Sharepoint 2013 branding with Design Manager

In SharePoint 2013, Design Manager renders a new trend for creating websites. This tool is accessible when you activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature or use the Publishing Portal site template at the site collection level. The purpose of this new tool is to offer users an easy way of branding SharePoint. This advanced tool allows designers to create a compelling behavior, look and feel for a SharePoint 2013 site by using the techniques they are most comfortable with. It also supports exporting and importing of a visual design, and thus helps you assure a consistent visual experience across all device platforms in your industry.

This article discusses about the designing and support capabilities involved in this development technology. Let's have a quick tour through SharePoint 2013.

Considerations for SharePoint Designers or Developers:

• Design packages: To create as well as export the visual designs as a package.

• Device channels: To create, change or delete a device channel along with reorder device channels in SP 2013.

• Image renditions: To create, edit as well as delete image renditions that define the attributes used for the purpose of displaying images in the publishing sites.

• Display templates: To relate display templates to Search Web Parts. Learn about how the templates are organized, for mapping properties by using jQuery or variables, or creating a custom display template.

• Themes: To use themes for customizing the look and feel of the sites.

• Snippets: To use the Snippet Gallery in Design Manager so that you are able to add SharePoint functionality quickly to your HTML page layout or master page. Snippets are HTML representations of SharePoint components and hence a snippet helps in controlling like a Web Part or a navigation bar.

Design Manager to Implement Designs

On the left side of this tool, there is a series of links representing the high-level tasks that need to be performed. Based on your designing plan as well as the requisites of your site, you might not have to carry out all these performances in thorough order. Nevertheless, this sequence is a vital starting point.

Before you start using this technology, you need a scheming. You can use a ready-made website template or create one of your own. A designing is simply a group of files that employ the visual designing of your site.

Generally, the file categories include:

• At least one HTML file which is going to be changed into a SharePoint master page

• JavaScript files

• One or more CSS files

• Different supporting files

• Images

Design Manager to Customize Your SharePoint 2013 Site

In order to represent your company's brand or if you want it to be designed in a way that does not look like SharePoint, you can easily customize your site as per your preference. Creating a custom design by using Design Manager can help you achieve the desired business goal. The new tool is a feature in SharePoint 2013 making it easier to create a fully pixel-perfect and customized design implementing the web-designing tools that you find yourself familiar with. It is a publishing dimension that can be made available in publishing sites in both Office 365 and SP Server 2013. The technology can also be used for branding the public-facing website in Office 365.

This tool can also help in creating visual designs for websites by applying any web design tool or HTML editor of your choice, and then upload that designing to SharePoint. Design Manager is the central hub as well as interface where all aspects of a custom designing is properly managed. Often, visual designing creations of publishing sites fit into the larger process, in which thousands of people as well as administrations are involved. You can hire developers from top companies in sharepoint development who can help you build products within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide sharepoint development services. If you would like to speak to one of our expert SharePoint developers, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

Understanding Details of SharePoint Reporting

SharePoint reporting is a broad and important area of discussion. Prior to going into the discussion of what is SP reporting and how does it help, it is necessary to look into why the same is necessary. When it comes to the governance implementation, understanding and managing the activities within the SP environment is extremely essential. Now, these include identification, assessment as well as prioritization of data, measuring and monitoring of the same, review and modification of the government strategy and creation of policies that guarantee overall security.

What is SharePoint Reporting?

SharePoint Reporting is a wide area that calls for varying requirements based on site, site collection as well as farm-level requirements. Seen from the perspective of the administrators, appropriate reporting helps in the maintenance of governance rules and compliance policies while also monitoring the issues related to growth and scalability.

Different Areas of SharePoint report development

SP Reporting can be broadly divided into five categories as follows:

• Permissions Reporting which involves troubleshooting to find out why users are unable to see the content, communicating about various types of compliance and auditing to find out who can access sensitive content.

• Usage or Activity Reporting is about finding out which content to be used, planning prospective growth as well as grasping hardware requirements.

• Audit Reporting to determine the details of the access and accordingly, adhere to the internal along with external compliance requirements.

• Performance Reporting that involves monitoring page load time to detect problems apart from planning for enhanced usage.

Permission

Report of permissions is immensely crucial for several reasons as follows:

• Auditing
• Maintenance of accurate records of user access
• Troubleshooting problems related to functionality that arise from the users' attempt at performing tasks without the required permission.

However, even with this, SP is unable to carry out centralized management of all permissions. Moreover, real time report is not a feasible option either because the data is available at the site-level, gathering which takes a lot of time. The newly improved 2013 version of SP solves these problems to a great extent though farm-wide visibility is still demanded by the administrators.

Usage and Activity

It is an essential way of tracking mechanism for planning capacities, disaster recovery while also helping the administrators undertake a much more effective management of the respective environment on a daily basis.

The concept paves the way for the necessary resources for the monitoring as well as measuring of the level of user adoption. This ensures that the businesses are able to derive the maximum profit out of their investment.

Storage

It is about analyzing storage, which in turn, is essential for planning capacities as well as understanding the requirements of growth cum performance of every team within an organization. Finding out the best practice to monitor as well as set limits on the size of the SP sites is an integral part of the governance policies. This should be followed by the setting of the governance policies on the right track along with assuring the end users about the availability of the storage to cater to their particular business needs.

Audit

For the SharePoint administrators, it is an essential point of focus, allowing the platform to become more widely adopted as well as critical for business operations. Audit reporting helps in establishing a stronger and well-maintained governance using both technology along with the best practices.

The requirement for this arises from several quarters, including the necessity of additional data as a part of capacity planning and for producing reports that display the access to certain items within a period.

With the web application development platform of SP growing within an organization along with more of such secure content finding their place in SP, auditing helps administrators by offering them with the much- needed tools. These tools enable proper management of important events along with changes that take place within the environment.

Performance

This comes from outside the development platform of SP by means of reporting against the farm as well as customer script. Third-party monitoring along with performance tools are also available. Now, most of the performance reporting is owned by the operators and not the SP administrators or end users. Attempts are made at filling this gap by means of the addition of the toolkit.

With the above-mentioned ones being among the popular most, there are also other options of SharePoint reporting. Understanding the concept allows organizers to manage both systems and resources with care and expertise.

We provide SharePoint portal development services. If you would like to hire sharepoint developer from our certified team of SharePoint developers, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.

SharePoint 2013 Performance Best Practices

SharePoint 2013, the newest version of the web application development platform is already giving a tough time to developers working on it with little knowledge. Indeed, the challenges that are faced by developers working on the platform are quite extensive and heavy much like the platform itself. Well, if you are new to the particular development platforms, you must always remember to integrate some tips ensuring highest performance level of the same. Likewise, experience developers must take a cue of the ideas while, taking up any development work as it would help you strengthen knowledge as well as promote discussion, which would ultimately lead to the development of a great application.

Here is a look at the best practices following which is sure to help you build something greater and better with SharePoint:

Always take note of the best time to cross the divide

A pertinent issue that often emerges with the development project while working on the platform is the best way of interacting with other systems in the network. Since, the web application relates to a composite application platform, this particular question needs to be answered quite often. Well, the solution rests with the idea of viewing the architecture of SharePoint from the web application. This particular approach stands as the easiest for now. While writing or coding Web parts, it is always advisable to make use of the object model of the platform.

Additionally, you can also make use of Web controls that function pertaining to a particular web application or ASP.NET form codebehind. The object model offers a rich and well known set of classes that allows you to interact with the web application development platform. Viewed from the perspective of the object model of SharePoint, the web application stands as an essential security boundary. Generally, the use of the object model for initiating interactions between the web applications must be avoided in all causes.

Gain advantage from the capabilities of the Native SharePoint

Development team often face issues that take away the opportunity of gaining complete benefit of the capabilities of native SharePoint. Well, the first issue implies at the platform being wide and extensive, which often makes it easier to develop custom solutions rather than offering time in understanding the offerings of the web application without any sort of custom coding. Secondly, the business owners often creates a list of detailed requirement, application behaviors, and wireframes that leaves little room for flexibility during the time of using OOB capabilities.

However, incorporating the offerings of the SharePoint often provides dividends, even if the deliverable at the end takes a slight move than the original requirement. The trick of gaining the advantage lies in complete understanding of the technology by the development team. Additionally, they also need to communicate the value and other advantages relating to a specific implementation of the application to the business organizations.

Gain knowledge regarding essential SPDev task and information

This particular purpose allows the developer to explain the common tasks that he might need to take up during software development in detail. When it comes to packaging the solutions pertaining to the SharePoint, the ways tend to be multiple. While on the one hand, you can completely rely on manual creation of diamond directive files (DDFs) and manifest.xml, the implementation of the Visual Studio projects cannot be ruled out completely, on the other hand. The use of VseWSS projects tend to be easier than the conventional process of manual creation of DDFs.

However, it is also important for you to note that some alternatives at times emerge to be useful for the enterprise and commercial deployments that also include the WSPBuilder, SPDeploy, STSDev, and DDFGenerator. It is advisable that you evaluate each tool carefully to find out what suits your needs the best. The trick lies in creating Solution packages for incorporating deployment rather than taking up manual deployment of code components.

Find out Solutions Off – Server

Every time, you get to work with SharePoint, you must make it a point to work on solutions that are free of any sort of dependencies that are often imposed by the development process. By making use of the Visual Studio development server, SharePoint Web services, ASP.NET Web Part framework support, along with third-party tools, you can easily finish the development task on a standard and general work station as against on a computer functioning on SharePoint.

Since SharePoint works on top of ASP.NET and IIS, the web development server that comes integrated with Visual Studio often makes a wonderful start point to begin with the process of SharePoint development. For instance, you can go onto developing HTTP handlers, Web controls as well as Web Parts in the particular light ambiance.

These a few of the best practices that can easily pave the road to successful SharePoint application development integrated with high performance and scalability.

We provide SharePoint 2013 mobile development services. If you would like to talk to one of our SharePoint developers or would like to take a look at the work they have done, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.