Laura Rogers @WonderLaura: Posts

Control Formatting of SharePoint Announcements

Laura Rogers — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:58:31 GMT

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We like to give people the freedom to add content to SharePoint as they wish in most cases, and we like them to be able to add announcements on their site whenever they need to. Do you ever cringe when you look at a SharePoint site, because of some crazy font or ugly colors that were used in the announcements that are prominently displayed on the home page? In this post, I'll show you how to tightly control the formatting of the way announcements look on your site.

This solution will work in either SharePoint 2007 or 2010, and will work on any version such as Foundation or Enterprise. This is also a good fit for SharePoint Online with Office 365.

A quick little bit of background… I maintain the site for the Birmingham, Alabama SharePoint User Group, and every month I post an announcement about the next upcoming meeting. The announcement is formatted the same way each time, with the speaker's photo on the side and a certain font used for the name of their presentation, and a certain font used for the date, and a different one for the description. Each month when I was adding a new announcement, I decided it was taking too long to do all this formatting, even though it was the same every time, which is what prompted me to create a workflow. So, although my motivation was just efficiency, your motivation may be uniformity among announcements.

In my SPUG announcements list, I have specific field names such as the speaker's name, the sponsor name, the speaker's job title, etc. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to keep the field names pretty generic for this post.

Here are the steps:

Create an "Announcements" list, if there isn't already one on your site.
Create a list called "Create Announcements", using the list template "custom list".
Create the following columns in the Create Announcements list:
Green Header - Single line of text
Brown Header - Single line of text
Body - Multiple lines of text - Enhanced rich text
Photo URL - Hyperlink
Expiration - Date/Time
Then, I renamed "Title" to "Black Title"
In the Announcements list, a template must be created. Create a new announcement. Make up a title, and then put the cursor in the body of the announcement. Since I want to show the speaker's photo to the left of the session description, I create a table. On the Insert tab, insert a table that's got one row and two columns.
In the left cell of the table, type "Picture", as a placeholder. In the right cell, type the following:
Now it's time to apply the colors. Select the text, and apply your desired colors to each line, as so:
Click Save.
Open that same announcement back up, click to edit it, and put the cursor in the Body field. Open the HTML source code, like this:
Copy the HTML code to the clipboard. Open SharePoint Designer.
Create a new workflow based on the Create Announcements list. Name it "New Announcement".
Add an action to set a workflow variable. (In SharePoint 2007, the action is called Store Dynamic String) Call the variable BodyTextVar, and it is a string variable.
Click the blue word Value. Click the little ellipsis next to it (the button with 3 dots). Paste the contents of the clipboard, which is the HTML source code. Mine looks like this
<div class="ExternalClassF2152D91E5604C86AA56CB2DF7047264"><table width="100%" class="ms-rteTable-default" border="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td>Picture</td><td><p style="color: #000; font-size: 18pt"><strong>Black Title</strong></p><p style="color: green; font-size: 12pt">Green Header</p><p style="color: #8f6c2e; font-size: 10pt"><strong>Brown Header</strong></p><p>Body</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div>
In the spot of the code where you see the word "Picture", that needs to be changed to HTML code for a picture. The Photo URL field will be used. Basically, each placeholder in the code will be replaced with the name of the actual field from the list, like this:
Note that when you insert the Body field, be sure and change Return field as: Plain Text.
When you insert the Photo URL field, be sure to select Return field as: URL
I used the <Add or Change Lookup> button in the code, to insert where the fields need to go. For example, I replaced Green Header with the actual field called Green Header. Click OK.
In the workflow, add the action Create List Item.
Click the blue words This List, and pick Announcements.
Set the Title field to the current list's Black Title, and click the Add button. Add the body field, like this, and click OK twice.
One more field. Click the Add button. Choose "Expires" and match it to the current list's "Expiration". The Create new list item action will then look like this. Click OK.
Publish the workflow. Note that since we didn't change the workflow initiation (Start) settings, it is only set up to be triggered manually, which is fine for testing.
Before you create an item in the Create Announcements list, be sure to get the URL of a photo that's in a library in SharePoint, to paste into the Photo URL field. Create a new item in the Create Announcements list, and fill in all the fields. Run the workflow.
You'll notice that your new announcement gets created. Lovely! Any tweaking that needs to be done regarding formatting and alignment needs to be done in the HTML code that's in the first action "set variable" in the workflow.
Another enhancement: You may want users to be able to create items in Create Announcements but not create or edit items in the actual announcements list. This can be done. In the workflow, insert an Impersonation Step, and put those 2 steps inside of it. That way, you can take away the users permissions to contribute to the announcements list, and the workflow will still be able to create items in it, because it runs with the credentials of you, the person who published the workflow.
The web part view: In the Announcements list, create a new view. Make it a Standard view, and call it Web Part. Only check the box next to the Body column. Set the filter so that Expires is greater than or equal to [Today]. Uncheck the box next to Tabular View.
On the home page of your site. Go to the web part toolpane of the Announcements web part. Change the view to this new Web Part view that you just created. Click OK. What is this for? Now, your announcements will be fully displayed on the home page without being cut off, and since we inserted the title field into the body of the announcement, only the body field needs to be shown.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,announcements,publishing,workflows,Foundation,web parts

Category: workflows

Published: 2/7/2012 11:58 PM

SharePoint 2010 – Dynamic Calculations in a List Form

Laura Rogers — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:53:04 GMT

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In SharePoint lists that contain calculated columns, you may have noticed that when a new form is being created or edited, the results of calculated columns do not display in the form itself, so the user does cannot see the result of the calculation until after they have saved that item. The calculated field can then be seen as a column in the list, or can be seen when viewing the display form of the item.

Now in SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2010, there is the ability to customize any SharePoint list with InfoPath. Because of this capability, you can dynamically display the calculated results in the form AS the user is filling it out!

In this example, there is an “Expenses” list with a sales figure for each type of expense for a trip. There is a calculated column, called Total, which shows a sum of all expenses for the trip.

Here’s how:

1. This is the “Total” calculated column in the list:

2. Create items in the list, and notice the calculated field in the display form:

3. In the SharePoint list, on the List tab of the ribbon, click the Customize Form button, which will instantly convert the SharePoint list form to an InfoPath form. Click the Quick Publish button in the toolbar at the top left of InfoPath.

4. Notice that now when viewing the form, the calculated field does not display at all:

5. Click the “Customize Form” button again. Add a new row to the bottom of the table in the InfoPath Form. From the “Insert a field” panel on the right, insert the “Total” field into the table. Right-click this field, and choose “Calculated Value Properties”. Change the format to decimal and currency and click OK.

6. The trick now is that we want the formula to be dynamically calculated as the currency fields are being filled out. Double click to select the Total field, and click the Default Value button in the ribbon in InfoPath:

7. On the Field or Group properties box, click the Function (Fx) button next to the Default Value box.

8. Use the Insert Field or Group button to insert the fields to re-create the same formula that exists in the calculated column, as so:

9. Click OK, leave the box checked that says “Refresh value when formula is recalculated”, and click OK again. Quick Publish the form again.

10. Now, when viewing the form in the browser, you’ll see the total field displayed, AND when filling out a new item, the total will be calculated AS the form is being filled out, which will look something like this:

Now you’ll not only be able to work-around the bug in which calculated columns aren’t included in InfoPath forms of SharePoint 2010 lists, you’ll be able to make the calculations dynamic in the form.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,InfoPath 2010,forms,calculations

Category: MS Office

Published: 6/3/2010 10:53 PM

Display User Data Fields for a SharePoint List

Laura Rogers — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:31:14 GMT

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You have all of this data in SharePoint, and you have all of this information about the site users, such as their department names, phone numbers, and much more. Instead of asking for site users to fill out all of their pertinent information every time they fill out a list item, form or survey in SharePoint, wouldn't it be nice to just use the information that is already there?

A while back, I wrote an article on how to report off of this data using Microsoft Access SharePoint: Find out About Site Users within Microsoft Access (Screencast). This method is flawed because once you create the report, there isn't a way to display it back in SharePoint… it's only in Access. I also wrote this post Pass Default Value From a Web Part Page to a New Item, which works okay, but you're really copying all that user data into some fields, which is really inefficient.

This week, I discovered a much better way than those other two, and it entails creating a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report. This solution can be used with all versions of SharePoint (not just enterprise). Before getting started, the prerequisites are that SSRS is already installed on a SharePoint web front end server, and it's all set up and integrated with SharePoint. Also, make sure that you are using SQL 2008 R2, or steps 19 and 20 won't work. You'll need the Report Builder Report and the Report Data Source content types added to a document library (I called my library "Reports"). For more information about SSRS, I did a presentation recently: Easy Reporting off of SharePoint Data.

In this example, I'm going to use a regular SharePoint tasks list, and the goal is to display the list of tasks, showing the "Assigned To" column, and also showing more information about each user that has a task assigned to them. (Note that part of these instructions are easier if you are working at the root level of the site collection, as opposed to a sub-site.)
Here's the final result. Those last two columns come directly from the SharePoint user information list:

In your Reports library, click the New button and choose Report Data Source.
Name it TeamSite, data source is Microsoft SharePoint List,and use your own SharePoint site URL as the connection string. Credentials has to be Windows authentication. Click OK.
In the library, click the New button again, and choose Report Builder Report. (If you've never used it before, you will be prompted to install it)
Note: if you get the error "To use Report Builder, you must install .Net Framework 3.5 on this computer", here is the resolution.
In the wizard, choose New Report. Click Table or Matrix Wizard.
Choose Create a Dataset, and click Next.
Choose to browse to find a data source, and navigate to the current library, which is where you already created the TeamSite data source, which is the one you want to select. Click Next.
Check the box next to your Tasks list on the left. (Note to make sure that there are some items in your list. It just helps to have test data.) Click Next.
Add a few fields to the Values section, by dragging them over. Click Next.
Since I didn't select any grouping on the Arrange Fields screen, on the Choose the Layout screen, all the options are grayed out. Click Next.
Pick a color preference on the Choose a Style screen, and click Finish.
If you'd like to preview your creation so far, click the Run button at the top, then click Design to close the preview. Go ahead and click the Save button at the top left, and drill down to your Reports library. Save this as TaskReport.rdl.
So far, we haven't done anything extraordinary, that's just a pretty report. Now it's time to add those user information columns that I promised you. Right click on Datasets on the left, and choose Add Dataset.
Call this new dataset UserInfo, and choose to use a dataset embedded in the report. Choose your TeamSite data source from the drop-down.
Click the Query Designer Button.
Check the box next to the User Information List on the left, and click OK.
(Note that only if you do NOT see the user information list, this is because it only exists at the root level of the site collection. You'll have to create a separate data source, call it "TopSite". Repeat steps 1 and 2, using the URL of the root site in your site collection. In the screenshot above, you'll be selecting the other, "TopSite".)
On the Dataset Properties screen, click OK.
A couple of columns can now be added. Again, the goal is to show extra information about each of the "Assigned To" people. Click to select the last column in the report, and choose Insert Column -> Right. Do this twice.
In the first new empty cell (not header), right click and choose Expression.
Paste this formula, click OK, and I'll explain it all in a minute.
=Lookup(Fields!Assigned_To.Value,Fields!Name.Value,Fields!Department.Value, "UserInfo")
Right click the next empty cell next to that one, pick expression again, and this one will have the job title:
=Lookup(Fields!Assigned_To.Value,Fields!Name.Value,Fields!Title.Value, "UserInfo")
In the column header cells, type titles for the new columns, "Assignee Department", and "Assignee Title".
Save. Close Report Builder. Now in your reports library, you can click to open this report (RDL file) and see how lovely it is.

Here's how that lookup formula really works…

The Lookup function has four sections, separated by commas:

Fields!Assigned_To.Value - This is the field in the current (tasks) dataset that is going to exactly match up to a field in the other (UserInfo) dataset. You can click Fields (DataSet1) (in the screenshot under Category) to pick from the list of all the other fields.
Fields!Name.Value - This is the field in the other dataset (UserInfo) that is going to exactly match with the Assigned_To field. In the user information list, the Name field is "Firstname Lastname".
Fields!Department.Value - this third part is the name of the field in the other dataset (UserInfo) that you want to display in this cell. To see a list of the names of the fields in that dataset, in the Category section of the above screenshot, you can click Datasets and then click UserInfo.
"UserInfo" - This fourth part of the formula is the name of the second dataset that you're looking up to. This is what we named it at step 13.

Anyway, that's it, I hope you have fun with this. I absolutely love SSRS. Don't forget that there's the Report Viewer web part, which will let you display your report on any page in SharePoint. Another side note that I may blog about separately is the fact that you can cache the data in your dataset, so that it doesn't take so long to render the report. It has to be a shared dataset to be able to do that, and we didn't do any shared datasets in these instructions, just for simplicity's sake.

Note, if you got stuck at step 15 and you still don't see the user information list, just paste this in the big white box called Query:

<RSSharePointList xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<ListName>UserInfo</ListName>
</RSSharePointList>

Here's the reference for the Lookup Function.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SSRS,SQL Server Reporting Services,SQL 2008 R2,Report Builder,User Information

Category: SSRS

Published: 2/1/2012 11:31 PM

Submit Form to a Secure Location

Laura Rogers — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:06:48 GMT

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Forms and security. It is a common requirement to have a form that can be filled out, and when it is submitted, it goes to a location that the form submitter does not have access to. This is tricky because the users need to have contribute access to a list or library in order to create new items in it, but then if they can do that, they can access everything else in the library. There are many variations of this requirement, but in this post, I'll show how it can be done in a pretty simple way.

General overview: This concept can be done with either a list item or a library. (I'll just use the term "list" in this overview, just to get the general point across). Create a content type. Create two lists. Add the content type to both lists. List A "New Items" items can be created by anyone on the site, and List B "Locked List" is locked down so that only managers have permissions to access it. When new items are created in "New Items", a SharePoint Designer workflow runs an impersonation step that copies that item over to the "Locked List", and then deletes it from the original list.

This solution can be done out of the box with SharePoint 2010 (any version), and SharePoint Online with Office 365.

Since InfoPath is the most common thing that I use to create forms, and I get asked about this a lot, I'm going to use an InfoPath form in my example here.

If you don't already have a document library on your site called "Form Templates", go ahead and create it.
When you publish your form to SharePoint, instead of publishing it directly to a form library, publish it as a content type. Note that if your form has been published as an administrative template, that's fine too, but just less common. Click Next.
Choose Create a new Content Type, and click Next.
Name your content type, with whatever the name of the form is. Mine is a Check Request. Click Next.
On the screen where you specify a location for the form template, click Browse. Select the Form Templates library on your site, and give your form a name. I called mine CheckRequest.xsn. Click Next.
Pick your fields that you want to be columns, and click Next. Click Publish. Click Close.
Create two new form libraries. "New Check Requests" and "Locked Check Requests".
Go to the Library Settings screen of New Check Requests, and click Advanced Settings.
Change Allow Management of Content Types to YES. Click OK.
On the Form Library Settings screen, click Add from existing site content types.
Click Check Request (or the name of your own content type from step 4) and click the Add button to move it to the right side. Click OK.
Click the "Form" content type, and click Delete this content type.
Go to the Library settings screen of Locked Check Requests. Repeat steps 8 through 12.
In your InfoPath form, make sure that the Submit data connection is set up to submit the forms to the New Check Requests library.
Open your site n SharePoint Designer, and create a new workflow based on the New Check Requests library.
Name the workflow New Check Request, and click OK.
Put your cursor underneath the Step 1 box, and click the Impersonation Step button in the ribbon, so your screen will look like this:
Delete Step 1. Put your cursor inside of the Impersonation step and add the action called Copy List Item. Then add the action Delete Item below it.
Set up the copy so that it copies from the current list over to the Locked Check Requests. Then make it delete the current item. Like this:
Click Workflow Settings in the ribbon. Under start options, only put a check box next to Start workflow automatically when an item is created.
Publish the workflow.

Okay, it's done now. The key here is that the permissions will be set up as so:

People who need to be able to fill out the form: Give them Contribute permissions on the New Check Requests Library. Do not give them permissions on the Locked Check Requests library at all.
People who need to be able to access the whole list of forms that have been submitted: If they need to be able to *modify the forms that have been submitted, give them Contribute access to the Locked Check Requests library. If you only want them to be able to see the submitted items and not change them, just give them read access.
The key here is that when the workflow copies items over from one list to another, it uses the login of the person who published the workflow. The best practice for workflows with impersonation steps is to publish the workflow as the SharePoint admin account, and not someone's personal account. You know, just in case. You wouldn't want someone to leave the company and then none of the workflows function anymore, right?

Again, to reiterate…. This is just the most simple way to accomplish this goal. Of course, with impersonation steps in a workflow, you could change permission on each individual item in the list or library via workflow. It just gets kinda messy and hard to manage when you start delving into individual item permissions. The method in this blog post is simple because you the permissions are set at the library level.

Keep in mind that with some list types in SharePoint, such as a custom list, there is a setting in advanced settings that you can use. Unfortunately, this setting just doesn't exist in libraries.

Note: If people will be modifying the submitted forms after they have been moved to the Locked Check Requests Library, there is one more important consideration… the submit data connection. You'll have to create another submit data connection that submits to Locked Check Requests, because you probably don't want to have a bunch of duplicate files. There just needs to be a condition that looks to see if this is a form that has already been initially submitted. So, for example, you can create a field called "FormStatus". When the submit button is clicked, add an action to set a field's value, where you set the FormStatus to submitted. That way, you can create a condition so that if a form has already been submitted initially, then it gets submitted to the Locked Check Requests.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Office 365,Workflows,InfoPath,security,forms,SharePoint Designer

Category: InfoPath

Published: 1/26/2012 12:06 AM

"I Need To..." Display a List of Documents

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:18 GMT

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In this article, I'll describe how to use the out-of-box "I Need To..." web part to display a dynamic list of documents in a document library.

About the "I Need To..." web part

This web part displays items in a list on the SharePoint site. The Title field is the field that will be displayed. The list also must have a hyperlink field, and it must be called "URL". There must also be a field in the list that is a choice field, to be filtered by.

Your Document Library
In this example, my document library is called "Documents".

Add a new column called "URL", and make it a hyperlink field
If you don't already have a choice field you'd like to filter by, add a new column called "Active". It's a choice field, with the options being Yes or No, with the default as yes.
Using SharePoint Designer, create a new workflow that will run when each new item is created or changed in the document library.
Call this step in the workflow "Set URL". There are no conditions, and only one action:
Set Field in Current Item: Set URL to the current item's URL Path field.
Click <Finish> to save the workflow.
Upload a couple of documents to the library, to test this.
Add the I Need To web part to your page. Go to the web part's toolpane.
In the List Name box, click the <Change...> button, and select your document library.
In the Filter Field box, select "Active" from the drop-down box, and in Filter Value, select Yes.
Click OK. Sometimes it makes you check in the page before displaying your changes.

You might see your document names in the drop-down box at this point, but you might not. The problem is that this web part uses the Title field, and a lot of times that field isn't utilized in document libraries. There are some options you have at this point:

Make the Title field a required field in your library.
OR, put a step in your workflow that will put information in your Title field...
Add a second step in the workflow called "Document title". Condition is "If Title is empty", and Action is to set the Title field to the Documents:Name.
OR, put a step in your workflow that will set only the items with Title information as "Active=Yes"...
Add a second step in the workflow called "Active Documents". Condition is "If Title is empty" AND "If Active=Yes", then the Action is to set the Active field to No.

Note: At this point, if users change the name of the document, but not the Title, nothing will happen to the title. But, since this workflow is set to run every time the document is changed, changes to the document names WILL be reflected in the document's URL.

Another thing you might want to do is hide the document library's URL field from forms. In the library's settings, go to Advanced settings. Change the setting “Allow management of content types” to Yes.
Now, there’s a new section in your library's settings called Content Types that contains one content type called “Document”.
Click on the Document content type, click on the URL field, and change it to Hidden. This will cause the field to be hidden when opening or editing the document properties. You can do the same for the "Active" field if you'd like.

Technorati Tags: Content types,document library,documents,web part,workflows

Category: workflows

Published: 3/16/2009 4:39 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: quote-i-need-to-quote-display-a-list-of-documents

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SharePoint Technical Conference (SP Tech Con)

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:19 GMT

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Twitter users, you can Re-Tweet This Post.

SP Tech Con (www.sptechcon.com) is coming up!

Looking forward to seeing you all at this conference! Presentations that I'll be doing:

Making the Most Of Out-of-the-Box Web Parts
Out-of-the-Box Web parts are extremely flexible. This session will provide business users and project managers with a detailed look at the Filter, KPI, Excel Web Access, Outlook Web Access and Business Data Catalog Web parts. Some Web part connection tricks will be shared, and customizations using SharePoint Designer will be demonstrated. Developers starting to work with SharePoint also could benefit from knowing its out-of-the-box functionality before they delve into custom coding.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: BASIC
So THAT’S How! SharePoint and Office 2007 Integration
Discover the best ways to tackle your daily work with the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Tips include how to use Instant Search in Outlook to keep all your SharePoint lists and libraries within easy reach, and how to use Excel Services Web parts so people can interact with a worksheet on a Web page. From offline document editing and two-way list synch, to workflows you can only find in Office, this session is packed with tricks you can use to increase your SharePoint productivity. Demo will include Access custom lists, blog publishing and dashboards.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: INTERMEDIATE
HELP! Creating a Community Of Support for SharePoint
How do end users obtain SharePoint-related help? In this session, we will go over challenges in helping and supporting SharePoint end users, and how to address those challenges. There are many different available avenues when it comes to SharePoint help, and we will cover how to consolidate that information to a single point of reference for your end users or customers to turn to. A SharePoint Help site and community for your company will not only make the users happy and confident, it will also reduce calls to the help desk.
Attendees will learn:
• Some user perspectives when it comes to obtaining SharePoint related help, and how to bring together available sources of help
• Why it’s important to do research to find out what the users need and what they’re looking for in SharePoint help
• Why it’s important to create a single point of reference for your company’s SharePoint users to get help with SharePoint, and how to tailor this site/community to your own company
TECHNICAL LEVEL: BASIC

Technorati Tags: Boston,conference

Category: conference

Published: 3/19/2009 4:40 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: sharepoint-technical-conference-sp-tech-con

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SP Tech Con - Get $100 off!

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

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When you register for the SharePoint Technical Conference (SPtechcon) in Boston, get $100 off because you know me. Use the promotional code: WONDERLAURA

Category: conference

Published: 4/16/2009 4:46 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: sp-tech-con-get-100-off

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SharePoint Saturday in Atlanta Recap

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

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SharePoint Saturday was in Atlanta on April 18th. My friend, Lori Gowin, and I were so excited when we first found out about this event a couple of months ago. I had immediately submitted an abstract, to do a presentation there.

Since we live in Birmingham, Alabama, it's only a two and a half hour drive over to Atlanta. Our friend, Cathy Dew, who we met at our SharePoint user group, works for CTS. CTS sponsored the speaker dinner in Atlanta, so Cathy and I conveniently brought Lori along with us to hob-nob with the speakers.

The speaker dinner was great, and you know it's always interesting meeting people in person... who you know from the internet. So, now we get to associate human beings with those little square icons whom we've been chatting with on twitter.

We were up bright and early for SharePoint Saturday the next morning. So exciting! We had a short keynote, and then my presentation was in the very first time slot. Also, we had live coverage of this event on the EndUserSharePoint site, courtesy of Mark Miller. This means that some of us committed to being "live bloggers", and basically took notes while we were in our sessions, and these notes and correspondence was live online. We even had pictures and videos! Here's the archived live blog. Oh, and here are several videos that Dux recorded. There was a little friendly competition going with the St. Louis MOSS Camp, which was going on at the same time and also live blogging!

It was unfortunate that Dux's presentation was at the same time, because I really wanted to see him speak. Oh well, I guess I'll have to wait until I see him again at SPTechCon in Boston.

Anyway, this was the third time that have done my presentation called "Making the most of Out-of-Box Web Parts". It gets so much easier each time I do it. The first time was with Brett Lonsdale of Lighting Tools, when we presented this at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego in February. Since he's the BDC guru and has a development background, he was the perfect person to talk about the BDC web parts, and the data view web part. The whole premise behind this presentation, is that no matter who you are (developer or not), it's best to learn what SharePoint can do out-of-box, before developing your own solutions.

The next session I went to was "Integrating SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with SharePoint" by Chris Regan. This session was great, because Chris went over all of the steps to take, and gotchas involved when installing SSRS. Stanalond mode vs. Integrated mode. He actually demo'ed the installation in detail. Good stuff!

Then, I went to "Business Intelligence: Build a dashboard with Excel Services and KPIs" by Jeremy Minich. Jeremy went over the Report Center template in MOSS, and how to put Excel Web Access web parts on the dashboard, and how to comfigure the web part settings. He also showed how to create KPIs and put the KPI web parts on the page.

After lunch, several of us live bloggers went to "Blogging with SharePoint" by Dan Lewis. This session was recorded and was streaming live, thanks to Eric Harlan. It was a lot of fun, and very informative. Dan went over different ways to blog and post blog entries, such as different software to use, and some tips and tricks.

And, finally, the last session I went to was "Content Query Web Part in the Wild" by Hasan Shahid and Amjad Ashraf. This one was great for me, because customizing the CQWP is something I've been struggling with. They showed how easy it can be!

Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot! Lori and I recorded a series of webcasts on the way to and from Atlanta. To view these, click HERE. I've been uploading a new one every day.

Category: conference

Published: 4/28/2009 4:46 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: sharepoint-saturday-in-atlanta-recap

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/18/laura-presentation-4-182_316feef5-92c8-4867-a16e-c641ac6b3225_3143F488.jpg

On-The-Go Series Completed

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

Body:

Lori Gowin and I drove to Atlanta for SharePoint Saturday on April 18th. We simply turned the camera on, and started talking. For the past few weeks, I've been uploading one new file each night. Now, the whole series has been uploaded for your viewing pleasure.

Click here to see the list of all ELEVEN webcasts. It will blow your mind (no, not really).

Before I had sliced our 2 big videos up into a bunch of little ~8 minute ones, I simply guessed that there would be about 10 of them. There ended up being eleven. Sorry, sue me.

Category: conference

Published: 5/9/2009 8:11 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: on-the-go-series-completed

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List View Styles

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

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When creating a new view on a SharePoint list or library, there's this little section towards the bottom of the view settings, called Style, that looks like this:

To see what each style looks like, you could easily modify your view, changing it to each style, one at a time. I've discovered something in SharePoint Designer allows for a PREVIEW of these built-in styles!

NOTE that you're not going to be modifying a page in SharePoint Designer at this point, only looking at it.

Open your site in SharePoint Designer, and double-click to open the default.aspx page (or any aspx page on your site that contains a list view web part).
Click to select the list view.
As you hover over this list view, look for a little icon that's a picture of a table, like so:
(see it on top of the word Departments, at the top left of the web part)
Click the drop-down box on it, and choose "Change Layout"
Go to the Layout tab
Scroll down through this list, and you'll notice that when you hover over each example, the name of it is displayed, and when you click on each example, there is a description of that view at the bottom! There's even a radio button on here that lets you change the view type to datasheet view.

That's your tidbit for the day. Just close the page you opened, and don't save any changes you made.

Category: Views

Published: 5/14/2009 8:13 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: list-view-styles

Categories: Views

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Hitting the East Coast

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

Body:

Less than two weeks go to! My whirlwind trip is getting closer and closer!

On Friday, June 19th, Tiffany Songvilay and I are going to meet up in Charlotte, NC for SharePoint Saturday. She's coming from Houston, and I'm coming from Birmingham, but we're going to arrive there around the same time. Since the speaker dinner is that night, I'm hitching a ride with Tiffany. Then, if all goes smoothly, we'll arrive together in style at the speaker dinner. I'm particularly looking forward to meeting Michael Gannotti for the first time. Here is the full list of the amazing other speakers that I'll get to hang out with. These people are wonderfully smart, witty, and I feel so lucky to be one of them. Serious SharePoint gurus! From what I understand, my friend Dan Lewis has been the key organizer of this event. Relax, Dan, it'll be great. I think I'm going to do my "Making the most of the Out-of-Box (MOSS) web parts" presentation.

But wait!
That's not all!
THEN, on Sunday the 21st, Tiffany and I are going to jet on up to Boston for SPTechCon, which is June 22nd through 24th! Mike Watson will also be at both events (Charlotte & Boston), and so will Dan User , who I'm also looking forward to meeting for the first time. I've never been to this particular conference before, but I think it's going to be friggin' awesome. Don't miss this one! So many friends will be there, I can't even count 'em all. You know who you are. AND, I get to meet my business associate, Mark Miller, of www.endusersharepoint.com, for the first time.

Here is a link to my blog post that describes the presentations that I'll be doing. One of them will be alongside Tiffany:

: Tiffany and Laura at the SharePoint Best Practices conference

See y'all there!

Category: conference

Published: 6/9/2009 8:18 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: hitting-the-east-coast

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SharePoint Trip Recap

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

Body:

Finally writing my recap of all the fun last week. What a trip. Uh, oh, I mean.... "Wow, I learned a lot!".

The adventure started out on June 19th, when I flew to Charlotte, NC, from my home in Birmingham, AL. Since the speaker party wasn't set to start until 8PM, I had to have dinner beforehand. I hooked up with Heather Waterman, and her husband and family, for some sushi. They have 2 adorable boys. After dinner, Heather and I headed over to the SharePoint Saturday speaker dinner. Not only are these people amazingly talented SharePoint geniuses, but I always have a great time just hanging out with them. Dan Lewis was the organizer of the whole SharePoint Saturday event. Kudos to Dan for all the hard work! After the speaker party, there was another party... in Doug Ware's suite!

The next morning, we all apparently recuperated (except for Mike and Tony maybe) and headed over to the big event - SharePoint Saturday! What sessions did I attend?

Rick Taylor's session: Designing a SharePoint Infrastructure for The Cloud “Windows Azure”
I didn't know what in the heck "Windows Azure" was, but now I do. Rick is very dynamic, and gave many real-world examples in his presentation, which was very helpful.

Dan Usher's session: Designing Effective Logical Architectures, Site Taxonomies and Supporting Infrastructures
Dan has a lot of real world experience in designing architecture for large SharePoint deployments, and this really showed in is presentation.

Then, after lunch, there was my wildly popular "Making the Most of the Out-of-Box Web Parts"
Earlier this year, Brett Lonsdale and I originally co-presented it at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in San Diego. Since he's the BDC guru, he did a much better job explaining BDC web parts than I could have. The premise behind this presentation is that it's a best practice to learn what you can do out-of-box with SharePoint before you go developing your own solutions and web parts.

Mike Gannotti was in the last time slot of the day, with "Web 2.0 and SharePoint"
Mike is just plain awesome. I consider him the social media guru, so of course he had a lot to say about the topic. He not only talked about social media as a concept, but how/when/why it should be used in SharePoint. I had just met Mike that day, but you know, we're BFF's now. ;-) He even put on his SharePoint Samurai outfit, and interviewed me.

Altogether, it was a day to remember. I got to see many old friends, and made some new ones. You know who you are. ;-) It's funny, I say "old friends", but I've known most of these people for less than a year. I guess since we've gotten to know each other, it seems like it's been longer. Again, Dan Lewis did an amazing job putting the event together, and was calm and collected the whole time. Here are the pictures that I took in Charlotte. Here's a random video of the day's wrap-up.

NEXT, I was off to Boston for SPTECHCON!

This was an event that I had been looking forward to for months and months. This conference is fairly new, and I hadn't been to it before, but I had 3 presentations to do!

The trip started out rough, with many flight delays because of bad weather in Boston. It rained the whole time I was there, I think. Anyway, did I mention how great Twitter is? Since I tweeted that I had arrived in Boston, and so did John Ross and Randy Drisgill, we were able to meet up with each other and share a taxi. There ended up being a traffic delay because of a wreck, so we really got to know each other, sitting crammed in the back of a cab for an hour or so.

Monday morning at breakfast, I got to meet Mark Miller, of www.endusersharepoint.com. He and I have actually taught online SharePoint training workshops together, but had never met in person. It was about time! We were joined at the table by Mike Watson. "Long time, no see". Mike had been in Charlotte, too.

Monday at SpTechCon consisted of full day and half day workshops. I had to see what all the hype was about, so I went to Todd Klindt and Shane Young's session on "Getting up to Speed as A SharePoint Administrator". I had been to one of Todd's sessions at Best Practices in San Diego, about stsadm, but I had never met Shane or seen him speak. So, now I know Shane. If you ever get a chance to see these guys present together... they're a great pair. Not only are they experts on the server administration side of SharePoint, but they play off of each other well, and are quite entertaining. When I mentioned "all the hype" in that first sentence, I was referring to the fact that several people had told me that I had to see Todd and Shane present together. ;-)

That afternoon, I popped in and out of a couple of sessions: Bob Mixon's "Share and Ye Shall Find: Delivering Content That Users Need" and Mark Miller and Paul Grenier's session called "Become Your Company’s SharePoint Superstar!"

Monday night was a great time. I'll just show you the pictures. Oh, and here's a video that really captures the spirit of the night.

Tuesday was a little relaxing for me, since I only had one presentation to do. It was called "HELP! Creating a Community of Support for SharePoint" This was about the concept of creating a SharePoint Help site for your company. Research the topics that are of the most interest to your end users, and create a site that is specifically geared towards them and their needs. You're not creating help content from scratch, just linking to it in an organized way that will make sense to the people looking for help.

Next, I attended Todd Klindt and Mike Watson's "Disaster Recovery in SharePoint". You not only need to have a backup plan, but a recovery plan. My takeaway: It's important to not only do the backups, but to actually practice the recovery part ahead of time. Personally, I've pulled an all-nighter at Sungard in Newark, in an exercise where our server team got to practice restoring all of our data, in a real test. This run-through ensured that we not only had the stuff backed up, but we had perfectly written out DR plans, and could pull it off (the restore) successfully. This was back when I was in a server support role.

Tuesday at lunch, Inna Gordin recorded this 25 second video clip of me.

The vendor expo area opened at 2:30. The conference organizers put in a booth called "SharePoint Help - 5 Cents". The purpose was so that us experts would take turns each sitting in the booth for an hour. Conference attendees could walk up and just ask us any SharePoint questions. Cute idea! I enjoyed talking to people, and even though I think they were shy at first, I did get several questions. This picture is of me and Woody Windischman.

After that, I attended John Stover's "Data and Views and Forms — Oh My! Building Apps Using The Data View Web Part". I love the data view web part, so I love learning more about it. This session was right up my alley. It was one big demo. John walked us through creating data view web parts for a solution where documents in a document library can have comments associated with them. VERY COOL. He even showed a couple of situations where you'd splice in a bit of Javascript or Jquery code.

Tuesday night, after the vendor hall reception, was the conference's "Beer and Pizza and Q&A" session, where attendees hung out with all of us and asked SharePoint questions. The tables each had signs, showing which topics are discussed at that table. Here are those pictures. THEN, we had a private speaker party in a suite supplied by the conference organizers. I was reeling from the absolute amount of genious in that room! Here are the pictures.

Wednesday, first thing, I had two presentations back to back. The first one was called "So THAT’S How! SharePoint and Office 2007 Integration". This one was originally supposed to be co-presented with Tiffany Songvilay. Tiffany ended up not coming on this trip, and she deleted her twitter account. Here is her blog about the subject. So, since Mark Miller and I have held several workshops on www.endusersharepoint.com, regarding MS Office integration with SharePoint, I invited him to join in on the session. This was sort of impromptu, but we made the most of it. The whole presentation was one big demo, anyway, so I think we pulled it off. The demo was of a policy management system. In this system, a document library is created for the policies. Each Word 2007 document is a company policy. I showed how to insert QuickParts into the document. This is a cool way of showing docment library metadata inside the word document, not just in the document information panel. We talked about how content types are used, and showed SharePoint integration with MS Outlook 2007. The hour FLEW by, the session was packed, and we were thrown a lot of questions.

My next presentation was "Making the Most Of Out-of-the-Box Web Parts", the one that I had done at SharePoint Saturday in Charlotte. I think it went over well. The room was packed and overflowing, which tells me that at least the title of the presentation was enticing enough. ;-)

Whew, after I was done presenting, the next session I went to was Paul Swider's "Integrating the SharePoint User Profile Store in the Enterprise". This was a great deep dive into audiences and user profiles and properties in the SSP, and how to make use of these features in real-world examples.

Next, I attended "Seven Ways to Leverage SharePoint for Project Management Success" by Dux Raymond Sy. I had heard for a while that Dux was a really good speaker, so I couldn't let the conference end without attending one of his sessions. In this one, Dux talks about the fact that Project Server is a really great product for project management, but a lot of companies aren't to the point that they'll benefit from such a product. Project Server lets you get into extreme granular detail about projects. Dux is the project management guru, by the way, and has even written a book called SharePoint for Project Management. Anyway, in this session he talked a lot about what a good tool SharePoint is for project managment, even without Project Server. I agree wholeheartedly. Although our project management team where I work does use MS Project Server, I have helped other departments with their own project sites, utilizing such features as content types and data view web parts to create a custom system for them.

Well, that was the last session I was able to go to, before I had to go catch my plane. Before we all parted ways, though, I was able to sneak in this quick interview with Todd Klindt. Mark Miller held the camera, and we both asked him questions. I recommend downloading the WMV to your hard drive before watching.

That trip went by way too fast. Thanks to all my SharePoint friends... for being such good friends, and for being such amazingly smart geniuses. To all of you who I didn't specifically mention by name in here, you know who you are. At first, I was going to attempt to specifically not mention any names at all, because of leaving people out, and because I didn't want this to be just a big list of name-dropping. This adventure was full of personal interactions, so not mentioning anyone wasn't really possible. Does that make sense? I hope so. My next trip will be to SharePoint Saturday in the Ozarks (Arkansas) on July 18th. See you there!

Category: conference

Published: 7/5/2009 8:22 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: sharepoint-trip-recap

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/27/13670694_73e1f5d4-0e7f-4d5d-bc25-929855a818a9_0C6B6598.jpg
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SharePoint Saturday - Ozarks

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:20 GMT

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Wow, tomorrow is SharePoint Saturday in the Ozarks (Harrison, Arkansas), and we're ready!

Cathy Dew, Lori Gowin and are are all going to be speakers, and drove together from Birmingham. Check out my Webcasts page to see the videos that we recorded on the 9 hour road trip yesterday. It's 50 minutes, split into five, 10 minute segments. We talked about many SharePoint subjects such as branding, personalization links, web parts, web services, project timelines, online workshops, InfoPath.

This is my shortest blog post ever, but maybe I'll get inspired later. We'll definitely take pictures at the speaker dinner tonight. I just can't wait to see everybody, and people should be arriving pretty soon!

Category: conference

Published: 7/17/2009 8:23 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: sharepoint-saturday-ozarks-1

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"For Me" Web part in MOSS

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

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Cool stuff... data view web parts again! So, here's an idea for a main page for a SharePoint intranet. This is using the data view web part (in SharePoint Designer) and a web service.

First of all, for beginners, here's my Data View Web Part, The Basics - Insert a DVWP on Your Page and there's an associated screencast, too. (There's a whole series of mine on data view web parts on that site)

Business solution: I'd like to have a web part on our main SharePoint intranet welcome page, that will show the current logged in user some links that pertain to them specifically. What better to use than the "Personalization Site Links" that already exist in my SSP!?

Background: When you create Personalization Site Links in your SSP, you're basically targeting specific links to specific audiences or groups of people. The end result is that when users go to their My Site, there will be a tab at the top for each of the links that is targeted to them. A good example is to set up a link for each major corporate department, and target it so that everyone in that department will see the link to their department's portal or home page.

Here's how to create a data view web part to utilize the personalization site links:

Open up your site and a web part page in SharePoint designer, and in the Data Source Library, click to expand "XML Web Services". Click to "Connect to a web service".
In the "Service description location", paste in the URL of your SharePoint site collection. At the end of that URL, put a /_vti_bin/PublishedLinksService.asmx
Go to the <Login> tab, and change it to "Use Windows Authentication". This, of course, will vary according to your authentication method in your own implementation.
On the <General> tab, you can change the name to "Personalization".
Back on the <Source> tab, click the <Connect now> button.
This is easy, there's only one operation, "GetLinks", so that's the one that should be selected. Click OK.
Click the name of the new web service on the right, and click to "Show Data"
I recommend putting all of the fields in a "Multiple item view", just so you can see what all is in there.
All I really want is the Title of the item to show, as a hyperlink to that item, and I only want to see those personalization site links and I'd also like to go ahead and include the My Site link, just in case users don't notice it already at the top right of the page. You'll notice that there may be other stuff in there, such as sites that you've saved as "My Links". I see that there's a LinkType field that will help me do a filter, and I found a Microsoft PDF file that has (on page 22) a list of what these Link Types are.
Anyway, In my Data view web part, I'm going to filter by LinkType = 4 OR LinkType = 2
I went ahead and removed all of the columns except for Title, and I made the title a hyperlink to the URL field in there. Here's my screencast on how to do hyperlinks in a DVWP.
Wow. Pretty! Now, I have a cute little web part that I can export, and place it anywhere in my site collection, like the main welcome page!

Category: Web Parts

Published: 7/23/2009 8:23 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: quote-for-me-quote-web-part-in-moss

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Appointment email Link, via SPD workflow

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

Body:

Last week on Stump the Panel, I put up a solution to the following question:

How to update a user's calendar in Outlook using workflow

Since this seemed to be a popular post, I thought I'd show it to you, and also expound upon it, to show the nitty gritty of how it's done.

Here's how I got to the business solution. The SharePoint "Employee Training" template allows you to add courses to a sharepoint calendar, and users can go to the site and register to take each course. There are built in workflows, and one of them sends a confirmation email to the person when they register for the course. So, I wanted the email to not only have a link to the event registration site, but to have a link that allows that registrant to immediately click to add the event to their own personal Outlook calendar.

The workflow already has a part with the "Send an email" action. For you, if you're looking at the same Employee Training template I'm looking at, you'll want to open the "Attendee Registration" workflow, and then look at the first step of the workflow, where it says "Store This is a confirmation... in Variable: ConfirmationBody. If you, the reader, are not specifically looking at this template, but want to try this out, just open a workflow and go into the "Send an email" action and follow along.

In the ConfirmationBody, the email body, you want the recipient to have a pretty little link, that when clicked, will open an Outlook appointment. Where are you going to get the link, you ask? Go ahead and go into any event item in any SharePoint calendar. In the toolbar at the top of that item, you'll see an "Export Event" button. You'll notice that when you click it, an Outlook meeting box pops up, will the info about that specific meeting. This is the link that you want, so right-click on "Export Event", and copy the link. I'll show you mine:

http://webappname/sites/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={6e63af05-7674-40bb-b487-ba9b01366708}&CacheControl=1&ID=8&Using=event.ics

We simply want this link to be included in the email to the recipient. The way to make this link specific to the actual event ID of the relevent list item, will be to replace the ID=8 in the link, to be the ID of the current list item in the workflow. Go ahead and delete the number after the ID= in your link, and click the <Add Lookup> button.

In this field, you're looking up the ID field from the Courses calendar, and matching it up with the Course ID field in the Registrations list.

This is the full text of what I put in my workflow. It not only includes a pretty "CLICK HERE" link, it also lets the user know that they'll need to click "Save and Close" once the appointment opens. Yes, you can use HTML in SharePoint Designer workflow emails.

If you would like to add this event to your Outlook calendar, <a href="http://webappname/sites/sitename/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&Cmd=Display&List={ec72e475-45aa-4f06-83e0-855ec9ca94d4}&CacheControl=1&ID=[%Courses:ID%]&Using=event.ics">CLICK HERE</a>, then click to Open, then Save & Close.

Just make sure that you use your own site's URL in there, and don't copy it from my site. Yours will have the correct site URL and unique ID for your list.

From now on, when people register for events on your training site, they will be able to quickly and easily add that event to their own calendar. Also, read more on the original question on Stump the Panel to see other people's ideas. Eric Alexander has written an entire blog series on modifications to the Employee Training template. He also added a post to this stump the panel entry, about how to create a calculated column with a link to click to add the appointment to your calendar!!

Category: workflows

Published: 8/17/2009 8:25 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: appointment-email-link-via-spd-workflow

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Obtaining a List's Views

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

Body:

This is another post of a solution related to Microsoft's SharePoint Employee Training template, but this solution can be used on any list on your site. Here's the story...

We use this employee training template to set up various training series at work. For example, if there's some diversity training coming up, there will be a lot of different appointments for this training, and employees can pick a time that's convenient for them, and sign up for one of them. For each of these series, I've created a view in the Courses SharePoint calendar that filters by the name of that training course, and I've trained the other appointment creators to do the same each time they have a new series. This makes it easy for them to send out an email, announcing the new training. They put a link to the filtered view for that training, right in the email.

If users simply went to a list of all courses, they may be overwhelmed, because their are so many different and varying courses in the calendar. They only need to see the list of that one pertinent course at that time. The payroll department may have a training series on how to use the new financials system, and the HR department may have some courses on diversity, and the community relations department may have some related to upcoming charity events. So, VIEWS on the calendar allow users to see a list of the one type of training they're looking for, which usually has eight to 10 different date/times that you can pick from to attend.

Anyway, so that's pretty simple... views. Well, I wanted to take it a step further. I want the users to be able to go to the main event registration site, and immediately see a list of the types of training that they can register for, which is really just a list of the filtered views on the calendar. Guess what... there's a web service for that!! There's a built in web service called views.asmx, and we can tap into it.

First of all, here's my 5 minute screencast, that teaches you how to connect to a web service from within SharePoint Designer. In the screencast, I demonstrated how to connect to sitedata.asmx, and I also wrote a previous blog entry called "I Love the SiteData.asmx Web Service".

In the example today, though, we'll be connecting to the Views web service instead. In the Service Description Location box, put in the URL of your site, and at the end of it, put /_vti_bin/views.asmx
For example, here's what it would look like http://webapp/sites/sitenamehere/_vti_bin/views.asmx. Click to <Connect>

For Operation, choose "GetViewCollection".
Double-click on the ListName parameter, and type the name of your list. In this example, it's the Courses calendar.
On the Login tab, set it to Windows authentication. Click OK.
When you click the name of the new web service source and choose "Get Data", you will see the Data Source Details Pane.

As you will have already seen in my screencast, the data can then be placed on the page as a data view web part. The Field that I displayed in mine is the "DisplayName", and I used the "URL" field as the hyperlink. Once you have created this web part on a regular web part page, you can then export it out, and then import it onto any page in your site. For this example, I put this data view on the main welcome page of the events registration site.

End result? When the calendar owner adds a new series of events to the calendar, she has been instructed to create a view for that set of events, just using a filter by the title field in the view. Once they have created this view, it will automatically be displayed in the new web part on the event home page! Therefore, end users can now easily see the types of training available, and click to see the list for that particular type of training, and register for the time that is convenient for them.

Category: Web Parts

Published: 8/18/2009 8:26 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: obtaining-a-lists-views

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BPC Recap Part 2 + News

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

Body:

This is continued from Part 1.

One of my cohorts at the End User SharePoint media booth at the Best Practices Conference was John Anderson, of Bamboo Nation. He wrote a series of blog posts during the conference. Here's the whole list of them. Great writing, John!

Altogether, a good time was had by all at the conference, and I always love hanging out with my SharePoint friends. This is a picture of @SharepointSara, @AndrewWoody (founder of #SharePint), me, and @CatPaint1.

Another fun thing that happened during the conference was getting to be interviewed for the SharePoint Podshow! Brett Lonsdale and I had done a co-presentation together at the last Best Practices conference in February, so it was only natural that we record a podshow about data view web parts. So, stay tuned to see when it goes live on their site. Speaking of the podshow... they're going to be doing an RV road trip from Seattle to Las Vegas, the week before the big SharePoint conference. Follow Road2SPC on twitter for updates during their trip.

Something very exciting happened in August. I got a new job! Shane Young at SharePoint 911 has brought me onto the team! Tomorrow, 9/9/2009 is the start date. Back in June at SPTechCon, it was a lot of fun getting to meet and spend time with the SharePoint 911 team. Who knew? Anyway, can't wait to get started! You can follow the SharePoint 911 team on twitter: @ShanesCows @drisgill @johnrossjr @jennifermason @sharepoint911.

Speaking of SharePoint 911, a couple of my new colleagues, John Ross and Randy Drisgill, live in Orlando, Florida. There is going to be a SharePoint Saturday in Tampa on November 14th, and we'll all be there!

Category: conference

Published: 9/8/2009 8:27 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: bpc-recap-part-2-+-news

Categories: conference

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/34/100_7809b_84953b45-1390-45af-b4b1-a12a6cdeb640_3A3A2A7C.jpg

Your Very Own Permissions Dashboard

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

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Using a web service and a little magic, it’s possible to create your own data view web part “dashboard” to quickly get to permissions and other screens for all of the lists and libraries on your SharePoint site. Here’s an example of what the goal is:

The first column is the title of each list and library on the site, linking directly to each list or library. The Inherited Security column does two things. First of all, it displays an icon to indicate whether that list inherits permissions from the site level or not. Secondly, each of these icons is a link directly to the permissions page for that specific list or library! The third column is a bonus. For the lists that have their own separate permissions, there is a link to directly add a new user to have permissions on that list.

Okay, okay, I’ll tell you how!

This post is really an expansion on a previous post of mine, called I Love the SiteData.asmx Web Service. First step: Go to that post and go all the way through step 14. We’ll pick up from there…

This is what you have so far. It’s a list of all the lists and libraries on the site, with the inherited security and internal name.

Now, the title of the library needs to be a link to the library itself. Click to select the title of the first document library. Click the little chevron next to it.
In the Format As field, select Hyperlink. Click Yes at the prompt.
Clear the Address field, and click the Function box next to it. Chose the DefaultViewURL field. Clear the Text To Display box, and choose the Title field for that one. Click OK.
For the icons in the inherited security column, you’ll need two pretty little icons of your choosing, to indicate Yes or No. If you have MOSS, the icons in this example are already right there on the server, and are called /_layouts/images/ewr212l.gif and /_layouts/images/ewr213l.gif. Anyway, for the next step, put your cursor inside one of the cells in the Inherited Security column, and insert BOTH of these images, right next to each other.
Click the Data View menu at the top of the screen and choose <Conditional Formatting>. Then the conditional formatting pane will be displayed on the right side of the screen.
Let’s create the hyperlink on each icon before we set the conditional formatting.

The fun part! The first question is, where the heck does the URL come from, to get straight to a library’s permissions page? Go to one of your libraries, and click to get to the settings page, and then click on “Permissions for this list”. Go to the browser’s address bar, and select that entire URL, copy it to your clipboard, and paste in notepad. It’s time to dissect it to see how it works. Here’s what my URL looks like:

https://sharepoint.company.com/sitename/_layouts/user.aspx?obj=%7B458828DD%2D7951%2D4FB6%2DA151%2D4CF8B36D863A%7D,list&List=%7B458828DD%2D7951%2D4FB6%2DA151%2D4CF8B36D863A%7D

What the heck is all that? Calm down, it’s okay, it’s just the GUID. Yeah, if you scroll up and look at that Internal Name column, this stuff actually matches up. (Here is where you can see how they match up) The part that I put in red in this URL is the GUID. It’s actually the same exact GUID twice in there. To make it manageable for what we’re going to do, I’m going to replace those GUIDs with asterisks for now.

https://sharepoint.company.com/sitename/_layouts/user.aspx?obj=*,list&List=*

Copy your string above (your own, not mine) to your clipboard (the second one with the asterisks). Click to select the green icon. Click the <Insert> menu, and choose Hyperlink. In the Address box, paste from your clipboard.
Select the first asterisk. Click the little function button to the right of the address box. Select the InternalName field and click OK. Select the other asterisk, and do the same thing. This is what it’ll look like at this point:

(that’s the magic part) ;-)

Click OK. Click to select the red icon, and create the exact same hyperlink on it. Both icons are going to link to the exact same thing, but only one icon will be displayed at a time, because of conditional formatting.
Click to select the green icon. On the conditional formatting pane, click the <Create> button, and choose <Show Content>. For the condition, choose Field Name InheritedSecurity Equals true.
Click to select the red icon. On the conditional formatting pane, click the <Create> button, and choose <Show Content>. For the condition, choose Field Name InheritedSecurity Equals false. Now the appropriate icon is displayed according to the inherited security of each of the lists.

So, do you see the pattern here? Once you know how to go to the properties page, and grab the URL of ANY properties page, you can add a column for that property, such as Title and Description, and dissect the URL, and use the InternalName to replace the GUID in the URL. Create an entire dashboard with a column to get to any settings page for your lists! You can remove that internal name column, it was just for you to see the data, for educational purposes.

So, for the third column in my original screenshot at the top, I simply clicked the permissions page on a list, and clicked to add a new user. Then, I snagged that URL and dissected it. Then, I used conditional formatting to only show that link if InheritedSecurity = false.

You all enjoy this one, and please let me know if you like it!

Oh, and here’s how to re-use this DVWP on other sites: From the browser, export the web part just as a file on your desktop. Open the file in notepad, and simply find and replace your site’s URL with the new site you want to put this web part on.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,data view,web part

Category: Web Parts

Published: 10/2/2009 10:44 AM

BlogTitleForUrl: your-very-own-permissions-dashboard

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Laura’s October Update

John Ross — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:28:21 GMT

Body:

There is a lot going on right now with me and SharePoint in October, so I’ll just cut to the chase and list it out.

SharePoint & Healthcare – Case Management
This Friday, October 9th, online

Examples of case management solutions provided in this workshop:

Exposing certain fields to fill out, according to the patient’s status
List of patients tied to their room’s information and phone number
A discharge calendar system
Patient census - key performance indicators
Color coding by patient insurance type

TechMixer University – Birmingham, Alabama
October 13th, 2009

I’ll be doing a presentation on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) out of box web parts. Also, the company I work for, SharePoint911, will be a sponsor of the event!

Then, the very next week, well, I don’t have to tell YOU…
It’s Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference!!!
October 18 – 22nd in Las Vegas

Yes, I’ll be there. Besides tweeting about where I am and what I’m doing (@WonderLaura), you’ll probably be able to find me at the SharePoint911 booth in the exhibit hall sometimes.

Other news…

When we were in Washington, DC for the Best Practices Conference in August, Brett Lonsdale and I recorded an episode of the SharePoint Podshow! We talked about creating data view web parts in SharePoint Designer. CLICK HERE to go to their site and download the show.

I think I’ll include a photo in this blog post. I had lunch with Cathy Dew and Lori Gowin last week in this beautiful fall weather:

But wait! There’s more!

Technical geek stuff. I’ve recorded a few new screencasts about the data view web part, on the End User SharePoint site:

SharePoint Shoptalk

Every Thursday at 12:30 EST, I virtually get together with Paul Galvin and Natalya Voskresenskaya for a conference call where everyone is invited to call in and ask questions. Here’s the registration link for the next session, Thursday 10/08 from 12:30 to 1:30 PM EDT: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=0z40kg9nb0t0842f. Stay tuned to our blogs for info about how to register for each week’s session.

Technorati Tags: conference,data view,web part

Category: conference

Published: 10/5/2009 2:23 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: laura’s-october-update

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List of SharePoint 2010 Web Parts

Laura Rogers — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:03:17 GMT

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As of Beta 2, the following is a comprehensive list of all SharePoint 2010 out-of-box web parts, with a couple of screen shots thrown in there! The groups are just the built-in groupings in the UI.

Lists & Libraries

· These are list view web parts for the lists & libraries on the site

Authoring

· Content Editor - Foundation

· Image Viewer – Foundation

· Media Web Part

· Page Viewer - Foundation

· Silverlight Web Part - Foundation

Business Data

· Business Data Actions

· Business Data Catalog Filter

· Business Data Item

· Business Data Item Builder

· Business Data List

· Business Data Related List

· Key Performance Indicators

· KPI Details

· Visio Graphics Service

Content Rollup

· Chart Viewer

· Content Query

· HTML Form Web Part - Foundation

· iView

· Picture Library Slideshow Web Part - Foundation

· RSS Viewer

· What’s Popular – pick from content, search queries, or search results;

· XML Viewer - Foundation

· Web Analytics Web Part

Documents

· Document ID Lookup

· Document Set Contents

· Document Set Properties

· Relevant Documents - Foundation

Filters

· Choice Filter

· Current User Filter

· Date Filter

· Filter Actions

· Page Field Filter

· Query String (URL) Filter

· SharePoint List Filter

· SQL Server Analysis Services Filter

· Text Filter

My Information

· My Calendar

· My Contacts

· My Inbox

· My Mail Folder

· My Tasks

Navigation

· Categories

· Site Aggregator

· Sites in Category

· Summary Links

· Table of Contents

· Tag Cloud

Office Client Applications

· Excel Web Access

· InfoPath Form Web Part

· WSRP Viewer

People

· Contact Details

· Profile Browser

· Site Users - Foundation

· User Tasks - Foundation

PerformancePoint

· PerformancePoint Filter

· PerformancePoint Report

· PerformancePoint Scorecard

· PerformancePoint Stack Selector

Search

· Advanced Search Box

· Dual Chinese Search

· Featured Content

· Federated Results

· People Refinement Panel

· People Search Box

· People Search Core Results

· Refinement Panel

· Related Queries

· Search Action Links

· Search Best Bets

· Search Box

· Search Core Results

· Search Paging

· Search Statistics

· Search Summary

· Top Federated Results

Miscellaneous

· Chart Web Part

Update on March 09, 2010 - Added "Foundation" next to the web parts that are available in SharePoint 2010 Foundation. Note that the web part categories have changed a couple of times, but those changes aren't indicated in this post.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,web parts,out of box

Category: Web Parts

Published: 11/2/2009 3:05 PM

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Financial Roll-Up Web Part

Laura Rogers — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:50:53 GMT

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in the front of it. That first digit is the item id. SO, what we need to do, is get this URL, but only use everything AFTER the # in there.

Here’s how (Yes, I finally figured it out after much trial and error). The magic formula. Click to select a title field, and click to change it to be formatted as a hyperlink. Paste the following formula into the Address box for the hyperlink:
{concat('/',substring-after(@FileDirRef,'#'),'/Dispform.aspx?ID=',@ID)}

In the Text to Display part of the hyperlink settings, put the Title field. This is what it will look like:

You should have seen me when I finally figured out that formula. It was definitely a geek “Woo” moment.

After a little alignment and format tweaking, here’s the final product. A true rollup.

Here's the link to the screencast where I show how to do it:
http://www.screencast.com/users/EndUserSharePoint/folders/SharePoint%20-%20Data%20View%20Web%20Part/media/544c1327-37d3-41ca-9c29-fa8796c8a458

Technorati Tags: data view,web parts,XSLT,rollup

Category: Web Parts

Published: 11/6/2009 9:50 PM

SharePoint Saturday in Tampa, coming up!

Laura Rogers — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:00:27 GMT

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This weekend is going to be great! It’s SharePoint Saturday in Tampa, Florida (and there are ones that will be going on in other cities, but ours is going to ROCK)

My presentation:

Introducing the SharePoint 2010 Out of Box Web Parts

In this session, you will get an introduction to the out-of-box web parts that are new in SharePoint 2010! You will not only see how the new web part user interface is different, but will get a demonstration of some new ones, like the chart web part. The tag cloud web part will be demonstrated, along with how tagging works, and so will the new data view web part in SharePoint Designer 2010. As always, it is important to get a feel for what you can do with SharePoint already, before starting with custom code.

TECHNICAL LEVEL: Basic
AUDIENCE: Business users, project managers, developers, business analysts

A lot of my favorite SharePoint buddies that I’ve met before will be there also, such as @BrettLonsdale @catpaint1 @SharePointLee @stevenmfowler @ronjones03 @TedPattison @sharepointsara and colleagues at SharePoint911: @drisgill @johnrossjr

Looking forward to meeting some new people, and learning some more about SharePoint 2010.

Technorati Tags: Tampa,SharePoint,SP2010,web parts

Category: conference

Published: 11/11/2009 9:00 PM

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/42/SharePointSatTampa_ffd89a978c3e4d4ab0e684d767fb82f6_13AC9B85.png

SPTECHCON is Coming Up in February

Laura Rogers — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:34:29 GMT

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There’s another SharePoint conference getting closer. It’s the SharePoint Technology Conference! I’ll be presenting the following sessions at this conference, and will be looking forward to seeing you there!

Half Day Workshops

W5-AM: SharePoint and Office 2007 Integration

Me and Mark Miller
Add to Outlook calendar
Discover the best ways to tackle your daily work with Office 2007. Tips include how to use Search folders in Outlook to keep all your SharePoint lists and libraries within easy reach, and how to display library metadata within Word 2007 documents. From offline document editing and two-way list sync, to reporting on SharePoint library data, this session is packed with tricks you can use to increase your SharePoint productivity. The demonstration will feature a company policy management system and will highlight Access custom lists, content types and quick parts. We will also touch on what’s new in SharePoint 2010 integration with Office 2010.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Basic
AUDIENCE: Business users, project managers

W7-PM: Creating Custom Business Solutions

Add to Outlook calendar
Some of the most commonly asked questions that SharePoint site managers and end users ask involve the need to create custom business solutions. In this workshop, you will learn how to use Data View/Data Form Web Parts in SharePoint Designer. Not only will this workshop cover these Web part fundamentals, but you will also learn from specific examples of ways to put these skills into play. You will learn how to create a merged list of multiple document libraries, how to create a change control system mashup, how to create a joined view of two different lists, and how to create a list/library permissions dashboard. The new Data View Web Part interface in SharePoint 2010 will also be demonstrated.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Beginner
AUDIENCE: End users, project managers

Technical Classes

105: SharePoint 2010: Out-of-the-Box Web Parts

Add to Outlook calendar
In this session, you will get an introduction to the out-of-box web parts that are new in SharePoint 2010! You will not only see how the new web part user interface is different, but will get a demonstration of some new ones, like the Chart Web Part. The Tag Cloud Web Part will be demonstrated, along with how tagging works, and so will the new Data View Web Part in SharePoint Designer 2010. As always, it is important to get a feel for what you can do with SharePoint already, before starting with custom code.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Basic
AUDIENCE: Business users, project managers, developers

502: Making the Most of Out-of-the-Box Web Parts

Add to Outlook calendar
This session will demonstrate just how flexible and useful the out-of-the-box Web parts are in SharePoint Server 2007, and will include a detailed look at the Filter, KPI, Excel Web Access, Outlook Web Access and Business Data Catalog Web parts. Attendees will be given a demonstration on customizing some of these Web parts using SharePoint Designer.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Basic
AUDIENCE: Business users, project managers, developers

804: Help! Creating a Community of Support for SharePoint

Add to Outlook calendar
How do users obtain SharePoint-related help? In this session, we will go over challenges in helping and supporting SharePoint end users, and how to address those challenges. There are many different avenues available when it comes to SharePoint help, and we will cover how to consolidate that information to a single point of reference for your end users or customers, reducing calls to the help desk. Attendees will hear some user perspectives about SharePoint help, and learn why it’s important to do research find out what users are looking for in SharePoint help.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Basic
AUDIENCE: Project managers, business users, architects

403: Creating an Electronic Form Solution Using InfoPath and SharePoint

Add to Outlook calendar
Paper, paper everywhere. There are so many forms in an office to keep track of that the task can overwhelm both the people who create the forms and those who fill them out. This class will show you how to ensure everyone is using the correct version of the form and create dynamic forms using InfoPath 2007 and the Forms Server capabilities built into SharePoint.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Basic/Intermediate
AUDIENCE: Business users, power users, architects

Technorati Tags: sptechcon,sharepoint 2010,web parts,conference

Category: conference

Published: 11/24/2009 2:34 PM

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The “New!” Icon in a Data View Web Part

Laura Rogers — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:56:37 GMT

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When new items are added to lists and libraries in SharePoint, a cute little icon appears next to each list item for 2 days after the creation date. When a data view web part is created, this icon does not exist by default, so it needs to be added back. Here are the steps for adding the New icon back, and how to configure it so that it displays only when items are new, as usual.

In a regular list view, take a look at the a list, so that the location of this icon may be grabbed. Here, I’ll do it for you. I right-clicked on the New icon, and copied the following part of the icon’s URL (in WSS 3.0):

/_layouts/1033/images/new.gif

This image exists on the server, so we can simply reference that image, without having to make a copy of it in a site image library.

Now that the icon’s location has been obtained, it can be inserted into the data view web part. In this example, there is a library with company policies in it. Put a space after the document name, and insert the image. The page will look like this, with the New icon next to each item in the list:

Notice that the page is displayed in split view, and note that the URL to the image is the same one that we just obtained.

Next, conditional formatting will be used in order to further customize the New button. At the top of the screen, click the <Data View> menu, and choose <Conditional Formatting>. This will display the Conditional Formatting pane on the right side of the screen.

Click to select any one of the icons. In the Conditional Formatting pane, click the <Create> button, and choose <Show Content…>.

On the Condition Criteria screen, click the <Advanced…> button.

In the “Select a function category” drop-down box, choose “All”.

Double-click on IfNew, to add it to the expression box. Create the expression as shown in the above screenshot. When the expression has been created, notice the Preview section at the bottom. All of the trues and falses represent the items in the document library, whether this item will be displayed next to them or not. Click OK. Click OK again.

Now, only the new items will have this icon displayed next to them. There’s your default list view functionality back!

There’s another cool thing that can be done with IfNew. Not just the Created field, but ANY date field in the list can be used in this expression. There could be a special icon that says “Modified”, and it could be inserted in the list, only to be displayed next to items that have been modified in the past couple of days.

In the following example, I created a custom field called “Due Date”. With a custom icon, and the expression in place with “Due Date” instead of “Created”, these icons will automatically display next to items whose due dates are within the next couple of days.

Where does this “2 days” thing come from, anyway? It is a setting at the web application level, and can be changed with the following stsadm command:

stsadm.exe -o setproperty -propertyname days-to-show-new-icon -propertyvalue [days the icon will be visible] -url [web app URL]

The screencast of this method is shown here:
http://www.screencast.com/users/EndUserSharePoint/folders/SharePoint%20-%20Data%20View%20Web%20Part/media/c49bead8-efd6-427c-8c54-004da4a6ffe1

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,WSS,data view web part,IfNew,new item

Category: Web Parts

Published: 12/1/2009 10:56 PM

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“Data View Preview” in SharePoint Designer 2010

Laura Rogers — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:31:21 GMT

Body:

When editing a data view in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010, on the <Design> tab, there’s a section called <Preview>. This title is a little misleading, because there are some pretty powerful options in this section, having to do with inline editing. Jennifer Mason wrote about “SharePoint 2010- Inline Editing for Views”, which shows how to set up a list or library view with inline editing. As is apparent, the view does not need to be created in SharePoint Designer in order to use inline editing, it can just be a regular browser view. In this post, I’ll describe a way to create a data view web part using SharePoint Designer 2010, and some extra functionalities that exist when inline editing is used.

Open the SharePoint 2010 site in SharePoint Designer 2010.
Click “Lists and Libraries” on the left side of the screen, and then click on the name of the list or library to modify. In this example, the list is called “Sales Report”.
On the right side of this page, in the Views section, click <New…> to create a new view. I’m going to be creative and call mine “Custom” and click OK.
Then, click the name of the view to edit it. All list view web parts are data view web parts in SharePoint 2010, so there’s no worry about breaking the page away from the site definition at this point.
When any part of the list view in the middle of the page is selected, the contextual ribbon at the top of the page will display the <List View Tools> set of tabs. On the <Options> tab, click the Inline Editing button. This toggle button will insert a seemingly empty column into the left side of the list. Again, Jennifer Mason’s blog shows examples of what inline editing looks like on a list item.
Click on the <Design> tab, and now that inline editing is turned on, there will be a couple of more configurations possible. In the Preview section of this tab, click the Data View Preview drop-down box.

The Edit Template and Insert Template choices are only available when inline editing is turned on.
Edit Template – This is the interface that displays in inline edit mode on any individual item in the list.
Insert Template – This interface is used when the “Plus” icon is clicked to add a new item to the list in an inline fashion. Editing the insert template will change the way this screen appears.

These screens were not easily configurable in SharePoint 2007.
There is another cool new option in this “Data View Preview” section, unrelated to inline editing. This is the option to edit the ‘No Matching Items’ Template. Back in the days of SharePoint 2007, when we wanted to change the text displayed when there were no items in a view, we could do only that… edit the text. An example of a case in which to use this functionality: There is a lit of tasks, filtered by tasks assigned to the logged in user. Instead of the default “There are no items to show in this view…”, the text can be changed to something more specific, like “There are currently no tasks assigned to you”. Now in SharePoint 2010, there’s the ability to edit that whole page that is displayed where there are no items in the view. In the Data View Preview drop-down box, choose ‘No Matching Items’ Template.
In this example, I edited the text, and also inserted an exclamation mark image.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010,sharepoint designer,data view web part,inline editing

Category: Views

Published: 12/6/2009 10:31 PM

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SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) Item-Level Formatting

Laura Rogers — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:50:02 GMT

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When a data view web part is created in SharePoint Designer 2010, there is a new way of formatting list items. In the SharePoint list’s data view web part, at the item level, there are two options that can be selected, as shown in this screenshot:

Show list item menu
Show link to item

Now, I’ll go into what each of these mean, and how to use them.

Show list item menu

First of all, what is the “list item menu”? That’s the menu that shows as a drop-down box on each item in a SharePoint list. Out of box, each list has a default field that this drop-down box displays on, which is typically the “Title” field. If you’ve ever created a custom list, you will have noticed this default field. It’s been pretty limited in the past, as seen in the following SharePoint 2007 example:

This list was created as a custom list, and the Title field was renamed as the Patient Name. In views, this field is the only one that can be displayed with the “edit menu”, as seen below:

This field is also restricted in that it can only be a single line of text field, with the field type being hard coded.

Flash forward to SharePoint 2010…

Pick ANY field in the data view, select it, click the little chevron next to it, and put a check box next to “show list item menu”. There can even be multiple fields in the same view, with this edit menu attached to them. Gone are the days where that one specific field has to be used in the view, just to get the menu on it.

Show Link To Item

The option to Show Link To Item, is just an easy way of creating a link to open that list item. In this screencast, I show the old SharePoint 2007 way of creating a hyperlink to an item in the data view web part. With this new option, simply select the check-box, and the link to the display form is created, with no further configuration necessary. This can be done on multiple fields in the same view.

What happened to the data view field options that used to exist on the menu for an item in a data view web part, as it was in SharePoint 2007 (as in this screenshot)?

You’ll miss this menu in SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) but here’s how you can find it:

Right-click on the list item, choose format item as, and then choose the desired format type. If the hyperlink needs to be configured to direct to an item link other than the display form (I showed you how to do that one the quick way by using “show link to item”), there are also more hyperlink options here.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint 2010,sp2010,data view web part

Category: Web Parts

Published: 12/15/2009 11:50 AM

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Laura’s 2010 Update

Laura Rogers — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:40:05 GMT

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2010 update… 2010 the year, as opposed to the version of SharePoint.

This year is going to be great, and I’m looking forward to going to some SharePoint events and also learn more and more about SharePoint 2010. Here’s a little update on some stuff I have coming up. There’s a list of Speaking Engagements on my blog, on the right side, but here’s a more detailed list of upcoming stuff.

Tuesday, January 12th – Birmingham, Alabama SharePoint User Group Meeting

I’ll be speaking on the new social experience in SharePoint 2010. We’re trying to grow our group, so please spread the word if you’re from around here. Let me or @catpaint1 or @LoriGowin know if you’d like to be on the mailing list, or if you’re a vendor who is interested in sponsoring us. Also, we’re always looking for new speakers. You don’t need to do some extravagant PowerPoint presentation. It can be something as simple as a demo of something you’ve been working on, or something cool you figured out how to do.

Follow: @bhamspug @catpaint1 @LoriGowin

Saturday, January 23rd – Virtual SharePoint Saturday EMEA

This is the first virtual SharePoint Saturday, and it is a global event! The site has a list of the parts of the world and associated times. For me in the Central Time Zone, the event starts at 2AM. Wow, I’m dedicated. Please take a look at the site, and there’s a link to register.

Follow: @EUSP @ericharlan, Hash tag: #spsemea

February 10-12 - SharePoint Technology Conference (SPTECHCON) in San Francisco

This one is going to be fantastic! I already wrote a blog post, listing all of the sessions I’ll be teaching. Of the list of sessions, the one I’m looking forward to the most will be the half-day workshop called “Creating Custom Business Solutions”. This is ALL about the data view web part!

First, I’ll be going over the main fundamentals working in SharePoint Designer 2007 with data. Then, the bulk of the afternoon will be demonstrations of custom solutions using the data view web part, and maybe I’ll throw in a little workflow stuff. Then, the last hour or so will be all about SharePoint Designer 2010, with a demo or two, and discussion of what’s new.

If you’re going to this one, note that I’m doing two different presentations about web parts. One is about MOSS 2007, and the other is SharePoint 2010.

Follow: @sptechcon, Hash Tag: #sptechcon

February 27th – SharePoint Saturday New Orleans

This SharePoint Saturday is going to be extra special for me, because New Orleans is my home town! I was born in Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans. I grew up in Luling, which is a very small Cajun town across the river from New Orleans. We moved to Baton Rouge when I was 12, and I ended up going to college at LSU (Louisiana State University).

With all that said, I’m excited about taking a trip back home, visiting parents and relatives, and speaking at SharePoint Saturday. Maybe I’ll even run into old friends or schoolmates!

Follow: @spsnola @tiffanywi @cheritnola, Hash Tag: #spsnola

April 19-21 - SharePoint Evolution Conference in London

This conference in London is going to be amazing! It’s put on by Steve Smith / Combined Knowledge, and there is a phenomenal list of speakers to present there. I haven’t been to Europe in at least 15 years, so I’ll be glad to go back and have some further London adventures. Besides myself, other SharePoint911 colleagues who will be presenting are Shane Young and Todd Klindt.

Follow: @stevesmithck Hash Tag: #spevo

In Summary, it’s going to be an exciting first quarter for me. All of these events are on my SharePoint calendar, if you’d like to connect to it or export these events to your calendar.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,New Orleans,SharePoint Saturday,EMEA,SPUG,SPtechcon,spevo

Category: conference

Published: 1/4/2010 2:40 PM

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SharePoint Basics – Compressing Image Files

Laura Rogers — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:00:03 GMT

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Before I got my gig as a consultant, and I worked a regular day job down in the trenches as a SharePoint Administrator at a large company, one of the things I did every day was look at SharePoint site quotas. We had many site collections, so I was able to closely keep tabs on their sizes.

Users frequently upload inordinately large files to their picture libraries, and don’t realize that these sizes aren’t really necessary just to display some company picnic or other such pictures on their site. When digital cameras are set to 6 megapixels or larger, there can be a default file size of 2 or 3 megabytes. Users tend to simply plug that camera into the computer and just dump everything up to their website, with no compression. Here are the steps to take, in order to compress large image files that have already been uploaded to SharePoint. Note that you should most likely discuss what you’re doing with the end user… just incase they do have a specific reason their files are that large. In most cases, though, they don’t know it.

To look at a site collection’s size, click <Site Settings> at the site collection level, and click <Storage Space Allocation> in the “Site Collection Administration” section. The libraries and lists will automatically be sorted with the largest size on top. The image libraries will have this icon: Click the name of the image library, and quickly look at some files sizes. Click the <View> drop-down box, choose <All Pictures> and choose <Details>. You can even sort by file size to see the largest. If there are files larger than, say 500KB, they are probably good candidates for compression.

Here’s how to compress all the files in a SharePoint Image Library:

Grab the URL to the library by copying it to your clipboard. Don’t copy the part at the end with the Forms\Allitems.aspx.
Open Picture Manager by clicking <Start> <Programs> <Microsoft Office> <Microsoft Office Tools> and <Microsoft Office Picture Manager>
Click the <File> menu, and choose <Add Picture Shortcut…>
In the Folder Name box, paste the URL to your picture library and click <Add>
Now, the image library images will be shown, and there will be a new shortcut under “My Picture Shortcuts” on the left.
Click the <Edit Pictures…> button.
Click to select a single picture, and then click the <Edit> menu and choose <Select All>
Click <Compress Pictures> on the right.
On the Compress Pictures panel, click to select “Web Pages”. This screen will now show the original total size of all the pictures in the library, and the estimated total size when they’re all compressed.
Click OK, and then click to <Save and Close>.
Note that this won’t work on BMP (bitmaps).

Now the images in the library have all been compressed and saved back to the library, and you’ve saved a bit of space on the server. You can train your end users to compress the files before uploading them to SharePoint also, also by using Picture Manager.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Picture Library,Images,compression

Category: Documents

Published: 1/11/2010 11:00 AM

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Social Connector in Outlook 2010

Laura Rogers — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:37:23 GMT

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This blog post is about the Social Connector in Outlook 2010 Beta, as it works with SharePoint 2010 Beta and Exchange 2010 Beta. I just wanted to quickly share with you a couple of discoveries of mine as I play with these products.

Environment:

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 are installed on one server, which is also the domain controller
I’ve installed Exchange 2010 on a second server, and went into group policy and set it up so that it allows everyone to log in locally. (so I can take turns logging in as pretend users)
Several pretend “Contoso” users have been created in Active Directory, and their profiles have successfully been imported into SharePoint 2010.
I’ve logged into SharePoint as each of these pretend users, and filled in some profile information, and went through a test Team Site and tagged items, rated items, and made Note Board notes.

In Outlook 2010, there’s a Social Connector that lets you connect to your SharePoint environment. When you select an email, at the bottom of the screen, there are a couple of little icons of gray people. Click that little arrow thingy, and it will expand the People Pane.

Then, click the Add button, as seen here:

This will bring up the screen where you can add social network accounts. Currently in this beta version, it appears as though SharePoint 2010 is the only option. I added the URL to my test environment: http://moss In the future, I believe there will be more options in here, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, etc.

Anyway, the main cool thing I wanted to show you today, is the Newsfeed that I discovered in Outlook 2010. I noticed that listed immediately after my Junk Email folder on the left side, there is a folder called Newsfeed. So I clicked on it to see what the heck it was.

THERE is the newsfeed of all of the activities that I’m following on my MySite in SharePoint!! Your profile on your MySite in SharePoint 2010 lets you follow all of the following activities. Hmmm, I thought the only place the followed activities were displayed was the My Network page on the MySite. Apparently this feed is in Outlook also. Bonus!

This is what it looks like, and you can click the image to get a closer look:

This is the “Molly Clark” mailbox on the Contoso domain. I clicked News Feed on the left. This feed lists all of the activities that Molly is following. When I click on an item, the reading pane shows me the following:

A user named Sean Chai rated a document with a 4 of 5
There is a link to the document, which is called “Test Move.docx”
People Pane: Since Sean has uploaded a picture of himself on his MySite, this picture is displayed here.

The little green plus under Sean’s picture allows you to add him to one of your social networks. The Office icon is a link directly to his MySite. Each time you receive emails in your inbox, you’ll be able to use the plus icon to add people who aren’t already in your social networks.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010,Outlook 2010,Exchange 2010,People Pane,social media

Category: MS Office

Published: 1/15/2010 9:37 AM

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Trying Out Visio Services in SharePoint 2010

Laura Rogers — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:56:45 GMT

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Task lists in SharePoint 2010 have a button on the List tab in the ribbon’s Connect & Export section, called Create Visio Diagram. Thought I’d try this out, and see what I could mock up using this, so I created several tasks in a list, and clicked the button. It’s the one on the right of “Sync to SharePoint Workspace”, that looks like a little diagram.

Clicking the Create Visio Diagram button launches Visio 2010 and automatically creates a diagram with the following tabs:

Tasks Status
Workload Distribution
Incomplete Tasks by Assigned To
And if there are workflows on the site that utilize this Tasks list, there will be a tab called “Workflow Tasks Status”

Interesting. This generated diagram seems to be static, though, meaning changes in the data won’t change the diagram. Here are the steps to make the data dynamic:

In Visio, click the <Data> tab in the ribbon. Click <Link Data to Shapes>
In the Data Selector, choose “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Services List”. Click <Next>
Enter the URL for your SharePoint site. Not a URL to a list, just the root of the site that the tasks list is in. Click <Next>
On the Select a List screen, choose “Tasks” and click <Next> and click <Finish>
Now a list of the tasks will be displayed at the bottom of the diagram in Visio. You now have the ability to manually drag each item in the task list up to the matching item in the diagram. The other way to match up the data is AUTOMATICALLY.
On the Data tab in the ribbon, click the <Automatically Link> button.
A wizard will pop up. “All shapes on this page” will be selected. Click <Next>.
The next screen will allow you to pick the field to match up the items in the diagram with the items in the Tasks list. By default, ID is selected. That’s a good one, since it’s unique. Click <Next> and then click <Finish>
Now, in the data table at the bottom of the diagram, there will be a little link icon next to each task row item, as so:
In Visio, click the <File> button, choose the <Share> tab on the left, and then click <Save to SharePoint> in the middle. In this demo, I chose a document library on the same site as the tasks list. Choose Web Drawing, and then click <Save to SharePoint>
When prompted, a pertinent name for this diagram would be “Tasks”.

Now, the data and the diagram are linked, so that viewing the diagram will always represent the current information in the tasks list. Nice!

The next thing to try out is the Visio Web Access web part with this task list, and see what happens when connecting web parts.

On the tasks list (all items view), click <Site Actions> and choose <Edit Page>
In the middle of the page, click <Add a web part>, choose “Office Client Applications” in the web part categories, choose the Visio Web Access web part, and click <Add>
In the Visio Web Access tool pane, the URL to the Visio diagram is needed, to enter as the “Diagram URL”. Simply click the ellipses next to the Diagram URL text box, to navigate to and select the Tasks.vdw that was just created.

Note that you could just click OK and stop right here, and you would still have a good graphical representation of the tasks in the Visio diagram above the task list. Further steps entail web part connections, for filtering of data… just to get a little more fancy.
For “Shape Data items to make available to Web Part connections”, type ID
Remember when we did that “automatically link” thing and chose the ID as the common field? Well, that’s why we’re using that field here. Click OK in the web part tool pane.
Next is the creation of a web part connection between Just like we’ve always created web part connections, click the little drop-down box at the top right of the Visio web part, choose “Connections”, then “Send Shape Data To”, then TASKS.
For the connection type, choose “Get Filter Values From” and click <Configure>
For the Provider and Consumer field names, choose ID for both. Click <Finish>
(if step 4 above was skipped, ID will not be an option from the Provider)
In the Visio web part, switch over to the Workload Distribution tab, as so:

NOW, on that Workload Distribution tab, when you click on individual tasks, it will automatically filter the tasks list to that one task! See in the screenshot below, I clicked on Molly’s In Progress task, which put a blue box around it and filtered the task list to that one item.

Also, take a look again at that screenshot at #5 above. Look at all the many different ways that you can connect this Visio Web Access web part to other web parts! Seems like some pretty neat little solutions could be created with Visio incorporated. Also, think about SharePoint workflows, and how they’re now tightly integrated with Visio. I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with creative ways to display the live diagrams of workflows as they’re running!

If you’re interested in reading more about Visio Web Services, Toni Frankola has written a great article for the SDN E-magazine SharePoint 2010 special. The PDF of this magazine can be downloaded here:

http://www.sdn.nl/FreeMagazine

Technorati Tags: Visio Web Services,sharepoint 2010,office integration,diagram

Category: Web Parts

Published: 1/19/2010 10:56 PM

Working With Data in SharePoint Designer 2010

Laura Rogers — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:57:21 GMT

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The SharePoint eMagazine 2010 Special is out! I wrote an article about the new Data View Web Part interface in SharePoint 2010. Here’s the link to download the PDF of this magazine:

Free DIWUG SharePoint eMagazine 2010 special

Mirjam van Olst and Marianne van Wanrooij did an amazing job putting this magazine together, and I’m humbled to be among such a list of esteemed SharePoint gurus. Check it out, and enjoy learning about all about SharePoint 2010.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,data view web part

Category: Web Parts

Published: 1/20/2010 11:57 PM

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Using Content Types as Statuses

Laura Rogers — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:29:41 GMT

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Today I’m going to show an interesting way that you can use SharePoint content types. First, I’ll show you what the end result looks like, which will help explain the concept of using content types as statuses.

This solution was originally created for SharePoint 2007, but can also be used the same way in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online with Office 365.

Statuses? I’m referring to a field in any kind of list, that is used to indicate the status level of a list item, such as a Task list. There is a built in field in a task list that contains a field called status, with levels like In Progress, Completed, etc. In this example, we have a patient admissions system as a SharePoint list. There are three different stages that a patient goes through in this list. They’re admitted, then they’re considered a current patient, and then they’re discharged from the hospital.

A requirement of this example patient list, is that for each “status level”, there are different fields that need to be filled out in the form. This is where content types can be quite useful. Here are screenshots of the end result of this example. Notice the “Content Type” drop-down box on each one, and the fields in each form… they’re different.

Notice that not only are the displayed fields different, but the required fields are also different at every step. This is all done using out of the box functionality in WSS or MOSS, and here’s how:

First, in planning, put together a spreadsheet that defines the list of all the fields (columns) that will exist in the SharePoint list, so that it can be determined which field needs to be in each status as “Optional”, “Required” or “Hidden”. It will look something like this (for time’s sake, I’m only entering four fields):

FIELD	Admission	Current Patient	Discharge
Admit Date	Required	Optional	Hidden
Case Manager	Optional	Optional	Optional
Discharge Date	Hidden	Optional	Required
Discharge To	Hidden	Hidden	Required

In the chart above, you can see that depending on what’s going on with the patient, certain fields are required or hidden. Here’s how to go about setting this type of list up on your site once the planning has been done. As I go through these steps, I’d like to point out that I’ve been through and messed up this process many many many times, and some of these steps need to be done in a certain order, or it can just end up getting hosed up and can be extremely time consuming.

Note that these next steps where we create the site columns and content types can be done in different order. Create all the site columns first or the content types first. I’m just choosing to create the content types first here.

A “master” content type is created first. In Site Settings and go to Site Content types. Click the <Create> button. Name it something appropriate. In this case I called it “Case Mgmt All”.
Since ultimately the type of list I’ll be using for this will just be a custom list, I’m going to pick “List Content Types” and Item as the parent for this first one, and I’m choosing to create a new group, which is just how it’s listed on the page with all the other content types:
Next, create each of the other status levels as content types. I chose to put numbers (1-3) in front of the names of each of mine, just so they’d be displayed in that order. Click the create button for the next one. Pick the parent type that was just created, as the parent, and for the group, choose the existing group (that was entered as a new group in step 2):
Repeat step 3 for each of the other status level content types, with the only difference being their names and descriptions. They should all use that first content type as the parent.
The next step is to create a bunch of site columns to associate with the new content types. On the Site Settings page, click Site Columns. Click Create. This is all pretty standard. For the first one, choose to create a new group called Case Mgmt. (we created the group in the content type gallery, and now we’re creating on in the site columns gallery.) Fields that will end up being set as required in all content types can be set as required on this screen also.
Just create all the rest of the columns, just as you would normally, just try and remember to pick your new grouping for each one.
Next is the fun (and sometimes tedious) part, where the site columns are put into content types. Go back to Site Settings and Site Content Types. Click on the name of the parent content type first. In this one, I called it Case Mgmt All.
Click “Add from existing site columns”
From the drop-down box, select the name of the column grouping that was created in step five, which will filter the list by only the pertinent columns. If you missed one or two, and forgot to place them in the new grouping when they were created, they won’t show here (I’ve done this many times) ;-)
Select all of the column names on the left, and click to ADD them to the right and click OK.
Now, notice that when back in the site gallery, as you look through each of your different status content types, they will each contain ALL of the fields that were just added to the parent!
<golf clap>
The next step is to go through each of the fields in each of the child content types, and change the ones that have to be required or hidden. I don’t recommend messing with the Title field at all here, or even changing the name of it. Not worth the hassle, we’ll do that later, but just keep in mind what it should be called. In this case, it’s “Patient Name”.
If the columns need to be re-ordered, I recommend doing it at the parent content type level first, and the children will inherit that order. After that, the children can still be re-ordered individually.
Just to clarify… Click on the first child content type, in this case it’s “Admissions”. Click on a field that should be set as required, and change it to Required, as so. Do this throughout all content types, for the required fields:
Note that fields can be set as required in the parent content type also, which will force that field to be required in all of the children.
For the fields that can be hidden from each content type, they can be Removed from those children. Do NOT remove any fields from the parent, as it will then be removed from all the children, and do not set any of the parent’s columns to hidden, either. So, look back at that original table you created, and for each of the ones that can be hidden in each content type, you can click the Remove button. I’ll show you a benefit of that compared to simply changing them to “Hidden”… in a minute.
In the Content type gallery, now when I click on my first content type called “1 Admissions”, this is what the screen looks like. Notice that a couple of the columns are required, and several have been removed.
Now it is time to create a new SharePoint list to put these content types in. For mine, I create a new custom list on the site, called “Patient List”.
In the list’s settings, go to Advanced Settings, and under “Allow management of Content Types”, change it to Yes.
In the Content Types section on the List Settings page, click “Add from existing site content types”. In the drop-down, pick that custom content type grouping you created in step 2, to filter the list. Select ONLY the one parent content type and click Add and click OK.
Since this is a custom list I’m using, the default content type that was already in my list, is called “Item”. Click the name of the item content type, and click “Delete this content type”.
Now the other, child content types can be added to the list. Click “Add from existing site content types”, choose your custom group in the drop-down, and then select all the rest of the content types and add them. Click OK.
Go ahead and rename the Title field to something else if need be, here at the list settings level. Optional.
Notice something cool in the list settings now. Next to each column name is a list of all of the content types that it exists in! In step 13 when I mentioned that removing the columns was better than hiding them, this is why. When they’re only set to hidden, then every content type shows up next to every field in this screen, and there isn’t a quick way to be able to see what lives where.
Next, it’s time to just make sure that the different status levels show in the desired order in the form. Still on the list settings screen, click “Change new button order and default content type”. Order the “statuses” as desired. If you uncheck any of them here, they will not only be hidden from the New drop-down button but also from within the edit form of any item.

All done. Now when you create new items in the list, only the fields in the first content type will be available to fill out. Then, you can edit an item and change the content type, to dynamically see the fields in the form change. This solution isn’t going to be for everyone. For example, you may not want the users to be able to switch between content types like that. One thing I’ve done for that kind of situation, is to uncheck all but the first content type (in that last screenshot). The, the content types are only changed via a workflow. For example, once a certain check box is checked or field is filled out, then the content type is changed by the workflow. then, the next time the users open the item, it will show the fields from that other content type. Not sure how well I explained that last part… maybe I’ll have to write a whole other blog post for that.

Click here to view an 8 minute screencast of this whole process.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,content types,WSS,site columns,Office 365

Published: 1/29/2010 2:42 PM

Asynchronous Update in SharePoint 2010

Laura Rogers — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:04:01 GMT

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In SharePoint 2010, we can now set up asynchronous updates on lists, libraries and other data views. Basically, this means that instead of users having to refresh the browser to see any changes to data on the screen, asynchronous updates can be used to either display a refresh button right on the list, or set it up to refresh automatically at an interval.

There are a couple of different ways to set up asynchronous updates:

From within the browser
From within SharePoint Designer 2010

From Within the Browser

It’s all about the web part properties. Go to the web part properties of a list view web part, and expand the AJAX Options section.

See in this screenshot that you can enable the asynchronous update. If you’d like end users to be able to click a button to refresh the data, choose “Show Manual Refresh Button”. There is also an option to automatically refresh the data in the web part at a certain interval. This means that if a user navigates to the web page and leaves it up in the browser all day, they will continue to see live data without having to use F5 to refresh the site.

When “Show manual refresh button” or “enable asynchronous automatic refresh” options are checked, the first option to “Enable asynchronous update” will automatically be selected when the web part properties are saved.

Enable Asynchronous Load can be selected independently of the Asynchronous update. With this option, data is requested from the server and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The resulting behavior? When navigating to the page in SharePoint, everything else on the page will load, but it won’t wait for this web part. There will be a second or two (depending on network speeds and the amount of data) that you will see this GIF that indicates that the data is loading.

Since these are all web part properties, they can be set on any of your list view web parts, and remember that ALL regular views of lists are also web part pages. Here’s how to change the web part settings on a list view… it’s not going to be in the “Modify View” settings.

Navigate to your list or library’s default view by clicking the name of it in the quick launch (such as AllItems.aspx).
At the top left, choose <Site Actions> and choose <Edit Page>.
At the top right of the web part, in this case “Shared Documents”, click the drop-down and choose Edit Web Part.
Then that’s where you then expand the AJAX Options section as shown above.

From Within SharePoint Designer 2010

Asynchronous update can also be configured on any data view web part from within SharePoint Designer. When you open your list view or data view page and click to put your cursor anywhere inside the data view part of the page, the contextual ribbon will then display 4 tabs in a “List View Tools” section. On the Options tab, there’s a section with all of the settings you’ll need. Check the box next to “Asynchronous Update” in order to make the other two options enabled.

Note that each time you set up asynchronous update on web parts, there will be hits to the server each time the refresh is done. Just something to consider in planning… don’t go crazy with this feature.

Technorati Tags: DVWP,SharePoint 2010,Microsoft SharePoint,Asynchronous,web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 2/21/2010 9:04 PM

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Word 2007 Integration Tidbits

Laura Rogers — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:16:40 GMT

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Today when I tweeted about the ability in Word to visually compare multiple versions of a document, I was surprised at the number of people who weren’t aware of this feature. So, this post is a quick step-by-step on a couple of cool things you can do with SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 integration.

Compare versions
Built in site columns related to Office files

Versioning

When versioning has been turned on in a document library’s versioning settings, you have the ability to not only view a list of versions from SharePoint in the browser, but you can view versions and visually compare them from within Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. Here’s how:

Open a Word document that exists in a SharePoint document library with versioning turned on.
Click the <Review> tab in Word. (in the ribbon at the top)
Click the Compare button.
See that there are multiple options at this point. You can not only compare versions to each other, but you can COMBINE revisions from multiple versions… into one single document.
Click the <Specific Version> button.
See the list of versions, which is the same list you’d see from SharePoint.
Click the <More> button at the bottom, to get even more options. You can compare WHAT in the documents gets compared!
Click to select a previous version, and then click the <Compare> button.
Now you’ll see the two documents side-by-side, with a list of all the differences. If you don’t see both on the screen, click the <Show Source Documents> button in the ribbon.

Default Document Site Columns

When looking at the list of default site columns in a SharePoint site, you may have noticed some in a group called “Core Document Columns”. Here’s how you can put a couple of those (Author & Keywords) to use, and how they inherently integrate with Office files!

In a document library, go to Document Library Settings
Click “Add from existing site columns”
From the “Core Document Columns” group, select Author and Keywords, Add them to the right, and click OK
What does this do? Try it out. Upload a new document to the library. Check it out, the Author field automatically defaults to the name of the person who originally created the document in Word. Click OK.
What about the keywords? Next step is to go ahead and open the file in Word, in edit mode. Click <File> and <Save As>.
See in the above screenshot. There’s the “Tags” text box. Type a couple of keywords in there, separated by semicolons, and click Save.
Go back to the document library in SharePoint. Notice that the keywords field is now filled in with the tags that you added in Word.

If you’re not familiar with this whole “tagging” thing, it’s definitely a concept that you’ll see more and more of, especially in SharePoint 2010. May as well start using it in 2007, and ramp up! ;-)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Microsoft Office,Microsoft Word,Integration,versioning,tagging

Category: MS Office

Published: 3/9/2010 4:16 PM

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SharePoint URL Basics

Laura Rogers — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:07:24 GMT

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In SharePoint, it often helps to know the basics of how things are structured, and what the standard syntax of URLs is. When explaining concepts to newcomers, I often take for granted that URLs are obvious, but they’re not if you’re not used to paying attention to them. In this post, I’ll quickly go over some basics of a SharePoint URL structure, geared toward SharePoint newcomers who want to become power users, or who want to have a bit more advanced knowledge of it. The first couple of these, like web applications and site collections are really quite technical concepts, with managed paths and such, but I’m going to attempt to water-down and simplify it.

Web Applications:

The beginning of the URL indicates its web app. It always starts with http:// and then there’s the name of your web app. For internal sites, this name has most likely been registered in DNS by a System Administrator. I’ll use the example http://intranet.contoso.com in this blog post, with Contoso being the company’s domain name. Most likely if your company has MOSS, you’ve got at least two web apps. Once for the main intranet, and one for the My Sites, such as http://my.contoso.com.

Site Collections:

A site collection can live at the root level of the web application OR can be at a managed path. When a site collection is at the root of the web app, it’s simply http://intranet.contoso.com. BUT, if the site collection is at a managed path, it will be two levels below, like this: http://intranet.contoso.com/sites/marketing
In this example, the “sites” is the managed path. (managed paths are set up by administrators in central administration)

Sub-Sites:

Sub-sites are created under site collections. So, following the example above, a sub-site called “promos” may have the URL of:
http://intranet.contoso.com/promos

OR, it could even be
http://intranet.contoso.com/sites/marketing/promos

Site Collections and Sub-sites will also have something extra, the default.aspx. This is the main landing page of the site. So, the full URL of the first example would be:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/default.aspx

When sending people the link to the site, or for that manner, linking to it in any way, it is not necessary to include the default.aspx at the end.

Publishing Sites

When using MOSS publishing sites, there is a “Pages” library involved (see library URLs in the next section). By default, the home page of a publishing site will be something like:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Pages/default.aspx

Each time you click <Site Actions> and choose to create a new page on your publishing site, it automatically gets created in this Pages library, with the URL that you specify on the new page screen. A new page called News on the same site will have a URL like this:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Pages/News.aspx

Document Libraries:

The URL of a document library can sometimes be confused with the URL of a sub-site. A library called “Presentations”, under the site called promos (in the first example of sub-sites), will have a URL of:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/presentations

But a document library does look a bit different, because of the view part of the URL, which I’ll get into in the Views section below, but here’s what the full URL of the default view of the presentations library would look like:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/presentations/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Within document libraries, the document URLs consist of the names of each document. For Example, if I upload an Excel file called “Project Hours.xlsx” to my “presentations” library, the URL to that file is:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/presentations/Project%20Hours.xlsx

Lists:

Lists actually do live under a folder called “Lists” in each site, so they’re easy to identify. A list called “budgets” will have a URL of:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/budgets

And yes, there will always be that default view when you create the list, so the full URL will be:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/budgets/AllItems.aspx

<>RANT: Notice that there are no strange characters anywhere in these example URLs. Those little %20 thingies are a major pet peeve of mine. Each time I create new lists, libraries, views, and even columns, I never use spaces or apostrophes or any weird characters like that. This makes the URLs ugly (in my opinion). It does take a few extra seconds of time, and a few extra clicks, but I make it a habit to first create the object with no spaces, and save it, and then go right back in and rename it. Since the URL is tied to the original name of the list or column or whatever, it will be nice and neat.

Views:

Views in lists and libraries each have their own URL. When I showed a customer the other day how to create a filtered view in a list, grab the view’s URL, and then use it elsewhere in the site to link directly to that filtered view, this customer thought that was the coolest thing ever. Basically, each view is a .ASPX file under the URL of the list. In libraries, there is a “Forms” folder, as you may have noticed in the example above, and in lists, there is no “Forms” folder. But lists do have that “Lists” folder that exists before the name of the list, as shown above. Anyway, so for example a tasks list in SharePoint has several default views, each with their own URL, as so:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/Tasks/AllItems.aspx
http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/Tasks/active.aspx
http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/Tasks/byowner.aspx

Items:

Each individual item has its own URL, based on the type of form you want to open it in. There are three default forms in SharePoint:

NewForm.aspx – This is the very first form that is used, when creating a new item in a list.
DispForm.aspx – This is the display form, to simply display the item after it has been created (as opposed to editing it)
EditForm.aspx – This is the form used to edit an item and then save it again.

Another important thing to know, is that every list and library item in SharePoint has its own unique ID, which is unique within that list or library. The ID is called “ID”, and is created in numerical order as each list item is created. This ID cannot be changed. Here is the syntax of the page on which you create a new task in a task list:

Here is the syntax of the very first task created in a task list:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/Tasks/NewForm.aspx

Here is the syntax of the very first task created in a task list, AFTER it has been created, when you’re simply viewing it:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ID=1

Notice that the New Form doesn’t have an ID associated with it. There is no ID, because the item hasn’t actually been created yet. It’s not created until you click OK that first time. Then, when we click “Edit Item”, this is the URL for that same first item (ID=1) that we created in the list:

http://intranet.contoso.com/promos/Lists/Tasks/EditForm.aspx?ID=1

Source:

But Laura, what’s all that &Source=BlahBlahBlah stuff at the end of URLs?

The source is where you’re going to be navigated back to, after the form is filled out, and it’s usually where I came from. Like what view I was looking at when edited the form. In this example, I was looking at the “By Owner” (byowner.aspx) view of the tasks list when I clicked to edit an item, and starting with the ampersand, this is what the URL looked like after the editform.aspx?ID=1

&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fintranet%2Econtoso%2Ecom%2Fpromos%2FLists%2FTasks%2Fbyowner%2Easpx

In one scenario, I used this source stuff to my advantage. I wanted the users to be navigated to a specific URL of my choosing after they filled out a certain form, so I created manual links in this certain site, all hard-coded with the Source information.

GUID:

Oh yeah, I went there. In each SharePoint site collection, each list and library has a long unique ID. This does exist in URLs in some places, like list settings. For example, on a tasks list, I click to go to the list’s settings page, and the URL (after the name of the site) looks like this. I’ve put the GUID in bold:

/_layouts/listedit.aspx?List=%7BD535FA0E%2D67A6%2D4182%2D9E6A%2D9513B06FB28A%7D

Therefore, when I go to the site here, and decode the URL, I get this:

{D535FA0E-67A6-4182-9E6A-9513B06FB28A}

Okay, okay, I’ll stop. This post isn’t geared towards developers, so I’m not going to get any more into the nitty gritty here. I guess if you want to know more about the GUID, you’ll let me know. ;-)

Hopefully, this has been a helpful and explanatory crash course for SharePoint newcomers who would like to get up-to-speed.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,URL,GUID,Links

Category: Views

Published: 3/19/2010 12:07 AM

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SharePoint List Form – Default User Information

Laura Rogers — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:27:28 GMT

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In MOSS Enterprise, there are some great “Filter” out of box web parts. In this post, I’ll explain how you can use the Current User Filter web part to send default information about the current user to multiple fields in a regular SharePoint list form. A while back, Lori Gowin blogged about how to auto-populate InfoPath Form fields with current user information. Also, in the past year, Mark Rackley has blogged about how to send a query parameter to a form field in a SharePoint list form. Today, I’m going to combine these two different ideas, and show you how to auto-populate SharePoint List (not InfoPath) form fields with property information about the current logged in user. This does involve some code-tweaking and patience, so thanks for bearing with me. ;-)

In this example, users fill out a form on your site, and this form contains fields called Department and Phone, that we want to be automatically populated in the form. This entails creating a custom “New Item Form” for the list. Ahead of time, I’ve created a list in SharePoint, with Department and Phone created as “single line of text” columns. The end result will be that when any user clicks to create a new item in a list, these two fields will be filled out already, like this:

In SharePoint Designer, navigate to your list on the left side of the screen, and find the file called NewForm.aspx. DON’T modify this default form. Create a new one by simply copying that one and pasting it in the same location. It will default to the name NewForm_copy(1).aspx, but you can just change it to something like NewFormCustom.aspx. If you need more info about this first step, I’ve created a screencast you can watch.
Delete or hide that default (only) web part on the aspx page, because you’re going to create a new custom one. Put the cursor inside of the only web part zone on the page, and click the Insert menu at the top of the screen, choose SharePoint Controls, and then Custom List Form. The name of my list is TestList (I know, real original), and be sure and pick the New Item Form here.
Next step is to create a parameter in the data view web part, for each field that we want to auto-populate. Click the Data View menu at the top of the screen, and click Parameters. Click the New Parameter button. Create the following 2 new parameters, both with the parameter source as Query String:

Parameter	Query String Variable	Default Value	What is it for?
ParamDept	UserDept		This will pass the user’s department name to the Department field in the list
ParamPhone	UserPhone		This will pass the user’s phone number (Business Phone) to the Phone field in the list

When your screen looks like this, click OK
The next step is to convert the Department and Phone form fields into Text boxes. Click to select the Phone field, and click the little chevron next to it.
In the Format As drop-down box, change it to Text Box. Do the same for the Department field.
The next step entails some code tweaking, so click the Split button at the bottom of the screen. When you click to select the Phone Text box, you’ll see that associated code is automatically selected in code view, like this:
Look to find the part of the code that says text=”{@Phone}” This is where that parameter information comes in handy. For the phone, we called it ParamPhone. So, we need to change this part of the code to say the following instead: text=”{$ParamPhone}”
VERY IMPORTANT! Notice that the @ has been replaced with a dollar sign here. I missed this part the first time I did this, and Mark Rackley was very kind to help me out and find that tiny little error. ;-)
Okay, now do the same for the Department field.
SAVE this form, and click the F12 key to open it in the browser. You can close the form in SharePoint Designer.
IN THE BROWSER… Click Site Actions, and Edit Page. Click to Add a Web Part, and add the Current User Filter to the page. Do this twice, so that there are 2 current user filters on the page. You will add an additional current user filter web part to represent each field in the form that you want to be auto-populated. So, in this form we have two… Department and Phone.
On the first Current User Filter web part, click to Modify Shared Web part, so that you’ll see the Web Part Tool Pane on the right side of the screen. Configure it like this:

The Filter Name is Phone, and for the SharePoint profile value, pick Work Phone from the drop-down box. At the end of this post, I’ll tell you more about where this drop-down info comes from.

In the Appearance section, I changed the Title to “Current User Phone”, but that’s optional, since this title and web part won’t be seen by end users anyway.
Click OK at the bottom of the web part toolpane.
Now, for the second Current User Filter web part, do the same thing, like this:
Filter Name – Department
SharePoint profile value – Department
Appearance/Title – Current User Department
The next step is to create the web part connections, to pass the current user information into the new item form, into the parameters that we created. At the top right corner of the list web part, click Edit, and choose Connections. Choose Get Parameters From, and then click Current User Phone (remember this is what I named the Title of the web part in the screenshot above).
Choose the ParamPhone in the Consumer Field Name drop-down box. This is the name of the parameter that we created in the table at step 3. Click Finish.
Next for the department… At the top right corner of the list web part, click Edit, and choose Connections. Choose Get Parameters From, and then click Current User Department. Choose the ParamDept in the Consumer Field Name drop-down box. Click Finish.
Click to Exit Edit Mode. You’ll see that those two fields will automatically be populated based on the information about you the logged in user.
The next step is to configure SharePoint Designer so that it uses the new “New Form” by default. In SharePoint Designer, right-click on the name of the list on the left side of the screen. Click Properties, and go to the Supporting Files tab.
Change the Content type from folder to whatever the other choice is here, such as Item. Next to New Item Form, click Browse, and go to the new custom file you just created, and click OK. Click Apply and OK.
Test it out. Go to your list in SharePoint, and click NEW. Your new item form will be displayed, with the 2 fields filled out for you.
Now, you can even take this a step further, and hide these filled-in fields from the user, as Mark has explained in his post. Basically, in the form’s code, you have to tweak the TD (table cells) for each cell in the row that you want to hide, so the code would look like this:

Where does the Current User information come from? Again, this is a MOSS Enterprise thing, and it comes from the user profiles and properties information in the SSP. The profile properties seen in the current user filter web part have to be set up in the SSP to be seen by “everyone” and set as “replicable”. Also, if a property doesn’t exist, such as “Zip code”, you can add it in User Profiles and properties list of properties, by clicking New Property. Basically, you have to pick which field in Active Directory to map to the new property in the SSP. Here’s some TechNet info on User Profile Properties.

Here is my screencast showing this whole solution

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MOSS,Current User Filter,web part connections,web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 4/29/2010 2:27 PM

SharePoint 2010 – Where’d “My Links” Go?

Laura Rogers — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:03:20 GMT

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In MOSS 2007, we’re used to seeing a link in a drop-down box at the top right of our SharePoint sites, called My Links. At first glance, it seems that this functionality has been removed from SharePoint 2010. It’s still there, sort of. Here are a couple of places that you can find it:

Libraries

In a library, go to the Library tab in the ribbon. Click the Connect to Office button. This is the interface to add or remove a link to the library to the list of “My Links”, as well as to manage this list of links.

When you click Add to SharePoint Sites, this library is not only added to your own personal list of links, but it is added to all of your Office suite of applications, on the “Open” and “Save As” screens.

When you click Manage SharePoint Sites, the following screen is displayed, with a list of your whole list of links:

My Site

So, there’s your “My Links”, but doesn’t it exist on your My Site? Yes, it does. Go to your My Site and click on My Content at the top. Click Site Actions, Edit Page, and click to Add a Web Part. In the Recommended Items category of web parts, click to add the My Links web part to the page. There it is! Right click on the My Links web part title, and copy that URL to the clipboard.

What if you want the My Links link to be more obvious and accessible, though? Yes, there’s a way to do that also, although it still won’t be the same as it is in SharePoint 2007. It entails adding My Links to the Personalization Site Links in the User Profile Service Application.

In Central Administration, click Manage Service Applications.
Click the User Profile Service Application.
Click Configure Personalization Site.
Click New Link.
Your URL will look something like that. In this scenario, I have a web app just for the my sites. Fill in an owner because that field is required. Leaving the Audience field blank means that this link will be shown to everyone.

Now, when users are on their My Site, My Profile, My Content, they will see this:

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,My Site,My Links,Personalization,User Profile Service Application

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/5/2010 10:03 PM

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Create a Web Part Page WITH a Quick Launch Menu

Laura Rogers — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:03:38 GMT

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This is just a very quick how-to post. I can’t stand those default web part pages for anything besides testing, because you lose the Quick Launch navigation, so I usually create a blank ASPX page instead. These are the steps to take to create your own web part page. This is also a useful method for creating custom form pages for your lists.

Create a document library to put your web part pages in.
Open your site in SharePoint Designer, and click File –> New –> ASPX
Click the Format menu, choose Master Page, and click Attach Master Page
Click OK for the Default Master Page.
Click the PlaceHolderMain section in the middle of the page, click the little chevron (the little gray button with an arrow on it), and click Create Custom Content.
Put your cursor inside of the PlaceHolderMain section. On the Insert Menu, choose SharePoint Controls, and click Web Part Zone.
Click File and Save As, and save it to the document library that you created at step one.

Now you have a blank web part page that DOES contain the Quick Launch navigation on the left. You can either add web parts here in SharePoint Designer, or from the browser. F12 will take you directly to that page in the browser.

Another hint: If you’d like to have multiple web part zones, step 6 would be to create a table first, and then insert the web part zones into each cell of the table.

Here is my screencast on this whole process: Web Part Pages - Making Your Own

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,web parts,web part zones,aspx,web part page

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/19/2010 5:03 PM

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Setting Permissions on SharePoint Views

Laura Rogers — Thu, 20 May 2010 01:48:16 GMT

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Here’s a little hack that you can do, in order to create permissions on views of any list or library. I’m not going to say this is the most pretty or perfect solution, but it’s at least a way to accomplish this. It gets asked all the time. “How can I set permissions so that only certain people can see certain views of my list?”

Maybe you have a situation that the default view of a list shows users only items that they’ve created, or only items in a certain filter like by department. That’s the only view that you want most users to see, except maybe “Managers” get an additional view with information pertaining to them. Anyway, here’s how you can do it. First, the high level:

Create a library to put web part pages in.
Create a new web part page in that library
Insert a data view web part of your list on the web part page
In the data view properties, turn on the SharePoint list toolbar and SAVE

Now, when you go to the regular default view of your list or library, you will see a new view in there with the same name as your list. Clicking on this view name will take you over to the web part page you created. This hack will allow you to change the permissions on your web part page. The resulting behavior is that users who click on that view name and don’t have access to that aspx web part page will get an access denied message. I know, it’s really disappointing that the “view” drop-down box isn’t security trimmed. Now, if you’re still interested, here are all of the steps to follow:

Create a document library on the site called “Views”.
Create a blank web part page, preferably using the method in my previous blog post Create a Web Part Page WITH a Quick Launch Menu and save that web part page in the doc library from step 1.
In SharePoint Designer, open this new blank web part page. Click the Data View menu and click Insert Data View.
Click the list or library, click Show Data, and select the fields you need and drag them into the web part zone. (If you need more help with inserting web part basics, check out my data view web part series of screencasts)
Open the Data View Properties screen. On the General tab, put a check next to the SharePoint List Toolbar. Click OK.
Click File and Save As, and save it to the document library created at step 1. Close SharePoint Designer.
This is probably something a lot of you have noticed before. Now, your list will have a new view in the list of views, that has the same name as the list itself. You can go to the document library settings, scroll all the way down to the Views section, and click on that view and rename it.

Here’s what you can do with this weird little hack. Notice that now when you click on that view name in the regular list, it takes to over to that web part page and the data view web part you created… over in that other document library called “Views”. This gives you the ability to set permissions per view! In the Views document library, click the drop-down box on that ASPX page that you created, and click Manage Permissions. Assign permissions to only the people who should have access to this view. Note that this is not a substitute for item level permissions. Users could technically still go to any of those list items, so this solution is not feasible in a high-security situation.

The end result is that each view that you create as a web part page is listed in the View drop-down box of the list or library, and people who don’t have access to that view ASPX page will get an Access Denied page if they try and click on it.

Again, this is not a perfect solution, but it gives at least some way to accomplish “view permissions”. Try it out and see what you think.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,views,view permissions,web parts,data view web parts,web part page

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/19/2010 9:48 PM

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/68/CropperCapture113_524C8BDE.png

Query String URLs are like, SO Useful! (Part 1 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:54:55 GMT

Body:

In this blog post, I’ll not only explain what Query String URL Filter web parts are, but what the whole concept is behind query strings, and some ways to make use of them in SharePoint. First of all, what is a query string? Basically, it’s a part of a URL that contains a filter, to send filter information to the page that you’re viewing. These are used all over the place on the web, not just in SharePoint. The basic syntax consists of a question mark followed by a word, and the “equals” something. So, if you are looking at a web page that consists of information pertaining to the marketing department, your URL could end with this query string:

?Department=Marketing

In SharePoint, if you have MOSS Enterprise, there’s an out-of-box web part called the Query String URL Filter. But, as I will show you later, you can still do query string filtering if you don’t have MOSS Enterprise.

So begins the love story between me and query strings…

The first time I used them was when I created a policy management system in SharePoint. Picture this, a library of policies, with a Department column in the library, and each policy was associated with a department name. To create a list of policies for each department, you could create multiple views on the library, with each view just being filtered by the Department column being equal to ___ (each department name). Well, I didn’t want to do this, because I didn’t want to have to go back and modify 30 different views if the business owner decided that a column needed to be added or something. So, instead, I did this:

Go to the default view URL:
http://contoso/policies/PolicyList/Forms/AllItems.aspx
Click Site Actions and Edit Page.
Insert the Query String URL Filter web part on this AllItems.aspx page, above the document library.
Go into the filter web part’s properties, shown in this screenshot.
In the Query String Parameter Name, put a word that describes the field you’ll be filtering by. The Filter Name can optionally be changed, but it doesn’t really matter.
Click OK in the web part tool pane.
Connect the Query String URL Filter web part to the list or library web part that you’d like to filter. In this case, it’s a list of company policies, in which I’m going to create a filter for policies related to each department name. At the top right corner of the filter web part, click the Edit button and choose Connections –> Send Filter Values To –> and choose the name of the library, in this case it is the Policy List, as shown in this screenshot:
On the Configure Connection screen, pick the Consumer field. The consumer web part is the one you’re sending the filter to. The Policy List here. I’m filtering by the Policy Department, so that’s what I pick in the drop-down box.

Note that whatever field you filter by needs to be displayed as a column in the web part in order for it to be listed in the drop-down box on this screen. If you’d like to filter by a column and NOT display it in the web part, that consumer web part needs to be a data view web part.
Click Finish and Exit Edit Mode.
Manually create a link to each department’s list of policies. Put these in a links list or in the Quick Launch or wherever. Here’s an example of what the filtered list of IT policies looks like:

Notice a couple of things. See that the Policy Department field shows that little filter icon, and it shows only the IT policies. Also notice the URL. It is:

http://moss:16071/policies/PolicyList/Forms/AllItems.aspx?department=it

Note: If you insert this web part on your default view, just remember that when new views are created, they will be based on this default view (by default) and they will also include this extra web part, which you may need to remove from new views.

I’ve demonstrated a very basic way that the Query String URL filter can be used. Once you understand the basic functionality, there are many more things you can do with it. Part 2 of this 4 part series will cover a more advanced, elaborate solution.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/20/2010 6:54 AM

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Query String URLs are Magical (Part 2 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Sat, 22 May 2010 18:39:35 GMT

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In my last post, I showed you what query string URLs are, and a simple example of what can be done with the MOSS Enterprise Query String URL Filter Web Part. In this post, I’ll get more into a really cool example of what can be accomplished with query strings, and taking it to the next level.

In this example, we have a site with

Project List
Tasks
Issues
Change History
Status Reports

The point is that all of these lists have something in common… the project. The main project list can have multiple items associated with it, from each of the other lists. We want to display all of these items on the same page in SharePoint. So, we create a “Project ID” field, which will be used as the common thread. We’ll start with the built in ID field in the main project list, and in each of the other lists, create a number field called “ProjID”.

I usually use workflows heavily in a solution like this, but this post isn’t really about that part. For now, I just want to show you how to create the “Project Details” page that shows all of the associated info for any given project, in which all associated lists have one common field.

Create a blank web part page, which will be used as the project details page. Use the method that I showed here, create a blank ASPX page called ProjectDetails.aspx, and save it somewhere like the root of the site.
A workflow step needs to be created on the main project list, so that each time a new project is created, a special URL is created for that project, for the details page. So first, in the main project list, create a new hyperlink field, and call it Detail Link.
Open the site in SharePoint Designer. Create a new workflow, and associate it with the main Project list, so that it runs when a new item is created.
The workflow has no conditions. For the first action, choose Build Dynamic String. Click the blue words “dynamic string”. Type in the URL to the new ProjectDetails.aspx page that you created at step one (this can be a relative URL, if you’d like). At the end of the aspx, type ?Project=

Then click the Add Lookup button, and choose the ID field from the current list. At the end, it’s important to put the comma space “Project Details”, exactly like in the screenshot above.

So, WHY are we doing all this? What does it mean? Well, this is the bread and butter of how your query string URL works. In my previous post, I explained query strings. We’re going to create a “query” called Project, and we’re going to use the ID as the unique identifier for the project. This is going to be the same number that is tied back to all those other lists related to this project, that will exist as the ProjID. The word “Project” above in the URL.. we’re just making it up for now (it doesn’t come from anywhere else at this point, and isn’t yet related to any fields or anything we’ve done so far). The reason for the comma space and Project Details, is that this is how you form the hyperlink, so that Project Details will be the actual words that users click on to get to that detail page.
Name this variable ProjDetailURL (instead of the default word “variable”)
The next action of the workflow is Set Field in Current Item. Click the blue word “field”, and select the Detail Link field that you created at step two.
In the blue “value” box, click the little function button, and select Workflow Data as the source, and pick the ProjDetailURL variable that you created at step five.
Click Finish to complete the workflow.
In the browser, go to the ProjectDetails.aspx page, so you can start populating it with web parts. In Edit Mode, click to add a web part, and add all of the associated lists, which in this example would be all of those bullet points at the beginning.
Also add the Query String URL Filter web part to the top of the page.
Edit the views of each of the list web parts on the page, and add the ProjID field to the current view for each.
Go to the web part properties of the Query String URL filter web part. For the Query String Parameter Name, type “Project”, like this screenshot below. This word “Project” ties back to step four. Use the same word here that you used there. Click OK in the web part tool pane.
Time to create all of the web part connections from the Query String URL, to each of the other web parts on the page. We’ll start with the Project List.
With the page in edit mode, click the Edit button at the top right corner of the Query String (URL) Filter Web Part.
Click Connections –> Send Filter Values To –> Project List. Choose the ID field, and click Finish.
On the Query String filter web part again, click Connections –> Send Filter Values To –> Tasks. Choose ProjID as the consumer field name, and click Finish. (This is why we did step eleven. If the field is not showing in the view, you can’t create a connection to it.
Repeat step fifteen, creating connections from the Query String URL filter web part to every single other web part on the page. After all the connections have been created, the web part will look like this:
Then Exit Edit Mode. All done!

Time to try it out. Put a query string in the URL, and you’ll see that it will automatically filter all the web parts by that one project ID. Notice the browser URL, the fact that the Query String URL filter web part is hidden, and that all of the web parts show the filter symbol in the appropriate column. Click the picture below to zoom in.

To finish it out, try creating a new Project in the main project list, the one we associated the workflow with in step three. Check out the resulting URL that the workflow creates, and you’ll see that it takes you to the project details page for that project.

Yes, I agree that displaying the ProjID on all of those web parts is quite redundant. You can make any or all of those web parts as Data View Web Parts, and you don’t have to display the ProjID as a column. It will then let you create connections to the web parts using any fields in the list, not just displayed ones.

Obviously this is not a complete solution, but a piece of a puzzle. The rest of the solution would entail workflows that automatically create tasks at certain phases of the project, and form pages that let you click to create a new issue or status report for that project. Maybe this series of blog posts will be more than four parts. ;-)

Here's my associated screencast:
MOSS Enterprise – Query String URL Filter Web Parts – Ramping It Up (Screencast)

Here are the other parts to this series:

Technorati Tags: query string url,sharepoint,web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/22/2010 2:39 PM

Web Part Connections – Improved in SharePoint 2010

Laura Rogers — Fri, 28 May 2010 03:42:35 GMT

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In SharePoint 2010, when you put a list view web part on a page, go to the web part tool pane, and switch the Selected View in the drop-down box, the following message pops up:

The part about disabling web part connections isn’t true anymore. Back in SharePoint 2007, when you created web part connections you had to make sure that the columns being filtered were actually displayed as columns. The connection configuration only let you choose from those visible columns. You can get around this by creating these lists as data view web parts in SharePoint 2007, which allows all columns to be available for filtering.

Anyway, in SharePoint 2010 this message isn’t valid anymore because ALL COLUMNS in the list are ALWAYS available when creating web part connections. So… don’t worry about it, and click OK. That’s all.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint 2010,sp2010,web parts,data view,web part connections

Category: Web Parts

Published: 5/27/2010 11:42 PM

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/71/image_d184700e36204a07a89c28bacc47c880_42CBE37C.png

The Query String URL & Data View Web Parts (Part 3 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:34:20 GMT

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In the last two posts of this series, I showed you how to use the MOSS Enterprise out of box web part called the Query String (URL) Filter. This post will show you how to accomplish the same thing, but without MOSS. This entails using the data view web part. I’ll use the same example of a project details page. The query string will be used to pass the project ID to each of the data view web parts on a page.

Even if you DO have MOSS, another good reason to use data view web parts for mash-ups, is that redundant column that you’re connecting to. You know how when you’re creating web part connections, the only columns available for the connection are the ones that are being displayed in the web part? When data view web parts are used, ALL list fields are available in the connection, not just the displayed ones!

Here’s how to configure each web part in SharePoint Designer, to use a Query String:

Create a blank web part page, and open it in SharePoint Designer. Insert a data view web part, we’ll just start with the issues list. Again, this is using the same project details example, so please read my last post about it.
In the Data View menu in the toolbar, click Parameters.
There will already be one parameter. Add a new Query String parameter, called “ProjParam”, like this:
In the Data View menu in the toolbar, click Filter.
Create a filter where the ProjID field is equal to the new parameter [ProjParam]:
Save the page. Make sure there are a couple of items in the list, each with a ProjID associated with them. Open the web part page in the browser and test the query string.

The trick is that now you use the URL in order to pass the project number to this web part. This is supposed to be a project mash-up, so add all of the associated lists to the page as data view web parts, and repeat steps two through five on each one.

The URL to the page will now end with the page name.aspx?Project=2

That red number is unique to each project. In my previous post, I showed how to create the workflow that generates that project details URL for each new project. This screenshot shows that this list is automatically filtered by issues that have a ProjID field equal to one, because of the URL.

In summary, here’s a brief comparison:

Query String (URL) Filter Web Part

Out of box web part
No SharePoint Designer needed
MOSS Enterprise version needed

Data View Web Part With Query String

SharePoint Designer data view web part creation needed
More complex setup
Can be done in just WSS, without MOSS

Note that you can still create all data view web parts, and still use the Query String URL Filter Web Part. This combination method will let you get rid of all of the redundant columns, in this case the ProjID… with the ease of use of the out of box query string URL filter web part.

Here are the other parts in this series:

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Designer,MOSS,Web Parts,data view web parts,Query string url

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/12/2010 7:34 PM

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SharePoint 2010 Related Lists (Part 4 of 4)

Laura Rogers — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:36:06 GMT

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Yes, the title of this post is a little confusing, especially if you read the other 3 part, but let me explain. The first three parts of this series were all about the Query String URL Filter, and how to create mashups that display multiple related lists on one page. Lists have a lot more relational capabilities now, which is seen everywhere from lookup columns to workflows. So, since we’re talking about mashups and related lists, I thought I’d show you the Related Lists button in SharePoint 2010, which lets you quickly throw a few web parts on a page, and automatically connects them. So, another title for this blog could be “how to do the stuff from the other 3 posts… in SharePoint 2010”

In this example in SharePoint 2010, there is a main projects list with several lists with related items that lookup to the projects list. Let’s create some simple ones quickly, just to try it out.

Custom list on the site called Projects. To try it out, all you need is a Title field.
Create a new Issues list on the site. Create a new required lookup column in the list, called ProjectID, and make it look up to the Project’s Title field.
Create a new Project Tasks list, and also add a required ProjectID field that looks up to the Project list’s Title field.
Create a few items in each list, with some tasks and some issues associated with each project name.
Go back to the Projects list. Click to create a new view, name it Mashup.
On the new view, click Site Actions and choose Edit Page.
CHECK IT OUT!!! There’s a button in here to Insert Related List!!!
Click the Insert Related List button, and the drop-down will show the Project Tasks list and the Issues list. Insert each one on the page.
On the Page tab in the ribbon, click Stop Editing. This is what the page looks like now:

DONE. WOW, it’s going to be so easy now for end users to be able to create their own related list views, without even having to know how to create the web part connections!

How did it work? Since the Issues and Project Task lists contained Lookup columns to the Project list, SharePoint automatically knew to consider them “related lists”. If a list has no other lists that look up TO IT, then the related lists button will be grayed out.

One more thing… yes, the Related Lists button does exist in SharePoint Designer 2010 also, and not just in the browser.

Here are the previous parts in this series:

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,web parts,web part connections,related lists,projects,SharePoint Designer

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/25/2010 5:36 PM

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Phone Number Validation in SharePoint 2007

Laura Rogers — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 19:50:01 GMT

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Yes, you can do ANY kind of validation such as phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, zip codes, whatever. If you’re really nerdy, you can even validate IP addresses. I just thought I’d catch your attention with the title, since phone numbers are one of the most frequent types of data that people need to validate. This is all done using regular expressions, with NO programming involved!

What is validation? It means that when you have a form with a box for someone to type their telephone number, you want to make sure they type an actual full phone number, in the right format.

Currently in SharePoint 2007, you can make a field required, and you can set it to a certain type of data such as a number or date. On the other hand, in SharePoint 2010, validation is now a built in option each time you create a new column in any list or library.

Guess what… this solution entails creating a data view web part!

In this example, I have 3 fields I want to validate:

Email Address
Business Phone
Social Security Number.

In a previous screencast, I showed you how to Customize Form Pages in SharePoint (Screencast), so this is the prerequisite for doing the validation. Once you’ve created a contact list, added a social security number text column, and opened the site in SharePoint designer and created the custom form, these are the steps you take to add the validation. This will need to be done on the NewForm AND the EditForm of your list.

In your custom form, click to select the Email Address field, and click the little chevron at the top right corner of it, like this:
In the Format As drop-down box, click to change the format to “Text Box”.
Click to select the text box, right-click it and click Properties, so that the Tag Properties toolpane will show on the left side of the screen.
Scroll to the very bottom of the tag properties pane to find the ID tag, and ~~rename it to EmailTextBox, like this~~: Correction! Don’t rename the text box. You’ll just have to remember which one is which.
Click the Insert menu at the top of the screen, select SharePoint Controls, and click on More SharePoint Controls. This will put a new toolpane on the right side of the screen, called Toolbox. Click to expand the ASP.NET Controls, and the Validation section in there:
In the form, put the cursor next to the email address text box, on the right of it. Double click the control called the RegularExpressionValidator to add it to the page. Then, double-click the RequiredFieldValidator to add it also.

I know what you’re thinking. If I’ve already set it up as a required field when I created the column in SharePoint, why would I need to make it required again? When you change a field to a text box in the form, it doesn’t recognize the SharePoint required field info at all.
Click to select the red RegularExpressionValidator, and then take a look at that Tag Properties tool pane on the left again. In the Behavior section, in ControlToValidate, select the ~~EmailTextBox~~ default name of that text box, which will be something like ff20.
Do the same thing with the RequiredFieldValidator. Set its ControlToValidate as the ~~EmailTextBox~~ default name of the text box.
You only need to add the RequiredFieldValidator if the field needs to be required. Otherwise you can leave it off.
Select the RegularExpressionValidator again, because now it’s time to set up the regular expression. In the Tag Properties pane’s Appearance section, set the Error Message to say:
Not a valid email address
In the Behavior section of the Tag Properties, go to the ValidationExpression box, and click the ellipsis button to see this, and select “Internet e-mail address” and click OK:

Here’s what the Tag Properties pane looks like when the Regular Expression Validator is selected:

THIS IS SO COOL. I know you want to, go ahead and try this one out, so ahead and save the page and hit F12 to preview in the browser. Try typing incorrect and correct email addresses, and you’ll see that when it’s not a real email address, the red error comes up.
Time do set up the validation for the other two fields. Repeat steps 1 through 10 for the social security number and phone number, but KEEP READING BECAUSE THERE’S A TRICK TO THESE OTHER TWO.
For the ControlToValidate box for each control, be sure to select the appropriate one (of the above three). The ErrorMessage obviously needs to be different for each field also.

SO HERE’S THE TRICKY PART THAT FRUSTRATED THE HELL OUT OF ME. In the regular expression editor, when you select the “U.S. Social Security number” or the “U.S. Phone Number” patterns, they (and others) JUST DON’T WORK, so here’s how to fix them…

First of all, this is the pattern for a social security number:

It’s 3 digits, then a hyphen, then two, a hyphen, then four, like 765-76-9900. See in the pattern in the box above, the numbers with the curly brackets {} around them represent the number of numbers in a row. The problem is that SHAREPOINT DOESN’T LIKE THE CURLY BRACKETS. So, any time you see a pattern that has curly brackets in it, you have to modify it. So the above pattern for a SSN would need to be modified to be:
\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d

Same goes for the phone number. Here’s what the modified phone number expression looks like:

This is the finished version of the NewForm. Again, you’ll need to do the exact same thing on the EditForm. I’ve typed a couple of them incorrectly, so each shows me an error message and the form can’t be submitted until they’re correct.

Here's my associated screencast, showing this process: Validate Email Addresses and Phone Numbers in SharePoint 2007 (Screencast)

In all my frustration figuring this out, here are the good reference sites that I came across, regarding regular expression patterns, in case you want to create your own:

Regular-Expressions.info

How To: Use Regular Expressions to Constrain Input in ASP.NET

Regular Expression Library

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,validation,MOSS,data view web parts,regular expressions

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/26/2010 3:50 PM

Display a Sub-Site List on a Top Level Site

Laura Rogers — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:59:10 GMT

Body:

In SharePoint 2007, it was possible to display any list or library from one site on another site in the same site collection, but to accomplish it usually entailed digging into SharePoint Designer and creating a data view web part. There was that little button when designing a data view web part, called “Connect to another Library”, which let you create a web part on one site, based off data in another site.

In SharePoint 2010, it is easy to put list or library data from a sub-site on a top level site in the same site collection, and it doesn’t entail creating any special web parts or breaking any pages off of the site definition! Here’s how:

Open the browser and go to the list or library that you want to ultimately display on another site.
Click the Library tab in the ribbon, and click the orange Edit Library button, to open it up in SharePoint Designer 2010.
In the Views section on the right, click on the name of ANY view, to open it up. Yes any. It doesn’t matter which view you pick here. Don’t worry, you won’t be modifying this page.
Put the cursor inside the content section of the list, so that the set of List View Tools tabs are displayed at the top.
Click the Web Part tab. In the Save Web Part section, there are two options:
- To Site Gallery – This option is used if you want to have the ability to insert this list onto any site page in the whole site collection.
- To File – This allows you to save the .WEBPART file on your computer, so that you can import that file onto any page in the site collection.
Click To File, and save it to your desktop. The following question pops up:

Do you want this Web Part to always show list data from the current web site? If you select No, the web part will show data from the list at the path ___, relative to the site in which it is used.

It is important to understand what this means. Click Yes to save this exact list. Click No, if you want this web part to be relative. So for example, if this is a list called Announcements, this web part would be used to display any list with the name Announcements that exists on the site that this web part is imported on. In this example, it’s a document library called Shared Documents.
Click Yes.
Close SharePoint Designer.
Go to the other site, on which you would like to display this list. Click to Add a web part, and click the little Upload button below all of the categories of web parts. Upload the web part and add it to the page.

This is where the AWESOMENESS became apparent to me. Now a default view of the sub-site’s list will be displayed AND you can go into the web part properties tool pane and change the view. YES, the familiar Selected View drop-down and Edit the Current view button are both available… even though the list you’re viewing exists on another site!

BUG alert 1: Unfortunately, the functionality described in this blog post only works when you’re viewing a sub-site’s information on a top level site. This doesn’t work the other way around (top level list on a sub-site) because when you try to import the web part on the page you get an error.

BUG alert 2: When importing any web part on a page, the upload functionality is a bit funky in 2010. Sometimes you have to upload the web part twice before it will stick, sometimes some other site list gets added to the page, and every time you have to click to insert a web part at least twice. The first time to upload it (then the list of web parts goes away), then the second time to add that web part to the page.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint 2010,web parts,sharepoint designer,data view web parts

Category: Web Parts

Published: 6/29/2010 12:59 PM

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The Best Practices Conference 2010 in DC

Laura Rogers — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:31:17 GMT

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The SharePoint Best Practices Conference is coming up next month in Washington, DC (Reston, VA, specifically). This is definitely one to look forward to.

Here are the sessions that I’ll be presenting at the conference:

Data View Web Part Best Practices - Old and New

Audience: Business Analyst, Power User, Administrator
Session Level: 200
In order to create custom business solutions in SharePoint, data view web parts are often created using SharePoint Designer. These data views are commonly used in order to take list and library views to a higher level of customization, without having to write code. In SharePoint 2010, these web parts have been drastically improved. In this session, you will learn how the data view web part best practices have changed in SharePoint 2010, which has made them not only more pervasive, but more accessible. You will learn old and new best practices related to list and library web parts, compared to views of other types of data sources.

Add event to my calendar

Form Approval Process - Best Practices

Audience: Business Analysts, Project Managers, Information Workers, Power Users
Session Level: 100
In your company, forms are everywhere, and they usually have some type of workflow associated with them. Approval workflows are a very common request in SharePoint, and there are several different ways to go about creating this process. SharePoint Designer and InfoPath are common tools that are used to not only create the business form, but to run it through an approval. Depending on the business requirements, there are different best practices involved. In this session, attendees will learn how SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2010 can be leveraged the most efficiently to create an approval process that is best for the specific project. Improvements from 2007 to 2010 will also be discussed.

Add event to my calendar

See you all there!

Technorati Tags: BPC10,workflows,data view web parts,best practices,sharepoint designer

Category: conference

Published: 7/20/2010 8:31 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: The Best Practices Conference 2010 in DC

Attachments: http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Attachments/78/banner304x1681_f23ddb52d4a147e1b0d4ededbd6d29e3_6B327687.jpg

SharePoint Technology Conference is Coming Up

Laura Rogers — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:27:40 GMT

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I absolutely can’t wait for SPTechCon in Boston this October! My co-workers will be there, and we will all be in the SharePoint911 booth there! This conference is not only wonderful because of the many hour-long sessions, but there is a whole day of “101” sessions that are more intense half-day or full-day workshops. Oh, and when you go to their website, there’s a great video on the left side of the homepage with 3 minutes of highlights from the last conference.

The following is the list of the five sessions that I’ll be teaching, and each has a link to add to your own calendar:

W8-AM: SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Integration

Wednesday, October 20, 2010: 8:30AM – noon Add to my calendar
Me & Mark Miller
This beginner-level session will help end users, project managers and information workers to discover the best ways to tackle your daily work with the 2010 Microsoft Office system. Tips include how to use Outlook to keep all your SharePoint lists and libraries within easy reach, and how to display library metadata within Word documents. From offline document editing and version comparisons, to reporting on SharePoint library data, this session is packed with tricks you can use to increase your SharePoint productivity. Think about integration from an end user’s perspective and come learn topics, such as how to make it simple to save files directly to SharePoint and work more efficiently. The demonstration will feature a company policy management system, and will feature Access custom lists, content types, and quick parts. Many of the integration points are available in both the 2007 and the 2010 suite of products. Integration improvements in SharePoint and Office 2010 will also be highlighted, such as those in InfoPath Forms Services, Visio Services and Access Services.

W8-PM: Creating Custom Business Solutions

Wednesday, October 20, 2010: 1:30PM – 5PM Add to my calendar
Some of the most commonly asked questions that SharePoint site managers and end users ask are around the need to create custom business solutions without having to be a developer. In this workshop, Laura Rogers will teach you how to use Data View/Data Form Web parts in SharePoint Designer 2010. Not only will this workshop cover Data View Web part fundamentals, but you will also learn specific examples of ways to put these skills into play. It is a best practice to learn what can be done out of the box in SharePoint before delving into custom code. This workshop will be presented using SharePoint 2010, but the topics that will be covered can be accomplished in either 2007 or 2010. Laura will highlight the new user interface in SharePoint Designer 2010 and the new ways to do those old familiar tasks.
What will you learn in this workshop?
- Fundamentals and best practices associated with creating data view Web parts, such as conditional formatting and hyperlinks
- Creating a merged list of multiple document libraries
- Creating a change control system mash-up
- Creating a joined view of two different lists
- Creating a list/library permissions dashboard

This session is designed from power users, project managers, business analysts and developers.

107: SharePoint 2010 Out-of-the-Box Web Parts

Thursday, October 21, 2010: 8:15AM – 9:30AM Add to my calendar
This session will demonstrate just how flexible and useful the out-of-the-box Web parts are in SharePoint Server 2010. There will be an overview of many of these Web parts, along with demonstrations of several new Web parts and some that have been improved or changed from MOSS 2007. Best practices and use cases of individual Web parts will be discussed. Some of the Web parts that will be covered are filter, content rollup, people, chart, Excel Web access and media. Attendees will also be given a demonstration on customizing data views using the new SharePoint Designer 2010. It helps developers know what can be done out of the box before writing code, and it’s also useful for end users to know the full extent of SharePoint’s Web parts.

506: The Power of Content Types

Friday, October 22, 2010: 8:30 – 9:45 Add to my calendar
In SharePoint, the concept of content types seems a bit ambiguous to most people, which becomes a negative factor when it comes to actual use of this feature. In this session, Laura Rogers will teach you what you need to know about content types to be able to implement them in your company. You may have heard that content types can be used in order to upload document templates so that they display as choices for users on a library’s “New” button. Yes, that can be done… but wait, there’s so much more! In conjunction with site columns, content types can be utilized to create custom business solutions. Take your lists and libraries to the next level without having to do any custom development. In this session, demonstrations will be done to take you through common scenarios, and show how to use the power of content types in SharePoint. Many of these concepts carry over from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, but new 2010 capabilities will be highlighted.

806: SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows: A Case Study

Friday, October 22, 2010: 2:30 – 3:45 Add to my calendar
In this session, learn how to create custom workflows in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010. The example used will be a travel-request system in SharePoint, with multiple levels of approval. Attendees will learn how much the approval workflow process has been improved in SharePoint 2010 compared to the same workflow in 2007, how to involve multiple SharePoint lists in a workflow, and how InfoPath is highly integrated into the SharePoint Designer workflow and the assigned approval tasks. Laura will walk through the creation of the entire workflow, and the new product capabilities, workflow customizations, and troubleshooting steps will be discussed along the way.

Technorati Tags: conference,workflows,content types,data view web parts,office integration

Category: conference

Published: 7/29/2010 1:27 PM

BlogTitleForUrl: SharePoint Technology Conference is Coming Up

Categories: conference

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InfoPath User Roles in Browser-Based Forms- Another Way (Part 1 of 2)

Laura Rogers — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:05:22 GMT

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This blog post applies to both InfoPath 2007 and 2010, and both SharePoint 2007 and 2010, in MOSS and SharePoint Server 2010 (not WSS or Foundation).

There’s a concept in InfoPath called “User Roles”. You can set up these roles, and when a person opens the form, the form knows if they belong to a certain role, and you can set up certain objects to hide or show in the form based on the user’s role, or switch to a view based on a role, etc. Each role that you set up can be defined by specific user names, Active Directory groups, or a person’s name from within the form, like this:

UNFORTUNATELY, there are a couple of limitations of this functionality in InfoPath.

User roles are NOT available when creating browser-based forms. Therefore, if your form absolutely requires these, then all users who ever fill out this form will need to have the InfoPath software installed on their computers. This is a huge limitation in a lot of cases.
User roles cannot be created based on SharePoint Groups, only AD groups.

There’s a blog post out there, that describes a a way to get around this limitation, and emulate user roles in a browser based form. BUT this method entails manually keeping up a separate SharePoint list where you define all of the users and their roles.

Today, I’m going to tell you about another way of using the currently logged in user’s information instead of roles, and this can be used in a browser-based form. This can be used with SharePoint groups, where the built in user roles cannot. The trick is a built in SharePoint web service called the user profile service. Lori Gowin blogged a while back about how to use this web service in order to auto-populate text boxes in any SharePoint form, with information about the current logged in user. My method entails using that same web service. Clarification: This doesn’t refer to ANY SharePoint group, this is only the “members” group that exists on each SharePoint site. There is another web service that can be used, UserGroup.asmx, in order to get the info about SharePoint groups in general, on a site.

There are a couple of very useful operations in the UserProfileService.asmx web service, so I’ll show you a couple of options (2 parts to this blog). In this example, you have a change request form. Site visitors fill out the form, and after they’ve filled it out, people in the IT department will have additional fields to fill in. We don’t want non-IT staff to see these additional fields, though. We will create another view in the form. This view will contain all of the original fields that were filled in by the originator, plus the additional IT fields. When the form is opened, we want it to automatically switch to this IT view when the logged in user is an IT person. The prerequisite is that there is a SharePoint group on your site called IT Group, and you are a member of it. Also, you’ll need a form with 2 views, one of them called IT Dept.

Create a new data connection in the InfoPath form, to receive data. The source is a web service. (In SharePoint 2010, pick SOAP web service.) Click NEXT.
Type the URL of the userprofileservice.asmx file. This is at the root of your SharePoint site, under the _vti_bin folder. Click Next.
For the operation, click GetUserMemberships, and click NEXT.
On the Parameter screen, just leave the default and click NEXT.
Leave “store a copy of the data…” unchecked, and click NEXT.
Leave “Automatically retrieve data when form is opened CHECKED, and click FINISH.
Now, when someone opens my form, I want the form to automatically switch to the IT view if the user is in a SharePoint group called “IT Group”.
- In InfoPath 2010, click the Data tab in the ribbon, and click the Form Load button, which will bring up the Rules pane on the right.
- In InfoPath 2007, click the Tools menu and choose Form Options. Click the Rules button on the Open and Save section.
Define the rule as so:
The condition is: Click the first drop-down box (the field name). Click “Select Field or Group”. In the drop-down for the data source, select GetUserMemberships, which was the first data connection that you created. Expand several levels and select the DisplayName field. Click OK.
For the value, click “type text” and type IT Group, as so. Click OK.
Click to add the Action. The action will be just to switch views.
The action is just to switch views, so you’re done with the form open rules now.
Now try it out. Publish the form. If you’re a member of the IT Group (SharePoint group), the form will now automatically switch to the IT Dept view when it opens.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post, for another way to go about accomplishing something similar with this same web service.

Testing: This GetUserMemberships operation returns a list of all groups that the current user is a member of, SharePoint and Active Directory. In order to see exactly what is returned from this operation, here’s how you can do this. In the data source pane on the right side of InfoPath, click the Main drop-down box at the top of it and change the data source to GetUserMemberships. This will show all the fields. Expand several levels until you get to the one called MembershipData. Drag this whole group of fields onto your form, as a repeating table. Preview your form. This will show you a list of all the groups that you are a member of. You may need to increase the width of the Display name field, so that you can see all the values. You’ll also notice that there is a field called Source that shows whether each one is a SharePoint group (“SharePointSite”) or a Distribution list.

Technorati Tags: InfoPath 2010,InfoPath,SharePoint,forms,web service

Category: MS Office

Published: 8/8/2010 1:05 PM

Categories: InfoPath

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InfoPath User Roles in Browser-Based Forms – Another Way (Part 2 of 2)

Laura Rogers — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:54:58 GMT

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In my previous post, I showed you the concept of creating a web service data connection to receive info about the currently logged in user. I showed how you can use information about the current user’s memberships, in order to mimic the user roles functionality. In this post, I’ll show how you can use a similar role functionality, but without having to use any groups at all. No distribution lists from AD, and no SharePoint groups. You’re just going to look at properties of the current user, and perform actions in the form accordingly. I’m going to use the same example that I used in the previous post, of a form that is filled out by end users, but that IT dept users will open to fill out more fields just for them.

Hopefully, your Active Directory profile information is accurate. If it is then this solution will be perfect for you. This method does not use SharePoint groups, but properties of the current user’s profile. This information comes from User Profiles and Properties in Central Administration, which in many companies is imported from Active Directory. We will create a form open rule that looks at the Department field in the current user’s profile.

You’re going to use the “Department” of the current logged in user, in order to determine if the current user is in the IT department. If they ARE, then they will get to see the “IT Dept” view of the form when they open it.

A data connection to the UserProfileService web service will be created again, but this time with a different operation selected.

Create a new data connection in the InfoPath form, to receive data. The source is a web service. (In SharePoint 2010, pick SOAP web service.) Click NEXT.
Type the URL of the userprofileservice.asmx file. This is at the root of your SharePoint site, under the _vti_bin folder. Click Next.
For the operation, click GetUserProfileByName, and click NEXT.
On the Parameter screen, just leave the default and click NEXT.
Leave “store a copy of the data…” unchecked, and click NEXT.
Leave “Automatically retrieve data when form is opened CHECKED, and click FINISH.
Next, a field will need to exist, in order to temporarily store the department name of whomever the currently logged in user is. This is not to be confused with the name of the department that you may have captured when the person originally filled out the form. This new field’s value will actually change each time a different person opens the form.
Create a new text field in the InfoPath form. Name it CurrentUserDepartment.
In the properties of this new field, click the little function button for the default value. fx
You’re going to set up this field so that it defaults to the current user’s department name. On the Insert Formula screen, click Insert Field or Group…
Pick GetUserProfileByName as the data source, click the name of the Value field, but don’t click OK yet. Click the Filter Data button.
Click the Add button, so we can add one filter.
Pick Name is equal to Department, and click OK on the four different screens.
This is what your CurrentUserDepartment field’s default value will look like now. Be sure to LEAVE the check box checked, for “Refresh value when formula is recalculated”. Yes, you do want it to be recalculated each time someone new opens the form. Click OK.

Note that you don’t have to actually display this field on the form at all. It can just exist in your list of data source fields. But for testing purposes during form creation, you’ll want to see this.
Now, when someone opens my form, I want the form to automatically switch to the IT view if the user’s department contains “IT”.
- In InfoPath 2010, click the Data tab in the ribbon, and click the Form Load button, which will bring up the Rules pane on the right.
- In InfoPath 2007, click the Tools menu and choose Form Options. Click the Rules button on the Open and Save section.
Define the rule:
The condition is: Click the first drop-down box (the field name). Select the name of the CurrentUserDepartment field. Select Contains from the second drop-down. In the third drop-down, choose Type Text… and type IT.

Unfortunately, this screen is case sensitive. So, if a user’s department name is not of the same case, this rule won’t apply.
Click to add the Action. The action will be just to switch views, switch to the IT Dept view.
Now try it out. Publish the form. If the text “IT” exists in the department name of your user profile, the form will now automatically switch to the IT Dept view when it opens.

BONUS extra stuff:

The field that we created in this example is used to simply capture the current user’s department name. If you’d like to create the fields that capture the form originator’s pertinent information like department, phone, job title, etc, you can create text boxes that default to each of those values. But when you do this, be sure to UNcheck the “Refresh value when formula is recalculated” check box. This is because you want the information to initially be captured when the first person fills out the form, but you don’t want it to change after that.
Also, the CurrentUserDepartment is going to be re-populated each time a different person opens the form, but you may want to do something extra incase the current user’s department field is blank. You can build in an action as part of the submit button, to set CurrentUserDepartment field to blank, that way you ensure that no one will incorrectly see information that does not pertain to them.

Here are a few references that pertain to some of the topics addressed in these last 2 posts of mine:

Auto-Pop Life with InfoPath (Part 1 of 2) – Lori Gowin

InfoPath – User Roles in Browser-Enabled Forms Using AD Groups – Clayton Cobb

Find out About Site Users within Microsoft Access (Screencast) - Me

Technorati Tags: InfoPath,SharePoint,UserProfileService,web service

Category: InfoPath

Published: 8/9/2010 8:54 PM

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