Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)

Appendix. Content You Can Reuse

Most of the focus of Essential SharePoint 2013 is on thinking strategically about planning and deploying SharePoint solutions for your organization. This section (available as a download from www.jornata.com/essentialsharepoint) is designed to provide content that you can use as part of your governance and training plans as well as some of the trickier “how to” information for new capabilities in SharePoint 2013 that users and site owners should know.

For the most part, we have included the topics that our clients have found particularly confusing or challenging, and we just couldn’t find a place to share these tips, lessons, and best practices in other chapters of the book. Our goal in creating this appendix is to provide something that you can literally copy and paste into your training, governance, or how-to guides, so that you can benefit from the lessons we have learned the hard way!

In this appendix, you will find the following:

Content for your governance and training plans

Tips for writing great content for SharePoint sites

Naming conventions that improve “findability”

Tips for writing better search queries

Glossary of social terminology for SharePoint 2013 (including an explanation of the difference between getting an alert in the newsfeed and setting up a notification alert)

New or different user tasks in SharePoint 2013

Creating and displaying views in lists and libraries

Managing copies of documents (Send To and Manage Copies)

Following documents, sites, people, and topics

Tips for creating posts in the newsfeed

New or different site owner tasks in SharePoint 2013

Sharing sites and documents with people outside your organization

Adding an app to a site

Using Promoted Links

Content for Your Governance and Training Plans

This section includes content that you can include as part of your governance documentation (either on a wiki site or as part of a short guidance document) and training material.

Tips for Writing Great Content for SharePoint Sites

Content management is a critical element of your governance plan. But before you manage the content, you had better decide that it is worth managing! Writing content for the Web is different from writing content that will be consumed as a document. The tips in Table A-1 will help your content authors create great content for Web pages in SharePoint.

Table A-1 Best Practices for Great Content for SharePoint Sites

Figure A-1 Enter a “friendly” description for all hyperlink Columns

Naming Conventions That Improve Findability

There are two types of naming conventions that will help improve the “findability” experience for users. The first type are conventions geared toward site owners, users with Full Control privileges. The second are naming conventions for content contributors.

What’s Up with %20?

All SharePoint users immediately notice something funny in the URLs for sites and documents: if the site or document name has any spaces in it, the spaces are replaced with “%20” in URL references. The “dreaded %20” makes it very difficult to read URLs for SharePoint content.

SharePoint itself isn’t responsible for inserting the %20 characters in your URLs. This is what happens when your references are “URL encoded.” A single character space in a name translates to %20 (three characters). Since your URL cannot be longer than 255 characters and the %20s are not very readable, it’s a good idea to eliminate as many spaces as possible—without compromising usability. As with most user experience items, you need to balance readability with usability. For the most part, the one tip to remember is to create most assets that power users can create (such as sites, lists, libraries, and views) using “CamelCase” names—in other words, smushing words together with no spaces but using capital letters to distinguish the words, for example, “ProposalTemplate” rather than “Proposal Template.” For file names, the tip is to use either a hyphen (-) or an underscore (_) to separate words.

Naming Conventions for Site Owners

Create meaningful names for the groups that you will use for your custom Columns, Content Types, and custom templates—use a name that is associated with the most common way that the objects will be used. For Site Column or Content Type group names, it’s OK to use spaces between the words. So, an acceptable name would be Marketing Content Types. This is better than “custom” because users will know that the Columns were specifically created for your solution (see Figure A-2). But this alone isn’t enough.

Figure A-2 Create a meaningful group name for your custom Content Types and Columns

Precede your group name with a period—for example, “.Marketing Content Types.” That little period has a really powerful effect—it will automatically force your custom groups to sort to the top of the list of groups that are exposed to your users. Try it; you’ll be surprised how much easier your life will be. This doesn’t affect anything technically; it’s just a naming trick to make your custom Content Types and Columns sort “above” the out-of-the-box ones (see Figure A-3).

Figure A-3 Naming groups with a preceding period (.) automatically sorts your custom groups at the top of Content Type and Column lists

Use the same trick with custom page templates. In the ideal scenario, remove templates that you don’t want your users to use so they don’t even see them. If that’s not feasible, put a period in front of your custom template names so that they will sort to the top of lists when users are given selection options when they create new pages.

Create all site, list, library, and view names using CamelCase, and then after the list, library, or view is created, go back into the settings and rename the Title (or view name) to include spaces in the names. This will eliminate %20 in the URL and still support a friendly user experience. (It’s like having your cake and eating it, too!)

Naming Conventions for Users with Document Contribution Permissions

SharePoint won’t allow many special characters in file names, so make sure you document these characters for your users. Refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905231 for a complete list of the characters that cannot be used in site, folder, server, and file names in SharePoint.

When creating file names for documents, use an underscore (_) in place of a space between words if file names have more than one word. Capitalize each word of the file name, for example, My_File_Name.docx. The underscore is the best option because SharePoint search understands the underscore as a word separator, which means each word will be part of the search index. Using an underscore eliminates %20s in the URL and still allows each word of the file name to be indexed for search, so this approach is definitely recommended over using spaces. One of the downsides of this recommendation is that it is difficult to distinguish the underscore from a space in a hyperlink, but this is usually a problem only if someone is trying to copy a URL by hand.

Try not to use hyphens or dashes to separate words. While SharePoint search (and other search engines) also recognizes a dash or hyphen (-) as a valid word separator, the underscore is preferred because hyphens are used as break points to wrap text on separate lines. URLs that contain hyphens often cause problems when they are included as links in e-mail messages.

To give your documents a user-friendly name, use the Title Column to create an additional name for your documents. In the Title Column, spaces, special characters, and punctuation marks are fine. It’s a good idea to always have a non-blank Title because the Title is displayed by default in search results and in Content Query Web Parts. You can also create a default “reader” view that displays the file icon and the Title to create a better user interface for folks who do not manage the file content.

If you absolutely have to have folders in your document libraries, you need to consider balancing readability of folder names with the goal of eliminating %20s in URLs. If you are more concerned about URL length and your folder names have more than one word, use underscores (_) to separate words in the folder names, for example, Folder_Name. If you can live with eliminating the biggest %20 offenders (site, list, library, and view names), use spaces to separate words in folder names because the underscore is not as readable in views that show folder names as a simple space between words.

Tips for Writing Better Search Queries

We have all heard the quote “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.” This quote can be rewritten in the context of search (and modern usage): “Give a person a document; you have answered today’s question. Teach a person how to search and you have answered all the questions for a lifetime.”

The following list of very simple search tips can help your users find content not only in SharePoint, but also on the public Internet. Some of these tips are provided by SharePoint as a hyperlink if no results are returned in a search query. You might want to consider adding a Web Part to your search results page with a permanent link to tips for searching that are relevant to your content or site.

Use search “groups” or verticals to narrow the scope of your search. On a Search Center site, use the preconfigured search “verticals” to narrow the scope of your search to just specific types of content. These verticals can be customized for your organization. For an example, seeFigure A-4.

Figure A-4 Use search verticals to narrow the scope of your search

Click query suggestions that appear as you type search queries. As you type a search in the search box, SharePoint search provides suggestions. These suggestions are based on past queries and include the items that you have searched for and clicked before.

Review the “did you mean” suggestions after you submit a search query. SharePoint search provides suggestions if the terms in your search query are similar to other queries that have been submitted frequently. This will help if you make a mistake as you type in the query box.

Use logical operators to narrow or expand your search. You can use the operators AND, OR, and NOT to expand or narrow your search query. Be sure to type the operator in all capital letters. For example, let’s say you are looking for your organization’s social media policy but you don’t know if it is called a policy or a manual or a handbook. You could write your query as “social media” AND (handbook OR policy OR manual). Notice the parentheses, which are used just as in algebra. (Note that you probably wouldn’t need to write a query that is this complicated to search for your social media policy, but you could!)

Capitalize operators in search. Normally, search does not care about capitalization. However, you must capitalize the words AND and OR if you want search to recognize the words as operators.

To make sure you find words with any term listed, be sure to separate terms with the OR operator. If you just string words together, SharePoint search assumes you are using the AND function. To make sure you find any term, separate terms with OR. For example, to find cats or dogs, type “cats OR dogs” as your query.

Use quotes to ensure that words must be found together, as in “social media.” If you were to type the two words without the quotes, search will interpret the query as (social AND media), which means that both words have to appear in results but not necessarily together as a single phrase. When you use quotes, be sure you know that the exact phrase in quotes is in the content you are looking for because search assumes that all of the words in quotes must appear in the content in order for it to be returned.

Use an asterisk as a wildcard (*) to find words that begin with a character string. For example, you can search for “Micro*” to find all documents that contain Microsoft or microchip or microscope.

Use [Property Name]:[value] to find content in managed properties. For example, to find all the documents written by Maureen Smith, you could use the query Author:Maur* or Author: “Maureen Smith.” Note that the results would be slightly different in the first query because that query (with the wildcard) would find documents written by anyone named Maureen or anyone named Mauro (or any name beginning with Maur). Note that this syntax works only for managed properties, which may be different in each organization. Some of the default managed properties that you may find particularly helpful for searching are Author, AssignedTo, ContentType, Description, Filename, ModifiedBy, CreatedBy, Skills, and Title. There is a complete list of managed properties, along with an indicator of which ones can be used in search queries, at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219630.aspx, though the list is not particularly end-user-friendly.

Glossary of Social Terminology for SharePoint 2013

Don’t assume that all of your users are familiar with the “social” features of SharePoint 2013. Following is a brief glossary that will help users become familiar with the basics of social in SharePoint.

Post. A post is an initial message created by a user in a newsfeed (or in Yammer) or discussion board or generated by the system in a newsfeed. An example of a system-generated message is a post that shows you that someone updated a document you are following.

Reply. A reply is a response to a post. A reply can be made by the person who created the post (typically, just to clarify the initial post) or by someone else.

Activity. An activity is either a post or a reply or a system-generated message. Examples of activities include

Microblog activities such as posts, replies, likes, mentions, and tagging

Following activities (people, documents, sites, and tags)

User profile activities (birthdays, job title changes, anniversaries, updates to Ask Me About, creating a blog post, or posting on a community site)

Document activities when a document is edited or shared

Conversation. A conversation consists of a single post and all of its associated replies. The terms thread and conversation thread are alternative terms for conversation. Note that you can have a conversation using several different SharePoint 2013 features: the newsfeed, Yammer, or a discussion board.

Likes. When someone makes a post or replies to a post, other people can “like” the post or reply. Likes provide a method to collect support for a post or indicate agreement. In your personal newsfeed, you can use the likes view to look at the newsfeed activities that you have previously liked. In a community site or in a discussion board where community features have been enabled, likes are also available for posts and replies. Within a community or team, members can improve their reputation by building up likes from others. You can also enable ratings on any list or library in a SharePoint site and choose one of two ways to allow users to rate an item—either likes or star ratings. The likes and star ratings for documents appear in the newsfeed for content you are following.

Mentions. When you create a post or reply, you can refer to other users by mentioning them. To mention someone in a post, place an @ symbol in front of the person’s name. As you are typing, the user profile service returns a list of names that match what you have entered. When users are mentioned, they receive an activity in their newsfeed that alerts them to the mention.

Tags. When you post or reply, you can associate a post with a topic by using a hashtag or just tag. To assign a tag, you place the number symbol (#) in front of the term that you want to include in the tag. The Managed Metadata Service returns a list of terms that match what you have entered. When a post contains tags, the newsfeed displays an activity related to that tag, and any users who follow that tag see the activity in their newsfeed. Using tags helps focus attention on a specific topic and can be used to filter posts and replies in search. Hashtags must be one word; to tag a post with the term “business development, use #BusinessDevelopment.

Discussion list versus newsfeed (which may be implemented via Yammer or the SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed). Both discussion lists and the newsfeed can be used to ask questions of colleagues. The newsfeed is like an internal Twitter site, where you can post timely questions that are not necessarily intended to become part of the overall corporate knowledge base. A discussion board, on the other hand, is often used to create more permanent answers to questions and can be used to build up your corporate knowledge base, especially with the ability to flag an answer as the “best reply” or to “feature” a particular conversation to call attention to it. The lines between the newsfeed and the discussion board are actually pretty blurry right now and are likely to get even blurrier as Yammer becomes more tightly integrated into SharePoint.

Newsfeed versus alert. Both the newsfeed and alerts are used to automatically give you information about activities or content that you care about in SharePoint. As a general rule, newsfeed activities stay in SharePoint, but you can choose to receive some of them in e-mail as well. Your preferences for the newsfeed are set in your profile, on the Newsfeed Settings page (see Figure A-5). Your newsfeed history is available in SharePoint for as long as your organization chooses to keep posts.

Figure A-5 Set your newsfeed preferences in the Newsfeed Settings area of your profile

Alerts are sent from SharePoint to either your e-mail or your mobile device as an SMS message, but you cannot find your “alert history” in SharePoint. If you delete your SMS message or e-mail alert, the information is no longer available. To set up an alert, you must go to the page or document or list or library that you want to be alerted about and select Alert Me from the ribbon, as shown in Figure A-6.

Figure A-6 Use the Alert Me button on the ribbon to set up an e-mail or SMS alert

When you set up an alert, you have the option of indicating what you want to be alerted about and how often you want alerts to be sent to you. The options for alerts are shown in Figure A-7. Alerts are helpful when you are working collaboratively on a document and you want to know immediately that someone has made an edit to the document. You can also find out about updates via the newsfeed if you are following a document, so whether you use an alert or the newsfeed will depend on your personal preference. Alerts are helpful when you want to monitor activity only via e-mail or SMS or when the item you want to monitor is not available to be tracked via the newsfeed, such as a list or individual items in a list.

Figure A-7 Alerts provide several options about what you want to be notified about and how often you want to receive notifications

New or Different User Tasks in SharePoint 2013

Many of the tasks for users work very similarly to the way they worked in SharePoint 2010, but of course the first thing your users will notice is that the way to access the menu function formerly known as Site Actions is now back in the upper-right corner of the page where it used to be in SharePoint 2007—and looks like a gear icon. Clicking the gear icon and clicking the Site Actions button perform the same function—but from a different side of the page. In this section, we describe some additional actions and activities that are different enough that you should consider providing some tips or instructions as part of your training material.

Creating and Displaying Views in Lists and Libraries

Creating views in lists and libraries in SharePoint 2013 is essentially the same as in SharePoint 2010, but there are some new (and helpful) features. The default view for lists and libraries shows all items in the list (up to 30 per page). Creating alternative views helps users quickly examine the contents of a list or library from different perspectives. For example, you can create a predefined view to group content by the Created By user or by a custom metadata attribute such as Project. You can also create a view to show more items or to show the items using a different style.

One way to create a new view is to click Create View from the ribbon in any list or library as shown in Figure A-8. This is similar to the way new views were created in SharePoint 2010. When you select the option to create a new view, you are presented with all of the options to customize your view, including the ability to select the Columns that you want to display and their order, how you want to sort or filter or group the items, and whether you want to calculate any item totals. You can also select a style, an item limit, and whether or not you want to display folders.

Figure A-8 Create a new view from the library or list ribbon

You can also quickly create a new view by clicking on the ellipsis (. . .) at the top of your list or library and clicking Create View as shown in Figure A-9.

Figure A-9 Create a new view from the list of views

One of the challenges with alternative views in SharePoint 2010 is that users often didn’t see that alternate views were available because to see them, you had to click the view drop-down, as shown in Figure A-10. In SharePoint 2013, the experience for users is improved because up to three views are shown by default for document libraries as shown in Figure A-9. The order of the views shows the view selected as the default view first; the remaining views are listed in alphabetical order by view name. If there are more than three views, users are forced to click the ellipsis (. . .) to see a listing of the additional views.

Figure A-10 Alternate views were hard to find in SharePoint 2010 unless you clicked the drop-down arrow next to the name of the default view

Managing Copies of Documents (Send To and Manage Copies)

The Send To command is a handy feature that allows you to copy a file to a different library and then manage the different copies of a source file after they are created. It is primarily helpful in publishing environments. In other words, the Send To command allows you to keep in syncdocuments that are created in one place (such as a private team site) and published in another (like an intranet site). This is a very cool capability, but if you choose to use it, you should understand the implications and be very certain that users who leverage this feature understand how it works. One very important thing to keep in mind: the copies of your document are updated only when you trigger the update from the Manage Copies page or if you require check-in/checkout on your source library and also use the document drop-down to check the document in and out. In other words, you need to do one of two things to get your target documents to update when you update the source:

Use Manage Copies to force the updates to transfer to the targets.

Set up your library to require check-in/checkout and use the Check Out and Check In buttons from the document drop-down to check the document in and out. Note: Using check-in and checkout from within the Office application used to edit the document will not trigger the update prompt.

Editing the source does not automatically update the target copies unless you trigger the update action using one of the two methods described. For this reason, you will want to make sure that when you choose to enable this feature, all users have sufficient training to understand exactly how it works. While this functionality can provide very useful file controls, to prevent errors in content publication, it is essential that contributors and site owners who use these tools have a thorough understanding of the system benefits and limitations.

In SharePoint 2010, the Send To command was available as a drop-down from the document. In SharePoint 2013, this command is available only from the ribbon. To access the Send To command in SharePoint 2013, select the document you want to work with, click Files in the ribbon, and locate the Send To command as shown in Figure A-11.

Figure A-11 The Send To command in SharePoint 2013 is available only in the ribbon

When a file is copied in this way, the copy maintains a relationship with its source file, and you can choose to update this copy with any changes that are made to the source file (upon check-in, as stated earlier). In addition, if the document Columns in the target library are the same as those in the source library, those Columns or fields are also updated when the copy is updated. (The Content Types in the source and target libraries do not have to match, but if they do, all of the metadata will be available in the target.) When you use the Send To command, you can choose to be prompted to update any existing copies whenever the source document is checked in as shown in Figure A-12 (although at the time of this writing, we have not been able to get this feature to work as described).

Figure A-12 Send To command options

The Send To command makes it easier to maintain files across libraries and sites because when files are copied by using the Send To command, the server tracks the relationship between the source file and all of its copies. You can view and manage all copies of a document centrally from the Manage Copies page as shown in Figure A-13, which is available on the ribbon just below the Send To button (see Figure A-11). You will need to access this page to actually update the target documents when you update the source. Manage Copies in the source document shows you which locations the document has been copied to, but the only way to find out if a document has been copied is to click Manage Copies, which might be a little confusing unless the entire purpose of your library is to manage source files. Notice that in the source, you can indicate whether you want all or just some of the copies to be updated. If you choose to update a target document, the target gets completely overridden—so if there have been changes in the target, they will be lost.

Figure A-13 Manage Copies page

Notice that the Manage Copies page has an option that allows you to create a new copy directly from the page. However, this option will not work unless check-in/checkout is required on the source. If you have checkout required on the source, when you check the document in after editing, you get a prompt in the check-in options that asks if you want to update the copies. If you say yes, the target copy will update—but only if you check the document in and out from the document context ellipsis (. . .) as shown in Figure A-14. When you check a document in from the document context, you will see the prompt to automatically update copies as shown in Figure A-15.

Figure A-14 You must use the document context to check out and check in a document to automatically trigger updates to target copies

Figure A-15 The prompt to update copies is displayed only when you check a document in from the document context

If you have Edit privileges in the target library and you edit a document that is connected to a source, you will not know this unless you first either view or edit the document’s properties. So, if you choose to take advantage of this capability, you should consider very strictly limiting Edit privileges in the target library. Figure A-16 shows the properties view in the target library.

Figure A-16 Document properties of a Send To document in the target library

In summary, the Send To command is a very powerful option, but using it is not trivial, so you will want to leverage this capability only in scenarios where you have a trained user group that updates content on a regular basis so that they follow the process that results in the desired and expected outcomes.

Following Documents, Sites, People, and Topics

SharePoint 2013 provides the ability to keep track of documents, sites, people, and topics of interest with the “follow” feature that users may be familiar with in consumer social media.

Following Documents

Following documents and SharePoint sites makes it easy for you to keep on top of the information you care about in SharePoint. When you follow content, there is no need to search for files to check their update status because you automatically receive notifications in your newsfeed whenever updates occur.

To follow a document, click the ellipsis (. . .) next to the document file name and then click Follow in the callout window. The document or file is added to the list of documents that you follow so that you can easily find it again. Updates to the document are automatically flagged in your newsfeed so that you can see what is happening to the document. Note that you do not get an e-mail when a document you follow is updated; you will only be notified in your newsfeed. If you want to get an e-mail message when a document is updated, you will need to set up an alert, which is done by selecting the document and then clicking Alert Me in the ribbon.

To find documents that you are following, click Newsfeed in the Suite Bar and open your list of followed documents as shown in Figure A-17. To stop following a document, click “Stop following” under the name of the document you no longer wish to follow in the list of documents you are following.

Figure A-17 Click the number above “documents” in the “I’m following” list to see a list of the documents you are following

Following Sites

To follow a site, click Follow in the upper-right corner of the site home page (and all other pages), as shown in Figure A-18. If you are already following a site, SharePoint will display a pop-up that says, “You’re already following this site.” You can see all of your followed sites by clicking the Sites tab of the Suite Bar. From the Sites page, you can stop following any site in which you are no longer interested.

Figure A-18 Click Follow in the upper-right corner of any page of the site to follow a site

Following People

When you follow people, you see the conversations they start in your newsfeed. You can also get updates when people start to follow a document, site, tag, or person if they have chosen to display these actions in their newsfeed settings. In addition, you will see a notification when they upload content to sites to which you have access and when they create new sites.

Following people is a social activity; following people allows you to discover information based on what your colleagues are interested in or what they are doing. It is one of many ways to help transfer the elusive tacit knowledge of an organization.

When someone follows you, you will get a notification in your newsfeed and in your e-mail as well, if you have not disabled the default setting that sends you an e-mail automatically when someone follows you. You cannot say no when someone chooses to follow you (and vice versa). You can, however, control which of the actions you take will appear in your newsfeed (and in the newsfeeds of others) in your newsfeed settings.

There are several ways in which you can sign up to follow a person:

To start following someone who posts to a newsfeed, click the “Follow [name]” link that appears under the post. You will see this link only for people you are not currently following.

To follow someone who is mentioned in a newsfeed post or someone whose name is listed as liking a post, click the person’s name and go to his or her profile page. On this page, click “Follow this Person.”

To stop following people, go to the list of people you are following on your newsfeed page and click the ellipsis (. . .) to open their callout. From the callout, click “Stop Following.” You can also stop following a person from his or her profile page.

Following Topics

To get information in your newsfeed about a topic that interests you, you can follow a tag for that topic. Tags are terms preceded by a hash symbol (#) in your newsfeed. When you start following a tag, you’ll get newsfeed notifications whenever someone uses that tag in newsfeed conversations or discussion board posts as long as the person mentioning the term uses the hashtag symbol, for example, #HR. When you’re no longer interested in news about the tag, you can stop following it.

When you see a tag in a newsfeed post that you want to follow, click the Follow tag below the post. If you don’t see that option, click the ellipsis (. . .) and then select the tag from the drop-down list as shown in Figure A-19.

Figure A-19 Follow a #tag from the newsfeed by clicking follow #[term]

To post a new tag that you or others can follow, type a #[tag] (such as #Legal or #Marketing) in your post window, click Post, and then click Follow #[tag] below the post.

To see how a tag is being used in conversations and documents associated with that tag, click a tag that interests you in a post in your newsfeed. An “About #[tag]” page appears with a list of all the content items that are associated with that tag. You can follow the tag from this page if you are not doing so already.

To stop following a tag, find the tag in the list of followed tags (refer to Figure A-17) and then delete it.

Tips for Creating Posts in the Newsfeed

Posting to the newsfeed allows you to both ask questions and share important information with your colleagues. The newsfeed is not intended to be a place where you post what you had for lunch or what you are planning to do this weekend. Think of the newsfeed in SharePoint as a way of narrating your work—sharing important project milestones, letting your colleagues know when you are struggling with an issue, or congratulating someone on an important achievement. Whether you are using the SharePoint 2013 newsfeed or the Yammer newsfeed, you can enrich your newsfeed posts with two special features: #tags and @mentions.

Mentioning people in a newsfeed post is a way of directing a post to specific people to get their attention (because when you @mention people, the post shows up in their newsfeed and possibly e-mail) and also a way of helping people make connections.

To mention someone in a post, type an @ character and start typing the name of the person you want to mention. As you type, SharePoint assumes that you’re most likely to mention people you’re currently following and lists them first. SharePoint then lists all the other people in your organization whose name matches what you have just started to type.

Adding a #tag (also called a hashtag) to a post is a way of helping group and organize posts by attaching a keyword to the post. Tags need to be one word (no spaces are allowed), so if the tag you want is a short phrase, you can combine the words in “CamelCase,” such as #BusinessDevelopment.

To add a tag to a post, type the # symbol and start typing a word. Previously entered tags will then appear for you to select. It’s always better to choose an existing tag if you can. (If your organization has a collection of topics that you typically talk about, for example, engineering disciplines in an engineering firm, the site administrator can predefine hashtags in the Managed Metadata Service.) As a best practice, try to limit the number of hashtags in a post to no more than three.

There are several other ways you can add interest and value to your newsfeed posts:

Add a hyperlink by cutting and pasting the URL of the link in the post box. When you do this, you are prompted to display a “friendly” name for the URL in the “Display as” box as shown in Figure A-20. You can use this same approach to create a link to a SharePoint document.

Figure A-20 SharePoint prompts you to enter a friendly “display as” name for hyperlinks in posts

Add a picture to a post by clicking the camera icon below the post box.

Add a video to a post using the same method as adding a hyperlink. When you post the entry, the video appears as a thumbnail, ready to be played.

New or Different Site Owner Tasks in SharePoint 2013

Managing security has always been an important task for site owners. Determining when and what to share is a very important role for them. In previous versions of SharePoint, securing content was easier than sharing content, and as a result, users often complained of getting way too many “access denied” messages. SharePoint 2013 makes it much easier for site owners to share entire sites and individual documents with both internal and, in the case of SharePoint 2013 Online, external users. This can provide a significant benefit in making it easier to break down information silos, but with this new great power comes an even greater responsibility to pay attention to the entire sharing process.

Sharing Sites and Documents with People Outside Your Organization

If you are using Office 365 or SharePoint Online, you can share content with people who are outside your organization. This is very helpful in scenarios where you want to collaborate on a document with a partner, supplier, or customer. In order for this feature to work, external sharing must be enabled for your environment and also for your site collection by the site administrator.

Sharing a Site

If you are the site owner (or you have Full Control permissions) in a SharePoint Online site and this feature has been enabled, you can share an entire site with an external user. To share your entire site, click the Share button in the upper-right corner of the page and enter the e-mail address of the user with whom you want to share the site. Note that users who do not have Full Control permissions will not be able to share an entire site with an external user.

The external user will receive an e-mail invitation to join your site. The e-mail will come from the Microsoft Online Services Team and will include a link to your site. Figure A-21 shows the invitation to a site called Marketing Community.

Figure A-21 E-mail invitation to a SharePoint Online site

When the external user clicks the link in the e-mail message, he or she is invited to sign in to your site with either an existing Office 365 ID or a free Microsoft account as shown in Figure A-22.

Figure A-22 External user sign-in screen

When you give external users access to an entire site, you are giving them access to the site and any sub-sites that share permissions with that site. For this reason, you need to be very careful when you provide access to external users. As a best practice, you can set up a site that you use specifically for external sharing and make sure that it has unique permissions from all of your other sites. Each organization will need to determine the scenarios in which external sharing is appropriate, and policies and guidelines for sharing should be documented as part of the governance plan.

Sharing a Document

You must have Full Control permissions to share a document with an external user in a SharePoint Online environment. There are two ways you can share a document with external users:

You can require them to sign in to your site to view the document. This is recommended if you are going to allow the external user to edit the document.

You can send them a guest link, which they can use to view or edit the document without signing in. This is recommended only if you are going to restrict the external user to Read access only and not allow editing. When you allow external users to have Edit access to a document without requiring sign-in, you will not be able to tell who made which change to your document because all anonymous users are identified as Guest Contributor.

To share a document externally, go to the document you want to share and click the ellipsis (. . .) to open the menu, and then click Share in the properties dialog box. Type the e-mail addresses of the external users with whom you want to share the document. In the drop-down, select the permission level you would like to grant and type a message letting the people you are inviting know what you would like them to do. As stated previously, if you want someone to be able to edit your document, it’s a good idea to select the “Require sign-in” check box as shown in Figure A-23.

Figure A-23 Require sign-in if you plan to allow external users to edit your document

Review What Has Been Shared

You can use the Share command to quickly see the list of people with whom a document or site has been shared. To see who has access to a site, click Share at the top right of the page and then click the “Shared with” link to view a list of people who have access to the site. To see who has access to a document or folder, select the item in the document library and then click “Shared with” on the Files tab in the ribbon.

Adding an App to a Site

In SharePoint 2013, the lists and libraries with which you are familiar from SharePoint 2010 are now called “apps.”

To add an app to a site, click the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the page and then the “Add an app” link in the drop-down. You will then be presented with all of the available apps for your site, including any apps in the SharePoint store that your organization has enabled.

Using Promoted Links

The Promoted Links app is a new type of SharePoint list that allows you to use images in tiles to highlight content both inside and outside your SharePoint site. When a user hovers over the Promoted Link tile, the description of the link pops up as shown in Figure A-24. Note that while the app is called Promoted Links, you can call the list something else on your site. In this example, the Promoted Links app is called Helpful Resources on the HR team site.

Figure A-24 Promoted Links allow you to create visually appealing links to your content

To use Promoted Links, you must first add the Promoted Links app to your site. The tiles view cannot be edited in the browser. To add links to a Promoted Links list, you will need to navigate to the list in Site Contents and select the All Promoted Links view from the ribbon. You will then be able to add a new link as shown in Figure A-25.

Figure A-25 New Promoted Link form

Think about the images or icons you want to use to create interest in your Promoted Links. You will need the URL for each image as you create each link item. As a best practice, store the images for your Promoted Links in the Site Assets library for your site and make sure they are no more than about 100KB for best performance.

Enter the following information about each Promoted Link:

Title. This is the text that users will see at the bottom of each image in the tiles view of the Promoted Links list. In Figure A-24, the Title of the first link is Frequently Asked Questions and the second is Contact Us. Keep your Titles short; use just a few words.

Background image location. Enter the hyperlink to the image for the link in this field. Be sure to add a user-friendly description for the link. If you do not specify an image, the default image is a blue square.

Description. Enter the “hover message” that users will see as they mouse over the link in the tiles view. The description can be a short sentence that tells your users what they will find if they click the link.

Link location. Enter the target URL for the link. You must enter the full http:// link in this field. Use the description area to create a user-friendly description for the URL. Users will not see this description in the tiles view, but it is a good practice to always add a “friendly” description for all hyperlinks.

Launch behavior. Specify how the link will launch for users who click on it. There are three options as shown in Figure A-26: (1) “In page navigation” means that the link will open in the same page as the current window, (2) “Dialog” means that the link will open in a dialog or pop-up box, and (3) “New tab” means that the link will open in a new tab in the current browser window.

Figure A-26 Launch behavior options in Promoted Links

Order. Specify an order in which you want your links to be displayed with 1 being first. If you leave the order blank, the links will be displayed in reverse order of when they were created, with the newest link listed first.

Be sure to test your Promoted Links to make sure that the launch behavior mode you have selected will work for each of your links. Note that Promoted Links in the Web Part tiles view does not wrap. If you have more tiles than can be displayed in your browser width, you will see a Previous/Next button in your Web Part. As a best practice, limit the number of Promoted Links to those that will be visible in most browsers. If you need or want to add more links, be sure to adjust the order of appearance so that the most important links will not be hidden behind the Next button.