SharePoint Content and Resources : Excel Services

@sharepointdev: My First Week on Twitter

randalli — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:29:00 GMT

I signed up for a twitter account last week under the alias @sharepointdev: http://twitter.com/sharepointdev.

The inspiration came from an NPR segment about companies using twitter to monitor tweets about their products or brands (e.g., Comcast). I thought about it a while and I came to the conclusion that this was an ideal way for me to monitor forum activity because I often don't have time to read and respond to MSDN Forum postings because of my busy schedule. But with only 140 characters, I can usually point people in the right direction and get them unstuck when they choose to write a post related to "SharePoint" or other keywords I search for and monitor. Having worked with the SharePoint product team for over 5 years, I am also in a unique position where I sometimes know just enough information about a wide variety of issues.

The Verdict
I was really happy with my first week on twitter and what I learned or helped people with. I picked up over 30 followers, and I even got looped into some conversations back and forth related to something that might have otherwise been a source of frustration (e.g., updates and patches) for some of the folks out there looking for help. I am thinking of twitter as an open forum where I can take the pulse of where SharePoint users are asking for guidance.

Here is an overview of where I pointed people over the course of the last week. I saw one issue come up twice (Excel Services), and overall I was able to answer several questions using existing resources on MSDN and TechNet:

@niphal: Here is an Office Online page with an introduction to SharePoint Designer and its features/capabilities: http://tinyurl.com/5k7qe5 about 17 hours ago from web in reply to niphal
@jmMcL: Have you tried creating a new view (do you have permissions to)? What are the current settings of your list? about 22 hours ago from web in reply to jmMcL
@top_book: You can also preview chapters 2 and 3 [of Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by Ted Pattison] online on MSDN: http://tinyurl.com/5ml9nt 12:50 PM yesterday from web in reply to top_book
@JDWade: We appreciate the feedback and the suggestions; I passed these along to the TechNet site manager and will follow you from now on! 12:36 PM Oct 21st from web in reply to JDWade
@travelingdarren: SharePoint Performance and Capacity Planning Resource Center on TechNet: http://tinyurl.com/5zqc4t 12:10 PM Oct 21st from web in reply to travelingdarren
@JDWade: The Updates Resource Center on TechNet is intended to guide SharePoint IT Pros through updates: http://tinyurl.com/36hlpf 11:56 AM Oct 21st from web in reply to JDWade
@bfgreen: The Excel Services Resource Center on MSDN could give you a starting point: http://tinyurl.com/52mo6a 8:14 AM Oct 21st from web in reply to bfgreen
@pseale: Check out our MSDN article about Creating a Custom Timer Job in SharePoint (written by AC): http://tinyurl.com/3vbe2o 1:35 PM Oct 15th from web in reply to pseale
@TheRecruiterGuy: Here is a showcase of some of the best-implemented WCM sites for SharePoint out there right now: http://tinyurl.com/4dllwq 7:19 AM Oct 15th from web in reply to TheRecruiterGuy
@spleendini: Check out How To Create a Minimal Master Page in SharePoint + the Wiki comments on MSDN: http://tinyurl.com/5kzrou 7:16 AM Oct 15th from web in reply to spleenboy
just published on MSDN: Performing Incremental Crawling with the BDC in MOSS 2007: http://tinyurl.com/3u7em9 2:40 PM Oct 14th from web
@UMLGuy: Here is the 7 Dev projects PDF: http://tinyurl.com/ytvres. And here is a free MOSS VHD you can download: http://tinyurl.com/366tzc. 10:54 AM Oct 13th from web in reply to UMLGuy
@pseale: Here's a great article for working with large lists in SharePoint: http://tinyurl.com/yrv6xd 10:12 AM Oct 13th from web in reply to pseale
@UMLGuy: A good place to start is with the SharePoint Administrator's Companion from MS Press and Bill English: http://tinyurl.com/3luxrk 9:09 AM Oct 13th from web in reply to UMLGuy

All in all, I'm going to continue to monitor any tweets I come across that mention "sharepoint" or other keywords and tags (such as "bdc" or "authentication" or "web parts"), as well as the people I'm following. If you're a SharePoint developer, IT Pro, consultant, or solution provider, feel free to follow me and I'll do the same to keep tabs on what's going on out in the community. We've often got an answer or at least a direction we can point you toward. Also, check out my feed for what's recently been published! http://twitter.com/sharepointdev.

10 Office Visual How-to Screencasts Now Published for MOSS!

randalli — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:13:00 GMT

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

Announcing the 1st Office Visual How to Videos for MOSS! 3 BDC and Excel Services Screencasts Posted on MSDN!

randalli — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:39:00 GMT

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

New MSDN Technical Articles and Downloads Published for MOSS

randalli — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:13:00 GMT

The following MOSS Technical Articles have been published recently in the MSDN Library. There is one article about Enterprise Search Best Practices, and three articles (two with downloads) about Excel Services.

Enterprise Search

Best Practices: Writing SQL Syntax Queries for Relevant Results in Enterprise Search

Excel Services

What is a Technical Article? Typically, it is a magazine-style article of 5 - 25 pages that demonstrates an end-to-end scenario around a core programming task. Often there are downloadable samples with the article, and at the very least we have code inline with the article. Another distinguishing feature is that articles usually stand on their own; in other words, you can read the article from end-to-end and get the full story. Nevertheless, we always provide links to additional information or to the relevant sections of the SDK.

MOSS Developer Portal on MSDN Updated

randalli — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:20:00 GMT

Hello folks.

We just published a major update to the MOSS Developer portal on MSDN, which you can access easily by typing msdn.microsoft.com/moss.

In addition to putting some useful links on the home page to highlight recently published or "Top" articles, we extended the scope of what we call Information Centers. Information Centers are pages full of resources and "Getting Started" information for folks who want to dig deeper into MOSS. Our goal is to create the most useful and reliable lists of resources for developers that can be referenced repeatedly and bookmarked for use in the future. Our current pages include:

We also updated the following pages to reflect newly published content:

We intend to add more Information Centers in the coming months; please let us know if you have any suggestions. The next two pages on our list of priorities are Enterprise Search and Workflow.

Let us know how we're doing, and keep checking back each month for updates to the MOSS Developer Portal.