Lightning Tools Blog

Business Data Connectivity Model – Finder Method

Lightning Tools — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:52:59 GMT

In our last blog post on the BCS we had an introduction to using a .NET assembly as a data source for the Business Connectivity Services. In this blog post we’ll go through all the steps to create a BCS shim using Visual Studio 2010 beta 2.

In this walk through we’ll refer to Entities and External Content Types. They are actually the same thing in the BCS. Entity is a hangover term from the Business Data Catalog and doesn’t look like it is completely going to go away for 2010.

This blog post has been published using Visual Studio 2010 beta 2. As of writing SharePoint 2010 beta 2 hasn’t been released yet so you can follow along with the Visual Studio bits, but you may have to wait a little while until the public beta of SharePoint 2010 for you to be able to deploy and test your BCS Model.

1, Open up Visual Studio 2010 and create a new project. Select the SharePoint 2010 project types and pick to create a new BCS Model

2, When the project is created you’ll see an Entity created on the model design surface.

You’ll also see two classes within the BdcModel1 folder called Entity1.cs and Entity1Service.cs. We are going to leave all of these things here so we can refer to them when we are building our own custom BCS Entity.

3, For this walk through we are going to make use of AdventureWorks2000. If you need to download this SQL Server database you can get it from here:

Download AdventureWorks2000 database

4, We want to create our own Entity to reflect Departments within our database. Drag and drop an Entity shape from the Visual Studio controls toolbox onto the bcs model design surface.

5, You’ll notice that when you created your blank BCS External Content Type a new EntityService.cs file was also automatically created for you. The BCS expects all your C# methods to reside in here that this particular entity will use.
Rename your Entity – Department

Also right click on the Methods section within the entity and choose to add a new method called GetDepartments

Notice that when we change the name of our Entity to Department, EntityService.cs has been renamed to DepartmentService.cs. If you open DepartmentService.cs you’ll see that when we created our BCS methods within our External Content Type shape it generated the method stubs for us in our service class.

6, Now we are going to write some code to bring the data back. Right click on your project and add a LINQ 2 SQL class. With the LINQ 2 SQL view open connect to your AdventureWorks2000 database in the server explorer and drag and drop the Departments table on to the design surface

7, When we are returning our data we could use the LINQ 2 SQL Department class that is automatically generated. I’ve found it better however to define our own Department class within the BCS model folder to use for a couple of reasons

- you need to define all the columns being returned by the BCS. The LINQ 2 SQL class may return properties that you do not want to be used within your BCS model. If you do use the LINQ 2 SQL class, and have class properties that are not defined within the BCS model you will get an error.

- taking this approach will help you later on if you want to bring data in from 2 different sources and present as a single External Content Type.

- I have just found it easier and nicer to use my own class :) It will help with Unit Testing and other code cleanliness that we’ll cover at a later date.

So add a new C# class to your BDCModel1 folder called Department.cs and add properties for each column of data you’d like to make use of with the BCS

public class Department
{
public int DepartmentId { get; set; }

public string Name { get; set; }

public string GroupName { get; set; }
}

8, Now we can write some code within our DepartmentService.cs class. Open it up and change the GetDepartments method signature to be:

public static IEnumerable<Department> GetDepartments()

9, Now we can write some LINQ 2 SQL to get our departments and return them, replace the line

throw new System.NotImplementedException();

with

DataClasses1DataContext db = new DataClasses1DataContext("server=localhost;database=adventureworks2000;uid=***;pwd=***");

            return from d in db.Departments
                   select new Department
                    {
                        DepartmentId = d.DepartmentID,
                        Name = d.Name,
                        GroupName = d.GroupName
                    };

10, Now we need to build up our BCS model to understand the data that is being returned by our method. Go back to your BCS model view and right click in the Identifiers section of our Department Entity. Choose to add a new identifier and give it a name of DepartmentId. With this identifier selected within your Entity you’ll see in the Properties pane you can see more information about it. Change the Type Name to be System.Int32

11, Before describing our data to our BCS model we need to create a return parameter. In the BDC Method details window use the parameters drop down entitled <add a parameter> to create a new one.

Set the Direction of this parameter to be Return.

There’s a bit of moving around between toolpane’s I’m afriad but this is the most logical way I have found of building up the BCS model

12, Now we want to go back to the BDC Explorer view. Expand the tree so you get to our Entity and Method and select the TypeDescriptor we have just created by adding the parameter. With it selected you’ll see we can edit it’s values in the Properties window. Make sure you have the following values set:

Name : DepartmentList
Type Name : System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1[[BdcModelProject2.BdcModel1.Department, BdcModel1]]
IsCollection : True

13, Right click on the DepartmentList node and choose to Add Type Descriptor

14, With this new Type Descriptor selected set the following property values:

Name : Department
Type Name : BdcModelProject2.BdcModel1.Department, BdcModel1
IsCollection : False

15, Now we need to build up each Type Descriptor for each column of data we want to be returned from our Department table. Right click on the Department Type Descriptor and add the following 3 TypeDescriptors:

Name : DepartmentId
Type Name : System.Int32
Identifier : DepartmentId

Name : Name
Type Name : System.String

Name : GroupName
Type Name : System.String

Our BDC Explorer tree should now look like this:

16, Now we need to create a MethodInstance element – this describes to the BCS what type of method ours is – for example whether it is a Finder, SpecificFinder etc

Click the Department Entity and view the BDC Method Details window. Use the MethodInstance drop down in the Instance section to ‘Create Finder Instance’.

With the instance selected set the following properties within the Properties window:

Default : True
Default Display Name : Department List
Return Parameter Name : parameter
Return Type Descriptor Name : DepartmentList

17, Now before you can deploy your model, check in DepartmentService.cs. Depending on the steps you have used to create your BCS model you may have accidentally created a second GetDepartments() method. If you have, simply delete the second one added and all will be good. (I’m trying to figure out the exact step that creates this duplicate method – will update when found).

18, Now we can build our project – and if it compiles OK press F5 to package it up and deploy it to SharePoint as a WSP.

Here’s the screenshot of our BCS External Content Type being used within the Business Data List Web Part

As you can see there are quite a lot of steps. The aim of BCS Meta Man is to compliment and build on the tools already within Visual Studio 2010. We’ll have a beta of BCS Meta Man ready the same time that SharePoint 2010 beta 2 ships.

In coming blog posts we’ll take a look at:

- creating a SpecificFinder and IdEnumerator method

- creating write back and update methods

- creating association methods

and plenty more! If you have any comments and feedback, especially on how you have been using the BCS tooling in Visual Studio please feel free to leave a comment.

<nick/>

[The information contained above is correct as of 01st November 2009. As of writing we are currently working with beta products and although we will do our best to update this post where necessary please note that by the time you are reading this some things will have changed]

BCS Shims – .NET assembly as a data source for Business Connectivity Services

Lightning Tools — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:06:31 GMT

One of the most powerful new things about the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) component of SharePoint 2010 is the ability to use a .NET assembly as a data source. This assembly is being termed a BCS shim. The Business Data Catalog was great in pulling data directly from a data source such as SQL Server – but if you wanted to do anything complex such as mashing data sources together the best approach was to go through a web service layer. With the BCS able to use a .NET assembly directly now this web service layer can be removed – although if you want to move in a WCF/Services direction the BCS will happily talk to these end points as well, more information on that in a later blog post.

There are two ways in which you can build your BCS shim – using the tooling that comes with Visual Studio 2010 or BCS Meta Man. With the tooling that comes with Visual Studio you still have to understand quite a lot of the underlying BCS model in terms of methods and TypeDescriptors and you also need to write all of your C# code. BCS Meta Man will do all the grunt work for you so that when you drag and drop a table on the design surface it will generate all the BCS model for you and also all the C# code you require. You can then just press F5 and it will deploy straight to SharePoint for you. BCS Meta Man really does build on top of what Microsoft and the Visual Studio team have done for us.

For now we’ll take a look at the tooling that comes with Visual Studio 2010 from Microsoft…

When you create a new BCS Model in Visual Studio 2010 it generates a HelloWorld type BCS model for you. In a later post we’ll go through step by step how to create a custom BCS shim, but for now let’s just take a look at the environment we have to work in and any interesting points. You’ll see on the design surface of Visual Studio the area where you can create your BCS External Content Types and where Microsoft have nicely generated one for you

If you click on your Entity, take a peek at the BDC Method Details window:

This is where you need to define your input and output parameters, as well as create Filters and MethodInstance attributes. Finally check out the BDC Explorer

This window gives you a great overview of your whole model from the root element, through to your LobSystem, methods and TypeDescriptors. This is where you can create the TypeDescriptors that will describe to the BCS the structure of the data being returned by your C# methods. It may take you a while to build up all the TypeDescriptors, and this is where you’ll need to understand the BCS in a bit of detail, but the good thing is once you have done it for one of your methods, you can Copy and Paste a node of TypeDescriptors from one method to the next – just remember you could be copy and pasting errors! :)

So what about the actual files that make up our BCS model and our C# code

The highlighted ones are what we are interested in. BdcModel1.bdcm is our BCS model class. It is a DSL diagram that translates the shapes we drop on our design surface to define our External Content Types to the BCS XML that SharePoint 2010 needs.

Each Entity (or External Content Type) that we define on our DSL will have a respective Service class ie our Entity is called Entity1, so our Service class is called Entity1Service.cs.

In this class you’ll find static methods that will be called by our BCS model when BCS methods are executed. In general you’ll have a separate method for your Finder, SpecificFinder, IdEnumerator etc. If you right click on your BCS entity on the design surface and create a new BCS method you’ll see that within Entity1Service.cs it automatically creates the method stub for you. Now you need to write your C# code for that method, and define in your model using the TypeDescriptors the data being returned.

Generally your BCS EntityService class is going to return collections of objects and Entity1.cs is simply a class that describes our object – just some public properties with getters and setters.

Once you have written all your code, and defined your BCS model you can press F5 and Visual Studio will package everything up for you into a WSP and deploy it to the SharePoint server that you picked when you created your project. If you want to debug at all you can place a breakpoint in your code and it will enter debug mode allowing you to step through your code and iron out any issues. If Visual Studio will not hit your breakpoint you may well have a problem with your BCS Model, or Visual Studio is having issues attaching to the correct SharePoint process.

As we are writing C# code the possibilities of where we can get our data and what we can do with it before it gets to the BCS and SharePoint are endless. This makes the BCS so much more powerful that the Business Data Catalog.

It’s also interesting to note that BDC + BCS, and External Content Type and Entity are still somewhat interchangeable terms within the UI. Things certainly should become more standardized as we move to RTM.

In a post coming shortly we’ll do a complete end to end walk through of how to create a custom BCS entity and the necessary BCS model to present your data to SharePoint.

If you’ve any questions or thoughts on the above text please feel free to leave a comment and get the discussion started.

<nick/>

[The information contained above is correct as of 30th October 2009. As of writing we are currently working with beta products and although we will do our best to update this post where necessary please note that by the time you are reading this some things will have changed]

Permissions Management Webinar with DeliverPoint

Lightning Tools — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:15:55 GMT

DeliverPoint Permissions is a permission management tool which provides reporting on permissions as well as providing huge timesaving on common tasks such as Transferring and Cloning permissions.

Brett Lonsdale will be presenting our new Permissions Management tool online in a free to attend webinar. We'll be demonstrating the Permission reporting functionality, how to clone user permissions, transfer permissions as well as delete dead accounts.

The presentation will last around 30 minutes and will be held on Tuesday 10th November at 11am Eastern (4pm GMT).

To register for the event, please email sales@lightningtools.com

You can also see an online video of the product in use now and download a trial of the product from www.deliverpoint.com

SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services

Lightning Tools — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:00:22 GMT

We are so happy to be able to talk about our plans for SharePoint 2010!

As you may have heard the Business Data Catalog is being renamed the Business Connectivity Services for SharePoint 2010. This brings with it not just a new name, but some great new features and functionality.

Lightning Tools aims to be the centre of all BCS knowledge and tooling so we’re happy to give you a link and screencast to our new tool that will support you in getting started with the BCS easily:

BCS Meta Man

We’ve also published a number of articles to introduce you to a number of new BCS concepts. We’ll be updating and adding to these over the coming weeks so keep an eye on this blog and our twitter account to get updates.

BCS Support Area

As always if you have any questions about this exciting new SharePoint release and Business Connectivity Services please email us at support@lightningtools.com

New Product - DeliverPoint

Lightning Tools — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:09:00 GMT

Lightning Tools has always designed its tools and web parts to provide solutions to its customers whilst ultimately saving them valuable time. This was the case with our very first product ‘BDC Meta Man’ as well as more recent products such as the Lightning Conductor Web Part. Our suite of products save you time by providing solutions that do not require you to learn or develop in languages such as XSL or XML.

Lightning Tools has a new offering known as DeliverPoint which has been a well-known product within the SharePoint community since SharePoint 2003. Hours of time is spent by IT Professionals and Support staff every day troubleshooting issues within SharePoint that could simply be a permissions issue. Time is spent manually trolling List Items, Lists and Site Permissions throughout very extensive Site Collections or Web Applications. Unfortunately this is a very manual task which is why it is so time consuming.

DeliverPoint provides Permission reporting across your Site Collections so that you can see exactly what permissions a specific user, SharePoint group, or domain group might have on a particular item. It doesn’t just stop there, common tasks IT Professional are issued involve cloning permissions from one user to another, transferring permissions or deleting users. Again, in large deployments this manual task can take hours or if not days.

DeliverPoint was developed originally by SharePoint MVP’s and well known developers Todd Bleeker and Paul Schaeflein. Lightning Tools acquired this product to compliment the tools we already provide and to further develop DeliverPoint for SharePoint 2010.

Bill English and Brett Lonsdale discussed the sale at the Best Practice conference in Washington DC in August this year.

A demonstration of the product can played from the following location: http://www.deliverpoint.com/Portals/0/CBTs/QuickStartGuide/player.html

Click here to download a Trial Version.

Lightning Tools will also be demonstrating the product on booth 1102 at the SharePoint Conference on the 19th October 2009 in Las Vegas. Please follow us on twitter @lightningtools for the demonstration start times. We are also providing a webinar on the third Wednesday of every month at 11am Eastern 4pm GMT.

For more information please email sales@lightningtools.com

Lightning Conductor Web Part 1.0.0.9

Lightning Tools — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:02:17 GMT

The Lightning Conductor Web Part has undergone some improvements. The main improvement is performance. We have tweaked the Web Part and the Tool Pane to offer better caching of data returned and caching of the crawled Lists, Content Types and Sites within the tool pane. This Caching can be switched on or off depending upon your requirements. Depending on the number of Site Collections, Sites, Lists it could take a while to display that within the data source section below:

To save this delay each time you change the Web Part properties, we can now cache the results by using a checkbox in the toolpane as per the below screenshot.

We listen to our customers no matter how big or small the feature requests are. Many people wanted the ability to switch on or off the column headings within the data grid. This is now available through a check box in the web parts toolpane as well as you can see from the above screenshot.

Within the Web Part we have always displayed the Edit Control Block menu on the title column providing users with the option to click the hyperlink to open an item, or choose the options from the ECB such as View Properties or Edit Properties. This is something that not everyone liked, so this is now optional.

Another improvement is the ability to set the column width for each of the columns displayed, this gives you more control over the display of the returned items. You can see the setting in the below screenshot.

Many other improvements have been made to the web part display since we have built our own alternative to the original SPGridView.

SharePoint and SAP made easy

Lightning Tools — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:21:02 GMT

We’re always looking for new solutions to make it easier to get your data useable in SharePoint through the Business Data Catalog. SAP has always been a difficult area for us due to the deep knowledge required of the SAP platform before you can even start thinking about the BDC side of things. Previous solutions have required additional tools, web service wrappers and all kinds of other things.

When Simplement came to us and said that with their solution getting SAP data into SharePoint was as easy as working with Microsoft SQL Server we were all ears! And after a demo of their solution which was put together with BDC Meta Man we were amazed at the possibilities this could bring. Making SAP available through MS SQL Server not only opens up SAP data to SharePoint, but all of your general .NET applications without developers having to learn about SAP.

The best thing to do is watch a brief screencast of it in action:

For more information check out our SAP and SharePoint page.

Business Connectivity Services Workshops

Lightning Tools — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:03:19 GMT

As you may have heard the Business Data Catalog is being renamed to Business Connectivity Services for SharePoint 2010. As well as a name change there are also a lot of new features and functionality available to you to integrate your Line of Business systems with SharePoint.

Lightning Tools is offering a 3 day workshop to review your implementation of the Business Data Catalog, bring you up to speed on the Business Connectivity Services and finally plan a route of attack for upgrading and making use of the new functionality available to you.

Day 1

Review implementation of Business Data Catalog
Detail functionality utilized and where

Day 2

Presentations, demo's and walk-through's on Business Connectivity Services

Day 3

Plan how to utilize BCS new functionality
Upgrade considerations from existing BDC usage

Day 1 and Day 3 are based around a number of worksheets which will be completed during the days so you have information to refer to once the workshop is over.

This workshop is run onsite so you can get the maximum benefit from our BDC and BCS expertise.

To express an interest in this workshop and get more details please send an email to sales@lightningtools.com. We expect dates to fill up fast so if you are interested please let us know asap.

SharePoint Forum Knowledge Base Feature released

Lightning Tools — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:12:25 GMT

On Thursday last week we posted the new version of the Lightning Storm Forums that contain the Knowledge Base functionality we previewed here.

We’ve recorded a short screen cast to show the knowledge base in action here:

We also added some new functionality and fixes:

Tagging is no longer case sensitive
Rich Text box now has immediate focus upon replying to a topic
Sticky topic icon changed

You can download a free trial of the web part from the here.

Building a Company Knowledge base with the Lightning Storm Forums Web Part

Lightning Tools — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:35:22 GMT

On Wednesday 30th September 2009 @ 11am Eastern, 4pm GMT , Nick Swan will be demonstrating the new features of the Lightning Storm Forums web part and building a company knowledge base.

Attendees will be given the opportunity to ask lots of questions.

To download a trial of the Lightning Storm Forums Web Part, please visit: http://www.lightningtools.com/lightning-storm-forums-for-sharepoint/default.aspx

To register for the event, please email sales@lightningtools.com.

Webinar: Aggregating across Site Collections with...

Lightning Tools — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:37:37 GMT

...Absolutely no programming required.

On Thursday 24th September 2009 at 11:00am Eastern, 4pm GMT Brett Lonsdale will be demonstrating the Lightning Conductor Web Part and how to rollup SharePoint lists items and documents from across multiple site collections without the need of writing any custom XML or XSL. We'll spend 30 minutes exploring some useful scenarios such as displaying documents and meta data in one location as well as how to design the best view of your data using 3 of the available vew options with the LCWP.

If you are interested in attending the free demonstration, please email sales@lightningtools.com to receive joining instructions.

An opportunity will be given at the end of the 30 mintues for any questions that you may have. A fully functional trial version of the web part is available from: http://www.lightningtools.com/pages/lightning-conductor-web-part.aspx

Lightning Storm Forums – Knowledge Base Preview

Lightning Tools — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:51:23 GMT

We’ve been really happy with the customer comments and feedback we’ve had about the Lightning Storm Forums. If you’ve been using any of our tools or web parts in an interesting way – please do let us know about it!

One of the features people like in the forums is being able to mark a topic as having been answered. This turns the forums into a real Questions & Answers type area. Once a question has been answered though, as time drifts by it will slowly move down the topic list as more questions are added – sometimes making it hard to find again.

Well, the Lightning Storm Forums now has a solution to create a Knowledge Base repository – this is a feature we are in final testing with so hope to have available to you within the next week or so… Here’s an example of it in use:

1, Someone has asked a question on the forum about best practice for web part deployment:

(click the image for a larger view)

The third reply is a good one, and so we’d like to keep this information in a place that’s easy to access – our Knowledge Base. We can add it to the Knowledge Base by clicking on the highlighted ‘Information’ icon at the top of the above screen shot.

2, Before committing the article to the Knowledge Base we may wish to edit it, so we show all of the topic’s posts in a single text box for you to do just this:

The first reply we had was a bad answer, so we can delete that text – then click on the ‘Add to Knowledge Base’ button at the bottom, and our article is created as a Web Part Page.

3, In the final image below you can see we have made use of the Lightning Conductor Web Part to pull the Knowledge Base articles in and display them just above the forums. This will help your users quickly find commonly asked questions and answers and stop them having to ask questions that have already been answered

Hopefully you like this feature – any feedback or further ideas please leave a comment or drop us an email. Keep an eye on this blog for news of when the new Knowledge Base functionality will be available!

<nick/>

Lightning Tools Support position

Lightning Tools — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:51:00 GMT

Lightning Tools is an expanding company providing SharePoint Tools & Web Parts to customers worldwide. We pride ourselves in offering exceptional customer service and products to a wide variety of organizations. As our customer base is growing, we need to expand our support team to be able to continue offering first class customer support across our product range and for the Business Data Catalog.

We are therefore looking to recruit an enthusiastic, polite, and well spoken individual with enthusiasm for Microsoft SharePoint. The role consists of liaising with customers via email, telephone and remote desktop support, as well as having the ability to learn our software and The Business Data Catalog.

Lightning Tools will encourage the right candidate to grow their skills and provide opportunities for learning and additional Microsoft qualifications.

Lightning Tools has two offices, Reading UK, and Anna Maria, FL. We are seeking to recruit at either location. If you are interested in the position please email brett@lightningtools.com along with your resume.

Strictly no agencies.

Best Practice Conference Washington 09

Lightning Tools — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:45:11 GMT

Lightning Tools was again a sponsor of the Best Practice conference this year which was held in Washington DC on the 24th August. Lightning Tools has sponsored every Best Practice conference so far both in the US and the UK.

This event as always was excellent offering a wide variety of Best Practices to consider when using SharePoint. Speakers such as Paul Culmsee, Ben Curry, Todd Bleeker and Andrew Woodward amongst many others provided excellent presentations and information when trying to get the best out of SharePoint. Lightning Tools co-owner Brett Lonsdale also provided a presentation on The Business Data Catalog and the best practices that you should consider when implementing the BDC.

These conferences from a vendors perspective are always very busy, but hopefully our team managed to speak and provide information to everyone that stopped by the Lightning Tools booth. If you were one of the few who perhaps we did not get a chance to speak with, please get in touch with us via sales@lightningtools.com

This time we had 50 copies of the new SharePoint 2007 developers guide to Business Data Catalog books to give away as the book launch. 50 copies were given to first come first served and we were delighted to give those to everyone who is considering using the BDC or trying to get the best out of it. You can order the book by following the link on our home page. Below you can see one of the lucky people to get their hands on the book 2 weeks early.

Lightning Tools also ran a competition to win one of two High Definition Flip Camera's. To win one of these prizes you needed to be spotted wearing a Lightning Tools sticker somewhere around the conference. Mark Elgersma from Mindsharp was happy to choose the winners by chasing after anyone displaying the Lightning Tools sticker. Below you can see one of the lucky winners.

So, now we are looking forward to the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas where you will be able to find Lightning Tools again. If you are there, please stop by to chat or see a demonstration of our newest products.

Lightning Storm Forums 1.0.0.10 release

Lightning Tools — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:55:28 GMT

We’ve just posted a new version of the Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint today. This isn’t a major release, but does contain a couple of new features and bug fixes. Here are the notes from the release document of the changes made:

Anonymous users cannot rate posts anymore - stops access denied issues
Bug fixed to update post count on front forum view after post deleted
RTE localization for German, French, Dutch & Japanese included
RSS feed fix for IE6 users
Version number added in web part properties toolbar

You can download the web part from the usual place – any feedback or ideas always welcome:

support@lightningtools.com

<nick/>

Using SalesForce? Check out our free BDC integration ebook

Lightning Tools — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:18:57 GMT

We are using SalesForce ourselves at Lightning Tools so it was an interesting project seeing how to integrate it with SharePoint 2007 and the Business Data Catalog. We’ve just published a free ebook that walks through how to do it in detail by creating a custom WCF web service layer. We’re also giving away the source code and we are hosting a dummy web service for you to even try out. You can get all the details you need from here:

SalesForce and the Business Data Catalog

We’ll be doing some more integration walkthroughs soon. If there’s a particular web service you’d like to see integrated please let us know.

<nick/>

BDC Meta Man Web Edition : How we did it?

Lightning Tools — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:06:52 GMT

We are very proud of our new product BDC Meta Man Web Edition - the latest in our line-up of great SharePoint tools and web parts - we are even more excited that the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog asked us to write an article on how we did it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/07/06/how-we-did-it-bdc-meta-man-web-edition.aspx

For more information on BDC Meta Man Web Edition check out the free trial and the screencasts available on our SharePoint Tools page: http://www.lightningtools.com/bdc-meta-man/web-edition.aspx

Using Twitter? Keep up to date with the latest Lightning Tools news by following us at http://twitter.com/lightningtools

Forum for SharePoint – case study

Lightning Tools — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:12:21 GMT

Gizmo have been happy users of the Lightning Storm Forums for a number of months now. Troy Cox was kind enough to spend a few minutes answering our questions on how they SharePoint and the forums:

Lightning Storm Forums case study

BDC Meta Man Web Edition Price Change

Lightning Tools — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:03:22 GMT

As anybody will know who has been involved with building and selling software products, pricing is the most difficult part to get right - and it seems this time with BDC Meta Man Web Edition we got it wrong! We described this as being an 'Enterprise Tool' and therefore expected only large companies would be interested in buying it. Of course if you describe something as 'Enterprise' there is a misconception that you can charge more for it!

We've certainly had lots of interest in BDC Meta Man Web Edition - but the sticking point has been the pricing. When we go back and analyze the sales of the original BDC Meta Man this makes sense:

1, Most companies do not need more than 4 licenses.

2, Only 2 or 3 people actually understand the structure of the database or system the organization wants integrated through the BDC

So with those two points in mind we've decided to drop the price of BDC Meta Man Web Edition to $3,000.00 for new customers. If you are an existing customer who has purchased BDC Meta Man please drop us an email and we'll be able to offer an even better deal.

SharePoint Forums – attach files

Lightning Tools — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:34:55 GMT

We’ve just pushed out a new version of the Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint that I know a few of you have been waiting for! :)

The single new bit of functionality in this release is the ability to attach files to forum posts. Once you’ve downloaded and installed/upgraded the WSP solution you’ll need to make sure you have the option in the web part toolbar properties enabled:

This is here incase you are using the forums on an anonymous internet site and you don’t want just anybody attaching files!

When this option is enabled, after the Rich Text Editor you’ll see a link to ‘Attach File’

When you click on this it will change to a file upload control which allows you to select the file you want to add to the post:

Now when the post is made you’ll see below the main post text the attached file will appear. Currently we only allow one file attachment per post.

You can get a free trail of the forums from the forum homepage.