Office365 Communities

www.devcow.com

Office 365 Central Administration

6 | SharePoint Saturday New York City 2011

Set up a Development Site

• Create staging location that you can do development

– <url>/sites/dev

– Deploy custom solutions to be tested at that location first

• Great approach for QA and UAT testing sites

– Keep in mind the lists or unique IDs could be different

7 |SharePoint Saturday New York City 2011

Determine your scenario

Common scenarios for Portal Implementations

Communities


Traditional Portal Site Structure


IT Administrators

• When building sites especially communities

– Always use quotas on SharePoint Online

• Allows you to maintain the size of the sites

• Helps control sprawl that may occur

• Prevents users from using it as a dumping ground

– Setting up resource usage

• Forces developers to think about solution

• Controls a runaway solution


Set up Extranets

Communities


Community Overview

• What is a community? Communities are working areas for active

collaboration between project teams, colleagues, and subject matter experts.

Communities can be focused on any number of topics, including

competencies, projects, clients, and events. They can also be used for more

informal collaboration about common social interests and best practices.

• What are the different Types of Communities (private and public)?

• Private – users must request and be granted permission by community

owner to join or follow the community

• Public – all employees have access to the community information & can

follow it.


When might you have communities?

• Large projects

• Virtual teaming, distributed dev

• Idea generation and refinement

• Communities of practice/interest

• Mentorship

• Expertise finding


Community Feature Comparison

SharePoint Online Communities Colleagues Friends

Personal Picture Personal Picture

Distribution Lists Facebook Groups

Discussion List The Wall

SharePoint Blogs / Noteboard Notes or blogs

Security of data/visibility Security of data/visibility

Tagging Tagging

Ratings Rating

Look at the team site and compare community features


Sizing Your Communities

• Determine how many sites to determine size

• How to create your sites – By Team or Department

– By Functional purpose

– By content category

– By project

– By customer

– By permission level or sensitivity


Create Templates Fe

atu

res/

We

b P

arts

Community Templates General Project Events

Libraries

Documents Included

Lists

Calendar Included

Links Included Included

Tasks Included

Announcements Included Included Included

Contacts Included

Project Team Included

Issues Included

Risks Included

Milestones Included

Survey Included

Pictures Included

Discussions Included

Logo


Community Site Structure

Landing Page

Community 1

Community 2

Community 3

Community 4


Communities Site Collections

• Cannot use Site Collections from within a site • Only can create sub sites from Central Administration



Communities – Sub Sites

• New Silverlight control to select sites

• New Site Templates


Problems with using Sub Sites

• No control of site quotas

• User can cross security boundaries

• SharePoint sprawl

• All in the same Content DB

• Content is stored together

• Might inherit – Security

– Navigation


Community Governance

• How long does a site live for

• Who can create sites – Create an approval workflow for site

– Create a Request List or form

• What size will a community be

• How do I follow a community?

• How do join a community? – Public

– Private


Security

• Top Level Site

– Create a group that can add sub sites

• Only allow a select group this ability

– Remove the self service creation and sub site creation

• Community Sites

– Do not inherit permissions

– Create an owner group, member group, and reader group


Creating Community Best Practices

• Always search for a community before you create a new one

• Avoid office specific communities when appropriate

• Provide Naming Guidelines

25

Create a reusable template for Project and Client

Office 365 Community Site Provisioner

My Sites


Customize My Sites


OOB Profile Page

Change the My Sites, add solutions, make more useful


Key Takeaways


Housekeeping

• Please remember to visit the ATE & Open Spaces for a chance to win an XBOX/Kinect. You can also enter into a raffle for an SPC Pass if you visit the sponsor booths to get your bingo card signed. All other prizes are related to ending session evaluations.

• Follow SharePoint Saturday New York City on Twitter @spsnyc and hashtag #spsnyc

Thanks to Our Sponsors!


Learn More about SharePoint 2010

Information for

IT Pros at TechNet

http://MSSharePointITPro.com

Information for

Developers at MSDN

http://MSSharePointDeveloper.com

Information for

Everyone

http://SharePoint.Microsoft.com


Brendon Schwartz

[email protected]

http://blogs.sharepointguys.com/brendon

Solutions Architect

Slalom Consulting

Technology

Office365 Communities