The solution to saving properties in Custom Field Types!

I have finally managed to put Anton’s code to the test in my own custom field type with great results.

The underlying issue is that the Update method does not seem to get called when adding a new field, and because there are a number of initializations of the field object the values in the custom propery editor controls get lost before you get to the OnAdded event where you could set them!

Display Web Part Page Maintenance Page

During my web part exercises, I want to find an easier way to delete a web part from a page. Enter the Web Part Page Maintenance page.

Please Use the SharePoint Backup Options!

I guess many of you read all of the different blogs coming out of Microsoft from Treb, Christophe and others so I try not to repeat stuff - but there are some new postings concerning backup and restore and migration of data between servers.  The links are referenced on Christophe’s blog.

So to add value I’ll concentrate on some problems I have seen - and hopefully convince you that having a full SharePoint backup of your farm is a good idea!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Hosting

This technical white paper details the deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007 within Microsoft, including the benefits and lessons learned, which may be helpful to other enterprises considering a large-scale implementation of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

MS KB Articles:

• Error message when you try to search for content in a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site: “The site could not be found in the Web application”
• Links do not appear as forward links on a wiki page in SharePoint Server 2007 or in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• How to manually collocate ProClarity Analytics Server 6.3 and SharePoint Server 2007 on port 80
• Warning message when you perform a content deployment or when you import contents to a site in SharePoint Server 2007: “Warning: Provisioning did not succeed”

Migration from WSSV2 to WSSV3

This is going to be a challening task and I am going to test this over the weekend. I wrote about moving WSSV2 MSDE database to WSSV3 SQL Embedded Edition earlier and step # 1 was to use the pre-scan tool.

SharePoint 2007: Issues with DataForm Web Parts and Site Templates

Have you had this issue yet? Open a site in SharePoint Designer, select Insert Data View from the Data View menu item, and do all the magic to add it to the page. Now save that site as a template and hydrate a site from it. What happens to that web part? Mine breaks and so does all the other devs’ that I work with. Here’s the problem.

Displaying the document URL in a document library column - part 2

In Part 1 of this post I discussed the possible options to obtain a document URL for a document in the document library. With this post I will explain how you can achieve this with a simple workflow.

Web Part Pages

I’m working on a problem with web part pages.  I created a document library to hold web part pages.  Using this doclib, there are two ways to create pages.  The first is using Sharepoint and hitting the New button.  After it is created, I edit it in Sharepoint Designer(SPD) and the familiar “Click to insert a web part” link is there.  However, the left navigation for the document libary is not there.  I can drag my lists from the Data Source Library onto the web parg area just fine.  But, when you save and view the page, it is just the page with no navigation.

NICE: Governance Information for SharePoint Server 2007

Governance is the set of roles, responsibilities, and processes that you put in place in an enterprise to guide the development and use of a solution based on SharePoint Products and Technologies. Effective governance can:

Using Delegate Controls in Sharepoint

After wrestling with the SDK information which skips a step or 2, I finally got the delegate control example to work that allows you to replace the Sharepoint Search box on the fly with your own custom control without ever having to touch the aspx page itself. This is a very cool feature with unlimited ramifications.

Fun with MOSS - PUBLISH THAT FILE!

Had a weird issue with an ASP.NET file that we had in our MOSS Pages directory. The page outputs an Excel file, but for some reason on mine it would render the output properly, but on everyone else’s computer it would render some code-created output…that I had deleted from the page a long time ago! WTF?!

MOSS 2007 search customization

Every time i’ve been using MOSS 2007 search, i always wanted to have a very simple thing. Before going deeper into the explanations, let’s look to the typical item returned after doing the search. What we see here? Actually we see almost everything that MOSS 2007 search could return OOB (out of the box). If you are interested for the details, see Microsoft.Search Schema Reference for Enterprise Search .

Plotting Your Data Using Virtual Earth – SharePoint Designer

After just having completed a podcast on geo tagging I thought this post by the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog was rather timely. Titled “Plotting Your Data Using Virtual Earth” supply you not only so great info. but the code to implement it as well.

Team-Based Development in SharePoint Server 2007

I worked with Microsoft’s Eric Charran on a previous engagement, and was pleasantly surprised to see a very helpful article he put together recently. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428899.aspx Summary: Learn to properly conduct team-environment development of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites and assemblies (Web Parts, site templates, custom list templates), as well as develop Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer artifacts (master pages, workflows, CSS sheets).

Updating an Item inside a SharePoint 2007 Workflow

Last week, I had the case where I wanted to update an item in a list inside a workflow process.
Of course, I wrote quickly the following code :

workflowProperties.Item[”Status”] = “Archived”;
workflowProperties.Item.Update();

MOSS 2007: Update on “Central Administration application pool account should be unique.”

As I wrote yesterday my MOSS site had this listed at Order 5 in things to do (and accessing it got a message that Central Administration was using an application pool that wasn’t unique). STOP: I’m now wondering (just that for the moment) what they mean here (in the subject line quote) by “account”.

Excellent Reference on MOSS Content Deployment

One of the big pain points with SPS 2003 was the fact that once you went to production all subsequent changes needed to be made real-time in your portal.  It made it hard to grow (or change) the intranet while managing risk to overall content management.  This was a big shock to IT folks who were used to the traditional web application deployment of ’staging’ to ‘production’.  MOSS 2007 includes content deployment which supports the traditional three tier deployment strategy (authoring-staging-production).

List and Library migration manager 2003->2007 from MetaLogix

Whether you are migrating between SharePoint servers, upgrading from SharePoint 2003 to 2007, or simply re-organizing your SharePoint content,
List and Library Migration Manager is an easy to use, convenient way of getting your SharePoint data across. With it’s familiar copy-and-paste-style user interface, you can quickly migrate all SharePoint list types between servers, while preserving your valuable metadata.

Metalogix Software - Website Migration Manager

Website Migration Manager for SharePoint
If your organization is moving to the SharePoint 2007 web content management platform, for streamlined website authoring, workflow and publishing,
Migration Manager helps you get there faster. By automating many of the arduous tasks traditionally associated with a website migration, such as generating lists of URLs, copying and pasting snippets of Html, and correcting links, you will save your team from having to undertake a time consuming and labour intensive, manual migration.

How to Conduct Page Version Comparison in MOSS