November 2007 - Posts
For any of you using the DataView Web Part in SharePoint Designer, you may have run across an issue when looking at Document Library data where you have folders.
By Default only the "top level" items are shown. In my case just some folders, not the actual files living in the folders. There is a quick fix for this.
1. In SharePoint Designer, click on your Data Source Details tab, and click on the Current Data Source: (Policy Documents...)
2. In the Data Source Properties window, change the "Item and Folder Scope" drop down in the bottom from Default to RecursiveAll. This will show all your nested data.
I hope this helps,
-Ryan
I wrote a byline that was picked up by Redmond Developer News, about using SharePoint as a platform for general web application development.
Jump Starting Web Application Development — With the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, Microsoft's document- and information-sharing technology is now a full-blown application-development platform. Many organizations are jump-starting their Web app development using MOSS or Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) because instead of reinventing the wheel, you can assemble and configure large parts of your portal application.
Read the full article...
I recently published an article (11/16) in the print/online editions of .NET Developer's Journal about Best Practices for Collaborative Portals. It includes case study information from a financial services client.
SharePoint 2007 - Best Practices for Collaborative Portals — It was the usual story: a short deadline and a tight budget. The client's internal staff said 'No way' to build the Web-based application in fewer than six months, with any fewer than three full-time resources. The project needed to be completed in two months. It included custom authentication, collaboration, business rules, and forums. Therefore we chose SharePoint 2007 as the development platform and configured the solution to handle 80% of the functionality. Where SharePoint could not meet the requirements through configuration, we developed custom code to complete the other 20%. Herein we'll detail some best practices and lessons learned from our implementation.
Read the full article...
I attended a great session by Rick Taylor this morning on migrating from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007. We've done some migrations and when dealing with customized implementations it is no picnic. In this session he talked about some of the pain points.
If your implementation was based off one of the Fantastic 40, this is going to be a tough pill to swallow: Fantastic 40 application templates are not supported for upgrade. Does this mean you can't upgrade? Of course not, it just means don't call Microsoft for help.
If you've been looking into migrating you probably already know there are 3 types of migration: In-Place, Gradual, and Content DB (or a hybrid of Gradual and Content). He, as do we, recommends doing the migration several times in a test environment before messing with production.
The basic strategy when migrating a customized implementation is Locate, Evaluate, and Upgrade. He pointed out a few tools for locating customizations including PRESCAN, SharePoint Configuration Analyzer, and WSSCrawler. He also mentioned a Prescan Parser but I couldn't find it (if I see him tomorrow I'll ask him).
When evaluating it is very important to determine the value of the customization: is it useful? is it being used? A key factor from a design standpoint is whether it is supportable going forward. The type of migration approach depends on whether you want to keep, remediate, or redo the customizations: Gradual for keeping, DB for remediating. Redoing the valuable customizations is often the decided approach in our experience because of all the new functionality available in 2007.
He spent a decent amount of time going over the mapping file and also talked about the justification of resetting the site definition. It probably is apparent from this post, but it was a great mix of high level guidance and detailed examples - it was one of the best sessions I attended.
-Joe
I attended a good session with Rick Taylor from Microsoft this morning on FBA (Forms Based Authentication) in SharePoint. This session had a particular interest to me because we have done quite of a but FBA implementations for our clients. It has turned out to be more popular than we originally thought it would be.
A couple of key pieces of information came out of this session that a lot of people not familiar with FBA might find useful. First, My Sites are compatible with FBA. There is some setup and planning that needs to be done because a single Web Application can only have a single Membership Provider, so mixing and matching My Sites with Windows Authentication will not be possible in the same Web Application, but you can architect some solutions that hopefully get what you need.
For those of you who struggle with managing your user database when using the .NET 2.0 security database as your primary FBA user store, the IW community is releasing a generic import tool. I don't know any more than that, and will post when I get some firm information, but my assumption is that this tool can read from your Active Directory forest to import user data into your FBA database. This should be an interesting tool for those looking for an FBA site with corporate users accessing it, possibly alongside external users.
Speaking of user management, CodePlex has an FBA user and role management application that installs into your existing WSS/MOSS environment as a solution. We have used this application and it does a pretty good job of giving you an interface to your ASP.NET security database from within SharePoint. It still had some bugs when we tried it, but it's a great start. http://www.codeplex.com/fba
Rick also talked briefly about how to use FBA with the Out of the Box Web Services available in WSS. The basics include the Authentication Web Service new for WSS 3.0 which allow you to create an authentication cookie to send with subsequent requests to the Web Service. This requires Client Integration to be turned ON for your FBA Web Application.
I'm still leaving stuff out, but it was a good session, thanks Rick!
-Ryan
So here I am in Vegas - and for this Englishman it's a first time. I am here with some of the other Syrinx SharePoint team for SharePoint Dev Connections. One thing we immediately noticed was that each track had it's own registration and colored bags - this was great - helped us spot the SharePoint people - or as we called them "Red Baggers". What shocked us was the number of red baggers, it was clear that SharePoint has come of age.
This morning Tom Rizzo of Microsoft confirmed our suspicion , Microsoft does indeed have a success on it's hands. SharePoint 2007 is the fastest growing Microsoft Server Product, 85 million users worldwide. Tom also confirmed that the next version of SharePoint will to be 64 bit only, but it was uncertain if a 32 bit development version would be made available, a la Exchange 2007. I don't see this as a huge issue since most servers are now 64bit and a new version of SharePoint is some time off. But what of new tools? for those of you doing SharePoint development, you are very much aware of the lack of full tool support and Visual Studio support, well I guess we will need to wait a little longer.
-- Ian
We just finished up a great session by Shane Young on SharePoint Governance. Shane had a lot of great advice about managing your deployments in a SharePoint farm.
Some of the important issues he mentioned were the overall need to define a success strategy. We couldn't agree more. SharePoint is designed to be a clean slate, it doesn't decide how your business, process, or application should run. Success should be determined before the project ever starts; learn what your business goals are first and plan your path to meet them in your SharePoint envrionment.
He also talked extensively about setting your parameters up front. This means you need to decide how to roll out your farm, what the configuration and information architecture looks like, then lock down the places that need to be secure and managed. We define some of these items by deciding in advance about which logical areas of our Site Collections have specific quotas, blocking of certain file types, information management policies, etc.
Shane also mentioned some of the great products currently under development for SharePoint on CodePlex. We have found this site to be a great source of community-driven templates, code, and ideas to help further the usability of SharePoint. Specifically he pointed towards the governance section at: http://codeplex.com/governance . But there is plenty more SharePoint-based projects on CodePlex we would recommend. On of the more interesting items he mentioned was the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 tool found here: http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3830
-Ryan
We just heard the opening "KeyNote" session for the SharePoint portion of the DevConnections conference delivered by Tom Rizzo. Tom is the Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server at Microsoft.
He announced the replacement of SharePoint for search with: SharePoint Search Server 2008. These changes will also roll into the full version of MOSS in the middle of 2008. He demonstrated some of the capabilities of the new server and they were pretty incredible. The ability to manage and combine federated searches into a common search location was something I could see a lot of people using in their enterprise. There is a free version that has a single-server limit if you want to try it out. It promises easier installation, new administration, better performance and scalability and no document limits. There is also connectors for Documentum and FileNet
Tom made the case that companies could buy MOSS *just* for searching and it would be worth it. After seeing his demonstration I would have to agree! http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx
Tom talked about the launching of the new SharePoint site at Microsoft, SharePointPedia: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/Home.aspx
We asked Tom about some better tools for SharePoint development, deployment, etc. and he pointed us towards Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 (VSTO) Here's a preliminary look: http://blogs.msdn.com/nikhil/archive/2007/06/05/vsto-2008-beta-1-what-s-in-there.aspx We're eager to check this out.
All in all it was a very informative opening session.
-Ryan
The Syrinx SharePoint team is currently in Las Vegas for the Fall DevConnections Conference.
We had a great full-day session yesterday with Ben Curry from MindSharp. He gave a solid overview about installation and deployment. It was definitely worth it for those people who have not yet set up a farm and needed some best practices to keep in mind and get them going.
A couple of key points to take away from this session was that MOSS will be 64 bit only in the next release, and that there are some issues with the OWSTimer service that can be mitigated by restarting the service nightly.
Mindsharp has also published some extensions to the stsadm.exe command line utility for SharePoint. I'm not sure where they are located, but a good place to start would be: http://mindsharpblogs.com/