Using the: SharePoint Data-View web part

A data view web part is very useful when comes to SharePoint display forms customization. You can add this web part by using the SharePoint designer tool.

1. Insert a data view web part onto the page you want to display in the list by selecting Data View > Insert Data View from the main menu.

2. Using the Data Source Library Task Pane in SharePoint designer select ‘Connect to another library‘ and browse to the site that contains the list you wish to display.

3. Expand the new site in the Data Source Library Task Pane and select the list or library that contains the information you wish to display. From the drop down select ‘Show Data‘ to populate the Data Preview tab.

4. From the list of columns, select the ones that you wish to display and select ‘Insert selected fields as multiple item view from the drop down menu at the top of the window. This will populate the data view with sample information (in a table by default). At this stage you may get an error in the design view that states:

“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator”.

This can be corrected by modifying the tag of the element of the data view to contain the reletive url of the site for the WebUrl parameter (look at the default parameters to find this out – should be something similar to ‘/news/’).

Sieena Launches 365Kin, an Employee Self-Service Portal

Sieena Launches 365Kin, an Employee Self-Service Portal

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 22, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Sieena announced today the release of the first version of 365Kin™, an Employee Self Service Portal designed to increase employee productivity and keep HR departments focused on their most important tasks. The Software as a Service (SaaS) HR SharePoint portal includes new modules for vacation and holiday tracking as well as one for personal data administration.

HR personnel are constantly interrupted by holiday and vacation leave requests. While considered to be important to both employees and companies alike, these repetitive tasks are time consuming, decrease productivity, and prevent HR personnel from focusing on more strategic activities. The HR SharePoint portal will function as a key employee touch point, freeing HR departments from tedious undertakings as well as helping them to have a much more organized personnel information management.

365Kin is a web-based automated leave tracking system that allows employees to access and update the most frequently requested vacation data themselves 24/7, 365 days a year from any computer without having to go through HR. Employees can create, track and update their leave requests, as well as access and update their personal information (such as contact information, experience and education among other information). 365Kin enables the HR staff as well as direct supervisors to approve or deny any changes and update a central calendar that will always document absences—allowing companies to preserve data integrity, and maintain quality control. For more information on 365Kin, visit http://www.365kin.com/.

With 365Kin, companies will reduce HR costs and errors, boost workforce productivity, morale and improve internal service at all levels of any organization.

"In today's economy, companies are even more intent on keeping their employees as productive, and strategically-focused than ever," said Mauricio Duran, Sieena President. "365Kin will add a new layer of efficiency to our HR customers' internal processes, while empowering employees to get the vacation or leave tracking information they need immediately - whether they're in the office or at home on the weekend."

About Sieena

Sieena is a software development firm headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. Sieena builds and maintains business-critical Web and collaboration platforms and is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. For more information, visit www.sieena.com or contact Richie Matthews of DIALOGO at richie@dialogo.us for media inquiries.

How to Optimize your Search Engine position using SharePoint.

It’s a fact that a great number of your site’s visitors come from Search Engines. This is why companies are investing good money on web marketing campaigns, and a very important part of this Marketing is having a great SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is about certain rules that most of Search Engines follow, and it’s a little more technical than it looks like.

Here I present to you some advice to optimize your Search; they can be very easy to follow if you plan them since the beginning of your Public Site design, using SharePoint off course.

Semantic Code. It’s very important to use the correct HTML elements, for example, in headers, use

to

. Use the “list” element if you need to group information on a list: organized

disorganized
or defined lists

.


Take advantage of the benefits that the SharePoint image libraries can offer. For better SEO it’s important to use the ALT and TITLE attributes on the site’s images. This is something SharePoint provide you with on its "Picture Libraries".




Keyword Density. You can check this solution on Mtelligent. Mtelligent allows you to add properties like Meta Keywords and Meta Description to SharePoint pages. It’s very important that all the words added to the “keywords” actually exist on your website. Bad use or property abuse are punished by Search engines, especially Google, so be careful!





Descriptive text on links. Try to use a clear description on your links, use the TITLE and Tooltip attributes, SharePoint provides a very useful Web part to accomplish this ("Summary Link Web Part"). As shown on the image below, you only have to fill in the attribute fields and you are set.










Friendly URLs. Make sure your site URL addresses describe themselves, avoid code or meaningless identifiers. There is a great solution on CodePlex, you install it on your site and it allows you to change your blog post’s URLs to make them more descriptive.






There are many other features you can implement with SharePoint:

• Use of a robots file.
• Workflow to update your sitemap
• Sites and Subsites in SharePoint. This is a great way to organize your site content, and search engines seem to like it.


At last, I’ll like to mention some of the practices you have to AVOID when planning and building your web site in SharePoint:

1. Avoid naming the site’s pages (page title) with the core functionality (ex.: Home-Home).Try using keywords.
2. Avoid adding just one keyword repeatedly all over your site, if you do this search engines could discard your page for being “suspicious”
3. Don’t use hidden fields with keywords visible to the search engine but not to the user.
4. Use temporary redirects.
5. Don’t use styles, nor “on line” javascript, it’s better to refer to them in a separate file.


I hope you find this information very useful when creating your site.