Managed paths for new site collections

Just saw a great demo on planning sites and found out how to use managed paths to create site collections in a web application that do not have to be the /sites/ path. I’m guessing this was the intended approach in SPS 2003, but having never seen it before it’s really alleviated a lot of the problems I’m used to running into.

Things to know about managed paths:

Opening documents from SharePoint crashes Internet Explorer

In some cases when opening a document from SharePoint Internet Explorer crashes. A few alternative solutions can be found in the following KB articles:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929360

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;840024

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;833714

Scaling to Extremely Large Lists and Performant Access Methods

The whitepaper for on understanding the best ways to access and work with extremly large lists is now available.  The paper titled “Working with Large Lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007” evaluates performance characteristics of large SharePoint lists under different loads and modes of operation. Although this whitepaper appears to be focused exclusively on SharePoint Server, you’ll find when it comes to list scalability and programmatic access to lists there is little difference between WSS 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007, especially since they use the same base lists.

Web parts and extended portals

I made a custom search web part for SharePoint as described at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms551453.aspx While developing, in number of occasions, I received an error: „Cannot import this web part”. The error seemed to appear randomly.As usual, the solution was simple. My SharePoint portal was extended to two sites.

Weird SPS Document Library issue

Found this while trying to get some code I wrote to work correctly and it is confirmed by MS. If you have a site structure like 

Company

                Directorates

                                IT

And create a document library called “GaryTest”  (my favorite document library name )and then create the folder structure like Folder1

Updated Base Master Page for Collaboration Sites

I have updated my base master page for MOSS collaboration sites (although I don’t like to call them that now, alas that is for another post. For consistency sake, I will keep the name).

I cleaned it up and labeled more content placeholders, moved a lot of unneeded items to the hidden panel at the bottom of the page.

SharePoint Migration Tools, SharePoint Social Networking and TechReady 5

Another great day here at TechReady. Right now am in a great presentation on SAP/SharePoint integration. Earlier sat in a really good one that Lawrence Liu led on Social Networking tools and there are some great things coming down the pike in enhancements to SharePoint blogs, Wikis, etc as a part of the community work he leads.

Delete Files with Workflow Using Duration

Delete Files with Workflow Using Duration

This is just a quick little tidbit.  Out-of-Box workflows in MOSS, unless manually kicked off, require an event to be triggered.  I was trying to figure out a way to automatically delete files from a document library 3 days after they were uploaded.  The doc library was being used strictly as a transfer point and needed to be kept clean.  Thanks to Sean S. for the idea…

So as simple as it is:

1.       Start a new workflow using SharePoint Designer by going to File -> New -> Workflow.

2.       Give the Workflow a name and select the target doc library or list.

3.       Set the start event.  I set mine to automatically start when the item is created or changed.  Click Next. Migration Tools

Kimmo did a great presentation of his upgrade tools here at TechReady 5 an internal only event.  There isn’t anything in the release folder, but he has been checking in code on the workspace.

http://www.codeplex.com/SPMigration/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

I know he’s looking for people to validate and help build out the tools which will help you migrate from WSS and SPS/MOSS in 1.0/2001 and 2.0/2003 to 3.0/2007.

Migration Workspace

Creating a New Document Template

When multiple content types are used, Document Templates are managed one per content type.  The following steps walk through uploading a new document template for a content type and assigning it to a document library. Go to Site Actions à Site Settings à Modify All Site Settings. Click on Site Content Types under Galleries. Click on the Content Type that is to be changed. Click on Advanced Settings under Settings.

Display CSS Classes within SharePoint

I’m posting this just because I’m getting tired of losing the script… This is a great script written by Microsoft to reveal CSS classes within SharePoint.

Taken from: (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms438349.aspx)

<script language=”jscript”>
function ClassInfo()
{
if (window.event.srcElement.className != null)
{
stsclass.innerText = window.event.srcElement.className;
}
elseSharePoint VHD available again at Microsoft.com

If you read my post the other day entitled SharePoint VHD may be getting fixed you probably noted that the download page for the SharePoint VPC was taken down on Saturday.  Looks like the download page is back up now with a publish date of 7/24/2007:

Get SPUser object for someone who’s never browsed a site before

My friend Mark is working on a MOSS project where all authenticated users have access to the web application, but because they might not have browsed the site yet, he wasn’t able to get an SPUser object for them because they weren’t yet in the content database. I’m big fan of the Contact object in the Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Tasks.dll, so we started down the path using this object, and figured out the code to make it happen:

How to Add a Task in a SharePoint 2007 (MOSS/WSS) Site Programmatically

Here is a piece of code (a function) to add a task. You can use it as a Web Method in a custom Web Service. This method can be used from Applications outside of SharePoint, provided the user using this application has sufficient privilege to update Tasks Lists.

public string CreateTask(string SitePath, string TaskName, string AssgnTo, DateTime DueDate)

    {

        string ReturnVal = “”;

        try

        {

TechReady 5 Update and SharePoint Resources

It’s been a while since I posted. I am out in Seattle all week for TechReady 5, an internal training event for the field. For me it is a great chance to meet with the product teams, get some training, and get to hang out with some of the “Big Boys” in the SharePoint field (I keep hoping if I rub shoulders enough some of those smarts will rub off by osmosis). I have attended some great sessions and will be posting much of what I have learned here after I return. In the meantime though I did want to call your attention to a few nuggets I have seen here.

ASP.Net Ajax Collapsible Panel Style Bug with Absolute Positioning

I’ve been working extensively with ASP.Net Ajax, and the Ajax Control Toolkit in SharePoint/MOSS, which I’ll try to document more later, but I wanted to toss a note up here about a problem I lost alot of time to with the CollapsiblePanel extender in the Ajax Control Toolkit. The javascript for the Collapsible Panel does some trickery during a collapse/expand, involving creating a new child div, and moving all the children into that div

Solution Providers for MOSS

A while ago I found a list on the net with solution providers that have some sort of integration with SharePoint technology. I would like to share that with you: 

“Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers a complete set of functions and tools for interfacing with data and application logic provided by line of business systems, including many features that work right out of the box. Our partner community is also engaged in building connectors, protocol handles, and interoperability solutions using the BDC and .NET technologies. Below is a short list of partners with solutions for Enterprise Search, data integration or data migration for specific Business Applications. This list will expand and change as new solutions are released.”

How to create your own custom wiki site definition

So, a good start with a posting today about one of the chalanges we’ve been dealing with the last couple of weeks. For our customer we want to create a customized wiki definition, with some additional fields and layout. Normally you would think to copy the wiki site definition and change the onet.xml and the list dinition for the additional fields. So this is what we did, and it turns out to work ok. But changing the layout of the wiki page itself is something different…

List views in SharePoint are not as prominent as in the previous version

Even I sometimes forget that I have a predefined view on a list to support a process. In the older versions of SharePoint the views were display as actions on the left of the list. Now they are hidden in a drop-down which is often scrolled off the screen if there are a lot of columns in the default view.

This happened to me today when I was talking to someone who said they had web page listing all the SharePoint related KB articles and hot fixes. That reminded me that I also had these KB’s listed in my resource list but you would not see the pre-defined view unless you found a page on my site that had the tool bar visible (not often the case).

Microsoft Webcast: Creating a Global Human Resources System Foundation with SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 100)

In this webcast, we describe how migration of the Microsoft Human Resources Web content platform to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables: Faster future development. Reduction of 50% custom code, resulting in business and IT agility. Lower sustenance costs. Essential capabilities for future state architecture.

SharePoint and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are quite a few factors that go into Search Engine Optimization. At the end of the day, content is king. Implementing SEO practices into SharePoint is no different. Focus on the following: Title tag has the biggest importance H1, H2, H3, etc. have the 2nd biggest importance in declining order H1 should have the page header or possibly the page title H2 should separate your content into sections… META tags are important and should be part of each single page Link between your sites and to other sites Include a sitemap

 

ANZ MOSS sites in the Wild

Steve Iatropoulos has started compiling a list of Australian/New Zealand websites that are being delivered by MOSS 2007.  Please help make this list grow by emailing steve with the Urls of websites that you know are being delivered by MOSS 2007.

Site Column to Crawled Property to Managed Property

Apparently the lifecycle of a site column (or other property for that matter) to become a crawled and then managed property isn’t easy to remember as I’ve had to “discover” it more than once. Let’s get it in writing this time… When a site column is first created, you can do all the search crawling you want. Full, incremental, doesn’t matter. It won’t show up as a Crawled Property until it’s actually used and there’s data associated with it.

Debugging tips for SharePoint

Debugging on SharePoint is much the same as debugging any other ASP.Net application…you can use the same techniques. Here are some of my tips for diagnosing & solving your problems… Debugging starts with your first line of code As you start writing some code you need to bear in mind that

Incorporating Telerik’s RadMenu in a MOSS 2007 Publishing Site

You have heard people say how easy it is to incorporate new navigation controls, either those you roll on your own or commercial ones you purchase, into a MOSS 2007 Publishing site… or any WSS v3 based site for that matter. Well, now you can see how

 

Using calculated field on Yes/No fields

When you are creating columns in a list you can opt for a calculated field. With this field you can do calculations depending on other fields. You can multiply, add, divide … fields with each other.

If you have a monthly wage field, you can automatically calculate the yearly wage by multiplying with 12.

You can use a calculated field on a Yes/no (checkbox) as well. For example if the checkbox is checked you can display “checked”, otherwise you can display “unchecked”.

This is the formula that you need to use:

SharePoint Designer 2007 Backup: Totally Broken for Sites Greater than 24MB in size

Did you know what SharePoint Designer 2007 backup (Site->Admin->Backup) is totally broken for sites greater than 24MB in size? …even though SPD tells you it succeeded and you’ve carefully burnt months and months of your CMP backup files onto a growing stack of DVDs?

It’s true. Validated by the SPD product group and PSS. …and to “add insult to injury”, MS isn’t sure this will be fixed in time for SP1.

Here’s a workaround:

MOSS Metadata Propperty Mapping Wierdness

I am noticing some wierdness with the MOSS’s metadata propperty mappings.

The scenario I tried was, went to a document library and added a new number column, did an incremental crawl, came back to search settings and went to add a new metadata propperty. If declare the metadata propperty as Integer it does not pick up my new column, but if I declare the metadata propperty as text it does.

Low-cost and no-cost marketing ideas help generate additional business, maximize profits and minimize investment.

REDMOND, Wash. — July 25, 2007

What: Many small-business owners do not have enough money to promote themselves effectively. If budget is an issue, some proven nontraditional marketing methods such as guerilla marketing can help get the word out.

The author of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days,” Al Lautenslager recently offered small businesses advice on marketing to maximize profits and increase customers as part of a free Microsoft^® Office Live Web seminar series. Lautenslager uses his own practical experience of running and managing a small-business print shop to provide small-business owners with helpful advice and insight on topics critical to success and to nontraditional forms of marketing and word of mouth. The seminar can be found at http://www.officelive.com.

For small businesses that seek to market themselves on a budget, Lautenslager provides the following tips:

• Use nontraditional marketing strategies. Guerrilla marketing uses nontraditional and effective tactics such as public relations and direct mail, and online marketing such as building a Web site, to help promote a business without breaking the budget. Small-business owners with tighter budgets should use nontraditional means of advertising and avoid the more expensive television commercials as well as ads in national newspapers and magazines.
• Network, network, network. Shaking hands and introducing oneself in the community is key. Meet with the local chamber of commerce, attend trade shows, ask for letters of recommendation and join free mailing lists. A potential future customer might be in the group. 
• Nominate the business for an award or establish a customer of the month award. Look for local award opportunities and nominate the company for them. Publicize the nomination and any awards once received. At the same time, one can present a plaque or certificate to customers and promote that as well. 
• Tie to a current news event. Look for a current event and ask if there is a way the business is directly supporting the cause. For example, if environmental issues are important in the community, show how the business is earth-friendly. 
• Hold a contest. Even for a one-person shop, holding a customer contest is a great way to boost employee morale and draw attention to a business. The prize could have direct ties to the business such as a free subscription or service to what the business offers.

Where: Lautenslager’s entire seminar is available in the Office Live Seminars archive, which can be found at http://www.officeliveseminars.com.

Who: The author of “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days” and “Kick It Up a Notch Marketing: 25 High Impact Marketing Strategies for Printers,” Lautenslager is a certified guerrilla marketing coach who helps businesses and professionals increase their revenue through focused marketing and an increased client base. He is a sought-after speaker, author, small-business owner, entrepreneur, consultant and certified guerrilla marketing coach, and his companies have helped hundreds of people succeed in their own businesses. Lautenslager is a principal of Market for Profits, a Chicago-based marketing consulting firm, and the president and owner of The Ink Well, a commercial printing and mailing company in Wheaton, Ill.

More Information: Targeting the fact that small businesses often have limited resources, Microsoft Office Live is sponsoring the free Microsoft Office Live seminar series. Microsoft Office Live is a set of Internet-based services and tools that help small businesses establish a professional Web presence and promote their business online. The series gives entrepreneurs access to some of today’s most dynamic business leaders through interactive Web seminars giving practical advice on the hottest topics facing small businesses today, such as marketing on a budget, starting a new business and franchising. The series is hosted by Susan Wilson Solovic, chief executive officer and chair of SBTV.com, a Web-based television network focused on small business.

Microsoft to manage Digg’s advertising inventory as Digg continues on strong growth path.

REDMOND, Wash., and SAN FRANCISCO — July 25, 2007 — Digg Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced an agreement in which the two companies will collaborate to bring relevant advertising to the more than 17 million unique monthly visitors to Digg, an innovative Web site that harnesses the collective wisdom of the world’s online audience to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Web. Microsoft’s advanced advertising technology and sales force combined with Digg’s unique and growing user community make possible the three-year collaboration, grounded in the companies’ commitment to technological innovation and user experience.

As part of the relationship, Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on Digg. The two companies also agreed to work together on future technology and advertising initiatives. 

“Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content,” said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg’s combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.”

Microsoft and Federated Media Publishing, Digg’s current advertising partner, plan to collaborate to bring integrated programs to Digg’s users and advertisers. “Federated Media has unique advertising sales assets that dovetail with our efforts, and we look forward to working with them,” Berkowitz said. 

“We’re now positioned to provide a world-class advertising solution that builds upon Digg’s philosophy of providing a great experience for users and advertisers,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “As the Digg audience continues to grow and diversify, we believe that this initiative with Microsoft, and the resources that it provides, will enable us to focus less on developing an advertising infrastructure and more on developing new and innovative features for the site.”

“We are thrilled to work with these two world-class companies,” said John Battelle, founder and CEO of Federated Media. “Digg is truly a remarkable brand.”

The companies expect to begin execution of the agreement in the coming weeks.

Source: Microsoft Press

I updated the OCS 2007 page on this blog with the latest available docs, webcasts and virtual labs. You can reach the page here: http://www.virtual-generations.com/ocs-2007/

We at ADA-ICT have the OCS 2007 up and running for quite a long time and are happy camming, Instant Messaging and VoIPing

First thing we want when it is available is the RoundTable camera, hehehehe.

Installation and configuration was quite easy but you have to RTFM and you definitely need to know what you’re doing. And damn what do I need desperately a 64-bit dedicated Exchange 2007 server -:)

Beware yourself with the Active Directory preparation. We ourselves had an issue where the wrong Exchange Server was detected by the installation script. Now I don’t even have an idea where I can modify this, but ADSI-Edit did the trick (AD deep dive)

Simple way to add role based rules to InfoPath Web Form

Web based InfoPath 2007 forms do not support the Role Based Access that is available as an InfoPath 2007 client form; so we need a work-a-round:

Scenario:

You create an application form that needs to be filled out and completed by various types of users:

* User A needs to fill out and submit the form by selecting a “Submit for Approval” button.
* User B needs to approve the form by selecting and “Approve” button.
o User A must not see “Approve” button.

Solution:

Ghosting and Site Templates (repost)

By default your SharePoint pages are ghosted, which means the layout template is stored on the web front end server’s file system, while the content is stored in SQL Server.

Once you make modifications to a page using SharePoint Designer 2007, the page becomes unghosted; both layout and content are stored in SQL Server and the file is detached from the template page.

There are some concerns with this:

Unable to connect publishing custom string handler for output caching (repost)

This had me troubling for quite a while and looking on the Internet didn’t really give any real solutions (here and here).

In my case the errors were caused by a custom Web Service that I added to SharePoint. When one of the Web Parts called the Web Service an event log entry was written:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office SharePoint Server
Event Category: Publishing Cache
Event ID: 5785 ProfilePictureEventHandler

A SharePoint Library event handler to automatically link a picture to a MOSS 2007 User Profile.

The file names must be of the following format: [accountName].[ext]

ItemAdded

• The event handler extracts the account name from the new file
• The Profile Picture URL property of the corresponding User Profile is updated
• In case of an error an entry will be written to the machine’s event log

ItemUpdating

(Recording) Building custom document workflow in SharePoint 2007

Here’s the link to a recording of the demonstration that I did today with instruction on how to access it.

Recorded Web Cast: Here are the instructions to view it.

1. Click here and then click the “Register Online” Button.
2. Put in your Attendee Name (in the box below) and hit the confirm button
3. Then either hit the “View Online” button to stream it over the web or the “download” button to save it on your hard drive and view it on your desktop Windows Media Player

EventHandlerManager

A tool for registering/unregistering Event Handlers from a SharePoint List or Library. It uses an XML file to register event handlers.

<definitions>
<definition assembly=”ProfilePictureEventHandler, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4f658f603c9b5170″ class=”Vandest.ProfilePictureEventHandler”>
<list url=”http://localhost/hr/employeepictures” contenttype=”" eventtype=”ItemAdded” />
<list url=”http://localhost/hr/employeepictures” contenttype=”" eventtype=”ItemUpdating” />
<list url=”http://localhost/hr/employeepictures” contenttype=”" eventtype=”ItemDeleting” />
</definition>
</definitions>

• The definition root node can contain multiple definition nodes

Windows SharePoint Services Migration Check List

This Post Outlines a check list for migration planning from Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This is prepared as on basis of Visio diagram (draft) published by Microsoft. This check list is just a high level overview of the migration process. If you need more info please refer to TechNet White Papers

Site definition customizations versus using feature stapling Part 1

Site definition customizations versus using feature stapling Part 1 I have been doing a lot of work recently with publishing site definitions and custom page layouts. The current project that I am working on requires the creation of custom publishing site definitions and custom page layouts that will be wrapped up into features and deployed as solution packages (.WSP).

SharePoint Blogs: SPSiteDataQuery limited to 10 document libraries or lists

In previous posts I talked about the pitfalls of searching in WSS or MOSS. I wanted to report one more limitation we have discovered when doing cross-list searches in WSS using the SPSiteDataQuery object. The SPWeb.GetSiteData method is used to execute cross-list searches within a site collection. This method takes a SPSiteDataQuery object which contains properties which need to be populated prior to sending it to the GetSiteData method. Using CAML

WSS FAQ additions and changes LXIV - 16th - 22nd July 2007

SharePoint guidance

I just had a recent discovery for a great SP content source! I think from now on before I leave a SharePoint engagement, I’m going to recommend indexing the CodePlex SharePoint governance page (http://www.codeplex.com/governance). The governance codeplex site references everything from Joel Oleson’s blog and all the content you really need to get SP planned properly. Now, it should be excluded from the All Sites search, but should certainly be included as part of a new SharePoint Administration scope.

SharePoint Web Service Example – Grabbing Wiki Content

I presented a session at Tech Ready (Microsoft internal conference) yesterday. One of the samples I showed was how information can be consumed from a SharePoint web service and repurposed. The specific example was taking the Wiki content we host internally on our FAQ site (it’s a great example of using Wikis to build a Frequently Asked Questions knowledgebase) and creating an html file from it.

The code sample is straightforward. I developed it using Visual C# Express Edition on my Vista laptop. The web reference I added was http://faq/sites/sharepoint/_vti_bin/lists.asmx.

How to configure Email Enabled Lists in MOSS 2007 RTM using Exchange 2007

Steve Smith over at Combined Knowledge has posted a new version of his excellent Email Enabled Lists white paper, this time for Exchange Server 2007. Go check it out.

http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm