OBA, SharePoint and Aghy

Global SharePoint Survey – Win a Conference Pass to the SPC!

aghy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:53:51 GMT

The Global SharePoint Survey is just released! This survey is aimed at understanding the adoption and usage of Microsoft Office SharePoint products and technologies worldwide. The survey is open to both business and IT professional users of SharePoint...(read more)

SharePoint 2007 SP2 - Update

aghy — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:17:14 GMT

The SharePoint 2007 SP2 bugfix is ready: “ The update can be applied before or after Service Pack 2 installation. If the update is applied prior to installing Service Pack 2 it will prevent the expiration date from being improperly activated during...(read more)

Using SharePoint for ECM requires careful prep

aghy — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:56:35 GMT

My article about ECM and SharePoint is just published : “Figuring out the best enterprise content management option for an enterprise is a multi-layer process that requires active contribution from all of the project's stakeholders. Many enterprises...(read more)

ODC 2009? - No! SPC 2009!

aghy — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:19:25 GMT

Last year I was very lucky. Althought couldn’t attend the Office Developer Conference 2008 personally, I had had a chance to blog about it at the officedevs.hu (Hungarian). After a while, officedevs.hu was closed, but I moved my posts to my Hungarian...(read more)

Office 2010 CTP in July

aghy — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:17:52 GMT

Tehced US 2009 has been this week, with also some news from the Office-SharePoint world. The most important announcement was made on the keynote: Office 2010 CTP will be available in this July! The registration is open , CTP will be invitation-only...(read more)

Tools and Programs I use in my everyday work

aghy — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:14:00 GMT

As a consultant and architect, my everyday work stands on two main pillars: I have to be well informed and up-to-date with current technologies, news and events, so I need tools for handing the huge information flow and help me to filter the relevant...(read more)

Community Server and JavaScript

aghy — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:45:00 GMT

As you probably recognized, DotNeteers blogs run on CommunityServer 2008. Unfortunately, JavaScript is globally disabled by default, so we were unable to add a lot of contents to our sites, for example to sidebars.

The reason is, that HTML contents (for example the content of Generic Content Widgets) are passed through the HTML scrubber to remove things like scripts etc. which users could insert into pages and cause harm. Of course, we didn’t want to enable JavaScript globally, for example because the chance of unkind comments or cross-site scripting.

One of the solution is the following: enable IFRAME that you can embed some HTML pages in. Insert your JavaScript into a simple HTML page, save it and upload to the CS. For example, my sample HTML page is so simple:

<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!—Insert your script here -->
</script>
</body>

After uploading, embed your HTML page into an IFRAME embedded to a Generic Content Widget:

<iframe src="/your_page_location.html" frameborder="0"> 
</iframe>

That’s it! :)

More info about CS2008 and HTML scrubbing: here.

Technorati Tags: Community Server,JavaScript,HTML,mashup

Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 SP2

aghy — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:24:38 GMT

Here you are! SP2s are here. You can find the announcement at the Product Group’s blog. Additional information and reasons to install are in Joel’s post:

Performance Reliability/Stability Fixes

2. Browser support for IE 8 and improvements in tier 2 browsers (Firefox)

3. Reliability improvements in Indexing and Index Corpus

4. Security Improvements

5. New STSADM Commands including some to fix corruption and relationships (orphaning)

BONUS! Pre Upgrade Checker! - 960577 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960577/ ) List of all Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Server Pre-Upgrade Checker knowledge base articles. This WILL Be required for the next version.

I’ve downloaded them, today is the install day!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,WSS 3.0,MOSS 2007,Office 2007,administration,Service Pack

SharePoint 2007 SP2

aghy — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:24:40 GMT

It’s just announced: the SP2 is coming on April 28. The details and the full list of updates can be found here.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2007,MOSS,WSS,MOSS 2007,WSS 3.0,SP,Service Pack,administration,development

SPBPUK – The Best Ever

aghy — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:28:30 GMT

As you probably know, I’ve been in London at the very beginning of April. As my baby girl is only 2.5 months old she was there with me as well as my son aged 3 and husband. It was not to easy to be a mom of two little kids and have two sessions at the same time, but definitely it was worth. The Best Practices Conference was the event best ever I’ve attended: hats off to Steve and Zoe and the other folks at Combined Knowledge: the place, the sessions, the attendees, and everything was superb, I’m very-very proud to be one of their speakers!

If I’d like to summarize the conference it would takes long hours and lots of space: it’s a mission impossible, but I’ve collected a few links for you:

Twitter #spbpuk: Social networking is not an empty buzzword anymore. A lot of speakers and attendees have twitted about the sessions, experiences and the feeling of SPBPC. A good example and idea the entry of EndUserSharePoint.com with a live twitter “show”. If you want to feel what that meant in the conference rooms, just check this picture :)
Andrew Woodward’s summary
Liam Cleary
Mark Rackley’s summary

As I promised, here are also my slide decks:

At least but not last, here are my photos of the week and the Conference.

Steve, Zoe and everybody: thanks again for this great conference!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2007,DMS,document management,search

Just published: Integrating document management systems into Microsoft SharePoint 2007

aghy — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:12:00 GMT

“When choosing integration, first ask yourself what you'll need to integrate. Documents are more than simple files. Their file format (.doxc, .txt, .pdf, etc.), content and metadata are also important. Decent DMS software handles those parts and makes them available to end users. Also determine what type of integration will best meet your business needs.”

The full article can be found here.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2007,DMS,document management system,integration

SharePoint Designer is Free!

aghy — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:26:00 GMT

Just announced officially: SharePoint Designer is available to download for free! No, this doesn't mean the end of this product's support. Moreover, stay tuned... I can't tell more as I'm under NDA, but the vNext will rock! Trust me!

If you want to know more, see Asif's post.

MVP Renewed

aghy — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:19:00 GMT

A few hours ago I've received the news: I've been renewed with the MVP award for another year.

New BDC Book: SharePoint 2007 Developer’s Guide to Business Data Catalog

aghy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:31:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Brett Lonsdale has announced on his blog the new BDC Book (The Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog) written by him and Nick Swan to “help people understand the Business Data Catalog and to be able to use the features of the BDC such as BDC Search, Business Data Column, Business Data Web Parts, and the BDC Object Model. The book also covers subjects like OBA.”

As you probably know, the goal of the BDC (Business Data Catalog) is to provide a general way to access our several LOB (Line-of-Business) systems and integrate their data into the MOSS 2007.

In my experiences, most people are not too familiar with BDC as they don’t know its real power. Or even if they know something about the BDC they’re afraid to use it. Don’t do! This book drives us to the main ways to use our LOB systems with a BDC definition:

BDC webparts
Business Data column
Search
User Profile Import
custom solutions

Moreover, we can also learn how to build up an Application Definition File, how to set up a secure BDC connection as well as extending the User Profiles. My favorite chapters are about displaying BDC data with the help of SharePoint Designer, and (of course :)) about Office Business Applications (OBAs).

Finally, Brett and Nick introduce us to writing back to BDC via the Application Definition File or the Object Model. – Oh yes, it’s possible even almost everybody thinks it’s a mission impossible. As the two Metaman-guys say: “The Business Data Catalog does actually support Read/Write both in the Object Model and in the Application Definition File. It is the Web Parts that simply don't support Write Back or Updates.” – Are you surprised? I told you: most people are not enough familiar with BDC…

All in all, this book covers every aspect of the Business Data Catalog, makes very deep and detailed introductions, examples and how-tos. A real must to have book if you work as a SharePoint developer!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2007,BDC,Business Data Catalog,book,review

Customizing master-detail lists with SharePoint Designer

aghy — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:48:13 GMT

Sometimes (very often) we have to be faced with the user requirements of master-detail lists. If you want to implement a very basic one, it’s very simple: lookup fields can have very big strong. For example, you need to store company data with contact people:

Well, how can you store these info pieces in SharePoint lists? – Of course, you’ll simply have two lists: first one for the companies, and the second one for the contact persons. In this second list you have to make a lookup column referring to the Companies list. In this column we’ll store the info where is that person’s working:

That’s great, but in most cases that’s not enough. You can maintain companies and contacts in different spaces, in different lists. The main problems with this are the followings:

You cannot see the related contacts on the Company’s form. For example, I’d like to have a form for Company1 where I can see Thomas, Spencer, Percy, Harvey and Harold.
You cannot maintain the contacts directly from the companies data form. When you view/edit a contact person, you’ll be redirected to the contacts list’s AllItems.aspx instead of the related company’s DispForm.aspx.

So, would you like to know what I’m talking about? The default display form of a company is something similar this:

Instead of that, I’d like to see something like that:

I’m very sorry because of the Hungarian UI, but to be honestly this example is from my company’s Intranet site. Most probably you’re interested in a few words, so let’s start your first Hungarian lesson:

Ügyfél = customer
Kapcsolattartó = contact person
Bezárás = close

That’s it, I hope you understand everything else :)

Well, making a form like that is very simple, you just have to create a Data View webpart with SharePoint Designer. The source list of this Data View is the contacts list, filtered by the current company: create a custom company DispForm webpart based on the URL’s ID parameter, and you can connect this webpart to the Data Views. You need this trick just because the URL contains the company’s ID, but in the Data Views you need the name of that.

In the Data Views, all of the the items’ link redirect you to the selected contact person’s DispForm / EditForm – and very similar, the New Contact (“Új kapcsolattartó”) link placed in the footer of the webpart redirects you to the contacts list’s NewForm.aspx.

That’s well and good, but how are we redirected to the company’s page from these forms? – This step requires two little tricks. First of all, we have to tell the forms where to come back. It’s pretty easy, just place a parameter in the URL. For example, the New Contact (“Új kapcsolattartó”) link is something like this:

http://intranet/cust_site/Lists/Contacts/NewForm.aspx?CustomerID=112

where CustomerID is the ID of the current company, and you can read this from the URL as a QueryString parameter:

OK, we’re ready on the companies’ side, let’s jump to the contacts list. Here we should update all forms (DispForm.aspx, EditForm.aspx, NewForm.aspx) and learn them to redirect us to the related company’s DispForm instead of Lists/Contacts/AllItems.aspx. As the logic of this modification is similar on all these forms, let’s only see the NewForm.

First of all, what you have to do to change the default redirecting of Save and Cancel buttons is to replace the default NewForm webpart to a custom one. Changing the redirecting to a static URL is very simple, but in this case we need a dynamic URL in the redirection, because of the CustomerID parameter. Let’s dig into it and see the way of dynamic redirecting step-by-step:

Read the CustomerID parameter from the URL (see above).
Place the following snippet to the beginning of the Data View webpart’s code. With it you can build the redirect URL (RedirectLoc) in a dynamic way:

    <xsl:param name="CustomerId" />

        <xsl:variable name="RedirectLoc">/cust_site/Lists/Customers/DispForm.aspx?ID=<xsl:value-of select="$CustomerId" />

    </xsl:variable>

Finally, replace the default SAVE and CANCEL button to this ones:

<input name="SaveButton1" type="submit" value="Save" onclick="javascr ipt: {ddwrt:GenFireServerEvent(concat('__commit;__redirect={',$RedirectLoc,'}'))}"/>

<input name="CancelButton1" type="button" value="Cancel" onclick="javascr ipt: {ddwrt:GenFireServerEvent(concat('__cancel;__redirect={',$RedirectLoc,'}'))}"/>

That’s it! Hope you like it – more to come, stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2007,WSS,WSS 3.0,SharePoint Designer,User Interface,webpart