‘Customizing SharePoint the supported way’ - slides and sample code now available

The slides and code from my presentation at last week’s UK SharePoint user group meeting are now available - the topic was ‘Customizing SharePoint the supported way - from end user to admin interfaces’. The slides etc. will appear on the user group website at some point but I’ve also published them at:

http://sharepointchris.googlepages.com/customizingsharepointsupportedway

The areas covered are:

Using Virtual Earth in SharePoint (Part 1 of 2)

Over the past few weeks Daniel Colarossi and I have been working together on developing a series of Web Parts using Virtual Earth.  This article describes two ways in which you can use Virtual Earth from within SharePoint.  I will shortly be adding to these with a couple of additional ways we have used Virtual Earth. Content Editor Web Part The simplest way to insert a Virtual Earth map into your SharePoint page is to use the out of the box Content Editor Web Part.

Why SharePoint Projects Fail

I have been involved with a lot of SharePoint projects, a real lot. For some of these, I play the role as the architect as well as the developer, however for a lot of remote projects (which I do a fair amount of) I am doing component based development, so generally handing things off to the “architects” that are staffed internally as organization FTE’s, and whom expect to receive a simple, installable package. I like playing this development role on occasion because it affords you very, very unique insight into the project operations, a higher-level view of the overall project, where you don’t have a huge vested interest outside of a particular deliverable, and basically you can make some very interesting conclusions and observations without fear of reprisal.

Requests Per Second Required for SharePoint Products and Technologies

One of the most common questions making its way to my Inbox as of recently is how to determine the required requests per second (RPS) to support a SharePoint Products and Technologies deployment. While many IT Pros opt to use the recommend values associated…

New SharePoint 2007 Publishing Portal

As my friends John Ross (on Moss) and Andrew Connell have mentioned already today, the new web portal for Orange County Public Schools has just gone live. The team I work for was responsible for transitioning their website from a loose confederation of around 50 department managed websites into one unified Microsoft SharePoint 2007 publishing portal. I think the key differentiator for the site (compared to many other public SharePoint sites) is that it is maintaned not by a central team, but instead by these 50 departments and their respective employees. As for the initiative, I was primarily responsible for all of the public facing UI elements of the portal.

MOSS Search UI Architecture - Introduction

To modify SharePoint’s default search behaviors, it’s important to understand how the user interface elements for search work together to specify a query, execute a search and display the results.  The following high-level overview shows how searches are executed and displayed.

1.       The search box near the upper right of most pages is a control that accepts search keywords and scope from the user, and passes them to the search results page using a query string and HTTP GET.

2.       The search controls on the advanced search page accept keywords, scopes, languages and properties from the user, and passes them to the search results page using form variables and HTTP POST.

3.       The search results page calls an internal class with the inputs it receives, which builds the query, issues the query against the index and receives the results.  The internal class is implemented as a singleton: Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.SearchResultHiddenObject

4.       Web parts on the search results page retrieve their portion of the results from the internal class to render their specialty: core results, high confidence results, page number, summary or statistics.

Does your SharePoint Workflow look like this?

Then you need to get more information!  Here’s a list of links after my SharePoint Workflow for Developers webcast today.

SharePoint Workflow introduction

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA101005871033.aspx

Create a workflow in SharePoint designer

How to change service accounts and their passwords in MOSS and WSS 3.0 

How to change the Application Pool Identity of a WSS or MOSS web application

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration, click Operations.
2. Under Security Configuration, click Service accounts.
3. Click the radio button beside Web application pool. Select Windows SharePoint Services Web Application. Select the application pool where you want to change the identity, for example: Sharepoint - 80.
4. Make a note of the existing settings in case you need to unwind your changes.
5. Select the Configurable radio button. Provide the user name and password. It helps to be explicit here and use the domain\account format (e.g. mydomain\SPService). Also be sure to use a strong password. Click OK.
6. To restart the application pool, either open IIS and recycle the application pool, or open a command prompt and type iisreset -noforce.
7. Open your SharePoint site in a browser to confirm that the change was successful.  

This change will be automatically propagated to all web front-ends.

Porting SharePoint Designer Workflows to Visual Studio

Hey everyone,

A lot of people ask if SPD workflows can be customized in Visual Studio so that you can deploy it as a reusable workflow template or add some code to it, and our official answer is that it’s not supported. But… it doesn’t mean it’s not possible to some extent;). In reality, an SPD workflow is just a Workflow Foundation XOML file that’s compiled on the fly, and this file can be opened in the Visual Studio Extensions for WF like any other VS workflow. Today, I’ll show you how to get started;). (It’ll be our little secret!)

Building a WSS 3.0 Server

I’m rebuilding a development server that I’ll be using for the conversion of www.benkoTIPs.com to document the various processes. So what are the steps in doing this?

We start with a base instance of Windows Server 2003 R2 with the latest updates installed. This version of Windows Server I added WSS 2.0 as one of the roles enabled for the server, this turned on ASP.NET 2.0 and configured IIS to host the site.

 Lessons learned from a real world implementation - Part I

My team just completed a large MOSS project and I thought now would be a great time to reflect back on the SharePoint implementation — not to be confused with MOSS MVP John Holliday’s SharePoint Reflections (of which I’m a big fan).  The first big issue that we ran into is what I refer to as the Great MOSS Paradox.  This is the idea that Microsoft markets SharePoint 2007 to businesses as an easy to use product with a laundry list of easy to implement features.  On the surface, yes this is 100% true but it comes with a very big disclaimer. 

SharePoint Designer Workflows

When people hear that SharePoint now has workflow support they often think that the product will support their “simple” scenario out of the box. This may be the case but there are some caveats:

• Out-of-the-box means SharePoint Designer is required to design the workflow (only option for WSS, MOSS has 4 simple and rigid Web UI based workflows)
• actions can only be performed on lists/libraries in the current site
• there is no “for each” loop to deal with multiple items that match the workflow condition
• you can’t create sites or documents from the workflows
• You can’t update other data sources (BDC, SPD data source library items)

I have found some customers getting burned by developer’s inexperience in this area so it is important to understand what you can and can’t do with the OOTB features. To get around the above limitations you will have to use Visual Studio to create an entire workflow for a list/library or just an activity that can be used in SPD.
See this summary of workflow resources and look for the ECM starter kit in the SDK.

Calling WSS 3.0 Web Services from WCF clients
 

Having just gone through this, I thought I’d share the basic procedure when calling WSS 3.0 Web services such as lists.asmx and views.asmx from a WCF client.  As you may know, the exceptions returned by the WSS Web services are terse.  Hopefully, this post will help someone trying to avoid those in their own project.

Step 1 - Add a Service Reference to the WCF service you want to call (Duh) 

Customizing My Site Templates

One of things that I’m currently researching is Customizing My Site Templates for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 since Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 does not offer My Site functionality [read the Evaluation Guide for features that are part of WSS 3.0]. If you want, you could create a custom My Site for each of your users with a custom login solution or a SharePoint authentication prompt [have more information about this? Comment below]. As many of you might already know, the SharePoint team released 7 Role Based My Site templates and “Under the Hood” white papers for Fantastic 40 Application Templates and Splendid 7 My Site Templates now available!  

Displaying OneNote files in SharePoint for all to see

That’s right. Users don’t need OneNote to see your notes thanks to Dave Tse’s OneNote Web Exporter on CodePlex. Here is an example of a discussion I was having with someone over a single server deployment for a small organization who wanted everything to be under one URL. http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/iframe.aspx?url=http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/pages.htm Dave suggests using the Page Viewer Web Part but then you have to manually set the height of the web part.  

Installing WSS 3.0 on Windows Server 2008 Beta 3

Aside: I’m sure I saw something saying that Windows Server 2008 RCP is out but I certainly can’t find it .. We left Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 in a Parallels VM where it couldn’t find the networking driver. I finally decided to spend more than the odd second on this and carefully looked at which driver was being used in a working Parallels VM running Windows Server 2003 (and WSS 3.0 - what else?) and then looking at the same location in the 2008 Beta 3 VM. In 2003 it was prleth.sys (and there were four more Parallels drivers) and in 2008 there were no Parallels drivers at all.

Two New Internet Websites Launched on MOSS 2007

In the spirit of talking about the cool projects I’ve been working on as mentioned in a previous post I want to bring your attention to two new MOSS-powered websites that just launched, right at the eve of this year’s Live Earth event (that’s currently happening as I write this).  The customer’s name is Conservation International and they’ve just re-launched their public internet web properties on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  Today, marks the official day of Live Earth, a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis. Live Earth will reach this worldwide audience through an unprecedented global media architecture covering all media platforms - TV, radio, Internet and wireless channels.

KB Articles:

• Error message when content is crawled in SharePoint Server 2007: “An unrecognized HTTP status was received. Check that the address can be accessed using Internet Explorer”

• Error message when you try to open a help window from a SharePoint Server 2007 site or from a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site: “Cannot display help”

• How to configure the Excel Services Unattended Service account in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

 

Dear Mr. InfoPath: (An open letter to the InfoPath Team)

I know we’ve had our issues.  I know that you might think that some of my approaches just don’t work for you.  I’m hoping we can work out our issues though.  Customers need to capture data through forms and having me build every form by hand with development tools just takes too much time.  So I’m hoping that we can work out differences out.  Here’s what I see as our major communications issues are:

Building professional internet sites using MOSS 2007 - Metatags (Part 2)

(please read the Part 1 here)

In the second part of building a professional set of Metatags for a public-facing MOSS site, I’m going to explain how to use the “MetaTag” WebControl in a MOSS environment.

MOSS Search and BI

Extending Enterprise Search Capabilities to your Business Intelligence Applications

…and corresponding downloadable code content.

More MOSS in the wild …

My colleague, Ian Palangio, has alerted me to a couple more cool sites on MOSS.  Check them out …

This site includes MOSS Search and will have multiple languages soon  http://www.goodmanintl.com/

Also, QLD Dept of Education has a public facing MOSS Search interface as a POC. http://wse.education.qld.gov.au/default.aspx

WSS FAQ additions and changes LXII - 2nd - 8th July 2007 

Simple Corporate Directory with InfoPath 2007, SharePoint 2007 and Web Service

Currently have a client that we built a SharePoint 2007 web part that displays Active Directory user name, company, title and extension and it’s filtered by location and last name initials.  All the LDAP queries were built in a .NET Class project and exposed through a .NET Web Service.  This was all great but I wanted a simple way to display the data in a table format during testing so I decided to use InfoPath 2007 as the presentation layer.  To get it to work was simply done by created a Data Connection to my web service and then inserting the repeating group from web service data source to the form as a repeating table.

Another Virtual Earth SharePoint demo 

Greg Chan had a nice post over on the SharePoint Designer team blog on customizing the item display form for a contacts list.

I was thinking more along the lines of a SharePoint mash-up solution so I built a web part page that listed all the contacts and when you clicked on one it would update the map.

 MOSS User Profile Info - How the information flows

Let me start with a diagram - 

Okay, now for the explanation.

As you can see, there are various moving peices in how the user profile information flows within MOSS. Here are the salient points -

SharePoint 2007: All you ever wanted to know about User Profiles

There seems to be a lot of misinformation about this particular topic, so I am just going to type out what I know, and everyone please add/correct as you consider necessary. Also if there are other Q’s that can be answered about User Profiles, please leave the questions as comments, and I’ll add the answers when I can.

What are User profiles?

In SharePoint 2007, a userid is uniquely identified by his/her username. The username is tied to the membership provider that the site is configured to authenticate against. A user however has a lot more information about him/her other than just their userid. For instance, they may have a phone number, email etc. All this information goes in the user profile.

Enhanced Content Query Web Part goes Beta 2!

I  am proud to announce that the Enhanced Content Query Web Part is now beta 2. The new release includes a WSP deployment file that simplifies deployment - just download the file, and use STSADM to install it - no more messing around with web.config, .dwp or .webpart files, or xslt style sheets!
I even wrote a small batch file to help you install it if you are uncomfortable with the stsadm command line. You can find the above in the project’s web site: http://www.codeplex.com/ECQWP

WSS 3.0 Language Packs - don’t be scared of them

I have always kept very quiet about the possibility of installing the Finnish version of WSS (both 2.0 and 3.0) because I didn’t want the hassle of having Finnish language error messages that Google wouldn’t be able to find (and that I would have difficulty not in understanding but in doing the 100% accurate - “accurate” = getting the same end text as in the English version, which isn’t necessarily a correct translation - translation that would allow me to ask an International audience what could be causing the error) even ignoring the fact that the Finnish version might well have fixes coming out later than the English version.

10 Steps To Effective SharePoint Project Management

Ok, so as Bob Fox pointed out:

“I have to admit that sometimes I do tend to just say things that should only be thought about and then discarded, but my good friend seems to not follow that logic”

Ok, so that is true, some of the things that I post on this blog are mostly because I am angry about something, but hell, its my blog, so whatever. They are often times just things that need to be said.

MOSS and WSS Best Practice analyser

If you have that niggling feeling that your WSS or MOSS installation isnt right, consider running this analyser. 
Partners:  consider this as part of a consultancy you can offer …

Building professional internet sites using MOSS 2007 - Page Titles (Part 3)

This post is how to build composite page titles using an enhanced FieldValue WebControl.

Page Titles are very important for internet sites since more and more search engines rank pages higher that contain (parts of) the search phrase in the page title. That’s why it makes sense to show keywords of your site in your page title - together with the actual location and maybe even the company name. This is what I would call a “composite page title”.

Example? See http://www.schleuniger.com/DesktopDefault.aspx/tabid-44/74_read-1590/ from site which I’ve built some years ago (yes, I know it was not built using MOSS, but the business case is the same).

SQL Maintenance Plans and MOSS give 100% CPU error

Andrew Bridgeman recently emailed me about an issue he had encountered with his internal MOSS 2007 deployment.    He had implemented the out of the box maintenance plans using the wizards and initially all was well with the world.  He only realised there may be a problem when the portal became unresponsive,and on investigation this was down to SQL Server running at 100% CPU and the crawler stuck on “crawling full”.