This post is common knowledge to all SharePoint professionals out there, but for newbie's it can save hours of hair pulling (as I’ve got to learn from a bunch of people I’ve helped out) ;) Scenario: There is a distribution list you can see and use in outlook, but when you search for the same list in SharePoint it doesn’t show up in the people picker. What gives? Chances are that the distribution list is not security enabled. This would need to be done by your domain administrator. He would need to...
A discussion list in unlike a normal list in that it consists of two content types - a Discussion content type that maps to the discussion topic and a Message that maps to all replies to the topic. If you examine the Discussion content type you’ll see that its inherited from the Folder content type. The reply contains a field called ‘ParentFolderId’ and as the name suggests it holds the ID of the discussion topic. So naturally if you were to do a query on the list for all items with the same ParentFolderId...
In the October edition of MSDN Magazine, there’s a great article that does a quick rundown of building a component that can be surfaced as a Web Part via the Gallery and placed in Web Part zones on pages. The article by Steve Fox is here: Steve Fox - Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint Development – MSDN Magazine October 2009 There’s a couple very important aspect that might not be 100% clear from the title – 1st, you’re really visually designing a User Control (ASCX). So, this is really just...
This post is the sixth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #6 – Shipment Tracking Web Part! I’ve been holding on to this one for a while. Until recently it was just a FedEx shipment tracker, but now the UPS and USPS Connectors have been published at RSSBus.com so this can be what I wanted it to be. This sample will allow the user to input...
It has been a long time coming and I was finally able to find a diamond in the rough by locating a wrapper for the “challenging” yet powerful Lists.asmx service provided by WSS 3.0. On my current project we had the need to interact with WSS to pull back some document templates that reside in a document library. It only made sense for the implementation of this repository to use Lists.asmx or interact with a custom service that uses the SharePoint object model. I figured by now someone had created...
This past week I was reminded of the “fun” in which hosting an application within SharePoint can present. We are developing a custom application for our client in which some areas must reside within a SharePoint environment. We did quite a bit of our development in this first iteration within a web application in order to pull things together and present the client with a working end-to-end “prototype.” The architecture is composed of several layers all of which will be “in process” communications...
This post is the fifth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #5 – QuickBooks Web Part! I accidently overwrote the original post. Sorry about that. Below are the steps for the QuickBooks webpart. If there are other QB searches you need to do, I can help with that. The RSSBus QBOps Connector has a ton of functionality. Step one is to make sure...
In the mix of things we were the 2nd SharePoint Saturday event and I think we can do far better. I wanted to have a free conference with 2010 content that people didn’t have to pay for if they couldn’t afford SPC. So we are now finally confirmed for Saturday, December 12th at Johnson Country Community College Regnier Center. This event will be bigger (250 is the cap) and far better. I have a lot of good people helping me out including Brian Laird, Kevin Huges, and Bob Davis. St. Louis is working...
For those of you looking for the slides for my presentation at devLink here is the link: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Presentations/Webpart%20Development.pptx. Here is the code samples: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/CodeSamples. So most of you guys know I’m more of an alternative/rock type person. I don’t enjoy country music much. It’s just not my thing that I will go and seek out. I don’t fully hate most of it. In fact Johnny Cash is a huge...
This post is the fourth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #4 – List Active Directory Groups and Users This web part will list each user group and its members, as defined in your Active Directory (or other LDAP server) installation. Step one is to make sure you have the RSSBus Web Part installed. See here for instructions. Step two, make...
Here is a screencast showing the absolute basics of how to use the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part. The screencast does not go over installation, but all that requires is that you download and run the setup on your SharePoint machine. Technorati Tags: SharePoint, RSSBus...
SharePoint’s Branding Limitations, Part 2 (SharePoint Magazine) As a Front-end Developer with a background in designing I’ll show you how to make a graphical design that works for a default SharePoint-environment. If you want to take control over the front-end, don’t use any themes. Create your art by using style sheets! SharePoint Daily - Bamboo Nation Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Limitations,Part,Magazine,Front,Developer,background,environment,Create,Bamboo,Nation,themes,sheets Windows Live Tags:...
Last week /n software announced new versions of three different toolkits, and a brand new SharePoint Integrator product. From nsoftware.com: NEW: /n software UPS Integrator V2 Released! Includes easy access to the most popular UPS mail capabilities including shipping, tracking, address verification, rate calculation, and much more. NEW: /n software SharePoint Integrator Released! Enables developers to build applications that integrate with Microsoft SharePoint Server, including components for working...
This post is the third in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #3 – Custom SQL Queries This web part will perform a custom SQL query, and allow you to display them however you like. Unlike previous examples, this one won’t be just cut and paste, since you’ll have to provide your own SQL connection string and query, and make replacements inside...
This post is the second in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #2 – List Document Libraries and Documents For this example, we’ll make a web part that displays a list of the most recently modified document libraries/documents on the site. Lots of SharePoint sites contain many libraries, each containing dozens or even hundreds of documents. Often...
So you work with SharePoint and you play World of Warcraft…Well I started talking to some people on twitter and on im and what not. There are a few of us that play World of Warcraft and we love SharePoint. We started a guild called “Sharing the Point” on Thrall on the Horde side. it’s a normal server. I have a couple toons ranging from 75 to 63 to 17…If you are interested in playing with other SharePoint people here is a list of officers who can invite you to the guild: Perengald (Paul Galvin or...
This post marks the beginning of a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. After that intro you’re probably already wondering what the catch is, and yep, there is one. These examples will require the use of the highly acclaimed RSSBus SharePoint WebPart. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. And now…let’s get on with it! #1 – SharePoint Image Rotator Step one is to make sure you have the...
For the price of zero dollars and zero cents you can attend SharePoint Saturday Ozarks in Harrison, Arkansas. I know a lot of you Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma people are always wondering when we will get more events out this way. We had a ton this year with MOSS Camp St. Louis, SPS KC, SPS Tulsa, and now SPS Ozarks and SPS Dallas. You guys can attend two events within a decent driving distance (Dallas and Harrison are not too far from each other). Mike Watson, Laura Roger,...
So I’ve blogged about this a lot. If you read my blog you know how I got started. Kansas City .Net User Group and walking up to the right person at the right time plus meeting the right people at the right events that just clicked as good people (Lee, Brian, Jeff, John, Tim, Michael). I guess looking back over the past 2 years (as of this month I believe?) in retrospect would be nice. I was pretty hardcore into World of Warcraft back then without many friends newly moved to Kansas City. Right now...
Here is a PowerScript function to automate the process of getting/logging the current number of connections to a particular Web Server. It will tell you the number of connections for each site on the server, so you can see the number of SharePoint connections, SharePoint Central Admin connections, etc. Thanks to MOW and Lee Holmes for their examples of using the PerformanceCounter class in PowerShell. function Get-WebServiceConnections(){ $results = @{} $perfmon = new-object System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter...
Many people configure email alerts in SharePoint through SharePoint Designer Workflows. The process is simple and useful, here it is outlined at End User SharePoint. In a nutshell, you create a workflow that sends out an alert, attach the workflow to a document library or list in SharePoint, tell SharePoint to run the workflow whenever the library/list changes. The options for sending the alert in SharePoint out of the box are limited to sending a plain email. I want more. Enter the /n software SharePoint...
The default RSS feeds in SharePoint are very basic and I want them to contain more information. I managed this by generating my own RSS feeds. Here is how I did it: First, install the RSSBus SharePoint WebPart. After running the setup, go to the Site Collection Features page to activate the Web Part. In order to create custom RSS feeds, you’ll also need to activate the “RSSBus Service Handler” feature. I created a special document library for my feeds, I called it “Really Simple Services”, since...
I added a little newsgroup browser to my SharePoint site with about a one page RSSBus SharePoint WebPart template. It works by importing the RSSBus NntpOps Connector. It calls its nntpListArticles operation to list the articles of a particular newsgroup and displays them in a table. Then when an article is clicked on, it calls the nntpGetArticle operation to retrieve the actual article – don’t worry – it will only retrieve the first 1000 lines of the article – if the thread is larger than that it...
I used the RSSBus WebPart to create a multi-source search in SharePoint – this will let me enter one search term, and see results from a variety of different search services at the same time. The RSSBus WebPart template turned out to be extremely simple, thanks to its built-in feed manipulation capabilities. <div id="search"> <label for="search"><b>Search:</b></label> <input id="search" type="text" name="search" size="25" value="[[_request.form:search| def('')]]"...
On Vista: Right click on “My Computer”, choose “Map Network Drive…” Choose a drive letter, and click “Connect to a Web site that you can use to store your documents and pictures.” Click on “Choose a custom network location”, type in the address for the network location. For Shared Documents Library, this will be something like: "http://yourserver/yoursite/Shared Documents". a name for the network location, and click next. Voila. Technorati Tags: SharePoint...
Using the PowerShellToys PowerShellWebPart, I was able to insert a PowerShell command prompt inside my SharePoint page with only a few lines of code and some html. Here is the PowerShellWebPart template that I used: <div style="background-color:DarkBlue; color:white; height:400px; width:650px"> <form method="GET" action="" enctype="multipart/form-data"> PS> <input type=text name="query" size="40" value="<%=$request['query']%>" /> <input type=submit value="Execute" />...
At PowerShellToys.com, you’ll find a bunch of new toys for PowerShell, including the first full release of PowerShellASP + free community license. The new toys? PowerShellADO, PowerShellPanel, PowerShellWebPart, and PowerShellRSS. Here’s a brief description of each, in my own words. For the official description and examples, check out PowerShellToys.com. PowerShellASP – write ASP pages with PowerShell scripting instead of vbscript. PowerShellADO – execute PowerShell cmdlets and return the results...
This set of posts is about a "Mini URL" service that I created initially to help provide a means to automate shortening of URL's for sending in emails to users in SharePoint. If you've used SharePoint and at times you need to send a link to a List or Document item one way is to "right-click" the item (whether it's a folder, list item, or document) then if it's IE choose "Copy Shortcut". You can then just past that into an email and send over to your recipient. Recently, I also noticed that even the...
Here is the slide deck link: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Presentations/Dazzling%20SharePoint%20with%20Silverlight.pptx Here are the code samples webservice and all: http://cid-8e2654c5f01e6069.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/CodeSamples?uc=1 If you have questions or comments don’t hesitate to contact me. Technorati Tags: MOSS,Silverlight,SharePoint...
In part 1, I showed how to add Twitter Search to SharePoint using the RSSBus WebPart. In part 2, I added input properties to the script so that the web part was controlled by the properties in the property editor. Now, I can hook this up with a regular input textbox to let the user drive the search. Now my RSSBus WebPart script looks like this: <rsb:info title="My Custom Search"> <input name="query" description="A default query" default="SharePoint" /> </rsb:info> <div align="center"...
In an earlier post I showed how I use the RSSBus SharePoint WebPart to show a list of Twitter search results in your SharePoint pages. Now I’ll expand on that a bit to show how to make the WebPart a bit more dynamic. The script of the webpart itself gives a ton of power to the webpart user. As shown before, each tweet can be formatted however you like. But we can do so much more, like specifying webpart input properties. Starting with the same script from last time, here’s how I can make the search...
I saw Michael @Gannotti’s Tweets Wiki and thought it was pretty handy. It made me think of @jazzychad’s TweetGrid and how that would be nice inside SharePoint. So I combined these two into my own little twitter search page in SharePoint, and here’s how: Tools I used: RSSBus SharePoint WebPart. Installed and activated the RSSBus SharePoint WebPart, added the webpart to my SharePoint page. I went to search.twitter.com, and did a search for “PowerShell”. The results page includes the RSS feed for the...
There are four upcoming SharePoint Saturday events all listed at http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ with speaker information and submission information. Some of them have registration links posted. The four cities and dates are: SharePoint Saturday San Francisco on Saturday, April 25th SharePoint Saturday DC on Saturday, May 2nd SharePoint Saturday Chicago on Saturday, June 13th SharePoint Saturday Charlotte on Saturday, June 20th If you cannot attend any of these events Mark Miller at http://www.endusersharepoint.com...
If you’re doing SharePoint development that requires accessing and modifying SharePoint over HTTP, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the RPC protocol (HTTP posts) used there. Unfortunately its not the greatest thing in the world, but it gets the job done I suppose. Here’s a hard to find but very useful MSDN resource: FrontPage Server Extensions RPC Protocol. Technorati Tags: SharePoint, RPC...
In a bold move, Microsoft decided to rename SharePoint one more time to SharePoint 2010 for the next version. Check out these two articles on the change, but it looks like the detachment from Office does not mean it will be less feature rich with the integration with Office, much like portals weren’t removed when it went from SPS to MOSS. I am excited to see the name change, but we really need a new acronym as trendy as MOSS was. MSP, SPX, not sure. No name has been released for WSS, but my bet is...
Coz its now free… Head over to the Microsoft Download site and get your copy: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42 Well, no more problems trying to persuade the business to buy it for users :) Technorati Tags: MOSS,Sharepoint,Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer,Sharepoint Designer...
I have looked at this topic before but I just got my hands on a new Wrox book called “Professional Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 Development using Microsoft Silverlight 2”, phew, could that title be any longer! At only £16 pounds don't expect a 1000 pager, but at just under 300 pages the content is good. It is pretty heavy on code with endless pages of it, but even if you take them out, there is some good content in there. If you have figured out how to deploy Silverlight to Sharepoint then I can’t promise...
I started this series to show how to copy different kinds of lists in SharePoint. Each type of list has its own challenges. In this article I will also demonstrate how to copy custom fields and keep the same internal name. It’s kind of annoying that you can’t create a field with the internal name you specify, but I found a pretty easy workaround. You create the field using AddFieldAsXml on the list Fields collection, and you use the internal name as the display name. This creates the field with the...
If you have multiple SharePoint web applications running on a server you would see multiple instances of w3wp.exe in TaskManager. When you need to monitor the performance of a SharePoint web app there is no way in TaskManager to figure out which w3wp process is the right one. Here's a quick way to identify the app pool associated with the running worker process: In the TaskManager menu select 'View' -> 'Select Columns' and check the 'PID (Process Identifier)' column Open command prompt window...
I was working with the People Editor Control and realized there are a couple weird things you need to do before you can read values into the control and save values into a list. Here are a few samples related to saving multiple items into a list and reading multiple items from a list into the control. Updating an Item from a PeopleEditor Control: string[] UsersSeperated = peUserEditor.CommaSeparatedAccounts.Split(','); SPFieldUserValueCollection UserCollection= new SPFieldUserValueCollection(); foreach...
I did something stupid against all my beliefs and should have never done it. I tried to deploy something on Friday. It was the dumbest mistake. First off I had no idea what type of master pages were in the environment. I assumed there was only one master page in the entire environment and I used the most disgustingly wrong program for a developer, SharePoint Designer. I pasted in this fix for AJAX Update Panels with FireFox (<script type='text/javascript'>_spOriginalFormAction = document.forms[0].action;...
The fantastic 40 templates from Microsoft can cause issues with content deployment. The following error prevents content deployment with the templates installed: 1. The content type name cannot contain: \ / : * ? " # % < > { } | ~ &, two consecutive periods (..), or special characters such as a tab. at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentType.ValidateName(String name) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentType.ValidateNameWithResource(String strVal, String& strLocalized) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContentType.set_Name(String...
The following error can occur during content deployment: The changeToken refers to a time before the start of the current change log. The changeToken refers to a time before the start of the current change log. at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.ThrowInvalidChangeTokenError(DateTime minChangeTime, Int32 minChangeNumber) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.GetIncrementalChanges() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.CalculateObjectsToExport() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Deployment.SPExport.Run()...
1. I installed and activated the RSSBus Web Part for SharePoint, which allows me as a SharePoint owner or member to create a customized web part from one of dozens of RSSBus connectors or any RSS/Atom feed I like, such as a Twitter Search RSS feed. 2. I added the RSSBus Web Part to my SharePoint page, and edited its content using the Source Editor. I am using the following template to format the results of my search.twitter.com RSS result: <rsb:call op=http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=+PowerShell+OR+RSSBus...
The RSSBus SharePoint Web Part might just be the most exciting thing I’ve had the pleasure to work with in quite a while. RSSBus is an amazingly powerful product, but the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part…its just a thing of beauty. What the web part does: it lets you expose data from just about anywhere inside SharePoint. The simplest example is to show an RSS feed like Google News or Yahoo News. I tweeted about that last week. I put together two more simple examples. One is using my Twitter Search RSS...
When I needed to read an Excel spreadsheet from a SharePoint site, it seemed like a simple enough request. Previously, whenever I needed to open an Excel file, I used an OleDb connection with the following connection string: string connectionString = @"Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0; Data Source={0};Persist Security Info=False; Extended Properties=""Excel 12.0;HDR=YES"""; connectionString = string.Format(connectionString, filePath); Of course, you can't open the file from the SharePoint site this...
I've been working with the SharePoint API lately. One of my tasks is to copy SharePoint lists from one site to another site. This can be done in code as long as the two sites are on the same machine. It's OK if they are in different web applications, but it can't be from one server to another. If you need to copy from one server to another, you either need to do an export/import, or find a way to save the settings and import them on the new machine. I believe you can use the SharePoint Web Services...
If WSS is free then what are the limitations? There is nothing good that is completely free, right? According to what I have found, if you setup WSS using SQL Server Embedded Edition (on the same server and not Express), then there is not a size limit. You have to setup WSS with the Basic option in order for it to install SQL Server EE (not Express); otherwise Express is installed and there is a 4 GB limit. Some are saying 500 GB may be a size constraint with EE, but I am not sure. SQL Server EE...
So I had the recent privilege to work with a bunch of InputFormTextboxes and KWIZ Tagging Controls. None of them would inherit my styles using the CSSClass tags for some reason. So I shoved a couple spans around the controls in the RenderContents method and finally the links inherited everything I needed. Morale of the story: <span></span> is your friend. Technorati Tags: MOSS,SharePoint,CSS,Webparts...
Today /n software announced new versions of three more toolkits today: SharePoint Extensions V3 BizTalk Adapters V3 SSIS Tasks V3 I have been involved in building these products, so if you have any questions feel free to let me know. Technorati Tags: BizTalk, SharePoint, SSIS...