It’s safe to say that Microsoft SharePoint Server™ is one of the more widely deployed technologies for document management and business collaboration. RemarQ ™ is an enhancement to SharePoint that provides visual tracking for what you (as a SharePoint user) do on a SharePoint site. While SharePoint has the “New” indicator for content on a site, in general it is difficult for users to identify which content they have already read. This is especially true for large document libraries and discussion threads. RemarQ keeps track of all of the things that you read in SharePoint and makes sure you know, at a glance, what you have or have not read. We are all familiar with email, and usually email systems do something similar in our Inbox. Messages that are unread usually are displayed with some type of visual clue (bold or highlighted) that indicates whether or not you have read it. RemarQ does the same thing for SharePoint but with lots of bells and whistles. The first release of RemarQ supported Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Foundation and Server editions. This is the 2.0 release and which also supports SharePoint 2016, and is now an open source project hosted here on GitHub.

RemarQ started life as an exercise in how to provide customization features for SharePoint 2003, that version never became publically available. The versions for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 were provided as open source CodePlex projects (http://readunreadcolumn.codeplex.com/ & http://voodoo.codeplex.com/ ). In 2013 I decided that it might be economically worthwhile to turn the technology into a licensed product and sell it. Unfortunately, RemarQ was never a financial success so I decided to repackage it as an open source project and release it here.

RemarQ is a SharePoint farm solution, it’s not a SharePoint App. It does its work by integrating a tracking database with dynamically generated JSLink scripts. RemarQ activates when a well-known site column (named RemarQ) is added to a list. The addition of the column queues up the list to be modified by a SharePoint job. The job updates the list schema, views on the list, context menu items, event handlers for the list, and then processes all existing items in the list. The reverse work is done when the site column is removed. The visual indicators for the list are processed in the browser in JavaScript that is generated from the JSLink attributes for the list. Items are marked read by several ways, you can use the context menus, you can read the item and you can also install an http module that will monitor for direct access from Office applications. The read marks are stored in an external database

A couple of key things about the solution files and the conversion to open source:

• The initial release version of RemarQ leveraged the licensed version of the Kendo UI, this release uses the open source Kendo version for one of the more complicated reports (the per document readers report) but otherwise Kendo is no longer used in the project.

• In the initial release of RemarQ, the read marks tables were available as external data sources (for CAML query), that feature is not available in this version of RemarQ.

• All licensing has been removed from the project and all of the features of the enterprise version of RemarQ are part of this project.

• The technology works on both SharePoint 2013 and 2016, the development environment uses the SharePoint 2013 Office Developer for Visual Studio 2013. I have NOT yet migrated the project to Visual Studio 2015. The installation package deploys and operates on both SharePoint 2013 and 2016.

• The project ships in US English, several alternate languages are available. The Balsamic Solutions culture manager can be used to update an installation but is not included in this distribution. If you need an alternate language, please send a request to info@balsamicsolutions.com for access to the culture manger and the language files for RemarQ.

• The documentation has been updated to reflect the current feature set and describes how the technology is installed and managed.

• The signing key used for this project is the same one as used for the release version. The logic is that anyone who has the product installed may want to reuse the lists they have so the key has been included.

• The repository includes a Setup project that requires InstallShield Express 2015 (the free version). The output from this project is the installer described in the administration guide. It will install RemarQ and all supporting files on a SharePoint server.

This repository has a number of directories including the base solution and some supporting projects and files:

• BalsamicSolutions.ReadUnreadSiteColumn : A Visual Studio SharePoint project that is the RemarQ solution
• DebugConsole : A Visual Studio project that can load test data and setup different test and code evaluation scenairos
• Documents : Installation and administration documentation
• Images : Graphics related to the project
• Other : Files needed by the instllation routines or related to the project.
• RemarQListProcessor : A Visual Studio project that is a windows service that can replace the SharePoint Jobs with an external processor
• RemarQSetup : An InstallShield Express setup project
• BuildTools : This project is included in the Setup solution so that the pre and post build events can be leveraged to create the WSP file for the setup project otherwise it provides no value.
• Translations : Some language files
• Utilities : A Visual Studio project with a utilities commmand processor for fixing common installation and configuration problems
• WSP : A working directory that contains the output WSP solution file. An MSI installer for the solution is also stored here. Due to the limitations of the Express version of InstallShield the MSI file is in a subdirectory named Express\SingleImage\DiskImages\DISK1. If you just want to use the technology then this might be the best option for you
• BalsamicSolutions.ReadUnreadSiteColumn.Setup.sln : A Visual Studio solution file
• BalsamicSolutions.ReadUnreadSiteColumn.sln : A Visual Studio solution file