SharePoint | Applied Information Sciences Blog

A global law firm gained a planning and billed-hours edge with a new custom SharePoint application, incorporating an intelligent data dashboard, developed by the experienced team at AIS. This custom-developed solution continues a rich history of success, as the firm views AIS as their IT project partner and a long-term extension of their team.

Background

The long-time AIS client is a top law firm with household name clients in the technology, financial, healthcare and retail industries. They staff more than 1,000 lawyers and offices in 12 cities in the United States, Europe and Asia. This client offers comprehensive legal capabilities for intellectual property, tax issues, real estate, bankruptcy, environmental, corporate law and more.

The Challenge

AIS was initially brought in to build the firm’s global intranet. The project, a SharePoint intranet application, was very successful and user adoption exceeded expectations. Around the same time, the firm hired another company to build a resource application for its main legal practice areas. But because of poor user feedback and bad performance, the application never made it to production. After nearly three years of time and money spent, the firm turned to AIS for help.

Click here to read the full case study.

Nick Ovuka

After watching demos on Power View I was excited to begin using the tool, as we recently configured SQL 2012 SSRS and PowerPivot with SharePoint 2010 for an internationally-focused client. But after playing around with my PowerPivot model in Power View, I realized the Map chart type that I had been so looking forward to using…was not available.

Turns out we had installed SQL 2012 but not SQL 2012 SP1. Power View gets a number of important upgrades in SP1, including much-needed filtering that’s missing from the earlier version, as well as my eagerly anticipated Map chart type. Read More…

Vinita Agrawal

In a recent project, we routinely modify a site, save the site as template and use the solution created to create new sites programmatically. This has been working well for the client for last six months and we haven’t encountered any issues. Occasionally, however, we encountered a problem which prevented us from deactivating or activating the solution in the solutions gallery. To overcome this, we deleted solutions from End User Recycle Bin and Deleted End User Recycle Bin views.

But this time around, every time I created the solution and created a site using this new solution and template, my new site looked bizarre! For instance, one of the libraries didn’t have the All Documents view and defaulted to My Documents view. But if you modified the URL for the library (from MyItems.aspx to AllItems.aspx), it would display the documents. Another difference was that the text from all content editor web parts on list pages were missing. The issue is displayed in pictures below using a test site. Read More…

Arun Mudiraj

The recent announcement about the general availability of Windows Azure IaaS comes with the following key enhancements:

Remote PowerShell is enabled by default when deploying Virtual Machine using PowerShell.
Availability of trial images such as SharePoint in the image gallery.

These enhancements make it easy to deploy a SharePoint Farm in an automated manner using PowerShell scripts.

The goal of this blog post is to walk you through such a script. Read More…

Joseph Klein

AIS is planning a second presentation of our newest SharePoint 2013 seminar in Reston, VA on May 15th. Last month’s seminar in Chevy Chase was a great, informative morning and we’re pleased to offer it again at a different DC metro area location for a wider audience. (Non-DC readers stay tuned; we plan to take this show on the road to other cities soon!)

After more than two years of early adoption research, analysis and technical readiness, AIS has determined that SharePoint 2013 has game-changing functionality as an application platform. This free half-day session will touch on all the new, compelling features of SharePoint and detail exactly how it can help you do more…with less.

Smarter Search
Simpler and Mobile-Ready UI
SharePoint App Store Model
Better Workflow
Social SharePoint
Easy Migration Tools
Lower Costs & more

AIS bloggers and team members Jason Storch and Chris Miller will be presenting and on-hand to answer any questions you have about SharePoint and how it can meet the specialized needs of your company or organization.

For more background, you can read our full SharePoint 2013 blog coverage by clicking here. We also have a short whitepaper available on The Top Reasons Your Business Will Love the New SharePoint.

Click here to register for this event. We look forward to seeing you there!

AISblog

Good question. And we’ve got the answer.

Here at AIS, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of hours envisioning, designing and constructing SharePoint-based solutions for our clients. With each new version of SharePoint, we make additional investments to deeply understand the new release’s capabilities.

We’ve taken a look at all the changes and enhancements in the latest version — and you just have to look at our blog archives to realize that a LOT has changed in 2013 — and put together a short, easy-to-read whitepaper that highlights the top new features that make SharePoint 2013 a must-have for your business, including:

Smarter Search
Simpler and Mobile-Ready UI
The game-changing SharePoint App Store Model
Better Workflow
Social SharePoint
Easy Migration Tools
Lower Costs
And much more!

Please CLICK HERE to download your free copy.

Not familiar with SharePoint as a business solution? Take a look at our SharePoint solutions on our website and contact us to learn more about how SharePoint can transform your organization.

Jason Storch

I recently completed a large document management system on SharePoint 2010 that used FAST Search and claims-based authentication. The client wanted to secure and limit access to customer-specific documents based on data coming from their CRM system.

We decided to implement a custom claim provider that would query the CRM system at login for customer claims based on the user ID. On upload (based on the customer that was assigned to the document), we used the content organizer to route the document to the correct site, library and folder based on the organization and security rules that we had. Each library had a claim for the customer assigned to it so only users with that claim could view the documents in the library. We would use search for the UI so that the users had a single place to find and view the documents. Sounds simple, right?

It should’ve been.

Unfortunately, the implementation was anything but simple. From the beginning, we hit the core limits of SharePoint 2010, FAST and Claims. Now that we’ve made it to the end, I want to talk about the limits we ran into and steps you can take in your design to avoid them. Read More…

AISblog

We’re honored to announce that AIS’ own Media Center app won an Appy award for “Coolest App” at the SharePoint MVP Summit 2013. Media Center is a SharePoint app that allows you to integrate your Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS) assets in SharePoint. And we agree that it’s pretty darn cool.

You can download the award-winning Media Center app for free from the Office store.

And here’s a brief video demo of the app’s capabilities:

Congratulations and special thanks to AIS team members Jason McNutt, Harin Sandhoo, and Sam Larko for their contributions to Media Center!

Craig Floyd

I have a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) app currently in testing and this week it came back with some weird issues. The app uses the Client Object Model to consume SharePoint 2010 lists and UX is a factor in the design, so we’ve decided to do some metrics recording to see how people interact with the app. We want to know what features people use and which efforts were wasted.

Strangely, we started noticing that the names of the metrics (which were also being written to a SharePoint list) were displaying some incorrect results…names like “ShowAllItemsOpened” were instead “showAllMenuItem_Click.” What’s that you say? Clearly that’s the name of an event handler! Well, you’d be right! But it worked before! What changed in testing? First, some background information …

Environment and Build Notes

I want to start off with some notes about the assumptions I took and the configuration I used. First, this VM is running in Hyper-V on Windows 8 and uses Windows Server 2012 which was installed through the GUI. (I’ll try to figure out PowerShell remoting and Hyper-V at a later date, but that wasn’t in the cards for this post.) Second, I’ve configured two virtual networks, one internal with a static IP and one external with a dynamic IP. I configured those through the GUI as well. However, almost everything else has been built using PowerShell. While we’ll only highlight some of the script in this post, you can find the full script at my CodePlex Project: Useful PowerShell Cmdlets.