web interface to your Exchange account served up at known URLs. So just wrap these in a iframe (Page Viewer web part) and you will have your full OWA interface embedded inside a SharePoint page. For a step by step guide of how to setup the Page View control to connect to Exchange Online (OWA) take a look at this article by Jesper_Osgaard.

So fast forward to SharePoint 2013, can we still use the Page Viewer web part technique? My experience so far has yielded mixed results.

More often than not the Page Viewer technique gets tripped up with security issues. I think the underlying issue is that an Internet Explorer session cannot handle authenticating with multiple domains at the same time and it just so happens SharePoint Online and Exchange Online reside in different domains.

This isn’t to say it flat out doesn’t work. Here’s a screenshot to prove it (no smoke and mirrors or Photoshop involved I promise). But I just didn’t find it stable enough to recommend it as a viable solution.

On reflection it would seem that Microsoft wasn’t able to iron out the complexities of integrating OWA content and SharePoint content in the same Internet Explorer session. If they could, then surely that would have provided better integration for the native SharePoint Site Mailboxes that were introduced in SharePoint 2013 (Exchange 2013). When a SharePoint Site Mailbox is provisioned, a mailbox is created in Exchange (for the SharePoint site) and a link is placed on the left navigation of the SharePoint site. When you click on the link you don’t get the mailbox content embedded in the SharePoint page (as you might expect and have hoped for!). Instead it launches a new Internet Explorer window (new IE session that can authenticate with a different domain) and opens the OWA URL directly to the mailbox. There’s essential no integration with the SharePoint UI other than a URL link.

Article Index

1. Introduction

Why use different default views based on navigation hierarchy?

What are the different levels that a default view can be set?

Caution: Per-location view defaults

2. Library default views

3. Folder default views

4. Custom Folder default views

5. Document Set (and Custom Document Set) default views

1. Introduction

This article describes the different methods and techniques available for configuring default views at different hierarchy levels (folder levels) within a SharePoint library. This article presents the options and how to implement them in SharePoint 2013. All options/settings discussed also apply to SharePoint 2010.

Why use different default views based on navigation hierarchy?

People use libraries for many different purposes. If you are storing different types of documents in a library (especially if you are using different content types) the properties (or columns) of information may be specific to the different types of items in your library. Allowing the default view to be set at different levels in the navigation hierarchy means that you can show the user views that are specifically customized for showing the data in that location.

This is really where all the action is at. We’re talking about what happens when the user navigates either from the root level of a library into a folder, or from a folder into a lower level folder. Usually we group items in folders for some logical reason, and based on that logic it is reasonable to expect that we might want to show a different view of the items in that folder.

We actually have a few options available to us at this level depending on the types of folders that have been implemented. Let me bore you with some details about folders that may assist with some of the terminology used through the rest of this article.

Folders are a content type in SharePoint. Through the SharePoint UI you can create your own custom content types that are based on the folder content type (I’ll refer to these as custom folder content types, or just Custom Folders). Then there’s Document Sets which are based on the folder content type (just like a custom folder content type) but contain a lot of extra intelligence that SharePoint gives you out of the box. In the same way you can create custom folders by extending the base Folder content type, you can also create your own Custom Document Set content types by extending the standard Document Set content type.

The techniques for applying a default view to a folder is different for Folders, Custom Folders, and Document Sets, so we will discuss them one at a time.

What are the different levels that a default view can be set?

Library (top level)

Folder

Custom Folder

Document Set

Custom Document Set

This article will go through each of these different navigation hierarchy levels and explain with examples how default views can be applied and what it looks like.

Caution: Per-location view defaults

SharePoint also has the concept of “per-location view defaults” which is part of the Metadata Navigation and Filtering feature. On the surface it seems that there is a big overlap between setting default at the different hierarchy levels (as I will discuss in this article) and the per-location view defaults (which claim to let you specify a default view to use at any level in the hierarchy). In reality the per-location defaults do not affect the default views used as a user navigates between folders. These per-location view default only apply if you select to open the location via the Metadata Navigation tree. This method has some fairly major caveats and I’d advise caution when using it to implement folder level view defaults. If you want to know more about this option please read SharePoint per-location view settings (capabilities, limitations & pitfalls)

2. Library default views

This one is as simple as it gets. Every list or library in SharePoint contains one or more views. One of those views can be set as the default. You do this directly on the view settings page.

Open the library and select Library Settings

Scroll down to the Views section, where you can see all views for the library and also which view is currently set as the default.

To change the default view, click the name of the view you want set as the new default. This will open the view settings page. Now tick the ‘Make this the default view’ checkbox.

Save the changes and now navigate to the library in SharePoint and this time your selected view is displayed by default.

3. Folder default views

When to use it

Use this method when you want to show one view in the root of the library (when not in any folder), and a different view when inside any folder within the library.

What it looks like

In this example I’ve added 3 columns to a standard Document Library (Project, Project Manager, Document Type)

In my library I have only folders at the root level of my library (no documents stored at this level) so I just want columns for the title of the folder.

When I go into any of the folders I want to see a different default view which shows me documents grouped by Project and also shows the Project Manager and Document Type.

How to implement it

Ensure content type management is enabled for the library. This is under Library Settings | Advanced Settings.

Create a view to use at the root (top-level) of the library, selecting the desired columns, sort order, etc. I’ve called mine ‘Library View’. The important steps here are to:

1 – Set this view as the default view

2 – Expand the Folders setting option and select ‘Show in this view: In the top-level folder’. Note: these options only become available once you have enabled management of content types in the library.

Now save the view and the library view settings should look similar to this:

Notice that Library View is designated to only show in Top-level and is set as the default view for the library.

Now create another view that you want to use to display documents when inside folders. Again create the view and setup the desired column, grouping, sort order etc. I’ve called mine ‘By Project’. Important steps here are:

1 – Set this view as the default view. Yes I agree this doesn’t seem right. You would expect this to replace the ‘Library View’ as the default view – but in combination with the ‘Folders: Show in’ option some unexpected magic happens! Read on.

2 – Expand the Folders setting option and select ‘Show in this view: In folders of content type [Folder]’

Now save the view and take a look at the view settings for the library.

SharePoint has allowed us to have 2 default views! The show in column tells us that the ‘Library View’ view is the default for the Top-level (or root) of the library and the ‘By Project’ view is the default when in any Folder.

That’s it – when you now navigate to the library you will see the ‘Library View’ and then clicking to navigate inside a folder will automatically switch to the ‘By Project View’.

I was interested to see what would happen if I created another view at the “Show in folder” level and tried to set it as the default. I created a view called ‘By Manager’ and set it as default.

As you can see SharePoint is enforcing that I can only have 1 default view at the folder level and this is independent of the default view at the Top-level.

4. Custom Folder default views

When to use it

Use this method when you want to be able to specify a default view at the root level of the library, and a different default view for each type of custom folder. Your intended design might not use custom folders, but consider using them so that you can use the different custom folder types to assign different default views.

What it looks like

I have created a library to hold employee timesheets and expense claims. Timesheets and Expenses are two separate content types that I have created. I want to create a folder per project in the library, and within each project I’ll create an Expenses folder and a Timesheet folder to store the actual documents. Since Expenses and Timesheets contain different columns I want a specific default view when browsing inside Expense folders and a different default view when browsing in Timesheet folders.

With the use of custom folder content types I can have a default view at the library level showing detailed folder information (as shown below)

Then the default view is changed when browsing into any of the Timesheet folders to present Timesheet specific information (such as Week Start Date, Employee Name and Total Hours) in a nice friendly format.

A different default view is used when browsing into any of the Expense folders so you can quickly see Expense specific information such as the Total Amount of the expense.

How to implement it

Ensure content type management is enabled for the library. This is under Library Settings | Advanced Settings.

Before configuring the library we need to create some custom folder content types that we will use in the library. Management of content types is done at the site level (Site settings | Site Content types)

Create a new content type for the custom Timesheet Folder, setting the parent content type to ‘Folder’.

Save the new content type, then add the existing Comments site column to this content type

Select the Comments column so that our content type now has these columns

Create a second custom folder content type for the Expenses Folder, setting the parent content type to ‘Folder’.

As with the Timesheets Folder content type, go ahead and add the Comments column

Now in the library settings we need to add the two new custom folder content types

Select the Timesheet Folder content type and the Expenses Folder content type

Your library setting should look similar to this

Now we need to create the view we want to use as default when browsing in Timesheet folders

Similarly we need a default view to use for showing Expenses

To get the default view applying to folders based on the custom content type of the folder, we go into the view settings for the view you want to make a default. So let’s start with the Timesheets by Week view.

Check the ‘Make this the default view’ checkbox

Expand the Folders setting option and select ‘Show in this view: In folders of content type: Timesheets Folder’

Then edit the Expenses by Project view. Check the ‘Make this the default view’ checkbox

Expand the Folders setting option and select ‘Show in this view: In folders of content type: Expenses Folder’

After making these changes the Views section of the library settings should be similar to this

Notice the All Documents view is set to Show In All. In this state you will find that the All Documents view will be the default (even within Timesheet and Expenses folders). We need to change the All Documents view so that it only used as the default at the top level.

Edit the All Documents view, expand the Folders setting option and select ‘Show in this view: In the top-level folder’. The View settings should now look like this.

Enough configuration, let’s start populating the library now. First we will setup the folder structure.

At the top level of the library we create Project folders using the regular Folder content type

Within each of these project folders, we create one Timesheets folder (using the Timesheet Folder content type) and one Expenses folder (using the Expenses Folder content type)

Inside the Project ABC folder, I now have these 2 folders.

Browsing to these folders now you should find that the default view is changing automatically as you navigate.

Library root/project subfolders (use All Documents view)

Expense Folders (use Expenses by Project view)

Timesheet Folders (use Timesheets by Week view)

5. Document Set (and Custom Document Set) default views

When to use it

Use this method when you are using Document Sets in your library and you want one view at the root level of the library and a different view when you are viewing the contents of a Document Set. The same default view will be used for all instances of the Document Set within the library. If you have multiple different Custom Document Set content types in the library, you can specify a different default view for each of the different Custom Document Sets.

What it looks like

When browsing the root level (top level) of the library the All Documents view is used by default

Navigating into any document set switches the default view so that we can present the document properties in a better way.

In the case of multiple Document Set content types you can have a default view at the top-level (customized for showing information about the document sets) then have a different default view for each of the different document set content types. In the following example I have a library with 2 custom document sets (Small Project Document Set and Large Project Document Set).

The default library view shows a list of all document sets (includes both Small Project and Large Projects) and exposes specific document set properties as columns and groups by Project Status

When navigating into the first project (which is an instance of the Small Project Document Set) I get a default view customized for small projects

When navigating into the second project (which is an instance of the Large Project Document Set) I get a default view customized for large projects

How to implement it

Ensure content type management is enabled for the library. This is under Library Settings | Advanced Settings.

From Library Settings click Add from existing site content types

Add the Document Set content type

Once you’ve created your document sets (at least a few to start with), configure the All Documents view to display document set information that you want to see.

Next create a new view to use when showing the content of a document set (I called mine Document Set View)

Select Library Settings | Content Types | Document Set

Then select Document Set settings

Now use the Welcome Page View option to select your new view to show content within Document Sets

We are done, navigating into a document set should now use this view by default.

If you are using multiple custom document set content type, simply repeat the steps to assign Welcome Page View to each of the content types.

Further Reading

https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/pages/automatically-switching-views-when-opening-a-sharepoint-folder.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/sharepoint-server-help/configure-the-availability-of-views-for-a-location-in-the-site-hierarchy-HA010378684.aspx

http://sharepointpromag.com/sharepoint-administration/implementing-folder-content-types

These are the essential resources I’ll be keeping my eye on as the SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas draws nearer.

The Official Site Conference Site

Goes without saying, this site IS the official conference site. Announcements, news and details released here are the real deal and your getting the information first hand.

SharePoint Conference Party Calendar #SPC14

Joel Oleson is keeping track of SharePints, parties, and events both official and unofficial. Joel’s party guidance in previous years has proven spot on so I hope he comes through with the good again this year!

Melalogix Best of Breed Awards and Gala 2014

This looks like it will be one of the largest unofficial parties. There’s limited tickets so keep your eyes and ears open on how to get your hands on a ticket for this one.

President Bill Clinton will deliver the keynote address at SharePoint Conference 2014

How often do you get to see an (ex) American President in the flesh? I won’t be missing the keynote, even if I’m more than a little lost of the connection between Bill and SharePoint!

The 2014 Microsoft Product Roadmap

My (obvious) tip is that the most significant announcements coming from Microsoft at the conference will be in relation to the 2014 product roadmap. Why wait for the conference? Take a look at this reference to see new updates and release expected soon or around conference time. Some details of what they include is already available. This may influence which sessions you decide to go to…

Collabshow Feed on all things SPC14

The Collabshow website has a page dedicated to all things SPC14. The website is run by Joel Oleson and is well worth keeping an eye on for news as the conference gets closer.

SPC14 Survival and Readiness Guide

Why start from scratch and try to think of everything yourself? People have already started putting together checklists and info packs on how to get the most out of the conference (even old guides from SPC12 are still quite relevant). This is one of the better one to emerge.

As the SharePoint community disperses from Las Vegas after another awesome conference it’s time to digest the new information and figure out what that really means for you.

The takeaways for each person are probably different as we all use SharePoint in different ways, although there was one very prominent message being pushed…

Microsoft’s forecast: Very cloudy with a chance of on-prem meatballs

Microsoft was pushing the cloud first model very heavily, Office 365 will be getting all the new bells and whistles with on-prem maybe getting some of the new features down the track. Features that integrate the different services (e.g. Yammer/SharePoint/Exchange/OneDrive) would probably only be available in Office 365 where Microsoft can guarantee the compatible versions across the services and control passing user identity between the services and may never make there way to on-prem.

Attendee’s forecast: We are not ready/can’t move/don’t want to move to the cloud yet

This was the sentiment I was hearing on the booth. The reasons for not wanting to jump to the cloud (at the moment) were varied but most had understandable reasons. Microsoft has the potential to alienate a lot of the community and customers (possibly losing them to competitive products) if they take the big stick approach and try to force people into Office 365.

On a more positive note for on-prem customers, it was announced that there will be a new release of SharePoint (on-prem) in 2015.

The Venetian was an awesome location for the conference. Maybe it’s just me or maybe Vegas has slightly refined itself since the last conference but I thought the area of the strip near the Venetian had a better buzz about it and was just a nicer end of town. The Venetian itself was excellent with plenty of great options for eating and drinking. Anyone know a place that does a gourmet burger better than Vegas?

SPC14 was the conference that saw us announce the growth and re-positioning of our brand. OnePlaceMail has become one product of the larger OnePlaceEnterprise suite. Along with OnePlaceMail, the OnePlaceEnterprise suite contains the new products OnePlaceDocs and OnePlaceLive. This growth and shift was well received at the conference and I’m really looking forward to this new phase as OnePlaceEnterprise enters the market.

Thanks to all those who came up to see us at the conference and traded SharePoint stories. I hope you all enjoyed the conference and were able to walk away more knowledgeable at the end of the day.