Month: April 2012

Details about SharePoint 2013 (a.k.a. SharePoint 15) are starting to emerge.  Somewhat redundanct articles from ZDnet and RedmondMag discuss some of the highlights that are currently being leaked.  Both reference an enterprising fellow named Bjorn Furuknap who has started a subscription service for publishing SharePoint 2013 rumors.   It looks like both of the articles rely heavily on his findings which, coupled with the caveat that anything can change at any time, means I’m going to take all of this with a grain of salt.  That being said, here is the current state of the rumor mill.

SharePoint 2013 New Features Summary*

• Expanded social networking capabilities
• Improved user interface – This is vague and subjective.  With the new Metro user-interface coming for Windows 8, “improved” could mean anything: similar to SharePoint 2010, similar to Metro, somewhere in between, or altogether different?  Improved?
• Changes in the Client-Side Object Model – Should make branding and site design easier and more robust
• An App Marketplace – Read More – Similar to Android and iPhone app stores
• Stronger Information Rights Management (IRM) functionality – Thus, increased document security and governance control out of the box.
• Education Module / App / Add-on – Read More – Thus, a specific flavor of SharePoint for Educators
• Expanded functionality for multi-tenancy – Good for hosting providers, so you’ll be able to get SharePoint 2013 “in the cloud” (apart from Office 365) and share server-wide apps and enhancements
• Increased functionality for mobile devices – SharePoint 2010 offers limited functionality for mobile devices.  Now with more and more mobile devices on the market with demand ever increasing, this is a smart move.
• Allow for looping workflows in SharePoint Designer – Currently not available except in Visual Studio
• Authentication via OAuth – Will allow for SharePoint 2013 to easily integrate with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites

*All, some, or none of these may ever actually materialize

A client has some of their users in limited permission groups, such as Read Only.  Thus, some of their ribbon commands for this limited group are disabled (“grayed out”).  The client wants for these users to not even see these grayed out ribbon commands both to cut down on the training issues and the complaining.

Tobias Lekman has written an excellent post on his blog about how to hide disabled ribbon commands as well as empty ribbon groups in SharePoint 2010.   To explain this second part, if an entire group of commands is disabled, and therefore not displayed, then you don’t want to display the empty ribbon group section either.  So his solution not only hides disabled commands but also any empty command group sections.

The solution uses some pretty simple CSS and some clever jQuery.  Good stuff.

For the type of person who just wants “the answer to the question” the above will suffice.  However, for the type of person that wants to know the How, Why, What For, and What Else (such as myself) there is a thorough article from Microsoft: Customizing and Extending the SharePoint 2010 Server Ribbon.