Rakesh's SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 End-Users Features Overview

2011-08-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

Hello Everyone,

SharePoint 2010

Microsoft is re-positioning SharePoint as “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise & the Web”
Value Pillars

Connect & Empower People – Allows the user to work the way they want, device they want
Cut Costs With a Unified Infrastructure – Integrated Platform, SharePoint Online , Multi-Tenancy
Rapidly Respond to Business Needs – Composite Application Tools for the Power Users

The “Pie Chart/Workloads” Has Changed – Value Proposition has been changed from the IT Solutions (SharePoint 2007) to End User and Business Solutions (SharePoint 2010)

Share Point 2010 – Sites

An ability to engage employees, partners and customers in an effective manner, both inside and outside the firewall (Aka. Document libraries, lists, team sites, department portals, intranets, and extranets)
Adoption of Office 2007 Ribbon UI – Context based UI, Familiar Office experience, Pinned to the top of the page even when user scrolls the page, Ribbon UI is extensible and can be customized
AJAX Everywhere – SharePoint 2010 is based on the Microsoft.NET 3.5 Framework, OOB support for the AJAX to reduce the page refresh and post back
Web Dialog Framework – Reduce the Navigation for quick data entry within same context.
Rich Theming – Import themes from the PowerPoint. It’s easy to apply corporate PowerPoint template branding to the SharePoint.
Easy Web Editing – Site Authoring made simple, Live preview and rich In-place Add/Edit including images, text, SharePoint lists, and web parts (No need for work around using Content Editor Web Parts).
Web Parts Improvements – End users can insert web parts within content blocks on the page as well as create lists on-the-fly
Multilingual User Interface (MUI) – Dynamically flip the languages, Ribbons, Menus, and Site Navigation are MUI aware, Site owners can configure the fields within lists to support MUI, End users can submit translations when they enter the content.
Audience Targeting – Support is based on the rules-based audiences, SharePoint groups, or distribution-list memberships. Virtually any individually item within the site – documents, events, custom list items, and even entire sites can be targeted to specific audiences, OOB rules can be defined from the User Profile Service Application.
Work anywhere using the Office Web Applications – Read-write office web access of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote
Easier location with the Multi-Lingual UI – Switch in runtime between languages
Go offline with SharePoint 2010 Workspace – Next Version of Microsoft Groove, It’s a rich desktop client application to take entire site contents, including custom lists and line of business data, and supports integration with InfoPath forms for richer data entry and data validation.
Improved Standards Compliance and Accessibility -Publishing Standards – XML and XHTML 1.0 for the cross browser support (32-bit IE 8, IE 7, Firefox 3.x are Level 1 Browsers. 64-bit are Level 2 Browsers, Most notable omission from this list is no Support for IE 6), and Accessibility Standards – WCAG 2.0 AA Compliance for disabled people.
Improved Data Validation and Constraints – Each item in list or library supports item level and list level validation, Can configure a column in the list to be unique.

SharePoint 2010 – Communities

An ability to find and interact with other people within an organization quickly and easily while leveraging both formal and informal networks. SharePoint 2010 is a true Social Computing Platform for the Enterprise by empowering employees to work together seamlessly. (Aka. MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter for the Enterprise)
Improved My Sites – Social Networking Hub, Enhanced Profiles, Tabbed Interface
Social Tagging using Tags, Tag Cloud, Ratings
Knowledge Mining using Keywords or Tags
Rating and Tagging Everywhere – Improve Feedback, Rate and Tag anything a person can see (People, pages, sites, documents, videos, posts, wikis etc.)
“I Like It” – Feedback option like Facebook “Like” feature.
Micro blogging using Note Board and Status Updates, Staying up to date with the activity feeds, Note boards are available for use on an individual user’s profile page, a tag’s page, and organization’s page.
Social Bookmarking (Delicious for the Enterprise) to share the internet bookmarks, Replaces the “My Link” feature of the SharePoint 2007
Silverlight based Organization Browser
Improved Wikis, Blogs, and Discussion Forums – Rich Text Editor with Office Ribbon UI to improve lightweight authoring experience.
Improved Blogs (Individual and Team Blogs) – Improved Navigation, Sort posts by category or date, AJAX based interface
Improved Individual Blogs – Linked to the individual My Site, New blog posts are added to the Recent Activity section of My Site Profile Page, Can launch external blogging program such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft Live Writer for desktop editing experience.
Improved Wikis – Improved authoring experience – Support for Wiki Syntax, “Wikis Everywhere” approach – SharePoint Site is a collection of pages, unlike collection of lists or libraries in SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint 2010 – Content

The facilities for the creation, review, publication, and disposal of content including conforming to defined compliance rules for all supported types.
ECM for the Masses – “Content” in the SharePoint 2010 is the “Content”. All the terms like Document Management System (DMS), Records Management (RM), Web Content Management (WCM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), Rich Media Management (RMM) falls under one single umbrella – Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for the Masses.
Metadata Everywhere – Metadata managed by new Enterprise Managed Metadata Service and Terms stored in the Term Store, Taxonomies – Centrally Managed, Folksonomies – Decentralized and Unmanaged Metadata Tagging, Tools to automatically extract and promote the metadata, New Managed Metadata field type, Metadata can be mandatory field to make sure information is collected.
Enterprise Content Types – Enables the content type syndication (allow site owners to submit their content types) . SharePoint 2007 had Site Collection Level Content Types and SharePoint 2010 Expanded to the reuse across SharePoint Farm.
Unique Document IDs – Implemented as a Feature, Capability to specify unique Document IDs within Site Collection, Unique IDs embedded within URL can be used to retrieve the document regardless of where it moved with the site collection.
Document Sets – Implemented as a Feature,A capability to group documents into single entity. Can be versioned, initiate workflows, and manage metadata on the set of documents. Improve document library performance.
Content Organizer – Automatically organize documents based on metadata or content type rules
Digital Asset Management – New Audio and Video Content Types, Video/Audio streaming using Silverlight Media Player, Ability to create training and learning sites, Users can directly add the images to the pages from the hard-drive or specifying web site URL without pre-uploading them to the central image library.
Records Management – Implemented as a Site Collection Feature – Ability to activate records management feature at the site level, In place records management to designate individual document in the library as a record or official file, Advanced Routing scenarios
Web Content Management – Improved Web Authoring using Ribbon UI, In Place Editing, and Reduction of Page refreshes, Site Owners can use Web Analytics Service to monitor the usage of their sites.
List Scalability – Support for the large lists and document libraries
SharePoint can now leverage the SQL Remote BLOB Storage (RBS), which allows documents to be stored in remote storage location rather than a SQL table, Supported only in the SQL Server 2008 R2.

SharePoint 2010 – Search

Locate relevant content across SharePoint lists, sites, and sources such as file shares, Web sites, or line-of-business applications.
Improved Search Experience – Suggestions for search terms, Did you mean Suggestion Web Part, Related Queries Web Part, Subscribe to RSS feed of Search Results, Bookmark for Search Results for later, Configure the Alert to rerun the search query at the scheduled intervals or notify the user via SMS or email.
Query Suggestions are mined from the Search Logs
Support for advance Query Syntax – Wildcard Search (e.g. “d*” will search everything starts with d)
Standard Search Hit highlighting in the search results
Improved Search Results Drilldown Capabilities using the Refiners, Refine content results by using tagging and metadata (document tagging or social tagging)
Improved People and Expertise Search
Phonetic Search – Find Nick Names and phonetically incorrectly spell names
Improved Search Relevance – Improved search based on usage, history, social behavior, and tagging
FAST Integration – Advanced Conversational and Visual Search Experience, Includes thumbnails and previewers, Deep Refinement with count, Search administrators can control the result presentation including promotion and demotion of the results, best bets, and visual best bets.
Large list of OOB Search Web Parts

SharePoint 2010 – Insights

Business users need the ability to not only rapidly deliver and share information but also to turn raw data into actionable results.
Allowing you to make better decisions faster and viewing data, people, and systems effortlessly in order to make those decisions.
Business Intelligence features can be activated in the any SharePoint Site, No longer limited to specific Site Template.
PerformancePoint Services – First class citizen in SharePoint – Full integration with SharePoint Security and Administration as well as storing all the content in the SharePoint lists, Advanced insights and analytics using scorecards, dashboards, visualizations, and KPIs.
Dashboard Designer – Allows IT Pros and Power Users to create rich and dynamic dashboards from various sources like Excel, SSRS, SSAS, Excel Services, Visio Services, and SharePoint lists, One-click dashboard publishing to the SharePoint.
Improved Excel Services – Excel 2010 Client supports 64bit client option to enable large spreadsheets, spreadsheets are no longer limited to the Excel’s 2 GB memory limitation, New data visualizations such as Sparklines, Excel Services are improved to support new features, Extensible using the new SOM APIs, REST APIs, and JavaScript Client Object Model.
New Chart Web Part – Supported data sources are web parts, SharePoint lists, BCS, and excel services.
Visio Services – New in SharePoint 2010, Visio Documents treated as first class document type, render Visio diagrams and charts on the web, apply filters on the Visio data within SharePoint, SharePoint will index Visio contents for fully searchable content. Leverage published excel spreadsheets, SQL Server databases cubes, and SharePoint lists as data source for Visio Visualizations.
Web Analytics – New in SharePoint 2010. Reports on site traffic, inventory, and how search is being used. Can be configured at the Web Application or Single WCM site. New OOB Web Parts for web analytics
SQL Server Reporting Services Integration – First class citizen in SharePoint, At this moment, it integrates with only SQL Server 2008 R2 (Kilimanjaro). SQL Server 2008 R2 will release in the same timeframe as SharePoint 2010.
PowerPivot for SharePoint (Project Gemini) – A powerful data analysis tool in the SQL Server 2008 R2, Process massive amounts of data in seconds, Load large data sets from virtually any source

SharePoint 2010 – Composites

Empower business users to create compelling applications in an IT-supported manner
Enhanced end-user tools for automation and design – Tools for the end-users and IT to write either no-code or minimal-code approach to integrate existing investments into SharePoint.
BCS for LOB data exchange – Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is evolution of the SharePoint 2007 Business Data Catalog (BDC), Supports both read-write interaction with the LOB data
External Content Types and External Lists using SharePoint Designer – Virtual SharePoint lists (Data stored in the LOB and UI in SharePoint) to read-write data, real-time synchronization with the LOB systems
InfoPath Form Services and Custom Workflows – New in SharePoint 2010 is the Site Level workflows (SharePoint 2007 workflows were document libraries and lists based)
Workflow Visualizations – Workflows execution plans can be monitored through Visio-based Visualizations to indicate the stage or status of the process or flowchart
Silverlight Web Part – Easily integrate Silverlight XAML applications within SharePoint
Reusable Workflows in the SharePoint Designer 2010 – Unlike SharePoint 2007, where SharePoint workflows were tied to the specific document library or list, reusable Workflows built in the SharePoint Designer 2010 can be exported from one SharePoint Site and imported into another Site.
Integration of Visio 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Visual Studio 2010 to improve Workflow authoring lifecycle – Allow end users to create workflows in Visio 2010, export them to SharePoint Designer 2010 to add business logic and business rules
Access Services – New in Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010, Publish Access based applications to the SharePoint to access the tables, forms, reports, and macros within SharePoint.
Interoperability – SharePoint data can be accessed through XML Web Services, SOM APIs, Client Object Model APIs, and REST interface. Additionally it provides OOB WSRP v1.1 consumer web part to display WSRP contents in the SharePoint.

References:
http://nikspatel.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/sharepoint-2010-end-users-improvements-and-new-features-overview/

SharePoint 2010 Top 10 Features

2010-11-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Features of SharePoint 2010

1. Social Media Investments – status integration with my sites, newsfeeds, my network, all that social media work around the my site. This was totally hush hush. I expect to see this area really expanded through the public beta in terms of best practices and community awareness. I hope to see some real effort from the community around helping establishing how to take advantage of these features. There are a few mentions in the blogosphere including John Anderson’s summary from the SPC session on Social Computing, I’m sure there will be more as the presentation and bits become available. Also make sure you get on the RSS of the SharePoint Enterprise Social Computing Blog

2. External lists – this was a great demo during the keynote. Showing a SQL table with contact information subsequently shown in a SharePoint external contact list, taken offline in the SharePoint Workspace, and contact objects shown in Outlook. BDC becomes BCS (Business Connectivity Services) with even much easier systems integration. There’s some documentation on MSDN for creating an external list. Also follow the Business Connectivity Services Team Blog

3. Large lists – the list throttling was shown off in SharePoint 2010, but the real list sizes showing real scale and control from the farm administrator was impressive. This was definitely used by the competition in the previous version to suggest that SharePoint didn’t scale. Despite the ability to scale to 5 million items in a list in the 2007 version, the 2000 item limit per view was often suggested as a limit for the list due to poor use by end users of the features such as indexed columns, limiting the views or using folders. Now with multi column indexes, and better control over item limited views, you can ensure that the queries are optimized and the list throttling and viewing will be better managed for performance of the server and the list. The happy hour controls is a happy medium for those needing to break out to do queries that are not the best. The SPDevWiki has some of the throttling screenshots and link to the ITPRO sneak peak video. Watch the keynote video demos that Arpan does.

4. Better Network Differencing & SharePoint Offline in SharePoint Workspace – I stopped by the SharePoint workspace booth, and I think the biggest, best innovations are in the differencing algorithm between the client and server as well as offline (closer?) experience of SharePoint. It’s still far from the 100% offline browsing experience, that may be a pipe dream with what can be done with webparts and search. But now we get lists, and external lists offline as well as what we had before. The peer to peer is still there, but the SharePoint uses are much more core to the product. The licensing model pushes this tool mainstream with Office 2010 deployments. What’s it missing… you gotta know: Blogs, Wikis, Pages… Of course you can get Blogs RSS feeds in Outlook. So really it comes down to Wikis and Pages. SharePoint Workspace Team Blog

5. High Availability/ Disaster Recovery Innovation – While I can’t give this area a 10, I do give it a B for effort. While replication is obviously a gap. (I know you tried.) The now built in to be mirroring aware, and the removal of fault tolerance of the services such as scaled out indexing will make it TONS easier and more reliable to backup. The configuration based backup is huge too. If you’re not a SharePoint 2007 admin you don’t realize how crazy the backup and unreliable SSP backup/restore was. SharePoint Solutions Blog on the 2010 Config Backup/Restore as well as Powershell with Screenshots on Disaster Recovery for 2010

6. Unattached Recovery – I think it’s pretty big deal that the product team decided to invest in the ability to recover from a restored database. I remember asking for this pretty much every version. So I do have to give them big kudos for hearing me and others around the ability to recover out of the database. The UI is in central admin. This was shown in the IT Pro sneak peak video, but I wasn’t able to clearly talk about what they had to do to support this. Essentially there is now an API for recovering data out of a database that isn’t in the farm. This is huge for pulling data out of a snapshot, and really reduces the need for a recovery farm, while I don’t think it fully eliminates that need due to discovery, but that’s another blog. SPDevwiki has some screenshots and TechNet now has articles on the Topic of Unattached 2010 Recovery. Illia Sotnikov gives us good overview of the evolution of the 2010 Backup/Recovery features

7. Admin Insights through the Logging & Usage database, and dev dashboard – The logging database with published schema! Thank you! That’s awesome. The ULS logs were such a pain, definitely looking forward to seeing all the right stuff getting logged and throttled into a database that does know what filling up drive with pure chattiness means. (I know that was a recent fix as well.) Those types of things do matter! The developer dashboard, ok, I’m over it. Call it developer, that’s fine, but we’ll benefit from it too! The dev dashboard is pure awesome. It’s like turning on debugging. I’d recommend setting it to “on demand” for Intranets. Making it easy for support to troubleshoot complaints on a portal page, or collaboration sites. Why not? For most environments I’d suggest turning it to “on” for dev, and “on demand” for test. On the internet you do likely want to keep it off. (Use STSADM or powershell to toggle the setting.) Better to have people convinced the slowness is them or the wire, not the page or the server. It would be over most heads of the people browsing an internet page anyway who would want to blame your server or SharePoint. Phil Wicklund – how to enable Dev Dashboard, Bob Fox has a what is Developer Dashboard, the SharePoint 2010 Dev Sneak Peak Video has a great demo of it.

8. Service Applications – The service oriented architectures and the buzz words of what SOA has become get a huge boost in SharePoint 2010. I’d like the search from the central portal, the profiles from the social media farm, the taxonomy and meta data from the ECM environment, and analysis and access services from the Finance deployment. As farms have become more specialized in large enterprises so have the expertise of those that run them. The one off custom farms that may end up departmentalized, don’t have to be limited in their services. They can get the richness of the global indexing and not have that be redundant indexing. Serge van den Oever SSP is dead, long live Service Applications, Spence Harbar has Service Applications Model Overview, and Andrew Connell’s New Service Application Architecture

9. SharePoint Designer Enhancements like portable workflows, and granular delegation – I didn’t hear the buzz I was expecting to about SPD during SPC. The huge innovations in SPD are exactly addressing the feedback that they were asked to implement, but only the SPD fans heard it. Portable workflows is huge, so is that ability to have people use SPD in the way you want them to. Only want them to use the FREE, yep still free SharePoint 2010 is free, tool for workflows, fine. Only want the design team to use it for design, that’s cool. The NDA kept us from telling you that SharePoint Designer really makes some big moves in the right direction around portability, control, and delegation. The same areas, that I thought it needed most. Let alone the even further flexibility of further integration, and BCS integration. SharePoint Designer Team Blog

10. Sandbox Solutions – now solutions built from the SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio are all .WSP. Great to see that consistency, but beyond that now SharePoint administrators can control the resources consumed from these client deployed sandboxed solutions which don’t require the admin to deploy. While in the past SharePoint administrators needed to deploy any solution, this option, yep it’s an option, allows you to throttle the system resources and allow those who own/administer sites to deploy solutions. The delegation and control is there. I think we’ll see much more best practices from more usage of sandboxed solutions, but now custom farms can still run out of the box software.

Rakesh...

Creating a Solution Package(.wsp) in 5 Steps

2010-05-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

For those who are new to the SharePoint solutions and features I would recommend to try the SharePoint Solutions Generator, which is a part of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions. It is a windows stand-alone application that converts your existing SharePoint web site into the solution package and creates a Visual Studio project for you to use.

What I personally don’t like in the automatic tools is that they always hide some part of the job they are doing behind the scenes. In this scenario you can’t really control and sometimes understand of that is going on. So, today I would like to blog about of how to manually create the SharePoint feature containing the list, how pack it into the solution package and finally deploy it to the production server. Everything will be done without any use of Visual Studio or other tools (only Notepad++).

So, let’s start!

Step 1. Folders

First, create the folder structure for the solution. I used MySolution but you can give a name whatever you want. Two folders were created beneath MySolution - source and bin. First is for the compiled package, second – to keep the feature and the customized list. I use the same file structure for the feature as in SharePoint - one folder per feature. Check out your SharePoint features hive at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\DiscussionsList and see how it’s organized.

In the source folder I made the feature folder called MyList and 2 subfolders inside - List Templates and Messages. In the end you will have something like this:

Step 2. Building a Feature.

Here we create our feature based on the SharePoint discussions list. Go to MyList folder and create a file feature.xml, where we reference 2 files, first – list manifest MyListManifest.xml and the second – schema.xml which is describing the list metadata. And don’t forget to change the GUID of feature Id with your own!

feature.xml

Title="My Feature"

Description="This is my feature containing a list"

Version="1.0.0.0"

Hidden="FALSE"

Scope="Web"

DefaultResourceFile="core"

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

Copy the original schema.xml file from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\DiscussionsList\Discuss folder to the Messages folder, and you have a list schema to start from, MyListManifest.xml we’ll create manually in the ListTemplates folder –

MyListManifest.xml

Name="Messages"

Type="108"

BaseType="0"

OnQuickLaunch="FALSE"

FolderCreation="FALSE"

SecurityBits="12"

Sequence="999"

DisplayName="My List"

Description="This is my custom list based on the discussions list"

Image="/_layouts/images/itdisc.gif"/>

What is important here is that the Name attribute must have the same name as the folder where schema.xml is placed, Messages, as SharePoint will look for the schema.xml file at that location!

After the end of this step you have 3 new files as seen on the picture

Step 3. Building a Solution Package (.wsp)

SharePoint Solution Packages (wsp ) provide a great way to distribute all your customization in just one flask and the creation of the .wsp ain’t so painful operation as you may think, I would say it is easy as hell! Everything starts from the traditional solution manifest .xml file in the Source folder:

manifest .xml

SolutionId="EC2EFD73-DBA2-4c0e-9C18-C8FC43F72E6C" >

Here, we reference our Feature.xml file that we had created before at the Step 2, and as you may guess it’s a good way to replace the the SolutionId GUID with something brand new J. The next that should be created is the data definition file (.ddf). It’s a simple text file with the building instructions for the makecab utility because the .wsp package is nothing more than a cabinet file with the .wsp extension. (If you rename .wsp or .stp file to .cab you’ll be able to see its contents). Let’s create a wsp.ddf in the Source folder:

wsp.ddf

.OPTION Explicit

.Set DiskDirectory1="..\bin"

.Set CabinetNameTemplate="MyListSolution.wsp"

manifest.xml

; These directory names (DestinationDir) are used for the folders creation under 12\TEMPLATE\Features

.Set DestinationDir="MyList\ListTemplates"

MyList\ListTemplates\MyListManifest.xml

.Set DestinationDir="MyList\Messages"

MyList\Messages\schema.xml

.Set DestinationDir="MyList"

MyList\Feature.xml

In this file we set an output folder for the compiled package..\bin, its name MyListSolution.wsp and we tell makecab to include 4 files (marked in red) and create 3 folders at the deployment phase (in blue). Now it’s time to build everything into a single file, but before we do that I create a build.cmd file in the Source folder with some lines to facilitate the building process

build.cmd

@setlocal

@pushd.

@cd %~dp0

makecab /f wsp.ddf

@popd

@endlocal

Here I reference the wsp.ddf file with processing instructions which I created before. After you run it your solution package will appear in the bin folder:

Step 4. Solution deployment.

So, the solution package has just been created and the last thing that is left to do is to deploy it to our production server. I always like then the script is doing my job, so I put 2 .cmd files into the bin folder to deploy and retract my.wsp package so I don’t have to deal with stsadm utility from command line.

DeployMyListSolution.cmd

@setlocal

@pushd.

@set PATH=C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN;%PATH% @cd %~dp0

stsadm.exe -o addsolution -filename MyListSolution.wsp

stsadm.exe -o deploysolution -name MyListSolution.wsp -local

@pause

@popd

@endlocal

RetractMyListSolution.cmd

@setlocal

@pushd.

@set PATH=C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN;%PATH% @cd %~dp0

stsadm.exe -o retractsolution -name MyListSolution.wsp –local

stsadm.exe -o deletesolution -name MyListSolution.wsp

@pause

@popd

@endlocal

After the solution is deployed you can activate the feature in the Site features menu of you site and start using the new list!

Step 5. Using the feature.

Before our custom list can be used the feature containing it must be activated within the SPWeb scope.

After activation is done your custom list will appear on the site’s create

Creating a MOSS 2007 State Machine Workflow

2010-04-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends,
Below is creation of state machine workflow

This will actually be a short series of posts covering the following topics:

1. Concepts and planning
2. Creating InfoPath forms
3. Developing the workflow
4. Deploying the workflow

Before you get started, you’ll need to make sure you’ve downloaded and installed the latest Office Server SDK (which comes with the Visual Studio workflow templates for SharePoint).

Business Case:
State machine workflows are good at automating processes that change between different states (or statuses) throughout the lifetime of the workflow. They have a defined beginning and end state, but the behavior in between those two points can vary based on inputs.

In this example, I’ll show a quick state machine representing a proposal creation process.

Let’s say Acme Widgets uses a proposal process to quote prices and sell its goods.

1. Roger, the salesperson, prepares a proposal, which must then be reviewed by the sales manager, Sheila.
2. Sheila may either approve the proposal to submit to the customer, or she can kick it back to Roger for modifications.
3. If Roger has to modify it, he does so, and then sends it back to Sheila for approval.
4. Once approved, Roger submits the proposal to the customer and awaits the outcome.

The customer can do one of three things:

Accept the proposal

Reject the proposal

Request modifications to the proposal

A graphical representation of the process looks something like this

The colored bands in the diagram represent the “state” of the workflow at a given point in time. This concept will be important when we actually design the workflow.

Side note: If you don’t do it already, I’d highly recommend doing a conceptual flow chart (similar to the one above) for your workflows. It doesn’t take long and offers clarity for you throughout the development process.

Note that the ability to go “backward” in the workflow is one of the factors that will determine whether you choose to implement a state machine workflow instead of a sequential one.

Planning

Based on the flow chart that I created, I can easily see what InfoPath forms I’m going to need to create for the various steps in the process.
Association Form. Ok, this isn’t represented in the flow chart, but I know I’ll need to create one to set any association-specific information for my workflow.
Initiation Form. This will be the one that is filled out when the workflow is first initialized.
Review Form. This will be the form used by the proposal reviewer. It needs to have the option to approve the proposal or to send it back to the creator for modifications. In either case, the reviewer should have the option to add comments that will be written to the workflow history list.
Modification Form. This form will be used by the salesperson to comment about any changes made to the proposal when re-submitting it for review. I can probably use the same InfoPath form as the initiation form here.
Pending Customer Form. This form will be used to specify the outcome of the submission of the proposal to the customer. The possible options here are to send the proposal back for modifications, mark that the customer rejected the proposal, or mark that the customer accepted the proposal.

Benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

2010-03-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

Hello Guys,

Below are the benefits of MOSS 2007

Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
Connect people with information and expertise.
Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

About Content Query

2010-03-04T06:04:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone,

Content Query:

We can use a Content Query control to link to pages or other items that are displayed based on a query that you design. For example, if you are presenting articles in an online news site, you could add a Content Query control to your site's Welcome Page layout so that new articles are highlighted on that page. You can build complex queries by using the Content Query field control. For example, you can specify which sites in your site collection to query, which lists to use, and what audience to target. You can also filter queries based on lists or libraries metadata.

We can add a Content Query control to a layout page in two ways:

· We can add it directly to the layout page and configure it. When you do this, any page that uses the layout page will display the results of the query.

· We can add it as a Web Part to a Web Part zone. When you do this, authors can modify the query or delete the Content Query control.

Convert MS Excel to SQL Server

2010-03-03T19:54:00.000-08:00

Converting Excel database spreadsheets to a MS SQL Server database provides a far more structured, more repeatable approach for business critical processes. Excel spreadsheets provide infinite flexibility, but at the cost of bad data, and the cost of managing a distributed application that is intended for just one or a few users. SQL Server database supports well-structured data, and repeatable, high quality data and workflow processes, with unlimited number of concurrent End Users. The good news is that PCA can migrate your Excel spreadsheets to MS SQL Server, and make your Excel Application more structured, while preserving the original functional integrity of the original MS Excel spreadsheet.

Comparison of MS Excel to SQL Server:

	MS Excel	SQL Server
Workflow	None (Email)	Process-flow defined
Concurrent Updates	No (Single User)	Yes (Multiple, concurrent Users)
Security	One password fits all	Role-based privileges
Version Issues	High (file data stamp)	None
Audit-ability	Low (date and email comparisons)	High (full audit trail)
Data Integrity	Low (somewhat constrained)	Highly constrained
Data Capacity	Limited	Unlimited
Data Structures	Flat: 2-dimensions	Relational: 3-dimensions

Advantages of Data View Web Part(DVWP)

2010-02-05T13:18:00.000-08:00

It has been posting interesting articles about Data View Web Part (DVWP).
I know a great deal about Data View Web Part and there are numerous solutions I posted here which were created with it (Blog archive SharePoint Lists and Libraries, Outlook Style KPIs).

We can use Data View Web Part to pull data from subsites

We can use Data View Web Part to aggregate data from more than one list

For more details check her post, or attend one of the online workshops about DVWP at End User SharePoint.

Advantage: This is very important for Windows SharePoint Services users since you do not have Content Query Web Part in WSS. By using DVWP you might be able to aggregate and present information in very interesting ways.

Problem: Although DVWP can aggregate data from subsites you would have to pre-configure all the sources. In case you add a new site you will need to ad it to your data sources. (I presume it might not perform very well when multiple sources are used).

Conclusion: No matter how hard you learn, when it comes to SharePoint, there is always something new to learn. Keep your eyes open!

Creating a SharePoint Site

2010-01-25T15:46:00.000-08:00

To create a SharePoint site, you must be a member of a site group that has the Create Subsites permission. This permission is included by default in the Full Control permission level. If you don't have the necessary permission, contact your server administrator.

On the File menu, point to New, and then click Web Site.
In the Specify the location of the new Web site box, type the location where you want to create the new site, including a name for the site.

For example, you might type http://My_Server/My_Site as the URL of your new SharePoint site. By default, Office SharePoint Designer 2007 suggests both a location and a name for the new site that are based on the site most recently opened. You may want to change either the location or the name, or both.
In the leftmost pane, click the category of template that you want to create.
If you click SharePoint Templates, the list of available templates is retrieved from the server. At this point, you may be prompted to enter your user name and password to log on to the server.

The list of SharePoint site templates is retrieved from the current server. When you connect to another server, you may see more, fewer, or other templates, depending on which ones the server administrator has made available.
In the center pane, click the template that you want to use to create your site.
If you want to add the new site to the current site — as folders in the current site, and not as a separate site — select the Add to current Web site check box. This check box is available only when you already have a site open.
Because this option applies the selected template to the current site, you can use the option only if no other template is already applied. For example, you cannot add a new site that you create from the Team Site template to a site that was created from the Blank Site template. In such a case, the only way to apply a new template is to delete the site and then re-create it based on another template.
If you want to use encrypted connections, select the Use Encrypted Connection (SSL) check box.
Click OK.
If you have chosen Import Web Site Wizard in the General category, the Import Web Site Wizard opens. Remember that the Import Web Site Wizard uses the Publishing feature, which cannot copy or move SharePoint content such as lists or libraries. Therefore, you cannot use the wizard to import a SharePoint site.

The new site is created on the server.

Building and Deploying Solution Packages

2009-12-29T12:39:00.000-08:00

Hello Guys,

First let's be clear on exactly what a Solution package is. Note I'm using 'Solution' with a capital S in this article to distinguish between what we are discussing here and the general idea of a technical solution built using SharePoint. A Solution is a package of SharePoint items for deployment - in physical terms it is a cabinet file (.cab) which is given the extension of .wsp to differentiate it from standard .cab files. Other articles on this blog cover the idea of using SharePoint Features to deploy functionality, so let's also be clear on the relationship between Features and Solutions. In general terms, some of the tasks which cannot be done with a Feature alone but can be done with a Solution include:

Deployment of certain files to the filesystem, e.g. an assembly for workflow or web parts, custom files which will reside in the ‘12’ folder
Deployment of web part definition files (.webpart)
Web.config modifications e.g. the ‘SafeControls’ entry required for a custom web part
Code Access Security config modifications e.g. those required for custom web parts not running from the GAC

In addition to being able to do these things, Solutions can also contain Features. The way I think of it is that the Solution wraps the Feature. In actual fact, I always recommend that even if they don't need to be (e.g. we're not doing anything in the list above), Features are always deployed as part of a Solution. The reason for this is that the Solution framework takes care of deploying all required files to all Web Front End (WFE) servers in a SharePoint farm. This alone is incredibly useful in working towards repeatable deployments, and ensures your WFEs stay synchronized.

How Solutions are specified
The key file used to specify what a Solution package consists of is the manifest.xml file. Going back to my earlier post on deploying web parts, the manifest.xml file for that scenario looks like this:

<Solution xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" SolutionId="122C0F04-78B7-4d42-9378-6F8B4F93ADD1">

  <FeatureManifests>

    <FeatureManifest Location="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart\feature.xml" />

  FeatureManifests>

  <Assemblies>

    <Assembly     Location="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart\COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.dll" 

        DeploymentTarget="GlobalAssemblyCache">

      <SafeControls>

        <SafeControl Assembly="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart,
COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=9f4da00116c38ec5" 

                    Namespace="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment" 

                    Safe="True" 

                    TypeName="*" />

        SafeControls>

    Assembly>

  Assemblies>

  <DwpFiles>

    <DwpFile 

     Location="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart\COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.webpart" 

      FileName="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.webpart" />

  DwpFiles>

Solution>

This is assuming the web part is being deployed to the GAC - for this illustration this is a simpler scenario than deploying to the web application's bin directory, where Code Access Security (CAS) policy would also be required. Effectively, the manifest specifies that the Solution package consists of the following:

a Feature with a header file named 'feature.xml'
an assembly for deployment to the GAC named 'COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.dll'
an entry in the SafeControls section of the application's web.config file, specifying all types in the specified assembly should be treated as safe
a web part definition file named 'COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.webpart' - this will be deployed to the web part gallery on the site

Importantly, all these details in the manifest.xml file are only used by SharePoint when the generated Solution package is deployed. They are effectively the instructions which say "go and get this item from the .wsp file and put it here". The actual process for generating the .wsp file is another task.

Building Solution packages
There are 2 options for building the actual package - build it manually using makecab.exe, or use an automated solution - there are several community-developed tools/techniques available. Since it's always good practise to understand what's actually happening in such processes, we'll cover how to do it manually here.
The first step is to write a .ddf (Diamond Directive File). This is a set of instructions for makecab.exe on how to build the folder hierarchy inside the .cab file. For my web part example, my file looks like:

.OPTION Explicit

.Set CabinetNameTemplate="COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.wsp"  

.Set DiskDirectory1="Package"

;***

manifest.xml

;** this directory name is used for the folder name under 12\TEMPLATE\Features, so should

;** match up with what you want to call the feature!

.Set DestinationDir=COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart

elements.xml

feature.xml

.Set DestinationDir=COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart

WebPart\COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.webpart

WebPart\COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.dll

;***

This file tells makecab.exe to do the following:

create a .cab file named 'COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart.wsp'
put the 'manfest.xml' file at the root of the hierarchy
put the 'elements.xml' and 'feature.xml' files in a subfolder called 'COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.WriteToFileWebPart'
also put the 2 other files (with extensions .webpart and .dll) in this same subfolder, but that makecab.exe should look for these files in a subfolder on the main filesystem called 'WebPart'

This instructions file is then passed to makecab.exe with the following command-line command:

D:\SolutionDeployment\Development\COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment>"C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Cabinet SDK\BIN\MAKECAB.EXE" /f
COB.Demo.WebPartDeployment.ddf

Couple of things to note here. At the command prompt we have ensured the current directory is the directory where all our Solution files are kept. This ensures that our relative references in the .ddf file above can be resolved. We pass the /f parameter to indicate we are passing a directives file, and also pass the location of this file.
Assuming all the files/references are OK, this results in a .cab file with a .wsp extension which will be created in a subfolder under the current directory called 'Package' (the folder will be created for you if it doesn't exist). We now have a Solution package which can be deployed to another SharePoint server. But first let's take a peek inside - this can be done by temporarily renaming the extension to .cab. You should then see something like:

SharePoint Interview Questions

2009-12-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends,

Below is the link for SharePoint Interview Questions. Please go through it.

http://it.toolbox.com/wiki/index.php/Sharepoint_Interview_questions

Thanks & Best Regards,
Rakesh

Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007

2009-11-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hello Folks,

Planning and implementing a collaborative extranet environment using SharePoint 2007 brings with it a unique set of challenges that you as a SharePoint administrator must overcome to be successful. Primarily, you want to provide SharePoint sites for your users to collaborate with customers, suppliers, and partners, but you have to be sure that proper security is maintained. You've probably decided that you want to keep extranet user account data stored separately from internal user data, but who is going to manage those extranet users, and how will these user managment activities be controlled and audited? What about requests from extranet users for new SharePoint sites? How will requests for new extranet sites be processed and subsequently provisioned?

The solution to the challenges you are facing is our new Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007 product. ExCM comes in two versions - Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

•ExCM - Standard Edition provides you with a suite of tools to Simplify SharePoint 2007 extranet user access and management. See the ExCM product page for more details.

•ExCM - Enterprise Edition allows your users to submit a request when he or she would like to have a new SharePoint 2007 site provisioned. You can easily associate custom workflows with the new site requests, asking for approval prior to site creation. Once a site request is approved, ExCM - EE will automatically provision the site for you using any SharePoint 2007 site definition you have specified.

I'm happy to announce that ExCM - Standard Edition is now available for download from new SharePoint Solutions Software site.

Resources for SharePoint Developers

2009-10-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

Hello,

SharePoint Developer Introduction for .NET Developers

http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

SharePoint 2007 Videos and Webcasts
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa940989.aspx

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/

Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint 2007 (NEW)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx

SharePoint Practice and Guidance
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx
http://www.codeplex.com/spg

Interview Questions on Sharepoint

2009-10-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

This are the some of the interview questions on SharePoint

1. Overview of Project?

2. MOSS 2007 Workflows experience?

3. MSCOE work

4. Describe last Project you did

5. Your role in the Project?

6. Most significant recent Projects in .NET technology

7. Windows services vs WCF

8. What is Service Endpoint?

9. What is ASMX vs. WCF?

10. What is View state Object?

11. A) Have you worked with Master Page?

B) How to define Master Types, How to Access Master page properties in content pages.

12. ON a content page, how do you put Master page?

13. What is a Strong Name? And its significance?

14. What is GAC?

15. Where do you find GAC info?

16. Have you worked with Generics in C#?

17. What is an Abstract class?

18. What have you done in SharePoint?

19. Have you worked with Features in SharePoint? Why features are used?

20. Where are the Documents being created in SharePoint?

21. Which events are handled? What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous events?

22. How you handled sessions and why?

23. What are Caml queries?

24. What is a web part?

25. In .NET, what is User Control?

26. What is the difference between web part and user control?

27. What are the main building blocks, when you create a custom field control?

Why we use custom field control, advantage over web part? How custom field helps in customization?

28. Have you worked on JavaScript?

29. Do you know the declaration syntax of Arrays and classes in JavaScript?

30. Which versions of SQL Server have you worked on?

31. Worked with Integrated SQL Reporting Service with MOSS?

Reg: Configuring and Implementing SSL in SharePoint

2009-09-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone, You can get the information regarding the implementation and Configuring from the below link. http://www.isaserver.org/img/upl/spskit/5installcaandssl/5installcaandssl.htm

Configuring Secure Socket Layer in MOSS 2007

2009-09-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

Hi,

A SharePoint 2007 development can get quite complex depending on the business case and requirements of your customer. Last year I have worked on a few SharePoint 2007 solutions. During the development I have noticed that it is extremely helpful if you know how the customer's infrastructure will look like. It will help you even more if you will configure your development environment to resemble the customer's infrastructure as much as possible.

One of the things you should definitely consider is working with anonymous access and SSL support from the very beginning if applicable because they have major impact on the custom code you might need to create. Examples of the things you should be considering are Regular Expression for url parsing and privileges elevation if required to access some of the SharePoint properties. Finding out that your solution doesn't work in the real environment might be painful – especially if it's after it all has been deployed.

Setting up anonymous access in SharePoint 2007 is really straight forward and can be done by turning on two checkboxes. It is a bit more difficult to set up a working SSL certificate on your development machine though. It's all get difficult if you don't have the access to a server issuing certificates and all you want is a dummy certificate for development purposes only.

Let's begin with creating a new SharePoint 2007 Web Application which will use SSL:

The most important here is setting up the port to 443 and enabling SSL support. Configuring these settings correctly should automatically create the correct load balanced url beginning with https and ending with :443.

Now we have the Web Application, we are ready to create and link the SSL certificate. I have assumed you don't have access to a certificate server and you need to create an SSL certificate by yourself. To do so, you will first of all need the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools. It contains a tool called SelfSSL which will create and link the dummy SSL certificate. After the installation you are almost ready to run the tool. The last detail you need to have is the ID of your Web Application which is required by SelfSSL. You can obtain it quite easily by running the IIS Manager > Properties of your Web Application and then opening the Logging Properties dialog.

The Web Application ID is the long number following W3SVC and in our case is 75208739:

Now we have all the details we must run SelfSSL by calling from the command prompt:

SelfSSL.exe /S:75208739 /T /Q

The SSL certificate will get automatically created and linked to our Web Application which will allow us to work with SharePoint through SSL.

Summary
Making your SharePoint 2007 development environment resemble the customer's production environment turns very useful during custom development. It allows you to debug your solution earlier and much more accurately. Furthermore you are able to test your deployment procedure much earlier in your development process what will spare you some unpleasant surprises afterwards.
Configuring anonymous access and SSL support if applicable isn't very difficult and covers the most common development issues. It is therefore worth making an integral part of your SharePoint 2007 development environment initiation.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Cancel reply
Your email is never shared.
Required fields are marked *

Name *

Email *

Website

Allowed tags:

Exchange Server 2009-09-01T10:56:00.000-07:00 Hi Everyone, I need some information regarding Exchange Servers in SharePoint. Regards, Rakesh.