SPField (column) Field Name, Title and internal Names and Spaces between them
I have been working with SharePoint and MOSS for sometime as a developer and hate the confusion with Title, Internal Name for SPField (Column) for a list and development effort going being it. I personally, if start building a site from scratch make sure there are absoulutely no spaces for any of my fields list name. I later change the field names editing them according to given requirement. Any developer who has worked with CAML queries and API’s accessing list knows what I am talking about.
Column Name is the name with which you create the column (field ) and no matter how many times you change it, It remains the same.
How to enable Windows Search Service in Windows Server 2008
I was setting up a new MOSS dev environment on Windows 2008 June CTP today, and after getting Outlook 2007 installed and configured, I opened it expecting to be taken to the Windows Desktop Search download site. Nope…
Instead, I saw a different message pop up saying ‘The Windows Search service is not installed. Outlook cannot provide fast search results when using the new Instant Search feature unless the service is installed.’
These simple, easy-to-use customizable job aids were created by Microsoft’s internal IT group to help employees get started with learning more about using a technology or product effectively, selecting the right product or service, or reviewing best practices. The content for Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System were published a couple of months ago, and I (and likely most of you) somehow missed it. The EPE home page is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687781.aspx, but for your convenience, I’ve listed the SharePoint specific content below.
- Collaboration Selection Guide
- Collaborating with SharePoint Server 2007 Overview
- SharePoint Server 2007 Sites and Workspaces Selection Guide
- SharePoint Server 2007 Document Collaboration Get Started
- SharePoint Server 2007 Team Sites Get Started
- Customizing a SharePoint Server 2007 Site Get Started
- SharePoint Server 2007 Web Parts Learn More
Getting the associated page layouts from a SharePoint document library
In MOSS 2007 you can associate a page layout with a content type. The MOSS publishing feature uses this mechanism to select the content type for the new page that you create by using the “Create Page†option from the Site Actions menu. By selecting a page layout, you directly select the content type for your content page.
In code I needed to find out what Page Layouts are associated with the content types that are associated with a document library. In this example I created a very simple WinForms application that lists the available page layouts for the content types associate with the “Pages†library in the “News†site of a publishing portal.
This document library has these content types associated:
Restructured SharePoint hosted web sites listing
A common question inside Microsoft is “What web sites are hosted on MOSS. We keep an internal list of referancable sites but there are 2 larger lists on the Internet.
I have just restructured my list to group them by industry as the single list of 58 sites was probably making it hard for people to find something that might interest them.
http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/websites.aspx
I also have a rating for each site but I need to convert the view to a data form so that I can represent the rating as a graphic showing stars (assuming there is not a patent on that 
Searching a List using List Web Service and Javascript
Some time back, we were trying to do a search on List and show the results in a page. And bcose of the requirement, the default search functionality provided by sharepoint has bcome out of scope. And we don’t want to write a custom web part for it, just bcose of installation issues. So, we thought of calling List WebService from JavaScript, parse result and display it. Everything through Content Editor Web Part.
So, what are required to do it from BLOCKED SCRIPT SOAP Envelope and AJAX.
Let’t see first, how to call the web service from javascript.
Using powershell to add a policy feature to the collection
Following is the script to add a policy to the feature collection. This script will add a policy to the Records Management’s feature collection.
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(”Microsoft.Office.Policy”)
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(”Microsoft.Office.Server”)
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(”Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal”)
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(”Microsoft.SharePoint”)
$Url = “http://server/marketing”
$site = new-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($Url)
#add policy to the collection
$xml = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText(”C:\My Documents\feature.xml”)
[Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.InformationPolicy.PolicyFeatureCollection]::Add($xml)
Interactive Media Manager for SharePoint Video Demo Found in the Wild Wild Web
I was just sent a link to a video of a demonstration of Interactive Media Manager for SharePoint.
“Microsoft Interactive Media Manager is a collaborative media management solution that extends Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for media and entertainment companies. The solution builds on existing technology investments, and helps companies create an end-to-end content production system accessible by everyone. In addition, Interactive Media Manager easily integrates with Microsoft business intelligence tools, giving management insight into production details.”
Blending publishing/collaboration functionality in SharePoint
Most often when creating SharePoint solutions, the requirements often map fairly well to one of the out-of-the-box site definitions which can be used to create new sites. If we’re creating heavily-branded internet/intranet sites (WCM sites), we’ll probably start with the ‘publishing site’ template. If we are deploying SharePoint in a document management/collaboration scenario, we’ll probably start with the ‘team site’ template, and so on. Where it gets interesting it when the project requirements effectively have a mix of this functionality. Characteristics of such a site might include:
- site has completely bespoke look and feel/navigation
- users will work with files stored in document libraries
- site templates or definitions are used to create several sites with the same content/functionality
- custom workflow is used to support a business process (other than standard content publishing), perhaps with InfoPath forms
FANTASTIC 40 TEMPLATE REVIEW – Sales Lead Pipeline
It’s been quite awhile since I posted but I’m now ready to get back at it. First up, I thought I’d post a review of the one of the MOSS templates that Microsoft published last spring – The Sales Lead Template. This is a pretty cool template that has a lot of the functions you need right out of the box to build a CRM system in SharePoint. In this review, we’ll look at the functions in the standard template then discuss some extensions you can make to it yourself. Of course, any discussion of SharePoint applications, especially when they involve mobile professionals like sales people, wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of how Colligo can help to improve things even further.
Many thanks to one of my colleagues here, Brent Bolleman, for preparing this entry.
Why two SharePoint Search services?
When you start search services on the farm using central administration, you will notice two Search services. Namely, Office SharePoint Server Search and Windows SharePoint Services Help Search. You need to turn on both of them for a complete server configuration. Immediately, a question flashes in your mind.
Why to start two SharePoint Search services? The answer can be found in below snippet from TechNet;
Using SharePoint Hyper Link fields with XSLT
This relates to the Data Form and other web parts that use XSL to render a URL list field (Search Results, Content Query, XML Web Part etc)
The URL field is displayed in the create and edit items list pages as 2 fields but is stored as a single string with the url separated from the display string by a comma.
To render the hyperlink you should use the following
Server Application Unavailable
Ever received the following issue when trying to configure your MOSS environment?
Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.
Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.
Example of MOSS calculation fields for Month-Year and Quarter-Year from date column
Recently I was asked to create new Monthly and Quarterly DVWPs for the “Time Card Management” template. One of the tasks was to create new columns for the Month and Quarter for DVWPs to group the information by. The Year value was tacked on the end to allow for separate year grouping. Below are the formulas for the columns.
Month-Year
=MONTH([Start Time])&”-”&YEAR([Start Time])
Canceling Check-out Event in Lists and Document Libraries returns an Error Message
With the new event model in WSS 3.0 we have the ability to cancel some user actions on the behalf of synchronous events like ItemUpdating or ItemDeleting.
To do this you have to implement an event handler: Create a class library with a class that inherit from Microsoft.SharePoint.SPItemEventReceiver. And then override the desired event methods (ItemDeleting, ItemUdating, …).
Now you have to register your event handler within SharePoint. You can do this programmatically through the object model or declaratively through a feature for a specific list type or a specific content type. Details are well documented in the WSS SDK. There is also a nice book excerpt about the whole story of event handling in WSS: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-306329.html
Excel Services - Data refresh failed
I had a lot of trouble with Excel Services. I wanted my Excel file to refresh data from SQL database. However, the following error appeared constantly:
Unable to retrieve external data for the following connections:
Connection_Name
The data sources may be unreachable, may not be responding, or may
have denied you access.
Verify that data refresh is enabled for the trusted file location and
that the workbook data authentication is correctly set.
Showing Recent Items in a SharePoint View
When lists have many items it’s useful to be able to display only those items created or perhaps modified in the last number of days. Since expressions cannot be added to filters in views a calculated column needs to be added to track the age of the item.
You might be tempted to use [Today] in the site column expression to calculate the number of days since the item was created. You will be able to save the site column, but when you add the column to the list the following error is displayed:
SharePoint 2007 Blogging Tweaks: Rich text blog comments and multiple category selection
Well that was easy! Thanks to an internal thread by Lawrence Liu on configuring rich comment support in SharePoint 2007, and Live Search for pointing me to a post by Ricky Spears on configuring SharePoint 2007 to support multiple categories, I’ve fixed two things that always bugged me about blogging in SharePoint 2007. Actually, once I configured both settings it actually made sense as it’s really just tweaking a list setting…
Here’s what I did:
It seems that the most casual observer of MOSS in its out-of-the-box status has reviewed the accessibility qualities it delivers and any practicalities in meeting established guidelines. In general, sites needing to meet AA standards require some development effort to help them on their way. In my role as the Higher Education Business Manager, this has been a fairly frequent conversation up and down the country. Of course, there are some excellent sites which have already been deployed in SharePoint that meet many accessibility criteria such as:
http://www.plymouthhospitals.nhs.uk
Performance issues with a list in MOSS 2007
Last week, I visited one of my favorite Customers in Belfast. They experienced performance issues in their Customer’s MOSS 2007 production environment.
Symptoms
The symptoms were the followings: a list item takes 10-20 seconds to open, sometimes more. Looking closer, it turns out that those list items are slow to open that are in a list that has a workflow associated and the workflow already finished running for the list item. The more time the list item is modified, the more time it takes to open it. My Customer is really a cool troubleshooter and he already found out these things, together with a SQL trace where it turns out that when the item is opened, the stored prodecure proc_GetListItemWorkflows is called too many times. If there were 2 modifications on the list item (so, the workflow ran 2 times already), it is called about 46 times, if it’s 3, it’s almost 100 times and so on. The stored procedure itself is just a SELECT statement and it’s pretty fast, but the overhead to call the SP takes some time - especially when you do it 46 times. 
If the store procedure’s contents are deleted, the problem is solved, but your MOSS box enters into an UNSUPPORTED STATE in this case. We found that the problem occurs only with sites based on the Content Publishing site template - so this means that WSS 3 sites are not affected.
MOSS and Forms-Based Authentication: the Tricks
There are three great guides to configuing FBA: Andrew Connell had the best article first. Dan Attis built on this by getting My Sites and Profile imports working (Part 1, Part 2). Then Stacey Draper wrote it for people who prefer paper in his chapter of Real World SharePoint. They all configure the web application using host headers, and this is why:
If you distinguish your web application by port alone, you will receive a 403 Forbidden Error when you try to reach many (but not all) application pages stored in the _layouts folder. For example, /_layouts/sitemanager.aspx and AccessDenied.aspx will work, but settings.aspx and viewlsts.aspx will not. The solution is to instead configure the web applications with host headers.
SharePoint Templates and Resources to Jump Start You on Your SharePoint Path
The past week in my conversations with clients the subject of how to quickly hit the ground running with SharePoint around various job functions has come up repeatedly and we have then discussed the 40 Fabulous Templates released by Microsoft for SharePoint. With that in mind I thought that since interest in these seems up it would warrant re-posting the links to them as well as to a great resource provided by Ian Morrish (he has loaded them all online so you can preview working examples).
Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- Board of Directors
- Business Performance Reporting
- Case Management for Government Agencies
- Classroom Management
- Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
Quick Tip on Enumerating Group Permissions
A workflow I designed for a client was doing something very simple - enumerating the members of a publishing approval group and displaying the user names on the workflow initiation form (which happened to be an ASPX page) - when all of a sudden content authors could no longer initiate the workflow. Each attempt was greeted by an ‘Access Denied’ error. Only the root system admin could launch the workflow, which is really strange as users need only the ‘Edit Items’ right to launch workflows.
SharePoint Style and Layout Changes on the Fly: Check out the Example Online
During yesterday’s meeting with one of my clients the subject of skinning SharePoint, ease of changing skins, and more came up. The desire to be able to create an Internet site that once custom skinned could be quickly re-skinned came up. A great example of abstracting out the styles for easy re-skinning can be seen with the upcoming CKS 2.0 (Community Kit for SharePoint). They have a link off their explanation of upcoming SharePoint blog enhancements that lets you view them (see CKS Blog Edition demo here).
I was just pinged by one of our sales reps about a question a client had as far as SharePoint scaling and reliability as SharePoint grows within their organization. They were concerned that as the site topped 6gb in size it would affect those factors. I quickly responded as SharePoint scales way beyond such a small size. Microsoft’s own internal implementation has now moved well past 14 TB in size and is growing. Additionally, we are nowhere near the size of deployments such as those at DELL and HP amongst others. It is simply a matter of properly architecting the system for you usage patterns and loads.
SharePoint: When to use a database, SharePoint, or wiki.
“My client asked me to come up with a presentation of whether to use to Sharepoint or Wiki or both and how. Our team is an international team with members in New York, Singapore and London. Currently we have a wiki and Sharepoint set up but there is no clear guide/structure of how or when to use each.” This describes how databases, SharePoint, and Wikis should operate. Real life varies. Always remember that we’re building processes, not temples. A database stores structured data. The structure is typically designed and owned by an individual.
This is my first post in a blog…..anywhere.
I decided to do this as I wanted to share my experiences of working with and developing on the SharePoint 2007 platform.
I have been a web developer for nearly 10 years and a programmer for almost 20 years. I enjoy the challenge. I’ve used SharePoint for a long time but never at a programming level - just as a user.
I’ve been given the task of customising SharePoint and implementing our department brand. My SharePoint Designer 2007 course isn’t until the end of October so things are a bit confusing at the moment!
I understand master and content pages through ASP.NET 2.0 but to actually get all this to work after making some changes is a real challenge!
KB Articles:
Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 hotfix package: August 24, 2007
Discussion: Site versus Web in MOSS 2007
I would like to open this discussion up because I’m having trouble differentiating the terms. Especially when dealing with the object model. SPSite vs. SPWeb. Are there any known differences? My latest thoughts have been that SPSite is the top level site for a site collection and SPWeb can be a site within that site collection… But very unsure here. Please comment!
SharePoint Internet “How We Did It†Goodness from the SharePoint Team Blog
An area of interest that came up several times while I was in Atlanta was around what it takes to create and launch a SharePoint driven Internet site. I brought up and pointed to the SharePoint product teams “How We Did It” postings and promised as follow-up to consolidate them in to a single linked list and to email those along. Well I sent out the email but thought I would pass them along here as well.
So without further ado, here is some “How We Did It” link love.
How we did it: Mission critical HawaiianAir.com website powered by MOSS 2007
The following guest blog entry is written by Jeffrey Hong and Avneesh Kaushik , who are Architect and Senior Consultant, respectively, in Microsoft Consulting Services , and who were the Technical Lead and SharePoint Lead, respectively, for the MOSS-based
MOSS: Effective introduction to an Organization
This entry describes some background information on a large (3,000 users) Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) rollout and what we did to get the project rolling in such a way that the client is happy and firmly down a path that ends with full adoption of the MOSS feature set. As of the writing of the entry, we are approximately 50% complete with the first phase of the project. As things progress, I’ll update this entry and/or write new entries.
In this specific case, the company had already installed SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The IT group installed the product in a sort of “let’s see if anyone cares” fashion. It was quickly adopted by many business users and became quite popular in the enterprise at large. As you can imagine, this was not the best rollout strategy (which the client readily admits) and when MOSS arrived on the scene, the client resolved to “do it right” and hired us to help them.
One of the central questions facing us when we started implementing this project was: How do we introduce MOSS to this client? Given that the client already had experience with SharePoint, we wondered — do we need to do “differential” training or do we start from the ground up? After working with key users, we determined that treating this as a green field project made more sense.
Copying Wiki Pages To New Wiki Page Library via PowerShell
This process will copy a wiki page from one library to another. Note : this process will set up the destination page as a “linked” document to the original. I’m sure there is a way to remove the “link” via code, but manually you need to accomplish this by editing the wiki page and clicking “Unlink” in the upper right of the page. Also, any wiki links that you set up pointing to your source wiki as an absolute hyperlink (<a href….>).
Can you tell what version of SharePoint by looking at the web site?
My PM recently asked this question. I wasn’t able to answer to this question. What a embarrassment!
I knew that by looking at the web site URL, we can at least identify that it is built using SharePoint. Wondering how to identify. Well all the Internet sites created using SharePoint will have ‘Pages’ in their address. There you go I told it! But again there is a catch here. What if some intelligent developer uses FURL to play with the URLs and remove that ‘Pages’ thingy. We can still figure out whether the site is a SharePoint one by viewing the page source. I know this is quite tricky as you need understand the mark-up.
Still I didn’t answer the question. You know why? Because I don’t know! Folks if any of you know how to find out if the site is created using SPS or MOSS, please take time to leave a comment.
Thanks in advance.
SharePoint: Editing the default.master page to add a URL to your custom logo
This isn’t complicated, but it may come in handy if you’re trying to replicate the look and feel of another site.
You’ve probably figured out how to add your logo to your top-level site(s) by going to Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings then picking Master Page from the “Look and Feel” section, then pointing to a custom logo URL.
Now you probably want that image to point somewhere, since that’s what a “home” image usually does in navigation (or maybe that’s just my webtuition). Crack open SharePoint Designer and open your site. Go to the _catalogs > masterpage (Master Page Gallery) folder. Choose to open the default.master page and agree to check it out.
Click on the area of your logo image, you should see something like “SharePoint:SiteLogoImage#onetidHeadbnnr0″ on the field that’s highlighted. In the code panel, click on the breadcrum one tag to the left, it should be “<td#GlobalTitleAr…ms-titleimage…>”. Use the down arrow to select “Edit Tag”.
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:
SPS to MOSS migration error - Cannot locate the list definition required for upgrade
If you’re migrating a SPS 2003 portal to MOSS 2007 that has customized area definitions, you’ll have to revert all those are definitions back to a standard are template before the migration would be successful.
After installing MOSS and running the PRESCAN tool you get stuck with this nasty error message:
09/04/2007 15:01:16 Cannot locate the list definition required for upgrade. Check to ensure you have all templates and language packs installed.
09/04/2007 15:01:16 Error: Exception scanning web: http://SERVER/Annual Enrollment
09/04/2007 15:01:16 System.IO.FileNotFoundException: The system cannot find the file specified.
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.UpdateSchemaAllListsOfWeb(String bstrUrl)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PreupgradeReport.Scan.ScanOneSPWeb(SqlConnection connection, String vsUrl, SPVirtualServer vs, SPSite site, SPWeb web)
BDC Catalog Visual Editor now available
Many ISV’s are interested in surfacing data in your appliation into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). MOSS introduced the Business Data Catalog (BDC) for you to do just that without code.
The BDC bridges the gap between the portal site and your application. You can bring in key data into:
- Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists
- Web Parts
- Search
- User profiles
- Custom applications
You describe the connection between the database and MOSS by defining a metadata model in XML. And until recently, that editing was done in raw XML.
Microsoft drops SharePoint fix
(InfoWorld) - September’s batch of Microsoft security patches was trimmed Friday as Microsoft announced that a planned update to its SharePoint collaboration software would not be released this month.
The update was to fix an elevation of privilege flaw, which had been rated “important” by Microsoft. This type of flaw can be used to give attackers access to Windows resources that would otherwise be blocked off.
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