​Establishing a solid information architecture is the key to a successful SharePoint project, regardless of the type (web content management, enterprise content management, etc.).  Over the years I've learned a lot about this from my good friend and fellow MVP Ruven Gotz. 

Ruven has done more to promote how to gather and build a solid IA from the business than anyone else in the SharePoint space.  His book Practical SharePoint 2010 Information Architecture is an excellent resource, regardless of what version of SharePoint you are using.  I also recommend checking out Ruven's blog at http://spinsiders.com/ruveng/.

One of the tools that Ruven introduced me to that all of our Senior Consultants at Envision IT use now is MindJet's MindManager (now just called MindJet).  It is a great tool for brainstorming and information planning and organizing.  It is not focused on the presentation details of the information, but rather just capturing the ideas and the relationships between them.

For our Envision Shakespeare Company site, we have started to flesh out the information architecture, along with some of the feature and term store ideas.  Joe did most of the work on this, and I've included both the PDF and MindJet versions of the files for you to see.

Envision Shakespeare Company Information Architecture.pdf

Envision Shakespeare Company Information Architecture.mmap

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​The Envision Shakespeare Company is a fictional theatre company focused on the works of William Shakespeare.  The idea is to capture the works of Shakespeare themselves, along with the requirements of an active theatre company, together into a web site delivered on SharePoint 2013.  Since Shakespeare's works are in the public domain, we have a large set of content to demonstrate the rich WCM features of SharePoint 2013.

The main goals of this project are to:

• Provide a rich user experience with both strong visuals and content for visitors
• A responsive design that works ideally on smartphones, tablets, and dekstops/notebooks
• Leverage as many of the SharePoint 2013 WCM features as are feasible
• Built in a way that supports a full enterprise software development life cycle

The functional elements of the site are:

• General company information
• Calendar of productions and performances
• News articles
• The full known works of Shakespeare

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 Wireframes are where the functionality and user experience of the site start to take shape.  There's no creative design yet (that comes next), but the pages of the site start to come to life.  This is where Jeff starts to work his magic.

There are a number of wireframe tools available for this task.  In Ruven's book that I mention in the Information Architecture section, he is a fan of Balsamiq wireframing.  We've used that, but more recently we have settled on Axure RP.  Yes it is a fair bit more expensive than Balsamiq, but it's not significant dollars, and it is very powerful yet quick to work with.

The key to wireframing is to not get caught up on the visual aspect.  There shouldn't be any images or colours, and fonts ar enot important.  The key is to capture the different type of pages in the site, the elements in them, and their functionality at a very high level.

One of the nice features of Axure is the ability to generate HTML versions of the wireframes.  This lets anyone with a browser view the wireframes, but more importantly they can have clickable elements in them, so the flow through the pages can also be experienced.

Jeff is still getting going on the wireframes, but I wanted to share what we have so far.  As with the IA, both the source Axure file and the HTML rendering are available below.

Envision Shakespeare Company Interactive HTML Wireframe

Envision Shakespeare Company Axure Wireframe

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​Any successful project starts with assembling a great team.  I'm blessed at Envision IT with no lack of strong team members to draw from for this project.  As we get deeper into the project the team members will likely grow to leverage individual strengths, but here is where we are starting.

Joe Seguin

• Joe is our Director of Consulting Services
• He leads the Senior Consulting team by example, drawing on six years of SharePoint experience
• He is driving the information architecture and specification aspects of the project
• As Project Manager, he also keeps us all on task to keep things moving forward according to plan

Jeff Clement

• Jeff is our user experience star
• Not only can he design and create fantastic concepts, but he can bring them to life through his impressive HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills
• Jeff will be building out the wireframe and design concepts, as well as leading the implementation of those ideas

James Brett

• James is one of our web developers, and brings 10 years of SharePoint experience to the table
• He'll be working closely with Jeff to breathe life into the designs as they light them up in SharePoint 

Wes Kroesbergen

• Wes is our system administrator
• He is the quiet one in the background that you don't directly see the results of his work, but everything falls apart without him
• Everything from the HyperV infrastructure to run all our VMs, to setting up and tweaking all the SharePoint farms, to being the point person on key features like search all fall to Wes

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​I haven't been very active this past year on my blog site, and it hasn't been for a lack of topics.  The last twelve months have been a whirlwind.  I first got the beta bits for SharePoint 2013 at the MVP Summit in February 2012, and I've spent a lot of the last 12 months getting up to speed on all the changes and new features.  I have to say I'm very excited about 2013.  One of the comments I heard from Microsoft was they made a much bigger investment in ECM in the 2010 release, and this time in 2013 that switched to focusing on WCM.  That along with the recent pricing changes that have made SharePoint much more affordable for public web sites should open a wealth of opportunities to develop sites on SharePoint 2013.

During the last year we've updated all of our products to run on SharePoint 2013, converted our Envision IT site, internal collaboration site, and my blog site to 2013, and delivered a lot of talks and webinars on SharePoint 2013.  You can see much of this on our Envision IT site at www.envisionit.com/sp2013.  Now it's time to start getting that knowledge organized so both our staff at Envision IT and the community in general can leverage it.

Table of Contents​

• Introduction
• Envision Shakespeare Company Project Background
• The Team
• Vision and Scope
• Agile Development
• Responsive Design Goals
• Information Architecture
• Wireframes
• Creative Design
• Twitter Bootstrap
• HTML Mockups
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Development Environment
• TFS and Continuous Integration
• Site Columns and Content Types
• Design Manager and Snippet Gallery
• Master Page
• Navigation
• Page Layouts
• Multi-lingual
• Accessibility
• Site Structure
• Search
• Content Search Web Part
• Display Templates
• Cross-Site Publishing
• Topic Pages
• Image and Video Renditions
• Search Engine Optimization
• Usage Analytics
• Workflows
• Permissions
• Extranet Requirements
• Digital Marketing Suite
• Custom Web Parts and Apps
• Hosting Options - On-Premise, Office 365, Azure, Third-Party
• Technical Architecture
• Staging and Production build and deployment
• Quality Assurance
• Change Management
• Training
• Content Authoring
• Go Live
• Post-Launch Support

​SharePoint Saturday Montreal was a great event on February 2, 2013.  You can go to the event page at www.sharepointsaturday.org/montreal to see all about it.  Serge Tremblay, Nicolas Georgeault. Alain Lord, Philippe Ouellet, and Benjamin Niaulin did a fantastic job organizing.  Not only was the venue ideal, the Wi-Fi solid, and the speakers delivering both English and French sessions, but they even had Montreal's famous Schwartz's Deli serving Montreal smoked meat sandwiches for lunch - awesome.

I gave two talks at the event.  The first was my Extranets in SharePoint, and the second was Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2013.  Links to the presentations can be found below.

• Extranets in SharePoint
• Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2013

Sessions were only 45 minutes long, and there was a lot of material to pack in.  Particularly for the upgrade talk, I didn't get into any of the special upgrade considerations like My Sites, User Profiles, or Search.  I promise to start blogging more frequently again, and expand on these topics shortly.

​On December 4th I delivered a Webinar on Rich Media Support in SharePoint 2013.  I focused on enhancements to image and video support in the new platform, specifically:

• Site owners can define standard sizes (renditions) for images that apply across the site
• As content authors load and use images, SharePoint automatically creates these different renditions to optimize the site visitor's experience
• Content authors can resize and crop images right in the browser, without the need for Photoshop or image management software

• Video is becoming more and more important for both internal and external sites
• 2013 has a new video content type that is actually a document set
• Drag and drop a video into SharePoint, and the video and thumbnail (automatically extracted from the first frame) are put in the document set
• Content authors can play the video in the browser, and select a different frame for the thumbnail, or upload their own
• Additional video formats (renditions) can be loaded into the document set for playing back on different devices
• Windows Azure Media Services further extends this by providing cloud-based transcoding (converting to different formats) and massively scaled streaming support (think London Olympics), as well as Smooth Streaming and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS, for Apple iOS adaptive streaming) support

Links to the presentation and video can be found below:

Presentation - Rich Media Support in SharePoint 2013 
Video - Rich Media Support in SharePoint 2013

On December 4th I ​delivered a Webinar on Extranets in SharePoint 2013, and also spoke to the licensing changes that will really change the game for both Extranets and public web sites. For on-premise installations, Microsoft is eliminating the For Internet Sites license requirement, bringing the licensing costs down significantly. Likewise in the cloud, Microsoft now provides up to 10,000 external user accounts for Extranets in Office 365, with no additional subscription fees.

More details about the webinar as well as links to the presentation and video can be found below

Presentation - Extranets in SharePoint 2013
Video - Extranets in SharePoint 2013

​SharePoint Saturday Ottawa on December 1st was a great day packed with sessions, and as expected, the focus and buzz was all on SharePoint 2013. You can find full coverage of the day's events at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ottawa/

Envision IT was a sponsor at the event, and I delivered 2 presentations on Extranets in SharePoint 2013 and Rich Media Support in SharePoint 2013.  You can view presentations and videos of my sessions on the event page here:

SharePoint Saturday Ottawa

On November 29th I delivered a Webcast on SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites (FIS) on Windows Azure with Stephen Giles,​ Partner Technology Advisor of Microsoft Canada. Envision IT is now an Azure Circle Partner, and we see Cloud solutions as an affordable way for organizations to stay connected and flexible while increasing productivity and growing their business.

SharePoint 2010 FIS on  Azure enables you to

• Rapidly deploy and host your business websites on a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure
• Rapidly deploy the infrastructure for a partner extranet site
• Rapidly deploy the infrastructure for a customer internet site using Windows Azure virtual machines

With SharePoint FIS on Windows Azure you can scale as your website traffic grows and pay only for what you use.

In this session we discussed how SharePoint FIS on Windows Azure helps reduce your time-to-market with new websites, provide a full extensible platform for both internal and external websites, and only pay for what you need.

We also showcased the consultation and deployment options available for you from Envision IT. 

You can view the presentation at the link below

SharePoint FIS on Azure

​On November 6th I delivered a Webinar on SharePoint 2013 and the Envision IT Digital Marketing Suite of Products. I demonstrated how images and videos are handled in SharePoint 2013, and showed how the Digital Marketing Suite of Products help make SharePoint easier to use and provide a richer end user experience.

• Video Player allows you to stream videos from a variety of sources onto different devices
• Photo Viewer provides easier sharing and management of images
• Image Rotator allows images that are stored in a SharePoint Asset Library to be displayed in rotating sequence on a web site
• Custom 404 will help eliminate 404 errors, broken or missing links, and mistyped URLs

You can view the presentation from the link below

Presentation - SharePoint 2013 and the Digital Marketing Suite

​On October 30th I delivered a Webinar on What's new in Search in SharePoint 2013.

Microsoft has made and continues to make massive investments in Search in SharePoint.  Following the acquisition of FAST in 2008, portions of the FAST search technology made its way into SharePoint Search, but FAST remained as a separate product.  For SharePoint 2013, there is only SharePoint Search, combining the power of FAST and the work that Microsoft has been doing to go beyond that.

Some of the key features highlighted are:

• Architecture and scalability
• 2013 Search user experience
• Live Office Preview using with integration of Office Web Applications
• Customization of the search presentation, using HTML display templates rather than XSLT
• Concept of Search Verticals
• Managed Metadata driven refinement
• The new Content Search web part - killer replacement for the Content Query web part
• Topic pages - leveraging managed Metadata Navigation, Content By Search web part and Improved Keyword Query Language
• Cross-site publishing to share content between sites or even farms, by leveraging search
• SEO enhancements - end user and search engine friendly URLs, on page SEO properties, auto-generated XML site map
• Usage Analytics - feeding right back into Search, usage based ranking, no. of views information in search results
• Top Viewed Pages - pre-configured Content Search web part

You can view the presentation and video at the links below:

Presentation - What's New in Search 2013
Video - What's New in Search 2013

​On October 23rd I delivered a Webinar on Extranets in SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

As more organizations recognize than an Extranet is a vital part of their web strategy, business partners are finding ways to dramatically improve on Extranet performance, functionality and user experience.

Microsoft SharePoint delivers a secure platform that allows a tailored approach towards achieving business goals with an Extranet. A SharePoint Extranet can support the following objectives:

• Build an online community
• Allow interaction between organization and customers, partners, vendors, and volunteers
• Reduce supply chain inefficiencies
• Offer customer self-service strategies
• Share business resources with partners

In this webinar, we demonstrated the latest technology enhancements and customizations for Extranet Portals that ensure organizations achieve their goals. We showcased how our clients are using SharePoint to transform their businesses, lower costs and maximize growth potential in a variety of scenarios:

• As an Internet web site members-only area developed for non-profit organizations (www.bgccan.com)
• As a series of health care portals (www.problemgambling.ca and knowledgex.camh.net)
• As a platform for retail web sites to enable tenants to post promotions and job offerings (www.torontoeatoncentre.com)
• As a Volunteer Information Portal for charitable events (Heart and Stroke Foundation)

We also discussed the various ways to extend SharePoint outside your organization.  We compared and contrasted the following technical solutions, and outlined where each is appropriate:

• Envision IT Extranet User Manager
• Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway
• Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway

You can view the presentation and video from the links below:

Presentation - Extranets in SharePoint 2010 and 2013
Video - Extranets in SharePoint 2010 and 2013