The Groove Web Services SDK for SharePoint Workspace 2010 provides documentation, WSDL definition files, and sample code for the Groove Web Services API. The Groove Web Services API in SharePoint Workspace 2010 provides compatibility with the API available in Groove 2007. It provides the same access to Groove 2007 workspaces and tools as Groove 2007. It also provides limited access to Groove 2010 workspaces, but does not provide access to the tools in Groove 2010 workspaces.
The locations of the Groove Web Services registry keys have changed. In addition, to improve security, the request and response keys are encrypted using DPAPI CurrentUser encryption. In order for your existing Groove Web Services applications to work with SharePoint Workspace 2010, you must make minor code modifications and recompile your application. You can update your application now to check for the new registry keys, but fall back to the Groove 2007 registry keys if the SharePoint Workspace registry keys are not present. In this way, your modified application will work with Groove 2007 and then continue to work when a user upgrades to SharePoint Workspace 2010.
The Groove Web Services SDK for SharePoint Workspace 2010 beta is available now.
We are excited to announce the release of the Microsoft Office 2010 public beta! Check out the official
announcement on the
Office 2010 Engineering blog. Betas for Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, among others, are available now for anyone to try through the site
www.microsoft.com/2010. You can pick up SharePoint Workspace as part of the Office Professional Plus package.
Take a look at this post for an overview of what you can do with SharePoint Workspace. We look forward to hearing your feedback!
So if you’ve had a chance to check out the intro to SPW, you already know that by using SharePoint Workspace, you can take much of your SharePoint content down from the server for viewing and editing, whether you’re online or offline. This is an overview of how you can work with lists in SharePoint Workspace.
Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 leverages the power, performance, and functionality of a rich client while keeping the experience as familiar as possible for you SharePoint savvy folks out there. From our use of InfoPath for item creation and editing, to synchronization of your public and private views for organization and navigation, SharePoint Workspace gives you everything you need to view and edit list content on your desktop. Let’s take a deeper look at the experience and some of the features…
Creating & updating records
With our close InfoPath integration, editing and updating your list items is a breeze. Items launch instantly and the client is light and responsive, making the experience clean, effective and efficient.
Figure 1a Figure 1b
Figures 1a and 1b show the item creation experience for both SharePoint Workspace and SharePoint, respectively. As you can see, all of the available supported content types (including folders) will be synchronized (forms customized in InfoPath included). After selecting your desired content type, you’ll be presented with a blank form hosted inside of a new editing window.
Figure 2a
Figure 2b
As you can see, SharePoint Workspace supports InfoPath forms in full fidelity. What you see above is a custom form rendered in the client (figure 2a) and on the server (figure 2b). In addition to the out-of-the-box forms, most customizations, including embedded images, actions, and logic, are supported. When editing items in the client, the forms are displayed in a separate editing window which has its own editing ribbon, offering you a familiar text editing experience (if you look closely you’ll see all of the familiar rich text editing controls contextually available). However, the new window is not the only method by which you can view your content.
Alternatively, content can be viewed in InfoPath forms in place as you navigate through the list in the preview pane. As in Outlook, the pane can be viewed vertically or horizontally (see figure 3 below) and it updates instantly as you navigate through items.
Figure 3
Views and navigation
For familiarity and ease-of-use, SharePoint Workspace will make available many of the views associated with each SharePoint List, including your personal views. For those of you not familiar with views in SharePoint, views allow you to capture certain perspectives on a given set of data – allowing you to sort and filter the items that will appear in a given view based on a variety of criteria. For example, let’s look at the images below of an events list.
Figure 4a
Figure 4b
Figure 4a is the full set of data, showing all of the events, sorted by creation date and time. This is the ‘default’ view for this list. Below that, however, I have my own personal view which contains a subset of the records sorted by time of occurrence in descending chronological order (most distant to most immediate). I’ve elected to use a filter for this view, as perhaps only those events occurring on the current day are interesting to me. Views are switched via a control that is easily accessible in the ribbon, allowing you to rapidly flip through your pre-canned filters and sorts. Although not shown here, threaded views and folders are also supported.
So that just about wraps up our overview of how lists are managed in SharePoint Workspace. Keep your eyes on this blog as we will be having more feature overviews and deep-dives for you in the near future…
Christian
In case you missed it, there was a nice write-up on SharePoint Workspace by J. Peter Bruzzese in InfoWorld last week…
Louise Snow on the Ribbon:
As mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, we’ve implemented the Ribbon and Backstage View in Office SharePoint Workspace 2010.
You will see the Ribbon in all your newly created 2010 workspaces, as well as workspaces created with Groove 2007 that you want to continue using in SharePoint Workspace 2010. Workspaces created in versions of Groove prior to 2007 will retain the traditional menu and toolbar UI. As a matter of fact, in Office 2010 every application has the Ribbon, including OneNote 2010, Publisher 2010, InfoPath 2010 and the new Office Web Apps. If you’re unfamiliar with the Ribbon, which debuted with Office 2007, you’ll want to read Jensen Harris’s post, The Story of the Ribbon .
In addition, all Office 2010 applications including SPW 2010 will have Microsoft Office Backstage view. Backstage view replaces the File menu in the core Office applications, and helps you find commonly accessed commands, including creating new or opening existing workspaces, defining workspace properties, and sharing your information. Read Clay’s post to find out what Microsoft Backstage is all about.
Let’s look at the SharePoint Workspace Ribbon in a bit more detail. Our Ribbon has three tabs – the Home tab for frequently used commands and commands that relate to items in focus; the Sync tab (in Groove workspaces this is the Workspace tab) which contains the commands that pertain the SharePoint workspace such as Sync Settings; and the View tab which allows you to sort and view the items in your workspaces in different ways. We also have contextual tabs that appear in certain situations such as resolving sync errors or conflicts.
SharePoint workspace Home tab
Even the Launchbar gets a very small Ribbon with a Home and a View tab for managing your workspaces.
Launchbar Home tab
We’ve designed our Ribbon so that if you’re already familiar with it from using Office 2007, you can easily find commands when you start using SharePoint Workspace 2010, and if you’re new to our app, you’ll have an easy time getting started.
Are you at the SharePoint Conference? Lucky you! If you’ve got space in your agenda, Maura FitzGerald and Nithya Ramkumar will be leading a breakout session on SharePoint Workspace at 1:15 p.m.today (Wed, 10/21). Go hear them talk about where SPW fits in as the client for SharePoint team sites…
Paul Cannon, product manager for SharePoint Workspace, offers a nice little intro to SPW in this video, showing you a few quick steps to use it effectively with SharePoint.
You can see the same thing out on YouTube here. Bon visionnement!
SharePoint Workspace functions as a desktop client application for the SharePoint 2010 server. It allows you to cache copies of your SharePoint site content on your desktop and provides automatic synchronization with the SharePoint server
Why Use SharePoint Workspace with your SharePoint site?
· SharePoint Workspace delivers fast, anytime, anywhere access to SharePoint content whether you are able to reach the SharePoint server or are working offline.
· SharePoint Workspace provides easy navigation in accessing and working with your SharePoint content. If you know how to use SharePoint, you will know how to use SharePoint Workspace.
· Whether you are connected or disconnected, SharePoint Workspace provides a seamless working experience. When connected to the SharePoint server, changes are synchronized automatically and when not connected, changes are cached locally. The next time you connect to the SharePoint server, your changes are automatically synchronized with the server.
Syncing it up
Creating a SharePoint Workspace from your SharePoint site is very easy; it’s integrated into the new SharePoint ribbon. An entire site can be synchronized by going to Site Actions -> Sync to Computer.
You will see a confirmation dialog.
Click “OK” to begin the download.
It may take a few minutes for all the content to be downloaded and for the workspace to be fully synchronized.
Once the content is downloaded, you can create and modify documents and list items in the workspace, which will automatically sync with the SharePoint server.
Taking site content offline is optimized for a one-click experience, but if you don’t want all the content from the site, you can configure which lists and libraries to take offline. To configure, after selecting “Sync to Computer” from the Site Actions menu, click the “Configure” button in the confirmation dialog to select specific lists and libraries you would like to take offline.
Additionally, you can create a workspace from the SharePoint Workspace Launchbar. From the ribbon, select “New, SharePoint Workspace” then simply paste the URL to the desired site into the dialog.
A while ago we announced on this blog that we’re changing the name of our product in the next major version of Office to be Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010. This name change signals the start of a new chapter for Microsoft’s collaboration client. SharePoint Workspace 2010 enables a whole new set of scenarios that will help you get more from your SharePoint deployment, and is now even easier to deploy and manage. We’ll keep innovating on the client and the server to deliver the best software-plus-services collaboration experience.
Groove’s existing communication and collaboration capabilities remain intact and are enhanced, which should be welcome news for those of you already using Groove. We’ll continue to provide a collaboration option for customers without access to SharePoint, and a unique way to work together across the network.
The SharePoint Workspace team has been designing, developing, and testing the 2010 release for quite some time, and using it every day for well over a year, and now we can share more details with you. Many of the new capabilities require SharePoint 2010 – have a look at the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek site.
We’ll start by providing a high-level overview of the major investments and enhancements for SharePoint Workspace 2010, and in future posts we’ll go into more detail on the feature areas, including screenshots and more.
Overview of SharePoint Workspace 2010 investments
Work with SharePoint Content anytime, anywhere
A fundamental part of our vision is offering powerful content creation and management, with access to your content from anywhere. Microsoft Office Groove 2007 already offers the ability to take SharePoint Document Libraries into Groove workspaces and share via our Peer + Relay architecture, and now we’re striving to provide the greatest breadth of capability, connectivity, and collaboration experience when working with site content, either offline or online, through seamless synchronization with SharePoint. In SharePoint Workspace 2010 we’ve added:
· SharePoint Workspace: A new workspace type that allows you to setup a synchronization relationship with all of the supported lists and libraries from a SharePoint site. The workspace contains site content available for you to read and edit while you are offline, and will automatically synchronize with SharePoint when you’re back online. New lists and libraries will automatically appear in the workspace when they are created (or customized) from SharePoint. You can take all of your favorite SharePoint sites with library/list content with you when you’re on the go.
· SharePoint Document Library Support: SharePoint Workspaces support the common SharePoint document library variants, and provide enhanced capabilities directly within the client, like: check-in and check-out, multiple content types including folders, drag and drop for document creation and organization including from Outlook or Windows Explorer, version history, and metadata/property support. Within these libraries, Microsoft Office documents gain all sorts of new capabilities including co-authoring, automatic merging, differential sync, and more.
· SharePoint List Support: SharePoint Workspaces can contain most standard SharePoint list types, including Discussion, Announcements, Links, and custom lists. Form previewing and editing is provided through Microsoft InfoPath 2010 technology.
· Virtual Lists through Business Connectivity Services (BCS): Pull down and work with your content from LOB applications or other external sources.
· Views: Both public and private views of lists and libraries are supported.
· Read & Unread, and Alert Customization: You will be notified when content changes or there are new additions to a SharePoint site that you are synchronizing through unread icons and our notification UI. These notifications can be customized to adapt to your information needs, on a per-workspace or list/library basis.
· Content Selection: Select individual libraries or lists for synchronization. Easy one-click setup directly from the default SharePoint browser UI. Recommended sites are shown during workspace creation, including those published by your SharePoint administrator.
· Broad Connectivity: Our synchronization with SharePoint supports numerous connectivity options, including Windows domain authentication, Forms-Based authentication, SSL configurations, and Alternative Access Mappings - for internal, extranet, and Internet scenarios.
Better together with Office
Since Groove 2007 was introduced into to the Microsoft Office suite of products, we’ve heard from you that you want more features to improve overall usability and offer a consistent experience with other applications in the suite. To this end we’ve added:
· Ribbon: Office 2007 pioneered this new way of working within your application, and we’ve adopted it as well. It has been designed to optimize our key scenarios while ensuring consistency across cross-product scenarios.
· Office Backstage: This new feature of Office 2010 provides a new view to increase the discoverability and usability for the contextual work that happens beyond the workspace.
· Cutting-Edge Collaborative Authoring: SharePoint Workspaces support seamless collaborative authoring sessions for Word and PowerPoint documents that are hosted in SharePoint document libraries.
· Instantly Find Documents, Lists, Attachments, and More: Your local documents and lists are easier to find and organize than ever before. Workspaces are automatically indexed and available through the familiar Windows Search user interface.
· Access Workspace Documents Directly from Office Applications: Offline documents can be opened or saved from Office applications through integration with the Windows Explorer. Navigate local folders like they were part of your Windows drive.
· New Contact Card with Integrated Presence: Office Communicator streamlines communication by allowing you to utilize its capabilities within the SharePoint Workspace application. Communicator presence is displayed directly in the Groove workspace member pane.
· Standard Office Features: We included numerous other features that are consistent with Office 2010 applications like: a 64-bit native client; support for IPv6 networking; Single Sign-On authentication; new language support including full IME, mirroring, and complex scripts; native integration with standard management tools like Active Directory; continuous help publishing through Office Online; and much more.
Expect to hear more about these enhancements in detail in future posts, along with others that haven’t been mentioned yet. In the meantime, enjoy SharePoint Workspace 2010...
It’s time to talk about the new stuff, and give you a sneak peek at what to expect in SharePoint Workspace 2010. We’ll be discussing some or all of the following subjects:
· SharePoint Workspace key scenarios
· Connectivity with SharePoint
· Working with SharePoint documents
· Working with SharePoint Lists
· Working with SharePoint Virtual Lists
· Search and local data access
· Integration with the Office suite
· Design elements and usability features
· Language support
· Client deployment
· Groove Workspaces
Drop us a comment if you’ve got other appropriate topics that you’d like to hear about. See you later in the month…
Groove 3.1 is going away. Of course that’s not strictly true: if you have it, you can still use it. But Microsoft will no longer be offering support for the product. If you’re running 3.1, you can look at this knowledge base article that describes the situation and offers suggestions on how you might proceed.
It was a good product with a good run, but things keep moving, and now we’re on to Office Groove 2007, with SharePoint Workspace 2010 on the way. If you’re ready to move on to a new version, be sure to read that KB article to get your migration right.
The Groove 2007 SDK has been updated for SP2. The SDK and the revised Groove Web Services documentation are available on MSDN. The new APIs provide two major capabilities:
- Creating invitations and controlling them from Groove Web Services applications
- Creating and maintaining invisible workspaces
These features allow your Web Services application to create workspaces that are accessed only through Groove Web Services applications. This allows you to provide your users with a single user interface to access data in the workspace, the one provided by your application. These invisible workspaces are hidden from the user in the Groove Launchbar or the Open Workspace list.
For a detailed list of new Groove Web Services operations, see the Release Notes. Note that you should check for the availability of the new APIs before calling them in your application. You can find sample code that shows you how to do this here.
We’re pleased to announce that the SharePoint Workspace (Groove) team is taking nominations to participate in the Office 2010 Technical Beta program.
We expect to release our Technical Preview in the month of July. The team is excited to get feedback from our community in order to help make this a great release. Here is your opportunity to nominate yourself to participate in the program.
Space is limited, so if you are interested in beta-testing SharePoint Workspace 2010, please complete the following nomination form (you will need to log into Microsoft Connect with a Live ID). We look forward to hearing from you.
If you’re a SharePoint Workspace (Groove) MVP, you have already been nominated and do not need to apply separately.
Joe Levine offers suggestions for importing data in a custom Forms tool:
Groove users developing custom Forms tools may commonly want to seed the tool with existing data. In some cases, your main objective for rolling out the custom tool may be to share an existing set of data records among team members. And since there could easily be a large number of existing data records, the only practical solution is to import them.
You can import records from a Microsoft Office Excel workbook, saved as a CSV (Comma Delimited) file. However, the process for accomplishing a successful import can be a bit finicky, and it is important to be aware of the requirements. Specifically:
· Column header names in the Excel workbook must exactly match corresponding field names defined in the custom tool, including case sensitivity.
· Column headers for corresponding Number or Date fields must be qualified by appending the data type to the column header name. For example:
Cost:Double
Start_Date:Date
· Columns in the workbook must be ordered to match the order of columns in the Custom tool view in which you will import the records.
Identifying field names and updating Excel workbook column header names
Typically, you will have your Excel data before you begin to design your custom tool. And as a result, you will already know the names to use when defining fields in Groove. Unfortunately, it is not quite so simple. Although the Groove Forms tool uses the field labels you specify to create field names, the field names do not always exactly match the field labels. For example, the Forms tool appends additional characters to some fields to accommodate certain characters such as word spaces, and it appends numbers to field names, when necessary, to ensure that field names are unique.
To ensure that you match field names exactly, you can follow this sequence:
1. Have the Excel Workbook handy so that you can review the column header names and their placement order. For example:
2. Create the custom Forms tool, using the column header names for your fields, and lay out a view to match the order of column headers in the Excel Workbook.
3. Publish the Forms tool design.
4. Create a sample record in the Forms tool.
5. Right-click the sample record, click Properties, and then click the Fields tab.
You see the list of fields and their respective field names in the Forms tool design:
6. Edit the column headers in the Excel Workbook as needed to match the actual field names in the Forms tool design, and append data type qualifiers:
Note: Appending the “String” data type qualifier is optional. Number and Date data type qualifiers are required.
Importing records into the Forms tool
Once you are confident that the Excel Workbook is suitably prepared, you can attempt the import:
1. Go to the custom Forms tool.
2. On the File menu, click Import, and then click Comma Delimited File (CSV).
3. Do the following in the Import Options dialog box:
· Select the form to import from the drop-down menu.
· Check Microsoft Office Excel.
· Select or accept the character set and locale
· Click OK.
The records should be imported. If you receive an error, review the field names and order of columns in the Excel Workbook and Forms tool design to make sure they match up, make corrections, and then try again.
As we’ve recently announced that Groove will be changing its name to SharePoint Workspace, this seems like a good time to change the name of the blog as well. The vehicle formerly known as All the Groovey News that Fits will henceforth be named Working the Spaces, Sharing the Point.
We’ll continue to give you the same sort of thing: we’ll tell you about what the development team is up to, we’ll alert you to what’s new with the products, and we’ll toss around ideas on how to get the most out of Groove 2007. Soon SharePoint Workspace 2010 will pop out of the oven, and we’ll tell you all about that, too.
Along with the name change, note the new and improved URL (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint_workspace_development_team/Default.aspx), and grab yourself a feed…
