How to Hide the “Ribbon” in SharePoint 2010

I struggled with this quite a bit before finding a solution that – as near as I can tell – simply hides the ribbon without any real consequences.  Of course, no ribbon means that when in a list or library you can’t do a whole lot.  In my case this requirement was handed down because the particular page we’re doing this in will only contain static content, and the customer wanted to save the screen real estate to make SharePoint look “more like our old version.” 

A frustrating request of course, but nonetheless I imagine many of us in the SharePoint world will come across this request at some point or another. 

After a few other attempts (such as simply deleting the controls in SharePoint Designer, or using different CSS methods and <asp:Panel> controls to set visibility and display properties, I kept getting JavaScript errors on the page, loss of the vertical scroll bar, and other odd behavior.

Here’s the solution I ended up with.  We didn’t want to do this at a site-level, so to do it at a page level we simply modified the appropriate <DIV> tags inline in the ASPX page (using SharePoint Designer):

<div id="s4-ribbonrow" class="s4-pr s4-ribbonrowhidetitle" style="display:none">

<div id="s4-ribboncont">

Intro–InfoPath 2010 Form Design with C# Code-Behind (Part 1 of 2)

Last week I had to create my first InfoPath 2010 form with code-behind for some custom business logic (as the business requirements were explained to me it quickly became apparent that “Rules” available in InfoPath weren’t going to be sufficient).

InfoPath is admittedly not a strong suit for me.  The small amount of interaction I had with it in IP 2007 and MOSS 2007 left me with a feeling that it wasn’t quite ready for prime-time, so I largely ignored it.

I have a new respect though for the most recent incarnation.  InfoPath 2010 is an incredibly powerful tool as I’ve learned.  Here’s Part 1 of a brief 2-part blog post describing how I went about implementing some custom business logic – including data access to a SQL 2008 R2 database – with custom C# code behind an InfoPath 2010 form, rendered as a browser form in SharePoint 2010.

“MySites” in SharePoint 2010

This post simply references a video I recorded for a customer a few months ago.  In it I give a brief overview of some of the new features of “MySites” in SharePoint 2010, and perhaps more importantly, some of the business reasons why these social features actually provide value in the enterprise. 

Many clients I’ve worked with in these early days of deploying SharePoint have chosen to disable the social features of SharePoint 2010.  While I understand the initial impression (“I don’t want Facebook inside my company!”), there is real business value to be gained by many of these features. 

This screencast was recorded as a reference point so my client could revisit some of these business reasons later down the road when they made a final decision about whether or not social features will be enabled for their organization. 

(P.S., I’m also testing Google Alerts to see how quickly this gets picked up!)

Here’s the screencast (thank you Camtasia!):

http://www.screencast.com/users/JonSchultz/folders/Default/media/58e6fb89-f1fd-41a2-990d-a1f022fb3541

 

Jonathon Schultz
mobile: 407.923.4946 | fax: 866.569.2615 | email: jon@jonschultz.com