Essential SharePoint

About |

Susan Hanley is a consultant, author and Microsoft Office Servers and Services MVP. She specializes in helping organizations build effective portal and collaboration solutions using SharePoint. She is the co-author of Essential SharePoint 2013. You can find her speaking schedule, white papers, books and conference presentations at www.susanhanley.com.

How-To

How to Ensure that Users are Prompted for Document Metadata in Office 365 and SharePoint 2016

In Office 365 (SharePoint Online) and SharePoint 2016, when you upload a single document to a library with metadata, you are not prompted to enter the metadata values unless at least one field is required. This article describes...

03/16/16

Opinion

5 Tips for Improving Document Findability in SharePoint

One of the best features about SharePoint is search – but did you know that there are several ways you can improve search results without touching a line of code? These five tips can help your users find what they are looking for more...

02/10/16

Opinion

5 Key Lessons from Award-Winning Intranets

The intranets that won the Step Two 2015 Intranet Innovation Award shared 5 key characteristics that every effective intranet should include. They were all: fit for purpose, built iteratively, measured, aligned with but not...

10/30/15

Opinion

If you measure it, they will come!

It’s always much easier to talk about measuring the value of technology investments when you are talking about systems such as general ledger or accounts payable – where the value can be measured in terms of improving a business...

08/21/15

Opinion

New activity logging and reporting for Office 365: Improve compliance and gain insights

In a blog post on July 8, 2015, Microsoft announced new activity logging and reporting capabilities for Office 365. These new features will begin rolling out starting this month and will be available in the reports section of the...

07/09/15

Opinion

Mobile First. Cloud First. People First. Welcome to Ignite 2015.

On May 4, 2015, Satya Nadella and other Microsoft executives announced upcoming capabilities coming to Office and Windows that are designed to reflect Microsoft’s focus on “mobile first|cloud first” and delivering consistent user...

05/09/15

Opinion

The future of SharePoint and Collaboration: Choose Your Own Adventure

This week, Microsoft published two blog posts that talk about the future of collaboration. The first, published on April 15, is called “The rise of dynamic teams.” This post is a bit of a “think piece” that talks about the rationale...

04/18/15

Opinion

5 Key Approaches to Overcome Barriers and Ensure Success with Enterprise Social

While enterprise communities can help drive change, getting people to transition to using enterprise social networks (ESNs) requires an investment in change management. This article recommends 5 key approaches to help drive adoption...

04/06/15

Opinion

The Design Lesson We Should Take Away from “The Dress” – Usability Testing Matters!

By now, pretty much everyone in the world has weighed in on the color of “the dress” originally appearing in a post in Tumblr. It’s amazing how this one little post basically blew up the internet, but there is a really important...

02/28/15

Opinion

Microsoft, Privacy, and the Cloud: Pick all Three

In a blog post today, Brad Smith, General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs for Microsoft announced that Microsoft has adopted the first international standard for cloud privacy (ISO/IEC 27018:2014)....

02/16/15

Opinion

Yes, Virginia, there will be another SharePoint on premises!

In a blog post on February 2, Julia White, Microsoft’s general manager for Office Product Management, defined a plan for the evolution of SharePoint, answering the question that a lot of customers wanted to know: With all the emphasis...

02/04/15

Opinion

Get a First Look at What to Expect at Microsoft Ignite! – the place to be from May 4-8, 2015

Earlier today, Microsoft published the first look at the session line up for the upcoming Ignite conference in Chicago from May 4-8, 2015. Ignite is a combined event that is bringing together people who may have attended the Microsoft...

01/28/15

Opinion

Tips to Help Content Editors Create Better Content for SharePoint Pages

Sometimes content authors need a little help to create great content for SharePoint. This article includes a dozen helpful hints for writing SharePoint content and five tips for using images to help improve user experience.

01/21/15

Opinion

5 New Year’s Resolutions (Tips) for SharePoint Power Users

5 Helpful SharePoint Tips for Better User Experiences

01/11/15

Opinion

12 Key Strategies for Unlocking the Secrets of SharePoint User Adoption

This article summarizes 12 key strategies for SharePoint user adoption.

08/29/14

Opinion

Measuring what Matters: Using SharePoint Analytics to Provide Clues about Business Impact

This article explores an approach to use to think about how to use system and business metrics to provide clues to help identify and improve both the adoption and business impact of SharePoint solutions.

07/11/14

Analysis

Insights from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference

There was an overwhelming amount of information to process at the recent Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas. This conference continued the themes of the last SharePoint Conference in 2012: cloud, mobile, and social....

03/10/14

Analysis

Hashtag Helper: 7 tips to get more value from hashtags in SharePoint 2013

The organizations I'm currently working with are seeing some tremendous value leveraging the social capabilities of SharePoint and Yammer. I'm going to share some great stories about how they have overcome barriers to deliver...

01/30/14

Analysis

Essential Intranets by James Robertson: Essential reading for intranet planning and design

I was lucky enough to get a copy of Essential Intranets by the always brilliant James Robertson to review. If he hadn't given it to me, I would have bought a copy, and you should too, because this book is a must read for intranet...

10/31/13

Analysis

SharePoint Trick: Link to an Image Thumbnail

I am working with a client where we have a SharePoint list and each list item is associated with an image in an image library. We can easily create a link from the list to the image itself using a Hyperlink column in the list - but...

08/30/13