Benefits of SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online (SPO) delivers the powerful features of SharePoint without the associated overhead of managing the infrastructure. It can be purchased on the cloud as a standalone offering or as part of an Office 365 suite. Let’s first have a look at Office 365(O365).

Office 365 is a cloud-based service hosted by Microsoft, designed with small businesses in mind, which includes the latest version of familiar Office applications (like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OWA, Calendar, Conferencing etc.). It’s easy to set up and manage, without the need for IT experience, and is supported by a 99.9% uptime guarantee SLA. Isn’t it fantastic?

Here’s what is unique about it:

•    It works perfectly with the Office we know and employees don’t have to learn a new tool
•    It is designed to help us work online or offline

   Now let’s drill down back to the specifics of SharePoint Online. It’s an app coming with Office 365 and has a simple integration with Outlook, Exchange Online, SharePoint Workspace and Lync Online.

   Using four major types of sites, it allows you to share stuff on the go, organize projects, discover answers, build apps in the cloud and manage cost and risk.

What makes SPO stand ahead of its counterparts is:

•    Its new UI is touch-sensitive. It also provides the ‘Drag & Drop’ documents feature from the user’s computer to a library
•    SkyDrive Pro provides cloud storage for employees. Many of us are already aware of it
•    Yammer brings the power of social networks for knowledge exchange and document sharing
•    A site mailbox which all members can access
•    The Cloud App Model (CAM) provides a new and easy programming model for the development, installation, management, and use of apps.
•    eDiscovery allows to discover content across sites, mailboxes and libraries, and keep them in place in SPO, Exchange Online and Lync Online

Very cool features!  Aren’t they? SPO is designed to share easily, share with anyone and share responsibly. So let’s get some idea about external sharing in SPO.

External Sharing can be provided using External Access or Guest Links! Using External Access, external users sign in with an MS or O365 ID and once inside, they are treated as internal users

Using Guest Links, whoever gets the document links can view or edit using OWA.

Now, after we have gained some understanding on SPO, let’s talk about different subscription plans. It is available in a variety of plans in order to meet the needs of an organization in the best possible way!

If purchased as part of O365 suite, it is available as following:

•    Small Business
•    Midsize Business
•    Enterprise plan (E1,E2,E3,E4 Plans)
•    Kiosk workers (K1, K2 Plans)

If purchased on a standalone basis, it is available as:

•    SharePoint Online (Plan 1)
•    SharePoint Online (Plan 2)

For a list of supported features in a particular plan, check out: SPO Service Description

To summarize in one line, SharePoint Online certainly looks to be a good business move!

 

Creating Dashboards using Data View webpart

Data View web part can be linked to data source and made to display the data in dashboards which change visually when the underlying data changes.

Data View web part will be configured as per the requirement in SharePoint designer.

In this blog SharePoint lists are Inventory, having items with different columns.

Now this list will be linked with the Data View web part to show the list data into Dashboard, steps to achieve the same areas following:

Publish a diagram as a Web drawing

Step1: Open Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 from the Start menu-> All Programs -> Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010

Step2: Go to File->Sites and select Open Site, here we have chosen the required site on which the data source(list) is.

Step3: It will open the site page. Here we see different options to modify the site. Here we select Edit Site Home Page, which will redirect you to the site page.

Step 4: Here we select Data View under Insert tab. While the cursor is at web part section of the page.

Step5:  When you click on the Data View it will show us a dropdown here we select Empty Data View option

Step 6:  This will insert a data view control on to the web part section of the page. With an option to select the data source.

Step 7: When you click on the option to select the data source , a small window will be opened , where from you can select the data source(in our case a list)

Step 8: When you select the data source, a new window will be opened in the side panel. It will ask you to select the desired columns/ fields you want in the Data View. It will also ask you how to display the data(like Single item or Multiple Item and like Form or View) 

Step 9: Here we select all the desired fields and select  Multiple Item View . Data will be fetched from the source & will be displayed in the Data View

Step10:  Now we will modify the Data view as per our requirement. We can modify directly through design or we can also do that through code behind to achieve the desired results.

Now we can see our Data View has been modified. It has different properties like GroupBy, Hyperlink, Table Borders, & little styling as well.

We can Save our changes to the site & can preview our site in browser using F12 .

Creating a Read Only site in SharePoint

Step1: First of all we will check the current site permissions for the existing users and groups.

 To do that we click on Site Actions, under this we select Site Permissions

Step2: When you click on Site Permissions, you can see the existing permissions to the site users and groups. We can see users have different kind of permissions like Contribute, Design etc. We want them all to have only read access to the site.

Step3:  To achieve this we will write a SharePoint Feature in Visual Studio 2012.

Visual Studio 2012 can be opened from Start menu( in admin mode).

Step4: Here we you will select New Project under Start Page.

Select SharePoint as your project type in the left panel. Then you will select the .NET Framework 3.5 and select SharePoint 2010 Project under it. Now enter the name of the Project, Location & Solution name in the lower panel.

Step5:  When you click ok after filling all the entries in the form then select the desired site and the Type of solution

Then click on Finish. An empty SharePoint Project will be opened. In this under Solution Explorer you will see all the components of your solution.

Step6: Under Solution Explorer in Features right click  on Feature1 and click on Add Event Receiver.

Now we write will our code under  Feature1.EventReceiver.cs

Step7: After writing the complete code we will deploy the solution from Solution Explorer.

Step8: Now on the site, click on Site Actions-> Site Settings 

Step9: A new page will be opened, click on Manage Site Features

Step10: A new page will be opened with all the site features listed on it. Select  our feature and click on Activate

Step11: Once the feature is activated, you can check the site permissions again.

Here we can see the permissions for the users and groups have been modified. Now they have only Read access to the site, they can’t make any changes to the site now.