Caterpillar Dealer WesTrac Launches THREE MOSS 2007 Public Internet Web Sites

Vivid Group developed three public internet websites for WesTrac powered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Umbrella site for the world - http://www.westrac.com/

(Please note this page with Virtual Earth included! )

Overview of SharePoint Navigation

Hi again, second post on hidden treasures in SharePoint Designer. Maybe not a big one, but could be very handy :-), especially when you want to present an overview of your navigation in your sites. Let SharePoint Designer create a view on you navigation:

Open a site in SharePoint Designer, go to Site in the menu bar and pick Navigation:

Fix the ‘problems’ in your Site

When you are creating or modifying sites or pages it could be very nice to see some reports. You can use the Site Usage reports but they give you reports on how many times your site has been viewed.

These are not the reports that I mean, I want to see some reports to know if there are some issues on my sites or pages. Again let SharePoint Designer be your friend and let him show you what is going wrong on your site.

SharePoint & Office Open XML Short Format Webcast Express Pilot

We’re trying out slightly new form factor - a shorter duration Webcast we’re calling Webcast Express. Most of you are familiar with our standard 60-min Webcast. These shorter format Webcasts are recorded straight to on-demand and generally run 10-20 minutes in length. For the pilot, we’re running them in a Web console and we’re making it easy to consume (ie. no registration).

With the feedback I’ve been getting from our evaluations and speaking with people at TechEd, I would think Webcast Express would be a no brainer. Shorter time committments and focused content will make it easier to consume in a single sitting. The no registration part means that the video will launch in just two clicks and you’re in.

All you ever wanted to know about SharePoint 2007 Site Templates

What are site templates?

Sometimes, you need to create the cutter for sites, so you can create cookie cutter sites easily. SharePoint comes with a few such cookie cutters out of the box. You might have seen this cookie cutter picker when creating a site/site collection etc. as shown below:

Sorting and pagination don’t work in a WebPart inherited from BusinessDataListWebPart

So you’re trying to extend the functionality of a BDC WebPart, but you realize that sorting and pagination get broken in the process. I’ve seen a few comments about this online, but nobody had figured out a solution yet. I even opened a ticket with the SharePoint team about it, but decided to try to tackle it on my own. After spending some time in Reflector, I figured out a few things and I was able to write my own code to make the sorting and paging work. You can find it below.

Blank “Author” field when querying document libraries

I just ran across this issue today. I’m still not entirely sure of the cause, but I’ve found a solution. I was creating a web part to pull a list of recent documents from the entire site collection formatted in a specific way, with links to the author’s profile and the parent site of the document. I started getting some errors from items inside of a team site document library. After some investigation, I realized that the “Author” field for the item was blank and that the items don’t even show up if you visit the document library. To disregard these, make sure your query includes a condition on the FSObjtype field:

Getting files attached to an instance of SPListItem

I was doing something with file attachments on custom lists in SharePoint recently, and the solution to iterating through the attachments and retrieving the binary file information wasn’t readily obvious to me.

For example, adding new attachments is done with the Add method on the SPListItem’s Attachments collection. No problem.

  newItem.Attachments.Add(fileName, contents);

  // where “contents” is a byte[]

However, when you want to retrieve the existing attachments and iterate through the Attachments collection, the WSS object model returns you a string containing the name of the attached file:

SharePoint Solution Deployment: Handy Post-Build Events

Having built some nice additional SharePoint WebControls, I want them to be deployed as a SharePoint solution, packed into a WSP file - and of course automated. I was very impressed how easy it is, to deploy Workflows based on the MOSS SDK Visual Studio Templates for Workflows. They use an own file structue in the project (”DeploymentFiles”) which consists of the needed .xml & .ddf files and also a .bat file that is used in a post-build command.

MOSS: 100% Unattended Installation

Hold on guys (and gals)! I have been doing this for last couple of weeks. Early next week you shall start seeing the series come through.

I am so excited about this, since it’s 100% unattended.

Forefront Security and MOSS ( Exception from HRESULT: 0×80041050)

This one took some time to weed out, but found that the Forefront Scan Engine had incorrectly flagged my welcome page in my Site Directory to VirusStatus=1 and was causing an Exception from HRESULT: 0×80041050 error.

Solution:

Moving the SharePoint Databases to a new SQL server instance

Well, you just have a brand new database server and you need to move all the databases from your old SQL server to the new SQL server. This is what I did to change the SQL server instance of an existing EPM farm. You cannot just backup and restore (or detach it) the databases. This is because the configuration database of your farm cannot be restored to a new SQL server. You have to use the backup/restore tools described here for EPM :

Content Database Restrictions

Number of Site Collections in a Content Database:
There are no restrictions.

Note: A content database can scale well to 50,000 site collections. There’s no magic line at 50K, but you may start to notice some overall throughput degradation as you go beyond 50,000.

Size of a Content Database:

Plan the end-user search experience (Office SharePoint Server)

This is very well-written article that all SharePoint DEVELOPERS should read prior to attempting to programmatically customize SharePoint search.  The article is intended for an ITPro audience, however, my experience has been that it is most often developers who are configuring search customization in SharePoint.

(Approval) workflow thingies

This has been on my mind for a couple of months and now I have the time to write a proper post about it. It’s about the user-friendliness of using custom workflows (or the default out-of-the-box even) on documents or in my case particularly: InfoPath Forms. The problem I am facing is that the customer finds it weird (and it is believe me) that approving a document or form requires a lot of steps that are not linked to each other.

SharePoint OOTB Web Parts

Q: Where is there a listing of SharePoint’s OOTB Web Parts?

A: You can find a listing here and here that should help.

SQL Server Webpart for Document Library Creation is Conquered

I swapped out the username and added an ’s’ to the table name.  Sometimes it’s very minuscule errors that cause problems with the entire lump of code.  I am still having problems with the BDC Version, however I am not ready to tackle it again just yet and will save it for a later date.  As far as I know the Sql Server Version of this webpart is just as speedy as the BDC Version.

Having trouble deleting a page layout because it’s still being referenced?

I see this question asked on a daily basis by many people;  “I’m trying to delete my page layout but it keeps telling me it’s still referenced — I swear it’s not!!! what’s wrong?”. Well, yes, it’s quite likely still being referenced, however …

AppPool crash when using persistent encrypted forms authentication cookies

In an ASP.NET 2.0 website created for a customer, I’ve run into a strange problem: the app-pool crashes every now and then. There’s no errormessage in the eventlog and the logging-mechanism in the website doesn’t get a chance to log the problem, because of the app-pool crash. All I could find were messages in the eventlog stating “Forms authentication failed for the request. Reason: The ticket supplied was invalid.”