Wednesday, 17 October 2007

SharePoint Comparison Sheet

An Excel sheet comparing features (new and old) regarding older and new SharePoint version.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/d/c/1dc632e8-71e1-466f-8a2f-c940f1438e0a/SharePointProductsComparison.xls

Seminar wih Fredrik Wackå

Today I have attended a short seminar about Enterprise 2.0 with Fredrik Wackå. If you have the chance to listen to him, don´t miss the opportunity.

During the presentation he talked about how the intranet has evolved according to different publishing models, low hanging fruits (tagging!) to get started, trust in an enterprise (how can we ISO certificate a Wiki or blog posts?), crowd knowledge (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds), cross functional information sharing, relevance and resources, strategy for Enterprise 2.0 and the importance of measuring the behaviour (referring to IBM, which claims that it can´t be measured. Are we up to the challenge?)

Sites mentioned:
www.flickr.com
www.facebook.com
www.linkedin.com
www.digg.com
www.twitter.com
del.icio.us
www.jaiku.com

More info here:
http://www.wpr.se/

Thursday, 27 September 2007

Dataview and unghosted pages

The XSLT DataView can be used for many things when you want to customize the layout of web parts in your site. The problem when using the Data view on pages are that the pages gets unghosted. Follow this instruction to maintain your pages ghosted and even get a decent test and dev page.

1. Create a web part page
2. Add the list web part to the web part page
3. Open the page in FP 2003
4. Convert the web part to a XSLT Data View
5. Do your changes (the web part is actually converted to a XSLT document, check the Code window in FP 2003)
6. Save the page
7. Open the web part page in your browser and export the web part
8. Open the page you want to display the web part on (i.e Home)
9. Import the web part to the page (check the web part properties, the XSLT is available for direct editing)
10. Delete the web part page if you don´t need it anymore

Done

Thursday, 28 June 2007

Adding functionality without server installation

While I'm enjoying my paternity leave I will write a few blog posts about extending Sharepoint sites without requiring developing and installing server side web parts. These posts will demonstrate a simple but effective approach for content aggregation and manipulating input forms on sites.

What you need to follow my examples are:

1. Two Invaluable Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Shortcuts
2. Knowledge about JavaScript, DOM and XMLHTTP objects
3. A clear understanding of the security settings of your sites
4. The downsides to use this approach (will be discussed while moving along)

In the next blog post I will set up the infrastructure code.

Tuesday, 8 May 2007

Crawled properties for HTML documents

We are currently running an intresting project including the index engine in cooperation with Tamino XML server. One action in the project is to index HTML documents from the Tamino XML server and use the MOSS Query Web Service to present search results.

The HTML contains the classic meta tag ">meta name="Keywords" content=""<" which still provides information to some crawlers. Here we encounter a problem. After the content source had been setup and the HTML documents had been crawled the "Keywords" properties didn´t show up in the crawled properties view, but other "meta" tags was, i.e ">meta name="Region" content="Sweden"<". For some reason the "Keywords" meta tag is skipped.

The solution to this case was to add another meta tag, "KeywordsCust" and add the same information as in "Keywords" from the source. After a full crawl the meta tag apperad in crawled properties, then just map it to "Keywords" in managed properties and you are ready to go.

Two test tools for the Query Web Service in MOSS / SPPS
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=89b3cda7-aad9-4919-8faf-34ef9b28c57b
http://www.mosssearch.com/searchwebservice.html

Tuesday, 24 April 2007

Heads up: Lookup column and multiple values

There is a new setting when using a lookup column, "Allow multiple values". This means that you can choose several values from the lookup column. Great! But you can use the column in views for sorting or grouping, but it can be used for filter. A drawback ofcourse. Uncheck "Allow mulitple values" and it can be used for sorting and grouping again. The same behaviour goes for column "Choice" when using "Checkboxes"

Introduction to 'SharePoint Enterprise Search'

A good introduction to the index engine, ifilters and the query interface. I have always considered the search engine the one component that is really worth the license cost of SPPS 2003 and with the improvments made in MOSS (change log crawling, continouse propagation) it will enable more accurate search results and better administration.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/01/Search/

If you are using Windows Desktop Search, then check out this tip to enable integration to the Search Center: http://markharrison.co.uk/blog/2006/10/sharepoint-search-directly-from.htm

Friday, 13 April 2007

Troubleshooting Explorer View

When a user can not use the "Explorer View" (Cannot find 'file://\\server\site\doclib. Make sure the path or Internet address is correct.) in a document library in Sharepoint the first thing to check is the "WebClient" service. It needs to be started to be able to use the "Explorer View".

Microsoft has also released a whitepaper for troublehooting the Explorer View

Debug Feature in WSS

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/04/10/debugger-feature-for-sharepoint.aspx

Tuesday, 10 April 2007

SharePoint Screen Casts and Demos

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/04/10/sharepoint-screen-casts-and-demos.aspx

Read list:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/04/09/investing-in-logical-architecture-design-samples.aspx