edhild's WebLog : Office 2007

My Presentation for Tomorrow's SharePoint Best Practices Conference

edhild — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:52:00 GMT

I just wanted to post the deck I will be using for my session (SPDev 314) at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Reston. My session includes mostly demos around document generation scenarios with SharePoint. There is a lot of use of the new Open XML SDK. Most of the code samples have already made it onto this blog. So I'll just post the deck. Enjoy!

http://cid-601cfa765e7a6fd3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/conference/SPDEV314%20Hild.pptx

Building Presentations from SharePoint Content

edhild — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:20:00 GMT

This is really just a publish of an old demo I have had for some time, but finally got around to putting a video together. This demo is about two different ways to build PowerPoint presentations based off of SharePoint content. The first uses an Office Add-in approach and the second does everything on the server using Open XML. Enjoy!

http://silverlight.services.live.com/55696/Building%20Presentations%20from%20SharePoint%20Content_2/video.wmv

By the way, both solutions are in my book: Pro SharePoint Solution Development

Visio 2007 crashing on exit on Vista 64bit

edhild — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

I had a minor success today. For the longest time, every time I closed Visio 2007 SP1 on my Vista 64bit machine, I would get a crash and an error. It was a minor annoyance since it was on exit... but I finally solved it today. First I launched Visio by using Explorer on the file system and choosing Run as Administrator. With it open, I went into the Trust Center and went to the Add-ins tab. I clicked the Go button to manage the COM-addins and then disabled the "Send to Bluetooth" add-in. This completely solved my problem. Not sure what this feature is, but I never use it. I should point out that do have a bluetooth mouse I use with my laptop. And now I don't experience the crash when running as a non-admin.

I know not anything MOSS related. But just in case anyone else is experiencing the same problem.

A SharePoint adventure in "Publish Links to Office"

edhild — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:33:00 GMT

So I had a need to do a little thing such as get a link to a MOSS site to show up in the "My SharePoint Sites" Save-As dialog in Office. First, this wasn't a site that I was indexing so, I couldn't rely on it picking up the fact that I was a member and automatically putting it into My SharePoint Sites list on my My Site. So let the adventure begin...

First, it seemed innocent enough. If you go to the SSP that your My Site uses, there is an Admin option to configure "Published Links to Office client applications". I went there, added a new entry http://partners.litware.com and set it to have the team site icon. Note that you can leave the audience field blank which will push the link to everyone. Very cool. There are more details on these steps half way down the page at this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/12/01/getting-started-with-personalization-in-moss-2007.aspx

My next step was to launch MS Word, go to the Save As dialog and click My SharePoint Sites. To my surprise the link wasn't there. Doh! First make sure you have visited your My Site and clicked the tab in the top-right corner to register the My Site with Office.

Also, it turns out Office client applications get this information by making a call to the web service and depending on the elapsed time, may not ask MOSS for an updated list of links. You can make Office forget it has a list by deleting this registry key (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal\LinkPublishingTimestamp ) and restart your Office application. Don't worry, it will recreate it the next time you click the My SharePoint Sites option in the Save As dialog.

Still no luck in my environment. Are you also using Windows Server 2008 as your dev environment? If so, WebDav and other desktop stuff needed to make this work is not turned on by default! You need to add the "Desktop Experience" feature (which requires a reboot). More info here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=51

And then yes it will work. On an interesting note discovered why watching Word make these requests through Fiddler. After calling the web service, the Office client application then makes a HTTP request to each of the links that it is pulling down. If it is unreachable or you don't have access, Word will remove that link. So even if you setup everything right, you still might not see it. In my case, the site was being accessed through an ADFS authentication provider, not NTLM like I had hoped so it wasn't showing. After a quick Url change, everything was fine.

Like I said a very simple problem... Thanks to Chad Wach for going on the adventure with me!

Video: Building Presentations from SharePoint Site Content

edhild — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:31:00 GMT

First sorry for the long time away from posting. It was quite a busy fourth quarter. But welcome to 2008!

I put together a quick video blog of two demonstrations I show about how to automate the creation of PowerPoint presentations based on SharePoint site content. The first part of the demo shows how a Visual Studio Tools for Office add-in for PowerPoint can call SharePoint's web services to retrieve content and build slides. The second approach shows how this can be done completely server side by manipulating the new Open XML formatted files. Both demos usually get people excited; I hope you enjoy them. The code for these is available on Apress' web site since they are from my book: Pro SharePoint Solution Development. This book is mentioned a lot in the blog so it should be easy to find more info if you are interested. Sorry for the background noise in the video. The HVAC system here is running full strength on this cold day.

Also, I will be presenting at the upcoming SharePoint conference in Seattle in March. My topic will be "Enforce Governance by Provisioning Sites through Workflows" or something like that. Stop by and say hi. I may have a few books to hand out. http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

Just an update: Ian at wssdemo.com has hosted this video on a streaming server which has much better quality: http://xpstream.winisp.net/imorrish/generate_ppt_sharepoint.wmv

Video: Building Presentations from SharePoint Content

Book Review: Essential SharePoint 2007 by Scott Jamison and others

edhild — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:05:00 GMT

This book fills a niche that has long been lacking in the SharePoint space. Where most books are targeted exclusively to developers or administrators, this book takes a fresh approach and focuses on the business impact of the technology. This book contains all the things you never find in most SharePoint books. How to roll out the technology so that end-users will use it, how to construct the taxonomy, what planning needs to be performed to increase the likelihood of success. Scott's approach creates a book that any business decision maker will want to read whose organization is considering SharePoint. More impressively, this is a book that developers and administrators should read to gain insight on how to make sure their implementations won't fail. Scott wealth of experience working with customers and implementations shines through. Great work! Here is a link to amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-SharePoint-2007-Scott-Jamison/dp/0321421744/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-4916604-4874568?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186149930&sr=8-1.

Almost finished my book... Pro SharePoint Solution Development: Combining .NET, SharePoint, and Office 2007

edhild — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 06:49:00 GMT

So I have not been posting for quite some time. The major reason is that every moment outside of work is being put into this latest effort. The book is called "Pro SharePoint Solution Development: Combining .NET, SharePoint, and Office 2007". It is going to be published by Apress in the spring. I'm nearing the point where most of the first drafts are complete and people are seeing my name on Amazon.com, sooooo I figured it was time to start sharing.

The book is for developers and focuses on solution development using Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 SE. With these three major components, we are able to tackle some common problems facing information workers as they try to collaborate, use data effectively, etc. After a few overview chapters on each technology, the other chapters are self contained problems/solutions.

I have posted a page containing more details and the current state of the table of contents. I will use this blog to elaborate as we finish the book up: http://blogs.msdn.com/edhild/pages/pro-sharepoint-solution-development-combining-net-sharepoint-and-office-2007.aspx

Come back for updates! Thanks -Ed