By Randy Drisgill
SharePoint911
Love them or hate them, themes were a useful feature in SharePoint 2007, as they provided a nice medium-effort way of changing the look and feel of a SharePoint site without messing with custom master pages.
Having said that, one common complaint with SharePoint 2007 themes was that they weren't very approachable for beginners. You had to place files in the SharePoint root folder (12 folder), edit XML files, and even do an IISReset before you could see your changes. For the 2010 release of SharePoint, the product team was listening to our cries, and they have provided a new theming engine that is extremely easy to use.
Gone are the days of using the SharePoint root folder for themes. Now you can just use Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 to create a theme, save it as a .THMX file, and then upload it directly into SharePoint and apply to your site. In most cases now, site owners can create their own themes in less than an hour without the assistance of developers.
This feature allows you to assign 12 different colors, including background, text, accents and hyperlink colors, as well as two fonts for headings and body text. When this theme is applied to a SharePoint site, the CSS of the site (whether it’s the default CSS or your own) is parsed for special comment markup for coloring and font replacements, and new CSS and colored images are generated on the fly and applied.
One thing to note is that just like SharePoint 2007 themes, none of the underlying HTML can be changed with a SharePoint 2010 theme. Also, unlike SharePoint 2007 themes, you can only recolor existing images; no custom background images are created with a SharePoint 2010 theme (even if they are defined in the theme from PowerPoint backgrounds). Also, if you are using the full SharePoint Server 2010 (as opposed to SharePoint Foundation 2010), themes can actually be modified directly in the SharePoint 2010 Web user interface. This allows for even faster adjustments to themes by site owners, without even going through the steps of using Microsoft Office to save and upload a new theme.
To create a theme in Microsoft Word, simply click Page Layout in the Ribbon and select Colors, then Create New Theme Colors… Select some new colors, give it a name, and click Save. Then, with Page Layout still selected from the Ribbon, click Fonts, then Create New Theme Fonts…, select a Heading font and a Body font, give it a name, and click Save.
Now, to export the .THMX file, click Themes, then Save Current Themes… and save the .THMX file to your desktop. Next, to upload the theme file to SharePoint, simply open your SharePoint 2010 site, log in, then click Site Actions, then Site Settings, and under Galleries click Themes.
From there, in the SharePoint Ribbon, select Documents, then Upload Document, find your new .THMX file, then click OK and then Save. This makes the theme available for selecting in SharePoint. To select it, simply click Site Actions, then Site Settings, and under Look and Feel, click Site Theme. From there, you can select your new theme and apply it to the site.
If you have SharePoint Server 2010, you can change the colors and fonts on the fly, and also apply the theme to all the sub-sites under the current site as well. Armed with this knowledge, you should be well on your way to creating your own themes for use in SharePoint 2010 in minutes, not the hours it took with SharePoint 2007!
Randy Drisgill is a SharePoint MVP and is the branding and design lead for consultant firm SharePoint 911.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Lieberman Software Integrates Password Manager With SharePoint
Lieberman Software this week announced its Enterprise Random Password Manager integrates with MOSS 2007 and earlier versions to provide a means to discover and secure privileged areas on SharePoint sites.
The automatic discovery feature allows IT administrators to change a password in a local ActiveDirectory file and then have that password propagate across all SharePoint components. The ability to control access to privileged SharePoint areas with time limits is also enabled by the integration, according to Lieberman.
"Most organizations’ privileged account passwords for enterprise applications and services, such as SharePoint Server, are rarely changed. This can result in failed security audits and potentially costly data breaches,” said Chris Stoneff, product manager, in a statement announcing the integration.
-- David
The automatic discovery feature allows IT administrators to change a password in a local ActiveDirectory file and then have that password propagate across all SharePoint components. The ability to control access to privileged SharePoint areas with time limits is also enabled by the integration, according to Lieberman.
"Most organizations’ privileged account passwords for enterprise applications and services, such as SharePoint Server, are rarely changed. This can result in failed security audits and potentially costly data breaches,” said Chris Stoneff, product manager, in a statement announcing the integration.
-- David
Monday, December 7, 2009
Spotlight on 2010: Large List Resource Throttling
By Ryan Keller, SharePoint911
On the performance front in SharePoint 2010, several new features have been introduced to keep your server farm running at its optimal level. One of these features is Large List Resource Throttling. But what exactly is it, what does it do, and why would you need it?
List size capacity has grown dramatically in SharePoint 2010, with projections that they will be able to accommodate up to 50 million items—well over the limits present in SharePoint 2007. A downside to the ability to handle this many items is the fact that it takes a lot of processing power and time to render a huge number of items at once.
In order to avoid taxing the servers too heavily, administrators have the ability to configure Large List Resource Throttling on a per-Web application basis throughout the farm. The throttling settings apply to all lists in all site collections contained in that Web application.
To set the throttling properties in Central Administration, click on Application Management and select Manage Web Applications. Select the Web application you want to configure, and in the Ribbon, click the dropdown under General Settings and select Resource Throttling to open the Resource Throttling window.
List throttling sets a limit to the number of items that can be displayed at a time in a list, preventing the server from becoming overloaded while rendering a particularly large number of items. Any user trying to access a view of a list that exceeds the threshold will be presented with a message explaining that the request could not be processed. The user has the option to create a new view of the list that meets the threshold requirements.
By default, the item threshold per view is 5,000 items for users and 20,000 items for administrators. These limits can easily be adjusted in Central Administration based on the requirements of the organization. Server hardware and network performance can also be a factor in determining the limits on list items.
In addition, administrators can provide a window of time during which the list-throttling feature is disabled, allowing users full access to large views of the lists on a site. Because rendering large lists can heavily tax the server's resources, it is best to enable the window for large queries during off-peak hours.
As a final note, one thing administrators should be aware of is the behavior of large lists after an upgrade. When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, any list with a default view that exceeds the threshold set in SharePoint 2010 will not be immediately available until a new default view is created.
Large List throttling is just one of the many useful performance features to be found in SharePoint 2010. Try out the SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and start looking at the new performance management features to determine what will work for your organization. When it's time to upgrade, you will have a better idea of what performance management features you will want to employ in your environment.
On the performance front in SharePoint 2010, several new features have been introduced to keep your server farm running at its optimal level. One of these features is Large List Resource Throttling. But what exactly is it, what does it do, and why would you need it?
List size capacity has grown dramatically in SharePoint 2010, with projections that they will be able to accommodate up to 50 million items—well over the limits present in SharePoint 2007. A downside to the ability to handle this many items is the fact that it takes a lot of processing power and time to render a huge number of items at once.
In order to avoid taxing the servers too heavily, administrators have the ability to configure Large List Resource Throttling on a per-Web application basis throughout the farm. The throttling settings apply to all lists in all site collections contained in that Web application.
To set the throttling properties in Central Administration, click on Application Management and select Manage Web Applications. Select the Web application you want to configure, and in the Ribbon, click the dropdown under General Settings and select Resource Throttling to open the Resource Throttling window.
List throttling sets a limit to the number of items that can be displayed at a time in a list, preventing the server from becoming overloaded while rendering a particularly large number of items. Any user trying to access a view of a list that exceeds the threshold will be presented with a message explaining that the request could not be processed. The user has the option to create a new view of the list that meets the threshold requirements.
By default, the item threshold per view is 5,000 items for users and 20,000 items for administrators. These limits can easily be adjusted in Central Administration based on the requirements of the organization. Server hardware and network performance can also be a factor in determining the limits on list items.
In addition, administrators can provide a window of time during which the list-throttling feature is disabled, allowing users full access to large views of the lists on a site. Because rendering large lists can heavily tax the server's resources, it is best to enable the window for large queries during off-peak hours.
As a final note, one thing administrators should be aware of is the behavior of large lists after an upgrade. When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, any list with a default view that exceeds the threshold set in SharePoint 2010 will not be immediately available until a new default view is created.
Large List throttling is just one of the many useful performance features to be found in SharePoint 2010. Try out the SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and start looking at the new performance management features to determine what will work for your organization. When it's time to upgrade, you will have a better idea of what performance management features you will want to employ in your environment.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Infomally, Most Staying on MOSS 2007
At DataLan's SharePoint Winter Expo in New York City yesterday, about 70 people turned out to hear about SharePoint 2010, and to hear from a number of software vendors that augment Microsoft's platform. Tony Smith of DataLan, who expertly moderated the event, asked for a show of hands to indicate how many people were using MOSS 2007. Almost every hand in the room went up. Then he asked how many people were even looking at SharePoint 2010. Only a few scattered hands went up. (I had heard a lot of this is Las Vegas at Microsoft's show as well.) MOSS 2007 was a dramatic upgrade from 2003, adding a whole host of new features and capabilites that turned SharePoint from a document management repository to a true enterprise platform. SharePoint 2010, we've come to learn, is not as focused on new features and capabilities as it is on collaboration and business productivity. So it's not surprising that people who have made big investments in MOSS 2007 would stay where they are. In fact, many are now just getting into areas that extend SharePoint beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities, so I'm sure they won't be migrating off their software perhaps until SharePoint 2012 (Microsoft has said it wants to update the software every two years).
-- David
-- David
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