How to Plan browser support in SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint 2013 supports several commonly used web browsers. This article describes different levels of web browser support and how ActiveX controls affect features.

About planning browser support

SharePoint 2013 supports several commonly used web browsers. However, certain web browsers could cause some SharePoint 2013 functionality to be downgraded, limited, or available only through alternative steps.

As you plan your deployment of SharePoint 2013, we recommend that you review the browsers used in your organization to guarantee optimal performance with SharePoint 2013.

Key planning phase of browser support

Browser support is an important part of your SharePoint 2013 implementation. Before you install SharePoint 2013, make sure that you know the browsers that SharePoint 2013 supports. The information in this article describes browser support in the following sections:

• Browser support matrix
• Browser details

Browser support matrix

The following table summarizes the support levels of typically used web browsers.

Browser	Supported	Not supported
Internet Explorer 10	X
Internet Explorer 9	X
Internet Explorer 8	X
Internet Explorer 7		X
Internet Explorer 6		X
Google Chrome (latest released version)	X
Mozilla Firefox (latest released version)	X
Apple Safari (latest released version)	X

Browser details

Review the details of the web browser that you have or plan to use in your organization to make sure that the web browser works with SharePoint 2013 and according to your business needs.

Supported Internet Explorer versions

The product group makes every effort to validate that SharePoint functionality works correctly with released versions of Internet Explorer. Customers who want a more deeply validated browser interaction experience should strongly consider Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 10, Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 8

Other supported browsers

Google Chrome (latest released version)

Mozilla Firefox (latest released version)

Apple Safari (latest released version)

ActiveX controls

Some functionality in SharePoint 2013 requires ActiveX controls. This produces limitations on browsers which do not support ActiveX. Currently only 32-bit versions of Internet Explorer support this functionality. All other browsers have the following limitations.

Internet Explorer 10 does not support Active X controls when in immersive mode. The functionality for the controls listed below should only be expected to work in desktop mode.
Plugin name	DLL Filename	What it does	Supported browser version	Known limitations
Digital Signature	Dsigctrl.dll, dsigres.dll	Digital signing takes place in both the InfoPath client and on the InfoPath Forms Services server. Make sure that the following conditions exist: Forms that are signed on the client can be verified on the server. Forms that are signed on the server can be verified on the client.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9 and 10	An inability to verify a form produces an error that states that the form cannot be signed.
NameCtrl	Name.dll	Enables a web page to display a contact card and presence status for people. Integrates through client-side APIs with Office 2013.	Supported in Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10. Firefox, Google Chrome are also supported by using a plug-in. Internet Explorer version 10 immersive mode is not supported.
TaskLauncher	Nameext.dll	Used to export items in a task list to Project Server if Project 2010 is installed on the client computer.	All browsers	If software requirements are not met, an error message states that you need to install Project Server.
SpreadSheetLauncher	Owssupp.dll	Used to verify whether Excel is installed for Export to Excel feature.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10	If Excel is not installed, an error message states that a list cannot be imported because a compatible spreadsheet application is not installed or is not compatible with the browser.
StssyncHandler	Owssupp.dll	Enables synchronization of lists of events and lists of contacts in SharePoint with a messaging application such as Outlook 2013.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10
ExportDatabase	Owssupp.dll	Enables a user to use an application such as Access to create or open a database that contains SharePoint list data.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10	To export a list, the client computer must have a SharePoint compatible application.
OpenDocuments	Owssupp.dll	Starts Office client applications so that a user can create a document or edit a document. Enables users to create documents that are based on a specified template, open documents as read-only, or open documents as read/write.	All except Internet Explorer version 10 in immersive mode.	If a compatible Office application or browser is not installed on a client, an error message states that the feature requires a SharePoint compatible application and web browser.
UploadCtl	Stsupld.dll	Enables drag-and-drop in SharePoint Server 2013 visual mode "upload multiple files" dialog box.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10
CopyCtl	Stsupld.dll	Enables a user to copy a document on a SharePoint site to one or more locations on a server.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10	In Firefox, Google Chrome, and immersive mode of Internet Explorer version 10, the copy progress dialog box is not displayed.
PPActiveX	PPSLAX.dll	Starts PowerPoint to open presentations from a slide library or publish individual slides to a slide library.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10	Does not work on Click-to-Run installations of Office and version of Office that run on Windows for ARM.
BCSLauncher	BCSLaunch.dll	Starts the Visual Studio Tools for Office installer to install a Visual Studio Tools for Office package that has been generated on the server.	Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10

You can also see what are the supported mobile devices browsers are for SharePoint 2013.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161353(v=office.15).aspx

Courtesy: Microsoft.

SharePoint Help - http 403 forbidden Error / hiding SharePoint help Icon.

Today one of my client stated that he could not open the ‘Set Blog Permissions’ link on one of this Blogs and got the error message. 

I checked the same on my test site and see the same behavior. Now question is why this is happening?

To give you background: We have SharePoint Help disallowed in our environment due to loop whole for the vulnerability attach with the Help.aspx page as per the MS security Bulletin release.   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/MS10-039. 

Just going a bit out of track from here, to suggest some other methods to disallow the help in SharePoint.  To Disallowing access to the help content page can be manually done need to run a small SharePoint farm. Follow the steps.

• open up IIS management console
• find the web application responsible for the public portal
• find the _layouts virtual folder
• find the file help.aspx and open the Properties window for that file
• Change the access permissions for that file.
• repeat these steps for "HelpSearch.aspx", too

You'll have to repeat these steps on all servers in your web farm.

If you even don’t want the users to see the Help icon on the site then commenting out the following lines in the master pages does the trick for the icon.

The MS Security Bulletin given above also suggests the automated workaround for this. 

You can easily test whether or not your site is prone to the breach, by using below url on your site:

“http:///_layouts/help.aspx?cid0=MS.WSS.manifest.xml%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27XSS%27%29%3C/script%3E&tid=X”

If your site is prone, you will see a JavaScript popup stating your site is hacked.

Hot fixes to resolve the vulnerabilities: WSS 3.0 hotfix: KB983444, MOSS hotfix: KB979445

Coming back to original question why ‘Set Blog Permissions’ link was not working for the client is that when we click the Set blog permissions link in the Admin web art page of the blog site. It tried to call the java script method/functions 

“javascript:HelpWindowsKey(%27MS_WSS_SetBlogPermissions%27)”. 

This script tries to call the Help.aspx, helpcontent.aspx page using HelpWindowsKey function. Since the Help doesn’t work so does this window.

 

Latest contributions: NothingButBranding.com

• We came out with a bang over at NothingButBranding.com (NBB) with our three part Mega Menu series.
• Learn how to create multiple SharePoint design variations using a single master page in NBB article, Master pages, who needs them anyways?
• Take that single master page to the next level by using JavaScript to generate CSS selectors in the NBB article, Multiple sites with varying designs in a single master page.
• Over on our blog, the SharePoint 2010 ribbon series has been continued with Ribbon CSS Tips and Tricks.

Ref: http://sharepointexperts.com 

Q: Does Windows Server 2012 support SharePoint 2010?

Ans: No, Windows Server 2012 doesn't support SharePoint 2010 right now. If you try to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2012, you might see at least one of three issues, described in this Microsoft Support article. Unless you don't mind being on the receiving end of some "unexpected behavior," it might be best to wait.

KB Article Explaining this:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2724471

10 Reasons Not to Brand SharePoint

• Branding public-facing SharePoint sites considered mandatory
• Custom user interfaces (UIs) require custom training
• Invest in a governance plan, governance team

It seems that one of the first things people want to do with a new Microsoft SharePoint installation is to brand it. Branding public-facing SharePoint sites is considered practically mandatory. 

Branding internal corporate portals to reinforce the company image might also make sense. But the most common use of SharePoint within an organization is for departmental sites, team-collaboration sites, and document-management sites. Should you brand these internal sites?

There are two kinds of SharePoint branding for internal sites. One preserves the full SharePoint UI and feature set. This type of simple branding modifies graphics, colors, and font types. It uses features that are built in to SharePoint to let site owners update site navigation and Web Parts.

This branding might involve changes to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or edits to the SharePoint master pages, but it leaves the UI completely predictable to the average SharePoint user and can be supported without help from an outside branding expert or the person or department that performed the branding.

Anything more complex than this falls into the second category of branding. This type of branding often involves an outside branding consultant and hours upon hours of planning, design, and implementation to match the external company website or an older, custom internal site. This type of branding changes how SharePoint and its UI work.

Before you decide to brand internal sites by using this second category of customizations, ask yourself the following 10 questions. (If you still insist on branding your SharePoint installation after reading this article, see the sidebar "If You Must Brand SharePoint.")

#1: Would you pay to brand Windows Explorer or Microsoft Excel?

Have you branded your word processor or your email client? Of course not! These are tools. They should have a consistent and predictable UI, such as an obvious start button. After learning how to use a tool one time, you should be able to figure how to use the same kind of tool the next time. 

SharePoint is also a tool, especially when used for team collaboration and document management. Branding sites that are used for those purposes-especially when users might access more than one site-should be treated as such.

#2: Do you want to increase your per-user costs?

The per-user cost of a SharePoint installation is fairly reasonable. That is, until you start spending $10,000 to $30,000 per department-or even per site-to pay for a graphics design firm or branding consultant to customize your internal sites. The real-world branding costs can easily be in the hundreds of dollars per user and provide only a cosmetic benefit.

#3: How fast do you want users to get to work?

Customizing UIs takes time and often delays the start of a new SharePoint installation. Then, when branding has been approved, teams are put together to get the sites branded. 

These teams must interview consultants, review designs, wait for delivery, and test the result before the sites can be deployed to users. And then, if each site looks different, with a different and unpredictable UI, users will be wasting time figuring out how to navigate the site and how to find content.

#4: How much do you want to spend on training?

Out of the box, SharePoint has a wealth of available training and support resources, including instructor-led classes, books, online videos, and endless web resources.

All these resources are affordable (or even free) but are useful only for uncustomized sites. Custom UIs require custom training; without it, users are less productive.

#5: How much do you want to spend on support?

If each site is different, will your support groups be able to help your site users? Will your Help desk be able to answer questions such as, "In the HR site, I click on a green duck to get to the employee manuals, but I just went to the IT site to find software manuals, and there's no green duck. There are just two trucks, a race car, and a go-cart. Which should I click?" 

(If you think the duck-and-cars example is ridiculous, I'm not just being silly. I've seen many branded SharePoint sites that can be described only as "unique" and can be explored only by clicking everything you see until you find what you're looking for. You've probably seen sites like these, too-although, to be fair, site owners are sometimes the ones who insist on these odd designs.)

This brings up a related issue: Graphic designers aren't always good SharePoint designers. Graphic designers tend to think of SharePoint as just another custom website and often break or remove the most basic features, such as Quick Launch or the ability to add or change a Web Part. 

After the consultant, designer, or brander has finished with the site, who will pay for fixing such issues, or even updating the site later? If you want to add just one more link to their custom-designed navigation, will you need to pay to redesign the site?

#6: How much time do you want to waste?

Of course, much too often, the site owner is the one doing the branding. SharePoint Designer is free, easy to download, and talked about everywhere on the web. And it's so easy to use that site owners often become self-taught site web designers, spending much of their time playing with SharePoint Designer. 

This problem isn't new. Remember the early spreadsheet days, when managers switched from managing teams to spending all day playing with spreadsheets? Now, in the age of SharePoint, we have managers and team leaders spending too much time as web designers. Most of these site owners have no design training and no governance.

#7: Do you know who's in charge?

When every department is doing its own thing with SharePoint, is any department doing the right thing with corporate assets? Are site owners following corporate standards for site content and content governance, or are they simply creating cool-looking sites with random links and storage? 

If you lose control of SharePoint and the content that's stored there, you might never get it back (short of starting over from scratch). And when the legal or R&D departments ask, "Can you find X?" or "Can you tell me who did Y?" are your SharePoint sites organized and structured enough to actually perform an audit?

#8: How difficult will sites be to audit?

If each department and team feels free to create custom UIs as a means of branding, then they also might feel free to store their content any way they like. If they have their own branding, then they will surely have their own custom content types, list types, and metadata.

How will a researcher or auditor find anything in such a system? Imagine being an auditor who must visit a hundred sites, each with a different UI, to find a document about a customer or a product. This Wild West approach is expensive and difficult to maintain.

#9: Are there better places to invest your money?

How much sense does it make to try to reduce costs by licensing SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server Standard Edition, only to spend a lot of money on custom (and cosmetic) branding, and then more money on custom training and lost productivity because of the branding? For the same price, you can stay with out-of-the-box SharePoint and spend the extra money on SharePoint Enterprise Edition, Microsoft FAST Search Server, and some powerful business intelligence (BI) tools. 

You might even have enough to invest in faster hardware, the next level of SharePoint, or more user training. If you're interested in doing things the right way, right from the start, then invest in a governance plan and an ongoing governance team.

#10: Do you really want to do this all over again?

Your branding costs don't end with the current installation of SharePoint. Sooner or later, along comes the next generation of SharePoint with a whole shopping cart full of new features that you want and need. 

Branded sites almost never upgrade cleanly. Over the past few years, I've seen how the migration from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007-and more recently from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010-has worked for branded sites. 

Typically, it hasn't been a good experience and has required paying branders to rebrand all the sites to work in the new version. Are you willing to bet on the effort and cost of moving your branded sites to the next version of SharePoint?

The Bottom Line

Before you make the decision to brand internal sites, make sure you have a real business need to do so. Remember, SharePoint is a tool, like Microsoft Word or Excel. You don't brand those programs, do you? 

Talk to other companies that use SharePoint, and find out what it's really costing them to brand sites, including the ongoing costs to support branded sites. Will new hires be able to figure out all the custom UIs and site designs? Will you need to upgrade customized sites to a new version of SharePoint (or even to another product)? 

Look at your budget. Can you afford the up-front costs, ongoing support costs, end-user training costs, and eventual upgrade costs of branding? 

And what about legal and business accessibility requirements (e.g., support for screen readers, high-contrast text, nonmouse navigation, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines--WCAG-2.0). How might branding affect these requirements? 

In a nutshell, do you really need to brand?

If you're still not convinced, see the sidebar to Michael's article: "If You Must Brand SharePoint."