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The client wanted an Intranet where everyone who has access could be a content contributor. Because of this desire, they needed to build centralized content repositories that could contain the content, while allowing display of content items throughout the Intranet based on metadata settings. This was an approach that was not inherently consistent with the way SharePoint "thinks" about content repositories.
Additional concerns included low bandwidth situations in field offices around the globe and a relatively unsophisticated user base.
The client did not have in-house expertise with SharePoint and had plans to use SharePoint not only as the platform for their Intranet, but possibly for their Extranets and Internet sites over time as well.
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Sympraxis Consulting LLC was the primary resource for construction and coding of the Intranet solution. As with all of our clients, we also spent significant time working with the client’s staff to educate them on SharePoint configuration and usage as well as the customized development. |
Content Types and Site Columns
To facilitate best practices in content management, we started with a good base of Site Columns and Content Type which could be reused across the Intranet. These fundamental building blocks ensured consistent metadata for all content as well as providing clean, centralized management capabilities.
Page Layouts to Set the Stage For Variations
In the first phase, we did not deploy variations to handle different languages or bandwidth options, but the client wanted to be in a good position to do so in the future. Because of this, we used page layouts extensively, which will allow for more rapid migration to variations when they decide to do so.
Data View Web Parts to Expose Content
Using a centralized content repository allowed us to display content items across the application in as many places as were appropriate based on the metadata tagging. So, for example, if an Operational Brief was tagged as having been created by the New York office, as relevant to Laos and Sri Lanka, and as having to do with Coordination Mechanisms, then that document is displayed in each of the sites: New York, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Coordination Mechanisms. Each site, based upon its site type, has a different set of metadata about that document displayed which is determined by what will be the most useful metadata in that context.
We used Data View Web Parts extensively to enable this functionality and also abstracted out the XSL into separate, componentized files for easy reuse.
Scripting to Add Business Rules
SharePoint’s out of the box content entry forms enforce data integrity at the column (field) level, but do not provide ways to enforce integrity among columns. By using JavaScript on the entry forms, we were able to implement inter-column relationships without losing the inherently strong out of the box forms capability for disparate Content Types. | 1 | | |
The client was launching several extranet sites to disseminate information to health care professionals and to create the beginnings of an online community of trusted advisors. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server was established in the company as a platform for internal websites, and the client wanted to leverage it for public-facing sites as well. The main challenge was user registration - the data on potentially thousands of non-employee users could not be stored in Active Directory or any other company-wide repository. Additionally, content access posed a challenge - registered users at one site might be allowed to visit another site, where they should still be known, but they should not see certain content until providing additional professional credentials.
| Sympraxis Consulting LLC was contracted to design and develop a solution for user registration and authentication. The solution not only worked with the current web applications but could also be easily repurposed for other applications in the future. | The solution relied upon SharePoint’s pluggable provider model that permits user and role information to be furnished from different data sources than those ordinarily used by SharePoint. The SharePoint user interface, using standard ASP.NET controls, collected and displayed user information, but all user data was stored in SQL Server database tables.
SQL Membership Provider
A specialized handler for basic user facts, the SQL Membership Provider, permitted user data to be stored in a set of SQL Server tables separate from any user data the company maintained about its employees. User registration data was gathered through a customization to the standard CreateUserWizard control.
Custom Profile Provider
SharePoint also permits ancillary user data, such as professional credentials, to be stored in an external data source separate from the SharePoint profile store. This was done with the SQL Profile Provider; we used an extension to the Profile Provider to store data in a way that would make reports easier to write.
Custom Role Provider
To ease the process of granting and restricting access to content to a large user audience, we leveraged the ASP.NET custom Role Provider. Upon account creation, users were programmatically added to appropriate roles, which in turn caused them to be members of pre-defined SharePoint groups. Content access was then managed simply in SharePoint through group membership.
| 2 | | | The client wanted to totally revamp its Internet presence, replacing an old site which had outlived its usefulness. Because of the age of the existing application, not much of the underlying data was available in a usable format. The client also wanted the new site to provide content in multiple different user-selectable languages. |
Sympraxis Consulting LLC subcontracted to the company which built the site and handled the branding and significant portions of the underlying coding of the solution built upon SharePoint. |
Translation of the Branding from Pictures to Reality
As in many scenarios, a graphic design firm generated nice looking flat images of the desired design with little understanding of the intricacies of implementing them. Based on our experience with branding many other sites, we were able to use our toolkit to get the branding up and running in minimal time, both taking advantage of SharePoint’s underlying CSS structures and building upon them.
Use of Variations to Provide Multi-Lingual Content
Since the client wanted to display content in several different languages, we took advantage of the variations capability of SharePoint to manage the different sites. Variations allow centralized management of content and page layouts, while displaying data in the appropriate language.
Custom List Management of Translated Content
Because SharePoint doesn’t provide an out of the box solution to manage translated content, we built up a set of lists which functioned as relational tables to hold the English content as well content in other languages.
Anonymous Access
Because this was an Internet-facing site, we took advantage of the anonymous access capabilities of SharePoint and IIS. | 3 |
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