Ian Morrish - WSSDemo Blog

I have had this information spread across several lists and pages on my site for a long time so I thought I would pull it all together on a  single web part page.

I haven’t been doing much with the site as I’ve been preparing for the upgrade to the next version...

Is that dedication or what? The web cast is on Office SharePoint Designer so I couldn’t resist and didn’t want to wait for the on-demand recording.
The web cast is covering the 3 BIG WSS features activated through  OSD:

• Data Catalogue/Data Form
• Workflow Designer
• Master Page/CSS

The old Data View Web Part has been turbo-charged. It now supports editing of data rather than just read- only. Data sources can also be joined together allowing lists to be joined to other databases and a single web part view of this joined data.

One feature of the workflow designer is to create an email based on an event in a list or library and have the ability to insert data from the list into the body of the email template.

All web pages in a WSS site are based on a single master page. The default master page is rather complex but it would be possible to build a light weight, CSS based layout template.

A good Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Product Guide is available from
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/programs/designer/guide.mspx

 

Now it’s 4am and I’m going to try and get back to sleep

I know some people get very frustrated by this error when you try and add some to a SharePoint site who’s Windows account was recreated.

 

Even though you delete their old account from a SharePoint site, you can’t add them back. You need to also delete them from the “Manage Site Collection Users” which can be found at the following URL  /_layouts/1033/siteusrs.aspx

As mentioned in my last post, here are the other 2 WSH scripts I wrote for SharePoint.
They both place content into a SharePoint library and have been used in production since the beta of SharePoint 2003. Both scripts require the WebClient service to be running so that the FileSystem object UNC paths get translated to web folders automatically.

The first one copies some web cam pictures into an image library. I did it this way becase it meant that the web part page rendered all at once and if, for some reason, the web cam machine was off line there would still be an image to display.

(save as a .wsf file, schedule to run every 5 minutes using Task Scheduler)

<package>
 <job id="Job1">
  <script id="GetWlgWebCam" language="VBScript">
  On Error Resume Next
  Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  Set f2 = fso.GetFile("\\wlgwebcam\webcam\webcam.jpg")

  If Err.number = 0 Then
   f2.Copy ("\\nzportal\Image Library\wlgwebcam.jpg")
  End If
  set FSO = nothing
  </script>
 </job>
</package>

 

The 2nd script gets an RSS feed and copies it to a document library. An XML Web Part then renders it.

 

<package>
 <job id="Job1">
  <reference id="MSXML" guid="{D63E0CE2-A0A2-11D0-9C02-00C04FC99C8E}" version="2.0"/>
  <object id="XMLHTTP" progid="Microsoft.XMLHTTP"/>
  <script id="GetWebXML" language="VBScript">
  XMLHTTP.open "GET", "http://news.com.com/2547-1_3-0-20.xml", false
  XMLHTTP.send

  strRSS = XMLHTTP.responseText
  If Err.number <> 0 Then
   Wscript.Quit
  End If
  Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
  Set AFileStream = FSO.OpenTextFile("\\nzportal\Document Library\news.xml", 2, True)
  If Err.number <> 0 Then
   Wscript.Quit
  End If
  AFileStream.WriteLine strRSS
  AFileStream.close
  set FSO = nothing
  </script>
 </job>
</package>

I have been building a Project Template Site POC for a customer.  The template site includes a list which holds the key metrics about the project; Description, sponsor, budget, start time, duration, type etc. There will only ever be one item in this list but when a new site is created from the template I wanted to ensure that the mandatory fields in this list are completed before the other site features can be used.

 

The solution was to add a Data View Web Part for the list to the home page and change the functionality that detects there are no items to display with some client side javascript code to redirect the browser to the lists NewForm.aspx page.

Here is the string you should look for in the DWP code…

There are no items to show in this view of the &quot;<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:ListProperty('Title')" />&quot; list.  To create a new item, click &quot;New item&quot; above.

Replace this with

<Script language=”javascript”>window.location=”lists/ProjectDetails/NewForm.aspx”</script>

This worked surprisingly well. As soon as the site is created, the user is taken directly to a form to complete the project details. The home page can’t be seen until the record has been created.
Of course this same code could be added to a list view web part but have you seen the source code for the list view? I try and stay away from CAML, that's for people who enjoy pain and suffering (XSL is bad enough).

 

I fully expect this POC to be implemented in production as a custom site definition so there will be no ghosting issues.

 

Oh, and there are a bunch of other capabilities with this approach. Just imagine the rollup of all this info...

Yesterday I was running a workshop to build a prototype SharePoint site template for projects. This involved the client describing their business process and me translating that into a WSS site that supported the structured and unstructured information relating to a project.

What was special about this workshop is that the meeting room had a touch sensitive white board which was hooked up to the mouse input on a computer. The OHP projected onto the same white board so as I touched things on the white board, the mouse was following my finger.

People at my presentations have always found it hard to keep up with how I do things in a SharePoint demo because I tend to move the mouse and click very fast. By driving the mouse with my finger it was much easier for the users to follow how I was doing all this cool stuff with SharePoint.

Just imagine dragging a Web Part onto a page with your finger directly on the projection screen That exactly what I did.

I have to get one of these http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Products/SMART+Boards/Front+Projection/

One of the frustrating things with the WSS v2 UI was the necessity to use FrontPage 2003 to modify the quick Launch menu on the home page.

In v3 the Quick Launch is displayed on most of the site pages, not just the home page but can now be customized through the browser administration UI.

Screen shot http://www.wssdemo.com/v3/QuickLaunchAdmin.jpg

Several people have asked me how to build the solution I mentioned in a previous post so I created a small article to complete the process (this is why I don't like using blogs to publish articles).

That legacy is twofold:

SharePoint Designer enforces limitations on what a user can create, edit and customize based on the Contributor rights you grant them.
This gives you full control over:

I have some screen shots of the Contributor Task Pane, Contributor Settings and the Group Property tabs for; General, Folders, Creating Pages, Editing, Formatting, Images and SharePoint