Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.  

While the Technical Preview program is already full, everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer, and we’ll have more to share about the release then. In the meantime, I do want to thank everyone who is participating in the Technical Preview for their contributions and all our customers for their continued support.

A technical preview of the Managed Object Model Software Development Kit for SharePoint 15 was also released today and this provides some insights into what might be included in the next version of SharePoint. Some of the more interesting additions are:

The addition of a CorporateCatalog enumeration with the following values:

• StoreFront – The package is from the marketplace.
• CorporateCatalog – The package is from a corporate gallery.
• DeveloperSite – The package is from a developer site.
• ObjectModel – The package is loaded via an object model.
• RemoteObjectModel – The package is uploaded via CSOM.

New SPApp, SPAppInstance and SPAppCatalog classes. The description for the SPApp class states: “Represents an app loaded onto Microsoft SharePoint Server and ready to be installed.” which also contains a CreateAppInstance method that states “Creates an instance of an app at the specified site specified by the web parameter. The new instance can then be retrievedby using the SPAppCatalog class and using the returned ID.”

This hints at an extended deployment framework allowing more control over deployment of custom components within SharePoint. For example we also have a SPWeb.LoadAndInstallApp method that is used to upload and install an app package and a SPWeb.AppDatabaseName property.

Another potentially related addition is the SPWebApplication.IsUserLicensedForEntity method that “Checks if the currently logged in user has the proper license to access the specified entity.”

There isn’t a lot of information about what these are used for but it raises some interesting questions – is this an extension to the feature and solution model for deploying additional SharePoint functionality? Will you be able to create apps that work on Windows 8 and SharePoint 15? If you have any ideas or find any other interesting bits of information leave a note in the comments below.

SharePoint 15 object model preview is a post from: SharePoint Config

SharePoint Online Flavours

SharePoint Online is part of Office 365 which has two broad offerings; the Office 365 public cloud and Office 365 dedicated.

As the name suggests the public cloud is a shared environment so other people will be using the same servers to run their SharePoint sites. To ensure one customer doesn’t affect another customer on the same server Microsoft has had to impose many significant restrictions. For example you can’t deploy files to the file system as this could overwrite files from another customer. This was also a driving force behind sandboxed solutions – a restricted set of allowed customisations that Microsoft can guarantee won’t affect other customers in a shared environment.

There are several different licencing models for the Office 365 public cloud. The main offerings are:

• Professionals and small businesses (P plans) – these are limited to 50 users and a single site collection. There are also less features available and there is no supported upgrade to the enterprise plans (E plans).
• Medium businesses and enterprises (E plans) – these allow 300 (non-my site) site collections containing 100GB of content each. The enterprise plans also include my sites and cross-site collection search. For more details have a look at the Microsoft SharePoint Online for Enterprises Service Description.

Office 365 dedicated is aimed at 30,000+ seat deployments so unless you have a large user base this isn’t going to be an option as Microsoft will only start discussing this if you have a deployment of this size. As you are the only customer using the servers, however, you are able to deploy full trust solutions in SharePoint Online dedicated although these still need to go through Microsoft approval process before they can be deployed to the servers. The rest of this article will focus on the features and limitations of the public cloud.

Screen shots of the administration panel for the P and E plans are shown below. Note the complete lack of farm level configuration in the P plans:

P1 Administration screen (note the ‘Manage team sites’ simply takes you to the team site settings page).

E3 Administration screen (note the SharePoint Online | Manage link takes you to the following additional admin screen)

E3 SharePoint Administration Screen

E3 SharePoint Site Collection Administration – note the resource and storage quotas. Sandbox solutions are limited to consuming the available resources in the quota – if these are used up all sandbox solutions stop running.

What’s In

A broad summary of the features available in SharePoint Online is included below. More details can be found in the Microsoft SharePoint Online for Enterprises Service Description.

• My Sites
• Office Integration (2007/2010)
• SharePoint Workspace 2010 for Offline Working
• External Sharing
• Simple Public-Facing Website
• Document Libraries
• Slide & Media Libraries
• Business Taxonomies & Tagging
• Document Sets & ID’s
• Office Web Apps
• Cross-site Collection Search
• Search Refiners
• Indexing Controls
• People Search
• Phonetic Search
• Excel Services
• Access Services
• Visio Services
• SharePoint Web Services
• Forms Services
• Custom Web Parts
• Silverlight controls
• Sandboxed Solutions
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Business Connectivity Services

As you can see there are a large number of features, and Microsoft is continuing to add to this by adding features. For example support for Business Connectivity Services and the Secure Store Service was added during October and November this year. If you need to extend these capabilities then sandboxed solutions can be used.

What’s Out

At the time of writing the following features were unavailable.

• Records Center
• Information Rights Management (IRM)
• SharePoint for Internet Sites and WCM workflow and approval
• Site Variations
• PerformancePoint Services
• Power Pivot
• Full-Trust Code Solutions
• FAST Search

Development Options

There are several options for developing custom solutions for SharePoint Online. As with on-premise SharePoint deployments you can use the browser to create site columns, content types, lists, web pages and other artefacts. You can also use SharePoint designer and InfoPath to create custom workflows, enhance list forms and provide similar customisations as you can with an on-premise deployment.

If you need to write code to provide functionality such as an event receiver or a web part then you can use sandboxed solutions to create and deploy managed code assemblies. If you need to provide functionality that isn’t supported in the sandbox such as timer jobs or service applications then one option is to host this logic in an external environment such as Windows Azure and interact with SharePoint online via the client object model and/or the SharePoint web services.

Key sandbox limitations

The sandbox model has some major restrictions on what is allowed. Some of the key limitations are:

• No access to the file system
• Code restrictions:
  • GAC deployment prohibited
  • Restricted set of allowed assemblies
• No server side external calls
• No Web Application or Farm scoped functionality
• No full-trust proxy allowed in SP-O standard

Limitation #1 – No access to the file system

Without the ability to deploy files or interact with files on the file system this prevents you from using the following in SharePoint Online:

• Site definitions – These require onet.xml and webtemp.xml files deployed to the SharePoint root directory so are not available. To work around this limitation you can use the WebTemplate element that is new in SharePoint 2010 (and often overlooked). To find out more check out Vesa’s great post on SharePoint 2010 and web templates.
• User controls – Again these need to be deployed to the ControlTemplates folder in the file system. To get around this limitation you can install the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools as these include a Sandboxed Visual Web Part template that can be used to write a control (.ascx) file that is then compiled and deployed in your assembly, circumventing this limitation.
• Application pages – Typically used for settings or admin pages but you cannot deploy to the _layouts virtual directory as this maps to the SharePoint root LAYOUTS folder so these cannot be used. A workaround for these is to create a site page and embed a web part on this page so it appears like an application page. Wictor Wilén has a good article on this at Custom application pages in the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox. Note when embedding your web part you need to use the SPUserCodeWebPart class rather than adding your web part directly to the page.
• Branding resources – Often resources such as images and JavaScript files are deployed to the SharePoint root so these need to be deployed to a library such as the Style Library instead. Another thing to note is that all file including masterpages and page layouts provisioned via a feature are checked out when using Sandboxed Solutions. Waldek’s article Automatically publishing files provisioned with Sandboxed Solutions provides a solution for this.
• Web.config – Without the ability to change the web.config file you are prevented from many things such as creating HttpModules, adding custom authentication providers, and changing the appsettings entries. Many of these cannot be avoided but for application settings you can still use the SPWeb property bag or a SharePoint list.
• ULS logs – As you cannot write to or view entries in the ULS logs or Windows Event Logs debugging errors becomes a lot more difficult. When a web part or event handler errors in SharePoint Online there is no stack trace available and no log to check for details of what caused the error. One solution is to log to a SharePoint list and this is something I demonstrated in the SharePoint Saturday session. You need to be mindful of resource usage so the ability to switch logging on and off in production is useful here. I’ll include more details and an example solution in a later post.

Limitation #2 – Accessing external data

Code running in SharePoint online is restricted to the scope of the current site collection. You cannot make web services calls or create new SPSite objects for other site collections. Some options for interacting with external data are:

• Use client side code – This could be in the form of a Silverlight application using the Client Object Model, JavaScript running in a browser using the ECMAScript client model or using the Managed client OM such as in an Office Add-in. Wictor has a interesting article on one example of how to do this in his article SharePoint Online and External Data using JSONP.
• Business connectivity services – The BCS feature allows you to create external lists that render data from an external system so you could create a WCF service that exposes data in an external system and display this as a SharePoint list.
• Data view web part – Another simple way of getting data in is to use SharePoint designer and the data view web part. This can be used to display an RSS feed on a SharePoint page, for example. Note that you cannot use this server side so its use is fairly limited.

Limitation #3 – Code restrictions

Some important points here are that you cannot deploy solutions to the GAC so your solutions do not have full trust. This prevents components such as custom workflow solutions and timer jobs from running. You also have a very restricted set of allowed assemblies and methods within those assemblies that can be called. For example the SPSecurity namespace is not allowed so you cannot run code under the application pool account as SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPriviledges is not allowed. The Visual Studio SharePoint Power Tools mentioned earlier help you with this limitation by compiling sandbox solutions against the allowed set of assemblies so you can identify the available methods via intellisense and at will see errors if you use these at compile time.

Another key thing to note is that you do not have full access to the Page and HttpRequest objects. When the sandboxed code runs it is executed under the SPUCWorkerProcess not the W3Wp.exe process. The SPUCWorkerProcess only contains a copy of the Page and SPWeb objects so methods that Microsoft have not implemented such as Page.ClientScript or Response.Redirect will not work.

Some good articles on this topic are (again) by Wictor and Waldek:

• Dynamically loading JavaScript from within Sandbox by Waldek
• Understanding the SharePoint 2010 Sandbox limitations by Wictor

The Sandboxed Solutions article on MSDN also has more in-depth coverage of some of these issues.

To get around some of these limitations one approach is to move your more complex application logic into an external system such as Windows Azure. The external system can then perform the procedures it needs to in a a fully trusted and fully featured environment. You might also want to store some of your data in an external system for compliance or cost reasons. Steve Fox has more information on this in his article Leveraging Windows Azure WCF Services to Connect BCS with SharePoint Online.

Limitation #4 – Deployment scope

Sandboxed solutions can only contains site collection or site/web scoped features. Additionally you don’t have full access to farm features such as search so there are features such as managed search properties that are not available in SharePoint Online. Other things that are unavailable are authentication providers and custom service applications. Again, for situations where you need to extend your SharePoint Online environment beyond the scope of the site collection you may want to consider moving this application logic elsewhere and/or consider a hybrid approach where some SharePoint content is online and some is on premise.

Resources

To find out more or get up and running I recommend using the following resources:

• Office 365 Trial – get started by setting up a 30 day trial account, or if you are a Microsoft partner sign up for an extended trial at http://www.microsoftcloudpartner.com/
• SharePoint Online for Office 365: Developer Guide
• Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools – include the Sandboxed Visual Web Part template and compilation rules for Sandbox Solutions
• FxCop Rules for SharePoint Online – SharePoint online contains a solution validator with additional rules on top of the sandbox solution restrictions. To ensure your solution is compatible before you upload it to SharePoint online you can run these FxCop rules.

I also found the following books useful resources for understanding more about SharePoint online development.

Deploying Cloud-Based Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Solutions – good overview of Office 365. Doesn’t go into a lot of depth in terms of development but has a great high-level overview of Office 365, SharePoint Online, and high-level options for SharePoint online customisation and development.

Developing Microsoft® SharePoint® Applications Using Windows Azure- useful hands on guide to developing applications using Windows Azure and integrating these with SharePoint.

Professional SharePoint 2010 Cloud Based Solutions- I’ve haven’t read this yet as it has just been released but it appears to have lots of hands on development examples of how to integrate SharePoint with a variety of cloud services.

Developing for SharePoint Online is a post from: SharePoint Config

There are 8 different tracks and heaps of great sessions so if you can make it I’d recommend it as a way of learning more and networking with the SharePoint community.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday UK is a post from: SharePoint Config

If there are a large number of content pages this type of tagging can help users find information as these columns can be used as filters on a list, items in a tag cloud or as search refinements.

The steps to add a managed metadata field to a publishing page are:

A) Create a managed metadata field

1. Provision a managed metadata field using type TaxonomyFieldType (or TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti to allow multiple values)
2. Configure the managed metadata column to reference an existing term set
3. Provision a hidden field of type Note
4. Configure the managed metadata column to use the hidden Note field
5. Ensure that the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature is activated on the site collection

B) Create a page layout that uses a managed metadata field

1. Create a site scoped feature for the page layout
2. Create a content type based on the ‘Page’ content type that uses the managed metadata fields
3. Create a page layout that uses the new content type
4. Create a web scoped feature for the content type association
5. Associate the content type with the pages library

As I’ve covered the process to create a managed metadata field in a previous article I won’t repeat that. Instead you can download the example solution and use the steps below to add the field to a page layout, or just use the steps below if you already have completed part A.

1. Create a site scoped feature for the page layout

In this example I’ve created two features – a site scoped feature named ‘Metadata Page’ and a web scoped feature named ‘Metadata Page Web’. The site scoped feature needs to contain the content type and page layout as these are deployed at the site collection level. It should also include a feature activation dependency on the feature(s) used in part A and the publishing infrastructure feature to ensure these features are available.

2. Create a content type based on the ‘Page’ content type that uses the managed metadata fields

Once you have deployed a managed metadata field you should create a content type that inherits from the Page content type (or one that derives from it such as the Article Page or Welcome Page). You will then want to include your managed metadata field and the hidden note field as well as any other fields you want to use in your layout. The example below adds the PublishingPageContent rich text field, the Regional Office managed metadata field and the associated hidden note field, and the Enterprise keywords field (a non-hierarchical open term set).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

  <!-- Parent ContentType: Page (0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF39) -->

  <ContentType ID="0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF3900e20db8f48c7c44d0938059ab05bace32"

               Name="Metadata Page"

               Group="Custom Content Types"

               Description="My Content Type"

               Inherits="TRUE"

               Version="0">

    <FieldRefs>

      <FieldRef ID="{f55c4d88-1f2e-4ad9-aaa8-819af4ee7ee8}" Name="PublishingPageContent"/>

      <FieldRef ID="{dcb76480-4735-11e0-ab07-0800200c9a66}" Name="RegionalOffice"/>

      <FieldRef ID="{9EDAB26E-CC44-4027-AB05-CB44EA3A6F72}" Name="RegionalOfficeTaxHTField0"/>

      <FieldRef ID="{23f27201-bee3-471e-b2e7-b64fd8b7ca38}" Name="TaxKeyword" />

    </FieldRefs>

  </ContentType>

</Elements>

Note that unlike the previous post I’m not adding the TaxCatchAll or TaxCatchAllLabel fields to my content type as these are added to the list automatically when you associate the content type with the Pages list (covered in step 3). This step is only required if you are creating a list definition – more details are in the post on issues provisioning SharePoint 2010 managed metadata fields.

3. Create a page layout that uses the new content type

To create the page layout you need to create an ASPX page and a module that will deploy this to the masterpage gallery. One way of creating the ASPX page is to use the CKS:Dev Visual Studio extensions that allow you to create this by right clicking on the content type in server explorer.

Alternatively you can just create an empty module and add a standard ASPX page with the mark-up shown below:

<%@ Page language="C#" Inherits="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingLayoutPage,Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing,Version=14.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" meta:webpartpageexpansion="full" meta:progid="SharePoint.WebPartPage.Document" %>

<%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePointWebControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingWebControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

<%@ Register Tagprefix="WebPartPages" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

<%@ Register Tagprefix="Taxonomy" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderPageTitle" runat="server">

      <SharePointWebControls:FieldValue id="PageTitle" FieldName="Title" runat="server"/>

</asp:Content>

<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea" runat="server">

    <SharePointWebControls:FieldValue FieldName="Title" runat="server"/>

</asp:Content>

<asp:Content ContentPlaceholderID="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server">

    <SharePointWebControls:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/Core Styles/page-layouts-21.css %>" runat="server"/>

    <PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel runat="server">

        <!-- Styles for edit mode only-->

        <SharePointWebControls:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/Core Styles/edit-mode-21.css %>"

            After="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/Core Styles/page-layouts-21.css %>" runat="server"/>

    </PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel>

    <SharePointWebControls:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/Core Styles/rca.css %>" runat="server"/>

</asp:Content>

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server">

    <h2><SharePointWebControls:TextField runat="server" FieldName="Title"/></h2>

    <p>

        <strong><PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel runat="server" PageDisplayMode="Display">Regional Office:</PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel></strong>

        <Taxonomy:TaxonomyFieldControl FieldName="RegionalOffice" InputFieldLabel="Regional Office" runat="server"></Taxonomy:TaxonomyFieldControl>

    </p>

    <p>

        <strong><PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel runat="server" PageDisplayMode="Display">Tags:</PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel></strong>

        <Taxonomy:TaxonomyFieldControl FieldName="TaxKeyword" InputFieldLabel="Tags" runat="server"></Taxonomy:TaxonomyFieldControl>

    </p>

    <div class="article-content">

        <PublishingWebControls:RichHtmlField FieldName="PublishingPageContent" HasInitialFocus="True" MinimumEditHeight="400px" runat="server"/>

    </div>

</asp:Content>

In your elements.xml file you then configure this page layout to be deployed to the masterpage gallery and use the content type you created in step 1 by using the following mark-up:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

  <Module Name="PageLayouts" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" Path="PageLayouts" RootWebOnly="TRUE">

    <File Url="MetadataPageLayout.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

      <Property Name="Title" Value="Metadata Page" />

      <Property Name="ContentType" Value="$Resources:cmscore,contenttype_pagelayout_name;" />

      <Property Name="PublishingPreviewImage" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/DefaultPageLayout.png, ~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/$Resources:core,Culture;/Preview Images/DefaultPageLayout.png" />

      <Property Name="PublishingAssociatedContentType" Value=";#Metadata Page;#0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF3900e20db8f48c7c44d0938059ab05bace32;#"/>

    </File>

  </Module>

</Elements>

4. Create a web scoped feature for the content type association

At this point you should check your features to make sure the content type and page layout are associated with the Metadata Page site scoped feature. You should also create a web scoped feature to use for the following item.

5. Associate the content type with the pages library

The last step is to associate the content type with the pages library. If you miss this step then users can still create pages using your page layout but if they only have contribute permission then the managed metadata functionality is not configured properly within the pages library correctly and you get the following error:

Failed to get value of the “{0}” column from the “Managed Metadata” field type control. See details in log. Exception message: Invalid field name. {1}

To create this association create an empty module element with the following mark-up:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

  <!-- Metadata page binding -->

  <ContentTypeBinding

    ContentTypeId="0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF3900e20db8f48c7c44d0938059ab05bace32"

    ListUrl="Pages"

  />

</Elements>

The web scoped feature that is used for this should be activated on all sites that will use the page layout you created earlier. It tells SharePoint to add the content type to the pages library as well as all associated fields and will correctly configure the managed metadata functionality when this is activated. To setup this association you might want to add this feature in your custom web templates (or site definitions) or use a FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation to associate your feature with existing site definitions such as the publishing site.

Once this is deployed you should be able to create a new page and select your page layout from the ribbon as shown below:

I’ve included the code used in the steps above in a Visual Studio 2010 project to add a managed metadata field to a publishing page layout. This builds on the previous example to create a managed metadata field so it also includes the code to create a list definition.

Adding Managed Metadata Fields to SharePoint Publishing Pages is a post from: SharePoint Config

In SharePoint 2010 these published links are managed under the user profile service application in a page called ‘Published links to Office client applications’.

We had an issue this week, however, where a client encountered the following error when trying to browse to this page.

The error message stated:

Your search encountered an error. If the problem persists, contact the portal site administrator.

There was nothing obvious in the event logs or the ULS logs about this message making it a bit of a mystery as to why it was failing.

After some investigation I found that the problem could be recreated by creating a published link that related to an audience and then deleting that audience. Yes that’s right, there is some really shoddy coding going on there and simply deleting the audience through the UI causes the entire published links screen to stop working! As you can’t see the links anymore you cannot delete the affected links. You also can’t undo the audience deletion so you are essentially stuck.

With some digging I found the values are stored in the SharedListSync table of the Profile DB relating to the user profile service application. As deleting information out of the SharePoint databases risks causing worse problems (not to mention leaving your farm in an unsupported state) I had a look at how the UI handles the deletion when the page is working and found a much better workaround.

If you add a checkbox to the page with a value that matches the ID of the link in the database you can delete the affected links. This is basically mimicking the checkboxes that would be on the page if it rendered correctly. You can then select the checkbox and use the delete button in exactly the same way SharePoint allows you to i.e. in a supported manner. This is shown below:

Note the highlighted checkbox that has been manually inserted into the DOM by editing the HTML mark up. The value=”1” will mean that the link with the ItemId of 1 in the database will be deleted. Determining the ID’s to delete does require access to the Profile DB but this can be done by taking a backup of the affected database and restoring it in a test environment if you don’t have access to live data. What you need to look for is the ItemId field in the SharedListSync table.

The values in the TargetTo column relate to an audience stored in the Profile_SearchAudienceTable. In this case we can see that the row with an ItemId of 2 has an audience so this would be the item to delete if there was a problem.

To add the checkbox to the page you can use tools such as Firebug for Firefox or the IE Developer toolbar. In either tool you just need to select the HTML tab, click edit and insert an input element with type=”checkbox” and a value matching the ItemId of the row to delete. For example to delete the row with ItemId of 2 you could insert the following.

<input type="checkbox" id="CheckedLinks1" value="2">

You need to make sure the input element is within the FORM tag of the page but it doesn’t matter where you put it. For example the screen shot below shows how you can edit the HTML using the IE developer toolbar to add the tag directly after the opening FORM element. This will place the checkbox to delete the item at the very top of the page.

If you have multiple items to remove you can add in multiple input elements, select all the items and delete them at once. Once you have deleted the links with missing audiences the screen should return to a usable state.

Error with published links to Office client applications is a post from: SharePoint Config

The XSLT used in the example above is shown below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"

xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime"

xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ASPNET/20"

xmlns:SEARCHWC="http://schemas.microsoft.com/searchserver/">

  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="no"/>

  <xsl:param name="SortBy" />

  <xsl:param name="DropDownOption" />

  <xsl:param name="RelevanceSortUrl" />

  <xsl:param name="RelevanceSortLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="SocialDistanceSortUrl" />

  <xsl:param name="SocialDistanceSortLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="NameSortUrl" />

  <xsl:param name="NameSortLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="IsNoKeyword" />

  <xsl:param name="IsFixedQuery" />

  <xsl:param name="ShowMoreLink" />

  <xsl:param name="MoreLinkLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="MoreLink" />

  <xsl:param name="AlertMeLink" />

  <xsl:param name="AlertMeText" />

  <xsl:param name="SrchRSSText" />

  <xsl:param name="SrchRSSLink" />

  <xsl:param name="ShowMessage" />

  <xsl:param name="ShowActionLinks" />

  <xsl:param name="SearchProviderText" />

  <xsl:param name="SearchProviderLink" />

  <xsl:param name="IsPeopleCoreResultsWebPart" />

  <xsl:param name="NoFixedQuery" />

  <xsl:param name="NoKeyword" />

  <xsl:param name="NoPeopleResults" />

  <xsl:param name="NoPeopleResults1" />

  <xsl:param name="NoPeopleResults2" />

  <xsl:param name="NoPeopleResults3" />

  <xsl:param name="NoPeopleResults4" />

  <xsl:param name="ParentOrgsLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="ViewHiearchyLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="RecentContentLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="ResponsibilitiesLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="SkillsLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="InterestsLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="PastProjectsLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="SchoolLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="MembershipLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="AboutMeLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="BaseOfficeLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="SummaryLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="ProfileViewLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="UpdateProfileLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="QueriesFoundYouLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="UpdateProfileKeywordLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="SelfSearchLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="NoKeywordLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="AddToMyColleaguesText" />

  <xsl:param name="PopupFetcingResultLabel" />

  <xsl:param name="IdPrefix" />

  <xsl:param name="LangPickerHeading" />

  <xsl:param name="LangPickerNodeSet" />

  <xsl:param name="FilterNodeSet" />

  <xsl:param name="ShowPeopleSortDropdown" />

  <xsl:param name="RecentUpdateTabLabel" />

  <!-- When there is no keywory to issue the search -->

  <xsl:template name="dvt_1.noKeyword">

    <span class="ms-sbplain">

      <xsl:choose>

        <xsl:when test="$IsFixedQuery">

          <xsl:value-of select="$NoFixedQuery" />

        </xsl:when>

        <xsl:otherwise>

          <xsl:value-of select="$NoKeyword" />

        </xsl:otherwise>

      </xsl:choose>

    </span>

  </xsl:template>

  <!-- When empty result set is returned from search -->

  <xsl:template name="dvt_1.empty">

    <div class="psrch-results">

      <xsl:if test="$ShowActionLinks">

        <xsl:call-template name="ActionBarTemplate" />

      </xsl:if>

    </div>

    <span class="srch-description" id="CSR_NO_RESULTS">

      <xsl:value-of select="$NoPeopleResults"/>

      <ol>

        <li>

          <xsl:value-of select="$NoPeopleResults1"/>

        </li>

        <li>

          <xsl:value-of select="$NoPeopleResults2"/>

        </li>

        <li>

          <xsl:value-of select="$NoPeopleResults3"/>

        </li>

        <li>

          <xsl:value-of select="$NoPeopleResults4"/>

        </li>

      </ol>

    </span>

  </xsl:template>

  <!-- Main body template-->

  <xsl:template name="dvt_1.body">

    <div class="psrch-results">

      <xsl:if test="$ShowActionLinks">

        <div class="srch-sort-right2">

          <xsl:if test="$LangPickerNodeSet and count($LangPickerNodeSet) &gt; 0">

            <label for="langpickerdd" id="langpickerddlabel">

              <xsl:value-of select="$LangPickerHeading"/>

            </label>

            <select title="{$LangPickerHeading}" class="srch-dropdown" onchange="window.location.href=this.value" id="langpickerdd">

              <xsl:for-each select="$LangPickerNodeSet">

                <xsl:element name="option">

                  <xsl:attribute name="value">

                    <xsl:value-of select="@url"/>

                  </xsl:attribute>

                  <xsl:if test="@selected = 'true'">

                    <xsl:attribute name="selected">selected</xsl:attribute>

                  </xsl:if>

                  <xsl:value-of select="@title"/>

                </xsl:element>

              </xsl:for-each>

            </select>

            <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&#8195;</xsl:text>

          </xsl:if>

          <xsl:if test="$ShowPeopleSortDropdown">

            <label for="sortbydd" id="sortbyddlabel">

              <xsl:value-of select="$SortBy" />

            </label>

            <select title="{$SortBy}" name="dropdown" onchange="window.location.href=this.value" class="srch-dropdown" id="sortbydd">

              <xsl:element name="option">

                <xsl:attribute name="value">

                  <xsl:value-of select="string($RelevanceSortUrl)"/>

                </xsl:attribute>

                <xsl:if test="$DropDownOption = '0'">

                  <xsl:attribute name="selected">selected</xsl:attribute>

                </xsl:if>

                <xsl:value-of select="$RelevanceSortLabel"/>

              </xsl:element>

              <xsl:if test="string-length($SocialDistanceSortUrl) &gt; 0 and string-length($SocialDistanceSortLabel) &gt; 0">

                <xsl:element name="option">

                  <xsl:attribute name="value">

                    <xsl:value-of select="string($SocialDistanceSortUrl)"/>

                  </xsl:attribute>

                  <xsl:if test="$DropDownOption = '1'">

                    <xsl:attribute name="selected">selected</xsl:attribute>

                  </xsl:if>

                  <xsl:value-of select="$SocialDistanceSortLabel"/>

                </xsl:element>

              </xsl:if>

              <xsl:element name="option">

                <xsl:attribute name="value">

                  <xsl:value-of select="string($NameSortUrl)"/>

                </xsl:attribute>

                <xsl:if test="$DropDownOption = '2'">

                  <xsl:attribute name="selected">selected</xsl:attribute>

                </xsl:if>

                <xsl:value-of select="$NameSortLabel"/>

              </xsl:element>

            </select>

            <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&#8195;</xsl:text>

          </xsl:if>

          <xsl:call-template name="ActionBarTemplate" />

        </div>

      </xsl:if>

      <table width="100%" class="ms-listviewtable">

        <thead>

          <tr class="ms-viewheadertr ms-vhltr">

            <td class="ms-vh2">Name</td>

            <td class="ms-vh2">Phone</td>

            <td class="ms-vh2">Email</td>

            <td class="ms-vh2">Job title</td>

            <td class="ms-vh2">Department</td>

            <td class="ms-vh2">Office</td>

          </tr>

        </thead>

        <xsl:for-each select="All_Results/Result">

          <xsl:call-template name="SingleResult"/>

        </xsl:for-each>

      </table>

      <xsl:call-template name="MoreLinkTemplate" />

    </div>

  </xsl:template>

  <!-- This template is called for each result -->

  <xsl:template name="SingleResult">

      <xsl:call-template name="SingleResultInternal" />

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="SingleResultInternal">

    <xsl:variable name="id" select="id"/>

    <xsl:variable name="currentId" select="concat($IdPrefix,$id)"/>

    <xsl:variable name="url" select="url"/>

    <xsl:variable name="email" select="workemail"/>

    <xsl:variable name="sip" select="sipaddress"/>

    <xsl:variable name="prefix">IMNRC('</xsl:variable>

    <xsl:variable name="suffix">')</xsl:variable>

    <xsl:variable name="hassip"       select="string-length($sip) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasemail"     select="string-length($email) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="haspn"        select="string-length(preferredname) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasydn"       select="string-length(yomidisplayname) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasjt"        select="string-length(jobtitle) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasdp"        select="string-length(department) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasorg"       select="string-length(orgnames) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="haswph"       select="string-length(workphone) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasonum"      select="string-length(officenumber) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hascol"       select="string-length(colleaguecategory) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasacu"       select="string-length(addtomycolleaguesurl) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hashier"      select="string-length(hierarchyurl) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasabme"      select="string-length(aboutme) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasresp"      select="string-length(responsibility) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hassk"        select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='SPShSkills') or hithighlightedproperties/skills/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasint"       select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='SPShInterests') or hithighlightedproperties/interests/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasorgparent" select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='OrgParentNames') or hithighlightedproperties/orgparentnames/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasmem"       select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='Memberships') or hithighlightedproperties/memberships/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="haspp"        select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='SPShPastProjects') or hithighlightedproperties/pastprojects/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasbol"       select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='SPShLocation') or hithighlightedproperties/baseofficelocation/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hassch"       select="($FilterNodeSet and $FilterNodeSet/@title='SPShSchool') or hithighlightedproperties/schools/@hashh &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hassum"       select="count(hithighlightedsummary/c0) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasvlm"       select="string-length(profileviewlastmonth) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasvlw"       select="string-length(profileviewlastweek) &gt; 0"/>

    <xsl:variable name="hasquery"     select="string-length(queriesfoundyou) &gt; 0"/>

    <tr>

      <td class="ms-vb2">

        <xsl:if test="$haspn">

          <a href="{string($url)}" id="{concat($currentId, '_CSR')}">

            <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/preferredname" />

          </a>

        </xsl:if>

      </td>

      <td class="ms-vb2">

        <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/workphone" />

      </td>

      <td class="ms-vb2">

        <xsl:choose>

          <xsl:when test="$hassip">

            <a id="{concat($currentId, '_EmailLink')}" href="{concat('mailto:', $sip)}">

              <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/sipaddress" />

            </a>

          </xsl:when>

          <xsl:otherwise>

            <a id="{concat($currentId, '_EmailLink')}" href="{concat('mailto:', $email)}">

              <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/workemail" />

            </a>

          </xsl:otherwise>

        </xsl:choose>

      </td>

      <td class="ms-vb2">

        <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/jobtitle" />

      </td>

      <td class="ms-vb2">

        <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/department" />

      </td>

      <td class="ms-vb2">

        <xsl:apply-templates select="hithighlightedproperties/officenumber" />

      </td>

    </tr>

  </xsl:template>

  <!-- XSL transformation starts here -->

  <xsl:template match="/">

    <xsl:if test="$AlertMeLink and $ShowActionLinks">

      <input type="hidden" name="P_Query" />

      <input type="hidden" name="P_LastNotificationTime" />

    </xsl:if>

    <div class="psrch-Main">

      <xsl:choose>

        <xsl:when test="$IsNoKeyword = 'True'" >

          <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.noKeyword" />

        </xsl:when>

        <xsl:when test="$ShowMessage = 'True'">

          <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.empty" />

        </xsl:when>

        <xsl:otherwise>

          <xsl:call-template name="dvt_1.body"/>

        </xsl:otherwise>

      </xsl:choose>

      <xsl:if test="$IsPeopleCoreResultsWebPart and (count(All_Results/Result) &gt; 0 or count(All_Results/FakeResult) &gt; 0)">

        <asp:Panel ID="PopupPanelPeopleCore" runat="server" CssClass="psrch-PopupPanel">

          <div id="PopupContainer" class="psrch-PopupContainer">

            <asp:UpdatePanel runat="server" ID="UpdatePanelPeopleCore" UpdateMode="Conditional" ChildrenAsTriggers="true">

              <ContentTemplate>

                <SEARCHWC:PeopleCoreResultPopupControl

                  id="PopupControl51A944753DF0430C8FE1EBAA70F3E945"

                  runat="server"/>

                <div id="PopupFooter">

                  <asp:UpdateProgress ID="UpdateProgress" DisplayAfter="0" AssociatedUpdatePanelID="UpdatePanelPeopleCore" runat="server">

                    <ProgressTemplate>

                      <span id="Progress">

                        <img class="psrch-UpdateGraphics" src="/_layouts/images/hig_progcircle_loading24.gif"/>

                        <xsl:value-of select="$PopupFetcingResultLabel" />

                      </span>

                    </ProgressTemplate>

                  </asp:UpdateProgress>

                </div>

              </ContentTemplate>

            </asp:UpdatePanel>

          </div>

        </asp:Panel>

      </xsl:if>

    </div>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="ActionBarTemplate">

    <xsl:if test="string-length($AlertMeLink) &gt; 0">

      <a href="{$AlertMeLink}" id="CSR_AM" title="{$AlertMeText}">

        <img src="/_layouts/images/bell.gif" alt="{$AlertMeText}" border="0"/>

      </a>

      <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&#8195;</xsl:text>

    </xsl:if>

    <xsl:if test="string-length($SrchRSSLink) &gt; 0">

      <a type="application/rss+xml" href="{string($SrchRSSLink)}" title="{$SrchRSSText}" id="SRCHRSSL">

        <img border="0" src="/_layouts/images/rss.gif" alt="{$SrchRSSText}"/>

      </a>

      <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&#8195;</xsl:text>

    </xsl:if>

    <xsl:if test="string-length($SearchProviderLink) &gt; 0">

      <a href="{string($SearchProviderLink)}" title="{$SearchProviderText}" >

        <img border="0" src="/_layouts/images/searchfolder.png" alt="{$SearchProviderText}"/>

      </a>

      <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&#8195;</xsl:text>

    </xsl:if>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="GetPicUrl">

    <xsl:param name="PicUrl"/>

    <xsl:param name="PlaceHolderUrl"/>

    <xsl:choose>

      <xsl:when test="string-length($PicUrl) &lt; 1 or starts-with($PicUrl, 'file:') or starts-with($PicUrl, '\\') or starts-with($PicUrl, '//')">

        <xsl:value-of select="$PlaceHolderUrl"/>

      </xsl:when>

      <xsl:otherwise>

        <xsl:value-of select="$PicUrl"/>

      </xsl:otherwise>

    </xsl:choose>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="MoreLinkTemplate">

    <xsl:if test="$ShowMoreLink = true() and string-length($MoreLink) &gt; 0">

      <div id="MoreLink">

        <a href="{string($MoreLink)}">

          <xsl:value-of select="$MoreLinkLabel"/>

        </a>

      </div>

    </xsl:if>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="RenderNameUrlMultivalue">

    <xsl:param name="names"/>

    <xsl:param name="urls"/>

    <xsl:param name="currentId"/>

    <xsl:for-each select="$names">

      <xsl:variable name="p" select="position()"/>

      <xsl:if test="string-length(.) &gt; 0">

        <xsl:if test="$p &gt; 1">

          <span class="psrch-TextSeparator"> :: </span>

        </xsl:if>

        <xsl:choose>

          <xsl:when test="string-length($urls[$p]) &gt; 0">

            <a id="{concat($currentId, '_MultivalueUrl')}" href="{string($urls[$p])}">

              <xsl:apply-templates select="." />

            </a>

          </xsl:when>

          <xsl:otherwise>

            <xsl:apply-templates select="." />

          </xsl:otherwise>

        </xsl:choose>

      </xsl:if>

    </xsl:for-each>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="RenderSimpleMultivalue">

    <xsl:param name="multivalue"/>

    <xsl:param name="cutoff"/>

    <xsl:for-each select="$multivalue">

      <xsl:sort data-type="number" order="descending" select="@hashh"/>

      <xsl:variable name="p" select="position()"/>

      <xsl:if test="string-length(.) &gt; 0">

        <xsl:choose>

          <xsl:when test="$p = 1">

            <span id="Multivalue">

              <xsl:apply-templates select="." />

            </span>

          </xsl:when>

          <xsl:when test="$p &gt; 1 and $p &lt;= $cutoff">

            <span class="psrch-TextSeparator"> :: </span>

            <span id="Multivalue">

              <xsl:apply-templates select="." />

            </span>

          </xsl:when>

          <xsl:when test="$p = $cutoff + 1">

            …

          </xsl:when>

        </xsl:choose>

      </xsl:if>

    </xsl:for-each>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="HitHighlighting">

    <xsl:param name="hh" />

    <xsl:apply-templates select="$hh"/>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="ddd">

    …

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c0">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c1">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c2">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c3">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c4">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c5">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c6">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c7">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c8">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="c9">

    <b>

      <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    </b>

  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

To get a search results page to use this simply copy and paste it into the XSL Editor property of the people search core results web part. Note that you need to uncheck the ‘use location visualization’ checkbox before the XSL Editor property is enabled.

A couple of other properties you may want to change are the Default Results Sorting (e.g. to sort by name) and the Results Per Page properties.

If you want to make further changes to the layout (to add further columns for example) you just need to change two places in the XSL file. The first is the dvt_1.body template that is marked with <!– Main body template–>. This template defines the column headings to use as shown below:

<table width="100%" class="ms-listviewtable">

  <thead>

    <tr class="ms-viewheadertr ms-vhltr">

      <td class="ms-vh2">Name</td>

      <td class="ms-vh2">Phone</td>

      <td class="ms-vh2">Email</td>

      <td class="ms-vh2">Job title</td>

      <td class="ms-vh2">Department</td>

      <td class="ms-vh2">Office</td>

    </tr>

  </thead>

  <xsl:for-each select="All_Results/Result">

    <xsl:call-template name="SingleResult"/>

  </xsl:for-each>

</table>

Adding a new td row will make a new column heading show up. To add the data in each result row we also need to update the SingleResultInternal template in the XSL file. I would suggest looking at the default XSL file and copying the relevant data into the custom XSL. For example to add a ‘Skills’ column you would add the following markup to the end of the template:

<td class="ms-vb2">

  <xsl:call-template name="RenderSimpleMultivalue">

    <xsl:with-param name="multivalue" select="hithighlightedproperties/skills"/>

    <xsl:with-param name="cutoff" select="5"/>

  </xsl:call-template>

</td>

Note that in this example I’ve removed a lot of the default XSL code so many of the properties that are normally displayed for each result are not included. You can obviously add these back in by reviewing the default XSL file and adding the ones you find useful in your scenario.

The column headings are also simply static text and don’t allow sorting or filtering in the way lists and library views do. In a subsequent post I hope to show how to get some additional sorting options working with this layout such as sorting by last name.

SharePoint 2010 People Directory Part 2 – Table Layout is a post from: SharePoint Config

This exam isn’t particularly technical and is focused on power users more than developers/IT pros so is open to a wide range of people. It also covers a lot of the basic features so if you are starting out with SharePoint 2010 you could use the exam as a motivator to get up to speed with the core SharePoint functionality. The Exam 77-886: SharePoint 2010 exam overview states the intended audience as:

Candidates for this exam are users who provide structure for information, extend out-of-the-box site features, solve business problems through composite applications, and facilitate collaboration with other site users.

Users perform all site user tasks. They optimize Web Part pages for team use by adding and configuring Web Parts from the Web Part gallery. They customize dashboards to target the information presented. Users focus on adapting SharePoint sites to their teams’ needs and improving productivity.

In regards to the beta program the Born to Learn blog contains more details and a list of participating test centres. You will need to contact your local test centre to get a voucher for the beta and schedule in a time slot. If you don’t have a test centre nearby you can email Certiport’s beta coordinator, Stacey Tilley, at betacoordinator@certiport.com to see if one can be organised in your region.

For more details about what the exam covers have a look at the skills measured on the official exam detail page. The exam contains 87 questions (most items are simulations but there are some multiple choice items) and you have 3 hours to complete everything.

[Update] If you are in the UK the test can be arranged at the following test centres (note you will also need to get a voucher by emailing learning@prodigysolutions.com):

SharePoint 2010 Microsoft Office Specialist Beta Exam 77-886 is a post from: SharePoint Config

Especially when the organisation only contains a few hundred people this can help users discover people in the organisation without necessarily knowing their names. The steps to create this are as follow (assuming the user profile and search services are running successfully):

1. Assuming you have an enterprise search center set up the first step to create the people directory is to create a new page. This can be done by navigating to the pages library and selecting New Document > Page from the ribbon.
   
   
2. On the create page screen select the People search results page layout to create a page that contains the people search results web parts.
3. The standard search result web part does not show any results unless a query is specified. To get all people to show up by default we need to specify either a fixed keyword query or append text to the query in the People Search Core Results web part properties. If we specify a fixed keyword query the web part will always display results for the specified search query on the page regardless of whether the user has entered a search query. If we select append text to query then when the user types a query we will see results from a search query that includes both the text the user entered and the text in the web part properties. For our people directory we can use this to show a default set of results (i.e. all people) but let the user refine this further by entering text (e.g. a person’s name or a department). The query we need to enter to retrieve all people is contentclass:spspeople.
   
4. We now have a list of people that will be displayed as soon as the user navigates to our custom people results page. By default we also have some refinements that appear if matching metadata is found within the result set. These are View matches by Name or Profile, Job Title, Organization and Managed Metadata columns (these pull out information such as Past projects, Ask Me About and other Managed Metadata fields contained in the edit profile screen). We can change these to show other metadata properties that are defined in our search centre. Some other properties that might be relevant are Department, Job Title and/or Past Projects.
5. [Update 10 June 2011] Note that the default Department managed property does not work correctly when used in the refinement panel (no results are displayed). To get this to work we need to create a new managed property that maps to the People:Department crawled property. This involves navigating to the ‘Metadata properties’ page of your search service application and creating a new Managed property. In this example I’ve named it DepartmentRefinement and mapped it to the People:Department(Text) property as shown below.
   
6. To change these we can edit the ‘Filter Category Definition’ property of the refinement panel to include the XML shown below. [Updated 10 June 2011 to correct department refinement]

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

   <FilterCategories>

     <Category Title="spshjobtitle" Description="Use this filter to restrict results to a specific job title"    Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.TaxonomyFilterGenerator"    MetadataThreshold="3"    NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3"    MaxNumberOfFilters="50"        ShowMoreLink="True"    MappedProperty="ows_MetadataFacetInfo"    MoreLinkText="show more"        LessLinkText="show fewer"/>

     <Category Title="Department"

    Description="Use this filter to restrict results to a specific department"

    Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator"

    MetadataThreshold="5"

    NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4"

        MaxNumberOfFilters="20"

        SortBy="Frequency"

        SortByForMoreFilters="Name"

        SortDirection="Descending"

        SortDirectionForMoreFilters="Ascending"

        ShowMoreLink="True"

       MappedProperty="DepartmentRefinement"

       MoreLinkText="show more"

       LessLinkText="show fewer"    />

     <Category Title="Organization" Description="Use this filter to restrict results to a specific organization"        Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator"        MetadataThreshold="5"        NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4"        MaxNumberOfFilters="50"        SortBy="Frequency"        SortDirection="Descending"    SortByForMoreFilters="Name"    SortDirectionForMoreFilters="Ascending"    ShowMoreLink="True"        MappedProperty="OrgNames"        MoreLinkText="show more"        LessLinkText="show fewer"/>

     <Category Title="Managed Metadata Columns" Description="Managed metadata of the documents"    Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.TaxonomyFilterGenerator"    MetadataThreshold="3"    NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3"    MaxNumberOfFilters="50"        ShowMoreLink="True"    MappedProperty="ows_MetadataFacetInfo"    MoreLinkText="show more"        LessLinkText="show fewer"/>

   </FilterCategories>

7. The important things to note here is that we are adding a new Category element with Title=Department (this will be used as the category heading) and MappedProperty=DepartmentRefinement. The MappedProperty attribute needs to match a managed property in the search service application. Department is added as a managed property by default but if you want to include other properties such as Office you will need to make sure there is a managed property that contains this information.
8. To ensure our custom Filter Category Definition is used we also need to ensure the Use Default Configuration is unchecked. Optionally we can also change the Accuracy Index to tweak the number of results that are inspected to generate refinements (higher values incurring a greater performance penalty but making refinements more accurate). For more details see the article “Change what appears in the Refinement Panel Web Part” on TechNet.
9. Once this is in place we get an updated refinement panel and we now have a simple people directory page that people can use to discover individuals within the organization without having to enter a search query.

This isn’t the most sophisticated people directory but it can be achieved in a few minutes without writing any code. With a little more effort we could change the rendering of the results (so they are displayed in a table layout for example) or provide additional filtering options such as an A-Z filter on the name field. If anyone is interested or has made other interesting additions to this search driven people directory please let me know in the comments below.

How to: Create a Simple SharePoint 2010 People Directory is a post from: SharePoint Config

I’ve posted the slides below as well as on SlideShare and will add some follow up posts covering the concepts and features I talked about to this blog in the near future.

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference Slides is a post from: SharePoint Config

Creating shared search scopes

Shared search scopes in SharePoint 2010 can easily be created using PowerShell commands such as New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope. Corey Roth covers this in his article on Creating Enterprise Search Scopes with PowerShell. While the PowerShell method can also be used to create site collection related search scopes you might also want to do this programmatically in a feature receiver when the site collection is created. Another thing you might want to do programmatically is to associate a search scope with a display group such as the ‘Search Dropdown’ so it appears in options next to the search box. I’ll cover both these scenarios in this article.

Creating site collection level search scopes and display groups

As I mentioned in the previous article on Issues creating SharePoint 2010 search scopes programmatically there are several ways of doing creating scopes and display groups programmatically. To summarise the previous article the classes are:

• SearchContext – this is now obsolete (and can also cause permission issues)
• SearchServiceApplication – this can lead to permission issues if called from within a feature receiver as it doesn’t use the search web service
• SearchServiceApplicationProxy – this uses the search web service but requires much more code and is difficult to work with
• RemoteScopes – this uses the search web service and is easy to work with

So the RemoteScopes is the class that I’ve used in this article. To use this class to add both a site collection level scope and a display group that contains the scope you can use a feature receiver similar to the one shown below:

using System;

using System.Linq;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using System.Security.Permissions;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Security;

using Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration;

namespace SharePointProject.Features.CreateSearchScope

{

    /// <summary>

    /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade.

    /// </summary>

    public class CreateSearchScopeEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver

    {

        private string scopeName = "Custom Scope";

        private string displayGroupName = "Custom Display Group";

        public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        {

            SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;

            // remotescopes class retrieves information via search web service so we run this as the search service account

            RemoteScopes remoteScopes = new RemoteScopes(SPServiceContext.GetContext(site));

            // see if there is an existing scope

            Scope scope = (from s

                           in remoteScopes.GetScopesForSite(new Uri(site.Url)).Cast<Scope>()

                           where s.Name == scopeName

                           select s).FirstOrDefault();

            // only add if the scope doesn't exist already

            if (scope == null)

            {

                scope = remoteScopes.AllScopes.Create(scopeName, "", new Uri(site.Url), true, "results.aspx", ScopeCompilationType.AlwaysCompile);

                scope.Rules.CreateUrlRule(ScopeRuleFilterBehavior.Require, UrlScopeRuleType.Folder, site.Url);

            }

            // see if there is an existing display group         

            ScopeDisplayGroup displayGroup = (from d

                                              in remoteScopes.GetDisplayGroupsForSite(new Uri(site.Url)).Cast<ScopeDisplayGroup>()

                                              where d.Name == displayGroupName

                                              select d).FirstOrDefault();

            // add if the display group doesn't exist

            if (displayGroup == null)

                displayGroup = remoteScopes.AllDisplayGroups.Create(displayGroupName, "", new Uri(site.Url), true);

            // add scope to display group if not already added

            if (!displayGroup.Contains(scope))

            {

                displayGroup.Add(scope);

                displayGroup.Default = scope;

                displayGroup.Update();

            }

            // optionally force a scope compilation so this is available immediately

            remoteScopes.StartCompilation();

        }

        public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        {

            SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;

            // remotescopes class retrieves information via search web service so we run this as the search service account

            RemoteScopes remoteScopes = new RemoteScopes(SPServiceContext.GetContext(site));

            // delete scope if found

            Scope scope = (from s

                           in remoteScopes.GetScopesForSite(new Uri(site.Url)).Cast<Scope>()

                           where s.Name == scopeName

                           select s).FirstOrDefault();

            if (scope != null)

                scope.Delete();

            // delete display group if found

            ScopeDisplayGroup displayGroup = (from d

                                              in remoteScopes.GetDisplayGroupsForSite(new Uri(site.Url)).Cast<ScopeDisplayGroup>()

                                              where d.Name == displayGroupName

                                              select d).FirstOrDefault();

            if (displayGroup != null)

                displayGroup.Delete();

        }

        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised after a feature has been installed.

        //public override void FeatureInstalled(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        //{

        //}

        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised before a feature is uninstalled.

        //public override void FeatureUninstalling(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        //{

        //}

        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised when a feature is upgrading.

        //public override void FeatureUpgrading(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties, string upgradeActionName, System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, string> parameters)

        //{

        //}

    }

}

Note that when we check for an existing site collection level scope we use the GetScopesForSite method. This ensures that the scope relates to the site collection we are running under. We also pass in the URL to the site when creating the scope to create a site collection specific scope.

If you are creating search scope display groups one thing you might want to do is configure the search box to use your display group (to only show the scopes you define).

This can be done via the use of a delegate control as shown below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

  <Control

    Id="SmallSearchInputBox"

    Sequence="20"

    ControlAssembly="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"

    ControlClass="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SearchBoxEx">

      <Property Name="ScopeDisplayGroupName">Custom Display Group</Property>

      <Property Name="FrameType">None</Property>

  </Control>

</Elements>

Note that we can continue to use the same search control we just set the ScopeDisplayGroupName property on this control and give it a lower sequence number than the existing control. For more information about delegate controls have a look at the article Delegate Control (Control Templatization) on MSDN.

Adding a shared scope to a scope display group

Adding a shared scope to a scope display group is similar but we use the GetSharedScopes method of the RemoteScopes class as shown below:

using System;

using System.Linq;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using System.Security.Permissions;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Security;

using Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration;

namespace SharePointProject.Features.CreateSearchScope

{

    /// <summary>

    /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade.

    /// </summary>

    public class CreateSearchScope : SPFeatureReceiver

    {

        private string scopeName = "Shared Scope";

        private string displayGroupName = "Search Dropdown";

        public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        {

            SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;

            // remotescopes class adds the scope via search web service so we run this as the search service account

            RemoteScopes remoteScopes = new RemoteScopes(SPServiceContext.GetContext(site));

            // see if there is an existing scope

            Scope scope = (from s

                           in remoteScopes.GetSharedScopes().Cast<Scope>()

                           where s.Name == scopeName

                           select s).FirstOrDefault();

            // see if there is an existing display group         

            ScopeDisplayGroup displayGroup = (from d

                                              in remoteScopes.GetDisplayGroupsForSite(new Uri(site.Url)).Cast<ScopeDisplayGroup>()

                                              where d.Name == displayGroupName

                                              select d).FirstOrDefault();

            // only add if the scope and display group exist

            if (scope != null && displayGroup != null && !displayGroup.Contains(scope))

            {

                displayGroup.Insert(0, scope);

                displayGroup.Default = scope;

                displayGroup.Update();

            }

            else

            {

                // optionally log warning or error message

            }

        }

        public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        {

            SPSite site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPSite;

            // remotescopes class retrieves information via search web service so we run this as the search service account

            RemoteScopes remoteScopes = new RemoteScopes(SPServiceContext.GetContext(site));

            // see if there is an existing scope

            Scope scope = (from s

                           in remoteScopes.GetSharedScopes().Cast<Scope>()

                           where s.Name == scopeName

                           select s).FirstOrDefault();

            // see if there is an existing display group         

            ScopeDisplayGroup displayGroup = (from d

                                              in remoteScopes.GetDisplayGroupsForSite(new Uri(site.Url)).Cast<ScopeDisplayGroup>()

                                              where d.Name == displayGroupName

                                              select d).FirstOrDefault();

            // remove the scope from the display group

            if (scope != null && displayGroup != null && displayGroup.Contains(scope))

                displayGroup.Remove(scope);

        }

        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised after a feature has been installed.

        //public override void FeatureInstalled(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        //{

        //}

        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised before a feature is uninstalled.

        //public override void FeatureUninstalling(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        //{

        //}

        // Uncomment the method below to handle the event raised when a feature is upgrading.

        //public override void FeatureUpgrading(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties, string upgradeActionName, System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, string> parameters)

        //{

        //}

    }

}

This code expects a shared scope named ‘Shared Scope’ to exist in the search service application, and a display group named ‘Search Dropdown’ to exist in the site collection we activate the feature on. If these are not present nothing is changed so you would probably want to throw an error or log a warning message depending on the situation.

As we used the Insert method to add our scope to the display group our scope now shows up at the top of the list, and because we used the default ‘Search Dropdown’ group we don’t need to use a delegate control – our scope will show up in the drop down automatically (although sometimes this takes a few minutes or an iisreset).

Creating SharePoint 2010 search scopes programmatically is a post from: SharePoint Config