Updated RSS Aggregator Web Part(Eric Shupps, Binarywaves)

I have posted an updated version of my RSS Aggregator web part here.  The new version includes some stability enhancements, better error reporting, and the option to open links in a new window.  Unfortunately I don’t have time at the moment to implement some of the other changes people have asked for, like XSL Formatting and summary text, but hopefully I’ll get around to those soon.  The zip file includes full source code and a readme file with installation instructions.

Localizing SharePoint 2007 site columns using resource files(Ton Stegeman, SharePoint blogs).

The site columns that are deployed by SharePoint are localized out of the box. In a Dutch SharePoint site, the displayname of field “Date Picture Taken” is “Afbeelding gemaakt op”. In this post I will show you how to do this for your own . The XML definition for the displayname of this field (from the fields feature looks like this:

SharePoint 2007 Design Tip: Using Background Images in your Site Design(Heather Solomon: HeatherSolomonblog)

A common trick in CSS design is to set a background image in the body tag for a site that contains a lot of the graphic elements of a site.  This is often used to create colored columns and bars in CSS only design.  See a screenshot. For example:

body {
background: url(”myimage.gif”);
}

When you do this in SharePoint, the background image will also appear in the Rich Text Editor used in the Content Editor Web Part.  See a screenshot.

SharePoint & Outlook – The Perfect Link(Microsoft Outlook team, MSDN blogs)

Outlook 2003 introduced integration with SharePoint, allowing you to see some SharePoint information (like calendars) in Outlook alongside your personal information. In Outlook 2007, we made this a whole lot better.

Here we’ll focus on the new Document Library syncing capability that allows you to easily access, preview, search, and edit your SharePoint document libraries in Outlook.

To begin, let’s start by syncing an existing Document Library to Outlook:

Microsoft SharePoint Deployment Planning Services(John Westworth, Technet blogs)

As organizations of all sizes around the world deploy Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server, they are engaging with trusted partners to assist with the planning of this critical IT responsibility. Through SharePoint Deployment Planning Services , Microsoft provides you with the tools, training and support needed to take advantage of this opportunity to help eligible customers overcome that challenge, while helping you to increase revenue and grow your business in the process.

Configuring external web farm FQDN after you create pool(Chad A. Lacy, Technet Blogs)

Many enterprises set up their OCS environment initially without plans to connect it externally and later decide that they do want to make OCS available externally. The natural tendency is to re-run the setup and check the box for external access. However, this does not completely configure everything as it would if you had done this the first time. Most importantly, the external URLs for the web components server are not populated.

Uploading Spreadsheets into SharePoint Lists(Sean Earp, Technet blogs)

Ran into an interesting issue when trying to upload a spreadsheet from Excel 2007 into SharePoint 2007.

To do so, you would normally click on Site Actions –> Create –> Import Spreadsheet.  In the past, I have found this to be the easiest way to create and populate a SharePoint List.  however, when doing so today, I got the following:

Import to Windows SharePoint Services list

Workaround - “Error” in navigation when creating a publishing site from code(Ishai Sagi, SharePoint Tips and Tricks)

Since I started working with sharepoint 2007 I was puzzled by this bug, and recently I asked more people how said they have that too. The problem happens when you use the API to create a site out of a template that has the publishing feature activated in it. The site is created ok, but the first user to open the site will see a very odd tab and quick-launch:

Creating features using the ElementFile node(Robin Meure, Robin’s SharePoint blog)

Andrew Connell (one of the best known SharePoint MVP’s around) has posted an article about using the, rather unknown, ElementFile node in which you can specify which files are included in your custom feature definition. So why do you wan to do this you might wonder.. well.. read the following snippet

SharePoint Beagle(Bob Fox, Bob Fox’s SharePoint blog)

I’m excited to announce a new offering by our very own Bob Mixon. He is about to release the first issue of a monthly Newsletter catering to all things Sharepoint. So why am I so excited? I’m one of the first featured contributors so get your butts over to www.BobMixonConsulting.com and sign up. Yes it’s free J 

Creating custom columns(A. James, geekswithblogs.net)

This one isfrom one of our team here at Solidsoft - Dave Robinson:

When creating any custom columns for content types, create the field without a space and then rename the field to include any spaces.

e.g If you have a field ‘Sox Reference’, create the field with a name of ‘SoxReference’ and then edit the field to make it ‘Sox Reference’.

Should you activate the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature on all site collections in a MOSS 2007 implementation?(Penny Coventry, Mindsharpblogs)

If you have installed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, either the standard or enterprise editions, then you have one or more site collections based on the Collaboration Portal and / or Publishing Portal site definitions. Within each of these site collections you will have a number of subsites based on Web Content Management-enabled SharePoint site definitions, which I refer to as publishing sites and a number of sites based on non-publishing site definitions or templates, such as, the team sites or meeting workspaces.

Known SharePoint Issue: Switching from inherited to custom permissions!(Chad Clarkes, SharePoint blogs)

SharePoint has a known issue when you’re working with the Security of SharePoint.  When you are working with the permission in Sharepoint and want to go back and forth between inherited and custom security, MOSS 2007 gets mad.  Breaks the entire portal.

Customize Announcements Summary View(Ryan McIntyre, SharePoint blogs)

While looking at customizing some home page content (including the Announcements summary web part), I came across this little gem describing how to do things like remove the By and Modified date from the display

Getting a pulse on the SharePoint blogosphere(Andrew Connell, AndrewConnell.com)

A while ago Dustin Miller offered to mirror your blog as long as it was SharePoint related through “the” place for a SharePoint blog: SharePointBlogs.com naturally. After seeing how it was implemented I jumped on board. Wow… now that was one smart move.

So here’s how it works.

Versioning settings on document libraries(Mirjam van Olst, SharePoint blogs)

Yesterday we got a question from a customer whether is was possible to have versioning on a library, and at the same time disabling the check in/ check out option. I didn’t know, but after a view minutes of looking around, my colleague Casper found the settings in the document library settings under Versioning Settings.

SharePoint 2007 (MOSS/WSS) how to change the template link within a InfoPath Form under a Form Library to point it to a New Form Template(Pranab, MSDN Blogs)

Requirement:  You have designed an InfoPath Form Template and published it as a Content Type.  You have a Form Library where you have made this Content Type as the Default Content Type. You have added few Forms which are associated with this Form Template or Content Type.

Exchange Managed Folders syncing to SharePoint(Mark Harrison, MarkHarisson.co.uk)

Plan e-mail message records retention:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/8f752e21-b5af-4ed1-b48e-26a72a6d3eaf1033.mspx?mfr=true
Email Enabled Lists in Moss2007 RTM using Exchange 2007:
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads%202007.htm

Exercise caution applying the SharePoint Daylight Savings Hotfix(Zac Smith, zac.provoke.co.nz)

After applying a number of successful New Zealand Daylight savings hot fixes we came across one that brought down an entire SharePoint farm. The patch seemed to install ok but the SharePoint products and technologies wizard threw an error around step 9.

Generating Test Data(Ethan Bertsch, SharePoint blogs)

Often times there is a need to have some good test data in lists or libraries for development, testing and demos. This post is specific to the SharePoint Work Acceleration Toolkit (SWAT) from iDevFactory. You can find the tool here

Using the ElementFile node in Feature definitions saves you in the deployment(Andrew Connell, AndrewConnell.com)

WSS v3 Feature definitions (feature.xml) files contain a section that points to files that do most of the heavy lifting of a Feature: <ElementManifests />. This section is where you specify your element manifest files that contain CAML markup that is processed as instructions upon Feature activation. These element manifest files are deployed using the <ElementManifest> element.

However there is a lesser known element that you can use in this same location to your advantage.

SharePoint Wiki: Create pages based on a template(Michael Hofer, SharePoint blogs)

To make Wiki pages look uniform, it would be handy if there was always the same template used when the pages  are created. Unfortunately, WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 doesn’t support this functionality (yet). The below paragraphs show the concept on how to achieve this functionality. Neither the code nor the configuration steps described are suitable for a production environment – they are just the proof-of-concept that it is possible. Adopt it freely!

Kerberos and MOSS case sensitive?(Shane, MSMVPS blogs)

Warning I am not a Windows AD Security “expert”, I don’t play one on TV, and I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Ok, so it is 1 am in the morning and I am working on my labs for Professional SharePoint Administration. In the class we do a least-privilege install where we end up with about 8 different accounts. Then we configure the whole farm to use Kerberos authentication. Lots of fun and I really think it is important to understand. It isn’t hard to do, just tedious. Anyway.

SharePoint Programmatically: Managing Solutions(Waldek Mastykarz,

Managing SharePoint 2007 Solutions programmatically isn’t a daily-matter: some of you might even participate on quite a few projects without even coming close to it. As I have worked with it recently a bit I would like to share my findings with you.

MOSS2007 – Show InfoPath fields within CQWP (Yes you can)(Liam Cleary, HelloItsLiam.com)

In the last post I had been investigating if it was possible to view the fields that are created by the “Administrator Approved” InfoPath forms. After a little tip from Adri Verlaan from Microsoft, I have been able to get the columns to render. To begin one the main issue was finding the actual field names that are being used.

Why is SharePoint slow when I first use it?(Andrew Woodward, 21apps.com)

Following a recent forum thread on the subject I thought it would be useful post something for all of the people who have recently moved to MOSS.

Quote for Joel Oleson:

Ever had users say, for some odd reason some times when I hit my SharePoint site it takes 30 seconds to load, then after a refresh it goes sub second, even clearing their cache the page is fast.

Friendly “Cannot Connect to the database” error someone?(Robin Meure, Robin’s SharePoint blog)

Does anyone know how to modify the (as a mate perfectly described it) awful white page with “Cannot connect to database” written in black across the top? It seems that no real html file is being written/rendered.

2 Stage Recycle Bin and recovery thoughts(Joel Oleson, MSDN Blogs)

Got a question today about how to think about the recycle bin.  Here are some thoughts.

Actually by default there are 2 stages of the recycle bin with built in retention policies and flushing built in by default.  You don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the end user item and list recycle bin functionality.

Mastering InfoPath Development Series(Steve Sofian,SharePoint blogs)

Adam Buenz of SharePointSecuity.com has published a set of comprehensive Mastering InfoPath Development Series.

Mystery of the _Hidden Event Content Type(Doug W, Elumenotion.com)

Earlier this week I was putting together a demo for an upcoming user group meeting about lists and content types where I was creating a new content type that would support some contact information and some calendaring information. The content type is used in two different lists. One is a contact list that can be connected to Outlook as a contact view and the other is a calendar that can be connected to Outlook as a calendar.

KB Article:

A Web Part that contains an ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 UpdatePanel control that uses the _doPostBack() function does not work when the URL of the hosting SharePoint Web site contains international characters

New version makes it easier to find, discover and share videos with fewer interruptions.

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 26, 2007 — Today, Microsoft Corp. released its latest version of MSN^® Video, offering consumers and advertisers an enhanced experience by improving the ability to find and discover premium and user-generated video content from the expansive MSN Video library, adding new community sharing features, and introducing a new time-based advertising delivery model.

The new MSN Video makes it easier for viewers to find and discover the breadth of video content from more than 40 leading video content providers, as well as video from across the Web. MSN Video now also integrates Soapbox user-generated videos directly into the same easy-to-use destination, and enables people to search and browse the entire MSN Video catalog while concurrently watching a video in a split-screen format. In addition, MSN Video users are now able to easily create playlists of their favorite videos and share them with friends.

“This latest release of MSN Video will make discovering, watching and sharing video easier and more entertaining than ever before,” said Rob Bennett, general manager, entertainment, video and sports for MSN. “By increasing the discoverability of our deep catalog, making it easier to share videos with friends, and improving the advertising model, we are continuing in our mission to make video an integral part of the MSN experience.”

The advertising delivery model for MSN Video, a first of its kind for a major online portal, now delivers advertising based on the amount of time a viewer spends watching videos, instead of by the number of clips watched. This improvement will provide a more predictable viewing experience and enable people to “channel surf” without being interrupted. MSN users will now see pre-roll advertisements before the first video and then see additional advertisements no more than once every three minutes during their viewing session.

The new version of MSN Video is available today in the U.S. and in a beta version in more than 10 markets worldwide, including Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the U.K. Over the next several months, MSN Video will be incorporated throughout all the MSN channels to creative a cohesive experience video experience throughout the portal.

About MSN Video

MSN Video is one of the largest free programmed video services on the Web, watched by more than 12 million unique users per month. In addition to streaming news, entertainment and sports video clips from more than 50 content partners including “The Today Show,” FOX Sports, MSNBC, Reveille, Control Room, CBS, News Corp. and Fox Entertainment Group, MSN Video presents a broad array of live events to online audiences worldwide. More than 50 top advertisers support MSN Video, which is available to consumers at no charge. MSN Video is available on the Web at http://msnvideo.com to consumers in the U.S. MSN Video is also live in Australia, Canada, France (English and French), Japan, the Netherlands and the U.K., and in Spanish in the U.S. MSN Video is in beta in Germany, Spain and Italy. Microsoft is testing a new beta of the next generation of MSN Video in the U.S. at http://next.video.msn.com.

Overall, MSN attracts more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month. With localized versions available globally in 42 markets and 21 languages, MSN is a world leader in delivering Web services to consumers and online advertising opportunities to businesses worldwide. Most recently, MSN partnered with Control Room to stream Live Earth, the largest online entertainment event in history with over 62 million streams worldwide.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft^® Web page at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass on Microsoft’s corporate information pages. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may since have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.mspx.

Source: Microsoft Press

2 Stage Recycle Bin and recovery thoughts (Joel Oleson, Joel Oleson’s SharePoint land)

Got a question today about how to think about the recycle bin.  Here are some thoughts.

Actually by default there are 2 stages of the recycle bin with built in retention policies and flushing built in by default.  You don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the end user item and list recycle bin functionality.

InfoPath Form Services and Workflow Tasks(Robert Bogue, ThorProjects.com)

InfoPath Forms Services and Workflows in SharePoint can deal a one-two punch to your business problems.  It’s a simple form to create and a framework to take action on those forms.  However, there are a few caveats, however, one of them is that getting a form to open up in InfoPath Forms Services can be setup in the library where the form is stored but when a workflow task is created the link back to the item will try to open up in the InfoPath client (if present) – not in forms services.

Another use of My Sites: School collaboration(Get the ‘Point)

I just read a post about a school in the UK that has switched to using SharePoint for its students. Instead of using My Documents on their hard drive, or using shared folders, the students will move to using My Sites. One of the benefits to this is that they’ll be able to access their documents from home, and collaborate with classmates and teachers.

Easy WSS Forms with Workflow and Anonymous Access(DougW, eLumenotion blog)

I am just having loads of fun with the anonymous membership provider. I mentioned in a previous post that the provider approach solves a wider range of issues than merely allowing anonymous types to upload files to a document library.

For example, you can’t create a workflow that is invoked by an anonymous user in WSS. Here is a thread on the MSDN forums about the issue. The solution the developer came up with was to muck about with the list forms on the list in question, just as I was contemplating before Søren Nielsen bought me a ticket on the clue train with his suggestion of a custom provider.

Branding SharePoint - Part 2: Creating the Design in SharePoint(Heather Solomon, Blog about design, SharePoint and CSS)

Part 2 of a multi-part series, in this article I cover site design implementation options (a fancy way to say master pages, themes and CSS) that you have for implementing your site design in SharePoint 2007.

The SharePoint Application Platform Debate(Eric Shupps, BinaryWave.com)

Andrew Connell posted some thoughts regarding the use of SharePoint as an application platform in response to a post by Jeffrey Palermo (Full Disclosure - Headspring Systems, the firm Jeffrey works for, is one of our clients but I’ve never met nor spoken with him).  Jeffrey seems to be arguing against SharePoint because it cannot be installed on a developer’s machine.  His other prerequisites for a good developer platform are that it is easy to install, configure debug and test.

Advanced Search issue in MOSS(Mindy Kelly, SharePointblogs.com)

There are plenty of blogs and articles that explain how to add properties to Advanced Search in MOSS, so I’m not going to get into that here.

What I have found is that there is an issue with the ModifiedBy property, where by default, the number of items found with this property is a big fat zero (0).

Finally, a solution that works!

Writing a Batch File to Run Back Ups(Becky Isserman, SharePointBlogs.com)

Someone left a comment today on an old post asking about writing batch file scripts to backup Sharepoint 2007.  Here is an example of one that I have written:

@echo off
echo ====================================================
echo Backup Script For Office SharePoint Server 2007
echo ====================================================
@echo off
stsadm.exe -o backup -url http://youresite -filename

Error Messages 6398, 6482, and 7076(Becky Isserman, SharePointblogs)

For weeks I have been dealing with google and researching MS hotfixes to get rid of the above errors in the event log.  Everyday it drove me completely insane that I could not find a fix.  Then one day I find this .Net 2.0 hotfix for remote servers.  I asked the client to obtain the hotfix for me and I tried testing it in a VPC.  It would not install the hotfix, because it stated that the component needed did not exist.  I was back to square one, so I started poking around Central Administration yesterday.

Custom Web Part Code: Deleting an Item(Chad Clarks, SharePointblogs.com)

So this works, but if anyone has any brighter ideas, I have open ears…  I was creating a document library web part and had to recreate some of the functionality in the menu…  So here is the way I delete and Item…

Declare and initialize a hidden field to store the id of the element to be deleted…  hfDeleteDoc

Master Page Madness(AAron nAAs, MindSharp blogs)

In SharePoint MOSS2007, there are some interesting things I’ve learned about Master Pages and Custom Master Pages.

1) On a site’s Settings / Look and Feel / “Master Page”…

Site Master Page is stored in the database webs.CustomMasterUrl column,

MOSS 2007 – Indexing Problems with ModifiedBy(Roni Hover, SharePointblogs.com)

With default settings the ModifiedBy property of the documents (the user who last modified the document) won’t be indexed and therefore can’t be used in advanced search.

After some hours of investigation without any success I got a solution from MSDN forum posted by Pritam Dahake that seems to work:

Adding own custom web service to SharePoint(Janne Matilla, MSDN Blogs)

I posted awhile back about InfoPath and Web Service data connection and I got question about using own web services in SharePoint (or at least I interpreted it that way :-). I tried to describe idea to have own custom “proxy” web service that would do all the necessary stuff inside SharePoint so that you could use local API and not the web service API. So if you know about application pages then you know what I’m talking about. Same things apply to web services too.

List Types & List Internal ID available within MOSS 2007(Bobby Habib, SharePointblogs.com)

The following lists the default lists types and their internal sharepoint ID available in MOSS 2007. This references list can prove to be handy when creating your own Site Definitions, List Definitions and for Event Handlers:

Mobile View Doesn’t Work on SharePoint ( WSS 3.0) List(SharePoint talk)

I recently ran into a situation where I couldn’t get the ‘Mobile View’ in WSS 3.0 to work on a list that I had created. I went into the view of the list and selected the Mobile checkboxes (’Make this a mobile view ‘ and ‘Make this the default mobile view‘), but it still was not showing up on my SharePoint site’s mobile homepage. My first thought was “What makes this list different than the other lists that have mobile views that are working?”

SharePoint 2007 Best Practices(Richard Knudson, Richard’s internet blog)

The topic of “best practices” in SharePoint 2007 is an important one. It certainly comes up all the time in training classes and seminars I deliver. And since SharePoint 2007 is such a mammoth application, there are as many best practices topics as there are product areas…which is a lot! Here are a number of what I take to be the most important areas:

A quick note about backup locations in WSS 3.0(Martinnr5, SharePointblogs.com)

As I needed to tamper with a customer site in a virtual lab environment I decided to do a one-off backup of it via the admin GUI.

After selecting the farm I decided to back this up to \\sharepointtest\c$\backup - a directory that I as administrator has full access to. To my frustration I got numerous errors that in ways indicated that the SQL databases was broken.

SharePoint Intranet Site Example - MSLibrary(Michael Gannotti, MikeysGblog)

Just wanted to leave you all with a little teaser image before I hit the road. I will do a walkthrough at a later time but this is another example of a great use of SharePoint technology here at Microsoft. MSLibrary, is our corporations international virtual Library and it rocks!

Stapling Features to the Global Site Definition(Ted Pattison, Inspirational Sharecasm)

If you are developing Features for SharePoint 2007, then Feature Stapling is one of those must-have techniques that you should have in your arsenal. The idea is that you can staple a Feature to a configuration defined within a site definition so that the Feature is automatically activated whenever a new site is provisioned from that specific configuration.
Microsoft Downloads:

• Hotfix Roll-up for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search (KB939077)
• SharePoint Server 2007 Tool: Add/Edit Crawl Rules with Form/Cookie Credentials

KB articles:

• When the database status for a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site collection has been set to offline, you may be unable to find items that are saved in the site collection
• Sites that require forms-based authentication or cookie-based authentication are not crawled in SharePoint Server 2007

Listing all sites per variations - an STSADM extension solution

A little while ago, we ran into an issue with the Variation label creation process; it was ending successfully without creating everything.  To make matters worst, it wasn’t picking the missing sites/pages with the Synchronization Timer Job.

So it was very difficult to figure out what was missing in a particular variation except by browsing to each pages and figuring out if the page was missing.  While we only had 150 sub-sites, it could create 10 or 140 of them.

New RSS Feeds for Office and SharePoint Developers

RSS feeds changed the strategy that lots of people use to learn about new things. As developers we are faced with a bulk load of emerging software development technologies and products and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the cool things you can do. RSS feeds help you discover the latest news from multiple sources and bloggers and learn more about new products and technologies. You can use Outlook, Windows Live, Windows Vista Sidebar, or other programs to subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds.

I’ve been posting for the last couple of months links to just published content for the MSDN Office Developer Center to help you keep up with new Office and SharePoint developer content. Today I am very happy to announce that we finally automated our RSS feed generation process. We have an internal tool that we use to track all our content publishing queue and workflow and we extended it to generate RSS feeds for Office and SharePoint. This will allow us to provide you weekly updates on new articles, code samples, videos, new pages, announcements, and fresh news related to Office and SharePoint development.

SAP integration with MOSS

There is a lot of really powerful integration between SAP and MOSS and the awareness about this is really, for some reason, quite low. We’ve talked about integrating LOB data into SharePoint with the Business Data Catalog but there are some specific capabilities to SAP when brought together with SharePoint that make an enterprise solution rich, user-friendly, and seamless.

To give you a quick overview of the BDC, it’s a way to bring LOB data into SharePoint without writing any code. You just define your entities with an Application Definition File (ADF – of type XML file) which you upload into the SharePoint Central Administration and then reuse throughout your portal as a shared service. You can then surface that LOB data as SharePoint lists, web parts, enterprise search, lists, user profiles and custom applications. It uses either SOAP to connect to the LOB system if it’s a traditional one like SAP, or ADO.NET if it’s a database system like SQL. In my previous blog post, I mentioned that the latest version of the SDK made available a tool for authoring the ADF file so that you no longer have to work with straight XML.

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Sizing and Configuration tool by HP (New!)

The HP ProLiant Sizer for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 is a downloadable tool (includes update notification) that assists the user in selecting the optimum HP ProLiant Server, HP BladeSystem and HP Storage configuration for collaboration and document management environments based on user requirements. The tool solicits data or uses built-in defaults to determine the optimum solution, based on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 best-practice configurations and supported growth paths.

The zip contains an executable. Run that and answer a few questions about where to install the tool. The install procedure will first install the SharePoint 2007 sizer, and then the (required) StorageWorks (SAN) sizer which allows the MOSS sizer to generate detailed storage solutions. Once installed, run the SharePoint sizer - that’s it.

Improving MOSS Search Relevancy

Recently I’ve been investigating the effects of changing the relevancy of MOSS search.  If you are interested in this, you might want to check this out:

Evaluating and Customizing Search Relevance in SharePoint Server 2007

After you through reading the article, you can download a cool tool to help you test your relevancy adjustments Search Relevancy Tool.

Farms, Web Apps, Site Collections, Sites - what is configured at what level?

I have been a bit slow getting started with my blog but here it is my first post!

This post covers what features and other items are configurable at each level - I do not believe this list is complete. Therefore if you have more to add to this please comment on my blog or email me…

SharePoint Records Management Virtual Lab

Microsoft have posted up a virtual lab to showcase the Records Management capabilities. The lab basically took you through:

• creating a new records center
• creating some Document Libraries for Financial Reports, Contracts, and Product Development Files. All with some custom metadata, retention policies and audit policies.
• creating record routing for each Content Type.
• configuring Central Administration to map a SharePoint instance to the Records Center
• applying a Document Library to a newly created Content Type e.g. Financial Reports
• submitting a Document to the Records Center

Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search

Locating the appropriate information or people in an organization can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Without enterprise search services, employees at Microsoft might:
- Spend countless hours duplicating effort on multiple projects and teams.
- Be unaware of critical information produced by other employees.
- Make business or technical decisions with incomplete or inaccurate data.

Creating and deploying a Custom Site Definition as a feature

Ok, so you really don’t develop a custom site definition as a Feature in the WSSv3 sense of the word ‘feature‘, but you can create a solution package which contains all the needed pieces for the custom site definition, including any Features you want activated on the site when it’s first created.

While there’s plenty of documentation around creating custom site definitions out there, I figured it would be beneficial to explain the steps needed to create the solution and deploy everything as a a single entity into WSSv3 as a WSP.

For this example, I’m going to create a custom version of the Team Site template without any significant changes because I don’t want to deep dive into how to create a custom site definition.   I’m then going to add a Label control to the default.aspx and populate it’s value in a new code-code behind class for the default.aspx page that’s not included out of the box.

While I don’t like forcing an install any anyone, I’m going to use the Visual Studio 2005 project template I created which will take care of most of the tricky pieces that are required to create and deploy the solution  This thing really does make custom solution development using Visual Studio for WSS a snap.  Please download it and check it out.

Once you’ve installed the Visual Studio project template correctly, create a new project using the MOSS Solution Builder Project template.  For this example, I named the project Example.CustomSiteSolution.

Planning updates to your WSS/MOSS server farm

Installing update (hotfixes, public updates, service packs) for WSS and MOSS can be a challenging tasks. Especially as a rollback in case that a problem occurs can be very expensive as it requires the restore of a backup as uninstall of hotfixes or service packs is not possible.

To help administrators plan such a task Microsoft has now published specific documentation:

• Deploy software updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Deploy software updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

Important change to MOSS 2007 for Internet Sites (MOSSFIS) licensing

For those of you who know me, you know I love the technology AND the business side of SharePoint. So, when we discovered that some of our licensing was hampering your deployment architectures, we immediately got to work remedying the situation. For those of you who know how our licensing works, you know that you couldn’t deploy an Intranet and Extranet in the same SharePoint farm because of the licensing. However, we built SharePoint from a technology standpoint to run Intranet, Extranet and even Internet sites all in the same farm, even on the same server! We worked lots and lots of special deals to help customers get changes to their individual licenses but that didn’t help our broad community of customers.

A couple more MOSS Sites in the wild

Just spotted these …

http://clubcar.ingersollrand.com/Pages/default.aspx

http://irutilityequipment.irco.com/Pages/home.aspx

Don’t panic! Site migration disparity is an elution…

OK, I’ve spent the last year of my life buried in SharePoint migrations. I’ve learned many, many things and even wrote my “Step-by-Step – A REAL world upgrade of a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) farm to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS)” document to help others out who had to fight through the process. One thing I had not noticed before but just picked up on is related to WSS site migrations. If you look at the following screen print…

No Left Navigation when new web part pages are created in sharepoint

Creating web part pages or basic pages on the fly in sharepoint is pretty easy just with a click of a button
But here comes a little set back you won’t get to see the left navigation menu when you view the page

But here comes a solution for this you will notice that the page’s layout  and design are all inherited  from the master page
but the side navigation is not.

Howto configure sql express to allow remote connections

This is fifth in the series - MOSS Scripted Installation.

In previous posts, I wrote about pre-requisites and a brief overview on config.xml. Next we saw, how MOSS 2007 could be installed silently with SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

It was a small step. This post is about allowing remote connections to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. If you ever need to move sql database, attach pre-configured database or detach existing database, you will need to enable remote connections in sql server 205 express edition. It is disabled by default.

SharePoint compliancy

Compliance Checklists for SharePoint :

• http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102306291033

More Compliance info :

• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/secmgmt/sm0407.mspx

Shiny new MOSS 2007 site from Content & Code!
Bandwidth planning for MOSS & HW Sizing

Positioning Microsoft Office SharePoint - Part 1

It is a great experience to sell SharePoint products & services for the past 4 years till now, let’s dive deep on how we can position Office SharePoint Server in a presales scenario. Where & How:

Where and how you would come across this product, based on my experience you would come across MOSS when there is a following requirement in an organization

• Collaboration & Social Computing
• Enterprise Search
• Portal (Intranet / Extranet)
• Document Management
• Knowledge Management
• Business Intelligence
• Content Management
• Business Forms & Process
• Workflow

SharePoint InfoPath

I’ve been getting some curly questions around InfoPath of late due to our organisation already using various other products in this space. It’s great to compare these feature for feature to get a better understanding of what they do and what things can be done in them.

I found a good post with a video of InfoPath features. It basically describes hooking up a form to a SQL Database Table for querying orders for a customer and updating them. It does illustrate how quickly it is to build this interface up in InfoPath. If you were to do this in ASP.NET or WinForms, you’d take a lot longer than that! It includes validation etc. also which is great!

SharePoint for development revisited

Well the discussions go further from the two big guns (Andrew Connell and Joel Olsen). The key takeaway was “not to reinvent the wheel”. The SharePoint platform does a lot of things out of the box that traditionally you’d spend days writing, for example, CRUD data access layers and database schemas that can now be implemented using SharePoint Lists and the SharePoint API.  The other key areas are direct integration with back-end systems such as Active Directory ,BDC, Excel Services and Form Services.

Interestingly he does mention that if it is storing more than 5000 records a day that he would recommend it being stored in a separate database. Even with this, you can still use the SharePoint platform to be the presentation layer and take advantage of the deployment of the solution as a series of web parts etc. and all the underlying security model, navigation and everything else that is inherited from .Net 2.0 and ASP.NET Frameworks. Further on this, Digital Wave recommend that you don’t let the native support dictate application requirements.

Sharepoint 2007 Document Libraries Capacity Planning

I got thrown a real curve ball today at work from one of our Technical Solutions Architects. He was querying if they moved 200Gb worth of files from a file store into SharePoint how big would the SQL 2005 database be?

I found a TechNet post that links off to various articles around capacity planning. This one seems to be most relevant to content storage.

Database Management

Bill Bauer has a great post describing how he’s managed some fairly advanced MOSS 2007 implementations database growth by moving, repartitioning etc.

SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF)

I was reading an article on WWF vs. LiveLink Workflow and reminiscing with my time working with WWF in beta on a big .NET project here in Perth. We came across some stumbling blocks with the persistence layer, which has been rewritten for SharePoint so that it stores it within it’s database natively.

One of the key criticisms of LiveLink Workflow was that it is written in it’s own language and not in a more accessible one such as Java or .NET. There’s been lots of promise of LiveLink and it’s newly acquired little brother eDocs (Hummingbird) being rewritten, but I’d have no idea of when this is going to be released. I guess it reemphasises the comments I made in a recent post around SharePoint being built in .NET and on one framework. A lot of the other vendors are built on various platforms due to them being acquired over time.

Deep Dive SharePoint 2007 Object Model

A big topic these days is about “Discoverability” and the .Net framework. Developers talk about how big the .Net framework has become with 2.0, 3.0 and now 3.5 frameworks. There a several ways to discover capabilities of a  framework. One way is word of mouth via blogs or developers you work with. Another is just searching through MSDN and Google. Finally, there is the Visual Studio object browser and of course Reflector. Last year when I was developing search solutions for both WSS and MOSS I realized that the SharePoint 2007 object model had expanded and changed. This was at a time when there was little or no documentation. Even now the documentation for the SharePoint 2007 object model leaves a lot to be desired. Since SharePoint 2003 I have used a “Discovery” tool named ClassMaster (http://www.certdev.com). This tool has enabled me to dive deep into the SharePoint object model and understand how to use SharePoint to its fullest extent.

Why won’t my site Quick Launch navigation accept relative URLs?

OK, so you’re trying to customize your site and then you try to add a relative URL to the Quick Launch menu.
You start by going to Site Action/Site Settings and then under the Look and Feel section, you clicked the “Navigation” link.

Editing the navigation as in this screen shot, you clicked “Add Link”.

MOSS2007 – Show InfoPath fields within CQWP (well attempt to)

I recently got asked a question regarding the viewing of InfoPath properties and fields within a CQWP. The question was specifically to do with “Administrator Approved” forms. Within MOSS2007 when you create a form you can either publish it to a document library, site content type or as an administrator approved form. When you publish the form you are able to specify what fields if any are promoted and become visible within the sites and libraries in SharePoint. In this post we will look at creating a very basic InfoPath form and then get the field values to render within a CQWP. Firstly we will look at creating a simple form. To do create the form you want and then select the “File, Publish” option. The following wizard will appear:

Update: Display “Append Changes to Existing Text” Fields in a Custom List Form Web Part

I want to thank Brian Hunsaker for pointing this out to me. I’ve posted several times about the difficulties I’ve had in the past with displaying text fields in custom web parts where the “Append Changes to Existing Text” option is turned on. An example of this is the comments field in the test issues list:

Relate to SharePoint as a Database - the two line up pretty well…

With all the talk about SharePoint as an application platform lately, I figured it might be good to post on the way I like to describe to SharePoint to clients.

Sure, you get a lot of neat features out of the box with SharePoint, but I’ve seen plenty of deer-in-headlight looks after people hear everything the product has to offer and the exponential amount of solutions that are possible when you look a little deeper.  Even after conversing a great deal about what SharePoint is and how it can help an organization, there are always a few folks who have that ‘but… I don’t get it!’ look.  Usually, it’s the business-focused people who understand the idea of SharePoint right away, but I’ve found that it’s the folks who are deep-technical in nature, but have been exposed to MOSS only through reading some articles and maybe been through a little training, who have a harder time grasping the SharePoint concept.  Let’s face it, it’s a new way of thought for most techies.

One thing I heard in February 2006 struck a cord with me for some reason: ‘Everything in SharePoint is a list.’  Got me thinking.  I did a ton of MCMS02 development, so I was used to performing app dev as using a robust API, and not heavily leveraging SQL.  Couple that with the article Gathering MOSS in the August 2006 issue of MSDN by one of the newest members of the MOSS blogging community, Ted Pattison, app dev in WSSv3 clicked.

Almost every client that I’ve talked to about SharePoint has had at least some technical experience in their careers, and even if they haven’t, they probably are familiar with the way a database is set up, so why not have them think about SharePoint in way that they already understand?

Starter for 10 with SharePoint

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