B@rney's Blog

Eating Bamboo

Bjarne L. Gram — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:18:00 GMT

Or: Evaluating Bamboo Solutions Project Management Suite…

Today I was given the task to evaluate the Bamboo Solutions Project Management Suite for a customer of ours.

For this task I created a separate Web Application and Site Collection on my Virtual Dev Server.

I got a link to download a bunch of stuff from their FTP server – and started installing.

First I installed all the modules I downloaded. All installations (except one) went without any glitches. One package had to be added to the solution store with stsadm, and deployed manually.

A couple of the modules required ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, but the first one with this requirement also helped to install it automagically.

All modules (except one) were installed using the SharePoint Solution Installer by Danish Lars Fastrup.

After installing all the modules I had quite a list of Solutions on my server!:

I’ll be posting my findings about these in separate blog-post – one for each module:

	Alert Plus Web Part	HW05.R2.4.SL
	Alerts Administrator	HW39.R1.1.SL
	Calendar Plus Web Part	HW20.R3.SL
	Chart Plus Web Part	HW27.R2.2.SL
	Cross List Web Part	HW09.R1.2.SL
	Data Viewer Web Part	HW37.R2.5.SL
	Group Email Web Part	HW14.R1.4.SL
	List Integrity	HW01.R2.1.SL
	List Print	HW50.R1.1.SL
	List Rollup	HW24.R3.4.SPV3.SL
	Mini-Calendar Web Part	HW22.R2.4.SL
	My Alerts Organizer	HW40.R1.1.SL
	SharePoint Custom Column Pack	HW41.CPL
	SharePoint In/Out Schedule Board	SA06.R1.SL
	SharePoint Task Master	HW45.R1.SL
	SharePoint Team Calendar	HW34.R1.1.SL
	SharePoint Site Creation Plus	HW28.R1.1SL
	Tree View Web Part	HW03.R1.4.SL
	Virtual Map View Web Part	HW31.R1.6.SL
	SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard	HW35.R1.SL

Bamboo: SharePoint Team Calendar

Bjarne L. Gram — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:57:02 GMT

One other of the Web Parts in the Bamboo Solutions SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard is the SharePoint Team Calendar.

After adding this Web Part to a page it looks like this:

On the top right hand side there are a few buttons:

The Web Part has to be configured before use. One of the options is where to store the events: Exchange, SharePoint or both! And you can even show multiple persons Exchange calendars in the same view – this is great!

I haven’t got an Exchange Server to play with, but here’s an image from the documentation:

Clicking New Appointment pops up a window:

This really looks great!

Bamboo: SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard

Bjarne L. Gram — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:30:41 GMT

From Bamboo Solutions web page:

The SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard gives you a simple view of the progress, health, and risk level of a single project, or the projects in your entire project portfolio.

I created a Team Site, deleted everything from the front page, and added the Project Portofolio Dashboard.

What I got was rather messy:

So I created a new Web Part Page to give the Dashboard more real estate on the page:

The Dashboard consists of several charts.

A Gant View:

Active Projects Health:

Overall Health of Active Projects:

At Risk Projects:

Planned vs. Actual Effort for Active Projects:

Types of Active Projects:

Phases of Active Projects:

Active Project Budgets:

The data the Web Part builds on lives in the Portfolio DashBoard List:

Each list item consist of a lot of information:

And the Web Part itself has a lot of configuration options!

Each of these categories have a lot of options – this was very confusing. My opinion is that they should have divided this up into several Web Parts – instead they’re using the term Widget about each of the areas of the Web Part.

ChartPart for SharePoint

Bjarne L. Gram — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

I just found ChartPart for SharePoint on CodePlex. This uses the Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET 3.5! You can use any list as data for a chart. Looks great!

Papercut

Bjarne L. Gram — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:36:00 GMT

Scott Watermasysk has written about Papercut - this allows you to debug SMTP, for instance when testing workflows...

SharePoint ACL's

Bjarne L. Gram — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:09:00 GMT

A former colleague, Kjell-Sverre, has written about "SharePoint ACLs: RoleDefinitions, RoleAssignments, Inheritance ". As allways, he writes good articles...

A great loss!

Bjarne L. Gram — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:21:11 GMT

I’m not the first one to blog about this, but probably not the last either.

The international SharePoint community has just lost one of the great contributors – Patrick Tisseghem passed away on Wednesday September 3rd in Gothenburg!

He’s been a great inspiration, one of the experts, and a nice guy!

I’ve met Patrick several times; during training in Norway, on our famous Geek Cruise, and when speaking at the Norwegian SharePoint Community!

I’ll miss you Patrick!

My condolences goes to his wife and two daughters.

User Profile Picture Library

Bjarne L. Gram — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:48:00 GMT

Do you need to simplify management of MOSS User Profile Pictures?
Steven Van de Craen has the solution!
He's created en Event Handler for a Picture Library that parses the filename of the uploaded image, and if it matches a username it updates that user's User Profile with the URL to the Picture Library.

Itay Shakury has created a WSP for this: Profile Picture Library.

I had some trouble getting this to work, I got this in the Event Log:

After digging into the source, I found that Steven was using:

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges

Several people had blogged about issues doing this, but Steven's code looked like it was taking these issues into account, it should work!

After a while I got an idea, maybe the AppPool Account my Web App was running under didn't have the appropriate user rights on the SSP?

I granted the account Manage User Profiles - and now it worked!

Technorati Tags: moss,sharepoint 2007

Lost my site creation metadata! - Solved

Bjarne L. Gram — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:51:36 GMT

When you click Create Site, some of the fields are related to listing the site in the SiteDirectory, like Department and Location. These are actually retrieved from the SiteDirectory and displayed in an IFrame!

At a customer location these were lost!

Event though I don't know how or why this happened, the solution was simple...

Click Site Actions | Site Settings | Modify All Site Settings

If you're not at the "top" - click Go to top level site settings.
Choose Site directory settings
Enter the Site Directory Path - usually /SiteDirectory

And OK - that's all, it's back!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint 2007,moss

Content and Structure reports not working

Bjarne L. Gram — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:55:00 GMT

One of my customers had an issue, the Content and Structure reports were not working.

I did *a lot of* Googling, and finally came across Marc's post here:

http://mexicanratdog.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/sharepoint-content-and-structure-reports-not-showing/

Marc had a similar issue, so I tested his Command Line App and found the same issue:

So I fired up SharePoint Manager 2007 and found the GUID for SiteCollectionReportsList:

Then I used sitecollectionreportslist.exe to set this GUID - and VOILA now the reports are working again!

[UPDATE!]

Hmm, I was a bit too fast here - seems this didn't do the trick anyway...

So I checked the errormessage, now it was:

The given key was not present in the dictionary.   at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowKeyNotFoundException()
   at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb.get_VariationRelationshipsListId()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.VariationSettings.get_GlobalRelationshipList()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.VariationSettings.GetVariationRootPublishingWebUrlFromRelationshipList()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.VariationSettings.get_RootPublishingWebUrl()

So I checked SharePoint Manager again, and found a List named Relationships List on the root Web. From there I copied the GUID to this list. I figured that this was also a property on the root web's AllProperties collection that wasn't set. So i modified Marc's code to get and set this ID. But to find the propertyname I had to use Lutz Roeder .NET Reflector on the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll, and here I found:

internal Guid VariationRelationshipsListId
{
    get
    {
        Guid empty = Guid.Empty;
        CacheManager manager = CacheManager.GetManager(this.Web.Site);
        if (this.allWebProperties == null)
        {
            CachedArea tryGetRootArea = manager.ObjectFactory.TryGetRootArea;
            if (tryGetRootArea != null)
            {
                string str = tryGetRootArea.Properties["_VarRelationshipsListId"].ToString();
                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(str))
                {
                    empty = new Guid(str);
                }
            }
        }
        if (!(empty == Guid.Empty))
        {
            return empty;
        }
        return this.GetGuidProperty("_VarRelationshipsListId", Guid.Empty);
    }
    set
    {
        this.SetGuidProperty("_VarRelationshipsListId", value);
    }
}

So, the property is named _VarRelationshipsListId, and I used this in my code to get and set this value.

After modification, Marc's code looked like this:

   1:  using System;

   2:  using System.Collections.Generic;

   3:  using System.Text;

   4:  using Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing;

   5:  using Microsoft.SharePoint;

6:

   7:  namespace VariationRelationshipsList

   8:  {

   9:    class Program

  10:    {

  11:      private const string KEY_VariationRelationshipsList = "_VarRelationshipsListId";

  12:      private const string PARAM_VariationRelationshipsListId = "-setVariationRelationshipsListId";

  13:      private const string PARAM_Help = "-help";

  14:      private const string PARAM_Url = "-url";

15:

  16:      static void Main(string[] args)

  17:      {

  18:        List<string> lstArgs = new List<string>(args);

  19:        if (lstArgs.Contains(PARAM_Help) || lstArgs.Count == 0)

  20:        {

  21:          PrintHelp();

  22:          return;

  23:        }

  24:        if (lstArgs.Contains(PARAM_Url))

  25:        {

  26:          int indUrlFlag = lstArgs.IndexOf(PARAM_Url);

  27:          if (lstArgs.Count > indUrlFlag + 1)

  28:          {

  29:            string siteUrl = lstArgs[indUrlFlag + 1];

  30:            try

  31:            {

  32:              using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteUrl))

  33:              {

  34:                if (!PublishingSite.IsPublishingSite(site))

  35:                {

  36:                  Console.WriteLine("Site must be a publishing site");

  37:                  return;

  38:                }

  39:                PublishingWeb pWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(site.RootWeb);

  40:                GetVariationRelationshipsListInformation(pWeb);

41:

  42:                if (lstArgs.Contains(PARAM_VariationRelationshipsListId))

  43:                {

  44:                  SetVariationRelationshipsList(lstArgs, pWeb);

  45:                }

  46:              }

  47:            }

  48:            catch (Exception ex)

  49:            {

  50:              Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());

  51:            }

  52:          }

  53:        }

  54:      }

  55:      private static void GetVariationRelationshipsListInformation(PublishingWeb pWeb)

  56:      {

  57:        if (pWeb.Web.AllProperties.ContainsKey(KEY_VariationRelationshipsList))

  58:        {

  59:          string result = pWeb.Web.AllProperties[KEY_VariationRelationshipsList].ToString();

  60:          Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Reports List ID: {0}", result));

61:

  62:          Guid listID = new Guid(result);

  63:          SPList reportsList = null;

  64:          try

  65:          {

  66:            reportsList = pWeb.Web.Lists.GetList(listID, false);

  67:          }

  68:          catch (Exception) { }

  69:          if (reportsList == null)

  70:          {

  71:            Console.WriteLine("Variations Relationships list could not be found at given GUID");

  72:          }

  73:          else

  74:          {

  75:            Console.WriteLine("Variations Relationships list was found at given GUID");

  76:          }

  77:        }

  78:        else

  79:        {

  80:          Console.WriteLine(KEY_VariationRelationshipsList + " property was not set on the current site");

  81:        }

  82:      }

  83:      private static void SetVariationRelationshipsList(List<string> lstArgs, PublishingWeb pWeb)

  84:      {

  85:        int indSetReportListIdFlag = lstArgs.IndexOf(PARAM_VariationRelationshipsListId);

  86:        if (lstArgs.Count > indSetReportListIdFlag + 1)

  87:        {

  88:          string newVariationsRelationshipsListId = lstArgs[indSetReportListIdFlag + 1];

  89:          //check to make sure this list actually exists

  90:          SPList newList;

  91:          try

  92:          {

  93:            newList = pWeb.Web.Lists.GetList(new Guid(newVariationsRelationshipsListId), false);

  94:          }

  95:          catch (Exception)

  96:          {

  97:            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Could not find new list: {0}", newVariationsRelationshipsListId)); ;

  98:            return;

  99:          }

 100:          Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Setting new variations realtionships list id: {0}...", newVariationsRelationshipsListId));

 101:          if (!pWeb.Web.AllProperties.ContainsKey(KEY_VariationRelationshipsList))

 102:            pWeb.Web.AllProperties.Add(KEY_VariationRelationshipsList, newVariationsRelationshipsListId);

 103:          else

 104:            pWeb.Web.AllProperties[KEY_VariationRelationshipsList] = newVariationsRelationshipsListId;

 105:          pWeb.Web.Update();

 106:        }

 107:      }

 108:

 109:      private static void PrintHelp()

 110:      {

 111:        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} <http://.... the url of the site collection to target>", PARAM_Url));

 112:        Console.WriteLine(String.Format("[{0}] <the guid of the list to which the Reports List property for the site should be set>", PARAM_VariationRelationshipsListId));

 113:      }

 114:    }

 115:  }

And, after running this handy little app - Content and Structure (SiteManager) is back online!

Thanks Marc!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint 2007,moss,wss