Shared Points for SharePoint : MOSS

Create Datasheet view missing

Stian Kirkeberg — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:06:00 GMT

The other the I got asked why the “Datasheet view” option was laking from “Create a new view”. It turned out to be a more troublesome way to find the solution than first expected.

First I checked the users rights on the site collection, but that really did not give any answers.

Secondly, I checked this on a virtual dev machine, with (more or less) the same configuration and features: No repro. Create datasheet view was available as it should be. So what could be the difference between these machines?

Thirdly, I compared site features and site collection features, but this neither give any findings.

OK, let’s see what happens in the ViewType.aspx which display this page:

fHideGridViewOption = ListViewWebPart.RestrictedTemplateType(spList) || !spList.DoesUserHavePermissions(SPBasePermissions.UseClientIntegration);

… and some more… but nothing really telling me why it might be hidden.

So I asked and looked for suggestions elsewhere: A lot of search hits and problem related to the DataSheet view is client integration, that was a dead end here. From one client I could reproduce the problem on one server and not on another. And the problem is not viewing the view.

Finally, I tried to open an existing datasheet view on the server with the problem. This gave the following error:

"The standard view of your list is being displayed because your site configuration does not support the Datasheet"

“Site configuration” – it should have said web application. Central Admin - application management - authentication providers - <your provider> – scroll to the bottom:

“Enable client Integration” was set to “NO”.

This was a setting long forgotten, since it is set to “YES” when you create a new web application in the GUI. However, one server had been set up using STSADM commands with the SharePoint PowerShell Deploy from Codeplex using EXTENDVS, so somehow I needed to compensate for this.

The easiest way is to call another stsadm command after the extendvs,

stsadm -o authentication

-url <URL name>

-type <type>

[-usebasic]

[-usewindowsintegrated]

[-exclusivelyusentlm]

[-membershipprovider] <membership provider name>

[-rolemanager] <role manager name>

[-enableclientintegration]

[-allowanonymous]

ref. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263116.aspx

and set the –enableclientintegration flag.

Just another small annoying thing that take a little too long to figure out…

Unit testing MOSS part 2 (of 2)

Jan Tore Lamøy — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:29:00 GMT

In the 1. article on Unit testing MOSS I described some of the findings and experience on unit testing SharePoint applications using the TypeMock Isolator framework. In this 2. article I will provide some examples of unit tests. Code under test You should...(read more)

OneNote and SharePoint – the basics

Thomas Læhren — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:51:14 GMT

OneNote is a hidden gem in the Office suite. I use OneNote for all my notes during meetings, workshops etc. As described on Office Online “Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 is a digital notebook that provides a flexible way to gather notes and information,...(read more)

Unit testing MOSS part 1 (of 2)

Jan Tore Lamøy — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:53:00 GMT

Some of our team members, including me and Frank Jusnes , were recently responsible for providing recommendations on how to unit test in SharePoint projects, and this is an overview of our findings and experiences. This is the first of two posts on the...(read more)

How to get a richer result set in MOSS

Thomas Læhren — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:26:11 GMT

To present additional information in the search result will often give a better user experience. The search results web parts can easily be modified to include meta data stored on e.g documents in MOSS. The meta data is stored via Content Types...(read more)

How to create Site Collection in a specific content dateabase part 2

Stian Kirkeberg — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:07:45 GMT

Following up on Thomas' post on how to create a site collection in a specific content database:

You can also use the STSADM command CreateSiteInNewDB

However this does not quite cut it. You would like to decide on which content database each time. To do that, you could use stsadm extensions. It will require some codewriting and testing, though. Luckily, a MVP, Gary Lapointe, has already made it for you. A "Create site in database" is available in his stsadm custom extension kit:

There are also other STSADM extensions available. If you have used or made one you would like to share, please send me an mail.

Please be aware that some of his extensions are made by use of reflection on MOSS assemblies, so take whaterever precautions you need in regard to this.

Next step, a roadmap to BI

Jon Løken — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:16:19 GMT

A little follow up on Stian’s post about “Where did the good stuff go?”.

Over at Office online it has been published a great Roadmap to business intelligence features of SharePoint Server 2007. The roadmap has put together a lot of pointers to resources in technet and other places. Here you can drilldown visually into the steps for planning, configure and interact. This is an easy way to get started on your next step. Below is the starting diagram:

You can further expand this chart, as this figure shows (expanded “Plan for Business Intelligence”)

Where did the good stuff go?

Stian Kirkeberg — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:27:00 GMT

Is this a typical SharePoint Project/scenario in a nutshell?

1. Analysis phase:
"SharePoint will fit our requirements! Lots of functionality we can use! Finally a product addressing a lot of problems we have. Workflows, forms, dashboards... Let's get this up and running as fast as we can!"
2. POC phase:
Small POC's (Proof Of Concepts) are made - what can we accomplish with ease?
3. Dev. phase:
First priority is on branding the sites to the company’s logo and color.
Migrate and/or upgrade existing systems to MOSS.
Optionally develop some custom functionality to cover business needs.
4. Test
5. Deploy to production

I might be generalizing a bit harsh here, but I’m trying to make a point: Somewhere between phase 1 and 4 a lot of good thinking and functionality disappears. Where did all the good thoughts and ideas about gathering data with BDC from the whole company to dashboards end up? How were we going to save a lot of time and money on using Excel services and reports? Why were we not able to go the whole way?

There is of course not one single reason for this. Obviously lack of time and resources are the most common, but do the projects really have to have this structure? I would like to see a bit more continuity; the project timeline outlined above is only the start. And in most cases I think a good start. But to be able to implement and use all of SharePoint features it will require time, both for the employees and the company to learn and evolve.

Make sure you don’t stop your SharePoint project after the initial release. Make plans for how you gradually can start using more and more functionality.

If you need a little inspiration to get back on track, take a look at this demo:

Make better business decisions with reports and dashboards

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of aggregating, storing, analyzing, and reporting on business data in order to support informed business decisions. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a number of tools that can help you extract data from a variety of sources and present that data in ways that facilitate analysis and decision making. In this demo, you'll see how employees at a fictitious company called Adventure Works use a Report Center site to create and manage reports, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
How to do it (text version):
Introduction to business intelligence in SharePoint Server 2007
Share Excel 2007 workbooks as interactive reports
Working with a Report Center site
Share and manage connections to external data
Create and publish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Share Excel 2007 worksheets and KPIs by using dashboards
Work with filter Web Parts
Introduction to Excel Services and Excel Web Access

Go back to your notes from the analysis and POC phase, pick up those great ideas you had again. Since you now already have SharePoint in place, it will not require much to go from a good to great implementation!

Good luck! :)

SharePoint Development and Programming FAQ

Stian Kirkeberg — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:37:52 GMT

MSDN forums opened SharePoint Development and Programming FAQ recently - add it to your favorites right away! :)

Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007

Stian Kirkeberg — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:42:37 GMT

To avoid common pitfalls and keep your Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment available and performing well, follow these best practices based on real-world experience from Microsoft Consulting Services and the product team.

Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007

Using FAST ESP with MOSS 2007

tommyo — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:52:00 GMT

In January 2008 Microsoft announced the acquisition of the company Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). FAST is a leading provider of enterprise search solutions. Since FAST is a Norwegian based company (and continues to be a subsidiary of Microsoft based in Norway), it was of course very exiting. Many of our customers already use FAST as their enterprise search solution in addition to SharePoint.

I’ve been playing around with the FAST ESP Web parts lately. FAST ESP is an advanced product and we will of course learn more about the actual product as the acquisition goes forward and the FAST products move on as new Microsoft solutions.

The figure below (taken from the FAST ESP Product Sheet) shows the architecture of the FAST ESP product:

The product-sheet can be found here: http://www.fast.no/l3a.aspx?m=1031

One important note is that FAST ESP not only searches MOSS content, but can index a wide range of document types from other sources like web, file shares, custom applications, custom databases etc through an extensive set of connectors.

FAST ESP Web Parts

Although FAST ESP has an extensive API and web services interface, the easiest way of integrating FAST with MOSS 2007 is to use the web parts available. Fortunately, these web parts come for free, including the source code, as a CodePlex project.

The web parts can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/espwebparts

The CodePlex project contains a set of installable web parts. All the web parts are bundled in a simple setup-program.

Note! From the comments on CodePlex, there seems to be some confusion about the prerequisites for using the web parts. You need the FAST ESP product to be able to use the web parts! FAST ESP is not free, and there is unfortunately no trial version of this product yet as far as I know. So, if you don’t have the FAST ESP product installed already, there’s no point installing these web parts.

The following web parts are available:

Name	Description
ESP Breadcrumb	Shows a breadcrumb trail containing you query and any navigators selected.
ESP Did you mean	Shows spellchecking information. If you mistype, the web part will suggest a correction
ESP Navigator	Shows a single navigator that is used to narrow down the search result. A navigator can be based on any field in the search result, for example document type, language, or date ranges
ESP Navigators	Displays all navigators returned in the result set
ESP Result List	Displays the actual search result
ESP Search Action	Displays action links that can be performed on the result, for example sorting.
ESP Search Box	The search box where you type your search keyword(s)
ESP Search Config	A hidden web part that configures the search view and other search settings for use by the other web parts. The ESP Result list also contains the search config, so if you use this web part, you don’t need to add Search Config
ESP Search Pagination	Displays paging information (1,2,3,4… and previous/next)
ESP Search Statistics	Displays statistics about a particular query, for example “Results 1 - 8 of about 838. Your search took 0.0160 seconds.”

Installing the web parts

If you want to install the web parts, go to this page http://www.codeplex.com/espwebparts/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14575

Download the Setup.zip file. You will find the source code and two videos on the same page.

Installation is easy. Log on to you MOSS server with the Farm admin account and run Setup.exe

The installer will check for necessary prerequisites:

The setup will then ask which MOSS web applications you want to install the web parts feature to. After installing the web parts, you will see a new Site Collection Feature which you need to activate:

After activating the ESP Search Web Parts feature, you can edit a page and add the web parts.

To be able to perform a search, you need at least to add the Search Box and the Result List web parts. After adding the two web parts, the page looks like this:

The Result list web part will display its configuration information when the page is in edit mode. Now, to be able to perform queries against the ESP Query server (FAST ESP Server), you need to configure the connection string. The query string is set in the ESP Connection String property of the web part(s). The default value is “localhost:15100”.

Instead of setting this value on each separate web part, you can set this globally through the ESP Connection configuration page which is installed by the web part setup. This page can be found under Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> ESP Query Server Connections:

All web parts will read this value unless overridden in the web part settings.

When the connection string has been set using the web part property, you need to apply the changes to be able to select the Search view to use for the query. Search views are configured centrally in FAST ESP, and the list of all available search views will be presented in the web part:

After selecting the Search view, you configure any other settings, but none of these are necessary to change to be able to perform a query.

The search box web part will look like this:

And the result list:

The particular example above shows search results from a Meridio Document Management system using MOSS 2007 as the search front end.

Other web parts

In addition to the search box and result list web part shown above, the other web parts are very valuable in order to create a great search experience.

As long as you have the Result list web part on a page, you only need to add the other web parts to the page and they will use the current search configuration and context to present their output.

Paging

Obviously you will need the possibility to navigate through many results by paging through the result set. To do this you add the “ESP Search Pagination” web part. Just add it to the page on top of or below the Result List web part:

Search statistics

If you add the Search Statistics web part, you will be able to show statistics about the current query:

There are no particular settings for this web part except the usual XSL, Search Group and so on.

Did you mean

The “Did you mean” web part is helpful in correcting misspelling of query terms. If a user misspells a word, this web part can show a suggestion of the correct spelling for that word. This function depends on the spell-check settings of the search configuration. Initially spell-check is OFF.

To turn on spell-check, go to the settings for the Result List or Search config web part and change the “Suggest corrections” property:

Now, if you misspell a word, the web part will suggest the correct spelling and you can click the correct word to execute a new query:

Setting the corrections setting to “Apply corrections automatically” will perform the initial query with the corrected word automatically, and the result will look like this:

Navigators

Navigators are a powerful feature of FAST ESP. It is mainly used for drilling down or restricting a large result set into a smaller result set (often called “Facets”, “Categories” or “Filters”). In fact, MOSS Search has no such web part.

The navigators are configured in the ESP administration (not through MOSS) and are based on default or custom search fields (metadata). There are two navigator web parts:

- ESP Navigator: Display one navigator

- ESP Navigators: Display all navigators

If you add the ESP Navigators web part, if will render the current navigators which is relevant (have any hits) for the current query:

The navigators summarize the result list into particular categories based on the different fields in the result, and count the number of hits for each value of that field.

If you click on one or more navigator value, this will apply the current filter on the search result to narrow the complete result list:

In this particular example I was only interested in English PDF documents, so I applied “Adobe PDF” as format and “en” as language. This reduced the number of results from 110 to 32.

If you click on the small “x” in front of the selected navigator values, you turn off that filter. The number of hits can be presented as a count or a percentage or both.

You can of course change the rendering of the navigators to your needs by modifying the XSL.

If you only want to display one particular navigator, you can use the ESP Navigator web part and select which navigator to display.

Customizing the design

The search results are returned from the ESP server as XML. All the web parts therefore uses XSL to render the actual HTML presented on the page. In order to change the output from the web part you will need to modify the default XSLT code to suit your particular needs.

As an example, I will edit the search result shown above a little bit by changing the XSL in the web part.

I will increase the size of the icon, change the title font to bold and let the text float to the right of the icon.

To do this, you would go to the web part properties and click on the XSL Editor Button:

This will open the editor:

The editor isn’t really a good editor, so it’s better to copy the whole text into another editor like Visual Studio to edit the xsl.

Find the code that renders the title of each search result:

<xsl:template match="Result" >

<xsl:variable name="id" select="id"/>

<xsl:variable name="url" select="url"/>

</a>

<a href="{$url}" id="{concat('CSR_',$id)}" title="{$url}">

<xsl:choose>

<xsl:when test="hithighlightedproperties/HHTitle[. != '']">

<xsl:call-template name="HitHighlighting">

<xsl:with-param name="hh" select="hithighlightedproperties/HHTitle" />

</xsl:call-template>

</xsl:when>

<xsl:otherwise>

<xsl:value-of select="title"/>

</xsl:otherwise>

</xsl:choose>

</a>

The changes I made appear in red/bold in the XSL code above. Now, after saving the changes, the output will look like this:

As you can see, this is the same way you change the rendering of the MOSS Search result web part. You can also put the XSL code in an external file and use the XSL Link property to point to a file that can be used by several web part instances.

Most of the other web parts also use XSL to change the rendering of the output.

Issues

I haven’t been able to really test the quality of the web parts and all their functionality to the fullest yet, but I’m quite pleased with the experience so far. I’ve looked through the code and it looks quite solid.

However, I noticed a couple of minor issues when playing around with the web parts.

A notable issue is that storing the global connection string in the Search connections config page does not work properly. It tries to save the connections as a persistent object in the SharePoint config database.

I got the following error message when visiting the configuration page and in some web parts:

“EXECUTE permission denied on object 'proc_putObject', database 'SharePoint_Config'”

So it seems that storing the connection string requires more permission in the database. I suppose this would not happen if you use the administrator account as service accounts, however my setup was using a separate service accounts for the Farm admin and the application pools.

The quick solution to this “problem” was to download the source code and modify the code a bit so that the global connection-string was hard-coded. This way I could set the connection-string in the web parts instead of using the global connection-string. A better approach might be to use web.config to store the connection string(s).

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Thomas Læhren — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:06:47 GMT

Key updates for SharePoint Server 2007 include:

New Search features such as federated search and a unified search administration dashboard.
Several core fixes to Search to improve performance and scale.
Platform performance improvements and fixes.
Several core fixes to the publishing Content Deployment features to improve reliability.

Key updates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include:

Platform performance improvements and fixes.
Several backup and restore fixes.
Several core Workflow fixes.

Download the updates here:

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Project 2007 (KB951547) - x86

Norwegian SharePoint Community, second meeting

Jan Tore Lamøy — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:18:00 GMT

The second meeting in the newly started Norwegian SharePoint Community group (link: here) were recently held. The meeting was fully booked (just as the 1. meeting), and there were a waiting list to attend. In other words a popular and most welcome initiative in the SharePoint community in Norway!

3 sessions were held, and the focus this time was usability and front end development experience and advice.

The first usability session, held by Anita Jenbergsen from Bouvet, elaborated on the added functionality to the http://www.statoilhydro.com/ site after its initial release. The functionality has had a very positive effect on usability for editors and includes:

Richer image handling and upload process
Custom Create Site and Create Page dialogs
Reporting dashboard for the items in the publishing pipeline and common tasks

The Front End session raised and answered some common front end issues that usually have to be dealt with in SharePoint development projects. The presenters, Ine Pettersen and Stig Nicolaisen (both Bouvet), demonstrated examples from http://www.statoilhydro.com/, REC intranet and Wilh. Wilhelmsen (WW) group intranet along with CSS best practices developed in the http://www.statoilhydro.com/ site.

Kristin Halvorsen from Objectware convinced the audience in the second usability session of some key points to be aware of in the initial phases of SharePoint projects to ensure usability.

The http://www.statoilhydro.com/ SharePoint site has with this received a lot attention in the Norwegian SharePoint Community as the 1. meeting included a session with Frank Jusnes, from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), focusing on the development process in SharePoint projects.

You can watch the sessions online, as they were recorded with LiveMeeting 2007 and RoundTable, link: here (supply a name and search).

Running the sessions with LiveMeeting allowed participants nation-wide to attend, and this sets the standard for community meetings in the future! Unfortunately the Front End session were not recorded.

Word 2007 as a blog editor

Thomas Læhren — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:45:40 GMT

Word 2007 is an excellent blog editor you can use towards blogs in SharePoint. No worries about uploading pictures you like to add to your blog post. Use Word as you normally do, and then publish it to the blog of your preference.

This is how you do it:

Choose Office button / New and select “New blog post”:

The first time, you also have to add your blog account. Click on “Manage Accounts”

Click New and choose “SharePoint blog”:

Click Next and type (or copy) in the URL to your blog:

(Example of an url to your blog My site: http://sharepoint/personal/[username]/Blog)

Click on the button “Picture Options” and make sure you select SharePoint blog as your picture provider.

After you have done this “one time configuration” and set up your account, you can now choose which blog your want to publish to:

(In my example I have created four blog accounts, and I’m choosing to publish to Blog1, which happens to be my blog at My site).

When you have chosen the blog you want to publish to, the categories are also available for you to choose:

As you can see, I have added pictures (screenshots) to my blog post. This was done by just pasting screenshots into my Word document.

You can, of course, use new functionality like SmartArt in your blog post as well.

The last step is to click on the “Publish” button (top left corner).

Good luck!

Microsoft Expression Studio 2 Ships, Advancing Superior Developer and Designer Collaboration

Stian Kirkeberg — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:39:55 GMT

Press release:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-01Expression2PR.mspx

Expression Web 2 adds support for PHP and Adobe Photoshop import based on customer feedback.
Expression Blend 2, in addition to Silverlight support, adds vertex animation and an improved user interface with a new split design/XAML view.
Expression Design 2 adds improved exporting functionality including the ability to export slices.
Expression Media 2 is a robust digital asset management solution for photographers and other creative professionals. It adds support for the latest file formats including RAW, provides geotagging functionality, and is supported by Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.
Expression Encoder 2 is now a core offering of the suite. It allows creative and Web professionals to optimize almost any type of video content quickly for publishing on the Web, either in streaming video, rich-media advertising or other Web 2.0 projects.

Features:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/features/Default.aspx?key=studio

Stop reading and go download the trial!