Back in December I wrote about the ability to customise the App Launcher, or Waffle as it lovingly known. The options were relatively limited unless you built your own app in Azure and deployed it to the organisation. However one request came up again and again, the ability to create a shortcut tile to a specific site or location inside the Office 365 tenant. Imagine being able to have a dedicated waffle link for the Marketing site, or perhaps a dedicated link through to a specific PWA instance.

One of the big things to happen in Office 365 whilst I was ‘offline’ was a quiet announcement about the removal of the My Tasks capability on your My Site. In case you hadn’t seen it, the My Tasks capability rolls up all tasks that have been assigned to you across SharePoint sites into a single view in your My Site. I’ve posted on it a few times before with the work management tag and it’s a great capability.

Today Brian Farnhill and I presented our session on Building Apps for SharePoint 2013 (with a little bit of Project Server thrown into the mix). The session was really well attended and we covered a heap of material on this massive topic. Unfortunately we ran a little overtime, so I’ll post a few of the demo’s I wanted to show up in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I here are some additional links as promised to keep you going 🙂

In the last post, we covered a few things you will need to know when hiding or disabling ribbon buttons in PWA. In this post we will look at how to actually hide the buttons. Where to start? Irrespective of whether you wish to hide or disable a button in the ribbon, you will need to follow the same basic process by building a solution in Visual Studio that will deploy your ribbon customisation.

In this final post covering off some miscellaneous new features of SharePoint 2010 that could be of benefit for you and your team I am going to look at three distinct areas: Managed metadata – providing consistent metadata across your organisation; Wiki improvements – how SharePoint 2010 wiki’s have been improved; and Graph web part – SharePoint’s new graphing data visualisation web part. Managed metadata SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept, managed metadata, which allows you to define a central set of metadata items for the whole farm which can be referenced across all sites.

Recently, at the Australian SharePoint Conference, I demonstrated how SharePoint 2010’s Visio Services could be used to create a fully interactive project management process map for your organisation. The concept behind the demonstration was to show how quickly and easily you could develop a process map that allows users to visualise a process, but also how you could link that process map to a template library and wiki library to automatically filter and display the relevant templates and wiki content.

Over the next few posts, I will be looking at a number of features in SharePoint 2010 that can be leveraged by a project manager or project team to make their lives easier. The first such feature I want to highlight are ‘Document Sets’. Document sets are a relatively simple concept, allowing the user to create a set of documents that can be treated as one, allowing metadata or workflows to be assigned against the set and thus consistently across each part within the document set.