SharePoint and Yammer - Is it worth for Organizations to go for SharePoint and Yammer together for Enterprise Social

Here are some of the opinions from some of the industry experts on SharePoint and Yammer:

http://www.habaneroconsulting.com/insights/sharepoint-yammer

 

Transform your SharePoint Customization, Farm solutions into SharePoint App / Add In Model - A great point to start

Here is the great training resource put together by a group of  Microsoft Consultants - http://dev.office.com/blogs/transforming-your-sharePoint-customizations

This is a great point to start if you are considering moving into cloud.

Find out what's new in SharePoint 2016

Microsoft has released a public beta of SharePoint 2016. Find out what's new here.

Search Crawl Error - Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository.....

Problem

After Windows updates were applied to the SharePoint Server, the search service failed to crawl the content. 

Error

"Access is denied.  Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled."

Cause
The windows update actually enabled the Loopbackcheck leading to crawl failure. The other related problem you will often observe is that you cannot login as another user if you have opened Central Admin on the server itself.

Resolution

There are two possible solutions listed at the Microsoft KB article.

Solution 1: Specify host names (Preferred method if NTLM authentication is desired)
Method 2: Disable the loopback check (less-recommended method)

For detail steps follow this link  to the KB article. 

Smooth scrolling in IPad and IPhones

Recently, I was working on implementation of SharePoint 2013 public site with responsive behavior using bootstrap.

I was facing unusual issue with scrolling of web pages in IPad and IPhones.  The scroll was not smooth enough like it was working in Android devices. One of my good friend who is an expert SharePoint UI developer suggested following one liner CSS fix for this issue.

-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

This worked like a charm.

I am not much familiar with the -webkit. As per this link, it is Open-Source browser Engine used by Safari which is the default browser in all Apple devices.

Development tools for SharePoint 2013

SharePoint provides whole lot of out-of-box features providing you a platform to deliver your various offerings with little involvement of development team. However; the out-of-box implementation usually needs another layer which contains added feature not provided built-in or enhancement to existing features. To facilitate this, there are tools available by Microsoft and 3rd party as well. We choose between them or in combination based on our customization requirements.

I have attempted to list most commonly used tools with brief description about it:

1. SharePoint Designer 2013 - This is a free tool available for download from Microsoft' site. This tool is useful in creating no-code solution. If you are looking for following then this tool is very handy. 
1. Master Page and Content Page Customization
2. Designer Workflows
3. BCS
4. Basic Web Parts
5. List Customization
2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 - Once Visual Studio has been installed, Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio needs to be installed separately (can be downloaded from the same link as Visual Studio) to develop solutions for SharePoint. Visual Studio is needed when the out-of-the-box solutions are not enough to meet your requirements. Visual Studio allows you to develop following type of SharePoint solutions:
1. Developing SharePoint solutions
2. Custom Site Columns Definition, Custom Content Types and Custom Lists
3. SharePoint Workflows
4. Web Parts, Application Pages
5. Packaging, Deployment and Debugging
3. NAPA - NAPA is web based tool by Microsoft for developing apps for SharePoint Online and Office 365. This tool will allow you to develop using client side model using combination of Javascript, HTML and CSS. Thus using this tool programming is done using Client Side Object Model of SharePoint. 
4. CAML Designer - When data needs to be fetched from SharePoint based on some filters you use XML based CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language). CAML is equivalent to the select query in SQL which defines the filters for fetching data. The CAML Designer is very useful in generating queries without having prior knowledge of the CAML schema.
5. SharePoint Manager - SharePoint Manager allows you to view and modify the properties of every Site, List and any other entity in a site collection.
6. SharePoint LogViewer - This tool is very handy during troubleshooting of issues where you need to go through generated logs to narrow down the root cause of the problem.
7. Internet Explorer Toolbar / Chrome Developer Tools / Firefox Developer Tool - These tools work with the rendered HTML content and CSS in browser. These are helpful for analyzing and troubleshooting the HTML layout and CSS issues, debugging of JavaScript, allows you to set breakpoint. The feature provided depends on the tool used.
8. InfoPath 2013 - Although, this is not a primary development tool for SharePoint development, InfoPath forms can be used to create electronic forms as an alternative to offline paper forms. It allows rapid development with no programming knowledge needed. However; it does allow coding to create forms with complex logic. SharePoint supports using InfoPath forms as display and edit forms for lists.

Do list your favorite tools in the comments section below. 

SharePoint 2010 CSS Reference Chart

Very useful CSS reference chart for SharePoint 2010

http://sharepointexperience.com/csschart/csschart.html