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One of the major uses for DocRead is it's ability to help in compliance efforts by sending out 'Required' reading to a group of users. Once it's been distributed a deadline is set and reminders will be sent to those users. The document will then may become overdue and can be tracked on the reports that are accessible from the Sharepoint site.

Some light-humoured SharePoint and DocRead "Keep Calm" posters.

A good friend of ours (Ian McNeice from Salem) had a bit of fun recently and produced a video of a couple of well known favourites discussing DocRead on board the Enterprise. It's very funny and worth a watch.

I noticed an alleged screenshot of the new SharePoint 2013 UI hitting twitter today and I really can't make my mind up if it's real! It's meant to be the home page of a new site (with a distinct metro feel to it).

Quite often when developing code for DocRead we need to be able to discover what versions of SharePoint are on installed in the target platform. So being the kind souls we are - we have decided to share this helper library. The class is a singleton, so only once instance can be used and is cached after the first hit - so there no perf hits. We have added LOTS of boolean's to make it really easy to find out if a product SKU is installed.

We are very excited to offer you the chance to win one of 3 copies of the "SharePoint 2010 Architect's Guidebook". The book was written by some very well known SharePoint champions including our very own Hugo Esperanca who also wrote an in-depth chapter on application development.

If you ever need to understand what the WSS_WPG or WSS_ADMIN_WPG groups can and can't do in SharePoint - look no further! The articles linked below outline their rights in great detail. It not only details what groups the various service accounts in SharePoint belong to, but also what permissions those groups have over data stores like the registry and file system. Awesome.

To test the UI of a new or existing SharePoint application you are going to need somewhere with the latest build on it. By 'build' we mean the code that your developers have written and compiled into something that can be installed, or deployed into SharePoint.

I don't want to give a full blow account of what Selenium is because it's very well documented here, however, I do want to give a quick insight into how it can help you test the UI of a SharePoint application.

As part of an on-going series of 'Testing SharePoint with Selenium' we intend to share some of what we have learnt when trying to automate the testing of a SharePoint add-on called DocRead. These posts will specifically cover functional and integration testing - not unit testing (which is worth a whole conversation on it's own).

A question recently came up asking us to explain how DocRead was different from what you can achieve with standard 'Information Management Policies' in SharePoint.

If you receive the 'Word experienced an error when trying to open the file' (as below), it's highly likely you are running Office 2010 in protected mode. Read this blog post to see how to solve it.

SharePoint 2013 is coming and it's coming to beta this year (we think). In reality - no one really knows - so I guess we need to sit tight and guess. I am intending to keep this list of useful SharePoint 2013 resources up to date, over the next few months.

We recently received query for DocRead to see if it was possible to set the 'Required Audience' and 'Acknowledgement Days' to about 100 policies on mass (via a script). Hence, being one who is always up for a challenge, I cranked open PowerGUI and set to work.

We are proud to announce the next set of features that have been agreed for our Roadmap. We are working closely with our clients to release features important to them first but everything below will be included in DocRead v2 (due for release in Summer 2012).

Just decided to have a few minutes investigation into the recently released SharePoint 15 Technical Preview Managed Object Model SDK to see if there is any insight into whats coming up! Here's some very findings..

I was recently trying to programmatically set the default (welcome) page of a team site, but my changes weren't taking effect. This post explains how to get around it.

This post will discuss how to create a Survey in SharePoint using out of the box functionality and nothing else! The example we will use is to create a survey that asks employees to answer questions about their previous training in the organisation.

This SharePoint code example illustrates how to develop a helper method to return an SPFile based on a Web, folder and file name.

DocRead can distribute, process, track and reporting on reading tasks for 1000’s of end users. To achieve this, an enterprise architecture had to be designed and implemented. This article gives a quick overview of the main components in the architecture.