Nov20
Categories:
For those who were at Sydney partner training I delivered yesterday, this is the application I said should be available any day;-)
StickySorter is an Office Labs sponsored spare-time project by two Microsoft employees, Julie and Sumit. The idea sprung from the need for project teams all over the world to gather and organize data using a collaborative process known as affinity diagramming. Since its inception, StickySorter has evolved into a desktop application so anyone can use it to collaborate and organize ideas electronically, using a familiar sticky note interface.
This could be an excellent tool to help capture document template and taxonomy requirements for your SharePoint Project
You can also define fields in the notes and all of the data captured can be exported to a CSV file.
Think; Tablet, Projector, remote users via Live Meeting...
Get it here http://www.officelabs.com/projects/stickysorter/Pages/default.aspx
Nov3
Categories: SharePoint document libraries support enforcing check out to make any changes to a document or its metadata. This is set in the Version Settings menu of the document library settings.
You might think that this option should be on by default but there are some downsides to doing this. The biggest impact to requiring check out is that you can't use the bulk editing Datasheet View. If require checkout is enabled, the Datasheet View will display "This view is read-only" message at the bottom.
Note: the Read-only indicator on the right is field specific.
If you don't enable the "Require Check Out" option then users need to be aware of how SharePoint prevents duplicate editing of a file (the following assumes Office 2007).
Explicit Check-Out
This happens when a user selects this option from the item actions drop-down menu.
There are three problems with this
- Assumption that the user knows to do this
- The drop down may not be available in the current view
- The document name is a hyperlink so the user may click on in their hast to edit it
(In WSS v2 and SPS 2003, selecting this option didn't actually open the document which confused users even more)
Implicit Check-out
If a user just click on the file name, the file will be implicitly checked out for a period of time dependant on the client OS (see my technical blog post on what happens when a user clicks on a hyperlink)
OS | Timeout |
Windows XP | 15 minutes |
Vista | 60 minutes |
If someone else clicks on the file during this time, they will see the following message...
As soon as a user closes a file that is implicitly checked out, the lock will be released (regardless of whether they save their changes or not) allowing another user to edit the file.
Note: if Office crashes or there is a network outage or RAS disconnect, the lock may remain in place and you either have to wait for the timeout or initiate an IIS reset on the server that the user opened the document from (hard to determine in an NLB environment).
In a nutshell, a quick document edit doesn't require users to explicitly check-out a document (MS obviously realised that 15 minutes was a bit too short for XP for a quick document editing session).
Why give the users so many choices? Wait for my next post on the different reasons why documents are stored in SharePoint.
Nov2
Categories:
Nov1
Categories: IIS 7 Smooth Streaming + Silverlight + Akamai distributed network!
Even in little old New Zealand, at the end of the Internet, this looks fantastic! Check it out http://www.smoothhd.com/
Oct30
Categories: It also provides valuable reporting capability.
The critical conditions that the SharePoint Management Pack monitors are summarized in the following reports that can be easily viewed through the System Center reporting console. Rules can be defined to alter how and when data is gathered, influencing the contents of these reports.
- Alerts Report
- Most Common Alerts Report
- Event Analysis Report
- Most Common Events Report
- .NET CLR Data Performance Report
- .NET CLR Memory Performance Report
- ASP .NET Applications Performance Report
- Indexing Service Performance Report
- Logical Disk Performance Report
- Memory Performance Report
- MOSS Search Performance Report
- Network Interface Performance Report
- Paging File Performance Report
- Physical Disk Performance Report
- Process Performance Report
- Processor Performance Report
- System Performance Report
- Web Service Performance Report across your SharePoint environments.

To help SharePoint teams meet and report on service level targets, the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager, a solution accelerator available as a download, provides the ability to monitor availability and performance for the entire SharePoint service from both the user's perspective and from a backend perspective. Top-level views and drill down capabilities let administrators investigate and resolve problems before they affect service levels.
If you want assistance with Monitoring Service for SharePoint 2007 with System Center Operations Manager 2007 might be what you need. (OK, I am an MCS consultant but I'm not desperate for work, just letting you this option is available;-)
Oct27
Categories: SharePointThere is so much video content available now days that can be used as a source of content for your web site (Internet or Intranet).
This article shows you how to create a SharePoint Publishing Layout page that supports authoring a web page with the following features:
- display a preview image which when clicked will start playing the video
- works with Firefox

We start by creating a new Content Type in the publishing site from the Site Actions>All Site Settings>Site content types
It is important that the new content type is based on the "Page" parent content type and that you save the new content type into the "Page Layout Content Types" group so that you will be able to find it in SharePoint Designer when it comes time to create a Layout Page.
We now have a basic publishing page content type with the standard publishing fields...

Select "Add from existing site columns" to add the following content fields:
- Byline
- Page Content
- Page Image
The Page Image field will be used to store the image that will be displayed in place of the media player until the user clicks on it.

Now we need to create a new field to hold the media file link. We use a plain text field so that either a http or mms link. Select "Add from new site column" to add the Video field and make it a type of "Single line of text".

Now we move to SharePoint Designer to create a Page Layout template from the New Menu...

"URL Name" is just the name of the template file that will be saved in the _catalogs/masterpage library.
"Title" is the text that will displayed next to the Content Type name when a user creates a page based on the Video content type (there can be multiple templates available for a content type).
We now have a page layout based on the default master page...

The Page Fields and Content Fields can now be dragged into the PlaceHolderMain area and any HTML/CSS formatting applied.
I have based my Video page on the layout provided by the ArticleLeft.aspx template with the following changes:
- Change the TD for the PublishingPageImage field to support an onclick event that will replace the image with the media player object
<td width="480" valign="top" onclick="videoCreate()">
<div id="Player">
<PublishingWebControls:RichImageField id="ImageField" FieldName="PublishingPageImage" runat="server"/>
</div>
</td>
- Add the Video field to the Edit Mode Panel
<PublishingWebControls:editmodepanel runat="server" id="editmodepanel1">
<SharePointWebControls:TextField FieldName="Video" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:TextField>
- Add the following javascript after the </PublishingWebControls:editmodepanel> tag which will create the media player object when the user clicks on the image.
<script type="text/javascript">
function wmpCreate(url) {
var str = "";
var agt = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
var is_ie = (agt.indexOf("msie") != -1);
if (is_ie) {
// create the WMP for IE
str = '<object id="contentPlayer" classid="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" width="480" height="320">';
} else {
// create it for FF.
str = '<object id="contentPlayer" type="application/x-ms-wmp" data="'+url+'" width="480" height="320">';
}
str += '<param name="url" value=""/>';
str += '<param name="uiMode" value="full">';
str += '<param name="autoStart" value="-1" />';
str += '<param name="stretchToFit" value="-1" />'; str += '<param name="windowlessVideo" value="0" />';
str += '<param name="enabled" value="-1" />';
str += '<param name="enableContextMenu" value="-1" />';
str += '<param name="fullScreen" value="0" />';
str += '</object>';
return str;
}
function videoCreate() {
var VideoSource = '<SharePointWebControls:FieldValue runat="server" id="MediaURLValue" FieldName="Video"/>';
document.getElementById('Player').innerHTML = wmpCreate(VideoSource);
var wmp = document.getElementById 'contentPlayer');
wmp.URL = VideoSource;
wmp.controls.play();
}
(I found this media player script somewhere on the internet and have lost the reference but credit to who ever created it)
The <SharePointWebControls:FieldValue...> allows us to use the content of a field without the html formatting that would otherwise be applied by SharePoint. We could use this method to get other page parameters such as video size etc.
Our page layout template should now look something like this...

Now we can save the page, check it in and publish it (this can be a tedious process during development so I often disable approval and require checkout on the Master Page library in a development environment).
Now we must enable the Vide Page content type in the Pages library.

We can now create a new Video page.

To create the preview image for the page layout, go to _catalogs/masterpage/Forms/AllItems.aspx and edit the properties of page layout where you can enter the path to the preview image. This image should be saved in the _catalogs/masterpage/en-us/preview images folder.

View a demo of this page here http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/wcm/Pages/imm.aspx
This page layout will only be available in the site collection in which it has been created in. You can turn this into a SharePoint Feature so that it can be activated in any site collection without having to go through these steps for each site collection. A good article on how to this can be found here...
http://weblogs.asp.net/jimjackson/archive/2007/11/05/create-a-new-page-layout-in-sharepoint-2007-feature-based.aspx
Oct15
Categories: SharePointEd Robinson the CEO of Aptimize has written
this paper with guidance for measuring the performance of SharePoint Intranet and Internet sites. Aptimize produces the Runtime Page Optimizer (
http://www.getrpo.com) – a software component that instantly speeds up web pages, applying Yahoo’s rules of
Exceptional Performance to ASP.NET and MOSS/SharePoint 2007 sites.
I use it on WSSDemo and have been impressed with the product and the level of support provided by the Aptimize team.
Ed is no stranger to SharePoint – he was a program manager for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, CMS and SharePoint, and now concentrates website performance software for the Microsoft platform.
Oct9
Categories: Microsoft has provided a good sample checklist for organizations to evaluate a custom or 3rd party SharePoint solution against.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707802.aspx
The one thing I think it fails to mention is evaluating the impact on being able to upgrade your SharePoint farm to v.next (MOSS 2009?). Why is this important? We may only be 12-18 months away from the next version I'm sure organizations will be chomping at the bit to take advantage of all the cool new features coming in the next version (sorry, no spoiler here).
Customizations range in scope from:
- very simple – a web part that uses only SharePoint API to display list information
- medium – a feature that changes some default behaviours of SharePoint
- complex – an ISV application that leverages SharePoint as a platform but delivers entirely new functionality
This range of customizations should be expanded and a weighting added to each giving a cost/risk to upgrade/migrate in the future.
One area that I would be careful about is using custom site definitions. These were available in WSS 2.0 and virtual discovered by the development community by reverse engineering soon after RTM. This approach to SharePoint customization lead to some documentation and even some sample site templates being released but then along came WSS 3.0 and only OOTB site definitions were upgraded automatically. WSS 3.0 also offers new feature and solution deployment options which can help you to add functionality to the out-of-the-box site definitions in a supported way. I suspect the OOTB site definition + Features may provide a cleaner upgrade path for you in the future (assuming your feature meets the evaluation criteria in the Code Acceptance Checklist ;-)
If your SharePoint farm is used for multiple applications, both OOTB and custom, such as Intranet Publishing, collaboration and a 3rd part project management solution, I would use the Code Isolation design principal by installing the 3rd party solution in its own SharePoint Web Application with a dedicated IIS Web Application Pool. If, in the future, you find that the 3rd party solution is not supported and can't be upgraded to v.next, you can migrate it off to another (smaller) SharePoint farm (at the cost of the department who selected this solution in the first place) and get on with upgrading the main farm.
Oct7
Categories:
Over the last 28 years of my professional career, I've always had a desk to call my own.
This was what it looked like this morning

And this is what it looks like now...

(I got a concession to leave the PC on the desk. Trying to get power and an ether net connection into my locker was going to be a problem ;-)
Oct4
Categories: SharePoint
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