SharePoint Saturday, Silicon Valley, 5/30/2015

My Presentation

• SharePoint Notifications: Migration, testing and upgrades communication strategy
• Abstract
  Robert Freeman coordinated SharePoint upgrades and governance for 2 of the State of California's largest public agencies. This session will go over some of the tools that were developed to implement the communication strategy and make the process run smoother for all. Links will be provided for a free download of the tool and you will get the opportunity to discuss migration, architecture, and upgrade strategy.
• Link to Presentation

Conference Link

• SharePoint Saturday Silicon Valley Homepage

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
• SharePoint 2010 Version
• SharePoint 2013 Version
• 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)
• Added a MultiSelect choice field in the list called "Display To"
• Based on the SP.PermissionKind Enumeration
• 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)
• Added a MultiSelect choice field in the list called "Display To"
• Based on the SP.PermissionKind Enumeration

Backlog

• Develop an Office 365 app version
• Add parameter for dismissal duration length