Owner: Planet MOSS URL:http://planetmoss.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 08:57:21 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Planet MOSS is devoted to SharePoint 2007 tips, tricks, and news. Also covers K2 BlackPearl, CRM, InfoPath, and related technologies, as well as Internet trends. Site statistics:Click here
Currently Team Foundation Server uses Windows Shar... 2007-08-04 04:45:00 Currently Team Foundation
Server uses Windows
SharePoint Services sites to host project sites. This provides a useful central point to collect development documentation, workspaces, meeting spaces, and allows people without TFS to at least view the related information (although now there is an additional option, the very cool TeamPlain Web Access for Team System, which is free for all licensed TFS users!). Unfortunately the current version only supports WSS 2.0 sites. There are some work arounds, but they can be flaky.The good news is that TFS 2008 will support WSS 3 sites - Abdelhamid Abdou talks about this on his blog in this posting. Better yet, when you setup TFS you are now given the choice to have the SharePoint integration on the same box, or point to an existing SharePoint application on another server.To learn more about the current workaround, you can read Brian Keller's blog posting here. Brian is a Technical Evangelist for TFS and makes it clear that any modifications to c Read more:Currently
Microsoft's SharePoint Team Blog published a fasci... 2007-08-03 03:59:00 Microsoft's SharePoint Team Blog published
a fascinating case study on the development of Glu Mobile Games's website a few weeks ago...The website was built on MOSS 2007 but with some significant rejigging to support some distinct needs: namely support for multiple cultures, fast load speed, streaming flash videos, and mobile devices. The blog entries are here:Part 1: Overview of the Solution Part 2: Master Pages and User ControlsPart 3: Performance - Cache is KingGlu Mobile shows what can be done using SharePoint as a product and SharePoint as a platform. The company creating the Glu Mobile website, AllIn Consulting, used MOSS as the basis for the site's content publishing and lists functionality, and then built their own custom ASP.NET controls and features to meet the stringent functional requirements. To quote them, Our design philosophy from the start was to integrate the best of ASP.NET 2.0 and MOSS 2007 to implement a highly functional, manageable, and scalable site within a Read more:Microsoft
The Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 (aka "Orcas") has... 2007-07-27 03:54:00 The Beta 2 of Visual
Studio 2008 (aka "Orcas") has been released. To download it, point your browser at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx. If you're using the VPC version you'll first have to download and install the base virtual hard disk, Base01.vhd. It's available here. After extracting the VPC or DVD, you'll also have to download and run a script to prevent the beta from messing up any existing Ajax development you may be working on. Finally, if you are using the VPC image you can log onto the box using the username "Administrator" and the password "P2ssw0rd". It will prompt you to change the password once you log in for the first time. Scott Guthrie has been blogging about many of the cool features that are contained in Visual Studio
2008. Some of the things that I hope to try over the next few days: Working with Linq, especially trying to figure out how it would work in an n-tier architecture;Nesting master pages;Trying out the enhanced CSS support;Usin
Another day, another SharePoint learning experienc... 2007-07-26 05:00:00 Another day, another SharePoint learning experience for me...This time one of my SharePoint colleagues at work, Viraf, was trying to connect to an Oracle database using the BDC. I'd had some previous success using database credentials authentication to a SQL Server-backed CRM application so he and I put our heads together to get this BDC Oracle connection working.Because we didn't have Oracle installed anywhere initially, we began by mocking up one of the client's tables in a temporary SQL Server 2005 database and using the steps in my previous post to connect to it. Since those instructions weren't using Integrated Windows Authentication and used plain old SQL command text, we figured this would be a pretty good head start. The only major change to the BDC Schema App file was the line:<Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="System.String">SqlServer</Property>had to change to:<Property Name="DatabaseAccessProvider" Type="System.String">Oracle</Property>
Shaun Leisegang, K2 principal technical specialist... 2007-07-19 04:19:00 Shaun Leisegang, K2 principal technical specialist, gave a webcast just now about how K2 blackpearl integrates with several Microsoft technologies. He showed how K2 workflows can be built and hosted in MOSS 2007, in Visual Studio, and in Visio. Some of the things I learned (in no particular order):Environment variables make it easy to transition workflows between environments without modifying any code;The updated K2 Tasks Web Part has a batch functionality allowing a user to select and approve or disapprove multiple tasks at once. The web part also has a new quick search that helps filter the lists of tasks, and exposes task actions right on the web part for redirecting (reassigning) tasks, delegating them, or performing some other action.The Visio integration allows a user to import existing K2 workflows into Visio...Once a workflow has been chosen from the file system, it pulls in all the workflow elements into the Visio environment. At this point those elements are "orphan activiti Read more:Shaun
I've been working a bit with one of my colleagues,... 2007-07-18 05:17:00 I've been working
a bit with one of my colleagues, Slava, developing web parts and deploying them using Features. One issue that cropped up was how to remove the custom web parts from the Web Part gallery and any websites if the feature was subsequently deactivated. This kind of feature cleanup isn't something that can be done without custom code.The solution Microsoft has provided is to create an event receiver called a Feature Receiver class for the feature. When tiggered, custom code can do any kind of setup, cleanup, or other job that might be required.There are four events in the Feature life-cycle that can be triggered:FeatureInstalled FeatureUninstalling FeatureActivated FeatureDeactivatingAt a high level the steps needed to create a Feature Receiver are:Create a strongly-named feature receiver assembly containing a class inheriting from SPFeatureReceiverAdd custom code to the appropriate feature receiver methodsDeploy the assembly to the GAC on the SharePoint server(s) where
Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 ("Orcas") ... 2007-07-12 05:29:00 Windows Server 2008, Visual
Studio 2008 ("Orcas") and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will all launch on February 27, 2008! So said Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2007 in Denver Colorado. The press release is here. Scott Guthrie later clarified in a comment on Scott Dorman's blog that release is often several weeks or months before the official launch.So it looks like we'll be able to start working with the new products around late January - which is good timing because I'm sure by then we'll be completely adapted to the huge changes in SQL 2005, Office 2007, .NET 3.5, WF, WCF, WPF, WWII, etc and ready to grab the next wave!
Read more:Visual Studio
, Windows
, Windows Server
Today I was creating a workflow in Visual Studio s... 2007-07-12 05:21:00 Today I was creating a workflow in Visual
Studio so I could repackage it with content types and lists, rather than using SharePoint Designer where the workflow has to be applied to a specific list.Whenever I tried to create a new SharePoint Sequential Workflow Library project, I got the error: "The project type is not supported by this installation". Turns out I had a pre-release version of the Visual Studio
2005 Extensions for .Net Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) - beta 1.2 to be precise. After uninstalling and reinstalling the release version, available here, I could create the workflow project.I'm currently following Nick Swan's excellent blog postings about how to create and deploy SharePoint workflows in Visual Studio: SharePoint 2007 Workflow with Visual Studio 2005 + InfoPath 2007 (RTM VERSION!) and Deploying our SharePoint 2007 Workflow with Visual Studio 2005 + InfoPath 2007 (RTM VERSION!) .
Read more:Today
K2 has announced a release date for blackpearl! Th... 2007-07-11 04:40:00 K2 has announced a release date for blackpearl! The date will be August 6. From the press release:K2 blackpearl gives business and technical users the ability to collaboratively design, assemble, execute, monitor and optimize dynamic business applications. K2 blackpearl includes business process management capabilities. Although blackpearl's capabilities far exceed those of K2's previous offering, K2.net2003, existing customers can upgrade easily. I'm not sure if pricing and licensing information is currently available somewhere or will be published on their website; as I recall for the previous version you had to inquire about it.K2 will present information and product demos this week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2007 in Denver, Colorado. You can view the full press release here.
MOSS 2007 uses "mobile views" to provide built-in ... 2007-07-09 03:09:00 MOSS 2007 uses "mobile views
" to provide built-in support for mobile devices. To view a site in mobile mode, use the following URL: http://URL/_layouts/mobile/default.aspx . There is also a shortcut URL you can enable: http://URL/m/. To enable it, run the following command on the SharePoint server: stsadm -o activatefeature -name MobilityRedirect -URL http://url/As you can see, mobile mode is just an HTML view without anything fancy.To simulate how SharePoint appears in a mobile device, you can use Visual Studio 2005's Device Emulator Manager and .ActiveSync.First, I'm assuming Visual Studio 2005 is installed on your SharePoint (development) server. It contains the Device Emulator Manager. You can find this under "Tools". Next, you need to configure a mobile device's network settings. The easy way to do this is to install ActiveSync 4.5.Once you've installed this, connect using Device Emulator Manager in VS2005. Simply right-click the device you want to emulate and click "Connect".
This week the trial license on one of my virtual ... 2007-07-07 02:21:00 This week the trial license on one of my virtual
servers expired. I tried to enter a valid license key, but it said: "Failure! Your license conversion operation failed. Check the error logs for details." Now this sounded like bad news. A quick search on the web turned up two postings on how to fix this: Tony on developerfood, and Shane Young at the SharePoint Farmer's Almanac.The solution is very simple:1) Restart the WSS Timer service (in the Services MMC)2) Restart IISNow I can log back in to the Portal without problems. As the 180-day trial MOSS licenses start to expire there will probably be more occurrences of this bug.
After Wednesday's live echo for SharePoint 2007 de... 2007-07-06 03:33:00 After Wednesday
's live echo for SharePoint 2007 demonstration, I spoke with Stephen Cummins to ask him more about it. In addition to being echoTechnology's Technical Evangelist, he's a SharePoint MVP and blogs at SPSFAQ and echoTechnology Support Blog.Question: What are the most important design considerations you follow when planning, implementing, and managing a SharePoint portal?Stephen:Not really understanding the SharePoint architecture leads to examples like trying to recreate file shares in document libraries, creating deep navigational structures, or one giant document library with hundreds of folders.It's best to be prepared - it makes more sense to have multiple smaller document libraries, so you can have an easier time assigning access to these libraries, applying different workflows and metadata. A poorly planned architecture can make it hard to grant access, and maintaining it is a manual and time consuming process. Another important consideration is capacity planning
Yesterday evening I saw a live demo of echoTechnol... 2007-07-05 04:10:00 Yesterday evening
I saw a live demo of echoTechnology's echo for SharePoint 2007 product, which is a tool for handling SharePoint migration and management. The presentation wasgiven by CEO Garry Smith, Technical Director Sergio Otoya, and Technical Evangelist Stephen Cummins. The company is positioning echo as the tool that "allows administrators toeffectively manage and migrate onto the SharePoint 2007 platform". The demo was an hour long and was really impressive. Following that I spoke with Stephen to get a little moreinformation about how they feel the product can be used. I'll be publishing that within a few days.Last night's demo gave a clear indication of echo's design philosophy, which is to make replication and change management as easy and granular as possible. This is importantbecause it's actually really hard to roll changes across different SharePoint versions, sites, and environments. I've mentioned before on this blog how complicated I find it toproperly manage the Read more:Yesterday
After K2's BlackPearl demonstration a few weeks ag... 2007-07-03 04:33:00 After K2's BlackPearl demonstration a few weeks
ago, I had a few questions. I contacted Josh Swihart at K2 and he and Anthony Petro, the Technical Product Manager, replied to me:Question: I know the BlackPearl Report Builder uses Reporting Services – can these reports be exported and even hosted on a distinct Reporting Services server or hosted in SharePoint’s integrated Report Centre? The reason I ask is that a lot of Microsoft products - MOSS, Dynamics CRM - all use Reporting Services, so from a server topology perspective it would be great to have them all publish to the same RS server and manage things a little more centrally. Josh and Anthony: Yes, when you install BlackPearl you must provide information on which Reporting Services server you want to connect to. The Report Designer will use this server when you “publish” a report to RS. Once the report is in RS, you can use standard UI in RS, or compatible apps like SharePoint RS web parts, to view these reports.Question:
SharePoint Governance is an extremely important pr... 2007-07-02 03:10:00 SharePoint Governance is an extremely important process to help guide and control any SharePoint implementation. Many organizations start down the rabbit hole with proof-of-concepts and trial installations that quickly get out of hand. I heard one IT manager refer to it as "SharePoint under every desk" and by that he meant runaway deployments that stretched IT support resources, duplicated content, created multiple "sources of truth", and generally caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth.A detailed governance document should be created early in the development of any SharePoint implementation. Key elements of a governance plan include coming up with an internal communications process, identifying key human and technical resources for the implementation, organizing training and support, and providing a clear hierarchy of roles and responsibilities for common SharePoint tasks such as managing documents, developing and maintaining content, provisioning sites, and providing end-user supp
I mentioned in a previous post that I was having t... 2007-06-29 03:03:00 I mentioned in a previous post that I was having trouble with Forms Based Authentication (Open LDAP) into SharePoint, or more specifically with the Client Integration part of it (opening Word and Excel when logged in using LDAP). I've received confirmation from Microsoft that this is by design: IIS and Office will only integrate using NTFS authentication.Now, having said this, and having personally seen it not working, there is a chance you can still use Office integration and FBA. I'm linking to Mike Fitzmaurice's blog where he discusses this issue in detail: FitzBlog.Willie Rust on his blog mentions that checking the "Sign me in automatically" checkbox when you log in using Forms Based Authentication will save a persistent cookie to your desktop. I did try this, but the browser wouldn't let me sign in if tried this...It was either log in successfully without setting a persistent cookie; or fail to enter the site at all. So your mileage may vary. Good luck!
UniqueWorld hosts Sydney's monthly SharePoint User... 2007-06-19 05:40:00 UniqueWorld hosts Sydney
's monthly SharePoint User Group at their office on 24 Campbell Street near Town Hall. It's a great chance to meet other SharePoint users, listen to speakers talk about SharePoint and related activities, eat pizza and drink beer.Tonight's talk was about Business Intelligence in Office 2007. The speaker was Grant Paisley...From the invitation blurb:Grant Paisley is the Chief Solutions Architect for Angry Koala (http://ak.com.au/), a Microsoft Partner specialisingin Business Intelligence Solutions. Grant is a SQL Server MVP, and president ofthe Sydney SQL Server User Group. With more than 10 years of consultingexperience in Business Intelligence and data warehousing Grant has worked onmany complex projects and produced a wide range of solutions. Grant's presentation was very interesting and I'll be blogging about it in detail tomorrow evening. Essentially he gave a rundown of ways Excel 2007 can interact with OLAP data, talked about Excel Services, integrated
If you're crawling case-sensitive URLs in your sea... 2007-06-16 01:52:00 If you're crawling case-sensitive URLs in your search catalog, such as an Apache-hosted intranet, you'll run into some strange errors. In your crawl log, you might see "Content for this URL is excluded by the server because a no-index attribute.". This implies that there is a no-index or no-follow metadata tag on the content, although there probably isn't. Further, the log will indicate the URLs as being all lower-case, when they aren't...There is a Microsoft hot fix for this (SharePoint Hotfix, April 12 2007). The KB article is at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932619. Basically you have to call up Microsoft and ask for the download, which they will send you a link for.Once you've installed the hotfix, go to your Shared Service provider(s)'s Search Settings. Reset all the crawled content and do a full crawl on your sources. Subsequently, the SharePoint crawler will pick up and crawl the URLs appropriately.
If you're Sydneyside then you may be interested in... 2007-08-18 05:20:00 If you're Sydneyside then you may be interested in attending two events this week: the .NET User Group and the SharePoint User Group.The SharePoint User Group meets at 5:30pm on Tuesday at Unique World's office on Level 14, 24 Campbell Street. Come along to the August User Group to hear Brad Saide from Live Point presenting on Business Data Catalogue and participate in a discussion with Han Duong from Live Point on customising SharePoint Themes. In addition to Brad & Han's presentations, Jey from K2 will showcase K2 blackpearl, the BPM product from K2, and how it extends MOSS 2007.The .NET User Group will be meeting at the Microsoft campus on Epping Road in North Ryde on Wednesday from 5:45pm to 9pm. This month Johann Kruse will be talking about Office Communicator 2007. You can find out more information about the event here. I'll try to get more information on how exactly Office Communicator hooks into SharePoint (presumably through the existing "presence awareness" feature and th
SharePoint Development Tips 2007-08-24 04:21:00 Mark Jones has an excellent post on best practices for SharePoint development on his blog, entitled "Sharepoint 2007 - Development
and Engineering Practices". He places a great deal of emphasis on team development using Visual Studio and some sort of source control. He further recommends that as much as possible is automated via scripts or code to ensure that you can minimize the deployment effort, avoid errors, and manage code changes and versioning. He's also a fan of test harnesses and not relying on SharePoint's object model to do all the testing for you. One of my favourite tips is his advice to customize as a last resort. Although the SDKs and tools are getting better, there's a lot that can be done by configuring what's already out-of-the-box long before any code needs to be touched. Office 14 is already underway and while I'm sure Microsoft will try to minimize the changes, it's a sure bet that enough will change between versions to make upgrading a roll-your
2007-08-23 03:25:00 The Microsoft SharePoint Team has just announced a major release to the SDKs - version 1.2 of each. The full details are here: http://blogs.msdn.com/randalli/archive/2007/08/22/just-published-major-update-to-the-moss-and-wss-downloadable-sdks-8-22-2007.aspxThis is wonderful news - not only will it make developing to the object model more understandable but there are numerous samples and, best of all, a BDC editor tool! Check this page out:The Business Data Catalog Definition Editor provides a visual tool for creating an Application Definition for BDC in MOSS 2007. Features include: Underlying XML is abstracted by the design surface and properties window Drag and drop web methods, tables, or views to create line of business (LOB) connections. Entities and methods are created automatically from database metadata and WSDLs. Additional method instances can be added to further enhance the database or web service connection. Method instances can be tested from within the tool, enabling incr
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