Summary of 'Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud' #spc12

Fresh from my first developer session at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, "Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud," I'm here to share a few of presenters Randy Drisgill and John Ross's tips for building a branded website in SharePoint 2013.

I was afraid entering the session that it would be code heavy, but was assured early on that there wasn't much code involved.

Agenda:

• Intro Branding On Premises and Online
• Low Effort branding
• Medium Effort branding
• High Effort branding
• SharePoint Online

Introduction

The talk begins with examples of branding, showing Microsoft logos that have changed over the years. Branding applies to all of your company's marketing and websites and can involve images, logos, CSS, etc.

Microsoft offers two plans, each with separate branding capabilities: small business plan and enterprise plan. It is interesting to see that Microsoft has different abilities on branding in the different plans.

The approach to branding is Low, Medium, High and apparently there is a fair amount of change beginning with the Medium Effort. When you reach the medium effort, it's time to bring in design manager.

Low Effort Branding

Page editor in SharePoint 2013 is pretty much the same as it was in SharePoint 2010: it still has the ribbon where you can add video, images, web parts, etc. I usually think that content publishing is important to get branding to look nice and create a good user experience.

Some of the new capabilities include composed looks — the themes have evolved and enable you to create themes with custom images and colors, master pages, etc.

My observation is that the default themes are pretty ugly. They actually looks a bit like editing a WordPress theme, but with less functionality, you choose your theme location, image url’s, master page url, and more. You can choose which fonts can be available in the editor, not sure that it's useful, but it's an option.

Medium Effort Branding

Medium effort branding brings the design manager into play. The design manager can be found in the site actions, but you need to have publishing activated on the site in order to locate it.

Basically you get your HTML and CSS uploaded to the design manager, then apply SharePoint objects like search. SharePoint designer is optional when using design manager, you are free to use whatever web tool to create your branding: notepad, Coda etc.

Both the master page and the page layouts can be edited with your web tools.

You can use the snippets gallery to get your navigation, breadcrumbs, search boxes, title, logo, etc. into the HTML design by copying the snippet code from the snippet gallery into the HTML code, then adding your own CSS and branding to it.

All of this can be done in a sandbox solution before publishing.

In your master page gallery folder you can create a subfolder to store all of your branding assets. Keep it nice and simple so that it is easy to understand and manage. A good practice is to document what you do as well; you may need it if your servers crash.

Before you start adding snippets, publish a version of the HTML file, this will give you a master page in the theme folder. When you've done this, you can go into the snippets gallery and change the options on the snippets you want, copy the snippets code and add to the HTML file in the place you want it. When you click save the HTML file will update the master file automatically. Pretty sweet!

Important to remember here is that you need to brand all of your site templates that you use, if you don’t you will get an unbranded page when you search or similar.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Bringing HTML5 to Windows Phone 8

Microsoft is promoting the new software developer kit (SDK) available for the IE10 browser as containing an emulator that allows testing of sites on the Windows Phone 8 platform. Microsoft says this functionality will help IE10 sites provide the same experience on mobile devices running Windows Phone 8 as they do on PCs and other devices.

‘Beautiful, Intuitive’ Sites for Windows Phone 8

IE10 developers will have the ability to create “beautiful” and “intuitive” site experiences for Windows Phone 8 users, according to Microsoft. The vendor says expanded CSS3 support enables features such as 3-D effects, faster animations and transitions, and aesthetic touches including CSS gradients and custom fonts. In addition, Microsoft says the IE10 SDK allows developers who lack “CSS and HTML ninja skills” to still create site features such as multiple columns, positioned floats and device adaptations.

Other features include an HTML5 application cache that makes website files available offline and indexed object storage. Microsoft cautions that IE10 for Windows Phone 8 is not quite as feature-rich as IE10 for Windows 8. Features not included in the Windows Phone 8 version include inline video, ActiveX and VBScript and drag-and-drop APIs, among others.

Microsoft Applies Responsive Design Principles to Windows Phone 8

While Microsoft’s IE10 development approach to Windows Phone 8 may not fully constitute a responsive design strategy, it does include many responsive design principles. As detailed in CMSWire's May 11 webinar, "Optimizing Mobile Customer Experience with Responsive Design," responsive design involves designing a site at different “break points,” or standard screen sizes, that allow designers to accommodate many different devices at once.

Instead of designing for a specific device, responsive design best practices dictate that you should plan to scale your digital experiences for a range of screen sizes, focusing on the smallest screen first and drawing from a single codebase. Responsive design relies on functionality of HTML5 and CSS3 to allow seamless adaptation of websites to mobile formats, and this aspect of responsive design is clearly evident in Microsoft’s IE10/Windows Phone 8 strategy.

Windows Phone 8 Leaps Ahead

While the Webmonkey developer news site does not give the new IE10/Windows Phone 8 development strategy unqualified praise, it does credit Microsoft for bringing IE 10 on mobile “leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors and support(ing) web app essentials like the Application Cache API for creating offline apps and IndexedDB for storing data.” Although Webmonkey concludes the Windows Phone 8 release of IE10 is “very close to feature parity with the desktop/tablet release,” it does find the lack of support for the File Access API and other missing features “disappointing.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

DtSearch 7.70 Adds Document Filters, Increased Multi-Level Search

Enterprise-based searching always wants more. And dtSearch, a supplier of enterprise and developer text retrieval software, is offering more — with the recently announced version 7.70 of its product line.

The new release features enhanced document filters, and APIs for OEMs that provide data parsing, conversion and extraction.

Indexed Search In Under a Second

DtSearch, which began providing text retrieval in 1991, offers a product line of enterprise search and developer text search products.

The search products’ spider can search local/remote content and static/dynamic web content, and it can reach across public/private sites, including support for log-ins and forms-based authentication. More than a terabyte of text can be covered in a single index, including directories, databases, online data and emails, and an unlimited number of indexes can be created and searched. According to dtSearch, that indexed search time is under a second, even across terabytes.

The document filters have supported a wide range of file formats and data types. In addition to all office productivity documents (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF and others), major email formats, compression formats such as ZIP and RAR, and Web-ready data such as HTML and XML/XSL, the filters are also built for dynamic data, including PHP, ASP.NET and all major databases.

Increased Search Support for Multi-Level Documents

Version 7.70 extends that support to images in Word (.doc/.docx), Powerpoint (.ppt/.pptx), Excel (.xls/.xlsx), Access (.mdb/accdb), RTF, and email files such as Thunderbird (mbox/.eml) and Outlook (.pst/.msg). These formats are shown as highlighted hits in context, and there’s also support for documents created by the Japanese word processor, Ichitaro.

The new release also increases the product’s support for documents and images that reside in multi-level nested configurations. This means it can find and display images in an email file, for instance. The company said that it can also find and display images in a PowerPoint file that has been embedded in a Word document attached as a zipped file to an email.

For developers, a new “object extraction” API allows for navigation through an embedded object’s structure, as if it were a hierarchy, and for extraction o09:31:00f any object.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Reverse-Engineering Twitter To Solve An Advertising Mystery

Does Twitter have an undocumented API for promoted Tweets? Dwolla developer Michael Schonfeld tore apart the app to find the answer.

Recently I opened the Twitter app on my Mac and noticed something very strange: It was omitting promoted tweets from my timeline. In the side-by-side comparisons below, notice the "howaboutwe.com" promoted tweet from Twitter.com on the right is missing from the Twitter.app feed on the left.

An example of Twitter breaking its own rules, or just a bug?

Then I found a missing promoted "Pepsi" tweet on Twitter.com which was absent from the feed on my iPhone Twitter app. There was definitely something going on here. Why would Twitter differentiate content between their official mobile app and their web client?

Back in September 2010, Twitter said that it was using its own API. "It fetches data from the same endpoints that the mobile site, our apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and every third-party application use," wrote Britt Selvitelle in a post on the engineering blog. That appears to no longer be the case, which raises an even more hairy question: Does Twitter have an undocumented API for promoted tweets? To find out, I did what every curious engineer would and decompiled the app. (Twitter, if you're reading this, please don't ban me from your network.)

Reverse Engineering Twitter.app

Twitter Sleuthing 101

1. Disassembled the app using class-dump.
2. Found the code routine that handles network responses using Hopper.app.
3. Detected network responses from the API using GDB.
4. Compared the API output to my Timeline feed using Rested for Mac.

My first idea was to set up a local proxy and examine if the Twitter.app was filtering out promoted tweets, or whether it was receiving them at all. Setting up a proxy proved not to be as easy as I had hoped. Twitter.app uses SSL encryption to communicate with the API server and because it's set to reject self-signed certificates, trying to spoof an SSL certificate renders the app completely non-functional.

For help, I enlisted my brother Daniel Schonfeld, a seasoned hacker for help disassembling Twitter.app. Fortunately for us, the app was written almost entirely in Objective C, which meant that we'd be able to examine some of the app's source code as it was written by Twitter's very own engineers; usually, when disassembling C/C++ binaries, source code loses its original naming symbology, but Objective-C preserves a lot of symbols which makes it easier to follow along.

Using a nifty tool called class-dump, we began examining the contents of Twitter.app and how it was designed. First, we set out to see if we could find any mentions or references to promoted tweets. It wasn't too long before we found this little gem buried within the code definition of the "Twitter Status" object. Notice the built-in flag for promoted tweets:

@interface TwitterStatus : NSObject <...>
{
NSDate *lastUpdated;
...
struct {
...
unsigned int isPromoted:1;

From this finding, we could assume that Twitter.app does in fact at times receives promoted tweets from the API server and classifies them as such using the "isPromoted" flag.

On to the Data Stream
Once we knew that Twitter.app has some built-in handling for promoted tweets, we had to dig deeper. Daniel fired up Hopper.app, a Mac disassembler, and a couple hours later, boom: He had found the code routine that handles network responses. Namely, the [ABHTTPRequest connection:DidReceiveResponse:] message (method). Now could finally answer our initial question: Does the app receive promoted tweets from the API server or not?

We used GDB to set up breakpoints in Twitter.app and forced it to show us what it was getting back from the API server. Specifically, our debugger will halt every time the app receives a network response.

To repeat our method, fire up a terminal window and launch the debugger:

> cd /Applications/Twitter.app/Contents/MacOS/
> gdb --arch=i386

Then, while working within gdb, type:

> (gdb) exec-file Twitter
> (gdb) b *0x6dec3
> (gdb) commands
> x/s $eax
> end
> (gdb) set print elements 0
> (gdb) r

This will cause the debugger to freeze Twitter.app on our given breakpoints. The first thing you'll notice is that Twitter.app is actually working with Twitter's XML format--yuck. The first couple API server responses will be your own account's information. Type **c**, then hit the **Enter** key to continue to the next breakpoint. The next block of XML you'll receive is your timeline feed. Comparing the XML to my Twitter.app feed and my Twitter.com feed, we discovered that Twitter.app is not actually not receiving the promoted tweets in the data feed from the API server at all.

Is This an Undocumented API?
Just one question remained: Were only Twitter's official apps not receiving promoted tweets from the API server? Or, does the API not return them to any client at all?

This was a rather easy test. Using Rested for Mac, I quickly polled Twitter's API server for my own timeline feed. As can be seen in the resulting output above (truncated for your convenience), it appears that the API server simply does not return any promoted tweets.

Conclusion: Twitter Has A Secret Feed For Promoted Tweets
The FAQ on Twitter's dev site says that, "As of March 12, 2012 there is no Advertising API for serving Twitter's promoted products in third party applications." Which means the promoted tweets ought to appear in any timeline that uses the API. That's obviously not the case.

The mobile ad market is an enormous and constantly growing one. Ad revenue is a major component of Twitter's revenue, and the company projects it to grow to $540 million by 2014. Twitter has also promised to "share a portion of advertising revenue" with developers who serve Twitter ads, according to its own Developer Rules of the Road.

Advertisers and developers, it's getting close to 10 p.m.: Do you know where your promoted tweets are?

Michael Schonfeld is head of developer relations at Dwolla, a service that empowers anyone with an Internet connection to send money simply. Follow Michael Schonfeld and his brother Daniel Schonfeld on Twitter.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2012, New Tools for Windows 8 & Azure

Microsoft is releasing Visual Studio 2012, the latest iteration of its Visual Studio developer tool suite. The IT giant says new features of the latest edition are designed to help developers “turn ideas into applications fast.”

Upgrades to Visual Studio 2012 start with a redesigned interface with streamlined workflows and simplified toolbars. Visual Studio 2012 also delivers new templates, designers, and testing and debugging tools for the Windows 8 OS, as well as a visual toolkit. Developers have the option of selling apps they create through the Windows Store.

"Windows Store" is what Microsoft now calls what were previously known as "Metro-style" apps developed using the Microsoft WinRT API. Microsoft has been phasing out the term "Metro" as a description of its modern design philosophy for about a month.

Other features include support for standards such as HTML5, CSS3 and the latest upgrades to ASP.NET, access to cloud servers and tools for taking apps to the Windows Azure cloud platform. Furthermore, Microsoft has also upgraded SharePoint with features like LightSwitch, which is designed to minimize the code required to write new applications.

Recognizing Shifts in the IT Landscape

According to PC Magazine, Visual Studio 2012 “bends to the shifting IT landscape” and its integrated development environment “reflects many of the changes that challenge developers, including mobility and cloud computing.”

Specifically, PC Magazine credits Microsoft with recognizing that employees expect to perform their tasks across a wide range of devices,  including tablets and smartphones, as well as the growing popularity of agile software development. PC Magazine says that when Visual Studio is used in conjunction with Microsoft's Team Foundation Server 2012 application lifecycle management product, organizations can specify which developers are involved in the project, as well as set a path for development, testing, updating and deployment of a new application.

One critique the article makes is of the revamped Visual Studio 2012 user interface. IDC development software analyst Al Hilwa terms it “bold and risky” and warns developers may find it distracting and lacking in flexibility and color.

Microsoft Preps for Windows 8

As reported by CMSWire in July, Microsoft is making a multifaceted push toward the expected October 26 formal release date of Windows 8, which is currently available in preview mode and has been released to manufacturing. The release of Visual Studio 2012 is part of larger preparations for the widespread availability of Windows 8. These preparations include new features released for the Azure platform in June 2012, as well as upgrades to the Microsoft Expression Blend user interface tool released last month and the unveiling of the Office 2013 preview in July.

Kentico Supports Visual Studio 2012

Customer experience management technology vendor Kentico is wasting no time in jumping on the Visual Studio 2012 bandwagon,announcing today that Kentico CMS 7 provides full support for both Visual Studio 2012 and the Microsoft .NET 4.5 Framework. They won't be the last to make this announcement either.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Twitter Gets Strict with Official API v1.1 Release

Twitter has officially released version 1.1 of its API. Initially announced in August, the updated API has stricter authentication policies and developer rules of the road, among other new features.

Twitter Toughens Up

In version 1.1, Twitter is requiring applications to authenticate all of their requests with the API. Twitter says this step will prevent abusive behavior and help it to further understand how categories of applications are using the API so it can better meet the needs of developers.

At this time, all authentication requires user context, but in the coming weeks Twitter says it will release support for a form of authentication not requiring a user context.

Twitter also updated its developer rules of the road, placing regulations against activities such as publishing private user information, resyndicating data and performing “surprise” actions not initiated by users. And all applications replicating the core Twitter experience, usually called "clients," will have some new restrictions placed on them, including a 100,000 user token limit.

There are also new display requirements (which were previously suggested guidelines), dictating things like display of the tweet author avatar and how text is displayed. Other changes include support for JSON only, discontinuing support for XML, Atom and RSS, which Twitter says are “infrequently” used.

Rate limits in version 1.1 of the API are divided into 15 minute intervals, which is a change from the 60 minute blocks in version 1.0. Additionally, all 1.1 endpoints require authentication, so no longer will there be a concept of unauthenticated calls and rate limits. Search will be rate limited at 180 queries per 15 minute window for the time being, but Twitter says it may adjust that over time. According to Twitter, developers will “now be able to query the API on a per endpoint basis a lot more than (they) previously could.” 

Show Me the Money

Although Twitter is stressing that the new changes will help eliminate abuses and make Twitter app development a more structured and orderly process, not all observers are convinced its motives are entirely pure. Last month, CMSWire columnist Stephen Fishman wrote that,

Twitter really does not care whether (solo developers) make money. Twitter cares whether Twitter makes money. In order for Twitter to make money, Twitter needs consumers to engage with Twitter on the Twitter site as much as possible. Twitter's value prop to developers is a free, functional and highly available micro-bloging platform that can easily be integrated into your site.”

Fishman also said the new API is directly aimed at “data scrapers” whose primary goal is to extract Twitter data for their own benefit.

Resyndication Rules Could Cause Problems

According to Mashabale Tech, new restrictions on resyndicating data appear to mean that information contained within a tweet — such as a URL — cannot be sent to another service using a third-party client. Mashable says this “could be problematic for social news aggregators such as paper.li, Postano and RebelMouse” and “have a much larger impact on the entire Twitter ecosystem,” including mainstream applications as well as third-party developers and power users.

Ultimately, Twitter is probably in a position to enact whatever API rules it likes and ride out any developer backlash. As Fishman states in his article, “If (Twitter’s value proposition) is not good enough, build and market your own platform and see how much money that makes you.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Ingeniux Unveils Version 8 of Its Web CMS, Focus is Mobile, ASP.NET

Ingeniux has released its CMS 8, with such features as a new deployment server technology, improved mobile optimization and new ASP.NET developer capabilities.

The .NET-based Dynamic Site Server (DSS) has been completely revised in the new version. Enhancements include content delivery and rendering performance, and default support for ASP.NET MVC3, the new Razor view engine and ASPX templates.

Mobile Optimization

DSS also has a new authentication and authorization system, mobile device detection that uses the 51Degrees.mobi library and support for XSLT templates. The .mobi library contains display specs for thousands of mobile devices, which enables the DSS to automatically redirect page requests to device-optimized pages.

Version 8 also provides a preview of how pages will look on specific mobile devices, using a library of device skins. Within the mobile device preview, which includes iPhone, iPad, and Android products, users can change content inline and can switch between portrait and landscape modes.

Also new is SiteSync, a replication system that increases granular control and monitoring, provides support for a variety of replication methods, enables configuration of replication rules for a particular site or publishing target, and allows replication to be scheduled as an automated task.

And a new Schema Designer, for creating and updating XML schemas, provides a drag-and-drop editor that allows schemas to be created without coding. The company said the new Designer simplifies the process of editing schemas, reviewing previous versions and syncing changes to existing content.

Web Experience Management

Ingeniux CMS is a web experience management system for sites. It offers web-based AJAX clients, in-context XML editing, integrated analytics, options for dynamic delivery and an App Store.

Founded in 1999 and based in Seattle, Ingeniux’s products provide management for websites, content and collaboration.

The company said its approach is different than other vendors, because it offers “a complete set of services that include quarterly site audits, on-call developer support, and community source website solutions like event calendars, newsletters, and slideshows.” Other services/products include SEO, analytics, site planning and development. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Developer Friendly FusionLeaf Open Source CMS Goes Live

FusionLeaf, the brainchild of developer Joseph Spurrier, is now open to the public, and the open source CMS can build fully featured websites complete with analytics, rich text editing and all the tools we expect from a modern Web CMS.

If you're not a tech geek, the system can be used like a lever to create your site, but developers especially can most properly wield the new release, according to Spurrier.

Twitter-Based Architecture

FusionLeaf is based on a toolkit called Bootstrap, and it's the same base used by Twitter, among other websites. 

FusionLeaf is built for speed and currently operates in either Windows or Linux based environments.  

This makes any website built with FusionLeaf a natural for viewing on varied screen sizes like mobile devices. Additionally, the system supports search engine optimization and tools like a sitemap generator, menu builder and a theme selector.

Flexibility Rules

This is one reason FusionLeaf is geared to developers. It's very configureable. There's an internal code editor that can change database code or text code in files, and there's a help section with code snippets and reference samples.

Furthermore, FusionLeaf includes security features like protection from SQL injection attacks and disaster recovery in the form of single click backup and restore. As an open source system, FusionLeaf is free to download, and it comes as a CMS portion and a Stack install. The Stack helps turn your Windows machine into a web server and gets the CMS portion up and running. It won't even take up that much hard drive space (40MB).

The Basic toolkit can be upgraded to the advanced Web toolkit as familiarity is gained with FusionLeaf.

Along with the above mentioned tools, FusionLeaf allows admins to see logged in users and the authority to give or withdraw access with one click. While FusionLeaf at first glance appears to be a one man project, perhaps with the right user base, the PHP compatible system could really take off. Any developes out there willing to give it a spin?

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com