Archive for May, 2007

31
May

The complete Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview videos

The complete set of videos is available:

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Prologue
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 1
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 2
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 3
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 4
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 5
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 6
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 7
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Highlights

31
May

New Windows Live Mail beta available

Download the newest Windows Live Mail beta.

Windows Live Mail beta will eventually replace Windows Mail, Outlook Express, and Windows Live mail desktop beta

31
May

Windows Live Messenger 8.5 Beta 1available

The newest Windows Messenger (version 8.5 beta 1) is available and can be downloaded here

31
May

Sharepoint link love 05-31-2007

Programmatically Using the Outgoing SMTP Server from Central Admin

Had a need today to programmatically get the outgoing SMTP server that is setup in the Central Administrator. Luckily, I found a sample of how to do this with WSS V3 from the folks at Covelle Corner. Worked like a champ for me!

MOSS 2007: Best Practices when upgrading

Microsoft published a technical whitepaper about the lessons learned upgrading/deploying MOSS 2007 at Microsoft itself. In this situation, the environment is huge, but this document will give you several point to take into consideration. Microsoft IT recommends the following best practices for deployment of an Office SharePoint Server 2007 solution within an enterprise. In some cases, deploying the solution without following these suggestions is possible, but this may result in unnecessary expense or effort. Best practices for initial activities are as follows: Perform a thorough audit of all products and platforms that the upgrade may affect, including Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, Windows SharePoint Services, and prior versions of SharePoint Products and Technologies, in addition to portals, sites, and content.

Create Your Own Twitter-Like App Using SharePoint Lists Functionality and Popfly

Trying out Twitter I like the idea of being able to log in on my phone, quickly hammer out a few items, and have that rendered then via that Twitter badge on my blog. As I look at what it is doing it seems to break down as follows:

You Asked For It, another Step By Step Popfly Tutorial for Pulling and Rendering SharePoint Data

I received a couple of questions on using address information in a SharePoint list with Popfly so I wanted to quick go through step by step how to set up. This process below has been used for both data with latitude and longitude as well as with simply an address. The two lists used can be seen as follows:

MOSS2007 – JavaScript Item Menus Part 1 (Real World Examples)

I have had quite a few emails recently about ways of either hiding, showing, adding or modifying the item level menu items that appear within lists and document library. In this post I thought I would examine what you can do and what the best approach would be (in my opinion anyway). Firstly the bulk of the menu items are drawn from the “CORE.JS” file that resides in the “12” hive.

MOSS2007 – JavaScript Item Menus Part 2 (Real World Examples)

In the last article we looked at hiding existing menu items and also adding new sub menu items. In this article we will look at adding our own custom menus and sub menu items within the same framework as before. We will use the same code as last time but build on it slightly. The objective now is to create a new menu at the same level as the “Send To” menu and then add some sub menu items. For this example the sub menu items will simply link to external website addresses. To start with let’s modify the code as shown below:

MOSS2007 – JavaScript Item Menus Part 3 (Real World)

One of the things I have been asked recently has been to do with changing the “Email Link To” menu item. Sometimes this link works, sometimes it doesn’t. Before we can look at changing it let’s take a look at the code that is used to create this link. The code block can be found within the “AddSendSubMenu” function within the “CORE.JS” file. Here is the code block in full:

Filter Central : Indexing XPS documents with MOSS 2007

Redirector WebPart SP Solution File Download

So, I am making available to the public the Redirector SharePoint WebPart that I wrote for a buddy who works at a fairly large financial firm (read this post for the complete story on that mess), it’s not very fancy, and the functionality that it introduces into a SharePoint is relatively simple in purpose. I had talked about it before in this post, but only had released the WebPart assembly and not the actual SharePoint solution file which is pretty significant for getting the thing off the ground in your environment.

Deploying a calculated site column using a feature in SharePoint 2007

It is not very easy to find a sample of how to define a site column of type calculated using the SharePoint 2007 features framework. The documentations shows how to do it using the user interface (see Calculate data in lists or libraries ). The documentation in the WSS SDK about the Formula Element in the CAML Core Schemas points in the right direction but is maybe not clear enough. I tested the sample code below by using the site columns in a list definition.

WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 Farm Host Header Upgrade FYI

Just got off the phone with Sean Livingston and we had a quick discussion about host header upgrade and an issue to which some customers have contacted product support. I’ve seen this before in IT. I know there aren’t too many host header deployments out there, but if you are you need to know about this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928305.

Setting the SharePoint 2007 Navigation Flyout Level

One of the biggest improvements with SharePoint 2007 has been navigation. The breadcrumbs help and the tabs make a lot of sense. One of the nice features of the tabs is that you can have an automatic flyout menu for subsites. Let’s say you have a top level ‘Clients’ tab with a subsite per client.

New Governance Tools and one must have freebie.

been a fan of Echo for SharePoint from Echo Technology as a solution to managing customizations and pushing out change across large numbers of site collections, and they have just announced their public beta will be in June 2007. It’s been long coming. They tell me in addition to web parts and layouts, it will help you push out changes to content types, master pages, and information management policies like auditing and expiration.

Internet facing WCM site performance optimizations

Master Pages and Layouts as Features

On most internet facing sites chances are you will start with a minimal master page and do extreme customizations. Also you will end up with some custom layouts in the process. I think it is a good idea to deploy the master pages and layouts as features. This may have an impact on the performance.

 

MOSS 2007 Resources and Tools for building OBAs

Great compile of MOSS 2007 Resources and Tools for building OBAs that continues from his previous post.

  • SharePoint Tips Utility Pack - package of SharePoint 2007 utilities for administrators and developers.
  • Floating ToolPane for SharePoint 2007

Another reason for “the virtual server that is referenced here is not in the config database.”

If you get the error “the virtual server that is referenced here is not in the config database” when you try to use object model, and if the microsoft KB article didn’t solve it for you, and you are totaly puzzled…you may have the same problem I have - lack of attention.

KB932091 has been re-released

As some of you may have experienced or seen in various blog or forum posts, some people encountered problems after installing WSS 3.0 hotfix KB932091. Recently, Microsoft has re-released the hotfix to correct the problem.

Ten Tips for Getting the Most Out of Microsoft PSS Support for SharePoint…

If you have called into the PSS Support Center for SharePoint related issues recently, you have probably encountered long hold times and slow responses. Let’s just say that SharePoint is an incredibly popular product and case volumes are at an all time high. Our support personnel are doing the best that we can to help you get your issue resolved as quickly as possible, but we are struggling to provide the quick resolution and high-quality support that you deserve and have grown to expect from Microsoft. Everyone is working as diligently as possible to help address your needs.

How to render Views of Lists

s is one of those cases where I went down several dead ends and spent way too much time chasing after all kinds of reasonable, yet ineffective, approaches, only to collapse in a heap, look up, and see the solution, glimmering above me, all shiny and simple.

The problem at hand: Now that I’ve got a hold of a SharePoint list (SPList) object, and I also have the View I want to use to display this list (SPView), what are my options for rendering?

Why use SPJobDefinition in SharePoint Resources de…

Recently Matthias Glubrecht and other readers of my post SharePoint Resources, Types, Use and Deployment asked me why do I use a custom SPJobDefinition to deploy resx files to the App_GlobalResources folder. The reason is simple (I remember when I asked Vincent Rothwell the same question and he was kind to explain this to me), the event receiver events (FeatureActivated etc.) are only invoked on the server where the feature gets activated not on all farm servers.

Getting Away From Fully Trusted Web Parts.

Ok, so you’ve set up your portal, and you’ve created a custom security policy so that you can run web parts without giving full trust to the entire portal. So, you’re ready to start writing web parts, right? Sure, but there is still more that you can do to protect you web parts from attack, as well as protect your portal from poor code – not that we ever write any poor code.

Nested ASP.NET Master Pages

Are you interested in achieving this: Designing a website with a consistent page design across the entire site, with different header graphics and color schemes for each of the major sections of the site (I came across this request quiet a lot actually). You should check this out:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x2b3ktt7.aspx

Forms Server | Session has exeeded the amount of allowable resources

MOSS 2007: Search and how Microsoft makes it unnecessarily difficult to start using it

I’ve been wondering why so many people (as seen in newsgroup postings) have had problems getting search to work *at all*.

After all, all you need to do is get Shared Services setup; start the SharePoint Server Search Service and by default it will search your “Local Office SharePoint Server sites”

Hah!!

Enabling Arabic Search in MOSS 2007

Does MOSS support Arabic Search?
This is the question I always receive from customers and partners. My answer always starts with the following:

The question should not be if MOSS does or doesn’t support Arabic Search, cause the answer would be simply – YES, IT DOES.

Quick CSS Tip: Remove Recycle Bin Link from QuickLaunch Menu

A client wanted to remove the Recylce Bin menu item from the Quick Launch Menu. This can be easily achieved using CSS customization for MOSS 2007.

Building a Site Creation Webpart - How do you get a list of templates?

I am playing around with a webpart in my new VPC that will inevitably create a site based on what a user inputs to a combo box and a couple text boxes.  I can get the user to create the site if I hardcode in the id for the template name, however I want to get all the template codes and shove them into a combo box.

31
May

Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map built with WPF

The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map.

What can you do with this tool?

The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help you build solutions. It allows you to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs). This map provides links to MSDN portal pages, technical articles, and key pointers to SDK and reference documentation topics.

Continue at source

31
May

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage

Via Steve Clayton the first video with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage:

Check out Steve’s blog, he’s has video 2 and is searching for more.

Update, Steve has the link to all the vids

 

Technorati Tags: - - -

31
May

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 Now Available (with SharePoint support!)

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 is now available. Improvements include:

New Authoring Capabilities

  • Inline spell checking
  • Table editing
  • Ability to add categories
  • Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
  • Support for excerpts and extended entries
  • Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
  • Paste Special

Integration and Compatibility

  • SharePoint 2007 support
  • New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers
  • Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
  • Integration with Windows Live Gallery
  • Support for Blogger Labels

Plus…

  • New look and feel
  • Available in 6 languages
  • Improved accessibility and keyboard support
  • Many other frequently requested enhancements!

Download

 Download2

Sources:

Windows Live Writer blog

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog

30
May

Youtube meets Apple!

Steve Jobs just announced it. Apple is bringing Youtube to the living room with AppleTV.

Check details on http://www.apple.com/ and http://www.apple.com/appletv/

Hmmhmmm, has Jobs just been Googled…?

30
May

Sharepoint link love 05-30-2007

Problems with licensing MOSS

So today had someone who had used the 180 day trial key of MOSS to its end. Apparently their key expired while we were all grilling out this weekend whoops.

Well, no problem. Just use my blog article How do I find out when my MOSS trial expires? And it has a section on “How to update from MOSS trial to MOSS Standard or Enterprise”. Crisis averted.

Not so fast. She was now getting the error message:

Parsing multi-value fields - MultiChoice, Lookup, User, URL. Rules for the “;#” delimiter.

For certain types of columns (aka fields), SharePoint stores several values in one field, using a delimiter to separate the different values.

Compiling SharePoint 2007 audiences using the SharePoint object model (C# code sample)

A while ago I was looking for a way to start audience compilation using code. While I was looking in the SDK I stumbled upon this little phrase which was quite annoying - “Compiling audiences is not supported in the object model. ” on
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.server.audience.audiencemanager.aspx .

Fortunately, it does seem to be possible - here’s what you need to do  (I added the code in a SharePoint application page - you know one of those pages that you add in the _layouts folder).

PostBack on TreeView Checkbox Click

The TreeView control included in ASP.Net 2.0 is lacking an option to cause a postback due to a user checking/unchecking a checkbox on a tree node.

I hacked together a little derived class to use in place of the treeview that postsback when the user clicks the checkbox, and also fires an event.

Reformatting XML retrieved directly from the SharePoint API

If you use the SPSiteDataQuery to get XML from SharePoint the results are easy to use with XSL. The format of the XML would be similar to the following…

<rows>
<row>
<Title>Page 1</Title>
<ContentType>Page</ContentType>
<ID>1</ID>
</row>
<row>
<Title>Page 2</Title>
<ContentType>Page</ContentType>
<ID>2</ID>
</row>
</rows>

Site Search not working…

One of my client have a very funny problem. They have deployed MOSS in a POC environment, and had their search settings set properly. Searching for information using the default content scope, “all sites”, yeilds expected results, hence crawling and searching is working fine.

I guess some of you might have noticed that when you are at a site, you will see a new search scope, “This Site”. When you are at a list, you will see additional scope, “This List”. These two scope appears by itself, and there seems to have no place to to set this, or to debug this… How to get this fix?

Building a Site Creation Webpart - How do you get a list of templates?

I am playing around with a webpart in my new VPC that will inevitably create a site based on what a user inputs to a combo box and a couple text boxes.  I can get the user to create the site if I hardcode in the id for the template name, however I want to get all the template codes and shove them into a combo box.  T

MOSS2007 – My “HttpHandler” more work!!

Since my last post on the Http Handler I am writing, I have not been able to fix the issue I get with the constant looping within the code and lack of attaching the “PreInit” method to the page.  However it works really well for normal team sites and site collections, well basically Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). I have had a little more time to work on this and have decided to expand it slightly.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Receives U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2 Certification

Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 has received U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 certification. Endorsed by the National Archives and Records Administration, the 5015.2 standard on which the DoD certification is based serves as the benchmark for government and corporate organizations that manage records and documents.

Private fields or Secure fields

uring SharePoint sessions I often get the question if you could have permissions on the properties of an item in a List or Document Library. This means that some of the properties of an item can be edited or filled in by someone with the right user permissions.

This is not available out-of-the-box and to make something like this you have to create a Custom Field Type. Because I’m a very polite and nice person, I’ve created such a private field for you and off course I will make it available on my blog, but let me first show you how it works.

Meanings of variables in the context menu’s script

If you are building a web part that displays context menus for list items - just like the context menus that SharePoint builds out of the box, you need to know the meaning of the attributes that you need to add to the table that holds the item. I couldn’t find any documentation or referance to it on the internet, so I decided to publish the results of my diggings.

Handle your customized SharePoint sites when you upgrade

If you have extensively customized your SharePoint sites (by using Microsoft Office FrontPage for example), you must decide how to handle your customized sites when you upgrade. Your approach will vary based on the extent of the customizations, the complexity of your site, and your goals for upgrading.

How do i get Word Macros to Work in MOSS/WSS 3.0

Hello Recently i have installed quite a few MOSS and WSS3.0 servers, and have ran into this problem more than once. The company has several word templates and quite a few contains differnt macros. They all worked in SPS2003 where you uploaded them to the FORM folder overwriting the template.doc file there - and…. it worked like a charm.  Today more likely than not you will use content types for templates and the forms library trick dosnt do no more.  But I dont se no reason why the macros shouldnt work.— well … but they dont.

Feature Extensions For WSS Blogs - What Next?

Well, it appears that what I was doing had a big overlap with what the guys over at the Community Kit for SharePoint were doing and so I have joined the team. The plan is now to incorporate the stuff I was doing with the great work they had already done to produce much better release than I could have on my own.

STP files, under the hood

Maybe the title here should be called “Hacking STP files”, but there may be some reasons you would like to know how to accomplish this. WARNING: Any details here are for educational purposes only, making changes to .STP files is not recommended, probably not supported, and generally is a bad idea. Why not instead restore the STP file, make a few tweaks, then re-save as a new template?

In WSS V3 Lookup fields are made easier to code against.

Many of you WSS V2 developers will have come across the “1#;Some text” value that lookup fields return. Some of you will have added code to you own utility classes to parse them to give the ID and Field values. In WSS V3 it gets much easier out of the box with the introduction of the SPFieldLookupValue object which will provide the LookupId and LookupValue fields for you.

30
May

Microsoft Surface still using flash?

Check http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ and find out yourself, the site uses flash instead of Silverlight

Why…..?