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March 20
When is a Pivot not a Power Pivot?

When it's a Live Labs Pivot. I have created an image pivot from screen shots of more than 1,500 SharePoint powered Internet sites.

You can download Live Labs Pivot from http://getpivot.com

The SharePoint Internet sites pivot can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/b4Z8NM (130Mb Zip). After you unzip it, click on the .cxml file and you should get this…

SharePoint Internet Pivot

I plan to host this pivot in a web part once the Silverlight 4 control for this is released (as per the MIX announcement).

If you find any errors or omissions, please submit them to http://www.wssdemo.com/pages/comments.aspx

February 24
Mindjet Provides SharePoint Support

It is not clear from the feature set if they have added create/edit/save support for MindManager in SharePoint libraries but they have treated SharePoint as a data source for maps. Even a SharePoint site structure can be imported into a map. This was something that I had attempted using the MindManager xml file format and a Data View Web Part http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=438 . Their solution is much nicer…

MinManager SharePoint site map

But it costs.

Mind Manager can now link directly to SharePoint Task lists and create dashboards as well as consuming search results to provide related links in the map.

For more information, check out the product page http://www.mindjet.com/products/mindmanager-for-sharepoint/overview

February 18
SharePoint 2010 Twitter Web Part with auto refresh

Many SharePoint 2010 web parts now support Ajax features. I have used a Data View which supports this feature

to provide the Twitter web part on my home page.

The web part will update the contents every 60 seconds without refreshing the entire page.

You can download the 2010 .webpart file from here… and import it onto a page on your own server (no server access required).

February 11
Mobile Web Thumbnail Index view of SharePoint Documents

Using the Office Web Applications with a mobile device is very cool. I really like the Thumbnail Index view for browsing the pages of a large document.

There is currently a bug in Beta 2 if OWA is enable on a SharePoint 2010 server with My Sites enabled and anonymous access that causes the mobile view (e.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/m) to prompt for authentication. For wssdemo.com you can use the account corp\demouser pass@word1

The document in this demo can be seen here…

January 20
SharePoint 2010 Column Validation

A new feature in SharePoint 2010 is validation of item creation based on either individual column value validation or an overall item validation based on multiple columns.

In this post, I'm going to look specifically at the column validation option. An example of where this might be useful is for reducing automated blog comment spam. In the example below, I have added a column to my SharePoint Blog Comments list called Antispam.

At the bottom of the column create page there is a new option to define the validation formula and message to display if the validation fails. In this example I require the user to enter the 3 character abbreviation for today.

Note: Initially I tried using [Today] which is the notation for substitution in filter conditions. Thanks Chakkaradeep for reminding me of this.

When a user creates an item the validation will be checked and rejected if validation fails.

January 16
SharePoint Lookup Column vs Term Store Metadata

There are many options when it comes to applying metadata and taxonomy to SharePoint content. SharePoint 2010 introduces a new farm service to provide a centralized taxonomy that supports hierarchical terms. In 2007 we only had the choice and Lookup columns which are still available in 2010 so why would you still use the lookup column?

Figure 1: Column choices in 2010

Many people would say that you should drop the old columns from use because they can't be shared across site collection but this is not correct as they can be shared across site collections using the Content Type Hub syndication feature of the Managed Metadata Service.

Limitations on Multiple Selection

Unlike the Managed Metadata column, the Lookup field allows column filtering on a single value even if there are multiple values selected for list items. The example below shows a look-up column that has multi-selection enabled and list items that have more than one lookup value selected. Filtering the column on a single value will still display matching items that have other values also (uses "Contains").

Figure 2: Multi-select lookup column filtering

 

Unfortunately this lookup column can't be used in the new Key Filters list navigation option. This is where the Term Store based multi select column does work.

Figure 3: Multi-select Term Store column filtering

(Usability note: I think the new metadata navigation area should be at the top of the quick launch otherwise users may not notice they are available if the site has a lot of lists and libraries showing in the Quick Launch. )

 

So depending on how you want to use the metadata might determine the type of column that will work best.

January 15
SharePoint 2010 Permissions

There are several places where you can use the built in SharePoint permissions (apart from Code and Site Permission administration. I have blogged about the SPSecurityTrimmedControl and ddwrt:IfHasRights uses in 2007 but there is the new ribbon custom commands in 2010 that also make use of the SharePoint permissions. So here is an overview of how you can use these permissions in the following scenarios followed by a complete list of the permission values.

Ribbon Custom Actions

You can add these to any list or library using SharePoint Designer from the List summary page

The properties of the action allow you to specify the Rights Mask to control visibility of the action.

SPSecurityTrimmedControl Class

Conditionally renders the contents of the control to the current user only if the current user has permissions defined in the PermissionString. You can use this in your master, page layouts or web part pages.

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="" ></SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

Ddwrt xsl namespace

You can use this in the Data View web part or any other web part that is derived from this (e.g. search or content query).

<xsl:if test="ddwrt:IfHasRights(permissionMask)">
something...
</xsl:if>

SharePoint designer also makes this function available in the xpath expression builder dialog.

List of permissions and mask values:

List/document perms

Mask

ViewListItems

1

AddListItems

2

EditListItems

4

DeleteListItems

8

ApproveItems

16

OpenItems

32

ViewVersions

64

DeleteVersions

128

CancelCheckout

256

ManagePersonalViews

512

ManageLists

2,048

ViewFormPages

4,096

Web level perms

Open

65,536

ViewPages

131,072

AddAndCustomizePages

262,144

ApplyThemeAndBorder

524,288

ApplyStyleSheets

1,048,576

ViewUsageData

2,097,152

CreateSSCSite

4,194,314

ManageSubwebs

8,388,608

CreateGroups

16,777,216

ManagePermissions

33,554,432

BrowseDirectories

67,108,864

BrowseUserInfo

134,217,728

AddDelPrivateWebParts

268,435,456

UpdatePersonalWebParts

536,870,912

ManageWeb

1,073,741,824

UseRemoteAPIs

137,438,953,472

ManageAlerts

274,877,906,944

CreateAlerts

549,755,813,888

EditMyUserInfo

1,099,511,627,776

special perms

EnumeratePermissions

4,611,686,018,427,380,000

January 09
Creating a SharePoint Statement of Governance

Courtesy of the Burton Group.

Everything from maintenance to politics described as "governance", but what is it really? What is the list of topics that should go into a web statement of governance that doesn't overlap with what is already in maintenance and administrator's manuals? Burton Group to the rescue! This poster provides a handy reference on how to create a SharePoint statement of governance (SOG). It is about 2.5 by 3.5 feet when printed and is the perfect companion to our Methodologies and Best Practices document "Website Governance: Guidance for Portals, SharePoint, and Intranets".

And best of all, the poster is free for download! Just click on the link to register and then download the file. It is suitable for printing on a large format printer or just scanning online. Download Poster

January 08
SharePoint 2010 Certifications

The following certifications (According to the MS Partner web site https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40121316) should be available in June.

IT Pro

  • 70-667 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover configuration of SharePoint 2010 including deployment, upgrade, management, and operation on a server farm.
  • 70-668 PRO: SharePoint 2010, Administrator
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover advanced SharePoint 2010 topics including capacity planning, topology designing, and performance tuning.

Developer

  • 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led course designed for developers with six months or more of .NET development experience. Course covers what you need to know to be an effective member of a SharePoint development team using Visual Studio 2010.
  • 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led training course designed for development team leads who have already passed the Developing on SharePoint 2010 technical specialist exam. The course covers choosing technologies for and scoping a SharePoint project, best practices for SharePoint development, configuring a SharePoint development environment, advanced use of SharePoint developer features, and debugging of code in a SharePoint project.
January 07
SharePoint Workspace Content in Windows Desktop Search

I had always struggled to find a compelling use for Groove that related to my heavy use of structured data (Lists) but with SharePoint Workspace now supporting Windows Desktop Search, I think I have found the killer use for it (read: I'm really excited about this :-).

From Vista or Windows 7, you can add a search shortcut to the Workspace…

And then search directly from Windows Explorer…

And open an item directly from the search results…

To enable this, you need to Sync the list to a SharePoint Workspace from the List Tools ribbon as shown below.

(It would be nice if you could publish a link to initiate the creation of a workspace for a list, I suspect this uses the client OM rather than a URL Moniker. I will investigate this)

Note: if this is the first time you have used the SharePoint Workspace client there will be a few additional account setup steps.

You can then access the list data in the Workspace client.

Notes:

  • I found that I had to experiment with the list views to find one that worked well for offline use.
  • Group by views don't work as expected.
  • Can't sort or filter on columns (need to create a lot more views or export to Excel).

To create a Desktop Search shortcut, click on the Search icon in the view above, search for *, and click Save Search.

Now I have a reason to complete all the SharePoint PowerShell commands and details in this list http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/PowerShell

You should be able to grab an offline copy of this list for yourself by using the guest logon corp\demouser pass@word1 but it looks like SharePoint Workspace requires contributor rights.

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