SharePoint Deployment Planning Services

We are delighted to announce our recent certification as a Microsoft SDPS (SharePoint Deployment Planning Services) provider.

Companies with Microsoft SA (Software Assurance) can avail of SPDS services with Central Solutions at no extra charge. SDPS is designed to help organisations plan an effective deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. SDPS includes a broad range of planning tools and services that help optimize the effectiveness of SharePoint’s core capabilities, and help lower the cost of deployment and adoption.

Through a range of 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15-day programmatic planning sessions, Central Solutions will conduct a highly effective planning process for deploying or getting more out of a customers’ SharePoint investment. An SDPS engagement focuses on three main MSSP sections: Qualify and Develop, Solution, Proof, mapping these to Solution Development, Strategy Briefing and Architecture Design, and Proof of Concept and Production Pilot respectively. Not all SDPS engagements include all of these sections. For example, only the 10-and 15-day engagements provide a Proof-of-Concept. A summary of the deliverables are provided in the table below.

Our consultants will work with your decision makers, stakeholders and subject matter experts during the engagement to build a business case and deliver an effective solution.

Further information is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/sa/benefits/packagedservices.mspx

SharePoint Themes – 10 New Themes from Microsoft

Microsoft have released 10 new SharePoint themes – screenshots below.

The templates can be downloaded from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a

SharePoint Breakfast Seminar [Westpark Shannon, 3rd March 2009]

Many of us are faced with the challenge of doing more with less in these turbulent times. This year in particular will see a tightening of corporate purse strings across the board. To drive crucial projects forward, it’s important that business groups and IT teams make the most of what they have.

Along with speakers from Microsoft, Intel and Dell, Central Solutions were delighted to be have been invited to speak at this breakfast seminar where we explore how to leverage Microsoft SharePoint to meet these challenges.

For further details, please see http://www.central-solutions.com/SharePoint_Seminar.pdf

SharePoint Gantt View: adjusting the scale

One of the terrific list features in SharePoint v3 (i.e. WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) is the Gantt View.

It’s available by default in a Project Tasks list or you can add a Gantt view to an existing list.

For further information, have a look at Microsoft Office Online: Create and manage a project task list

While this feature is not intended as an alternative to project scheduling tools such as MS-Project, for many projects/project teams, it provides a more than adequate means of defining/presenting/sharing/managing the project plan.

However, out-of-the-box it does have a couple of limitations including:

• it doesn’t support task dependencies or linking
• grouping of tasks (i.e. as sub-tasks) isn’t available
• the timescale isn’t adjustable (by either user or administrator) and the default view is in weeks. For projects spanning months, this can be a nuisance.

On a recent project, I was looking for a means to adjust the project timescale. After much searching and for the most part being told that it couldn’t be done (at least not without significant coding effort), I found this blog post by Christophe at Path to SharePoint How to scale down the SharePoint Gantt view. It’s a simple, quick and flexible solution and only requires you to:

1. Edit the page with the Gantt View and insert a Content Editor Web Part
2. Modify the Content Editor Web Part and using the Source Editor, insert the CSS code provided.
3. Hide the Content Editor Web Part and Save the page.

Of course, hopefully Microsoft will see fit to provide this out-of-the-box in the next release?

SharePoint Best Practices Conference [London, 6-8 April '09]

If you haven’t had the opportunity to go to the US to check out the SharePoint Best Practices conference then don’t worry because the conference is also being held in London from 6th to 8th April 2009. The conference site is now live and ready for registration – http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/

Planning your SharePoint Deployment

Key to a successful deployment of a SharePoint based intranet, collaboration solution, records repository, etc. is a solid plan. To assist in the planning process, the Microsoft SharePoint product team has released a number of resources which should be of help:

Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx

(Governance Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb507202.aspx

SharePoint Users Group Ireland

Details of the first meeting of the SharePoint Users Group Ireland have been finalised. For further details, see http://www.sugie.org/