Connect.Collaborate.SharePoint
Jan
29

One thing I wanted to achieve with my SharePoint CKS:EBE blog template was to support the full width of visitor's browsers.
I guess most blogs display in narrow columns because it makes it faster to read. I'm a man of few words but many pictures which doesn't seem to work with the templates I have seen (not only on the SharePoint platform).

Based on my visitor resolution statistics,

Resolution

Visits

1280x1024

29.44%

1024x768

23.67%

1280x800

10.80%

1680x1050

9.72%

1440x900

6.86%

1920x1200

4.90%

1400x1050

4.35%

1600x1200

3.31%

1152x864

2.43%

1280x768

1.04%


(All other resolutions represent 3.5% and most of those are still greater than 1024 in width)

I have gone with 100% width in the template to better support screen shots and hope that it won't slow down your reading.

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Jan
29

Thanks to Nas Khan from the Intergen Interactive team for taking my ideas and producing something much better than I expected.

It didn't take much to convince Nas to add some Silverlight animation to the theme;-)

If you aren't viewing this post directly on my site, go there now!

We might even get a variation of this theme into the CKS:EBE RTM version...

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Jan
23
This is the must have addon for MOSS. I have been runnuning v1 for ages and it adds enormous value to your metadata.
Download it from http://www.codeplex.com/facetedsearch
I'm on holiday but had to post this from my pocket pc...
Categories:SharePoint

 
Jan
22
Still a long way to go but I'm trying to capture all the way I approach end-to-end process facilitation using SharePoint, not just document libraries.
There is a nice little Excel Services web part in there showing the initial metadata/content type matrix.
Categories:SharePoint

 
Jan
19

 

SPSReport is a very useful tool as it creates lots of text files for sorts of information about your SharePoint environment. This tool is provided by the Microsoft PPS engineers to capture relevant information which is used to assist a customer in resolving problems but you can also use it yourself.

WSSDemo is suffering from several problems, the main one being not enough processor or memory to run a single server installation (including Domain Controller, SQL Server/AnalysisReporting Services, MOSS Forms Server, Excel Services and the SLK. All that will change shortly when my new uba-server comes on line.

In the mean time, something sever is happening at 8:56am for the last 3 days.

Looks suspiciously like a timer job. EventType clr20r3, P1 w3wp.exe, P2 6.0.3790.3959, P3 45d6968e, P4 microsoft.sharepoint, P5 12.0.0.0, P6 473bb903, P7 8a, P8 25, P9 microsoft.sharepoint.spexception, P10 NIL.

So the first thing I do after looking at the System event logs (which give nothing more than the error above) is to run SPSReport but it has expired.

You can download a new version of the tool from http://www.codeplex.com/spsreport which is valid until 1 April 2008 (I can feel a prank coming ;-)

Will wssdemo.com keep going for another week while I build the new server or do I have to fix this?

Note: yes I do hit "Send Reports Now", every time. They are probably getting sick of error reports from me;-)

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Jan
19

I'm always trying to educate developers on the Data Form web part (DFWP). If there was a Visual Studio add-in to configure the DFWP I think there would be a much greater uptake in using the web part in custom SharePoint solutions because developers seem to think that using SharePoint Designer (SPD) is not real development.

The number of times I've seen developers spending days on a web part that uses SPGridView which I could have built in 5 minutes...

Upon this revelation, developers often say to me, ah – but I need to display some images in place of the data values and provide column sorting. Of course the DFWP does all of this and more.

The final objection is that the DFWP requires knowledge of XSL. This is where SharePoint designer comes into its own with automatic xsl generation and dynamic linking between design and code view for the data elements.

Some of the benefits of the DFWP:

  • It is based on XSL – so you have separation of the presentation from the data and can do all the conditional formatting you want.
  • You can update the web part on a production server without console access.
  • It supports lots of data sources (SharePoint data sources, data base connections, Web Services, xml files, server scripts (rss feeds etc).
  • You can convert an existing List View into a DFWP.

A few tips when using the DFWP:

  • When using a SharePoint list/library data source, change from ListID to ListName (using SPD code view). This lets you use the .webpart definition in a site template.
  • After completing the xsl design for the DFWP in SPD, copy it into the Style Library (already exists in a MOSS publishing site collection, otherwise create one yourself) then all instances of the DFWP can be updated from a central location.
  • Database connections can't use integrated security. If you have MOSS, use SSO.

The only time I have to concede is for administration pages in the Layouts folder where you don't appear to be able to use web parts at all.

So developers, please consider the DFWP the next time you want to build a data bound web part. Check out John Jansen's videos on getting the most out of SharePoint Designer 2007.

Categories:SharePoint

 
Jan
18

I got access to my Office Live Workspace beta today (another distraction taking me away from SharePoint).

Here is the list of workspace templates



This is what you see after creating a Project Workspace

And this is the Participants list. Notice the Outlook and Excel integration!

It looks very good, should give the competition a run for its money...

Anyway, I got distracted, my new WSSDemo.com server has arrived and been racked up. I've taken the next few days off work to start the software install.

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Jan
17

My first week back at work and there has been so much demand that I've not been able to publish any of my recent experiments. Going back to work was such a shock that I'm taking the next off ;-)

One thing that I did want to share came about from a problem I was trying to solve with the DVWP. I was doing a CrossList query over all sites in the site collection (if you didn't know you can do this, see this blog post) and want to return list items that met a specific criteria but rather than provide a link to the item, I wanted to link to the site containing the item. I have wanted to do the same with the Content Query and Related Documents web parts but they don't support this.

In my case it was a list that exists in every site template containing key project details. The FileRef for the returned items looks like this 1;#projects/project3/lists/Project Details/1_.000

So I could use <xsl:variable name="ProjectURLtemp" select="substring-after(@FileRef, '#')"></xsl:variable>
to drop the 1;# and do a substring-before' /lists' to remove the unwanted remainder.

I also found this http://xsltsl.sourceforge.net/string.html#template.str:substring-before-last and a bunch of other useful functions you can download and use in your Data View/Form xsl.

e.g.

<xsl:variable name="ProjectURL">
  <xsl:call-template name="str:substring-before-last">
      <xsl:with-param name="text" select="$ProjectURLtemp"/>
      <xsl:with-param name="chars">/Lists</xsl:with-param>
    </xsl:call-template>
 </xsl:variable>

<a href="{$ProjectURL}"><xsl:value-of select="@Title" /></a>

Each sub site in this example has a Data View of the list being queried on the home page which also supports an edit mode. The reason I did this is that the list should only have 1 entry and if users went to the normal list view they might be tempted to create additional rows.

I'll include a screen shot of the rollup result and also describe how the document templates web part works. Every sub site displays the document templates, 30 in this case was too many to use content types, which are held in the top level site but when you click on one of then it behaves the same as a content type and knows to save the document into the current sites document library.

Categories:Personal

 
Jan
11

Just thought I would create this for anyone who doubts that it can be done. A list of most US cities and the state they are in (I can think of a few jokes here...). Over 59,000 items.

http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Large/

The state field is just a text field rather than a look up (because the source was an Excel file). The default view is grouped by State with an item limit of 100 per page.

Performance was pretty good without adding an index to the State field. After turning on the index I think it generates the page a little faster.

The nice thing about the Group By view is that it uses Ajax like functionality. This is where the index on the State field improved the performance of bringing back the cities very quickly.

From this list I plan to build some other demos that use this as lookup data.

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Jan
9

And thanks to an RSS fed of the search engine, I can render the results with the Data View web part.

http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/Channel9Screencasts.aspx

My main reason for using the Data View web part was to solve the expanding/collapsing compatibility issue for Firefox users.

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