Add Column from Existing Site Columns menu item
Question: what is the easiest way to add a column to a list or document library in SharePoint 2007?
Answer: navigate to the list, from the Settings menu, choose Create Column.
Question: how do you add an existing Site Column to a list or document library?
Answer: navigate to the list, from the Settings menu, choose List/Document Library Settings, scroll down to the Columns section and click Add from existing site columns.
In the beta versions of SharePoint 2007 there was an easier way to add an existing Site Column to a list or document library because there was another menu item in the Settings menu: Add column from existing site columns. For those of you who are nostalgic about the beta’s of Office 12, and want to have the menu item back: I’ve created simple feature to add the menu item:
Learning SharePoint Designer 2007
You can do many things with SPD 2007 that you can’t normally do it using the browser interface. Lets not forget about how easy it is to create a custom workflow using SPD. My favourite feature of SPD is the power of Data View Web Part and how we can tweak it to our needs. Until recently, there isn’t much learning material available for SPD. Microsoft SharePoint Designer team is quickly updating its ’Help How-to’ series, with various ’How to use SPD’ articles. I would definitely recommend you to keep an eye on the below links, if you are enthusiastic about learning SharePoint Designer or forced to do so!
Evolving Company Culture Starts With a “SharePoint”
Within Vista you can have a weather gadget in your sidebar. It turns out you can use the “webservices” of this MSN service for “free”. ( It uses an url “http://weather.service.msn.com/data.aspx?src=vista&weadegreetype=C&culture=en-US&wealocations={0}” to retreive the weather data.
So I created this ajax style webpart that you can use in your portal/mysite to display the current weather at a location of your choice.
Vista Sidebar
Ran across an interesting project on CodePlex. This is a project that provides enhanced functionality for community sites projects built on SharePoint. Actually, there is a variety of interesting projects on CodePlex related to SharePoint.
The Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest.
Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB941422)
Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This update includes updated time zone definitions for daylight saving time (DST) start dates and end dates for New Zealand 2007. This update also includes other fixes.
Update for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (KB941412)
Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. This update includes updated time zone definitions for daylight saving time (DST) start dates and end dates for New Zealand 2007. This update also includes other fixes.
Pre-Announcing the “Accessibility Kit for SharePoint” (AKS)
About a month ago on July 31st, HiSoftware issued a press release, announcing an agreement with Microsoft to develop the Accessibility Kit for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. The kit will provide templates, master pages, controls and Web parts along with technical documentation to advance the accessibility of MOSS based web sites and applications for people with disabilities, especially those who are vision impaired. All of the source code will be provided via the Microsoft Permissive License and will be available on CodePlex and/or another (more accessible) web site later this year for customers and other Microsoft partners to download, reuse, and extend. This e-mail provides more details about the announcement.
SharePoint Containment Hierarchy
I could elaborate on this image forever. I’ve used this PPT smart art as an illustration in my decks recently. The SharePoint Dummies book on the cover has a similar example. I find it helpful to break this down to the level you’re working at, but seeing it all at once can be helpful. I use it to show what farms are, or to explain what a web app is, or to show the emphasis on the site collection as the atomic unit.
The other thing that you’ll find that’s interesting, is outside of SSPs which apply to SharePoint Server, Project Server, and other services and servers installed on WSS, the hierarchy is consistent. That’s very powerful.
As promised in my Installation and Configuration of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 webcast (http://www.msreadiness.com/CourseDetail.aspx?id=6479), we have posted a step-by-step guide on http://oem.microsoft.com/serversource that walks you through everything I did during the demonstration portion of the webcast. There is also a PDF version that you can download for use offline. And while you’re there, be sure to check out all the other step-by-step guides created by the BOB Team–there’s tons of great information to help you!
SharePoint, IronPython, and another lesson in the virtue of laziness
I’m doing an internal project that involves reading several different data sources from a SharePoint 2007 server, merging them, and posting the merged data back to the server. Being lazy, I wanted to use IronPython, write as little code as possible, and do everything dynamically.
Reading the data sources, which are customized SharePoint lists (i.e., database tables), was straightforward. Every SharePoint list offers an “Export to Spreadsheet†link which produces an XML dump. Given that export URL, here’s a recipe for reading the data (from a Windows client that’s already authenticated to the server) and converting it to a list of Python dictionaries.
Dynamic Site integrated with a Database, List, or BDC Data
Use web parts that either actions(BDC Data), custom columns(List), or spgridview control(Database), to establish links that provide a query variable to your dynamic page. On your dynamic page, create a web part or embed server side code that creates a folder in each of your lists, document libraries, or wikki libraries. Make sure that these folder are also assigned an id value to an id field(only can be do programmatically, no default UI for this). Use the query variable given to arrange for a rootfolder query variable that navigates list web parts to their respective folders. Modify any extraneous links through javascript, utilize cookies and redirects with a custom web part to hold id values despite application page navigation. Well, I hope this helps, and good luck in the world of sharepoint!
Using a Web Service as a Data Source in SharePoint Designer Bug
I can set up a web service as a datasource in Share Point Designer. However, when I attempt to pull that information into a drop down list list form control it does not populate with information. I’ve tried it several different ways, and paralleled it with a working model using a direct sql connection. I believe this to be an error with SharePoint Designer. Please comment with any related experiences.
SharePoint Blogs: Activate features through code
For a recent project I did, I had to activate a feature programatically.
I needed some research to achieve this, so I thought I’d just put it in a post. It’s only a few lines of code, so nothing hard to do here …
Basically, what it does is update the FeatureCollection object of a given Site or Site Collection. Adding a feature to this collection automatically activates it.
! Do make sure the feature is already installed in the farm/site/web/… when trying to activate it.
Found a Library over at Codeplex.com that can communicate with Flickr.
I was able to create a WebPart that uses FlickrNet to display Flickr photos of a specific user (by screenname) on a Sharepoint 2007 portal or on a MySite.
With LightBox 2.03 the photo’s are displayed over the current page.
The overview looks like this:
This document describes the content types’ hierarchy and how to inherit existing content types. The main reason for making this document is that the standard documentation doesn’t contain such a description and it is a part of the SharePoint 2007 server which will be used in any ECM scenario.
Hierarchy Content types are ordered in a hierarchy (See attachment below for the whole content type inheritance tree - “Appendix A - ContentTypes hierarchy.pdf”) to enable reuse and to make maintenance easier. This means that all content types inherit from the same base system content type.
The default content types which are already present in the SharePoint server is found in an XML file which resides in the feature folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ctypes\ctypeswss.xml. If you want to find the publishing content types they are found here: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\PublishingResources\PublishingContentTypes.xml. To most important thing to understand when working with content types is that the ID of a content type reveals its base content types and when making your own content type you must provide a unique ID which includes the base content type you wish to inherit from.
Quick notice: Codeplex project started with sharepoint sources (including Flexlistviewer!!)
Ok, this is just a real quick post to notify you of the following. We decided to start a codeplex project at http://www.codeplex.com/isdemos At this project all the sample code from this blog is available. Due to the enormous amount of questions we also decided to put the flexlistviewer sources up for download. I’ll make time to put up a more elaborate post describing the available demos any time soon. Have fun and if you have any comments or enhancements to the demos. (Or if you want to participate) Drop me a line! Cheers,Bart
SharePoint 2007 colour (color) calendar
The in-built calendar view is SharePoint 2007 is a heck of a lot better than the one in 2003 but it still lacks a feature requested by many customers - the ability to colour (or color for our US friends) code the entries like you can in Outlook.
I had previously created a coloured calendar in 2003 and started to investigate how this might be achieved in 2007. Whilst there are commercial alternatives avilable, the licencing models can be cumbersome - tied to a physical machine etc which make development and deployment a pain.
New Release of the Event Receivers Manager
Thanks to everyone who has sent me comments. Today I’ve uploaded v1.1 of the Event Receivers Manager to my CodePlex site ( http://www.codeplex.com/elblanco ) which fixes the issues related to the breadcrumb controls on the application pages.
I am hitting the road all day for client on-sites but I did want to leave you with some Monday Morning SharePoint reading.
- Joel Oleson has just posted a new piece on configuration options for hosted SharePoint that looks pretty good. Check out “Configuration Options for SharePoint (Hosting Options)”
- TheKid has a couple of really good posts up. The one I am most excited about focuses on the latest iteration of the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS). Check out “A very useful CAML tool for WSS” and “Upgraded to the next version of CKS:EBE“
I also wanted to remind you of a couple of pieces I posted over the weekend and last week that if you missed I think warrant a good looking over.
Configuration Options for SharePoint (Hosting Options)
I’ve been looking at SharePoint in building blocks and pieces lately. The WSS manageability controls paper lays out what you can configure at the web app layer vs. a site collection for example. One of the pivots I’ve been looking at lately is hosting as in building a service offering. Building a service around SharePoint, not just bringing up servers, but saying, what should we do to maximize what we can get out of this app while getting economies of scale out of IT and “commoditizing” this app. Whether it’s the web team, the intranet team, or an IT team in some department, it is worth considering this as a service rather than continuing to reinvent the wheel… cause it won’t turn out the same and may be an up hill battle to support and integrate separate deployments the way you want to.
Video: Demo of Extending SharePoint to Collab on Document Fragments
have had many requests from customers and peers to have a look at my solution for supporting collaboration on fragments (or sections) of a MS Word document. In fact, few have referred to it as “slide libraries for word documents”. It leverages the some custom actions in SharePoint with the Open XML file format to modify Word documents on the server. I’m a bit flattered, but thought I would take the time to capture a demonstration of the solution as a video to share. If you don’t follow this blog, this solution is one of the chapters in my book: Pro SharePoint Solution Development. You can get the code off of Apress’ web site as well as get a more thorough code walkthrough in the book. This demonstration is more how an end-user would use the solution. My first attempt at “podcasting”. Anyway, I placed the video on MSN SoapBox so it should be easy to get. See the link and info below.
New Zealand DST updates for Sharepoint, Dynamics, SQL Notifications, Visual Studio, CE and JVM
SharePoint Skinner tool… just what the doctor ordered…
If you remember back to the days of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 i.e. “old” SharePoint, then you’ll remember James Milne wrote a tool called SPSkin, basically a skinner for SharePoint. I had been hoping he would update it for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 i.e. “new” SharePoint, but alas he hasn’t.
Instead, Doug W. (from Atlanta) over at Elumenotion has gone about creating what I believe to be the very first skinner for SharePoint 2007. Check out his SharePoint Skinner Tutorial and DOWNLOAD your copy today! A worthy download…
Managing social networking with Office SharePoint Server 2007
MOSS Search: How to control content to be crawled..
Today morning I was answering a DL question. Question was…”How to I control what Search content to be crawled? There are some paths URLs which I do not want to crawl?. I was wondering if there is a way to configure MOSS Search to exclude the path and library names in the search result? YES! You can easily control content to be crawled using following techique . Create a new page INDEX.HTML and use Index.html page to control what needs to be crawled.
Why Everybody Should Use MOSS 2007 for their Internet Site.
Progammatically Adding Folders to a SharePoint List
This took me longer than it should have to get working as the things I tried first compiled but did nothing:
myList.Folders.Add("DoesNotWork", SPFileSystemObjectType.Folder);The way I got it to work in the end was like this:
SPList myList = myWeb.Lists["My List"];
SPListItem newFolder = myList.Items.Add(myList.RootFolder.ServerRelativeUrl, SPFileSystemObjectType.Folder, null);
if (newFolder != null)
{
newFolder["Name"] = "Name of Folder";
newFolder.Update();
}
Hope this helps somebody 
Working on a dynamic site creator
I am currently attempting to use a site creator tool. What I would like to do is expose a web service to an external application that will create a sharepoint site for every client in the external app, delete the site if the client is deleted and create a site based on a custom template if a new client is created.
Problems I am having with this process.
First, couldn’t get sp1 for VS2005 installed, which a tutorial said was needed for my sharepoint web service to work correctly… Error Code: 2755 occurs on the attempt to install….
I came across this with a customer support issue this week. This is the WORST error handling EVER– but hopefully posting this will help someone else, if not give you a chuckle.
So this is the message we get when SharePoint gets a FileNotFoundException when a web part referencing an assembly (such as the System.Web.Extensions.dll assembly) that cannot be found is added to a Web Part page. So…. If an AJAX Web Part is added and ASP.NET Ajax is not installed, SharePoint complains about the Closed web Parts Gallery:
Using scheduling of pages but not the authoring workflow
In various onet.xml you often see the two publishing features with the following property SimplePublishing set to true.
The advantage with this is that you don’t have to go through the Approval workflow for every page that is going to be published. The disadvantage is that you lose the ability to schedule pages for later publishing and how long they should be published.
The solution to get the best of both worlds (scheduling but no approval workflow) is to change the site definition to this instead:
<SiteFeatures>
KB Articles:
- How to automate the deletion of backups in SharePoint Server 2007 and in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by using a Visual Basic script
- How to point to a custom 404 error Web page in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- How to add a custom Web Part that was created by using Visual Basic to a SharePoint Server 2007 Web site
Tam Tam releases free webparts for the Sharepoint 2007 Community
Head over to codeplex to download our Webpart Solution:
TamTam.SharePoint.Webparts 1.0.4.20
Solution that contains some fun tamtam webparts for SharePoint 2007.
- Rss reader ( ajax style, caching and no javascipt warnings ) ( strips imgs !!but leaves styles intact for better reading. No https/htpp mixing errors )
- MSN Weather
- Smoelenboek based on search/profiles
- Birthdays based on search/profiles
- Flickr photo webpart (simple overview)
- Flickr photo webpart (with lightbox 2.03 image viewer)
Do you want to use Resources to translate your site’s language, think again!
Due to the fact that migration between different server languages is not supported, one of the possible solutions might be to change the resources (like we did it in CMS) to “translate†the labels in the site, well you can do this but be warned that the consequences can be unpredictable.
What are resources? Well in Sharepoint you have files that determine the language being used and the correspondent labels text, you have these files for a number of languages. If you change the files marked within the en-US folder for the pt-pt (portuguese) for example, this will mean that all labels in English will stay in Portuguese.
Another Sharepoint Web Services rant : untyped data vs. incompletely typed data
Working with the Web Services in WSSv2 and v3 is an exercise in sheer frustration. I’ve written before about serious and glaring omissions in the Web Services API that Sharepoint exposes, but it’s not only the things missing, it’s the lack of consistency in the APIs that ARE implemented that’s annoying.
For most of the APIs, the return value for most methods is an XmlNode, usually documented pretty well in the SDK. It means we have to fiddle with XML to extract data, but it’s not so bad. For instance the Lists WS’s GetListCollection() returns a known, documented, schema-linked XML containing many properties for a given list.
For some reason, though, the SiteData web service chooses to return data as typed objects instead - oddly named objects at that (_sList, _sWebWithMetadata[], and so forth), but only for SOME data. The GetSite() method, for instance, will return a typed metadata object for the site metadata and the list of Lists, but a completely untyped STRING containing XML data for the list of groups and group members.
Futhermore, these XML snippets are sometimes undocumented, and you have to try it out to see what you get. What you get, sometimes, is the same XML you would get from a call to a different web service, but stripped of the namespace - so even though it’s the same structure, you can’t use the same code to parse both.
Sharepoint cannot authenticate to ISA Server
This gave and gives me a hard time! Imagine MOSS 2007 running in a corporate intranet. Your requirement is to connect to datasources on the internet. There are various scenarios, the most common are to
- Consume RSS Feeds using the RSSFeed webpart
- Consume a WebService or Server-Side Script using the SharePoint Designer DataView Webpart
When using the DataView WebPart, you’ll get the following error message when trying to show the data from the internet source:
“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. …â€
Provisioning Content Type’s fields is quite straight forward when using Solutions: using Element Manifests you can define your own Content Types and their properties among which fields. Unfortunately there is one serious con to the solution Microsoft has offered: you simply cannot provision any Lookup Field using the Element Manifest.
Lookup Fields obtain their values from an existing list. Each Lookup Field is being linked to its list using the list’s ID. As the ID’s are being generated after creating the instances there is no way to provision a Lookup Field linked to a newly created list during Solution deployment. That’s when Feature Receivers are useful. Feature Receivers are nothing more than custom code you can attach to events triggered by a feature. Provisioning a custom field programmatically works exactly the same as doing it using the GUI: first you need to create a Site Column and then you need to attach it to the Content Type of your choice.
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