Yesterday, you’ve seen the first half of my checklist for a successful SharePoint 2010 site. Today, I’m going to talk about few final tips so your next site is as good as you want it gets.

Beware of out-of-the-box forms
You know all of those handy DispForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx, well those may be really great for a collaboration site, but there is really no place for them in a public site scenario, at least for general audience to see. First of all, those forms expose fully or partially the collaboration functionality which users have no access to (alerts, workflows stc) … secondly, they just don’t inherit your beautiful masterpage and look just plain. Lock all of those down; one of the recommended approaches is to enable ViewFormPagesLockdown feature on the site collection, which should be enabled by default for Publishing Sites. This will ensure, View All Site Content, and other internal pages are locked down too.
Read more on Lockdown Mode in SharePoint 2010

Careful with out-of-the-box modal dialogs, they bite
Modals look ok for a collaboration site, but for public site they are not something you should actively rely on. First, they make your site look dated; secondly, they load a lot of JavaScript making your site slow; finally, have you seen how modal dialogs render on a mobile device? Try zooming into the dialog on a touch phone . If you need your users to enter data, just create a web part for it, it’ll be worth it.

Test customizations as an anonymous user
If your site has customizations, such as web parts or application pages, make sure all of those work under the anonymous user. In the best case scenario, your web part won’t render on the page. In not so lucky scenario, you will get an Access Denied on entire page or just plain old equivalent of SharePoint 500 Error. If you have a suspicion that a web part is crashing your page, use an old trick – append the URL of the page with ?contents=1 … as in default.aspx?contents=1 and you will see a web part maintenance page where you can disable individual web parts and then go back to the page and add the web part again with a proper configuration.

Test the content as an anonymous user
Same as above, but this time related to content. Especially if you’re using publishing workflows and your page is in checked out or pending approval state, you will not see latest changes when accessing the site under anonymous user. In some cases, if you’re using a sophisticated automated deployment as described in chapter one of my book here you may forget to publish and approve pages resulting in entire site to have blank pages. Obviously, again, using my wonderful book example, you can just bulk publish all of those pages in a matter of minutes.

Weather, stock, twitter, and other JavaScript web parts – those can be trouble
If you’re using Weather, Twitter, some kind of real time or pseudo-real time stock web part ensure that those run asynchronously. If your weather web part is pulling multiple JavaScript files from a weather provider loaded with ads and those take time to load – your entire page can fail to load until that web part has loaded its resources. If you run those web parts in asynchronous mode, they load when they’re ready but the user is still can view the site. This also applies if you’re hosting ads from an ad provider.

Check for JavaScript errors on page
If you’re using legacy JavaScript modules; something that was created 3 years ago and you’re not referencing the latest JS libraries, you might not only lose cross-browser compatibility, but also cause occasional JavaScript errors on page. Keep in mind that depending on where your JavaScript error has occurred, the rest of JS scripts may fail to load making your page look ok, but be partially or completely dysfunctional.

Use analytics, in-and-out-of-the-box
One of the most important measures for any public site, is it’s usage. This is really the only way for you to know your customer reach. So make sure you use analytics, both out-of-the-box SharePoint, ISV analytics tools, and classic things such as Google Analytics.

That’s about it. Obviously, the list is not a final list, public site is a journey with continuous improvement opportunities, so keep up with it.

Enjoy!

Whether you’re building a public site using SharePoint foundation, cloud hosted environment OR using a dedicated environment with SharePoint Enterprise edition, there are few things to be aware of and pay attention to:

Keep the branding fresh
This applies to new sites and existing designs to be ported over to SharePoint as a new platform. The branding of your site will represent what your company is all about online. So, freshen up your site with few new ideas to keep it up to date.

Be mobile friendly
Remember about mobile devices, and not just phones, tablets too, and not just that one tablet. If you’re going to be supporting mobile devices, make sure you support at least few current models. Most of the new mobile devices have browsers capable of running HTML5, and if they don’t they will very soon; so this is not a lot of work.
Use a masterpage which is HTML5 compatible, like this one here: http://kyleschaeffer.com/sharepoint/v5-responsive-html5-master-page/. It’ll render the masterpage differently based on the screen resolution etc.

Really think about your site Information Architecture
Now I know that you’re probably yawning there … who needs information architecture, right? And I’m sure for a large corporate site you’re doing all the due diligence to get it right, right? For small, simple sites, at least decide what main sections are you going to have on your site: About Us, Clients, Products?
The reason why you want to think about IA, is so that you can decide how each of those sections are going to look like and what content will go where. In a future, if you need to add a new section, you can re-use one of the existing ones as a template. Also, your navigation is going to be more straightforward. I’ve seen some sites where all the pages sit on a root site and there is over 50 of them; now how do you expect anyone to navigate such a flat structure?

Multilingual requirements? Think about the implementation now
Again, this is not something that will come up right away for everyone … but if you think you might have a requirement to support multiple languages on your site in a near future, think about the implementation and design your site with those requirements in mind. You might want to use SharePoint variations feature or create a separate site collections for each language. Whatever the approach, knowing it early will reduce the amount of rework once the implementation starts.

WIKIs are great for SharePoint Foundation sites
If your site is built on SharePoint Foundation, try designing it around the WIKI infrastructure. By having your main site areas as WIKI libraries you can allow your content authors to create new pages using SharePoint UI. You can also roll up those pages which translates in easier content authoring experience without having to use tools like SharePoint Designer just to create pages.

Don’t hardcode, use Content Query, Reusable Content
Content Editor Web Part is a great tool, but if you have a phone number or a link hardcoded in it on 5 different pages, you will really hate yourself when it comes to updating it.
Instead, use a reusable content list, available in Publishing site infrastructure, which allows you to reference a reusable piece of content from a single source. Same goes for roll ups. If you have news articles and such, or even company products as pages, use roll-ups rather than hardcoding links on pages.

Add some content before showing it off internally
Lorem ipsum might be realistic way of showing how the content will look like on your site, but really … just enter some real content at least for main areas of the site so that people can visualize what the site and all the sections are all about.

Are you gonna use that search or should I “return it”?
Don’t forget that search is available in SharePoint Foundation and Server versions. If you’re not using it, disable the feature so that search pages are not parsed by search engines and you end up exposing a part of the site that is not branded nor functional, ask me how I know.

Now that you mention, what about those search engines? SEO?
Yes, SharePoint 2010 needs some work when it comes to SEO. There is no way I can summarize it all in this paragraph, so I’ll give you this really helpful link. There is quite a lot on the subject.

I think this is good for starters, stay tuned for the part 2 (now posted)

You can thank me later or you can check out my SharePoint 2010 Branding book and learn more!

Whether you’re using SharePoing Designer to customize your site or other tools, you’ll benefit from this quick tutorial on how to transfer those customizations to Visual Studio so that you can share them with others.

Enjoy!

Here is the scenario: You’ve got WFE Server which is also an app server with PowerPivot set up, we’ll call it SPWFE. You also have the database server which is a SharePoint database, let’s call it SPDB. That same server hosts reporting services. Lastly you’ve got a 3rd database server hosting some data, let’s call it the LOBDataDB. So you have a PowerPivot workbook sitting in your SPWFE PowerPivot library, the data retrieved being retrieved from LOBDataDB. When you execute the workbook right from the PowerPivot library – the workbook renders no problem. When you use this workbook as a datasource to build the report in the ReportBuilder you get

The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized

Here are the ground rules … you have to configure Kerberos authentication on:
-SPWFE, since it will be accessing data and passing credentials to other machines
-SPDB, well if SPWFE uses Kerberos, the DB server has to use it too
-LOBDataDB, needs to have Kerberos configured because SPWFE will be accessing information from it

For detailed instructions on how to configure Kerberos in each of the scenarios, search for this document which explains everything in details: Configure Kerberos Authentication for SharePoint 2010 Products

The solution:

So considering Kerberos is configured, you still need to ensure that PowerPivot uses Kerberos for it’s configurations.

On the SPWFE machine, access the following default folder for default PowerPivot installation:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\PowerPivot

Find the web.config, and locate the four nodes:

<transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/>

and replace the clientCredentialType attribute value to:

<transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm"/>

Now, under the customBinding node, locate the

<httpTransport manualAddressing="true"
authenticationScheme="Negotiate" transferMode="Streamed"
maxReceivedMessageSize="9223372036854775807"/>

and ensure the authenticationScheme is set to Negotiate as shown above.
Make this change for both custom bindings.

Now when you access the report server query builder and pass the PowerPivot datasheet as a data source, you should have no problem adding an entities.

Enjoy!

If you’re trying to explore one of the cool new integrations in SharePoint 2010 BI stack, PowerPivot, you might run into the problem where your PowerPivot workbooks will return the following error, when you try clicking on the slicer in your excel sheet in attempt to filter the data:

Unable to refresh data for a data connection in the workbook.
Try again or contact your system administrator.
The following connections failed to refresh
Data

Now, the first you might think – that the issue is related to the data refresh, and there is plenty on the internet related to the data refresh. The error is actually related to the PowerPivot not being able to access the data. The refresh capability is the ability to refresh workbooks automatically and has nothing to do with this error, in fact it will mislead you trying to troubleshoot the wrong issue.

If your SharePoint is running in a multiserver environment where your database is sitting somewhere else and your web front end sitting on another machine you might think that authentication has failed.
You may even think you need to install Kerberos, however …
The PowerPivot system is claims aware, and uses the Claims To Windows Token Service to recreate the client’s Windows identity using the client’s claims token in order to connect with the Analysis Service engine that runs on the application server.

Also Microsoft tells us:

When a PowerPivot workbook is uploaded in SharePoint Server,
it already contains the PowerPivot data that the workbook uses.
When the user opens the PowerPivot workbook in Excel Web Access and
interacts with the slicers, the PowerPivot System Service loads
the data in the workbook directly into its Analysis Services engine.
No access is made to the data connection embedded in the workbook.

However, if your PowerPivot workbook contains a data connection to a SQL Server instance that is linked to another SQL Server instance on a separate machine, you’ll need to configure Kerberos authentication with identity delegation for data refresh your data.

Check out how to configure Kerberos in this scenario using the doc here.

If you fall under the scenario where you don’t have distributed data stored on multiple servers and used in your PowerPivot workbook, then ensure the following:

You have installed SQL Server Analysis Services (PowerPivot) on your web front end machine.
When you navigate to Central Admin -> Services on this server, in the list of services on your web front end machine you see SQL Server Analysis Services (PowerPivot) is a started state.
If you don’t see it at all on the web front end server, you must install SQL Server Analysis Services (PowerPivot).
If you see it in the stopped state, try starting it again and refresh the page; if the service stops shortly after, the account which runs the service might have an expired password.

A simple way to verify that out of the box configuration works, navigate to Central Admin -> Manage Service Applications -> PowerPivot Service Application and ensure that PowerPivot Service Application dashboard shows its own system reports.

If you don’t see those, it’s a very high chance you won’t get your custom reports working.