Can you report off of “Comments” entered when documents are checked in/out? If so, any help on how to get them all?
Here is what I am doing: I navigate to a document that needs to be updated. I use the ‘Check Out’ function and then ‘Edit in Microsoft Excel’ function. I make the changes I need and then ‘Check In’ the document. I am prompted at check in to provide ‘Comments’ (it’s not a mandatory field, but I utilize it). I imagine it’s saved to the database somewhere, but I have no idea of what rights/access I need to get to that information. Unfortunately I’m an end user and not an IT member. I’m sure if I had access to the DB I could explain a little better.

No problem Staccee… this one is a simple problem to solve.

• The first thing you need to check if Versioning is turned on for your document library. Go to Document library settings > Versioning Settings to turn it on. (More…).
  • In case you do not have privileges to customize document library settings call your Site Owner to help you with this one
• On the document menu there should be Version History Option and it will show you all previous version along with Check-in comments and time stamps. It will also show who made the change to a document.

Location of Version history option is shown at the following figure:

And this is how version history looks like:

Update: Laura also posted a nice workaround solution in a comment below.

Update from Staccee : Thanks! You rock Toni :))

As you recall from this blog, we had one in Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark). Europe is bit different and it is not that easy to create a community event on Saturday (especially if it is nice day on Mediterranean). Maybe SharePoint Friday might work?

Mark Miller and Isaac Stith were sitting together, having launch during SharePoint Conference Las Vegas, and idea just poped out. We should do a live SharePoint Saturday Conference for countries in the European Time Zones (GMT). The target date is January 23rd 2010. This is an early announcement as we are still pre-organizing it but please sign for our announcements list here.

Take advantage of the early bird prices for Slovenian SharePoint Conference on November 27 if you purchase your ticket before Friday November 6. This is your last chance to save 40 € on entry.  The rates will go up after Friday, so register today.

Here is my session:

Best scenarios to boost your SharePoint implementation – Toni Frankola

Your organization has deployed SharePoint as the ultimate collaboration platform that will solve all your problems in a blink of an eye. However you, as the content owner, are still struggling with end users and all the SharePoint features. In this session we are going to discuss tools you have at hand and simple and effective scenarios you can implement on your portal. These will help end-users to perform day-to-day operations with ease and to boost the overall SharePoint adoption.

You can check the entire session list here…

We will also have SharePint event on Thursday :: 26 November, from 7 p.m. in Unisex :: Murska Sobota :: location.

Join us!

We already have a number of events last night like #ShareIndian and #SharePint which were great.

I will be attending these sessions today (it was impossible to choose because many good sessions overlap):

• 9:00 AM - Keynote: Unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• 10:30 AM - Keynote: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Drilldown
• 1:15 PM - SharePoint 2010 Overview and Whats New
• 2:45 PM - SharePoint 2010 Administration: Part 1
• 4:30 PM - Developing with SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions

Hope to see you there…

Follow live blogging from the conference…

I am trying to get your PhoneBook search as you type to work with a Links list and have not been able to make the edits that are needed for it to work.

Yes, it is possible to customize this solution to work with any list you wish, but you need to tweak the code a bit. I am using very powerful  Javascript API for the SharePoint webservices by Darren Johnstone that allows you to do anything.

In order to make this to work you need to customize:

-       Query for retrieving results (CAML)

-       Part of the code that renders results

In both cases you need to know a bit of Javascript, XML, HTML and CAML. We will be using my original script as starting point. Download it to your Notepad or SharePoint Designer.

New CAML Query

The first thing we need to change is CAML query. I prefer to be as efficient as possible and I am using CAML Query Builder (if you are not CAML quru this is the best way).

Create a CAML query (figure 1) for your Links list (it searches for data in two fields: URL and Notes). Hit Test button and it will display results from your list (figure 2). Adjust the query as needed.

Figure 1	Figure 2

As a result I got the one below. But you can customize it to add some additional fields you might have.

<Query>

<Where>

<Or>

<Contains>

<FieldRef Name=’URL’ />

<Value Type=’URL’>Sharepoint</Value>

</Contains>

<Contains>

<FieldRef Name=’Comments’ />

<Value Type=’Note’>SharePoint</Value>

</Contains>

</Or>

</Where>

</Query>

Implementing new query

Now we need to implement the changes back to the original web part. You have to combine the new query with the rest of the code. After I implemented the changes the query in the code looks like this (You must also update viewfields part, it is responsible for configuring the set of fields to be returned by query)

var items = lists.getListItems(

contactsListName,   // listName

”,         // viewName

‘<Query><Where><Or><Contains><FieldRef Name=”URL” /><Value Type=”URL”>’ + query + ‘</Value></Contains><Contains><FieldRef Name=”Comments” /><Value Type=”Note”>’ + query + ‘</Value></Contains></Or></Where></Query>’,  // query

‘<ViewFields><FieldRef Name=”URL”/><FieldRef Name=”Notes”/></ViewFields>’,  // viewFields

30,  // rowLimit

‘<QueryOptions> <IncludeMandatoryColumns>TRUE</IncludeMandatoryColumns> </QueryOptions>’  // queryOptions

);

You also have to change the results part to match your query.

results  += “<li><a style=’color:white’ href=’” + rows.item(i).getAttribute(’ows_URL’) +  “‘>” + rows.item(i).getAttribute(’ows_URL’) + “</a></li>”;

And you are ready to go…

Conclusion

You can search as you type with any list type. You just need to modify the CAML query and results display to match the format of your list. Have fun.

Deploying

• Upload this web part or paste this script to Content Editor Web Part
• Modify the following two lines with your SharePoint URLs and Contacts list name

var sharePointSite = “http://<sharepoint_site_url_with_contacts_list>”; //e.g. “http://intranet”

var contactsListName = “Contacts”; // enter your List name here

• (Optionally) Update JQuery location if you would like to use it from another location

My Session

You can check slide decks from by session here.

Other sessions and speakers

• SharePoint Tips & Tricks
  Tobias Zimmergren, @zimmergren
• Building WSP Packages Efficiently
  Carsten Keutmann, @keutmann
• Boosting SharePoint Implementations
  Toni Frankola, @tonifrankola
• SharePoint Online and Windows Azure
  Wictor Wilen, @wictor
• Bulletproof SharePoint Farm
  Michael Noel, @michaeltnoel
• SharePoint Nightmares
  Marianne van Wanrooij, @mariannerd
• Top 10 ways to improve SharePoint performance
  Mike Watson, @mikewat
• SharePoint Archiving for Storage Optimization
  Brian Bennett/Stephen Budd
• Custom Field Types
  Marianne van Wanrooij, @mariannerd
• How to securely search enterprise systems with SharePoint
  Christopher Even, @notorioustech
• Social Applications for SharePoint
  Daniel McPherson, @danmc
• Strategies for Successful SharePoint Backup and Recovery
  Sarju Raja
• SharePoint Battle
  Henrik Nordtorp, @nordtorp
• Roadmap to the ‘Right’ Governance Plan
  Shikhar Agarwal
• Business development on MOSS
  Boris Nyland

Thank you for wonderful weekend I hope to see you all in Vegas or some other upcoming SharePoint event (like SharePoint Conference Slovenia coming up in November)

Yes, I am flying across central Europe to Copenhagen, Denmark to attend the first SharePoint Saturday in Europe. I am looking forward to meet some of the European SharePoint colleagues/partners, and to present some of mine SharePoint experiences to.

I will be speaking about:

IT Pro Track: Best scenarios to boost your SharePoint implementation.

Your organization has deployed SharePoint as the ultimate collaboration platform that will solve all your problems in a blink of an eye. However you, as the content owner, are still struggling with end users and all the SharePoint features. In this session we are going to discuss tools you have at hand and simple and effective scenarios you can implement on your portal. These will help end-users to perform day-to-day operations with ease and to boost the overall SharePoint adoption.

Language: English
Session Level: Intermediate

Check full schedule here…

As usual I will be posting slide decks after the event. Hope to see you in Copenhagen!

Phonebooks are being used when an employee needs to call a coworker on office number or when a receptions wants to inform you that someone is waiting for you in the lobby. In large organizations you must have such an application.

Windows SharePoint Services already has Contacts list feature built-in, it only misses one thing: some form of quick search of contacts. So I made search-as-you type functionality for WSS Contacts list.

It is similar to Search as you type by Jan by it does not require MOSS and it searches only one list. So if your search is not working or not indexing your contacts this web part will still work.

Deploying

• Upload this web part or paste this script to Content Editor Web Part
• Modify the following two lines with your SharePoint URLs and Contacts list name

var sharePointSite = “http://<sharepoint_site_url_with_contacts_list>”; //e.g. “http://intranet”

var contactsListName = “Contacts”; // enter your Contacts list name here

• (Optionally) Update Jquery location if you would like to use it from another location

Credits

I was partially inspired by Search as you type by Jan Tielens, I used Javascript API for the SharePoint webservices by  Darren Johnstone to query the data and  jQuery PHP Ajax Autosuggest by Ashley to create suggestion drowpdown.

Hope you will find a good use for this one…

In your article “Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Part 2 - Building a development lab” you say that developer has 64-bit Server on the machine and VPC and develops in VPC. Why do you need VPC? The max RAM I can get out of my VPC is 2.3GB, while you can have 3.3 on the server. Can you explain?

32bit Windows XP operating system can only address up to 4GB of RAM. This is the limitation you are hitting here. You should switch to 64bit operating system. Check this article for full list of maximal RAM addressed by various Microsoft operating systems.

Thank you Toni. The other question was about whether to use virtualization or not. Once PC has server OS, why not just develop on it?

If possible you should run your host operating system on 64bit platform and on Windows 2008 if possible. It can address a lot of RAM and it is much faster than other virtualization technology. You do not expensive hardware, any entry-level server or more powerful desktop will do.

The problem with SharePoint is that it is not a simple .NET application. For example you cannot revert certain actions easily (like installing Service Packs, new versions and stuff). In case you are doing everything on top of your server (without virtual machines) it would be much harder to revert to previous state. It can be done, but not easily. And sometime you might figure out that after weeks of testing you cannot use SharePoint Service Pack 2 because some 3rd party application does not work correctly. You will not be able to go back. Sometimes you even need to work on old system while you are testing a new upgrade, if you have only one machine than this might be a problem…

In case you need to support more than one client, you should stick with virtual machines. Each client has a different SharePoint installation; here are some of the options:

1) Operating systems: Windows 2003/2003 R2/2008/2008 R2

2) Platform: 32bit / 64bit

3) Service Pack: None / SP1 / SP2

4) Edition: WSS/SharePoint Standard/SharePoint Enterprise

5) SQL: 2000/2005/2008 (plus Service Packs)

6) Farm configuration: Basic, Single Server, Farm…

and the list goes on and on.

Some clients might also have some additional software on top of SharePoint…

So my advice is: always use Virtual Machines. Recreate exactly the same environment as your client does and stick to it as much as possible.

Thanks a lot for the very detailed answer. We are in the process of building SharePoint lab and were debating the issue of VM / no VM when I came across your article on the web. It is exactly what we need! We’ll go with Win 2008 Standard Edition w Hyper V (x64) as a development environment. The only kicker I heard related to 64bit / 32bit, is that Workflow development environment relies on 32-bit dlls, but that’s fine – we can have 32-bit guest for that purpose…

You can have 32bit VM guests on 64bit host, but you cannot do the other way around… so I would go for 64bit.

Bear in mind that SharePoint 2010 will work only on 64bit Windows 2008 and it will also require SQL Server 2005 / 2008 64bit. If possible plan ahead now.

It is a bit over optimistic (SharePoint is not silver bullet) but it might help a novice user to to understand the key SharePoint concepts. Check it out:

You can check videos on Creative Commons web page.