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:

• GSD Locations with latitude and longitude
• Baseball Stadiums just address information

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.