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By: Kristin Ruth
Posted:
January 2, 2009 at 2:45 PM
I think of this because when rolling out SharePoint for your Company Intranet it becomes increasingly more valuable to step back and look at the various documentation and communication tools. Some that can be considered:
· Microsoft Suite
o Windows Explorer – Files Shares
o Excel, Word, Access, Visio, Project
o Outlook
· Documents
o Attachments
o PDFs
o Images
o Video
· Communications
o Meetings
o 1:1s
o Training Classes
o Conf
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By: Kristin Ruth
Posted:
January 2, 2009 at 2:40 PM
You know how you felt when you were a teenager and you may have heard at least once but probably several times not under our house. Recently, I had this same experience but it was not a flashback to my teenage years but during an IT Change Control Meeting. Eyes go wide with traditional Change Control Team members and methodologies when you educate on the functionality and flexibility of SharePoint. It is a fine balance to provide the user community access to the functionality of SharePoin
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By: Kristin Ruth
Posted:
January 2, 2009 at 2:26 PM
No I am not going to break into song about chicks, cows and horses. But this song came to mind as I thought about the SharePoint environments that are created across an organization. Do you sometimes wonder how the sites just keep growing? Is it the excitement during the project design or training phase? Or, perhaps it was the CEO’s email announcing that your company is moving to online collaboration for everything? While this a great signal in strong user adoption, you want to create a
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 31, 2008 at 8:25 PMOver the past six months, I've been experimenting a lot with the Virtual Earth Map Control. I must say that I've been really impressed with the great community out there contributing guidance and code examples to help folks learn what this stuff is all about. There is a tangible level of excitement for this kind of technology. So in this spirit, I thought I'd throw in a few bits of my own work. My particular area of focus has involved loading shape data via an ETL process and plotting them as
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
December 31, 2008 at 5:44 PMIn this blog I will show you how to manipulate SharePoint objects with LINQ. In my personal opinion, LINQ makes code less verbose, hence makes code easier to read and understand. LINQ also makes SharePoint application development fun. LINQ is general to Microsoft.NET framework and neither LINQ nor SharePoint are dependent on each other. Obviously SharePoint can be used without LINQ and similarly LINQ can be used outside of SharePoint with other .NET applications, but if you decide to use LINQ in
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By: Matthew Morse
Posted:
December 31, 2008 at 4:38 PMIn my last post, I described the process that I follow when customizing search results in SharePoint using the Core Search Results web part that ships with MOSS. If you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest you start there for some context on the rest of this post. On a recent project, I ran across the requirement of grouping search results by a managed property. It seemed relatively straightforward from a functional perspective, and given SharePoint’s XML-based architecture in search, feasible from a
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
December 31, 2008 at 2:56 PMMicrosoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) has two content type groups defined for publishing pages: 1. Page Layout Content Types 2. Publishing Content Types Figure 1: Publishing Content Types in MOSS All content types in “Page Layout Content Types” group derive (inherit) from “Page” content type. Both SharePoint Designer (SPD) and browser interface of MOSS wouldn’t let you associate a content type to a page layout unless the content type drove from base “Page” content type, but be care
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
December 31, 2008 at 2:50 PMSharePoint is not just a web application, it is a web platform. Being a SharePoint developer is not easy. If you have ever done any SharePoint development, you’re probably aware of some of the challenges. Here are some points that I think will make SharePoint development experience better. 1. Use OOTB tools before jumping into custom development –Developers that are new to SharePoint don’t usually hesitate to jump into creating custom solutions to solve their business and technical challenges, b
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
December 30, 2008 at 4:30 PM
When it comes to tweaking the look and feel of SharePoint web parts, one of the best ways is through the use of XSL Transformations. Numerous out-of-the-box web parts can be completely customized through XSLT, including all lists and document libraries.
In my case, I was recently configuring a Content Query Web Part when I ran into a challenge. My template needed to parse fields from a custom list into parameters for a custom page's query string:
<a href="/Pages/Page.aspx?Titl
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By: Matthew Morse
Posted:
December 29, 2008 at 4:37 PMThe purpose of this post is to share the process that I’ve begun to follow in my own work related to search customization and to provide an opportunity for you to share what’s worked for you, as well. The post assumes that you’re generally familiar with how search results are customized using the SharePoint search web parts. There are numerous resources available for the mechanics of search result customization within SharePoint. For example, Matt McDermott has a good series of posts giving an
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
December 26, 2008 at 5:45 PM
While mocking up some quick wireframes, I recently jumped into SharePoint Designer to customize ItemStyle.xsl. After checking out my file and making updates to the template, I saved it and proceeded to "Check In". What I was greeted with was a surprising error message:
"Cannot perform this operation. The file is no longer checked out or has been deleted."
Confused, I retraced my steps in case it was a fluke. Looking at the library, I could see the file was checked
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
December 23, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Earlier this year, I decided to try running Windows Home Server to organize my personal network. Between my wife and me, we have six machines: four laptops, a Media Center, and one desktop. Keeping them backed up was always a concern and I had trouble finding files strewn about multiple disks. Centralized backup (with single instance store) and data striping enticed me to try it out, so I provisioned my spare desktop as a budget server and took the plunge. I've been running WHS for about six m
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 23, 2008 at 2:36 PM
Overview:
I had recently been tasked to perform my first installation of PerformancePoint Monitoring Server 2007 onto a Server Farm. Most of my experience to date had been using the SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence suite (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and PerformancePoint), however, I had not yet had an opportunity to do much of the actual configuration and / or installation. This was especially true for installations pertaining to Server Farms.
The hope of this blog is to help someone else tha
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 23, 2008 at 1:38 PM
Problem:
I was recently tasked with creating an SSIS package to pull data from a 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 with an installation of Oracle 9i Database into a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 with an installation of SQL Server 2005. On the surface this seemed like a simple task since SSIS has built in Oracle data connections. However, this proved to be a lot harder than I could have ever imagined.
After initially having trouble connecting to the Oracle 9i Database I took s
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By: Matthew Morse
Posted:
December 22, 2008 at 11:37 AMIf you’ve done work with MOSS audiences, you’re probably aware that one of the ways that you can build an audience is to set up rules based on values found on each user’s profile. For example: In this case, I’ve set up a membership condition so that the “Favorite Ice Cream” custom user profile property must equal “Chocolate” for a given user to be included in my audience. When the audience is compiled, the output looks something like this: So now my audience has three user profiles that mat
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
December 21, 2008 at 11:06 PMLast week we came across a very interesting problem. A routine deployment made some of the web parts throw an exception whenever you made a change to its properties and tried to save the changes. This exception was also seen when we tried to add a web part to a page. It was not only for custom web parts but also for OOTB (Out of the box) web parts. Now what could have possibly happen that would make the OOTB web parts break and throw an exception. Looking into the issue, I found that the culprit
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
December 21, 2008 at 11:04 PMI don't know how or why but sometimes the fields in a content type can get hidden. And you wont get an option of un-hiding the field using the UI. Actually if you try and un-hide the field using the object model, it wont let you. The CanToggleHidden property will be false. And the object model does not allow you to reset this property. There is a way to reset this property. The following code uses reflection to invoke the right method and reset the property. After the code executes the field (SP
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
December 21, 2008 at 11:00 PM I saw some applications making use of the carosel to display their products and that made me think. What if I had a set of products related to each other. Like if I was displaying Vaccum cleaners then clicking on of the vaccum cleaners would show me another carousel which would display different accessories for that vaccum cleaner. We can architect this by creating different entities. 1. Carousel - This class handles the items in it and rotates them at the set speed. 2. Carousel Controller -
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 21, 2008 at 10:12 PM
Over the weekend, I experienced some frustration installing the SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies. The last time I tried this for SQL 2005, I ran into problems caused by that fact that I use Windows 2008 Server (as a workstation) and have User Account Control enabled. This time, the issue was different and equally elusive. Fortunately, I learned of a better way to do this installation rather than using the GUI and hoping for the best.
It all started when
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
December 18, 2008 at 2:51 PMIn some instances, the OR logic in fulltextsqlquery works as an AND which could be very confusing when trying to build queries. For example, let's say you have two managed properties that are both mapped to two different crawled properties. Now if you execute a query and search for a term that is available in one item and that this item meets one of the filtering criteria set up in your OR logic but not the other one then you will not get no results back (!). Suddenly your OR looks and behaves m
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
December 18, 2008 at 8:46 AMDuring a recent deployment of SCMDM I ran into a little snag while publishing the internal IIS web site on the Enrollment Server. Because my client was using an ISA Server 2006 Array I needed to get the exact same certificate on both array nodes in order to configure the Listener correctly. If you follow the technical article Configuring External and Internal Firewalls in Mobile Device Manager then the requested certificate will not be configured to allow exporting the private key. And because
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 17, 2008 at 6:02 PM
After working on various Exchange-related projects you start to accumulate some useful scripts and tools. For me, PowerShell has proven to be an invaluable tool and although I usually can't find enough time to develop ellaborate scripts, I do occassionally come across some common but useful one-liners in some situations.
Here's a few of these that you might find useful:
Show mailbox statistics (excluding system mailboxes)Get-MailboxStatistics -server mbxserver1 | where {$_.ObjectClass
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
December 17, 2008 at 12:47 AMHere are a few gotchas that I ran into while working with SharePoint search.
BETWEEN doesn't exist: I made the mistake to assume that I could use the BETWEEN clause in my fulltextsqlqueries when it is not usable! Luckily, one simple work around is to use >= and <= instead. I lost a lot of time with that one just assuming that the BETWEEN clause would work in my queries and that the problem must have come from something else.
Sorting columns: If your columns contain null values and tha
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
December 17, 2008 at 8:59 AMI feel a little silly just finding out this little tip recently as I can’t count how many times I’ve had to manually re-join a Windows workstation or member server to a domain in my life. This is a pretty common procedure as various issues can sometimes cause problems with the secure channel communications between workstations and domain controllers in an Active Directory domain. Rejoining the domain reestablishes the trusted partnership and in most cases resolves the issue. The tried-and-true
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 16, 2008 at 4:30 PM
In Part 1 of this blog I gave a theoretical overview of how to deal with slowly changing dimensions as well as some of the general advantages and disadvantages of each technique.
Moving away from the theoretical overview and more towards the actual practice of the theories, my first attempt to handle slowly changing dimensions was within SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). Microsoft developed a Data Flow Transformation to handle b
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 16, 2008 at 4:23 PM
Overview:
Although quite prevalent within the world of Business Intelligence, certain situations can still make handling slowly changing dimensions quite challenging. Just recently I had been tasked to deal with slowly changing dimensions in order to allow data within a dimension table to properly update while making sure to retain the history of the changes within the table.
For me the main challenge with handling the slowly changing dimension in this case was performance. No matter w
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By: Gene Furibondo
Posted:
December 15, 2008 at 4:44 PM
So, we have kind of this inside joke on our team regarding Silverlight after I suggested to a few of the guys that I was going to rewrite the reporting services front end using Silverlight technology. Since then, I have often referred to Silverlight as the solution to any technical problem and offer solutions based purely on the technology. That is because I didn't really know what it was or how cool it really is or could be. Especially in the context of BI and data visualizations.
I wa
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
December 15, 2008 at 3:28 PM
Be cautious when using the results table count if you are planning to build a paging control to wrap around your results.
After a query gets executed, a results table gets returned back. The count of the results table should be helpful in theory in order to build your paging feature so that user can go through all the results. Now, one thing to keep in mind with the table count is that it can either be an exact or an estimate count. The more results get returned, the greater the chance you w
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 10, 2008 at 2:49 PM
Hopefully this blog will help someone avoid spending time scratching their head wondering why their cert request is not working when submitting it to a CA. Some of you may have already figured this out but for some reason this problem never reared its head until recently. The problem and solution are pretty simple. The premise of the problem lies in generating a public certificate request for a CAS server with special or reserved characters in the company name or other field you need to popula
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
December 10, 2008 at 8:11 AMAnyone who’s attempted to troubleshoot Address Book problems in OCS before has probably at least tried to open up the GalContacts.db file on a workstation running Office Communicator. Unfortunately it’s in some alien language with human strings dispersed among countless delimiters: This makes troubleshooting Address Book normalization operations kind of a pain. But luckily there is a registry setting available that can be configured on the client’s HKCU or HKLM key which will create a comma
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
December 6, 2008 at 6:51 AMBy now most everyone should be aware that AOL made a certificate configuration change earlier this week that affected PIC communications between OCS users and AOL instant messaging users. Here is the first released blog describing the fix: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL Well, I just found out that Yahoo will be performing emergency maintenance between 4:30PM and 4:30AM EST. The release I read didn’t specify if this was starting yesterday (Friday) or
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
November 26, 2008 at 10:34 AM
The purpose of this post is to hopefully help someone who is experiencing difficulty connecting an Entourage 2008 client to Exchange 2007, more specifically, with Exchange hosted on Windows Server 2008.
When the platform was Windows Server 2003 connecting an Entourage client was as easy as enabling WebDAV in IIS 6.0. With 2008 and IIS 7.0 WebDAV is not integrated into IIS anymore so it's not as simple as setting the security to 'Allowed'. So I went through the new process of downloading, i
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
November 25, 2008 at 9:15 PMUsually when installing a major upgrade to SharePoint first you install the update (notably - SP1, The SharePoint Infrastructure Update, soon SP2) then to complete the install you must run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. On many occasions I have seen the Wizard get stuck on the final step and eventually error out. In almost every circumstance there is usually something going on with the Windows SharePoint Services Search. I have found the best way to mitigate th
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By: Ilya Basin
Posted:
November 25, 2008 at 2:47 PM
Provisioning a list instance in the object model is so much better than doing it using CAML.
In CAML you must copy a schema.xml file (hundreds of lines of code) from an existing list (say, from the CustomList feature) and then, without understanding the entire code, make changes to it. I don’t know about you, but it does not “sit well” with me when I have to modify and use code in my project that I don’t understand completelty (unless, of course, it is a “black box”, like a thrid party
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By: Ilya Basin
Posted:
November 25, 2008 at 2:13 PM
Continuing a series of posts with examples for provisioning SharePoint elements through an object model, here is an example of how to create a content type using an object model:
public static SPContentType CreateContentType(SPWeb web, string contentTypeName, List<SPField> columns)
{
//create an empty content type and add it to content type collection
SPContentType contentType = new SPContentType(web.AvailableContentTypes["Item"], web.
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By: Ilya Basin
Posted:
November 25, 2008 at 2:11 PM
Creating a Site Column in SharePoint programmatically using an object model
In my last blog I talked about how to create a lookup site column programmatically, but I figured it might be useful to have an example of how to create a regular site column. Here are two methods: one for Choice columns and another one good for other types:
public static SPFieldChoice CreateChoiceSiteColumn(SPWeb web, string fieldName, StringCollection choices)
{
string nam
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By: Ilya Basin
Posted:
November 25, 2008 at 2:03 PM
Provisioning lookup site columns cannot be done through CAML alone. I have seen claims that it could be done (see http://blogs.msdn.com/joshuag/archive/2008/03/14/add-sharepoint-lookup-column-declaratively-through-caml-xml.aspx) but I was never able to make it work when the column to lookup is not “Title” or when it resides on the list in a different SPWeb.
I also saw methdos on the web that suggeest a combination of CAML and an object model but they seem akward and somewhat kludgy (see
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By: Matthew Morse
Posted:
November 18, 2008 at 10:45 AMI was working at a client recently and "shetiquette" was the term they used to refer to "SharePoint Etiquette" -- the behavior users exhibit in collaborating with each other in MOSS. Their examples of bad shetiquette include: Checking out documents and never checking them back in (I've been known to be guilty of that on occasion). Putting garbage in metadata fields. For example, the description of a document is "asdfasdf." I thought the term was cool -- though yo
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
November 17, 2008 at 1:50 PMThe TechNet documentation for SCMDM 2008 contains detailed steps for deploying each role, but the server prerequisites are a bitter scattered across the documentation and you really have to read through the entire document to understand how it all comes together. Although I highly recommend reading through all of the documentation, I’ve decided to put together a detailed list covering the installation of each component as is a certain order that should be used. Assuming that most first-time ins
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
November 17, 2008 at 1:49 PMDmitry Polzin has created a Vista Sidebar Gadget for Office Communicator that helps better manage multiple conversation windows. You can download it from the Windows Live Gallery here:http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=2701d34d-ec6a-48ec-9ce2-a3932345f3a8 As with any gadgets the window can be either docked in the sidebar or dragged out into the desktop . The gadget’s title bar shows your current presence with the total number of active conversations (e.g. 6). You can also Minimize
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By: Matthew Morse
Posted:
November 14, 2008 at 5:13 PMToday was our second annual MOSS Camp held at the Clarity offices in Chicago. As I mentioned in my previous post, our approach this year was to choose a simple business scenario and then spend the day in various sessions all focused on building and delivering a SharePoint solution. The code is being published on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/MOSSCamp. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the day's presentations: Burt Floraday and I kicked things off with a tag-team presentation of t
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 13, 2008 at 11:29 PMVoiceCon wrapped up today. Two big surprises for me: Cisco had no booth; Nortel had virtually no presence at all. Cisco had a couple guys in some of the panels with what I'd say were mixed results. But they had no keynote speaker, no booth in the exhibit hall. There were a few Cisco IP phones, but they were at the IBM booth, the HP booth and a few others. There was no demo or anything compelling that Cisco had to offer at VoiceCon. I was pretty disappointed.
Nortel had an even lesser presence.
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 13, 2008 at 11:52 AMGood news for UC at large: Here at VoiceCon, Microsoft and IBM have committed to having federation interoperability for Office Communications Server 2007 and Lotus SameTime – support for it will be official in Q1 of 2009. For OCS, this will be part of the R2 release, according to Eric Swift of Microsoft. There will be no additional charge from either IBM or Microsoft to make this happen. IBM are still working on federation interop with MSN, which is not yet complete. But for now SameTime / OCS i
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
November 12, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Today, a client brought up a common issue with web parts: they could set a fixed (scrollable) width for any web part, but for certain types, they could not set a fixed height. The option would be listed in the site's Appearance settings, but saving it had no effect on the layout.
This became increasingly troublesome in the case of list web parts. Several pages collated diverse lists, and the longer lists would use all of the screen real estate at the expense of equally important lists.
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By: Ilya Basin
Posted:
November 12, 2008 a |
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