Here’s a video overview of Atlassian Bamboo’s integrations with Jira. Learn how these two powerful tools combine forces to improve efficiency, traceability, and coordination across your product team. Read more on Jira here, and discover more ways to achieve continuous integration Zen with Bamboo over here!

The Agile Framework, and in particular scrum allows any team or organization the ability to deliver product to the customer at the pace of new technology. But it's not just for software development.

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Some of you may remember when shared drives were a revolutionary way of sharing documents throughout a company. Business documents were stored on a drive within a massive tree of folders that most employees could access. The problem with shared drives was that whoever edited a document last won – and by that I mean if Joe in accounting and Sue in management were editing the same document, there was no way for them to know if anyone else was editing it at the same time. So if Sue saved the document and overwrote it on the shared drive, and Joe finished and saved it an hour later, Joe’s version would become the document – and all Sue’s work would be lost, resulting in wasted time, wasted money, and…well, extreme frustration.

This is why SharePoint‘s version control is so useful. Here’s how it works in a document library. Click on Settings, then Document Library Settings. // Here, under General Settings, click Versioning Settings. // Here’s where you’ll set this up. Content Approval’s asking if you want to approve or reject submitted documents or changes – you would want to do this if you didn’t want everyone with access to the library to see approved, pending, and rejected drafts…for this example, I’ll turn this off for the sake of simplicity. Document Version History is want we really want here. I want a new version to be created every time I update a document – and I want the old versions of the document to remain available in case I mess up and need to revert to a previous version. Right now, No Versioning is selected – so I’ll change that. I can choose major versions or minor versions. I recommend major and minor versions for precision – if someone merely changes the punctuation in the document, I don’t want the document to jump from 2.0 to 3.0.

Below, I can choose how many older versions to keep on file. 2.0s and 3.0s are considered Major Versions, while 2.1.1s and 3.1.1s are considered minor or “drafts.”

Draft Item Security lets you choose who can see every version of a document. You can choose to extend this visibility to anyone who can read items in the library, to those with editing capabilities, or only to users who approve changes. I’m not requiring an approval process for this library, so I can’t choose the last option – but I’ll choose only those who can edit documents, since those are the people likely to be on the team with access to this library.

Lastly, Requiring Check Out is very important. Checking out a document to edit it tells the rest of the world you’re editing that document – if you don’t do that, you revert to the shared drive scenario I mentioned earlier. I’m selecting “yes” here to require my team to check out a document to edit it. You can learn how to check documents in and out in a separate videoblog.

So now let’s test this…let’s say we need to update our Worker’s Comp Form. I’ll click Edit in Microsoft Word – notice I’m “about to check out and edit this” – // and in Word, I’ll make the changes. Now I’ll check in the document – and notice it’s asking me what type of version I’m checking in. These were minor edits, so I’m checking in a minor version or draft – so I’ll select that, and let people know what I did…then click OK.

Now I can click on the Version History of this document and see my latest version here. If I click the drop-down arrow, I can choose to view or unpublish my version – or restore the version below. I can also delete all minor versions – all the small drafts – and keep major ones, the 2.0s and 3.0s, to make things simpler.

That’s the scoop on versioning. Visit our blog for more.

One of the most important things to consider when designing a SharePoint site – or designing any site – is creating easy and intuitive access to data with logical organization. In SharePoint, it’s useful to store frequently-viewed pages, lists, and libraries in the Quick Launch bar on the left side of the page.

The Quick Launch bar allows you to quickly navigate to pages you commonly need. Here we have landing pages that aggregate related data and furthermore may limit data to those things that are important to the specific user logged in. Your SharePoint developer determines which pages, lists, and libraries appear in the Quick Launch bar. It’s important to not consider the Quick Launch bar as a site index – remember, not all pages, lists, and libraries of your SharePoint site…unless your site is very, very small…should appear in the Quick Launch bar. Only those needed frequently should be stored there.

The Quick Launch bar can be specific for every site or sub-site in SharePoint. A quick etymology lesson: we’re working inside a sub-site right now. This Demo sub-site is a sub-site of our main SharePoint site, titled Brothers Lane Collaboration Site – as you see in the top left. Sites may divide into sub-sites, and sub-sites may divide into pages. There is only a Home page on our Demo sub-site. If there were another page, titled Sales or Legal Matters, etc, you’d see it here. So the Quick Launch menu can vary from site to site or sub-site to sub-site, but not from page to page. All pages on a site or subsite will have the same Quick Launch menu.

You can add a library or list to the Quick Launch bar by using the Settings tab, as you see here in Test Library B, and clicking on Title, Description and Navigation. Here you see the option to “display in Quick Launch.” I’ll select yes…and here you see Test Library B in the Quick Launch.

Find other SharePoint how-to’s and learn more on our blog.

This text mirrors what you’ll hear in the video.

SharePoint provides a common framework for helping you do your work efficiently and effectively, and to improve communications between you and your colleagues. This introductory video is intended to provide you with a base understanding of Microsoft SharePoint – so we’ll cover the terminology you need to know to make your way around the software.

We’ll start with Lists. Within SharePoint, data is organized in to collections called Lists. Lists are like a table in a database or an Excel worksheet in that they contain many individual records or rows.
List attributes are shown as column headings, as you see here. They help distinguish list items from one another.

A list item is a discrete record within a list that has the same attributes as every other list item in that list. These attributes can be of many types including, but not limited to, numbers, strings, dates, files, and system users. It should be noted that file attributes are attachments to the list item.

The next important term you need to know is Document Library. Document Libraries, like Lists, are collections of data – but unlike Lists, Document Libraries are meant to be a repository for documents, including Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, etc. As you see, this library is already populated with some documents. The attributes of those documents are shown again as column headings.

A Document Library Item is a discrete record, and more importantly, a discrete document. Each document in the document library will have the same attributes as other documents in the library – though each document may have a different template. You can create a templates for files within your document library – and select one to use for a new document in the New tab. Two important features to note are:

• Number one, the Document Control feature, which allows a single editor to check out a document to edit it, thereby restricting access to only one user at a time. Permissions can be given to users to allow for read-only or more restricted permissions.
• Number two is Document Versioning, which allows for changes made to the document to be tracked over time.

The next term is Workflow. A Workflow is a packaged set of instructions that can be executed in a repeatable fashion for any given List Item or Document Library Item. Workflows may be executed automatically by the system on the creation or modification of a list or library item, or manually by the user.

The button you see here shows where to access Workflows for this List Item. You can see it by using the drop down and on the display form. Note that not all lists will have workflows associated with them. Only workflows that are manually executable will be displayed here.

The next term is View. All Lists and Document Libraries present the information contained within them by using Views. Views are similar to a simple database query where you can specify what kind of records you want to see (filtering) and how they should be presented (grouping and sorting).

Here I’m showing a view of Test List A using the All Items by Status view. You can select a different view – even a custom view you create – in this box in the upper right of your screen.

The last term is Web Part. Web parts are sections of a web page meant to share related information. These web parts can have many uses throughout a web site.

Here I’m showing a Web Part within the display form for a Test List A item. This web part shows only those documents where the related Test List A Item is the same as the list item being displayed above.

Now you’re familiar with the foundational elements of SharePoint. Our how-to videos will show you how to perform basic user and developer-level operations using these elements.

Method One:

1. Click the drop-down arrow on the document
2. Click CHECK OUT
3. Open document for editing by clicking the drop-down menu
4. Click EDIT IN MICROSOFT WORD
5. Edit document
6. In Word, click the top left menu
7. Under PUBLISH, click CHECK IN
8. Enter latest version comments
9. Click CHECK IN or OK

Method Two:

1. Click document name in SharePoint
2. Select EDIT, click OK
3. In Word, click top left menu
4. Under PUBLISH, click CHECK OUT
5. Edit document
6. Under PUBLISH, click CHECK IN
7. Enter latest version comments
8. Click CHECK IN or OK

You can always correct any mistakes by closing your document and checking in/out from the SharePoint page. 

Add FOLDERS and/or ATTRIBUTES to make your SharePoint library easier to navigate.

To add folders, click NEW, and then NEW FOLDER.

1. Click SITE ACTIONS button in upper right
2. Click CREATE
3. Click DOCUMENT LIBRARY, top of left column
4. Name/assign settings
5. Click CREATE

1. Click UPLOAD tab
2. Click UPLOAD DOCUMENT or UPLOAD MULTIPLE DOCUMENTS
3. Find and select desired documents from your system
4. Click UPLOAD
5. Name and assign attributes
6. Click OK

More SharePoint how-to’s on our blog or on our YouTube channel.