|
Resources
News & Events
|
|
Monthly Tips, News and Views from Coyote Creek
|
OCTOBER 2011
|
Presidents Perspective
Make an Investment in America: Hire a New College Grad
 Recently, while browsing at a local bookstore, I struck up a conversation with the young man behind the counter. It turned out that he had recently graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in Computer Science. Unfortunately, he – like so many other recent college graduates, including my own son – couldn't get a job in his field. Instead of applying his education in a professional IT position, he was working for slightly more than minimum wage as a retail clerk.
What Recent Grads Want
I asked the young man what he was looking for in the IT field. His response: "Anything that will pay and give me a chance." What exactly were his salary expectations? He wanted to make $35 to $50K per year.
The Jobs Have Moved Off Shore
If you think about it, somewhere around $35K is what we're currently paying off shore workers. You know – the people who now hold the jobs that used to go to new college grads.
This realization made me sad... and angry... and fearful of its implications for the future.
In the interest of saving money, American businesses have moved a large percentage of white collar, educated jobs off shore. Meanwhile we have a large population of eager, educated young people right here who can't get decent jobs (and sometimes can't find employment at all). There's something wrong with this picture.
Let's Move the Jobs Back to the U.S.
So here's what I propose: let's start investing in America and the future leaders of our country by hiring new college grads! In terms of wages it will actually cost about the same as hiring off shore workers. In return we'll get employees who are eager, enthusiastic and want to learn. Plus, our new employees will spend their wages here in the U.S., which of course will help our economy overall. And we'll be helping to grow the next generation of U.S. business leaders.
Sure it will probably take a little more effort to train these new hires and give them the relevant experience they need, but I think it will be worth it.
I'm going to find a way to do this at Coyote Creek. I'm hereby challenging other business leaders to do the same.
Mike Faster
President
Technical Editorial
Branding Your SharePoint Sites
How do you want your SharePoint sites to look? For organizations that use SharePoint sites exclusively for internal use, SharePoint's default "look and feel" might be just fine. All of the basic user interface elements are there, and some users find the default design's familiarity comforting.
More often than not, however, we're finding that most organizations want even their internal sites to have distinct looks, usually to make it easier for users to identify the type of content the site works with or the department to which the site belongs. For externally-facing SharePoint sites, branding the sites so that they integrate seamlessly with the rest of the organization's branding has always been a must.
How much customization is possible?
The good news is, with SharePoint you can customize as much of the look and feel of your SharePoint sites as you want. SharePoint itself is based on ASP.NET technology, Microsoft's web application platform. Using those same ASP.NET technologies you can customize everything from fonts and colors to navigation, flash, graphics, images, layout and more.
Two approaches to customizing the look and feel of SharePoint sites
SharePoint offers two approaches to customization. The first, "themes," is appropriate for internal sites. This is basically "customization light." The second, "custom master page" is used for externally-facing sites as well as those internal sites that require a high degree of customization. Here are some details about each of these approaches…
- Themes: While themes have been around since SharePoint 2003, SharePoint 2010 updated themes and made them much easier to implement. Using the themes function you can change a site's colors and fonts (including both font type and font size), and upload your company's logo for use on all pages. Choosing from about 12 colors, you can create a custom palette for each site. Once implemented, each element on the page will pick up one or more of those colors. The trick, however, is figuring out what will actually happen when you change each color! For example, if you change the seventh color in the palette from blue to green, which parts of the page will be affected? It can take some trial and error to get things the way you want them.
One of the nice things about themes is that it is implemented through your browser, with no special tools required. You can create a theme and then apply it to the sites or site collections of your choice. Multiple themes can be created, each applied to different sites. Plus, because SharePoint has the same theme file format as Microsoft’s Office products, you can design a theme inside of, say, PowerPoint, and have a similar theme applied within SharePoint.
A major limitation of themes, however, is that it can only be used to change a site’s colors, fonts and logo. If you want to change the layout of the site, or make more complex changes, you need to use the “custom master page” approach to customization.
- Custom Master Page: The "custom master page" approach can be used to change just about any aspect of the look and feel of your SharePoint site. To use this approach you can either build a master page completely "from scratch," or you can take an existing Microsoft master page and make the changes that you want. Primarily because there are tens of thousands of lines of CSS code applied to each SharePoint site, we recommend against the "starting from scratch" approach. It is far more practical to start with out-of-the-box CSS code and then override the pieces that you want to change.
When using the custom master page approach, one of the things you need to be aware of is the way that themes are implemented in out-of-the-box SharePoint sites. The CSS code for SharePoint sites includes specially coded comments that allow the theme engine to replace that CSS element with whatever is specified in the theme. If you leave these comments as is – and do not also hard code your theme elements – then you'll be able to use themes with your custom master pages. Otherwise attempting to apply a theme to the site will have no effect.
How to create a custom master page
Once again, there are two possible approaches…
- Use SharePoint Designer: The easiest way to create a custom master page is to use SharePoint Designer, a separate program which can be downloaded for free. Using SharePoint Designer you'll be able to choose from a gallery of default master pages, make a copy of your chosen page, and then edit it.
- Use a starter master page: The second option – which also uses SharePoint Designer – is to use a starter master page, such as one of those which Randy Drisgill, a SharePoint MVP, has made available at CodePlex. This is instead of using one of the default master pages mentioned above. What Randy has created at Codeplex is a series of very raw starter master pages that each have all of the required elements, but do not include any styling or layout. This gives you the flexibility to get the exact layout that you want, without having to undo what's in one of the default master pages. If you need to build your own extremely customized sites, this is the way to go.
Regardless of which method you use to create your custom master page, once you have the master page and the CSS the way you want them within SharePoint Designer, the best way to deploy it is to take these elements and build a SharePoint Solutions Package (which is a .wsp file) inside of Visual Studio. You would then give that Solutions Package to your IT operations team, for deployment on your SharePoint production server farm. Once there, the branding can be turned on as a feature on the different sites or site collections to which you want it applied.
How Coyote Creek can help
Although creating and implementing themes is relatively straight-forward, creating custom master pages requires expertise. Yes, given enough time a technically astute person can figure it all out. But is it worth it? For most companies, branding the SharePoint sites is essentially a one-time process. Investing the time and resources into getting past the learning curve probably doesn't make a lot of sense.
Coyote Creek has extensive experience with branding SharePoint sites, from creating and implementing themes to the full customization of custom master pages. We have already learned the process. All we need to know is what will be unique about your site, and we can make it happen for you.
Lance Elworth
SharePoint Architect
|
Hold The Date!
Coyote Creek will be hosting our second CIO Dinner at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011.
If you are interested to attend and hear from experts as well as your peers from leading Bay Area companies discuss where SaaS fits in their applications portfolio and strategy, please contact us.
RMM Webinar
Are Frustrations with Exchange Driving You to The Cloud?
November 16th, 2011
Audience:
IT Decision Makers, CIO, CFO
Microsoft Exchange is the lifeblood system for many organizations. But, as more and more functionality gets added at both the user and infrastructure level, Exchange is becoming ever more complex, time-consuming and costly to monitor, maintain and manage.
If you're considering outsourcing or moving to the Cloud because of Exchange frustrations or cost, join Coyote Creek for this webinar to hear about your alternatives.
To register, please click here.
Product Spotlight
What You Need to Know about Enterprise Vault 10
Version 10 of Enterprise Vault (EV) – Symantec's information archiving platform – is now available. New features include:
- Social media and website archiving
- Support for Outlook 2011 for Mac
- Ability to seamlessly archive to the Cloud
- Built-in classification services
However, be forewarned – EV10's advanced 64-bit architecture means that most organizations will need to upgrade their hardware and/or operating system before they can make the switch.
Want to know more? Watch for our upcoming blog posts, or contact us.
Contact Us
Your primary contact with Coyote Creek is your Account Manager but you are welcome to contact our management team at any time. Please contact Terri Carney our Director of Sales, and she will get you talking to the right people at Coyote Creek.
About Coyote Creek
Founded in 1998 by a team of former corporate IT professionals, Coyote Creek understands the issues and complexities that are part of large-scale and high-growth IT environments. Pragmatic and vendor neutral, Coyote Creek brings deep expertise to help customers manage technology and project risk, inspiring confidence and creating peace of mind. For more information, please visit www.coyotecrk.com.
|
|