Chris's unofficial Office Live developer blog : Windows SharePoint Services

Advanced List Publishing

cbeiter — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:23:32 GMT

In the previous release of Office Live, we had a deeply hidden and difficult to use feature known as Data Sharing. This feature was designed to allow you to take the data from one of the lists in your password-secured 'business applications' and publish it out to your public-facing web site as a dynamic list or table of items. So when you update an item in the private list it was automatically updated on your public web site. Data Sharing also provided the inverse... forms on your public web site that collect data into a business application list.

Despite the efforts of our intern (hi Chester!), the feature was a dud. When publishing a list (aka Display Data), there were only 3 options for how to layout the data, and the approval process was onerous at best. The form builder (aka Collect Data) also had some major hurdles, such as numerous unsupported column types and lack of ability to directly set what columns you were collecting data into. Despite its shortcomings, we did get a good amount of customer and developer feedback that they liked the concept, just not the implementation.

In our recent release, we set out to address the major usability problems, add more UI flexibility and also address some of the major underlying technical limitations. We especially wanted to give developers more power so they could unlock scenarios that they know best. We set a goal that a 'normal' small business user could set this up... you don't have to be a developer.

I won't give you a full blow-by-blow account of all the changes we implemented, let's just say that instead of having to take a bunch of shortcuts to squeeze this feature into our Nov 06 release, we were able to get a full development milestone to build it the way we thought was best. OK, OK, we did take a few shortcuts, and big chunks of what we hoped to do were cut (you gotta dream big!), but by and large the end result is a much more flexible, powerful and usable solution.

Advanced Mode

Hopefully you have seen my blog post about the new Web Site Designer 'advanced mode'. If you haven't, go check it out to learn how to configure that for your Office Live Small Business web site. This post will focus on the advanced mode capabilities and other developer-centric features for the List Publisher specifically, so that will be an important piece of homework for you to start with.

List Publisher Module

To recap, the List Publisher is a module that you can drop onto a web page using the Office Live page designer tool. To add a module, just click on the zone where you want to add it on the page, select the Modules dropdown, and select the List Publisher module. The property sheet for the module will pop up to guide you through the rest of the process. Modules can be moved around into any zone on a page, resized, copy & pasted and packaged up into a solution file.

The List Publisher property sheet gives you the ability to select lists from any of the business applications or Business Contact Manager in the password-protected area of your Office Live subscription. Once you pick an app and a list from that app, the controls on the property sheet are populated and enabled.

NOTE: You may not have the Business Applications provisioned on your Office Live Small Business account. If you don't, you will be notified. They're free, so check 'em out. If you already have them added to your account, you might not see a list you want to publish. From the Business Applications, you can add a variety of interesting apps to perform common tasks for small businesses such as Contact Management, Project Management, Team Workspaces and more. Just click + Add Application in the left nav once you go to the Business Apps and you will see a gallery. Don't see the one you want to use? You can also create a custom app or add a custom list to one of the Business Apps you already have to suit your needs.

Defining your data details

On the data details tab, you can define the exact data you want to publish by selecting the 'Create custom information view' radio button. That allows you to select the columns you want, reorder them, and rename the labels for each column.

Instead of picking and choosing from the full set of columns, you may decide to base your data details on a SharePoint view by selecting 'Use columns from an existing view' and then selecting the view you want from the dropdown. These "views" are kind of like mini-reports that are part of the Business App that are generally used to format the list data in a way that is more useful. For example, you might have a task list with an "overdue" view, "assigned to me" view, etc.

Selecting one of these views on the module property sheet is kind of like a big shortcut for you, plus it has some added power. We automatically select only those columns that are present on the view for inclusion on the published list. You cannot add or remove columns from the data details unless you switch back to the custom information view mode.

Why would you want to limit yourself by using an existing view? Because SharePoint views also give you the ability to add a sort order and create filters on the list. Using the task list example again, you may want to only publish the active tasks, and the SharePoint view makes that possible by filtering only those tasks where status = active. You need to go to the Business Application itself to create or modify a SharePoint view, but depending on what you are trying to do, it may well be worth the effort.

Creating a layout template

Once you have selected the data, now you need to decide how it should appear. The layout tab gives you 3 options: a dropdown to select one of 3 predefined layouts, an option to link to a XSLT file and finally, a text area where you can edit/paste XSLT code directly.

The layout dropdown is pretty self-explanatory... grid, repeating form or repeating form centered are standard layouts for basic publishing. But this blog post is about 'advanced' publishing, so let's talk about the other controls instead.

So far we have ignored the 'View XML source' button that hovers above the 2 tabs on the right of the property sheet. By clicking it, you get an XML document that describes the schema you have configured on the data details tab. As you make more changes, that XML will be updated. Once you have the data details ironed out and are viewing the XML, you can write your own XSLT code to generate HTML/Script output exactly like you want it. Here's where things get very interesting.

The Grid Layout example

The Edit XSLT control contains a default XSLT that you may use as a sample. By writing a couple simple loops, it first iterates over the fields in the schema, and writes out the DisplayName attribute of each Field node. This lets you write the column headers out in the grid example.

You can then write a second loop to create a new row in the HTML grid/table for each Row node of the XML, grabbing each of the attributes of the Row and outputting them as the value for one of the columns of the grid. The attributes on the Row nodes correspond to the order of the Field nodes in the Schema subsection of the XML.

Now you have a simple HTML grid of all the items in your list.

Instead of just outputting the values as raw text into a grid-like table, you can manipulate the values in any way you see fit such as passing them to a javascript function, building them into part of a URL or querystring, applying different fonts & styles conditionally based on a test of the value, and so on. In the grid example, we look at the position of the Row node using the XSLT mod function. This allows us to change the style class name for each row, and build alternating colors into our grid.

In XSLT, you can pretty much output any HTML you would normally create for a web page, including styles and javascript. So, the sky and your imagination are really the limit.

To Link or Not to Link

The main difference between linking to an XSLT file vs. editing it directly on the module is that linking will give you the ability to share an XSLT across multiple modules, and manage the code all in one place for easy maintenance. The text area is a better option while you are still developing and debugging the XSLT you are working on.

Syndicating your list with RSS 2.0 and Simple List Extensions

You've probably noticed by now the recognizable orange RSS icon at the bottom of the page. This checkbox is selected by default, and by doing so, publishes your list also as an RSS 2.0 feed at a separate URL. We also adhere to the Simple List Extensions proposal, which provides both an enhanced experience in Internet Explorer 7.0 and formats the data from your list in a way that is more usable by developers who are consuming your list feed on a 3rd party server/service/application. I'll dig more into the syndication features in a future blog post.

You can read more about advanced list publisher features in our dev guide.

Packaging your business apps and web site into a cohesive Office Live Solution

cbeiter — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:08:00 GMT

Another great advance in the Winter 08 release of Office Live Small Business is the new Solution Packaging technology. This service allows you to take components off of your public-facing web site & entire business applications, package them together, creating a comprehensive solution to a Small Business problem. See this article in our dev guide for a great overview of the packager.

As an example, you might create a Business Application for a restaurant to manage a rotating menu. The Business Application will be pretty simple, probably just a SharePoint list of names, prices, descriptions, etc. Then let us say that you have pages on your public-facing web site where you have used the List Publisher to publish the menu. By doing this, the changes that the chef makes to the list on the business app can be dynamically published up to the daily rotating menu on your public web site.

This is great, but how do you wrap this up and allow your friend who also has a restaurant site reuse what you built? Before the new version of Office Live, you would be able to package up the Business App as an .stp file and send it to your friend. That would only recreate the Bizapp. But the public-facing pages and the List Publisher module would all need to be created from scratch.

Not anymore... now you can package up both the Business Applications and components of your web site into an Office Live Package (.olp) file. From a granularity perspective, you can choose any Business App to include, optionally including the data in the lists as seed data. For the Web Site, you can package web pages, images, documents, and (also new in the Winter release) page templates you have created. Everything is stitched up together into a single .olp file.

So, you send the restaurant .olp file to your friend. She deploys the solution on her subscription. Office Live will read the contents of the file, putting all of the individual components into the correct places. We will even patch up connections made through the List Publisher and Form Designer modules between a public web page and the newly created restaurant business app. Note... we do require your friend to make one final step of visiting the pages and confirming the module settings before we start publishing data for the restaurant menu... this is to prevent people from accidentally publishing business-sensitive data.

The really big innovation here is the packaging up of your public site, something you could not previously do with anything made on your Office Live site using our Web Site Designer. Now, with the packager, you can package those pages, templates, images etc. and share them to your hearts content!

Another scenario we are very excited about is supporting the sharing of web page templates. You now have the ability, in advanced mode, of creating web page templates. Maybe you create a great web site for a real estate office. You may not want to share your entire site, but maybe you create templates for a few of the pages such as publishing the home listings. Now you can package that template up in an .olp file and share it to anyone else on Office Live Small Business.

Before you ask, let me get out in front of the question and say NO, we do not enforce any sort of intellectual property rights on the .olp files you create. So, if you are thinking of building a business around these solutions, you do have to think about the fact that someone else can package up what you give them and give it away for free. Our goal was to get this out ASAP, and this is one of the features that didn't make the cut. Also, we wanted these solutions to be as viral as possible, so everyone can cross-pollinate ideas in a more (gasp) open source kind of way. As we get feedback on the packager, we hope to also learn more about the IP scenarios so we can work them into a future release.

Versioning is another thing we did not tackle in this release. If pages already exist on your web site, the deployment of a package with files of the same name will fail. There is an "overwrite" checkbox to make this work though. Also, if you package a new version of a business application, and it already exists, we will deploy a second copy of it side-by-side. There really is no good way to do a delta update to a business application yet, so that's what we went with. Again, this is another area we hope to get more feedback and scenarios on.

I think the most exciting thing about the new packager is that we don't really know how it might be used. I can imagine many things, but ultimately it's up to the creativity of our developer audience to take advantage and help guide us in the right direction for the next round of improvements.

Creating a "vertical" application on Office Live

cbeiter — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:48:00 GMT

We've mentioned before the idea of creating a custom application that sits on top of Office Live and is tailored to meet the needs of a specific "vertical" industry such as real estate, construction or retail. Our technical evangelist Rohit Puri has created a new sample called the Inn Manager, which is designed for a hypothetical Bed & Breakfast inn. Learn more and download the sample & instructions from the Office Live team blog.

The interesting thing about this sample is it really walks you through the different steps of configuring a custom application on Office Live, both the web hosting side of putting up pretty web pages, but also the collaboration side of using Business Applications to help manage your business. He also did a screencast if you want to catch the highlights.

Flash charts for Office Live business applications

cbeiter — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:48:00 GMT

Charting is one area that we've wanted to see improve in Office Live. Fortunately, since enough of our platform is opened up, developers can take it upon themselves to do some charting work if they need it for their customers.

Darren Johnstone has a blog that covers the work he is doing with Office Live. He's one of our early partners in the UK. He recently posted several code samples for how to extract data from an Office Live Business App or Workspace and turn it into an SWF flash chart. This is a nice innovation on the Office Live platform. Check it out! He even packaged everything up as a download so you can try it out for yourself on your own Office Live site. This is NOT to be missed!

Office Live Business Contact Manager + Zillow.com mashup sample

cbeiter — Wed, 16 May 2007 23:00:00 GMT

A pretty cool mashup courtesy of our devs Katy and Albert (who you may be familiar with from his screencast videos). There is a complete writeup coming soon on the Office Live team blog, but since the sample is already posted, I wanted to get the word out to my blog subscribers also. UPDATE: Here's a link to the formal write up on the team blog.

Short version, the tool passes the addresses of contacts from your Office Live Business Contact Manager to Zillow.com's API Network and displays property estimates (aka Zestimates), charts, maps, comparables, etc. for the contact you select.

It's a very simple scenario, but the underlying concept of having a Contact Management store in the cloud accessible from any computer with an internet connection and that can integrate easily with other services for value added scenarios, that's pretty cool. OK, I am a geek.

Thanks David and Mark at Zillow for your help.

New Web Services for Office Live?

cbeiter — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:39:00 GMT

We've heard before that there are some gaps in the web services that are offered as part of Office Live. For the most part, we allow you to use many of the web services from Windows SharePoint Services v3 on which our business applications & workspaces are built. However, we had to block some of these, and some may be more difficult to use than you would like. We've also recently introduced our first major Office Live-specific web service to help you work with our authentication system, Windows Live ID.

We are evaluating if there are any major gaps that we can patch up to make the story more complete. Here are some questions which might get help get your thoughts started:

What's missing? What new web services do you need?
What web services are blocked that you want unblocked?
What web services are too difficult to use?
Even if you don't know the web service specifically, tell us if there are scenarios where you think web services might help.

Just reply here with your comments, or use the form on my blog to contact me directly if you prefer to remain confidential.

We appreciate your help! Thanks,

Chris

SharePoint Designer Training videos

cbeiter — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:19:00 GMT

Office Live recommends SharePoint Designer as the premier development tool for building composite applications and enhancements to the Office Live Business Applications. I think I've mentioned that here before. Well, our friends on the SPD team have created several useful training videos that you should check out. There are 6 of them. I think 5 of them are fully relevant to Office Live. The 6th one regarding the Visual Studio add-ins is not relevant to Office Live because you cannot upload your own custom code.

Enjoy!

Microsoft Office Live featured on the .NET show

cbeiter — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:57:00 GMT

Tara and Rajesh from our team discuss and demo Office Live in the latest .NET show. Check it out!

Tara spends quite a bit of time focusing on developer scenarios and gives a nice demo of both web hosting features and the applications platform area that is built on Windows SharePoint Services v3.

If you are new to Office Live, this is a great introduction to some of the most powerful developer features.

Office Live Time Card Code Sample

cbeiter — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:22:00 GMT

Hey folks, it's been awhile since I've posted. We're busily working on some new features for the Office Live application platform for our next release. I'm writing specs, doing screenshots, use case diagrams, etc. etc. etc. Hopefully we'll get some of these features out to you soon, some will be later. If there is some burning feature request you have, please let us know!

Anyway, the point of this post is that Office Live has a new code sample available on the Microsoft Download Center. Actually, it's been available for a little bit, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it. It's essentially a timecard system that works with our project manager business application. It's really pretty simple... just a web page that you can display on an Office Live dashboard. It lets you select a task, and then click start to clock in and stop to clock out. It stores the start and end times for that duration in a new WSS list and associates each of those durations with the task you selected. The task shows you the aggregated amount of time.

And we use the core libary of javascript functions developed in our first sample [contacts map] to talk to the WSS web services and read and write data into the tasks and timecard lists. It's really a simple little add-on for Office Live, but hopefully it illustrates some of the powerful things you can create to add on to your subscription or those of customers who hire you to enhance theirs.

You can read the official write-up about it on the Office Live team blog.

WSS v3 SDK and Workflow Starter Kit

cbeiter — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Just heard about the update release of the Windows SharePoint Services v3 SDK and also something called the Workflow Starter Kit. I don't know anything about the Workflow Starter Kit, but it sounds pretty helpful. The big question in my mind is what relevance it will have for Office Live users. I'll post more after we've had a chance on our team to check it out more thorougly, but for now wanted to let folks know.

It'd be my assumption that most of the Workflow Starter Kit should be relevant for Office Live Business Applications, so this could be a really nice boost for anyone trying to use workflow for their solutions.

Workflow in Office Live

cbeiter — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 04:10:00 GMT

We've been heads-down crunching on the next release for Office Live, so I've been pretty bad at blogging for the last few weeks. But the WSS team blogged a couple weeks ago about a new whitepaper regarding Windows Workflow Foundations and it's use in Windows SharePoint Services version 3.

Since Office Live is moving to WSS v3 in our next release, we'll also be making Workflow available. Office SharePoint Designer is the tool of choice for configuring workflow on Office Live. So, once again, if you are thinking of being an Office Live Solution Developer, you should be ramping up on SharePoint Designer and WSS v3. Now make sure to add to the mix the Windows Workflow Foundation functionality in SPD.

Workflow Designer is really rich, and there's a ton you can do with it. You can create tasks, modify list items, send emails, create forms & surveys, and so on and so on. Since the target market for Office Live if small businesses, who rarely have the time or inclination to experiment with technology, Solution Developers should have the experience and know-how to recommend if Workflow is right for the customer's scenarios on Office Live.

Note that we're not going to open up our Office Live servers to custom Actions, because that requires uploading custom code to our server environment. This is consistent with our current plans on custom WSS web parts, which we also won't be supporting... yet. They are both things we want to achieve in future versions.

Anyway, enough for now. Just coming up for a quick breath of air, before I dive back in.

Windows Live ID - something to read up on

cbeiter — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:10:00 GMT

Another recent announcement that has relevance to Office Live developers is regarding the updated Windows Live ID service, formerly known as Passport. Live ID is what Office Live uses for authentication in our v1.0 Beta today, and also what we plan to continue to use in future releases.

Some developers writing Office Live apps may want to familiarize themselves with it, others do not need to worry about it. For example, if you are customizing existing Office Live Business Applications or creating new ones (via Sharepoint templates), you should be fine without needing to delve into authentication.

However, if you are thinking about how to integrate Windows Client apps with Office Live, Windows Live ID will eventually be important to you. Here's a snippet from a white paper on their service that will hopefully make it clear:

A second SDK—the Windows Live ID Client SDK—runs on end users' computers. This SDK makes it easier to write new client applications that understand Windows Live IDs and supports the sharing of authentication state across multiple rich clients and browsers. It also manages short-lived certificates issued by the Windows Live ID Certificate Authority; these certificates can be used in security-sensitive applications such as peer-to-peer communication channels.

The article pretty much just annnouces their intention to release some SDKs, but doesn't provide a specific timeline for it. So to keep up with changes to the Live ID or find out when the SDK is ready, check out their blog on MSN Spaces. I'll also try to post something back up here when they have something more to show.

Now, you may ask, how would I write a Windows App that works against Office Live? As mentioned before here and elsewhere, Office Live is moving to the WSS v3 platform in an upcoming release. We are hoping to expose many of the web services that WSS v3 provides, and maybe a few of our own. Again, take that with a grain of salt and invest your time at your own peril (no guarantees, warrantees implied)... the Office Live API story is not yet complete.