SharePoint

SharePoint Forums – Anonymous Posting

Lightning Tools — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:25:44 GMT

Yesterday we put out a new release of Social Squared – version 1.0.0.6 – our enterprise forum solution for SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

The main new feature included in this release is the ability to allow people to anonymously post new topics in an individual forum. This has a few settings so is very configurable:

Authenticated Users

Some organizations want to allow users who are authenticated into SharePoint to post anonymously. A good scenario for this is a company feedback forum where the organization wants to get honest feedback from employees. The feedback may be deemed better if employees can leave the comments completely anonymously.

There are a few settings when allowing authenticated users to post anonymously:

Can create topics – allow authenticated users to anonymously create new topics

Can create replies – allow authenticated users to anonymously create replies to existing topics

Require name – if set a textbox asks the user to enter a name when posting anonymously

Require email – if set a textbox asks the user to enter an email address when posting anonymously

Anonymous Users

If you are running a public facing web site then it is unlikely that everyone that visits the site will be authenticated. Social Squared also allows anonymous visitors to post anonymous topics or replies to forums that are setup for this.

The settings are the same as above, so you can set whether these anonymous users can create new topics, or just post replies to existing ones – and also if they are required to enter a name and email address when posting.

Try it out…

We’ve enabled the Test Forum in Social Squared to allow anonymous users to create new topics and replies, you can try it out here:

http://connect.lightningtools.com/default.aspx?action=ViewTopics&fid=7

Download…

You can download a fully functional trial of Social Squared to try out this functionality from here:

Social Squared Download Page.

Coming tomorrow…

In the previous release we added the ability to set where the forums would look up the CSS, image, and user control files it uses to render itself. Tomorrow we’ll be releasing a new UI package that changes the look of the forums so it looks great in SharePoint 2010! It is also a great example of how to customize and deploy a custom look and feel for Social Squared.

RevertToSelf and the Business Data Catalog

Lightning Tools — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:50:27 GMT

The double hop issue is something that comes up a number of times in support questions when people are using the Business Data Catalog with MS SQL Server, and SharePoint and SQL are on separate servers.

There are a few solutions to this:

1, Implement Kerberos

2, Use Single Sign On

3, Use RevertToSelf

We’ll be stepping through how to use BDC Meta Man to configure RevertToSelf.

1, When you have your entities configured within BDC Meta Man it is time to change the BDC Authentication Type. In the bottom left tree view right click on the root tree node and select ‘Edit…’ from the context menu that appears

2, When the Lob System settings form opens up change the Authentication Mode to RevertToSelf

3, You can then click the Save button, and generate your application definition file as normal and import it into SharePoint.

4, When you are trying to use this BDC data within SharePoint, as you are using RevertToSelf - SharePoint will try to connect to SQL Server as the Identity that the Application Pool is running under that the web application is using. To check which account this is, open IIS and expand the application pools.

This account will need permissions to read the data in your SQL Server database so make sure you grant the necessary access rights.

If you still need to secure the data to certain users you can do that through the Shared Service Provider by setting the BDC permissions to specific BDC applications or entities.

<nick/>

Social Squared July Release

Lightning Tools — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:32:37 GMT

We released a new version of Social Squared that contains a few fixes that you will want to checkout.

1, Rich Text Editor Buttons and Tooltips

We’ve fixed the rich text editor so that all the buttons now come up with the proper tooltips

2, Search box

In our previous version of Social Squared we introduced the search box which allowed you to search your topics and posts for keywords. This was only visible however on the front page of the forum. We’ve changed this so it is available for every forum view such as forums, topics and posts.

3, Topics RSS Feed Improved

Each forum has it’s own RSS feed. Before this release the topics RSS feed only had each topic title included which was a hyperlink to the topic within the forums itself. We’ve now improved this so the topics RSS feed actually includes the initial body of the first post of the topic, plus each reply thereafter. This means you can see everything you need to about the topic within your RSS reader

4, Moderator bug fixed

If you had setup moderation for a forum, added some moderators – but then changed your mind and turned moderation off, the forum would still be under moderation due to the fact that moderators were still assigned. We’ve now fixed this so that the Moderation checkbox is what controls if a forum is under moderation.

5, Paging bug fixed

There was an issue where topics would not page correctly if your forum was running on a site setup for anonymous access and the user was not logged in. Now fixed.

So we are up to version 1.0.0.5 now with Social Squared. We’ve got some cool features coming in next months release which include a new design you can optionally choose to use, plus the ability to allow users to create posts anonymously.

Social Squared Feature Pages

Lightning Tools — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:52:00 GMT

We’ve just updated the Social Squared homepage with a number of sub pages that highlight some of the cool functionality in our SharePoint forums web part for larger organizations, check them out here:

- Unread topic indication
- Topic and post moderation
- Email alerts for new topics and posts
- User post count
- Topic ratings
- User signatures
- Search
- Quote posts in your reply

If you want to try out the forums yourself make sure you take a look at our Connect Site and try posting something over there.

<nick/>

How to set permissions for BDC Entities

Lightning Tools — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:39:51 GMT

One common support question we have is when people have imported their BDC XML application definition file into the Shared Service Provider, they go to their SharePoint page and try to configure the BDC Data List Web Part but there are no entities to pick from. This is usually a permissions problem, as your user will need permissions to each BDC application and entity you want them to be able to use.

To set the permissions go into your Shared Service Administration page and click on the ‘Business Data Catalog permissions’ link

In here you can give users access to the BDC in general. You can use AD groups, as well as the group [Authenticated Users] if you wanted to give a permission to everybody who logs into SharePoint. Once you have enabled the permissions you can use the button to ‘Copy all permissions to descendants’ and this will copy the permission to all the BDC applications and entities.

If you want to give specific permissions to a BDC application, view the list of applications you have imported and use the drop down menu to display the link to Manage Permissions at the application level

[Please click the image for a larger view]

If you want to give specific permissions to specific entities you can do this by navigating to the entity and clicking on the ‘Manage Permissions’ link within the entity view:

More SharePoint Forum Goodness

Lightning Tools — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:57:41 GMT

We have just put out another release of our SharePoint Enterprise Forum tool Social Squared. These new features are a result of us using the forums ourselves on our Connect site, and features requested by customers and people testing the forums out. Here is a low down of what is new:

1, RSS feeds

You can now subscribe to an RSS feed for each individual forum. RSS is a great way to get alerts whenever a new topic is added to a forum if you’d prefer not to get email alerts

[Please click images for a larger view]

2, Ability to customize look and feed of the forums (dramatically!)

Up to now you have been stuck with the lovely gray color and theme that comes with Social Squared out of the box. You’ll be glad to know that this can now all be customized as much as you want.

We deploy User Controls, CSS and Image files to the SharePoint RootFolder. You can’t over write these as we will replace them if you upgrade to a future release of Social Squared, but you can now create your own folders in the SharePoint RootFolder and copy our files to these new folders and then customize them as much as you want. Finally you’ll need to go into Site Settings –> Social Squared Forums –> Path Manager and set the location of the folders that contain your custom files:

We’ll have a detailed how-to document up in the next few days on how to do this.

3, Anonymous users now see action buttons

If you were visiting Social Squared as an anonymous user you would not see any of the buttons to create a new topic or post a reply, these wouldn’t appear until you logged in.

To a new user visiting the forum it would look like you couldn’t actually do anything! There was no hint that you needed to login or register before you could post. We’ve now changed this so that anonymous users can see the button to create a new topic or post. Upon clicking on them however they are redirected to the login page.

And we’ve also implemented a few bug fixes:

1, Profile pictures are now resized with the correct aspect ratio.
2, Moderated forums – last post not updated until a moderated topic is approved.
3, Deleted topics – no longer appear as last updated topics once deleted.
4, Anonymous users can now search.

You can download the new version of Social Squared from here:

Social Squared Download

or of course you can just try it out on our Connect Site.

Social Squared June Release

Lightning Tools — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:40:26 GMT

Another month and and a new release of Social Squared – our Enterprise Forum Solution for SharePoint. As this is a new product for us we are able to iterate quite quickly to add new features as we get feedback from people using the forums. Here is the new features we’ve added in this release:

Reply and Quote

When you want to add something to a new topic you’ll now see a new button you can use:

Now you can add a new reply, while quoting the original text to make it obvious which post, or even part of a post you are replying directly to. Here is a reply that includes the original question as a quote:

This certainly makes it easier to follow a conversation that is happening in a topic.

Search

Search is now built into the Social Squared Solution. At the top right of the web part you’ll find a search textbox and button:

It will then take you to a custom _layouts page that will display the search results for you with some advanced search options to help you narrow down the results.

Upload Avatar Pictures

You can now upload custom pictures to display along side your posts in the forums. These avatar pictures are stored in the Social Squared db. At the moment if you have a picture setup against your SharePoint profile – we do not use that. We’d love some feedback on this – should we always default to that, or leave things how it is? Or maybe configuration options are required around users profile photos.

Signatures

Users of internet forums are familiar to signatures. These are very similar to signatures you can create to be inserted at the bottom of all your emails – a bit of html that contains a link or telephone number etc. This can now be set by each user within their profile settings page.

Try it out!!!

We are running Social Squared forums on our own SharePoint site so please feel free to go over there and checkout the new features:

http://connect.lightningtools.com

And you can also download a free fully functional trial of the solution from here:

Social Squared Trial Download

We hope you like these new features. If you feel we should change something we have implemented or are missing a feature please let us know at support@lightningtools.com

<nick/>

Social Squared 1.0.0.2 release

Lightning Tools — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:08:17 GMT

Now that we have the initial version of Social Squared released – our 2nd SharePoint Forum Web Part tool – we’ll be iterating quite quickly adding new features and improvements based on our own findings of using the forums on our own Discussion Site and from people using the forums on their own SharePoint sites. We’ve just pushed out a new release that has the following improvements:

Forum Settings Page

Linked from the site settings page, the Forums Settings page will allow you to customize how the forums look and work:

At the moment we have 2 settings:

1, Show profile picture – this setting decides if user profile pictures are displayed next to users posts.

2, Show email addresses – if you are running your forum on a public web site you may not want to display your users email addresses.

We’ll certainly be adding more configuration settings in future releases.

Please give the forums a try over on our Connect Site, or download the free trial to deploy it to your own SharePoint environment.

<nick/>

Check out Social Squared

Lightning Tools — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:11:29 GMT

We have been really happy with how the Lightning Storm Forums has been doing. We get emails from people every day who are happy to find something for SharePoint that looks and work likes a normal forum does on the internet. SharePoint does have Discussion Boards available to use – but they do look and feel slightly different to standard forum type tools.

The Lightning Storm Forums use a number of SharePoint lists as storage for topics, posts and user information. While these lists can scale to store hundreds of thousands of items – the more you put in them and the harder you try to process the data in the lists the slower things get. People have been asking for more advanced forum features such as :

- post/topic moderation

- indication of new posts since your last visit

- better forum and user stats

plus many more.

We didn’t feel comfortable adding this functionality to the Lightning Storm Forums as it would lead to a slow down in performance – which is something nobody wants. So we’ve decided to build another forum tool called Social Squared. Social Squared directly uses Microsoft SQL Server for storage which gives us a lot more power in what we can do with the features.

Here is how to decide which forum web part is best for you:

Lightning Storm Forums

You require team based communication

General forum features

Storage part of a SharePoint site

Social Squared

You require a company-wide discussion platform

Advanced forum features

Happy to have separate storage database

You can find more information out about both of our SharePoint Community Tools here.

Try them now…

We are a big believer in building products that we use ourselves, and therefore have setup our Lightning Tools Connect site to be our main proving ground for the forums. This means you can try the forums out without having to install anything yourself!

We of course have a trial version of the forums available for download which you can get from here:

Social Squared Forums Download.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting about some of the features we’ve built into Social Squared.

Please give the forums a try, and let us know your feedback.

<nick/>

How Synergy Corporate Technologies have been using DeliverPoint

Lightning Tools — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:42:15 GMT

We had a chance to catch up with James Beck from Synergy Corporate Technologies on how they have been making use of DeliverPoint on some of their consultancy engagements. You can read what he had to say here:

How Synergy deploy DeliverPoint to their customers

<nick/>