Syrinx on SharePoint

How about some (almost) free Business Intelligence?

I spent a lot of time at the Microsoft office last week in Waltham, including the Quarterly Partner Briefing on Tuesday 3/24. One of the sessions I attended on BI put on by Bob Lincavicks and Tara Seppa clarified some recent announcements about PerformancePoint being rolled into SharePoint. When I first heard about this in January I did not understand it, but after last Tuesday the roadmap and economics are much more clear.

Summary: If you have Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, MOSS Standard Cal, MOSS Enterprise Cal, and Software Assurance, you are now entitled to get PerformancePoint Server at no additional charge starting yesterday 4/1/2009. No, this is not an April Fools! You download some new bits and can install and use them. PerformancePoint is Microsoft's full-blown BI platform that sits on top of SQL Server (SSIS/SSRS) and allows you to do all the reporting, dashboarding, scorecards, drill downs, etc until your heart's content. Learn more about PerformancePoint here: http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/performancepoint-server.aspx
and about the licensing announcement here: http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/announcement.aspx

Most companies we have run into are either already in the situation stated above, or in one of the two following "YOU ALMOST HAVE IT!" states:

1. Have MOSS ECALs as part of a package they purchased, and have considered implementing MOSS (may be running WSS at the moment, or not)

2. Have MOSS server with standard CALs

If you are in either situation, consider stepping up to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) with Standard & Enterprise CALs w/Software Assurance. Chances are your step-up costs won’t be that big, and will pale in comparison to PerformancePoint's old $25K/server & $195/Cal price tags. You'll get the Enterprise capabilities of MOSS (Excel Services, Forms Services, BDC, etc) which are worth it in and of themselves, and then be free-rolling on the PerformancePoint. In 2009, who doesn't want to use a tool like PerformancePoint to get a better handle on the strategic and operational aspects of their business to spot trends, make better and more timely decisions, and target cost cutting? Getting this capability as part of the package can help loosen up budgeting that might not otherwise apply.

Fine print: PerformancePoint will release one more Service Pack as a standalone product this summer, and then if you INSISTED on running it standalone forever, mainstream support would end in 2013, and extended support would end in 2018. See details here: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=12922 Microsoft will be rolling the Monitoring and Analytics pieces of PerformancePoint directly into SharePoint in the Wave 14 (next year this time) timeframe. When they do that they will drop the Planning module from PerformancePoint. There are three capabilities currently in PerformancePoint (Monitoring, Analytics, and Planning). If you're not using Planning now (everyone in the above scenarios) you're not going to miss it and don't need to worry about it.

Windows IT Pro Article on Workflow Released

I wanted to let everyone know I completed an article on using SharePoint workflow with the emphasis on what you can do out of the box with MOSS entitled:

SharePoint Workflows

Transform business processes without writing code. 

It has been published in Windows IT Pro magazine.  Here is a link to the article:

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/101350/sharepoint-workflows.html

It is also in the April print edition as well.

-Ryan

Presentation on Enterprise Search at Microsoft

I recently presented a case study at Microsoft on 3/26 about work we have done at Gilbane Building Company on custom search components within their enterprise.  I had some requests for the presentation and I wanted to provide a link to the powerpoint.  Thanks again to Microsoft for hosting the event, and Jon Rider from Gilbane.  Here is the link to the presentation.

-Ryan

Making Business Data Actionable with Dashboards

Business intelligence is a rapidly growing sector of IT development and expenditure budgets. Products include financial modeling, data analysis, data mining, reporting and charting tools. The large vendors, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, all have products in this space and continue to develop new ones and refine the existing ones. These tools generate huge amounts of additional data and charts about the business data. This, in turn, creates a new problem:  how do you make all this data readily consumable and, more importantly, actionable? How do you summarize the data? The answer is a BI dashboard.

Read the full article

Customized Content Rating for SharePoint

I wanted to share with you a recent client undertaking involving adding "star rating" and comments to SharePoint content.  As usual, clients prefer not to build everything from scratch, so I looked what was available via 3rd party options and found 2 potentially viable solutions:

SharePoint Document Rating System  from codeplex:  http://www.codeplex.com/spdocrating and a licensed offering from KwizCom:  http://www.kwizcom.com/

At the time, the codeplex solution seemed a little more difficult to deal with, requiring content types and multiple columns in a list to function.  These column also appeared to be based on non-standard formats, and it was not straightforward to use the columns as managed properties to create more fine-tuned search options.

Since the KwizCom solution was simply a custom field type installed into SharePoint based on a common decimal base type, it seemed much easier to implement.  The downside was that it was some custom code, not open source, and it was entirely obfuscated so when I needed to make some adjustments based on my requirements, I was really stuck with what they gave me.  Here's what I did in case someone is thinking about doing this:

I added their custom field to my SharePoint environment and created a site column from it called Ratings.  Below is a screen shot of what this looks like in a list/library

The above shows what the column looks like and what it shows you when you hover over the item.  When you click on the item you get a pop up where you can rate and read comments similar to this:

Ok, so the easy part is done:  Install the product and add it to a list, and fill out some data.  They give you that for free :)  Now I had to come up with my own solution for the next 2 problems.  First, I needed to include the ratings for documents in search results.  It turns out to be pretty easy, but there were a couple wrinkles.

1.  I had to copy some images over from the KwizCom installation location to where the layout images live in the 12 hive here:  C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

2.  Then I had to modify the Search Results page (Search Core Results) to include my column in the XML, and then add a series of XSL "when" to display the star rating image AND the link to the comments as this was a requirement.

<xsl:when test="contentrating='1'"> - <img align="top" style="cursor:pointer;" onclick="window.ratingelement=this.parentNode;commonShowModalDialog('/_layouts/RatingRedirect.aspx?ItemURL={url}&amp;SiteName={sitename}&amp;a=1' ,'dialogHeight:450px;dialogWidth:350px;scroll:no;toolbar:no;status:no;resizable:no;', null, this.parentNode);" src="_layouts/KWizCom_RatingSolution/Images/1.0.gif"/></xsl:when>

The savvy of you may look at this XSL and wonder what "RatingRedirect.aspx" is.  Well, this is something I had to come up with because the KwizCom code is locked down.  Essentially I had to write a gateway page that took the querystring data available in the search results page and send it to a location that had the ability to look up the proper data required by the KwizCom page to load rating details.  The aspx page code I wrote looks like this:

The basics here are that I need to some ListItem data that is completely unavailable at the search results page.

Also consider that only list items can contain ratings.  Much of the unratable content can be exluded from search results using contentclass exclusions in your search scopes, but the one that tripped me up was a standard site aspx page.  If the page did not live in a library but was returned in search results, it would display with zero ratings.  When a user clicked on the details they would receive an error because this was an unratable item.  You see my rudimentary error handling section in the code above to at least inform people about the status.

We also added a higher level check in the XSL to only return rating data from content sources that actually had the rating installed.  Other SharePoint web applications or site collections within the SSP that does not contain rating data needs to be excluded.

These changes allowed my search results to show the ratings details AND allowed users to view the comments AND add their own comments right from the search results page.  The only hiccup is that until another crawl is run, the changes won't be shown in the search results because that data is pulled from the index and not in real time.  A small price to pay.

Finally, I had to deploy this.  Essentially the client wanted to add this to any document libraries that already existed in their site collection.  It seems every client requires me to write a tool that iterates over a site collection and checks for something in each web/list.  It's either inheritance, permissions, features, etc. that need to be set for every list if some condition is met.  So I had some code I could re-use.  I won't paste the whole thing here, but it was pretty simple:

I iterated over every site and did the following:  checked for each list to see if it inherited from base templates of document library or link lists.  If so, I iterated over the fields to see if the Rating field was present.  If not, I would add the field to the list, then add it to the default view of the list. 

Then you have to "tickle" the list, and un-tickle it.  This one was critical.  Due to the nature in which this data is stored, there is an inherent bug with the KwizCom solution.  Their design created a hidden list per web that holds the rating data.  This list is not created until a least one rating is made in the web.  This code must not run with elevated permissions because users without proper permissions to create the list will receive an error.  It's odd that they missed this because their solution only requires read access in order to rate items, so they must have written elevated permission code elsewhere in their solution.

At any rate, the tickle adds a rating to the first item in the list, updates the item, then removes the rating.  This ensures the container list exists moving forward.

All in all it did not take too long to implement and the 3rd party price was pretty inexpensive.

I hope this helps,

-Ryan Thomas

Deleting Deeply Entrenched Site Columns - Another Reason for Governance

I was recently called back to a previous client to help with a list of issues and tasks they had accumulated, and I was surprised to find one very difficult one:

The client complained about seeing multiple duplicate columns available for views and filtering in one of their large document libraries.  I knew they used InfoPath, so I had assumed that they had run into the problem I blogged about here:  Automatic Creation of InfoPath forms - not as easy as I thought regarding InfoPath re-creating duplicate site columns when in certain cases of re-publishing forms.

This client had not done anything like this with InfoPath, instead they had created approval workflows (out of the box) at the web/site level and applied them Content Types, so far so good.  Each of the multiple Content Type had their own approval workflows, and the columns appearing multiple times all happened to be the name of the column created as the WorkflowStatus type used by SharePoint to maintain the state/status of the workflow.  I'm not exactly sure what happened,  but I'm assuming they created, deleted, re-created, etc. these workflows using the same name a bunch of times, possibly at different levels within the sites, since some of the Content Types lived at the Site Collection level.  This caused this column to keep showing up (same Display Name, unique Internal Name) multiple times.

Although normally not a big deal, this was a real bugger to get rid of.  The UI won't let you drop the field because it is read only on the list, and it's also attached to the Content Type.

Here is how I solved it:

1.  Gather up all the data to make sure you know which field is current and legitimate by looking at the data contained within it.  Keep at note of the internal name by sorting on it in a list view and looking for the SortField querystring parameter.

2.  Delete it from the Content Type first by going to list settings and clicking on a your Content Type link.  Then click on any of the columns in this list to get to the "Change List Content Type Column" screen.  We need to replace some variables in the querystring to locate our hidden field/column.

First, replace the Field parameter with the *Internal Name* of your field.  You have that from #1 above.

Second, you need to replace the Fid (FieldID) parameter with the correct GUID of the field you want to delete from the Content Type.  The easiest way for me to do this is to use SharePoint Manager 2007, an invaluable tool that is free from CodePlex.  Here is a screenshot where I can see and verify the Internal Name and ID.  You can see the duplicate field names under the "Customer Specification" Content Type in the left tree view.

Once you have replaced both of these values MAKE SURE YOU FORCE A BROWSER RELOAD.  The best way to do this is copy the new url and load it in a new browser window.  You should see your column details in the page.  If you just swap variables and hit "Delete" the data in the page may still be pointing at the legitimate column you clicked on to get here.

3.  Delete the Field from the actual list.

I was not able to find a way to delete the field from the list through the UI no matter how much trickery or querystring replacement I tried.  Fields need to have their Hidden and ReadOnlyField status set false before they can be deleted, and SharePoint Manager 2007 wouldn't let me do this for some reason.  I had to resort to a console application.  Quick and dirty code pasted below.

Automatic Creation of InfoPath forms - not as easy as I thought

I recently completed what I estimated to be a small project of taking an existing set of InfoPath forms that represented Content Types and Site Columns for a client's yearly employee review process.  Last year they had to manually create a number of forms for each employee to be filled out and eventually sent to Human Resources.  If each employee has an average of 6 forms (they do peer reviews) and a manager is required to pre-fill each form and manage the permissions of said form for each employee, a significant amount of time is wasted. 

I estimated that in about a week or two we could write a web part to collect all the data, load up and pre-fill each form's XML, add it to the doc library, and set the permissions for the forms throughout their lifecycle based on the current status of the review process.  It will take too long to go over the whole project/code-base, so I'll highlight the important areas.

1.   Web Part to collect employee, supervisor, reviewer users and some dates, etc.

2.  Event Handler on the form library to look at the status as updated by the form upon submit.

Problem 1:

I thought I could be clever.  Knowing the XSN generated from InfoPath contained the underlying XML file I would need to populate and save in SharePoint, I thought I could use the foundation from this blog post to get to that file:  http://www.kindohm.com/archive/2008/01/10/programmatically-create-an-infopath-form-instance-from-xsn-template.aspx

It is a great concept, albeit a little hokey.  The basic concept is to use the XMLFormView control to load an instance of an XSN, then extract the XML from it and use it.  The problem is that you can't get the control to initialize unless it is actually run in a page.  So, the poster put the form in another aspx page and calls it via his code (in my case the web part) through the WebClient or HTTPWebRequest and return it as a Response Type of XML.  This solution works great in Windows Server 2003, but Windows Server 2008 it only throws 401 Unauthorized errors.  It tried everything, every different type of credential I could.  The only time it worked in Server 2008 is when I used the default app pool in IIS, and it has some different settings (Network service account, etc) that I wouldn't want to use for MOSS.  At any rate I could not get around this problem even after hitting up some MOSS MVPs that I have tremendous respect for.

Problem 2:

I worked around Problem 1 (hopefully temporarily) by saving my InfoPath forms as source files and manually dropping a copy of the XML container in the form library where the XSN lives.  This created Problem 2.

If you create your InfoPath form on your local machine, the resulting XML does not share the same XML processing instructions as those that are created when publishing to a SharePoint library.  So, I had to manually replace the instructions in each XML file as it was created.  I had to use scientific method to find out which instructions were causing the form to load improperly, but it came down to these two items:  href and solutionversion.  Href is obvious, the xml needs to point to the library that is hosting it so Forms Server knows where to process the form.  Until it is published to the library this value is not set, so I had to set it by hand.  Code snippet below:

Solutionversion turned out to be completely obnoxious.  By default, the solution version in the "save as source" XML is exactly 3 revisions ahead of the one published to SharePoint.  So I needed to manually decrement my XML file so Forms Server could properly load it: 

Since processing instructions are just whole single nodes, I couldn't easily just replace individual attributes.  Instead I had to grab the existing entire node and replace those elements I needed to update via string manipulation, delete and re-add my new processing node back into the XML.  This all seemed to work, and can be completely removed if I can get the security issue in Problem 1 fixed at a later time.

Problem 3:

This problem isn't specific to InfoPath or this solution, but has come up enough that some people new to this game should be aware of.  If you want to give a set of users rights to add items to a document library, but then only see and manage their own items, you can't do it.  It works fine with standard lists (an advanced setting on Lists) but this was left out for Document Library and child lists.  Why?  I'm not sure. 

It certainly makes it difficult on projects such as these where you need to assign users certain items, and list item permission by hand can be tedious and error-prone. 

My common solution to this problem (when I don't have workflow as my manager of the data) is to use an event handler on the list to look at the appropriate metadata and content type and determine what needs to happen.  It is sort of a mini rules engine for permissions processing and it looks like this:

First, override your events (ItemAdded and ItemUpdated for example) and check the Content Type: (feel free to use more descriptive terms, the names have been changed in my code to protect the innocent)

Here is what the permissions setting code looks like:

This code is pretty straightforward except for HandleEventFiring which is something none of you have seen before,  This is a custom class I created to handle versioning issues on list items, etc.  My full blog post about how and why I use it is here:  http://blogs.syrinx.com/blogs/sharepoint/archive/2008/11/10/disabling-event-firing-on-splistitem-update-differently.aspx

And finally, the code to set the actual permissions:

That's my solution for one way (without custom workflow) to manage document permissions to allow everyone to contribute, but then lock down the documents upon creation and updating.

Problem 4:

Another concern with InfoPath I ran into was publishing updated forms to SharePoint and mapping fields to site columns.  InfoPath supports creating site columns locally and mapping them to it's local XML data fields to be updated automatically upon submission. 

Upon publishing changes to a test environment I didn't realize that it is possible for these fields to get out of sync.  InfoPath protects itself by creating brand new site columns with the same name.  From the SharePoint UI and InfoPath perspective everything looks great until you see your column names showing up twice in list management and view creation screens.  Your code also starts breaking as it's looking for a certain internal name that is no longer being populated.

Basically SharePoint just creates a new site column with the same display name, but creates an internal name like columnname1 or columnname12.  The fix for this is DON'T DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.  It is a pain to hunt down the correct columns and delete them (after deleting your content type form because of the "in use" issue) 

Instead, at this screen:

Click "Modify" and make sure the local field is mapped to your correct site column.  If you see (none:  create new site column) you need to change it unless this is a brand new field.

The screen below shows how to "re-map" to an existing site column created by InfoPath:

Well, I know this post was long, and it didn't cover everything I did, but I tried to cover the parts that caused me some hang-ups.  Despite losing 2.5 days alone to the security problem I still was able to deliver the mini-project on time.  There were some things I would have much rather done differently, but due to the issues and time constraints I had to get something out there and working.

I hope this helps,

-Ryan Thomas

Grouped SPGridview Exceptions

Yesterday I spent many hours trying to solve what should have been a simple issue - grouped views in a SPGridview.

 I was building a web part that used an embedded SPGridview - this was part of a template I created used by a TemplateBasedControl which was the created by the Web Part. All was working fine until I decided to add grouping. I set the GroupField, AllowGrouping, and AllowGroupCollapse properties:

<SharePoint:SPGridView AutoGenerateColumns="false" runat="server" ShowHeader="true" ShowFooter="true"
            GroupField="GroupField" AllowGroupCollapse="false"
            AllowGrouping="true" DisplayGroupFieldName="false"
            ID="inventoryGrid" AutoGenerateDeleteButton="false" AutoGenerateEditButton="false"
            AutoGenerateSelectButton="false">

The control rendered fine until a postback happened - then I started getting exceptions, relating to SPMenuField. Since I was not creating a SPMenuField I was confused. After much digging I came across some helpful hints - pointing to postback issues with SPGridview.

Of particular help was http://www.thesug.org/blogs/patrickr/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=2 . However I simplified my code down and it seemed to work for me. My solution involved creating my own Class derived from SPGridview and then overriding the LoadControlState method as shown in the above post but since my control was being used in a webpart and I cannot modify the page - I just called DataBind directly:

So my class code looks like:

 public class LTCSPGridView : SPGridView
 {
     protected override void LoadControlState(object savedState)
        {
            base.LoadControlState(savedState);
            if (this.DataSource == null)
            {
                this.DataBind();
                this.InvokeRequiresDataSource();
            }
        }

        public event EventHandler RequiresDataSource;

        protected void InvokeRequiresDataSource()
        {
            EventHandler handler = this.RequiresDataSource;
            if (handler != null)
            {
                handler(this, new EventArgs());
            }
        }
    }

My modified Template definition then looks like:

<ltc:LTCSPGridView AutoGenerateColumns="false" runat="server" ShowHeader="true" ShowFooter="true"
            GroupField="GroupField" AllowGroupCollapse="false" AllowGrouping="true" DisplayGroupFieldName="false"
            ID="inventoryGrid" AutoGenerateDeleteButton="false" AutoGenerateEditButton="false"
            AutoGenerateSelectButton="false">

This fixed my problems - I hope it helps someone else.

Ian.

Going Green (and Saving Green) with SharePoint

One of the most popular project types we see with clients is automating a manual process using SharePoint, in order to streamline a Line-of-Business operation. Typically, this starts out with a pain point that surfaces, where people have become fed up with a particular inefficiency and start figuring out what that problem is costing them. To illustrate this use, I’ll share a recent client example, where a financial services company had distributed sales agents who were independent contractors. These agents typically needed to be licensed or certified in order to sell products or deliver services for the company. The compliance department was “pained” by the time-intensive manual – and error-prone – processes of tracking which contractors in the network were currently licensed or needed license renewals, maintaining documentation on licenses, and providing audit support..

While a national company, the enterprise still faxed documents around to facilitate these processes, and the faxes needed to be filed and maintained for each subcontractor. Over time, this became costly, as an increasingly large amount of people, paper, processes, and places (storage) were allocated to this effort. Finally, a department head asked an employee to detail the hard and soft costs, as well as corporate sustainability factors associated with the processes. They included:

• Resources dedicated to managing the process, with full benefits and infrastructure overhead
• Cost of agents’ time to maintain compliance
• Storage of paper
• Retrieval of paper for audits
• Failure rate on audits and cost-per-incident
• Transmission costs - fax lines, hardware, and consumables
• Volume of paper waste contributing to the company’s overall carbon footprint

After an initial assessment, the compliance department understood the current processes to ensure current sales agent certification were screaming to be automated and optimized, and SharePoint – which the company was already using for other document management systems - was a great (simple) tool to handle the automation. With its built-in capabilities for workflow, approval loops, and document management, SharePoint jump-started the project and cut the development time by 75% over conventional “from-scratch” application development. The solution was implemented and deployed in a matter of a few months. Using the new process, the client now sees more green from:

• Personnel freed up for revenue-generating activities
• Eliminated paper usage and consumables in the printing process (going green!)
• Reduced storage and retrieval costs
• Increased audit success rates, reducing costs associated with failed audits

The project paid for itself in the same calendar year and will continue to work saving thousands every month. This sort of cost recovery project is a popular strategy in today’s business climate. Smart organizations are making strategic investments in technology where it can help them trim costs dramatically, and push more money to the bottom line every month. Almost every company has a challenge in some area of document management, from Human Resources to Sales to Operations. Using technologies such as SharePoint can help move these manual processes and forms online, for easier completion, retention, retrieval, and management.

SharePoint Connections is a wrap

I wanted to drop a last note and stay thanks to everyone who attended the show.  I met some great people and talked a lot about SharePoint and associated technologies.  It was fun to see what other people are doing with the platform and how they are using certain extensible pieces of SharePoint.

I particularly enjoyed the sessions from Erik Mau on some of the more advanced options for managing Enterprise Search in SharePoint.  These were very informative and I will certainly find them useful in my SharePoint travels.

Thanks again,

-Ryan

Team System Futures From Dev Connections

At the Dev Connections conference, Doug Seven gave a great presentation on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). He started by discussing Agile development and the Agile Manifesto (see http://agilemanifesto.org/) and then highlighted how VSTS and TFS can be used to facilitate Agile development. What was nice to see was how different types of users, project planners, developers etc, can use different tools, Excel and VSTS, to view and edit the same data, allowing them to both work in a comfortable environment. He also showed how easily continuous integration and builds can be setup in a few mouse clicks.

Following on from this Doug gave us a glimpse of VSTS 2010 AKA Rosario. There are a couple of minor changes that facilitate Test Driven Development (TDD), For example in VS2008 you need to create a class and method before you can create a Unit Test - this goes against the TDD "rules" in that you are supposed to write the test first which makes you write the code. In VS2010 - you can now create the Unit Test first and then Right Click to create a class and method stub.

Another nice feature, so that we as developers no longer have to have the "token of shame" for breaking the build, is the notion of Gated Check in. With a gated check in policy, the developer checks in their code change and it is stored in a "Shelf Set". The shelf set is then merged locally and used to do a build; only if this build is completed is the code committed to the mainline code for use by other team members.

The builds in VS2010 will now be controlled using Windows Workflow, what was not clear to me is if the build workflow can then access the Windows SharePoint Services workflow environment to create or update WSS / SharePoint data. I can see this may be hard to do since they could potentially be running on different database servers.

Finally of note is the test case selection process, which can be used as part of the check in process. With VS2008 if you require unit tests to be run as part of a build after check in, this can take considerable time, with potentially the bulk of the tests not executing any of the new code. With VS2010, you can select to run a subset of the tests, with the subset being selected based on which tests will execute the newly checked in code. The test selection is performed using the test coverage information from the previous test runs. This should reduce the test case selection and time to execute making running unit tests as part of the check in very appealing.

Ian.

SharePoint Connections Update

We have attended some great sessions over the past couple days, I was especially impressed with Pej Javaheri's session on Excel Services and Michael Noel's session on MOSS Farm Redundancy.

Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007 is one of the interesting discussions that has come up during Michael's session.  It looks like a very interesting tool for backing up and managing Microsoft Server environments, including what I care about most:  SharePoint and associated data.  I'll make sure to grab a copy and run it through its paces and report back to you.

-Ryan

Thomas Rizzo SharePoint KeyNote at SharePoint Connections

This morning was the official Keynote for the SharePoint part of DevConnections.  Thomas Rizzo (who also gave last year's Keynote) gave us some hints into the the Office 14 release of SharePoint, including the ability to collaborate on Office documents simultaneously.  The emphasis towards instant gratification from a collaboration perspective is exciting.  He also mentioned some of the new downloads available from CodePlex and the community kits. 

There was a lot of emphasis on the Office Online movement, allowing organizations to utilize shared hosting environments for Microsoft Server technologies.  You won't get access to all the administrative functions, but it's a reasonably inexpensive way to get started with SharePoint, Exchange, OCS, and an ever-growing field of Microsoft Server technologies.

Another interesting point was the Content Management Interoperability Services designed to create a standard or API for connections between Enterprise Content Management systems.  This will make it much easier to integrate these platforms and manage the content between them.

More to come...

-Ryan

Custom Item Layouts Using Custom Form Templates

Earlier this year I worked on a workflow project that required the fields of a list item be hidden based on the status of the record and the users application rights. After some digging around I found the ListFieldIterator class (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webcontrols.listfielditerator_methods.aspx) which has a IsFieldExcluded method (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webcontrols.listfielditerator.isfieldexcluded.aspx).  This allows you to exclude fields from being displayed when iterating over the fields in a list item.

The next problem was how to create my own field iterator  and use it with my content type. This led me to Custom Form Templates: Form Templates are the method by which SharePoint displays a content type in display, new, and edit form. By default lists all use the same template. The template is a combination of HTML markup and server control references; some of the controls are standard ASP.Net control and some are SharePoint TemplateBasedcControl controls (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webcontrols.templatebasedcontrol.aspx). The TemplateBasedControls can take a template which is a combination of HTML markup, ASP.Net server controls and SharePoint TemplateBasedControl controls - and so it repeats. This is the way in which SharePoint builds the UI. You can find the templates, all of which have a name, in the 12\Template\ControlTemplates directory; most of them in one file - defaulttemplates.ascx.

Searching through this file you can find template for laying out such things as document items, standard toolbars, view selectors etc. You can modify the default behavior for a given template by creating a new template with the same name and deploying it to the 12 hive and restarting IIS. You should never modify the installed files in the 12 hive as the files are used by all sites on the farm and you could break functionality.

By creating custom form layouts it is possible to layout list items in any way you need, for example the SharePoint KPI edit pages are just custom layout forms. You can change the markup and control order in the template, additionally  you can define alternate templates for use with a particular control - this separation of UI markup from the control code is very powerful and flexible.

Attaching a Form template to a content type

For our application we were defining new content types using CAML and a feature definition. Attaching the custom form is achieved by adding some additional CAML markup to the type declaration:

<Elements  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >
    <ContentType Description="Licensing Task Content Type"
                 ID="0x01008F4414E2376E47d2A84745642AFA85E3"
                 Name="LicensingTask"
                 Group="Syrinx"
                 Version="0">

...
        <XmlDocuments>
            <XmlDocument NamespaceURI="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/contenttype/forms">
                <FormTemplates xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3/contenttype/forms">
                    <Display>LicenseDisplayForm</Display>
                    <Edit>LicenseEditForm</Edit>
                    <New>LicenseEditForm</New>
                </FormTemplates>
            </XmlDocument>

In the above example the LicensingTask content type uses a form called LicenseEditForm for new and edit and LicenseDisplay form for displaying items.

The content of the template is :

   1:  <SharePoint:RenderingTemplate ID="LTCLicenseEditForm" runat="server">

   2:      <Template>

   3:          <wssuc:ToolBar CssClass="ms-formtoolbar" id="toolBarTbltop" RightButtonSeparator="&nbsp;" runat="server">

   4:              <template_rightbuttons>

   5:                  <SharePoint:SaveButton runat="server"/>

   6:                  <SharePoint:GoBackButton runat="server"/>

   7:              </template_rightbuttons>

   8:          </wssuc:ToolBar>

   9:          <table class="ms-formtable" style="margin-top: 8px;" border="0" cellpadding="0" id="formTbl"

  10:              cellspacing="0" width="100%">

  11:              <ltc:TaskListFieldIterator runat="server" />

  12:          </table>

  13:          <SharePoint:CreatedModifiedInfo ID="CreatedModifiedInfo1" runat="server" />

  14:          <wssuc:ToolBar CssClass="ms-formtoolbar" id="toolBarTblbottom" RightButtonSeparator="&nbsp;"

  15:              runat="server">

  16:              <template_rightbuttons>

  17:                  <SharePoint:SaveButton runat="server"/>

  18:                  <SharePoint:GoBackButton runat="server"/>

  19:              </template_rightbuttons>

  20:          </wssuc:ToolBar>

  21:      </Template>

  22:  </SharePoint:RenderingTemplate>

  23:   

Line 11 is where the use of the custom field iterator is defined. The prefix ltc is used to identify the control to be used is from a specific assembly and namespace, at the top of the template ascx file there is a prefix definition:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="ltc" Assembly="Licensing, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6c1fd21dbc7fb55e"
    Namespace="syrinx.SharePoint.Licensing.WebControls" %>

For more information on layout forms see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa544142.aspx 

SharePoint Connections in Las Vegas is underway

I've been very busy the past few months on various SharePoint projects, but forced myself to get out for this conference because of how good it was last year.  I'll try to report on the sessions and post some pictures of the happenings out here.

-Ryan