Tim W's Blog

Sharepoint Daily WTF – Datasheet View

2009-07-30T16:19:00.001+10:00

This one stumped me…

At a particular client site, they have mixed versions of Office (2003 and 2007) on their desktops, and have just recently embraced Sharepoint’s datasheet view for bulk editing lists of client, suppliers etc.

Well, today one of them mentioned that certain columns weren't appearing in their datasheet view, but they were on other computers.

As it turns out, it appears that Lookup Fields and People Picker columns don't work in the datasheet view of the Office 2003 install.
A real bummer, so my only workaround was to use the choice fields (drop down list)

I’m on the Office 2010 Technical Preview

2009-07-15T10:09:00.001+10:00

Yesterday I received my first email from Microsoft with a welcome to the Office 2010 Technical Preview.

Currently we can download and evaluate the client side (Outlook,word,excel etc) software with the server bits (SharePoint, Project Server etc) coming soon.

Exciting times ahead and my colleagues and I at Stargate will have some fantastic learning's we’ll share with the community.
more on that later.

Operation Deep Throat

2009-07-07T22:32:00.001+10:00

Twas heading out to a pre-sales meeting today with a colleague, Justin. When we decided we had plenty of time for a sit down lunch and a chat about the upcoming meeting.
Ordering the Roast of the Day wouldn't usually raise alarm bells as a time consuming dish, but by the time it finally arrived we were looking at a 2 minute window so I began to woof this down like I hadn't eaten in weeks. - This is where things undoubtedly took a turn for the worst as I found I was having problems digesting the food, even with a pint of water by my side.

It didn't stop there, I made my way to the meeting having thrown up twice on the way and found myself mid-sentence when I had another fit. Quite a sight for Justin and the 2 poor gentlemen opposite me!

The whole experience was like a bad case of indigestion of which no amount of mylanta or water was going to fix.

It was a few hours later that I managed to throw up again and this time, a large (and last) part of my lunch finally came up – and with it, the offending obstruction.

How I managed to swallow this piece of tasty lamb I dont know. But it obviously didnt make it the whole way down.

Rai’s a SharePoint Master

2009-07-07T22:18:00.001+10:00

One of my Stargate colleagues, Rai Umair has just returned from Redmond after completing his SharePoint Masters course & a few days later he had the great news that he’d passed the gruelling 3 week course.

What makes this achievement even more impressive is that Rai is currently the only SharePoint master in the asia/pacific region and will no doubt be highly sort after.

Well done Rai… and you look good in the robe and lightsaber we gave him to mark the occasion.

Daily WTF - IE 64 bit & SharePoint

2009-07-07T22:05:00.001+10:00

I booted up IE 8 64-bit version to test it on a SharePoint site and thought I was going crazy when the following options appeared on the actions menu of a document library.

In my 32-bit IE 8 it looks like this.

Seems all the Office/SharePoint integration goodies are not supported in the 64-bit environment or its due to my Office client only being 32-bit.

Back on the Blogs with a new Laptop

2009-06-26T20:24:00.001+10:00

Its been a while since I last posted, largely thanks to having my tablet PC stolen from my car whilst I was at the MOSSIG May meeting. So rebuilding my machine and remembering all my passwords (like my blog) was quite a process. Ben & Steve at work did help me through the difficult time, with a somewhat dummed down tablet.

Anyways, every cloud has a silver lining, and I’m wrapped with the latest edition – a Dell Studio XPS 16. It has the most amazing screen I’ve seen in a laptop!

As for the move back to a laptop, well the Tablet PC just didnt cut the mustard for me. As a consultant its great in meetings for note taking, but it comes at a price. The specs and screen size & resolution are still too far behind for equivalently priced laptops. Especially when you’re trying to run virtual images, Sharepoint Designer and something as simple as viewing Outlook – especially when you plugin Xobni.

6 Little Known Tips for SharePoint Designer

2009-04-21T13:36:00.001+10:00

Below is 6 tips I’ve put together where I’ve steered away from just listing the common features & benefits of Sharepoint Designer (SPD), but focussing on the little gold nuggets I’ve found in the product over the years of using it that directly solve some requirements that my customers have had.

Hopefully you find something you didn’t know & if you’re new to SPD, we’ve been running a free training session through MOSSIG to coincide with the announcement of SPD now also being a free download. This has been hugely popular so let us know if you want to see more of them.

Here’s my six tips (in no particular order)

1.) Grouping documents and list Items beyond 2 levels.
By default, you can only group list items and documents to 2 levels by using the built in views on a list or library. By using the dataview webpart in SPD, you can group as many levels as you like. Further to this, you can also control the look and feel of the grouping, so you’re not limited to just clicking on the + sign or even displaying the field name you’re grouping on.

2.) Bulk Check-in of Files.
A common problem is when someone had uploaded a swag of documents only to find they’re all (by default) checked out to them. Rather then resorting to individually checking in each document through the browser (very painful), know that in SPD you can select them all and bulk check in.

3.) Renaming a List or Library’s URL Path.
You can rename a list or library through the browser, but this doesn't rename the URL path along with it. SPD is you’re answer here – it can rename both.

4.) Displaying information from another SharePoint site
I should explain that a ‘site’ can be as simple as a subsite or another site within the same SharePoint site collection.
To set the scene, a common problem you’ll run into is how to show information that doesn’t exist on the same site. The news is a common scenario for an intranet, whereby you have a central news list (either a news centre or a top level announcements list) and you’d like to display that through many sites – like the department or team sites. You’ll know that when you look in the webpart gallery you’ll only find the lists and libraries that are on the current site.
Now there are some webparts which will roll up or down the items from other sites or you could use a simple RSS feed but these lack the control and display that you’d ultimately want. I’d recommend you again look at the Dataview webpart in SharePoint together with a little hidden link in the Data Source Library toolpane - ‘Connect to Another Library’.

If you click this link you can type in the URL of the other Sharepoint site you’d like and then you can see all it’s lists and libraries to import….

Very handy for the scenario I’ve mentioned but also for displaying information from 2 lists that you might have joined with a Lookup field…

5.) Customising Search Results
If you’re using MOSS or Search Server Express for WSS, then you’ll know that the out of the box search results page lacks some style. Essentially, this is just XSL, although its hard to customise the look and feel like you can with a Dataview.
Follow this post on how to use SPD with your search results to pretty them up.

6.) Enhanced Web Part Connections
If you’ve ever used WebPart connections in the browser you’ll know that you have to display the field that you’re filtering on. This isn’t always ideal, and through SPD and those lovely dataviews again, you don’t need to display the field. You can also do away with the ‘Radiobutton’ selection as SPD will let you customise that too.

Running Sharepoint on Vista and my presentation Prep

2009-03-24T21:46:00.001+11:00

So I’m sitting here trying to prep for my presentation on Sharepoint Designer tomorrow to the MOSSIG group and I thought I’d be clever and run the presso directly from my laptop to avoid the age old VPC performance problems.

Well, there’s a neat little blog post from the Bamboo guys about how to get Vista to run Sharepoint on a desktop (both MOSS and WSS). I’ve seen this in action, but never attempted it myself, but after tonight. I think I’ll give it a miss for a while.

The problem isnt Bamboo, but rather my Vista tablet PC’s inability to turn on IIS and the other services I need to pre-configure before I can install Sharepoint…. shame that there’s some issue there but I must say I’m pretty impressed in Vista’s durability to rollback a change that wont update. Just boot it into Safe Mode and it will roll it back.

Major News from MS on Sharepoint

2009-01-27T14:35:00.002+11:00

I'm not usually one for rehashing a blog post, but the latest news out of the Sharepoint Team blog warrants a mention.
With times getting tough this year MS have added significant value & even more reason to push to the MOSS Enterprise CAL by including Performance Point Server in it.
See the article here

This is significant, considering PPoint in Oz is upwards of $30k in licensing fees alone.

Next Version of Outlook & Visio to get the Ribbon

2009-01-23T11:19:00.002+11:00

If these early screenshots are anything to go by, the next version of Office (14) will complete the Ribbon UI through Outlook and Visio.
Outlook had some Ribbon tweaks, but this was just in the input screens of mail, calendar & task entries so it looks like the UI is here to stay.
Hopefully the Sharepoint Designer 2009 gets some loving as well and they improve the look and feel of the workflow editor.

New Year, New Job

2009-01-23T10:06:00.006+11:00

A decision I made in December 08 that after 3 years at PA building the Sharepoint practice, was that I'd head over to the Stargate Group into their Professional Services team.
There were a number of reasons for taking up the challenge at Stargate. There's definetly a freshness that a change of scenery can bring, but I'm really excited about working with some top people in the industry, well known and respected by their peers in there areas- and Stargate has been quietly grabbing alot of them.
Ben, Ed, Rai & Steve in the Sharepoint Team, Bill, Miguel in Biztalk and Mark in CRM are just a few here and make it a compelling team of skilled people so watch this space as no doubt my post will age quickly with the people we're bringing on and the services we're putting in place.
I'll be working as a Principal Consultant (or is that Principle) across our 3 technology platforms in Sharepoint, Biztalk and Dynamics CRM, primarily focussing on my pet area in Sharepoint.

Thankyou to all the wellwishers as I started this week. Its still business as usual with everything else and the usergroup so if you need to contact me, my new address is: tim*dot*wragg *at* stargategroup*dot*com*dot*au

MSN Messenger is getting too Smart for its own good

2008-11-08T10:08:00.001+11:00

The ad-sense in MSN Messenger is starting to rival Amazon… or maybe it was just a co-incidence.

I started a new conversation in the live messenger beta and this is what came up.

Designing and Implementing a Security Model in SharePoint

2008-11-05T18:06:00.001+11:00

V3 of SharePoint made some huge steps in the granularity of how you can set permissions on content stored in a site, most notably the ability to lock down individual items in a list or library.

So If you’ve ever tried to lock down a SharePoint site collection you may have had a hell of a time trying to understand how best to design a security model and then implement it.

Below I’ve attempted to outline an approach which may help you get going, its broken down into 4 main areas.

How Permissions Work
How to ‘Stop Inheriting Permissions’ to create your own.
Initial Planning before you begin
Some Gotchas and other Recommendations.

How Permissions work in SharePoint

When you create a new site collection in SharePoint there are 3 main groups that are created – Site Visitors, Site Members and Site Owners where you add users.
Additional to this is 3 main permission sets – Read, Contribute and Full Control which control your level of access.

Basically a site group gets assigned a permission set like below.

Sharepoint Group	Site Permission
Site Visitor	Read
Site Member	Contribute
Site Owner	Full Control

There are other groups and permissions which I haven't mentioned, but to keep it simple these are the 3 that are consistent in both WSS and MOSS. Also, you can create your own SharePoint Groups and Site Permissions which is common practice.

Now, take an average site collection where you’ll have a top level site and a collection of subsites (ala a site collection) you will run into scenarios where you’ll want to lock down sites, content within sites and even individual files within libraries – all of which is possible and the best way I feel is to ‘Stop Inheriting Permissions’ (or detaching) at the level required and either customise the existing sharepoint groups, or create your own as needed.

Detaching permissions at a site level: Goto Site Actions –> Site Settings –> Advanced Permissions –> Permission Levels (in the toolbar)
The url should be http://YOURSITE/YOURSUBSITE/_layouts/role.aspx

Edit the permission level in the toolbar and you’ll be prompted like so.

At a list/library level: Goto the list or library settings –> Permissions for this library.

Click on the ‘Edit Permissions’ in the toolbar.

And at a file/folder level: Goto ‘Manage Permissions’ on the file by either the dropdown menu or when viewing the properties of the file/list.

Its also important to know where the same SharePoint or AD group can be leveraged off elsewhere in your site collection, for this its best to look at the overall picture first.

Initial Planning – “getting the overall picture”

I’d highly recommend that you draw up your site collection in a site map style in Visio. From there detail each of the areas where content needs to be locked down or other site permissions need to be applied. It will help draw out the where similarities may exist and help you plan what groups of people need access and where. It then becomes a way to discuss this security model with your IT department, as you will want to leverage off existing Active Directory Groups where possible.

Once you have this plan in place you’ll be a good position to start configuring SharePoint with the unique permissions. The best way I feel to achieve this is to ‘stop inheriting’ permissions at the level you require – whether that’s at a site, list/library or file/folder level.

Breaking Group and Permission Inheritance – “some gotcha’s”

When you stop inheriting permissions you need to be mindful of an apparent bug in SharePoint which happens at a site level detach/re-attach. If you break permissions at a file level and then restore everything goes back to normal (as expected). When done at a list/library level the library returns to normal but keeps any unique permissions that may be applied at a file/folder level (again as expected). When however you attach/re-attach at a site level the change cascades down and overwrites any custom permissions at a list/library or file/folder level (not expected :)). – hopefully that makes sense, as its not consistent and can cause some real heartache if you’ve spent time customising some libraries in a site.

Also, you can ‘detach' site permissions at a site level which allows you to customise the specifics of what a permission group can do. An example might be that you want to lock down the ‘Read’ permission group so they can’t view old versions of files. This is fine, just be aware that if you ‘re-attach’ the permissions back that it will cascade the change down for groups as well (as described above)

Active Directory - “leverage it, don’t redesign it”

Be careful not to try to implement your security model from AD alone. It could create an unnecessary burden on your IT department who in most cases, shouldn’t be owning SharePoint. There is still a balance here, but a general rule to follow is that you shouldn't be creating lots of AD groups for the sole purpose of using them in SharePoint. AD needs to be leveraged across your entire organisation (in an MS world) so it could quickly get out of control if every application took the AD approach to configuring security.

In recommending this approach, I’m mindful that some Business scenarios would actually apply to IT owning all the security access for SharePoint and it can make sense for system administrators to try to control SharePoint solely from AD.. after all, its easier to look in AD and understand where uses have access.

Item Level Permissions - “use folders and/or workflow”

If you’re looking to lock down items within a document library then use Folders to set permissions. If you put your documents in those folders they will inherit those permissions – just like the file system. This is a far more manageable & intuitive approach then setting the permissions on each item.

Locking down lists like tasks, calendar, wiki’s, blogs etc is a little harder as you can’t use folders. Every list in SharePoint allows you to lock down items to the creator which usually suffices for most requirements. ie ‘users can only read and/or edit their own items’ check the list settings –> Advanced Settings for your options.
Alternatively, I’ve used workflow to lock down items after they’ve been created. A scenario might be that a user fills out a list form and one of the metadata columns is their department. You can then use a workflow to trigger and lockdown the item to the department group only, another example is to simply lock down a form from the user after they’ve submitted it. These kinds of workflow actions where you set permissions on items are not in the default install of SharePoint, you can grab them on CodePlex with the useful SharePoint Designer Workflow Actions.

Additional Links
- Data Security Risks

Happy permission setting :)

Windows Mobile 6 Daylight Savings Fix (Australia)

2008-10-08T11:27:00.001+11:00

This was driving me nuts yesterday as my phone was constantly going back an hour thinking that daylight savings hadn’t come in for Melbourne and Sydney people.

just install the cab on your device.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/d/a/5daa2d11-6733-442d-a275-429af43a62f0/windowsmobile-kb949168.cab

Ah Lemphers you visionary

2008-10-08T09:09:00.001+11:00

One of our home grown Microsoft’ees David Lemphers is making a name for himself in Redmond as the Snr Product Manager of Cloud Services.

No doubt many people are envious of his position – even if we dont know what ‘the cloud’ is all about yet.

Check out this article about Steve Ballmer and the references to David Lemphers – the coin’er of the term ‘the cloud’

http://www.betanews.com/article/By_Windows_Cloud_did_Ballmer_mean_an_operating_system/1222976790

Dave has been a great supporter of the MOSSIG group as well having been a panellist on 2 of my podcasts – one being on the cloud.

Check out our panel session podcasts here - http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/MOSSIG/Wiki/Podcasts.aspx

Global Case Study for MOSS

2008-10-03T15:56:00.001+10:00

One of the first MOSS implementations I worked on was Timbercorp – which has been recognised as a global case study for Microsoft.

We really pushed the boundaries with this one with MOSS being so new to market and the lack of tools & help at the time around the BDC, Excel Services, Kerberos (oh Kerberos) and Reporting Services it was quite a learning experience but we got a great end result.

http://www.microsoft.com/asia/partnersolutionmarketplace/CaseStudyDetail.aspx?casestudyid=4000002168

Diagram of SharePoint ISV’s

2008-10-03T15:21:00.001+10:00

This is a handy little diagram which gives you some scope of the 3rd parties who are extending the Sharepoint platform.

Wishlist: Export Sharepoint Configurations

2008-09-23T15:30:00.001+10:00

MS Dynamics CRM does it to great effect, and I'm hoping one day the Product Team will incorporate it into Sharepoint.

Its the ability to export the configurations of a CRM application and import it into another implementation - minus the data.

So within SharePoint you can save lists, libraries and sites as templates as well as backup site collections, but you can't seem separate the configuration from the data and import into another Sharepoint implementation.

To put it in a real world scenario - think of a staging and a live environment. It would be great to make configuration changes to a list or library in staging and then be able to apply those changes to the live site without loosing the live data. This would be great if it could apply to a single list or library, right up to a site collection. oh, and throw in workflow configurations while your at it, as you can't move them whatsoever.

There may be a 3rd party that does this, I've never actually looked that hard for one, but its a worthwhile feature and much needed by anyone doing deployment.

Blog Considerations for SharePoint

2008-07-29T11:00:00.001+10:00

One of the great features with WSS V3 or MOSS is its blogging capabilities, which is best utilised when everyone can contribute easily to a blog, subscribe to the RSS feed and stay looped in.
If you're wanting to incorporate a blog into your SharePoint environment I'd suggest the following considerations.

Contributing Content
Unfortunately, SharePoint provides a limited web interface for posting blogs, mainly with formatting text and adding images to a post - which can easily turn an end-user off.
To get around this, I've often recommended Word 2007's blog capabilities as the perfect replacement for the web interface however Office 2007 isn't always available - so what is and is free? Well I use Live Writer to manage this blog, and hooray, it also works with SharePoint.

Making it Look Good
Check out the Community Kit for Sharepoint - there are some blog extensions in there which give your blog site a great facelift, but also provide a number of new and enhanced features.

Joining the Dots with Sharepoint

2008-07-25T11:37:00.001+10:00

Quite often I run into people who think something can't be done in SharePoint because of an apparent 'Showstopper' with the way SharePoint appears to function.

Hopefully I made sense with that opening sentence but what I'm referring to is the great wealth of 3rd party add-ons and the community aboard have been developing webparts, features, custom code or just posting design ideas to make things work in SharePoint.

Below are some of my favourites which I roll out in most implementations and if you didn't know about them, it may bring a new perspective to what and how you can architect solutions on the SharePoint platform.

General
----------------------------------
Community Kit for Sharepoint
This is a truely amazing piece of work... Dont let the name fool you either, I've used the blog extensions on intranets to give them some serious enhancements and a new UI.

CKS Weather & World Clock
Everyone wants the weather on their intranet :) - this is the best free one I've found.
Alternatively, I've used the web capture webpart to snap the weather from nice looking weather sites like MSN.

KwizCom
These guys have been round a while, and I'd say they've really matured recently with the quality of their webparts and features but also they've found the holes in SharePoint and plugged them well... Check out their site, as you can view online demo's or trial most things.
This is the only 3rd party I've listed here, everything else listed here is free to download.

Lists & Libraries
----------------------------------
SmartTools for Sharepoint
A nice little feature that provides some additional features to lists and libraries.

The Expert Calendar
this mini calendar webpart was developed by Courtenay one of my colleagues in Sydney.

Workflow
----------------------------------
Custom Workflow Activities
Some great ones in here that really help extend what you can do with workflow scenarios.

Site Provisioning Activity
I modified a sample from a blog I found which allows me to automatically create a site from a workflow, I gave it some mods so it basically allows me to tweak all the settings you get in the 'Create Site' page - including the site template. I use it alot for project/meeting related requirements where a workspace usually gets created.

Sharepoint Workflow & BPM Podcast

2008-07-25T10:21:00.001+10:00

Its been a bit of a lag putting this one up. But at our may MOSSIG meeting I ran the workflow panel session and the podcast is available at our mossig site.
Its a great listen for anyone looking to understand and position bpm and workflow requirements in Sharepoint.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Workflow Panel Session (May 2008)

Recorded at the May Monthly Meeting, our panel were product specialists & architects who represented a number of bpm & workflow technologies. Each of our product specialists presented some background to each product (Slides - Nintex, K2, Skelta) as well as the Workflow Foundation and SharePoint Designer. We then started fleshing out our understanding of workflow and our common scenarios and pains with some great insights from the panel and audience on designing and developing workflow solutions as well as positioning of the relevant technologies to us.

Panellists:

Elaine Van Burgen (Solutions Architect - SDM),

Steve Heaney (Product Specialist - Nintex) ,

Jey Srikantha (Product Specialist - K2)

Vinay Joseph (Product Specialist of Skelta - SDM)

MC'd by Tim Wragg

Back on the Blogs

2008-07-25T10:17:00.001+10:00

Its been a while, but I'm back on the blogs. The main reason for the hiatus has been a move to Vista and the loss of all my usernames and passwords in IE but I've finally recovered by Blogger one. I also lost my archived mail :( - but thats another story.

Great Podcast on the Cloud and Mobility – get it here

2008-05-19T19:31:00.001+10:00

As part of the Office System Forum earlier this month, I ran a panel session with David Lemphers, Nigel Watson and Chris Vidotto from Microsoft. This was a great session where we started with the emergence of cloud based services, defining what they are and what it means for partners and consumers.
Our second topic was on mobility and the general consensus that mobility applications have been poorly designed & implemented and the market remains largely untapped . This topic was a lot of fun, as broad as ‘mobility’ can be, most people can relate from a device & application point of view.
We wrapped up the panel session with a fun look at an IT startup where each panelist pitched their ideas for a new business. There was some great social networking ideas both funny and thought provoking.
It’s a great listen and you can grab it here – at the podcast’s on the MOSSIG’s site.

Smashing Magazine

2008-05-07T17:19:00.000+10:00

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently on the user interface of SharePoint just on those little refinements that mean so much to the end users. In years gone by I used to rely on Google & Live images for my little graphics that adds those nice touches to your sites. Well today a client pointed me to a great site which has a lot of packaged web designs & images which are free to download.
Smashing Magazine - Check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Office Developer Conference 2008 - Book Now!

2008-04-16T16:16:00.002+10:00

It’s coming! – The Office System forum for 2008 will be a premier event for anyone working with Office System technologies like Office, SharePoint, Search – so that means most people :).
I’ll be organizing an enterprise search track (if there is interest in the sign up) which will be fun but I’m also planning the special Microsoft panel session on the Friday. I hosted one at MOSSIG a few months back and it went down really well – we got Dave, Nigel and Graham debating Microsoft's platform vision with some amazing insights from 3 smart lads.
Well I promise this panel session will be bigger and better as we’ll debate a range of topics related to the Office System.
Bigger Panel, Bigger Audience, More Topics – dont miss out on being a part of it.

So what else is there in the conference?
Well, we’ve locked in a 2 day conference with a business/innovation day on Friday 2nd May. Throughout that day you’ll hear presentations & panel sessions from Microsoft and the MOSSIG community on where the Office System is going with an exclusive look at Office 14 – not to mention the networking opportunities that will be available over the day.
Saturday we’re going to get down and dirty with technical/developer centric presentations on Office, SharePoint, Search and anything else that’s Office System related.
Places will go quickly so go to the Office System Forum website to learn more and register.