SharePoint Solutions Blog

Updated: Building a SharePoint 2010 Service Application #sp2010

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:57:00 PDT

A few weeks back, I wrote a series of three articles on the topic of building SharePoint 2010 Service Applications. Today, I have updated the source code for these articles to include Powershell cmdlets for provisioning, retrieving and updating the demo service application from the command line.

The three articles and a link to download the source code solution can be found on the SharePoint Solutions' community site:

Part One – The Service Application
Part Two – The Service Application’s Admin Interface
Part Three – The WCF Service Endpoint
Part Four – The User Application Page

Take 2: Lists as Native SQL Server Tables in SharePoint 2010? #spc09 #SP2010

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:25:00 PDT

Last week, while at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, I wrote a blog post on being disappointed that SharePoint 2010 does not seem to include a critical feature promised by Bill Gates and Tom Rizzo in their keynote speech at last year's (2008) SharePoint Conference.

The feature promised was a one-to-one relationship (as needed for specific applications) between a SharePoint List and a native database table (SQL Server, Oracle, etc.). I explain in my first blog post why I think this is an extremely important feature to have.

Turns out that this feature IS included in SharePoint 2010! It is just that it did not receive the level of coverage in this year's keynote speech that I was expecting based on the expectation that Microsoft built up in last year's keynote speech. So, I missed it even though I was sitting in the audience during last week's keynote.

I discovered that the new feature exists (and truly looks outstanding) after getting back home and starting to watch some of the recorded breakout sessions that I didn't get a chance to attend.

The specific new features that enable this are named External Content Types and External Lists. These two new features fall into the overall category of the new Business Connectivity Services feature-set of SharePoint 2010.

The way this works is that you can now create (using SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010) External Content Types which are really just a definition of an external database table (or web service). Once an External Content Type is defined for the external database table, an External List can be created (using the SharePoint 2010 browser UI, SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010). The External List behaves just like any first-class List in SharePoint 2010. Anything you can do with a native List in SharePoint 2010 (workflows, permissions, views, etc.) can be done with External Lists.

But, the data that is displayed and stored for an External List is not stored in the SharePoint 2010 content database. The data in the External Lists lives in the external database table - and, only there. Therefore, if it is updated by a non-SharePoint application (think an ERP system or CRM system for instance), the data that is displayed in the SharePoint External List will update immediately.

This is totally different from the way the MOSS 2007 Business Data Catalog worked. In the MOSS 2007 BDC, the business data brought into SharePoint was stored in a List column(s) in the SharePoint Content Database. So, if the data changed in the external database, the values in the corresponding SharePoint List did not get updated immediately.

Futhermore, in the MOSS 2007 BDC it was not really possible to update data in the external database from within SharePoint. With External Content Types and External Lists in SharePoint 2010, all of that has changed. If you change a value of a column in a SharePoint 2010 External List, the new value is immediately written to the external database.

The last, but certainly not the least, important announcement is that External Content Types and External Lists are "baked-in" to SharePoint 2010 Foundation (the new name for WSS 4.0). This means that all of this goodness is now available to any organization that chooses to use SharePoint 2010, regardless of whether you are using a free or premium version of SharePoint.

Very exciting!

Job Opening: SharePoint Consultant - Solution Architect #spc09

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:31:00 PDT

If you are a SharePoint expert and you like working in a friendly, people-oriented environment, SharePoint Solutions is the place for you. A desire to work for a company that has a strong customer focus and high standards for quality of work is also important.

SharePoint Consultant - Solution Architect

We are seeking a SharePoint Solution Architect with previous consulting industry experience (e.g. Microsoft Gold Partner, Accenture, Avanade, MCS, etc.). This position is responsible for working with our consulting clients to understand their needs and help them architect solutions using SharePoint. One or more of the following approaches can be used in delivering consulting services to our clients: 1 - 2 hour web consultations using Live Meeting; 3 - 5 day Focused On-site Engagements; longer project-based engagements.

The successful candidate will have a minimum of 5 - 7 years of consulting industry experience and a minimum of 2 years full-time SharePoint consulting experience. Excellent communication skills and ability to present himself/herself professionally is a MUST for this position.

The position requires a minimum of 50% travel. While a few clients are open to remote consulting services to minimize travel costs, most clients still prefer face-to-face consulting. Ideally, the employee will relocate to our headquarters city, which is Nashville. However, we will consider candidates who live in the continental United States and are interested in the position but cannot relocate. All candidates must live within an hour drive of a major city airport to be considered.

Salary is commensurate with experience.

If you are interested in this position at SharePoint Solutions, forward your resume to careers {at} sharepointsolutions {dot} com. Or, if you happen to be attending the SharePoint Conference this week in Las Vegas, stop by our booth (#1021, adjacent to the Microsoft Product Pavilion) and talk to us about it.

Job Opening: SharePoint .NET Developer Course Author/Instructor #spc09

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:55:00 PDT

If you are a SharePoint expert and you like working in a friendly, people-oriented environment, SharePoint Solutions is the place for you. A desire to work for a company that has a strong customer focus and high standards for quality of work is also important.

SharePoint .NET Developer Course Author/Instructor

We are seeking an experienced SharePoint .NET Developer who also has the ability to author outstanding training course curriculum and teach professional developer students using that curriculum.

This position requires at least five years of full-time .NET development experience and at least three years of full-time SharePoint .NET development experience. In addition, a successful candidate will have excellent writing skills and be gifted at classroom teaching.

Through most of 2010, this position will be 100% devoted to authoring curriculum and teaching classes on SharePoint 2010. After 2010, the position will be split 50/50 between teaching classes and doing short SharePoint .NET development consulting projects.

The position requires a minimum of 50% travel. While authoring courseware, the employee will work from their home office and can live anywhere in the continental United States as long as he/she is less than an hour drive from a major city airport. When teaching classes the employee will be required to travel to one of our training locations in Nashville, Chicago, Dallas, Boston or Seattle.

Salary is commensurate with experience.

If you are interested in this position at SharePoint Solutions, forward your resume to careers {at} sharepointsolutions {dot} com. Or, if you happen to be attending the SharePoint Conference this week in Las Vegas, stop by our booth (#1021, adjacent to the Microsoft Product Pavilion) and talk to us about it.

Lists as Native SQL Tables in SharePoint 2010? #spc09

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:14:00 PDT

Even after today's keynote speech by Steve Ballmer and Tom Rizzo, I am wondering if this got included in SharePoint 2010?

I expected it to be one of the big announcements, but heard nothing about it. I also have seen nothing to indicate that it got added as I have played around with the Technical Preview version that we have had and were under NDA until today.

Why was I expecting this to be one of the big announcements? Only because at the SharePoint Conference in 2008 in Seattle it was promised at the keynote by Bill Gates and Tom Rizzo (the Director of SharePoint at Microsoft).

Why am I so anxious about this feature being included? The reason is that the guts of SharePoint (including document libraries) is built 100% on SharePoint List technology. And, it is the limitations of SharePoint List technology that has held back the possibility of porting thousands of applications around the world to SharePoint. What Gates and Rizzo talked about in 2008 seemed to open the door for the possibility for the bread-and-butter line of business (or vertical market) applications that are prevalent in industry after industry, to be ported to SharePoint.

Why would anyone want this to happen? Well, from a user perspective, in many organizations SharePoint and the Office client applications have been slowly but surely becoming the business application operating system - the way that Windows became the business application operating system many years ago. A big chunk of daily tasks now get done by rank and file users that are primarily using Office and SharePoint to get them done. Isn't the next logical step to port the line-of-business applications that they use to be native SharePoint applications in order to provide the best user experience?

The problem to-date is that there is not a one-to-one relationship between a SharePoint List and a native SQL Server table. Instead, there is a single (as in one) native SQL Server table that contains all of the list data for all lists in a SharePoint site collection. (In organizations that have SharePoint implemented in a single site collection, that means all field, row and list data is contained in a single SQL Server table.)

Most database-oriented people that have worked with SharePoint for a few years know that this is the case, but it is not something that is widely discussed and many newcomers to SharePoint don't know about this fact. So, just to drive this home, if you are in an relatively small organization that has say 75 sites in a site collection and an average of 6 lists in each site (task lists, announcement lists, links lists, etc, etc.) and an average of 60 rows in each list, that means that all of this data, a total of 27,000 records are all stored in a single SQL server table. Therefore if you assumed that the 450 lists in your site collection represent 450 SQL Server tables, you would have assumed wrong. All the rows for all 450 of these lists are stored in a single SQL Server table that just continues to grow and grow as you add more lists and rows.

Imagine what this SQL Server table looks like at a large multi-national corporation for one of their site collections? There might be millions and millions of records in this SQL Server table.

The bottom line to all of this is that SharePoint Lists are abstracted from the native SQL Server database. In other words, no matter how many lists you create and how many columns and records you add to them, all of that data is stored in a single SQL Server table that only SharePoint has the permission to write to directly.

Of course, this defies all of the rules of architecting fully normalized database structures. But, when SharePoint was conceived, Lists were not envisioned as being used just like relational database tables. The thought was that SharePoint Lists were just a better way to do everyday data tracking activities that users had previously relied on Excel spreadsheets for. Therefore a single table that is not normalized would be OK for SharePoint List data.

But now, the user interface of SharePoint has become so popular and the richness of the common SharePoint feature-set so powerful, that users are wanting more. Why shouldn't application developers be able to develop native relational database applications using SharePoint as the platform? Only one major reason that I can think of - SharePoint Lists are not available as native SQL Server tables that can support complex relationships, triggers and a host of other important functions that are needed to develop powerful database applications.

That gets me back to where I started. Is this feature (option to have native SQL Server table for a SharePoint List) really in SharePoint 2010 and I have just missed it? So far, I can't find it - and Bill Gates is now retired :( .

Important Update: New information related to this feature can be found in this new blog pos t. It definitely looks like the feature has been included in SharePoint 2010 - it just wasn't very apparent!

SharePoint Conference: Theater Sessions at Our Booth + Ipod Nanos

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:24:00 PDT

We will have our team and a large booth at the SharePoint Conference next week in Las Vegas. We've designed the booth this year with a mini-theater area (50" plasma, sound system, chairs, etc.) so that our experts can conduct short sessions on topics that we feel we have a special perspective on.

We plan for these sessions to be short (approximately 15 minutes) and on a very specific topic. So, if you are in the exhibit hall and want to take a break from swag hunting for a few minutes and see a quick presentation delivered by an expert on the topic, we invite you to stop by. Like I said, this is a "mini" theater, so don't expect a big area that will accommodate hundreds. We'll have a half-dozen seats available and then standing room for another 10 - 12 people.

You should be able to easily find us as we will be right next to the Microsoft Pavilion where Microsoft will have lots of individual stands demonstrating various features in SharePoint 2010.

Here is the schedule we are planning for right now:

Sunday Evening, October 18:

6:15 - 6:30, "Top 3 Best Practices for Deploying SharePoint on the Extranet"

6:45 - 7:00, "Easy SharePoint Extranet with Extranet Collaboration Manager"

7:15 - 7:30, "Outlook Email and SharePoint Integration with WISDOM Message"

7:45 - 8:00, "SharePoint Designer Workflow Series: Looping Through SharePoint Lists"

8:15 - 8:30, "Automating and Controlling Your Site Request, Creation and Permission Process"

Monday Afternoon, October 19:

4:00 - 4:15, "Souping up SharePoint for Document Management: WISDOM DMF"

Tuesday Afternoon, October 20:

4:00 - 4:15, "The New SharePoint Help Community Website"

Wednesday Afternoon, October 21:

4:00 - 4:15, "After One Year with MOSS for the Internet: Lessons Learned From sharepointsolutions.com"

Wednesday Evening, October 21:

5:45 - 6:00, "Expert Opinion: The New Workflow Features in SharePoint 2010"

6:15 - 6:30, "Expert Opinion: Impact of SharePoint 2010 on Extranet Deployments"

6:45 - 7:00, "Expert Opinion: Usability Improvements in SharePoint 2010"

In addition to these sessions, we will always be available (when the exhibit hall is open - which, unlike previous years, is most of the time) to talk and do one-on-one demos.

Finally, we will be giving away one of the new 5th Generation Ipod Nanos (the new one that comes with an integrated video camera) each day. All you have to do to get in on the drawing is come by the booth and let us scan your badge to enter you.

If you are attending, make sure to stop by and say hello! Looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference!

SharePoint 2010 Training is Coming!

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:26:00 PDT

In preparation for the SharePoint Conference next week, on our website we've outlined our plans for offering SharePoint 2010 training.

The short version of the story is that we have already started working on a full lineup of SharePoint 2010 courses that will be targeted at a variety of audiences such as: IT Administrators, IT Developers, IT Managers, non-IT Managers and non-IT Users.

Furthermore, one of the courses, "SharePoint 2010 Skills Upgrade and Planning" will begin to be offered in December (assuming the public beta of SharePoint 2010 is released sometime in November.)

This new SharePoint 2010 course will be offered 1 - 2 times per month at different locations around the US and online. It is being designed by, and will be taught by, our most seasoned SharePoint instructors/consultants. It will be targeted at IT Professionals and non-IT Project Leaders who will be responsible for planning out the SharePoint 2010 adoption strategy for their organization.

If you would like to be notified when we release new information about our SharePoint 2010 training classes (such as course outlines, dates, locations, etc.), I encourage you to visit this page and sign-up for an email alert.

We're getting excited about SharePoint 2010 and are looking forward to offering a new slate of classes!

WSS as a platform for public-facing, anonymous-access Internet websites

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:57:00 PDT

As I mentioned in a post last week, our public website is a MOSS-based site and we are celebrating its first birthday this month (We launched it on October 1, 2008. Prior to that we had a standard HTML website since 2003.). For the most part, we are very happy with our decision to launch our new site on MOSS.

Reality is that there aren't that many companies that can afford to pay the licensing costs to have their public Internet running on MOSS. The stated retail price for MOSS for Internet Sites is $41,134 per server.

So, if you are running a couple of load-balanced servers for your Internet site, you are looking at around 80k to license MOSS for Internet Sites for them. The only piece of good news here (financially speaking) is that this gives you unlimited anonymous user access - so there are no CALs to buy. (In case you are wondering, since we are Microsoft Gold Partner, we get our licenses as part of the Gold Partner program and pay much, much less than this - otherwise, we wouldn't be able to afford MOSS for our Internet site.)

So, what are you to do if you want a SharePoint-based Internet site? Well, it is not all that widely publicized, but several businesses around the world have figured out how to do this quite nicely with WSS only. And, more importantly, there are no (zero) SharePoint licensing costs if you do it this way.

You say, hold on now, there is no way that can be true! First, I don't believe that you can develop a really polished public site with WSS!

Well, I am not going to argue about this using words. Instead, I am going to point you to some examples that I think prove differently. All of these sites are built using WSS 3.0:

http://6sc.com/default.aspx (check out this page for how they did it)

http://www.zevenseas.com/en/default.aspx

http://www.nestle.si/default.aspx

http://www.acision.com/default.aspx

There are more out there, but these are four that I particularly like.

OK, if I have convinced you about the viability of developing a public website using WSS 3.0, what about whether or not I have my facts straight about the no-cost for licenses?

First, in case you don't already know, WSS 3.0 is a free add-on to Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. If you have Windows Server licensed properly, you don't have to pay anything else for WSS - period. This is a pretty commonly known fact so I am not goint to bother hyperlinking to any proof of it.

Second, there is a very popular and well-respected Microsoft (as in, employee) architect in New Zealand, Ian Morrish, who blogged about this in March of this year. Here is the link to his blog post: http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2009/03/06/Web-Content-Management-with-Windows-SharePoint-Services.aspx. Make sure and read the comments at the bottom of the post, because Ian says the following in response to a question about whether this is "legal" or not:

Ian says:

"It is legal. If you are using full SQL server then SQL Server must be per-proc licensed but the built in DBthat comes with single server WSS is free. If you want to authenticate Internet users then you only need the Windows Internet licence which is cheap compared to MOSS for Internet license."

The Windows Internet license he mentioned (its formal name is Windows Server External Connector license) is required (but, according to Ian only if you want to authenticate external users - which most Internet sites don't), but it is a Windows Server licensing add-on, not a SharePoint license. Again, as long as you have Windows Server properly licensed, there are NO additional licenses required for WSS in any scenario. WSS is truly a free add-on to Windows Servers.

I know at this point you are wondering what is the cost of the Windows Server External Connector license if it turns out I need it? Well, according to this page on Microsoft's site it retails for $1999 for Windows Server 2008 (scroll down towards the bottom to find it). This license is purchased per server. So, if you have a two server farm for running your public website and you want to use WSS as the platform, the retail license cost to get you there would be $3998. Furthermore, this will allow unlimited external users to access your website.

Now, I am not saying that WSS is as good as a platform for public websites as MOSS is. PLEASE, don't hear me say that! MOSS has some great features that make it very, very nice as a web content management system. WSS does not include these features at all. One of the biggest of these features is the publishing subsystem that allows you to decentralize content authorship for different portions of you website. It includes a robust approval system so that approver's can be assigned to review authored content before it goes live. WSS does not have this same level of functionality.

But, for those companies where MOSS is simply not an option due to the cost, it certainly appears that there is evidence that WSS 3.0 can be used successfully as an extremely low-cost platform for building Internet sites.

I'd say that right now WordPress is probably the most popular open source platform for building high-quality websites. If you thought WordPress is only for blogging, you thought wrong. There are thousands of websites around the world running on WordPress (here is a good example). I like WordPress a lot, but I think WSS 3.0 is a very capable website platform as well and would definitely evaluate both of them if I were setting out to build a new website.

Updating SharePoint Profiles from ASP.NET Profile Data

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:59:00 PDT

Becky Bertram has published a nice developer guide on how to update SharePoint profile data from ASP.NET profile data. I wanted to make sure our customer's saw this post, so here's a link:

Updating SharePoint Profiles from ASP.NET Profile Data

Nice article Becky. Thanks for posting it.

MOSS for Internet and 301 Redirects

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:54:00 PDT

We've been using MOSS for our public Internet site for SharePoint Solutions for almost a year now. We have a very broad range of products and services, and therefore our site is what I would categorize as "moderately" complex. It takes work every day to keep all of the content fresh, do a good job marketing our products and services, and enhance usability. If you are reading this and your title is Webmaster and that is your full-time job, you know exactly what I am talking about (regardless of whether you are using MOSS or Drupal or something else).

As you may know, MOSS 2007 is version 1 of the web content management features of SharePoint that really make SharePoint a viable platform for a public-facing Internet site. Microsoft had a previous product designed for this purpose, Microsoft Content Management Server, which was retired with the release of MOSS 2007.

We like MOSS 2007 as a content management platform for a public Internet site, but the fact that it is a version 1 product continues to be evident to us every day.

One example is its inability to natively handle 301 redirects. This may sound like something that is no big deal, but it is a very big deal if you are using MOSS for a public Internet site and care about searching engine optimization (SEO).

The reason is that if you change the URL to an existing page on your site, the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) will still have your existing page in their indexes and will therefore still display your old URL in their listings until they find and index the new page. If you want them to find the new page and index it properly, the best practice way to do this is by creating a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. This tells the search crawler that you have replaced Page A with Page B and that you would like for it to do the same in its index.

It is critical that the redirect is a type 301, not a type 302. A 301 is a "permanent" redirect, while a type 302 is a "temporary" redirect. According to the experts on search engine optimization (SEO), the search engines honor 301 redirects and will update their indexes accordingly, but they do not honor 302 redirects.

Getting back to MOSS and 301 redirects - there is no way to natively redirect one page in MOSS to another page and return a 301 permanent redirect status to the requestor (be it a human or a bot). Several people have offered up custom developed code to do this, but there is no consensus on whether any of these is really a good solution or not. Even if one of them is, it is still a hack to native MOSS to get a feature that really needs to be supported out-of-the-box in some user-friendly way because changing URLs is something that the average content manager is going to need to do quickly and easily from time to time over the life of a web site.

Interestingly, MOSS does offer a native and easy way to achieve a 302 temporary redirect. If you are using the Publishing Sites feature (which is what most MOSS public Internet sites use), you can enable a "Redirect Page" content type in your publishing pages libraries. This is an out-of-the-box content type, that will allow you to create a page that has a property that allows you to enter a URL to redirect to. From a live visitor standpoint, this certainly gives you a way to easily redirect from an old page to a new page. But, from a search bot standpoint, it doesn't do anything for you at all.

So, what is the solution? Well, first, I am hoping that something has been added to SharePoint 2010 to allow a content manager to create a 301 redirect from the user interface. Guess I need to add that to our list of what the community is hoping will be in SharePoint 2010.

In the meantime, the two different categories of solutions that I have been able to find are:

Use custom code to enhance your MOSS for Internet implementation to be able to return 301 redirects (here is one example), or
Use "URL re-writing" technology with IIS to accomplish this (for IIS6 here is an exampl e, for IIS7 there is now native capability to do this). This technology will allow you to set up a map of old URLs to new URLs and then it will return 301 permanent redirects to requestors.

In my mind, neither of these is a great solution given the fact that the whole idea behind a web content management system is to put the power to maintain the website in the hands of non-technical content authors and content managers. Option 1 requires programming, which these folks can't do. Option 2 requires access to the web front-ends and configuration of IIS-related settings, which these folks probably can't do and even if they could would not be given access too.

So, really what is needed here is an out-of-the-box feature to support page-level 301 redirects. Will it be in SharePoint 2010?.........................

New One-day, Business Data Catalog (BDC) Training Delivered Live Online

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:37:00 PDT

We've just launched a new one-day, live online training class about the MOSS Business Data Catalog. The course is named "BDC Fast Track - Mastering SharePoint's Business Data Catalog in One Day".

The curriculum that we use in this course is the same curriculum we have developed and refined over the last couple of years and use for a portion of our three-day, classroom-based "Objective: Integration - Using MOSS and the Business Data Catalog for Enterprise Application Integration" course.

The BDC Fast Track training class is designed to give students "just the BDC" and to provide it in an online, live format so that no travel is involved.

The class is taught by Paul Vaughn who is our specialist in SharePoint's BI and business data integration technologies. Paul has been teaching on these subjects for us for the last four years and has also been doing SharePoint BI and BDC consulting for numerous clients. So, if you take this class, you are guaranteed to be taught by one of the foremost BDC experts in the business.

The first class will be held on September 1. Then, we will be running it about every two weeks from then on depending on demand. The cost is $595.

Check out the course details and schedule!

Souping up SharePoint Document Management

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:18:00 PDT

Until SharePoint came along, organizations basically had two choices to manage their documents: proprietary document management software, like Documentum and Open Text (for those of us with deep pockets), and file servers (for the rest of us). But, since SharePoint emerged onto the document management scene in 2003, all of that has been changing rapidly.

There is no question that SharePoint has filled that critical gap in the area of affordable document management. Still, there are significant capabilities missing from the SharePoint document management feature set that growing organizations need, and that those using high-end proprietary programs don’t want to give up in their quest to lower costs.

Here are some basic features that SharePoint really needs in order to shine as a document management platform:

Easy navigation from within all of the Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, etc.) to open and save files in SharePoint document libraries. A tree-view type of browse dialog that pops up on “Open and Save” is really what is needed. That tree-view dialog should allow the user to locate the appropriate SharePoint document library - ideally in any SharePoint farm, site collection or site that the user has security rights to

Full integration of Outlook with SharePoint sites and document libraries, in order to support easy drag-and-drop storage of emails in SharePoint – including capture of metadata

Consistent dialogs for metadata capture when storing a document in SharePoint, regardless of the client program being used

Preservation of metadata and version history on documents when they are moved from one library to another (using drag-and-drop or copy/paste)

Support in Adobe Acrobat and Reader for opening from, and saving to, SharePoint libraries

Really, all of these features are about either A) ensuring that the document management system enables users that work with documents day-in and day-out to be very productive, or B) making sure that the data associated with the documents is accurate and complete. These are just two basic, fundamental objectives of a document management system that SharePoint struggles with out-of-the-box.

Wouldn’t it be great if these features could be added to native SharePoint at an affordable price? The good news is that a software company in Australia, MacroView Business Technology, has been working tirelessly since 2006 to bring these features to SharePoint in the form of a professionally developed and supported, 100% native add-in named WISDOM Document Management Framework (DMF).

WISDOM DMF lifts SharePoint 2007 to the level of the world’s leading players in document management systems. It adds all the missing features I listed above plus many others. And, a WISDOM solution is usually about half the price (or less) of a comparable Documentum, Interwoven, Open Text, Oracle or IBM solution.

We’ve forged a partnership with MacroView, and are now a U.S. distributor and integrator of the WISDOM lineup of products. To see what WISDOM has to offer, check out the overview video below and the WISDOM DMF product page and WISDOM Message (for Outlook) product page on our website.

Training – Whose Responsibility Is It?

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Spears) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:10:00 PDT

Think about these two questions for a moment: How did you get to your current position in your organization? How did you get to your current position in life? Seriously, stop and think about them for a moment before you continue reading.

You probably realized that your present position in your job and life is the result of the education you’ve received up to this point.

Where did you get the education that brought you to this point? It probably came from a variety of sources. Some of it was formal classroom education—elementary through high school and maybe even college. Some of it was things you learned from reading books, trade publications, and even blogs like the one you’re reading now. Some of it was gained by watching others. Some of it was learned through trial and error as you had to solve problems in your life or career.

Where do you want to go next? Do you want a new position within your current company? or perhaps in another company? Do you want more income? Do you want new challenges? In what other areas do you want to grow? Well, I’ve got some news for you…

What got you here won’t get you there! You reached your current station in your career and life because of your current education. If you want to move to some other station, you will need to advance your education first. It is rare that we are given the opportunity to advance to a position where we can learn as we go—we usually need to be “knowledged-up” beforehand. Knowledged-up is my term for learning as much as you can about something—it’s like getting loaded-up, juiced-up, powered-up, or tuned-up except with information. :)

Who is responsible to make sure that you’re trained for advancement in career and life? Well, it depends. It depends on who wants you to advance. If your employer wants to advance, or your employer wants you to advance in an area for the good of the company, then it is the employer’s responsibility. But if you are the one who wants to advance, then it is your responsibility!

I recently had the privilege of working with a gentleman who contacted us asking for a unique type of consulting. The organization he worked for had an opening for a SharePoint Architect and he wanted the position. His company hadn’t asked him to fill the role, he decided that was what he wanted. The company had needs too: someone with the knowledge and expertise to take that area of the company to the next level--the company didn’t have a need to move this individual into the position. Likewise, the company you work for probably doesn’t need you to move into a better position.

This client was already successful in his current position. That provided a good foundation for him, but he realized that what got him to his current position wouldn’t get him this new position. He needed to get “knowledged-up” on a number of things in SharePoint before he would be ready to step into this new position that he wanted. Because of his existing good foundation, he was able to spend a dozen or so hours in web consultations with some of our subject-area experts to fill in the missing information he needed to be qualified for this position.

Needless to say, he got the job. He told us, “Thank you for you and your team's help over the past few weeks! It put me over the edge in knowledge and confidence.”

What if your employer isn’t willing to seek educational opportunities for you and to pay for your education? This gets back to the question of whose responsible for your education. If you are the one who wants to advance, you will likely need to seek out your own educational opportunities. You may even have to pay for the education out of your own pocket. That’s what this individual did—he will make that up quickly though in the increased salary in his new position! It not only took him to a new position in his company, but also to a new position in his career and life.

What if your employer isn’t willing to give you time off for education? A few days of training can have a bigger impact on your overall life than a few days sitting on a beach during vacation. You may want to consider using a few vacation days to take a training class. Others may relax for a few days and then return to the same job, with the same salary, for several more years while you may take those same vacation days--spend them in a classroom, or even at home in an online class--and earn yourself a new position with a higher salary and exciting new challenges.

Do you need a new degree or specific subject matter education? In these economic times, organizations are more interested in what you can do help them solve particular business problems than they are in your general education. General business education isn’t bad, but businesses need people who can help them automate business processes, give them a strategic advantage through business intelligence, or help their teams collaborate more effectively. In most organizations this type of expertise is needed more than yet one more person with a masters degree. And the best news is this: it takes much less time and money to become proficient in a narrow subject area than in general business.

Where can you find quality education that will allow you to move to the next level? My suggestion, of course, is our training right here at SharePoint Solutions. If you’re looking to get started with SharePoint, you may want to consider our 3-day SharePoint 2007 Jump-Start or 4-day Applying SharePoint 2007 MOSS Core Features class. If you’re already using SharePoint, you may want to get “knowledged-up” in some specialized areas such as SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath, SharePoint Branding and Design, or SharePoint Business Intelligence.

If you’re short on both time and money, consider taking our 1-Day Online Business Data Catalog (BDC) Fast Track class or check out the free information in our SharePoint Workflow and SharePoint Extranet Resource Centers.

Regardless of your time or budget, you owe it to yourself to take control of your future and get the education you need. Who knows, after you select the class that is best for you, you may even be able to get your employer to pay for it! :)

New Free SharePoint Training Video Library

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:40:00 PDT

We've been working on putting together a free SharePoint Training Video library for a while now and as of today it is officially launched!

To start out with, we have six, 30 minute to 1 hour videos available. The videos are delivered by our expert SharePoint instructors and consultants. These training videos are more in-depth than many of the free screencasts that you might find on the Internet.

They are presented similar to the way we deliver modules in our classroom-based SharePoint training courses. Generally, they all include some lecture on concepts and then show detailed demonstrations. Of course, in our classroom courses, students also receive a comprehensive course manual, work through detailed hands-on lab exercises and get to ask their expert instructor all of the unique questions they have. So, these free training videos are not a replacement for thorough training in the classroom, but we feel that they may be a great place to start for a lot of people.

Our plans are to populate the library with different videos that will appeal to learners that have different skill levels and different roles within their organization. To start out with, we have at least one video available for each of these SharePoint experience levels: Just Getting Started, Intermediate, Advanced. We also target different videos to the following SharePoint roles: IT Manager, IT Administrator, IT Developer, Non-IT Manager, and Non-IT User.

All that is required to access the library is to register for it during the sign-up process. Once you are registered, you can watch as many of the videos as you want to and as many times as you want to. Since you will be registered for the library, you will get an email from us any time we add new videos to the library (this is a good reason you should give us a valid email address and add sharepointsolutions.com to your white list).

Sign up today and let us know what you think about the videos!

What are you hoping for in SharePoint 2010?: Public Request!

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:14:00 PDT

Seems like today is a good day to ask this question.

The reason is that today is the first day of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. And, the first official "sneak peek" of SharePoint 2010 will be given on Tuesday in a breakout session titled "Building Solutions on SharePoint: The Value Delivered Today, and a Sneak Peek at Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010 ".

The session will be given by our friend at Microsoft, Owen Allen, and his colleague, Arpan Shah.

One thing that I haven't run across anywhere on the Internet is a wish-list of features for SharePoint 2010 that was contributed to primarily by the public. (Someone else has probably tried assembling one, but I just haven't run across it yet).

Granted, it is probably way too late for a groundswell of public opinion that would cause any substantial changes to be made to the 2010 feature-set, but still, seems like it would be fun and potentially useful to have a public record of what the people are wanting! In fact, after the actual feature-set becomes known, I will commit to doing an analysis of what people were hoping for vs. what is actually delivered, and will publish the results on this blog.

So, give us your SharePoint 2010 wish list in the form of comments to this blog post. We will publish any comments that are not blatant rants or deemed offensive.

Let the people be heard!

P.S. If you think this is a post that others might want to know about and participate in, please Digg it with the linked image in the upper right corner. If you are not already a member of Digg, I believe you will have to create an account before you can digg the article, but that is a free and painless process. Also, if you are a twitterer, we would love for you to tweet out a link to this post. Thanks!

Why NOW is the Best Time to Get Started Developing SharePoint Designer Workflows

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Spears) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:52:00 PDT

Regardless of the size of your organization, you are certainly looking for ways to save money in these difficult and uncertain economic times. That’s one of the reasons SharePoint has remained extremely popular during our present economic downturn—companies are only investing in those areas they know will provide huge returns quickly.

One of the areas where SharePoint, even the free WSS (Windows SharePoint Services), can quickly provide very high returns for your company is in the area of no-code workflows created with SharePoint Designer. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. SharePoint Designer Workflows are Easy to Write

When I started college back in 1985 one of my professors told me that in five years all programming would be plain-English programming, “You’ll just sit down in front of your computer and tell it what you want.” Well, 1990 came and went and here we are 19 years later. If you’ve seen C# code, then you know that all programming isn’t plain-English programming.

Workflows written with SharePoint Designer are the closest thing I’ve ever seen to plain-English programming. Everything you add to your workflow—and most of the configurations—are just selecting things from drop-down boxes and lists. There is no complicated syntax to learn or lists of command and functions to memorize.

2. SharePoint Designer Workflows Can Be Written by the Business Users Who Are Close to the Business Process

Once your organization has identified a particular business process that could benefit from some automation, you will usually either hire an outside programmer to write a customized program, or make use of a programmer inside your company. These programmers are usually very costly to hire and employ—they are also usually far removed from the business process you want to automate.

For example, let’s assume that you work in your company’s purchasing department. When an employee needs you to order something, she fills out a paper requisition form and send it to you via inter-office mail. When you get it, you contact her manager for approval. If it’s over a certain dollar amount, you may also need to get the approval of manager’s manager. Once you’ve received all the necessary approvals, you order the item and then communicate the expected delivery information to the person who requested it. If the requestor wants an update on the status, they call you, you get the information, then you call the requestor back with the information. On top of all this, you periodically call the requestor to see if the item has arrived so you can take it off your radar for tracking. If it’s late, you’ll need to contact the supplier. There is a lot of communication and tracking going on in this scenario.

You realize that your job could be a lot easier—and you could do more important work—if this process of requesting, approving, tracking, and communicating could be automated. So your company contracts a computer programmer to write a system to handle all this. After a few good meetings this programmer will eventually be able to understand the technical mechanics of your process. However, she probably will never fully understand how this process affects the entire company and how it is a component of the culture of your organization—only someone close to the business process understands those things.

It would be so much better if you, as the business user who has the full understanding of this process, could be the one to also automate the process. Because Microsoft designed SharePoint Designer workflows to be a tool for information workers and end users to use to automate their business processes, you can take control of the automation process without bringing in a costly programmer that doesn’t understand the full ramifications of the process.

3. SharePoint Designer Is Now FREE!

So, how much would you pay for a program that allowed your business users to automate business processes in near plain-English? $299.95? That’s what you would have paid a few months ago. However, Microsoft recently made SharePoint Designer 2007 available as a free download. It’s no longer cost prohibitive to allow end users to have access to this powerful program.

To get started writing your own workflows, download SharePoint Designer 2007 for free now.

4. There Are Lots of Great FREE Resources on SharePoint Designer Workflows

Have you visited our SharePoint Workflow Resource Center yet? If not, you really need to. You’ll find lots of information here including whitepapers, recorded webinars and demos, links to our best blog posts on SharePoint Designer workflows, a sample module from on of our workflow training courses, case studies, and much, much more. You really owe it to yourself to spend some time browsing this resource center.

5. Instructor-Led SharePoint Designer Workflow Training Is Very Affordable

Although SharePoint Designer workflows are easy to write, it’s likely that new users will benefit from some training where they get hands-on experience with help from an expert instructor. After all, the best way to learn to write workflows is, well, by writing workflows. In our workflow class, students write very practical workflows that they can also use in their own organization for things like handling supply requisitions, reserving equipment, and routing forms for digital signature approval—with time limits.

We currently have two opportunities for instructor-led SharePoint Designer Workflow training:

Our most affordable option is the 5-day online class: Essentials of InfoPath and SharePoint Workflows. It’s only $1,495 and students can attend from their own desks at work or home with a morning session of live lecture, demo, and interactive questions and answer. The afternoon consists of lab exercises with instructors available to assist and answer questions. We still have a few spots open in this class for the weeks of July 27th and August 24th.

For those wanting deeper and more comprehensive training, we offer our 4-day classroom training class: Mission: Automation – SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath. This class is $2,395 but will go much deeper into what you can do with both InfoPath and SharePoint Designer workflows. We still have a few openings in our July 21st class in Dallas, TX; our August 18th class in Nashville, TN; and our September 15th class in Chicago, Il.

6. The Things You Can Automate Are Practically Limitless

Every business must have business process to function properly. It’s likely that a large number of those processes could benefit from SharePoint Designer workflow automation. A great place to get ideas for identifying processes for automation is our free whitepaper: Developing No-Code Workflows.

7. Extending Your SharePoint Designer Workflows with Additional Activities is Very Affordable

Although Microsoft has given information workers and end users a lot of power and functionality right out of the box, you will eventually want your workflows to do some heavier duty things such as set permissions on list items, loop through items in a list, FTP items to remote servers, send emails with attachments, or read RSS feeds.

We listen closely when our students and our SharePoint consulting clients tell us they need additional functionality in their SharePoint Designer workflows. We’ve created solutions to meet many of these requests and rolled them into a suite of activities called Workflow Essentials. If you want to take your SharePoint Designer workflows to the next level, you owe it to yourself to check out this very affordable product. At only $795 per Web Front End, it’s much more affordable than many other SharePoint workflow products, but provides great power with the value.

8. SharePoint Designer Workflow Consulting is very Affordable

If you need a little help, or a lot, with your SharePoint Designer workflows, we are here. Our expert consultants are available for anything from a 1-hour web consultation to help you plan your solution or help you solve a particular problem you’re having, to a multi-day on-site engagement where we can get involved at any level or depth in your automation project. Web consultations are only $250/hour and can save you many hours of looking for solutions online. Discounts are also available if you purchase multiple blocks; and longer engagements can be priced per project or per hour.

The Bottom Line: What Are Some Real Numbers?

You’re probably wondering what all this really means for your company. Let’s take a look at the example I gave above. We’ll assume that our purchasing agent earn $15/hour ($600/week, $2,400/month, $30,000/year) and spends 15% of his time getting approvals and communicating with the requestors. He estimates that by automating this process using SharePoint Designer workflows he can cut the amount of time he spends by two-thirds. This will save him 10% of his time. On a weekly basis this will save the company $60/week, $240/month, or $3,000/year by freeing up that employee to do other things that computers can’t do.

Since the SharePoint Designer program is free, If the employee attended our online Essentials of InfoPath and SharePoint Workflows class, the company only has a $1,495 investment and is saving money after only six months. Even if you add in the time the employee spent in the class (30 hours x $15 = $450) and time spent writing the workflow (10 hours x $15 = $150), the company is still saving very quickly. And not only is the company saving money, but the purchasing agent is will likely be much happier and everyone else who orders materials will be happier as well—they’ll probably all be saving time too.

It’s likely that after automating one process, this employee will identify several other processes that can be automated as well. For example, he may spend quite a bit of time attaching purchase orders to emails and sending the emails. With a $795 investment in Workflow Essentials, he can now automate this part of his job. And all the activities are available to all other workers that may want to make use of them. If one $8/hour employee saves 30-minutes each week from one of these automated processes then that’s a savings of around $200/year. If 100 of those employees save a half hour each week, or only 6-minutes a day, you’re looking at a $20,000/year overall savings. The numbers just keep adding up the more you automate even seemingly minor processes.

With the quick returns that SharePoint Designer workflows provide, I can’t think of any reason why your company wouldn’t be investing in this valuable area of technology. Can you?

Check Out These SharePoint Designer Workflow Essentials Videos!

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Spears) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:31:00 PDT

I recently recorded a bunch of videos that demonstrate how each of the activities in our Workflow Essentials product work. If you aren’t already familiar with Workflow Essentials, it adds more than two dozen activities and conditions to your SharePoint Designer workflows so you can can do so much more with them.

Most of these videos are only 2-3 minutes long. But these activities are so easy to use that even in just a couple minutes you’ll get to see how to add them to your workflow project, how to configure them, and then get to see how they work in a real running workflow.

You can watch all 13 Workflow Essentials videos together. Although there are 24 activities, many of the videos include multiple activities so you get to see how they work together.

You’ll can also access any of the videos for a particular workflow action by visiting the Workflow Essentials product page; then find the activity you’re interested in and click on the Watch Video link.

One of the most common things that information workers and end users would like to do in their SharePoint Designer workflows is manage permissions on items in SharePoint lists and libraries. Workflow Essentials makes this really easy with three activities: Grant Permission on Item, Delete Item Permission Assignment, and Reset Item Permission Inheritance. Below, you can watch the video that shows how to add and configure these three activities and then you’ll get to see them in action.

What Students Are Saying About SharePoint Solutions’ Online Classes

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Spears) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:02:00 PDT

Last week I taught our first live online class: Essentials of InfoPath and SharePoint Workflows. We had a fantastic group of students and I really enjoyed working with them.

We’re offering this same class online again the week of July 27th and August 24th. Our online classes are taught by an expert SharePoint instructor with lots of knowledge and experience from the field. You’ll be able to interact with other students and do labs on your own just as if you were sitting in one of our classrooms. These classes will fill up quickly, so register for an online SharePoint class today!

So, what did some of the students in this class have to say about it? Read their comments for yourself:

“This is definitely one of the best classes I've taken. It was actually my second class online and the format/presentation/labs/etc all worked really well. I'm leaving this class with tons of ideas to implement and can't wait to dig in and get started. The labs were great and the documentation was flawless. I will definitely keep SharePoint Solutions in mind for future classes.”

“[The instructors] added extra value to the class with their input and the extra demos.”

“I've attended in person SharePoint Solutions courses and the format online worked just as well for me.”

“A plus for the online courses is being able to watch the instructor help other students work through problems.”

“Well Done! Very informative in regular terms not techie terms.”

“The online format was great for me.”

“Great job. You kept the class flowing great.”

“It was an excellent class.”

“[The instructor] presented complex material very well. He made sure everyone was following along and answered questions thoroughly.”

“Great Class.”

“[The instructor] was very patient and helpful even beyond the scope of the class.”

SharePoint Data Zoom: Content Rotator Web Part

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:51:00 PDT

The SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part is a free tool which allows #SharePoint users to easily build dynamic, data-driven content on any page. This new Fading Content Rotator script allows you to rotate through content from a SharePoint list. The content from each list item will be displayed in turn, with fading in and out for a nice visual effect. Here's a live demo of the script.

Download the SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part here.

How to get column names to wrap in #SharePoint new item forms (NewForm.aspx)

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Pine) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:18:00 PDT

I was asked the other day if there might be a slick CSS method for getting long column names to wrap in a SharePoint list’s new item form (NewForm.aspx). The long column names were causing a horizontal scroll at times and just plain didn’t look right.

The first thing I did was to examine the code that NewForm.aspx was presenting to the browser. I found the culprit was a <nobr> tag wrapped around the column name.

<nobr> stands for ‘no break’ and overrides the normal HTML line-wrapping. A little research yielded the following CSS override. Basically redefining the nobr tag to allow the column name to wrap.

nobr {white-space: normal}

Armed with that info, you have a few options. You could add this to your custom style sheet or master page. This would override all instances of the nobr tag so you will have to be sure that is really what you want to do.

Another option would be to deploy the CSS on just the NewForm.aspx page for your list using SharePoint Designer. If you want to be able to make future tweaks (or remove the CSS all together) from the browser, add a web part zone to the form page and deploy the CSS in a content editor web part. This is the method I will describe here.

The high-level overview:

Add a web part zone to your new item page
Add a content editor web part (CEWP) to the zone
Add the following code to the Source Editor of the CEWP

<style type= "text/css">
nobr {white-space: normal}
</style>

The details:

Browse to your list and click ‘New’ (Item)

On the File menu, select ‘Edit with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer’

This will launch SharePoint Designer (SPD). In SPD, add a web part zone to the page. (‘New Web Part Zone’ is on the Web Part task pane)

Click the ‘Click to insert a Web Part’ hyperlink and add the Content Editor Web Part

Save the page (which will customize it from the site def)

Back in your browser, refresh the new item page

Click ‘Site Actions’, ‘Edit Page’

On the CEWP, click the ‘edit’ drop down and select ‘Modify Shared Web Part’

Click the ‘Source Editor’ button and type in the following:

<style type="text/css">
nobr {white-space: normal}
</style>

Click ‘Save’, and ‘OK’ and you should see the long column names wrap immediately

The default width for the Title column is 190px. If you want it a bit wider you could modify the CEWP source code to specify a width, like this:

Which will make that first column 225px instead.

When you have it looking right, edit the page again and edit the CEWP web part again.

Expand the ‘Appearance’ section and give it a meaningful title, like “CEWP-CSS Constrain width on new item form” and set the Chrome Type to ‘None’

You can export the web part to use elsewhere in your site if needed.

The My Links Web Part – It’s Not Just for My Sites #sharepoint

noreply@blogger.com (Ricky Spears) — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:46:00 PDT

I’ve talked to a number of folks in recent months that have wanted to add the links stored in a user’s My Links list in their My Site to other SharePoint pages that weren’t in the My Site site collection. Up until yesterday, I had always thought this would require some custom programming.

If you aren’t familiar with My Links, it’s a great place to store those things you might normally store in your Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox Bookmarks. The advantage to using My Links is that they are always available to you anywhere you are logged into SharePoint. So, if you log in on a different computer, your links are there. And the links can go anywhere; they don’t have to be links to SharePoint locations. Here is a screenshot of how My Links is usually accessed in SharePoint.

Yesterday, just for fun, I decided to try an experiment; and my experiment worked! I added a My LInks web part to my My Site. Then I exported it and saved it to my desktop.

Next I went to the home page of my portal, made the page editable, and clicked on Add a Web Part for one of the web part zones. I closed the Add Web Parts dialog by clicking on the link at the bottom for the Advanced Web Part gallery and options. This opened the Add Web Parts Tool Pane in the right-hand side of my browser. At the top I clicked on the down arrow beside Browse and selected Import.

I browsed to and selected the My_Links.dwp web part I had saved to my desktop and clicked the Upload button.

To finish, I just drug the My Links web part where I wanted it on the page and published the page. All my links were then showing up on the page and as I logged in as different test users, their links showed up as well, as expected.

SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath Training… Online! #sharepoint

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin Pine) — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:41:00 PDT

For a couple of reasons, Mission: Automation – SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath is one of my favorite classes to teach.

The student feedback is incredible. Everything in this class is something they can put to work right away. You can see the light bulbs come on as students learn things they will utilize as soon as they get back to their office.
The courseware is just terrific. The author of Mission Automation, Ricky Spears, has set the bar high in terms of quality content and hands-on labs. You may see only one module that specifically mentions SharePoint Designer Workflows, but don’t be fooled. In each successive module you will put more and more complex SPD workflows under your belt. Fun stuff.

Now Ricky has done it again. With the release of Essentials of InfoPath and SharePoint Workflows, you can learn a ton of useful InfoPath and SharePoint workflow information. Information you will be able to put to work right away. And the best thing about it, you can take this class online, right from your desk. The class is taught over five days with three hours of lecture and live demos in the morning and two to three hours of lab assistance in the afternoon.

I don’t know where you plan to be on May 18th but I will be online, learning even more about InfoPath and SharePoint Workflow as Ricky Spears teaches this class.

Using XSLT to Create a Forms Server Link on a Task Form

noreply@blogger.com (Russell Wright) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:26:00 PDT

When you use the "Assign a To-do Item" action in a SharePoint Designer workflow, a form is created that is presented to the user when they edit the task that the action created. This form allows the user to "complete the task" that was assigned during the workflow.

Located on this task form is a link to the related list item. When this related list item is an InfoPath form, a link is provided to the xml form, but unfortunately this link doesn't respect the "open in browser" directive that is selected on the form library advanced settings when the library is configured to forms server. Here's how you can make a change to the XSLT on the form to change the link to open the form using forms server.

First, open the aspx form that was created in the SPD workflow. You're going to edit some of the form code. Go ahead the click the Split tab at the bottom to view the code and the form design.

Once the form is open, click on the chevron to open the Common Data View Tasks pane. If you can't get to the chevron, you can right-click on PlaceHolderMain and select Show Common Control Tasks. Check the box "Show with sample data." This will display the table as shown.

While in the split mode, click to place your cursor in the cell to the right of the cell containing the label "Related list item." It's the one that looks empty. Notice in the code window where your cursor is located. Find the <a> tag and all its related code. It should be similar to that shown.

Now, change the code between the quotes in the href= as follows. Of course, you need to use your relative URL to the formserver.aspx page.

{concat('http://portal.awbikes.local/st/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation=',substring-before(@WorkflowLink,', '),'&OpenIn=Browser')}

You are using the concat function to create a link to the form server as described in MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms772417.aspx. In this instance, the link will look like this:

http://portal.awbikes.local/st/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation=URL-TO-XML-FORM&OpenIn=Browser

Now, when you click on the link you should see the form opens with forms services.

Subsequent recompiles of the workflow will not affect your form modifications. If you make a mistake and need to start over, simply delete the aspx task form and recompile your workflow.

Silverlight: The easiest method to get SharePoint list data

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:16:00 PDT

In this post, I will share the simplest, most direct method I’ve found to access SharePoint list data from a Silverlight control hosted within a SharePoint web part. Contrary to most examples I’ve seen, this methodology will not require any custom web services. I’m am however going to assume that you have a working knowledge of how to build a simple SharePoint Web Part and a simple Silverlight control.

In learning new programming techniques, I’d rather read code examples than listen to some one bloviate, so for your reference this article uses four code listings which can be found in this online repository. These listings are:

Listing 1 – Silverlight Hosting Web Part
Listing 2 - Web Part Hosted Silverlight Control – App
Listing 3 - Web Part Hosted Silverlight Control – Page
Listing 4 - Web Part Hosted Silverlight Control – Page XAML

Step 1: Getting the list data

In this step, we’ll use our old friend owssvr.dll to fetch an XML representation of our list data. For any given list in SharePoint, its XML data can get accessed using this URL:

http://[server]/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?Cmd=Display&List=[Guid]&XMLDATA=TRUE

In the above URL, Guid is the Id for your SharePoint list. To find out the Guid for your list, visit the list’s settings page and snag the Guid from the Url.

Step 2: Create the web part host

In Listing 1, we create a web part to host our Silverlight control. This web part will “lazy load” the Silverlight control’s compiled .xap file at runtime. I recommend uploading the .xap file to a SharePoint document library. This web part has 2 properties; the relative path to our .xap file and the Guid of our SharePoint list. Note that this technique still allows for complete step debugging.

Step 3: Silverlight Application file

In Listing 2, the Silverlight application file handles receiving parameters from our web part and passing the list Guid on to the Silverlight control itself.

Step 4: Silverlight Page code behind

The code in Listing 3 does most of the heavy lifting. This is where we fetch and parse the list data’s XML.

Step 5: Silverlight Page Xaml

Listing 4 is a simple Silverlight Xaml page with a DataGrid added.

And there you have it. I believe this technique to be the simplest, most direct method of fetching SharePoint list data for use in Silverlight. Questions or comments?

SharePoint Data Zoom: Handling Complex List Field Types

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:11:00 PDT

The free SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part gives you the power and flexibility of creating SharePoint apps from .NET code, but with a much quicker result and without the hassles of coding, compiling and deploying your solution.

As a case and point, let’s take a look at the $SPFields context item. We’ve added $SPFields to provide better support for “hard to access” SharePoint list fields like Look-up, User, URL, Multi-Column, Multi-Choice and Rating Scale fields. To illustrate, let’s look at an example:

 1## Get the list
 2#set( $myLinksList = $web.lists.get_item("DOT Links") )
 3
 4#foreach($myLink in $myLinksList.Items)
 5
 6 ## Get hard to read SharePoint fields
 7 #set( $urlValue = $SPFields.GetUrlValue($myLink.get_item("URL")) )
 8 #set( $stateValue = $SPFields.GetLookupValue($myLink.get_item("State")) )
 9 #set( $ownerValue = $SPFields.GetUserValue($web, $myLink.get_item("Owner")) )
10
11 #beforeall
12   <table class="ms-listviewtable" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%">
13     <tr class="ms-viewheadertr">
14       <th class="ms-vh2-nofilter">Title</th>
15       <th class="ms-vh2-nofilter">State</th>
16       <th class="ms-vh2-nofilter">Owner</th>
17     </tr>
18 #odd
19     <tr class="">
20 #even
21     <tr class="ms-alternating">
22 #each
23       <td class="ms-vb2"><a href="$urlValue.URL">$urlValue.Description</a></td>
24       <td class="ms-vb2">$stateValue.LookupValue</td>
25       <td class="ms-vb2">$ownerValue.LookupValue</td>
26 #after
27     </tr>
28 #afterall
29   </table>
30 #nodata
31   No links found
32#end

In line 2 two of the example above, we load a variable $myLinksList with the “Dot Links” list. In line 4, we begin a for..each loop to iterate over each item in the list. On line 7 though 9, you’ll notice that we’re using the $SPFields context object to set the variables for three complex fields. $SPFields.GetUrlValue will handle parsing the URL type fields, while $SPfields.GetLookupValue can hand fetching the value of a lookup field from another list! Finally, $SPFields.GetUserValue handles parsing a User type field for you.

If you drop your attention down to lines 23 through 25, you’ll see where the convenience of the $SPFields context item really shines. For the URL field, we simply need to call $urlValue.URL and $urlValue.Description to get at our data. With the lookup and user field types, calling $stateValue.LookupValue and $ownerValue.LookupValue does the trick.

Here’s a screen shot of the simple output:

Convenient and flexible yet powerful! Don’t you agree?

Documentation for the $SPFields context item is here. The sample script above can be downloaded from the community site here.

To download the SharePoint Data Zoom Web Part, go here.