Connect.Collaborate.SharePoint
May
31

The Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that helps developers visualize the different programs, servers, services, and tools that will help them build solutions. It allows them to drill down to each product and technology and learn about new features, objects, Web services, namespaces, and schemas required to extend Microsoft Office and build custom Office Business Applications (OBAs).

I have just installed this and it appears to be very useful as a reference for SharePoint information. It is more like a portal on your desktop.

Office System Developers Map

Download from here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb497969.aspx

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May
30
My map demo http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/map.aspx suffered from problem where I was adding the text from a SharePoint List field into the parameter of a javascript function. What if the string has single or double quotes?
 
Problem not solved but I did add some validation to the lat and long values.
 
Just as well this is a demo and not a production system ;-)
 
Today was spent trouble shooting an SPS 2003 dev environment where search would not work after restoring only the portal content db from a production system. Crawling worked fine but search resulted in Network Error for which there are several KB's related to index files out of sync but the dev server is a single server so this did not apply.
Ended up deleting and recreating the portal as the portal only provides search and site directory to 6 large WSS virtual servers. Still had to remove the Job function from the farm and re add it to get the index files/db deleted otherwise crawler would hand on first full index.
 
Although it is a bit of a drag working on SPS 2003, it is still interesting helping customers solve problems like finding a site blowing out the content db because a team discovered they could all share their music collection in a document library!
I also had someone looking over my shoulder all day and they commented that they had not seen me make a typo all day. That was 4pm and needless to say it was all down hill from then;-)
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May
28
I threw together a quick demo
of the code demonstrated in the blog
 
My demo uses a SharePoint List to hold the data so you can try adding your own locations to the list at the bottom of the page.
 
This is similar to the other demo I created using the local.live sample http://www.wssdemo.com/demo which used client side script and the msxml object to call the SharePoint list web service to get the location data except that this new demo uses the Data View web part to emit the javascript to update the map.
 
I'm working on a Popfly block so that I can incorporate SharePoint data in a mash up (just using an RSS feed  was a bit too simple for me). Most of my time has been spent trying to keep at least 500Mb of free space on this server. WSSDemo.com only has a 36 Gb mirrored disk so if anyone has suitable disks for a HP ML 370 they wish to donate, I have 4 empty slots begging to be filled!
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May
19
I have added a Book content type to my resources after one of my colleagues mentioned that attendees of the APAC SharePoint conference last week were complaining that there are no books on MOSS.
I have only listed the published books as there are twice as many still to be published.
 
In case you hadn't noticed, all of my resources are stored in a single list using Content Types to differentiate resources that require different metadata.
Here is my previous post on this
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May
19
My blog site started misbehaving last week. Viewing an individual blog or trying to view the comments would jump you directly to the new comment page.
I couldn't figure out what was going on but removing the new comment form from the display posing details page has prevented the error but not really solved the problem.
I will create another blog site and see how the display post item page is meant to work. Nothing like a bit of reverse engineering.
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May
15

As posted by Lawrence Liu in the SharePoint Team Blog.

You can get the download links for any template from http://www.wssdemo.com/application or download all 7 templates from here…

I have installed each of the templates for you to view (it was a late night…). Username: vs\demouser Password:Templates.

Note: they require Analysis Services Enterprise Edition. I installed them on Standard edition and only found the HR Manager template required enterprise features.

The Administrative Assistant template displays a highlights calendar for the organization, such as award functions and meetings, so you have activity information at your finger tips for better coordination. The template also displays the payment summary containing details about payments made for items under different categories. Also, the template displays the list of available facilities in the organization and the respective contact person as well as an issues list containing details about issues related to office management.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/admin

The Controller-Financial Analyst template helps controllers and financial analysts automate the process of analyzing financial data and information, helping them in their overall decision-making process. The template assists in tracking top performing products and opportunities at different geography levels. It also provides a graphical view of product sales and revenue. The overall design of this Role-Based My Site template is to help Controllers/Financial Analysts achieve their goals of communicating overall corporate performance, budget, and future growth projection to the management, investors, and other stakeholders.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/fa

The Customer Service Manager template helps you streamline the process of monitoring performance and enables the quick decision making that is usually required when addressing a customer's complaints. The template provides a graphical view displaying call distribution, service performance, operation costs, and representative quality indicators. The template helps you review order status and also displays key performance indicators for customer satisfaction and vendor performance. The Role-Based My Site template is designed to help customer service managers attain their goal of 100-percent customer satisfaction.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/customer

The HR Manager template helps keep a tab on the employee composition and distribution within the organization. During the performance review cycle, the template provides information on the status of performance reviews and helps the HR Manager in quickly identifying bottlenecks associated with it. As a part of employee engagement, the template displays various activities conducted on a monthly basis. It also displays details about training conducted for employees under various categories, info about attrition rates at the organization and business unit level, shows job opening details and employee referrals along with interview schedules for hiring to help with recruitment management.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/hrmanager

The IT Manager template focuses on the IT manager in a maintenance division handling location support. The services rendered by the support team are governed by the Service Level Agreement (SLA), where service level is defined by response, resolution, and threshold. IT managers oversee the support services provided by the team of IT engineers for SLA adherence and coordinate with the team for backups and updates. They also oversee the incident calls and escalations being logged in the help desk. At a product level, IT managers track license renewal and their respective roadmaps and updates.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/ITManager

The Marketing Manager template helps streamline the process of lead inquiries and conversions. The template assists with activities such as budget planning for marketing activities, planning activities for certain initiatives, planning for collateral, and implementing a wide range of promotions for products. This template also displays metrics related to the number of activities conducted and provides assistance in managing competitor information. The overall design of this template is to help marketing managers attain their goals developing and implementing marketing communications focused on brand development, customer acquisition, and engagement.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/marketingmanager

The Sales Account Manager template helps managers streamline the process of analysis of sales and opportunity information for their overall decision making. The template assists in customer account tracking against a set of performance metrics, such as quarterly revenue, growth and opportunity. It also provides a graphical view of the geographical distribution of product sales and opportunities. The objective of this Role-Based My Site Template is to help the Sales Manager attain their goals of customer satisfaction and revenue augmentation.
http://www.wssdemo.com/application/sales

 

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May
13

Office SharePoint Server include a "My Links" feature to keep track of the team sites you belong to and lets you book mark other SharePoint sites in the farm easily.

But what if you want to add a non-SharePoint site to your My Links. Try adding this shortcut to your IE favourites

javascript:function%20addlink(){t=document.title;u=escape(location.href);var%20q='http://ianmorr-moss/_vti_bin/portalapi.aspx?cmd=PinToMyPage&ListViewURL='+u+'&ListTitle='+t+'&ReturnUrl='+u;location.href=q;};%20addlink();

Replace ianmorr-moss with your portal host. Now, when you click the "Add to My Links favourite, you will be redirected to this page with the link information pre populated.

The nice thing about this is that after you click OK or Cancel, you will be returned to the page you bookmarked.

(It is easier to edit the properties of an existing favourite in the IE Links folder and paste in this javascript function)

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May
7
If you have added your own fields to any of the templates that use the Project tracking features, you may have noticed that your fields don't show up in the new or edit item pages.
Just turn on Content Type management in the list settings page and then click on the Project content type to add your existing list fields to the content type.
 
If you have tried the Bug Database template:
Don't forget to run stsadm.exe -o copyappbincontent
as per the Bug Database template and instructions:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C72D23AF-F556-47AA-A6F2-0027246A9928&displaylang=en
(thanks to Charles Wieland for spotting my mistake)
 
Workaround for resolve.aspx error Edit
First, find resolve.aspx, close.aspx and activate.aspx. they should be in your sharepoint 12 folder under \template\features\bugtrackingmodules\
open each in turn and find the two blocks of code in each file which do a resource load:
text="<%$Resources:tsa,ResolveBugPageTitle%>"
replace these with a hardcoded string, such as
text="Resolve Bug"
save the files. reload.
(thanks Jason)
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May
3
If "valuable" is defined by the users then it would be the content they refer to most often. I was surprised by some real world SharePoint usage stats I generated for one of my customers.
 
Although they have more than twice as many Word documents than Excel spreadsheets, the xls files represent 44% of access to existing files while .doc. only represented 10%. No other type was above 4%.
 
This customer has over 400 Gb of content in over 600 team sites running on 6 web apps with 12 content db's
 
16% of the sites get more than 100 visits per day and only 2% get less than 1 visit per day (on average).
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May
2
This is a "MOSS as an application platform" story. Not my usual post but it is a good example of what can be done with MOSS.
Customer Profile
MTV Networks, based in New York, is a leading operator of entertainment cable channels, including MTV and other niche brands around the world. It employs 7,000 people and has 10,000 desktops.
Business Situation
MTV needed to automate three manual, paper-based workflows and provide staffers with self-serve access to actionable business information.
Solution 
MTV chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to create three different solutions in one development environment in just three weeks. 
Benefits
  • Reduces time it takes to process new employees by at least 1 day
  • Cuts time it takes to provide auditors with data from one week to 1 day (8 hrs)
  • Reduces time it takes to fill out new employee form by 15 to 20 minutes 
  • Saves 4 hours a week in project updates
Download the case study http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/8/e/d8e71785-0431-4f09-9f8d-79bf1da1f0f8/MTV.doc
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