Thursday, April 9, 2015

SharePoint Migration and Administration Notification Tool

Scenario
  • You are performing an administrative change at the SharePoint site level or for all sub-sites starting at a particular location
    • Examples
      • Migration
      • Retention, Archival or Deletion
      • Redesign
      • User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
      • Upgrade
      • Restructure
      • Merge
  • You need to convey the administrative status to all users on the site
    • Likely as part of your SharePoint administrative communications plan
    Issue
    • There is no simple or easy out of the box way to accomplish this
    • We don't want to manually replicate notifications on each sub-site, modify the master pages, or configure content roll-ups on each site
    Solution
    • I developed the SharePoint Migration Notification Tool specifically for this purpose
      • Download SharePointMigrationNotification.wsp for deployment at the Site Collection level on a SharePoint on-premises farm
      • Add and Install the WSP file you downloaded
      • Enable the site collection feature named "Migration Notification" on each site collection
      • Add a list to the root site for each site collection.  Select the "Migration Notification URLs" list template (found under Blank & Custom list types)
        • You can name this whatever you like, but you should only have 1 of these lists at the site collection root because the tool uses the first one it finds
    • Here are some examples of the default notifications you can configure
      • You can also add your own custom notification messages

    • Here is the list configured at the Site Collection root level that defines your notifications
      • The new/edit item forms describe what should be entered in each field

    • Notification Tool Feature List
      • Site Collection Deployed full trust solution (Currently designed for SharePoint 2010+)
      • Client object model exclusively used for notification processing in order to support future releases on the SharePoint 2013 app model and Office 365 environments
      • Drop down selection of common notification scenarios
      • Migration notification list definition
        • Must be added to the root site collection
      • Configurable notification text with wiki-like syntax for inserting hyperlinks or a date from the Migration Notification List
        • More Info URL
        • New URL
        • Migration Date
      • SharePoint client object model property bag caching to reduce server load and increase performance
      • Supports the standard notification color selections
      • Include all sub-sites (notification can be overridden at the child site level)
      • New / test site URL replacement including the full path to the current page/form
      • Notification disable flag
      • Automatic population of the title field from the New Site URL wiki when sent to a ".../NewForm.aspx?source=..."  page (Using "New URL Set Title" syntax)
      • Permission based notification visibility (security trimming)
      • Notification dismissal option (cookie based)
        • 1 day dismissal duration
      • Automatically delete sites from the migration notification list by selecting Auto Delete or Auto Recycle in the Old Site Status field
        • This capability is enabled through a separate Site Collection feature and requires the user to have permissions to delete the site
        • This feature is especially useful for retention policies that require you to post a notice of deletion before deleting the site.
        • If you use Auto Delete instead of Auto Recycle, you should backup the site first if there is any possibility of needing a restore
    • Contact me for SharePoint Farm Upgrade or Migration services, to request a customized version of this solution, or to provide SharePoint Solution Architecture services
    Releases
    • Release 1.3.2.0 (2013 only): 11/7/2015
      • Fixed a bug when removing an existing Migration Notification List and adding another with a different name.
    • Release 1.3.1.0: 7/6/2015
      • SharePoint 2013 list view fix
      • 3 digit year date format fix (115 fixed to be 2015)
    • Release 1.3.0.0: 5/29/2015
      • SharePoint 2013 version created
    • Release 1.3.0.0: 5/27/2015
      • New Features
        • Auto Delete Old Site feature added
          • New feature activates migration notification list event receiver keying off a new field type "Old Site Status"
        • Refactored to use ScriptLink and _layouts JavaScript code file to enable browser based code caching
    • Release 1.2.1.0: 5/15/2015
      • Bug Fixes
        • Redirect URL now works when browsing folders within a list/library
          • These links now redirect to the Document Library root folder
      • New Features
        • Notification dismissal option (cookie based)
          • 1 day dismissal duration
    • Release 1.2.0.0: 5/13/2015
      • Bug Fixes
        • URLs with spaces and special characters now work correctly
          • You will need to make sure to unencode the URLs when entering them in the list.  The title field description now reflects this requirement.
        • Redirect URLs with special characters will now be encoded correctly
      • Added Features
        • Permission based notification visibility (security trimming)
    Backlog
    • Develop an Office 365 app version
    • Add parameter for dismissal duration length

    6 comments:

    1. Love the idea of this, but we installed it in 2010 and the status bars do not come up at all. I enabled the notification as well as every single permission mask type. It's been enabled for a couple of hours and still does not come up.

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      Replies
      1. Hi Michael, can you post a screenshot of your Migration Notification URLs list entries. Also, is the list installed at the root site collection? It should be at "http://www.mydomain.com/MigrationNotificationURLList" or similar.

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    2. You are awesome, this is working like a charm, thank you so much

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    3. Thank you Robert for this tool! Is it possible to show multiple notifications? Or is it designed to show one notification ribbon at a time (or am I doing something wrong).
      Thanks!

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. Glad you're using it! This tool only displays 1 notification at a time. It will however add-in SharePoint generated notifications as additional messages. This can be a little odd if the color changes. The code logic prioritizes items deepest into the hierarchy first, then it just goes by whatever record it parses first if there is a tie. Ex: A root level notification will be overridden by a notification entered at the subsite level.

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    4. Very Nice Blogs! I have to learning for lot of information for this sites.Sharing for wonderful information about the SharePoint Migration and Notification Tool.

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