11. February 2010 by Vince.

There are a few ways to brand your SharePoint site so that it has the look and feel that is right for your company.  You can use the web interface to change themes and styles or use SharePoint designer to edit layouts and master pages.  However, these methods only give you one-off modifications to a specific site collection, and don’t allow you to migrate your design across multiple sites or SharePoint installations.

What I need to accomplish:

• brand my SharePoint site, including master pages, layout pages, stylesheets, and images
• apply the same branding to 3 environments: dev, staging, and production

The best way to do this is to use Visual Studio to create a Solution Package with all of the branding elements included.  This way we can simply deploy the solution onto all of the different environments to have a uniform look and feel without having to do the work multiple times.

This article in msdn describes in great detail the steps for creating the solution and deploying it, by having the administrator activate the branding feature on the site.

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14. January 2010 by Vince.

[Listening to Nas: Stillmatic] Okay, so my company is getting ready to come up, enterprise style, and how do we do this?  Set up a Sharepoint site.  Cool.  Now I’ve been assigned to this project.  Let me back it up.  The company currently has about 3,000 employees who all use a PHP-based intranet for work applications and document management.  The intranet sits on a LAMP stack (which we recently migrated over from Mac servers) and was created when the company was just a start-up, and development standards and architecture were not of any concern.  The current phase of the Sharepoint project involves three major components:

• creating a document management system
• migrating existing documents on the Intranet and file servers over
• integrating our existing Intranet applications on the Sharepoint site

Until the project started a couple months ago, I had absolutely no experience with Sharepoint at all.  In fact, I didn’t even know what the hell it was.  But that all had to change really quickly.  Unfortunately, my company cut the budget for training so we (myself and another developer) were pretty much instructed to just find some online tutorials and figure it out by ourselves.  That is the whole reason for this section of the blog: to document all the stuff that I break and how to fix it ;)  And also to share all the good knowledge that I learn along the way.

Just FYI, there is already a LOT of really good blogs out there about Sharepoint, and I’m going to try to minimize duplication as much as possible, so don’t expect to find every answer you want here.  I am most definitely not the expert, but I will post the links to their sites whenever I find out some good tidbits.  I’m just merely documenting my aches and pains of learning Sharepoint from the ground up.

Word of warning: don’t expect to find any sort of logical order in my posts either.  I’m really just attacking this thing from all angles and sharing what I learn along the way.

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