MSDN Webcast: MSDN geekSpeak: Custom Authentication Providers for SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 200)
Nick Grattan writes “As an alternative to programming against the SharePoint web services you can use the SharePoint object model. The object model can be used when the application will run on the server where SharePoint is installed …or in assemblies that are run within a site..
Retrieving List Information in Share Point
One common tasks that I have needed to do while working with SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is to retrieve information in regards lists or libraries. You need this information when you want to perform add, update, or delete functions when working with data from a document library.
In today’s post I will walk you though retrieving the list information. We will be getting this list information via the Lists.asmx web service.
Self-Service Site Creation and permissions
Yet again a post about permissions! This one is about the self service site management feature that you can enable in the Central Administration page near the Application Management and then right here : So you enable it and click on “OK” just like the screenshot below : Next you want to create a site using the ’scsignup.aspx’ page and there you get an access denied error and SharePoint wants you to login with a user who has sufficient permissions to perform this action.
Two Applications to Help with Getting the Perfect Colors for Your SharePoint Styles
If you are engaged in creating visually appealing sites, be they SharePoint based or not, getting just the right color as your base and then deriving a suitable palette of other colors to compliment it can be a chore. This weekend I stumbled across two web based tools that can help ease that piece of the process.
- First up getting the perfect base color can be a chore. Wouldn’t it be great to have a utility that allowed you to pick the exact color from anything visible on your computer screen? Color Crop allows you to do just that. You can grab your free copy here.
- You have that great base color now how do you get the rest of your palette? Why not give Color Jack a try. Color Jack allows you to pick a primary color and then it provides the rest of the palette for you. Try Color Jack here.
I have faced an interesting bug on a customer’s site. We were trying to configure the user profile import feature of MOSS 2007. We used the default configuration since the MOSS 2007 server was a member of the domain. We were getting a warning ( god, I can’t remember the warning detail, so I can not write it here, stupid me ) that says, it can not connect to the domain controller ( it was something like “access denied” and “object not found” or stuff like that ).
Nikander and Margriet on SharePoint: Working with noise words
Noise words are words that do not improve the relevancy of a matching document, and, therefore, are not considered useful in a search query. Words such as “and”, “the”, or the company name are very common and will be found in almost any document and are therefore useless in a search query.
If you want to see which words are considered noise words, or if you want to add your own noise words to the list, you can find the default set of noise word lists at the following location: [drive letter]:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Config. This folder contains noise word lists for a wide range of languages, such as English (noiseeng.txt) and Dutch (noisenld.txt). If there is not a noise word list that supports your language, you can add noise words to the neutral noise word file (noiseneu.txt).
New SharePoint Search case study has just been posted up on Microsoft Case Studies.
“Endsleigh Insurance Services staffers did not use the search functionality on their intranet to find information because it delivered irrelevant results. In response, Endsleigh deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 with Enterprise Search. Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, Endsleigh redesigned its intranet. With Enterprise Search, staffers have experienced a 100 percent improvement in search results, improving their productivity.”
Publishing Page - List does not exist error message
I ran into an issue today where users could not access as SharePoint 2007 Publishing Site Page. The error message was:List does not exist.
The page you selected contains a list that does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user. Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services. I had no problem viewing my site and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I then looked at the URL for the page which was:Â
SharePoint: Capture SharePoint User Data in InfoPath
Requirement: Submit schedule change requests to SharePoint so supervisors can approve them through workflow.
Challenge:Â I needed to be able to create these list/library items with unique names per person, so no one has more than one schedule request active at a time.
Solution: This wasn’t a case where I could use a survey or custom list to get the user data into SharePoint–it would have to be Infopath. I created my schedule maker in InfoPath and learned to capture the current user name from SharePoint using web services and store it in the InfoPath form as a variable.
AJAX SharePoint List Rotator WebPart
Sometimes, you want to rotate items out of a SharePoint list on a random basis in order to make this information available to your users, for example, some items that might be housed within your enterprise portal that would be helpful to rotate on something like your intranet frontpage displayed in no specified order are:
Technology Tips
Work Related Tips
Random Quotes
Company News
Upcoming Company Changes / Business Announcements
So, without further a due, a shocker of a WebPart, the AJAX Rotator WebPart.
SharePoint Learning Kit: Part 3 - rewriten and shorter.
I have decided to rewrite my last post - not happy with it 
going to shorten it.
I thought for part 3 I would give a bit of a work through of SLK and assigning a document to a pupil.
- Install SLK
- Create a new Team Site
- Give your learners view access to your site
- Give your instructor for that class members access
- Enable SharePoint Learning Kit for that site
- Go to Site Actions
- Go to Site Settings
- Under Site Administration go to Site Features
- Make sure SharePoint Learning Kit is Activated
I was looking at these updated metrics today from MS IT and found them insightful and interesting. The ratio for recycle bin you may find interesting as a new metric. Couple of new estimates based on this environment: ~30% of documents in environment is indexable, ~%5 storage in use for 30 day recycle bin.
With the table below you could look at growth rates of steady state farms vs. greenfield as well as growth of my site farms over time. Note this data is provided as sample data and may not reflect other environments.
Current Global SharePoint FootPrint
15.2 Terabytes Used by databases
152,236 Site Collections
397,226 Sites (Webs)
Documents In 2007 SharePointÂ
8,109,804Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Indexable Documents
29,803,180          Total Documents Â
SharePoint List Performance
Anyone who has dealt with development in SharePoint has likely had to deal with SPList, SPListItem and SPListItemCollection. Recently I have been working on some projects that were experiencing some performance issues. Looking at the code, I started to realize that while I had heard a lot of things from Microsoft (specifically the SharePoint product team) about how much the SharePoint list performance had been increased, I had not actually seen a lot of publications around where, how and some good ways to take advantage of them. Certainly there are articles about Indexed columns, and many about views only up to 1000-2000 items.  I decided to dig a little deeper, and I think you might be as surprised as I was about what I found.
ByPass Error Page while canceling the event in Event Handler
Actually, till some time back, i was searching for a way to bypass the error page, while canceling the event in event handler. In one of our application, when user deletes a item, event handler should cancel event, set a different status (so, that item will not processed in the application anymore). And user should not get the error page, according to the user, item is deleted. One of my friend, gave the solution in minutes. Though many of you might already know this, but i think it is worth putting in a blog. Here is the simple code, which helps us doing that
More useful and (free!) SharePoint “Features” available at http://www.CodePlex.com/Features
About 6 months ago, I posted a guest blog entry by Scot Hillier, a SharePoint MVP, about the shared source Features project that he had started on CodePlex. Since then, several others (Brendon Schwartz, Dan Attis, Renaud Comte, and Stacy Draper) have joined the project, and I’m very happy to post this update from Scot about additional features that are now available. I look forward to seeing even more features become available over the next 6 months as the project grows. If you would like to contribute to the project, please contact Scot via the http://www.codeplex.com/features project site.
SDK availability for SharePoint 2007 SDK 1.2 and WSS 3.0 SDK 1.2…!
We are very proud to announce a major update to the MOSS and WSS Software Development Kit (SDK) downloads. You can install them from the following locations:
· MOSS 2007 SDK 1.2. Includes Conceptual and Class Library Reference documentation, Web Services documentation, and Developer Tools and Samples for MOSS and WSS. See below for a detailed breakdown what’s new in this release.
· WSS 3.0 SDK 1.2. Includes Conceptual and Class Library Reference documentation, Web Services documentation, and Developer Tools and Samples for WSS technology only. See below for a detailed breakdown what’s new in this release.
Combining SharePoint and Twitter by Ben McCormack
I love it when folks forward me their write-ups to read and pass along. J Just got one from Ben McCormack (one of the friendly folks I have met on Facebook). Ben has been looking at SharePoint and Twitter and the integration between the two and just put up a nice posting on it. The posting includes a link to a video he made demonstrating how he integrated them. Thanks for the tips Ben!
See “Combining SharePoint and Twitter.”
Default Locale of Sites are wrong
It seems everybody is suffering with this. There are a number of posting about how to hack the DB to change the default locale from 1033. Nothing is guaranteed to wind up the users more. I thought I would check (for my own sanity) what the locale settings are on my servers and just try to bottom out a misconfiguration issue ahead of assuming it is a bug. MOSS should have inherited the locale setting correctly shouldn’t it? Time to go and check what is going wrong. Check the Time zone setting on at the web application level (in Manage Web Application Settings). Yes, set correctly. Check the locale of the computer. This is set correctly in Regional settings control panel applet. Yes, also set correctly.
A Nice 2 Part series on getting started with SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 from MSDN
Over at MSDN there is a nice 2 part series about getting started in developing SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 solutions/add-ins. These 2 articles are well worth the read for any newbie (like myself) and I would highly recommend reading them.
They can be found here:
Part 1
Part 2
To Create Workflow Association and Initiation Forms (Windows SharePoint Services) :
To Create Workflow Association and Initiation Forms (Windows SharePoint Services) :
1. Specifying Association Forms
You specify a workflow’s association form in the workflow template definition XML. To do this, set the value of the AssociationURL attribute of the Workflow Element (Elements) element to the custom form page you want to use for workflow association. For example:
AssociationURL="MyWkflAssociationPage.aspx"
Anonymous Access to InfoPath Forms
I wrote an artice on using anonymous access for InfoPath forms on MOSS 2007. You can read it by clickling here…
KB Articles:
KB Articles:
For Download: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies
I have been asked quite a few times about SharePoint integration with SQL Reporting Services and where to get information or code so I thought I should post a link up here to that.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies
“Overview
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies (Reporting Services Add-in) allows you to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2) report processing and management capabilities within Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The download provides the following functionality:
If you followed my last post, I promised you a great way to do production deployements across all your web front ends with one double click of the mouse. The fundamental component to making this work is SharePoint solution packages. This isn’t a new idea; in fact, many people have already blogged on it:
Chris O’Brien
Chris Johnson
MSDN
Integrating Access Contacts with SharePoint and Outlook
There was a question on our post about getting Access to recognize tables as specific WSS table templates around what else you need to do to get the new Add From Outlook feature to work on a custom contacts table. This feature uses the same mechanism to determine that a table is a contact table, but more than that it needs to know how to map fields in your table to those in the Outlook contact store. There are a bunch of fields, so easier than building this out yourself, here’s a quick snippet of VBA that will take any table, and make it into a contacts table. Just plop this into your solution, then update the table name and field names to reflect the fields in your custom contacts implementation, and run it.
SPContext.Current.FormContext is my new best friend !
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spformcontext_members.aspx
FormContext has this super Method
1. SetFormMode Use it to change the current SPControlMode (haven’t tried this out)
FormContext has two awesome Properties
1. FieldControlCollection - Get a collection of the Field Controls.
2. FormMode - Get the Current SPControlMode
Thank you for the collection of links. The ‘Developing InfoPath Forms for Anonymous Access’ article by Paylaşım Noktası holds a significant interest for me. What I’d like to direct your attention to is the first phrase which starts the article. Author states that “there has always been a problem to add items to a list on WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.” As a person how has some experience in working with list items I would completely agree with the author. However, I would add, it is believed there are no problems with managing item security be it the add, remove or copy operations performed by MOSS administrator or some other security-related operations specific to permission access control in Sharepoint Server. When in this example the result with adding an InfoPath to the form library to allow anonymous users send filled form has been achieved relatively easy by creating an special web service, the situation with performing permission level configurations can be more resource consuming. For example we maintain a relatively large Sharepoint farm. We recently began a transition from an existing Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 to Sharepoint Server 2007. This all induces a huge amount of work to put into making all things solid and compliant across the farm. From my admin-based point of view, sharepoint security management and administration require using specialized tools. To be more specific, I recently tried Scriptlogic’s Security Explorer (just got tired of making the implementation myself) and I think I would stick to it and try it a little more. The administration and permission management there is very well organized. I noticed that I just don’t spend time for routine task. And last but not least, I am impressed with the idea to make all the farm structure available within one console. Don’t like multipage interface and prefer controlling the things from a single view.
First things first, thanks for your extended reaction! As always, everyday is a pleasure for me to provide you all with the link love.
I didn’t know this tool. Thanks for the tip. I was wondering the last couple of days how it could be possible, with a minimal set of resources, to manage a whole farm with web part/item/page level security implemented. Every ordinary IT manager or IT Pro wants to have a reporting tool. I did a quick scan of the tool. I also like the fact that it’s not web-based. Although SharePoint is in my opinion a fantastic product. The fact that it’s web-based could sometimes be an obstacle when you want to work quick. I will try this one myself the next working day
Thanks again for sharing
Hello again, Jaap. I am glad that my post was helpful. It’s always nice to see people find useful something you find useful too. How do you like it? Have you tried it? I’m really enjoying the permission cloning feature. That really helps me with achieving compliance and the consolidation of security configurations between several sites. It’s like comparing multiregion select with drag-and-drop functionality in Explorer and the old copy command for file management.