FlyView - SharePoint Site Menu And Navigation Tool

Introducing FlyView for SharePoint Online, 2016, 2013, 2010 and 2007

I like to introduce one of the SharePoint tools I have been working on lately, for SharePoint Online, 2013, 2010 and 2007.  A tool that is designed to improve SharePoint user experience.

A SharePoint user would know what this phrase means 'Working on it...'. It means the time it takes for us to browse through the layers of SharePoint sites, libraries and folders of our SharePoint intranet and team sites and discover SharePoint content.

The SharePoint User Experience - Today

The present SharePoint experience involves a lot of page loads and as such delivers a 'Stop n Go' user experience. No doubt Microsoft have improved their SharePoint products a lot and in the world of collaboration they stand out form the crowd, however SharePoint users often complain about the difficulties in exploring and discovering SharePoint content. So much so sometimes it is said if you want to hide something then store it in SharePoint. Definitely it is not that it is due to SharePoint product design. In part it could be because of a number of factors such as bad governance, inefficient information architecture, lack of processes and standards, SharePoint search not properly configured etc. However yes, to some extent the problem exacerbate due to the way SharePoint offers the user to navigate the sites, click by click, page loads by page loads.

Furthermore the absence of breadcrumb menu in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 (even limitations with SharePoint 2010) doesn't help either. Often you find yourself lost, not knowing where exactly you are, how did you arrive here and how to get out of here.

Result:

Whatever could be the reason, in the end it is the end users who suffer. They love SharePoint but complain about the user experience, delivering a kind of love-hate User-SharePoint relationship.

Solution: FlyView for SharePoint, a lightning fast SharePoint Site menu

I decided to give it a try, with one of my best friend, and ended up with developing FlyView for SharePoint. We wanted to bring back the true love of SharePoint to its users. Researching and creating a product (in an evolutionary way that took about two years of product development and refinement including failures :) ) that would address the navigation challenges in SharePoint in an intuitive way. I humbly hope it would genuinely help the SharePoint users in getting most out of it.

So what is it?

It is a chrome web browser extension for SharePoint that you can add to your browser in seconds. FlyView detects when you visit a SharePoint intranet or team site (where you need to authenticate) and adds a self hiding Site menu nav bar on the top of the site as an overlay.

Now as you move your mouse on this nav bar it reveals it's self expanding menu and sub menus. You are essentially gliding through the SharePoint site structure. Your landing page doesn't change and you see everything that you are allowed to in FlyView, your focus is on the structure and files/documents. It significantly reduces the page loads and thus optimise the network bandwidth too.

See FlyView in Action here

Any concerns?

You do not need to install anything on the server or the desktop (apart from the chrome extension). It is developer in pure javascript and can only perform the actions on your behalf. That is if you are not allowed to do something then FlyView couldn't either. Also it is a ready only tool that reads the site structure and helps you navigate the site very fast.

Testimonials and Feedbacks:

I personally use it and a big fan of it. I can see it has increased my productivity where I spend less time in discovering SharePoint content and more time in consuming the knowledge.

In a short period of time we now have over 600 users and have received some great user feedback (see on chromestore) which is very encouraging and enable me to keep moving forward.

What's Next?

A server version and a SharePoint Online app is on it's way which will enable the organisations to deploy it once and have it available in all major browsers including Internet Explorer and on mobile devices such as IPads. The users will not have to install anything as it will be installed on the server.

Additionally soon I will be releasing the History and Favorites features (Feb 2016) which will further improve the speed with you which you could navigate the SharePoint sites and libraries.

Follow us on twitter for the updates : Aurorabits
Visit our website: www.aurorabits.com 

SharePoint 2010/2013 Health Checking and Monitoring

[Update Mar 2015: I have written another article on SharePoint Governance, published on my new blogsite www.mycloudview.net ]

A. SPDOCKIT :

I have lately tested another SharePoint health check tool SPDockit for SharePoint 2010/2013 (SharePoint Documentation Kit) for SharePoint 2007/2010/2013 and have to say it saved at least 2-3 days of my time on a consulting engagement, this tool is impressive and works better than the out of the box health check rules. In my job I often conduct SharePoint farm health-checks and  perform farm audits and honestly SPDocKit does help me immensely in collecting and analyzing SharePoint farm and site data. The idea itself is no rocket science, it is simply all about extracting almost every possible piece of information from your SP farm and then presenting them by means of an elegant and interactive dashboard interface. The same information displayed in the dashboard can also be generated and saved as reports in pdf and word formats.

The reports can be used as AS-Built documents, created with speed. The tool has its own set of health check rules that enables you to quickly perform healthcheck on your farm against the SharePoint best practices though in some cases you may find not all the rules and recommendation applicable to your environment. Nevertheless it does explanation or refers to best practices if you are not clear what you should do. Another feature that I love is that you can take a snapshot of your farm configuration/settings, save them in a file and then can compare them with other farms or with the same farm later using them as a baseline for comparison.

It is priced reasonably around $400-700 /farm or consultant. If you are working for a consulting company then I suggest buying licenses for consultants. For the clients/business farm based licensing would be a better option.

You can download the SPDocKit here and try it for 30 days : Download

(I was able to deliver my engagement by using the trial version, was fully functional with all information available through the dashboard options, the only limitation was the cut-down version of reports generated, nevertheless I used the screenshots of the dashboard screens to populate my reports, we are going to buy the full version for the future.)

B. SPFarmReport:

A free tool that I tested on a farm e where I had to do a quick sp2010 farm (with 5 servers) healthcheck, produced a very detailed and nicely formatted report, however I did find it missed some details, on content databases and application pools. Still a good tool that you can pass it on to admins to provide you with a detailed view of Farm configuration and settings.

http://spsfarmreport.codeplex.com/

C. Out of the Box:

• A nice article that summarizes monitoring using OOTB SP 2010 tools http://www.packtpub.com/article/microsoft-sharepoint-2010-administration-monitoring-and-reporting
• However, you cannot use windows PowerShell to view health report data http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663478.aspx

  

So if you opt to go Out of the Box then you have to leverage SharePoint Health Anayzer.

- To configure the SharePoint health analyzer jobs

1. Run the jobs - http://www.sharepointusecases.com/index.php/2010/10/run-all-sharepoint-2010-health-rules-now/
2. And then ask the System Admin in prod to grab the SharePoint Health Analyzer reports from the central admin

D. SCOM - System Center Operations Manager

The SharePoint 2010 Products Management Pack (MP) is built to detect, diagnose, and alert on software and hardware incidents discovered by agents installed on SharePoint machines.

1. Health monitoring of SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps
2. Monitors Events and Services and alerts when service outages are detected
3. Monitors Performance and warns users when SharePoint performance is at risk
4. Forwards users to up-to-date TechNet knowledge articles

A nice video from Brian farnhill, very nice http://www.screencast.com/users/BrianFarnhill/folders/Default/media/3f9f1d6e-4678-4666-88e6-25765f2a7b64

E. Custom Health-check rules

One more thing that can be done (looks beyond the scope of engagement but for future reference) is creating custom health check rules.

http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Custom-Health-Rule-for-SharePoint-2010-that-checks-for-Debug-build-assemblies.aspx

Probably you won’t create the rules, but prefer to wait till they appear on codeplex or as a separate product

F. FlyView For SharePoint - Helps you with SharePoint Site content structure health check

Also like to share this Site exploring tool FlyView that I created. It allows you to explore the information architecture of your entire site with ease, you can see and search the sub-sites, libraries, lists and documents with ease. This way you can check how healthy your site is from content structure perspective. It is a free tool that you can add to your Chrome browser in seconds and it works when you login to your SharePoint site. It is compatible with SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2013, 2010 and 2007. 

(Installation Video)

Download FlyView browser plugin for SharePoint from the Chrome Store 

Hope it would help