SharePoint Managed Metadata - Import Term Set

In a new SharePoint tutorial in the kalmstrom.com Tips section I describe how to import a list of metadata to SharePoint using a free third party macro-enabled Excel template.

Information about information
Metadata is often described as information about information. The SharePoint Search will give more exact and accurate data if everyone add metadata to items when they create them, but for this to work well there must be a specified list of metadata to choose from.

Managed metadata
Such centrally pre-defined metadata is called managed metadata. This collection of centrally managed terms that should be used as metadata is managed by a Term Store administrator, who organizes them into a hierarchical term set.

Import to Term Store
In the Tips article I show how to import metadata to the term store. This is done with the help of a macro-enabled Excel template, created by another Swedish SharePoint expert, Wictor Wilén. He created it for SharePoint and Excel 2010, but it works just as well with the 2013 versions, both on-premise and SharePoint Online. Thank you, Wictor!

The demo below is rather summary, but in the Tips article about import of metadata I give links to more detailed information.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

New Forces In The kalmstrom.com Support

Today is a special day, as my father, Sigge, celebrates his seventieth birthday. Sigge has been working with kalmstrom.com since 2007, but now he is leaving some of his tasks to younger forces.

Support anchor
When Sigge joined kalmstrom.com the team was small, but even at that time questions had to be answered and problems had to be solved. I think nearly all our customers and evaluators have had contact with Sigge, who also was responsible for the support during the first years.

Sigge made sure all e-mails were answered quickly and all problems were solved in a timely manner, and his work has been much appreciated.

However, Sigge is not a software developer, and eventually we could let one of the kalmstrom.com developers, Jitu Patidar, take over Sigge's responsibility. Sigge continued to answer e-mails, but not as many as before.

Strong support = strong products
Today we have two more developers in the support team: Arpeet Gujarathi and Ankit Raghuvanshi. To engage developers directly in the technical support is highly beneficial to the product development.

             

When developers get to know first-hand about a problem or request, directly from the caller, there are no delays and the developers get a better understanding of how the kalmstrom.com Solutions are used. For the same reason the QA team is also following the support contacts closely, even if they are not communicating with customers.

German and Swedish
Sigge will continue to answer e-mails in German and Swedish. He will also answer urgent support e-mails in evenings and weekends, when our developers are off. He can always contact either Jitu or kalmstrom.com Lead Developer Jayant Rimza at such occasions, so that we can give service also out of office hours.

I am happy to be able to work together with my parents and take advantage of their experiences, and I am sure Sigge will be in the background for many years more. Thank you for all your good work so far, Daddy!

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

SharePoint Study Manager Overview

The development of Study Manager, our SharePoint Solution for online training, will soon be finished. Study Manager is a sponsored kalmstrom.com Solution, requested by teachers who want to add self-correcting exercises and tasks to SharePoint and supervise their students' work with them.

Take advantage of SharePoint
Many companies and organizations use SharePoint for cooperation and sharing, so SharePoint was the obvious platform when I was asked to develop a learning management system. Using SharePoint as the base means that Study Manager will be easier to understand and learn.

Another advantage is that inbuilt SharePoint features like forum apps, news feeds and document libraries can be used to customize and enhance the Study Manager site collection. In the manual we describe how such customizations can be made, and there is much more information in the SharePoint Tips articles on kalmstrom.com

Even if we have made use of as much standard SharePoint functionality as possible, the development of Study Manager has been a large-scale undertaking. I am glad that the kalmstrom.com developers and testers are so skilled and know SharePoint so well that we could take on this development commission.

               

Study Manager documentation
The documentation of Study Manager has also been an extensive task, as everything had to be created from scratch. My mother Kate and Rituka Rimza have done the major parts, and now the manual is almost finished and the slideshow is displayed here below.

Several video demonstrations are also nearly completed, and the web pages are coming together nicely. Soon everything will be ready for the Study Manager release.

If you want to know more about Study Manager before the QA team gives thumbs up, take a look at the slideshow and read about Study Manager in my earlier blog posts:
http://blog.kalmstrom.com/2014/12/sharepoint-study-manager-exercises-and.html
http://blog.kalmstrom.com/2015/01/create-sharepoint-self-study-exercises.html

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Anniversaries For YouTube And The kalmstrom.com Channel

I don't think it has escaped anyone that YouTube celebrated its ten years anniversary on February 14, but YouTube actually has one more cause for celebrating: the kalmstrom.com YouTube channel has been live for five years ;-)

Product demos and Microsoft tutorials
The kalmstrom.com YouTube Channel contains two kinds of video demonstrations: demos of the kalmstrom.com Solutions and tutorials on Microsoft platforms.

Each of our products has an introduction video and also demonstrations on installation and various features. They are popular among our subscribers and maybe even more among evaluators, who get easily accessible information that is a good complement to the more detailed descriptions in the manuals.

The kalmstrom.com Tips section has around 100 YouTube videos combined with written explanations and step by step instructions. It began as a service to kalmstrom.com Subscribers, but we soon saw that many more wanted to study my tutorials on SharePoint, Excel and Outlook and other IT topics. We even have a few articles about YouTube videos!

Quality issues
We created the kalmstrom.com YouTube Channel on February 17, 2010. By that time we had managed to achieve good quality videos, after a long process of trial and error. Our videos most often show computer screens with many details, so we had to find a way of recording and producing that gave very clear videos.

That we finally could create videos with acceptable quality did not only depend on our persistence in trying. During the time we experimented YouTube developed fast and gave more possibilities, and as YouTube grew the software we use for recording, Camtasia Studio, adapted to YouTube. Now we are happily uploading at least one video per week!

YouTube Partner
Today kalmstrom.com Business Solutions is a YouTube Partner with access to additional YouTube features. The kalmstrom.com Channel has well over 4000 subscribers, and I am sure the number of views will reach a million this year. That is not bad for a channel that neither has music nor cute cats and dogs!

We are constantly deleting old product videos and replacing them with new ones when the kalmstrom.com Solutions are updated. In spite of those removals we still have over 200 videos on YouTube.



After five years on YouTube the kalmstrom.com Channel is a success, and I will make sure it stays that way. You can look forward to many more informative video demonstrations from kalmstrom.com.

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Use SharePoint Surveys For Polls And Questionnaires

When you quickly need to collect opinions from a group of people I don't think there is a faster way than to use a SharePoint Survey. It only takes a few minutes to create it, and provided people are logged in and really do answer you can have the result in a few minutes more. You can even get a graphic presentation of the result or export it to Excel!

In a new article in the kalmstrom.com Tips section I describe step by step how to create a survey in SharePoint 2013. The steps are similar in earlier versions, as this feature has not changed much since SharePoint 2007.

Survey app
When you create the survey app it looks much like a normal list, but there are some differences. You see one of them when you select answer type for your survey question: the survey list has a rating scale answer type, in addition to choice, single or multiple lines of text, Yes/No and other more common answer types.

The other difference comes when you have entered a question and selected answer type and other settings: there is no OK button like in other lists. Instead you can choose between Next Question and Finish. If you select Next Question, you can add another question with the same or a new answer type.

Survey + Workflow issue
A drawback when you use a survey is that it does not support workflows, and this is something to keep in mind. If you for example want to archive survey results to another SharePoint list, you cannot do it with a workflow.

However, for archiving kalmstrom.com has a better solution: SP Archive. With SP Archive you can send SharePoint list items to an Access or SQL Server database in a customized manner that gives you more influence over the process than you get with a workflow.

Study Group Surveys
When I created the Tips article about SharePoint Survey creation I thought about Study Manager, the new kalmstrom.com SharePoint Solution under development.

Study Manager is installed in its own site collection, one for each subject. In this site collection teachers add the self-study material that Study Manager gives a framework for, but it should also be used for wider cooperation and information on the subject.

All users have access to the Study Manager root site, so here you can gather news feeds, videos, forums and surveys that is interesting for all teachers and students. Each study group or class has its own subsite, which can be used for material of the same kind intended only for the group.

I hope this survey tip will be interesting not only to Study Manager users but to many more. The SharePoint Survey is a convenient tool that should be used more than I think it is.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions