April, 2007

A couple of weeks ago I announced the arrival of a new content type: the Office Visual How-to Screencast. Now instead of 3 of them we have published 10 for MOSS!

Search

• Creating a Custom Search Page and Tabs in the Search Center of SharePoint Server by Patrick Tisseghem, U2U
  The Search Center is a new type of site that is included by default in the site collection when you provision a collaboration portal. Its goal is to provide users with a customized search experience, and to replace the search box that is available at the top of the pages in the portal. There are two editions of the Search Center: the Search Center Lite and the Search Center with Tabs. The Search Center Lite is typically added to site collections where the publishing features are not activated. An example is a site collection with only team sites. The Search Center with Tabs offers a full customization using a tab-based user interface, but it requires the publishing features to be active. This is the case by default within collaboration portals. This article covers two customization options that can be performed in the Search Center with Tabs: how to add custom search pages and tabs, and, how to replace the XSLT for the search results with a custom XSLT.
  
• Creating and Exposing Managed Properties in the Advanced Search Page of SharePoint Server Enterprise Search by Patrick Tisseghem, U2U
  Lists and document libraries in SharePoint sites typically have extra columns defined for them. This custom metadata is collected by the crawler when it indexes the contents of these containers. Administrators can expose this custom metadata to the users who perform search queries in the Search Center. The Advanced Search page has a property picker that can be populated with managed properties. This article explains and illustrates how to expose managed properties to the user, and also explains how developers can programmatically create managed properties.
  
• Creating and Exposing Search Scopes in SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search by Patrick Tisseghem, U2U
  Search scopes in SharePoint Server 2007 are used to narrow the search results returned to users executing a search query. Search scopes can be shared or locally defined. You can use different rules in the definition of a search scope, from simply scoping based on a content source to more complex scoping with conditions using custom metadata. You can view search scopes in the browser with scope pickers. Scope pickers are connected to a display group listing the scopes to be displayed.
  
• Creating Content Sources to Crawl Business Data in SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search by Patrick Tisseghem, U2U
  A content source is a location that contains resources, and you may want the resources crawled or indexed. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes functionality to search Web sites and SharePoint sites, folders, and data exposed using the Business Data Catalog.  In this Visual How-to article, we'll focus on working with the Business Data Catalog with step-by-step instructions and samples.
  

Business Data Catalog (BDC)

• Refining Business Data Catalog Search with Scopes by Ryan Femling, 3Sharp
  You can use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to search entities and other Business Data Catalog items, site collections, and people. You can easily refine the results of these Business Data Catalog searches with scopes. When you define the scopes, you can use them to segregate your Business Data Catalog search results from the rest of your SharePoint Server 2007 search results. You can display this data in a separate Web Part on the Search Results, or in a separate landing page altogether. This ability to segregate yet display the data side-by-side allows the searcher to easily see what they have searched on that is in the Business Data Catalog, along with any relevant material from SharePoint Server 2007.
  
• Using Business Data Catalog Actions to Pass Parameters to InfoPath 2007 Browser Forms by David Gerhardt, 3Sharp
  You can build forms with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 that run both in InfoPath 2007 and in a Web browser. For browser scenarios, you can integrate with the Business Data Catalog in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 by having a custom action pass a parameter value to form files.
  
• Filtering one Business Data Catalog List from Another by Using Associations in SharePoint Server 2007 by John Peltonen, 3Sharp (previously announced)
  The Business Data Catalog allows you to define multiple entities for a given line-of-business (LOB) system. Furthermore, within the metadata file, you can create associations that define a hierarchy within the entities. For example, if there are two entities defined, such as customers and orders, you can create an association to tie the customer entity directly to the order entity. This allows users within your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal to create master-child behavior.
  
• Creating Business Data Catalog Entities in SharePoint Server 2007 by John Peltonen, 3Sharp (previously announced)
  The Business Data Catalog is a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 feature that exposes and incorporates Line-of-Business (LOB) data into other baseline portal functionality, such as lists and enterprise search. To incorporate this data into your portal, you must build an XML file that identifies where the data is stored (either Microsoft SQL Server or a Web service) and what the data looks like (for example, what the data types and primary keys are).
  

Excel Services

• Creating Managed-Code UDFs for Excel Services by Joel Krist, Akona Systems
  Much like previous versions of Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 provides support for user-defined functions (UDFs). UDFs are custom functions that extend the calculation and data-import capabilities of Excel 2007.
• Retrieving Excel 2007 Workbooks or Snapshots Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services by Joel Krist, Akona Systems (previously announced)
  If you want to save a copy of an up-to-date workbook, store it somewhere, send it to someone, and so on, you can retrieve an entire workbook or a snapshot using Excel Web Services. When a user or application requests a snapshot, Excel Services opens the Excel file on the server, refreshes data sources, and calculates all Excel formulas. Excel Services then generates and sends a snapshot back through the Web service API.

Let us know what you think!  We have many more coming soon for MOSS, and we look forward to your feedback about the subjects we're choosing, the usefulness, and the technical depth of the videos.  Let us know what you'd like to start seeing more of or less of!

More information:  Office Visual How-to Center on MSDN

In addition to SharePoint, my team also writes and publishes SDK content for the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) offering of the 2007 Microsoft Office System, which includes Project, Project Server, Project Portfolio Server, and Project Web Access.

The SDK was just refreshed to include a substantial amount of new content and downloads for the Microsoft EPM offering.  Thanks to Jim on my team for compiling this excellent list of what's new and changed:

I'm very excited to announce that we launched a new content type on MSDN recently:  the Office Visual How to! 

Here's the idea behind the Office Visual How to topics:

• See It.  If you've got 10 - 15 minutes to watch a video showing the code in action, you can stream it from the article page.  You can also download it!
• Code It.  If you want to see the code and copy it into your project to try it out yourself, it's also printed with the article.
• Read It.  We also walk you through the code and give you contextual information so you can see what's going on in detail.
• Explore It.  We provide links to more information in the MOSS SDK, on the MOSS Developer Portal, in team blogs, and elsewhere on MSDN.

We have 3 new Visual How to topics for MOSS that went live this week:

• Filtering one Business Data Catalog List from Another by Using Associations in SharePoint Server 2007 by John Peltonen @3Sharp
• Creating Business Data Catalog Entities in SharePoint Server 2007 by John Peltonen @3Sharp
• Retrieving Excel 2007 Workbooks or Snapshots Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services by Joel Krist @Akona Systems

We have a long list of MOSS videos and topics that will go live in the coming weeks, so stay tuned to this blog or the MOSS Portal on MSDN for updates!  Also, don't forget to check out the Office Developer How-to Center on MSDN for a complete list of our popular How-to content type.

Also published recently on MSDN:

• Item-Level Auditing with SharePoint Server 2007 by Ted Pattison