SharePointed

if you want to view the Web Part Page Maintenance page simply do the following:

add ?contents=1 to the site URL.

example

http://intranet/?contents=1

I recently spent a stupid amount of time looking for a list of users that have enabled their My Site.

Log into Central Administration, navigate to Application Management, under the SharePoint Site Management section click on Site collection list.

Central Administration > Application Management > Site Collection List 

On the right side of the screen you will see dropdown box for Web Application, select your My Site host. Now a list of My Sites users will be displayed.

During the past several months, we’ve seen a lot of questions about developing custom SharePoint workflows in the comments of various posts on this blog as well as in the SharePoint Workflow community forum. Many of the answers can be found in a recently published MSDN technical article written by a couple of senior consultants (Daniel Odievich and Alireza Etemad Mazaheri) in Microsoft Consulting Services. If you have any questions about developing workflows in SharePoint, please read the article first, and if you still have any questions, then post them in the forum referenced above.

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Overview

The National Native Title Tribunal of Australia assists people to resolve native title issues over land and waters. Set up under the Native Title Act 1993, the Tribunal is an Australian Commonwealth Government agency and is part of the Attorney General’s portfolio. The Tribunal needed to upgrade its website, and the Vivid Group, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was selected to develop the new website using MOSS 2007.

The Tribunal website needed to provide access to government records related to the native title process. The records have complex content types with thousands of pages based on each, and many pages also link to other images and documents that would be available to download. MOSS 2007, with its flexible support for content types and advanced web content management functionality, was a very suitable candidate for a tough job like this.

Here’s a list of the content objects and how many of each were ultimately implemented on the website:

Create a Custom Site Definition

A custom site definition was developed based on the out of the box publishing site template. The site definition referenced custom Features containing customisations developed for the website.

Develop Master Pages

One primary Master Pages was developed, which is used throughout the website. Other Master Pages were developed to provide “print friendly” views of the page and a text-mode version. These Master Pages are switched on the fly using a custom base Publishing Layout Page class, which switches the Master Page based on query string parameters. We utilized the following technical articles to develop our Master Pages:

• Adding functionalities to pages by inheriting PublishingLayoutPage
  http://blogs.msdn.com/jannemattila/archive/2007/04/14/adding-functionalities-to-pages-by-inheriting-publishingpagelayout.aspx
  
• Adding Code-Behind Files to Master Pages and Page Layouts in SharePoint Server 2007
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb986729.aspx

BlendTrans meta tags were added to the Master Page to smooth transitions between pages and reduce “refresh flicker” when browsing through the site using Internet Explorer.

<meta http-equiv=”Page-Enter” content=”blendTrans(Duration=0)” />

<meta http-equiv=”Page-Exit” content=”blendTrans(Duration=0)” />

Certain SharePoint files were also removed from the Master Pages to avoid end users downloading unnecessary JavaScript and CSS files they do not use, such as core.js. These files are required for content authors but not for the anonymous viewer of the website. Reducing the page size results in faster page load time, which is critical for visitors, who have a low bandwidth Internet connection. We utilized the following technical articles to optimize the Master Pages:

• How to Optimize a SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Site for Performance
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727371.aspx
  
• HttpContext.Current.Request.IsAuthenticated is false when the user is anonymous, so this can be used to detect and control what is sent to the browser for a Master Page.

Plan Content Types and Site Columns

Content that is stored in SharePoint Libraries or Lists can be based on Content Types and Site Columns defined at the Site Collection level. Content types and site columns can be defined and deployed via SharePoint Features. Developing with Features allows all work to be stored in a source control system like Microsoft Team Foundation Server. You also have full control over the internal name used for Site Columns, which is not provided when manually creating them on the website. We utilized the following technical articles to implement our Features for deployment:

• Creating a Custom Feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263911.aspx
  
• Creating Site Columns with Features & Creating Content Types with Features
  http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-305859.html

It took quite a while for us to work through the Content Types and Site Columns for the website, and we continued to rework them as we migrated the content across many times. We utilized the following technical articles to define our Content Types and Site Columns:

• Plan Content Types
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287765.aspx
  
• Introduction to Columns
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms450825.aspx

When planning Site Columns, it is likely that some may be common and used across many Content Types. Some columns can be based on lookup fields to SharePoint Lists, which provide a way to easily manage the values available to be selected for a column. When any new values are required, they can be added to the appropriate List and then automatically reflected in all respective Site Columns. The NNTT website required over 250 custom Site Columns to support all of the various Content Types and Page Layouts used throughout the website. All Site Columns and Content Types were deployed as Features.

We originally documented all the Content Types and Site Columns in the “requirements gathering” phase of the project into requirements documents. We then stored all Content Type and Site Column information in a custom List to help us manage the “schema definition and development” process because multiple people were doing the work over a period of a few months. We found that using a series of custom SharePoint Lists was better than tracking the entire process using Excel spreadsheets.

Plan Page Layouts

Page Layouts are page templates that are associated with a Content Type which defines the fields of information that can be stored within a Publishing Page. A Page Layout needs to handle multiple page modes — two of which are Display Mode and Edit Mode.

Display Mode: The rendered view of the page, which an anonymous visitor would see. The following screenshot shows a typical page on the website in read-only mode.

Edit Mode: The rendered view of the page, which an authenticated content author/editor would see. The following screenshot shows the same page as above but in Edit Mode with controls that allow the user to add or update data in the available Page Fields.

Lookup field controls were used heavily to simplify content authoring by controlling the values that can be set in various Page Fields. The Display and Edit modes are quite different for the website, so two sets of controls were used to render the different modes to the user. You can programmatically detect the form mode by checking the SPFormContext of the current SPContext as described in the following technical articles:

• SPFormContext - http://www.sharepointblogs.com/spsherm/archive/2007/08/29/spformcontext.aspx
  
• SPContext.Current.FormContext - http://sharepoint-sezai-moss-2007.blogspot.com/2008/02/spcontextcurrentformcontext.html

Content Migration

With a new website replacing an old one, the migration of content from the old to the new website was required. Not only did HTML/text content need to be migrated but so did hundreds of images and thousands of documents to which hyperlinks also needed to be updated to reflect their new paths in SharePoint document and picture libraries. Having gone through the migration process, we learned 3 key things:

• Data migration method depends a lot on the source system - for instance, access to an API or the source database.
  
• Migrate content into MOSS 2007 Publishing Pages if you want content authors to have the ability to edit that content in MOSS 2007.
  
• You can optionally integrate other systems via web service APIs or custom SQL Server databases.

We also learned that data migrations into a new system never worked completely the first time, resulting in the need to run migrations many times with incremental bug fixes and other adjustments until all content has been correctly migrated. There was also a need to go back and validate that the Content Types and Site Column schema of the new website has been defined correctly to accommodate the migrated data.

Website Functionality

Menu navigation, page content navigation, and search navigation were implemented with custom server controls or web parts.

Custom menus were developed with the MOSS 2007 Publishing Navigation Providers used as a data source so that the menus would be configurable via the built-in Modify Navigation feature.

Field controls were used to provide the ability to edit of page content and configure page level settings. Several Page Layouts had custom Adobe Flash Field Controls, which allowed content authors to embed Flash-based multimedia content in the pages.

Flash-based maps were developed to provide drill-down into Australian States, which also triggered contextual content searches by encoding the appropriate parameter in the search page query string.

Search was very important due to the large volume of content and the complexity of content types with many attributes per document or page. The following section provides more details on how we implemented content search.

Content Search

SharePoint’s Enterprise Search capabilities provide keyword search across many varying sources of content such as pages, documents, databases, and more. Developer documentation for SharePoint Search is well documented at:

• Querying Enterprise Search
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa981100.aspx

We used the Business Data Catalog and custom developed stored procedures to implement search against data stored in SQL Server databases. SQL Server 2005 contains an optimised function (ROW_NUMBER) for quickly returning specific pages of search results.

• ROW_NUMBER (Transact-SQL)
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186734.aspx

We used CAML queries for searching page content in various custom advanced search pages. Paging was implemented with CAML queries to optimise the performance of queries. More information on paging can be found at:

• SPListItemCollectionPosition Class (Microsoft.SharePoint)
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.splistitemcollectionposition.aspx

We controlled the number of items returned from CAML queries by specifying a number for the RowLimit property of SPQuery. SPQuery also has a ListItemCollectionPosition property that is used for controlling paging of CAML queries.

Mailing List Integration with Microsoft CRM 3.0

Microsoft CRM 3.0 was used to handle the back-end mailing list for the website. Custom CRM entities were developed to support mailing list integration with SharePoint. Custom web forms were then developed to capture information from end users to push information into CRM.

The web forms generate the XML required for InfoPath form submissions, so when a user fills out the web form, a complete InfoPath form is programmatically generated and submitted to the InfoPath form library, allowing Tribunal personnel to process and update the form using InfoPath, which provides a much richer user experience than the browser.

The Vivid Group Development Team
http://www.vividgroup.com.au

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Congrats to our comrades in the Office client product groups for living up to Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles. More details about this important announcement on Doug Mahugh’s (”Mr. Interop / OpenXML”) blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/05/21/office-support-for-document-format-standards.aspx.

<Lawrence />

It’s exciting to see customers using SharePoint for their Internet sites.  We’ve seen some great success stories and big companies choosing SharePoint for their web content management solution.  While SharePoint offers a rich set of capabilities out-of-the-box, customers want to add new functionality, customize the look and feel and add business specific logic.  This requires a deep understanding of the SharePoint web content management (WCM) capabilities.

 

I’m happy to announce that Andrew Connell, a SharePoint MVP, has written a book titled “Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007“, the first of its kind to cover design, development and deployment of SharePoint WCM solutions.  I’ve known Andrew for several years now so when he asked me to write the foreword, I said yes immediately - I knew Andrew would deliver high quality content that would benefit the SharePoint community.  He’s a well-known expert in the field and has created some great content for the community.  One of his most popular WCM blog postings is where he consolidated SharePoint WCM resources.  We will also be posting a couple chapters from the book on MSDN to give you a sneak peak!  While the book will be available shortly after this TechEd, we will have the first 1400 copies of the book at TechEd that we’ll be giving away.

 

So keep your eyes open when the book releases!  If you’re coming to TechEd, swing by the SharePoint booth for a chance to get a copy and have Andrew sign it for you!  See you at TechEd.

 

Arpan Shah

If you’re interested in becoming a (better) SharePoint developer, I’d like to call your attention to the 3 opportunities below.

Introduction to SharePoint for .NET Developers Live Webcast

In this 10 part series, you will receive practical technical information from Robert Bogue and Andrew Connell, both SharePoint MVPs, covering 10 fundamental developer topics on SharePoint via Live Meeting webcast.

About the series:

• Every Tuesday and Wednesday from May 20 to June 18
  
• Starts at 9:00AM PST
  
• Each session is 60 minutes long
  
• Level 200 with intro, demo, and coding

Register today by clicking on the registration links below. In case you miss any, each webcast will be recorded for later viewing via the same respective registration link.

SharePoint Fire Starter In-Person Event

We aim to provide you with a productive experience and turn you into a capable and confident SharePoint developer before the end of the event. We have awesome speakers from the Microsoft product groups, who will present on topics that will help you build and customize Web 2.0 style web sites with SharePoint.

When: June 11, 2008

Where: Microsoft Redmond Campus, Conference Center (Building 33) – Kodiak Room

Register now to take advantage of this special event!

Patterns & Practices for Developers and Architects

Glenn Block, Technical Product Planner in the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group, has setup a survey and wants your feedback on pain points and need for guidance. While there is already plenty of content available for SharePoint developers, what the P&P group develops and publishes is the cream of the crop. Here’s the group’s charter:

Microsoft patterns & practices was created to meet the demands of architects and application developers seeking guidance on how to apply Microsoft’s array of products and technologies to common application development scenarios and technical challenges. Microsoft patterns & practices are Microsoft’s proven recommendations for how to design, develop, deploy, and operate architecturally sound application for the Microsoft platform.

The P&P group’s new focus on creating deep and prescriptive guidance for SharePoint is further affirmation of SharePoint’s market success as an application development platform.

<Lawrence />

If you’re involved with SharePoint in some way, either as a customer or partner, I think that you’ll be excited to learn about a new program we’re announcing today called SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS). SDPS is a partner and Microsoft Consulting Services delivered offering designed to help our Software Assurance (SA) customers successfully plan and deploy SharePoint. Using field proven business and technical guidance, the program provides best practices and well defined results through 1, 3, 5, 10 or 15 day deployment planning sessions. The number of Packaged Service days that a customer can receive is determined by a combination of the number of qualifying Office licenses and the number of Core CAL (Client Access License) Suites and Enterprise CAL Suites. So, no additional investment is needed by the customer to take advantage of this tremendous program.

While the length of the deployment planning engagement will be dependent on the customer’s SA benefit level, the types of services delivered as listed below will depend on the length of  the engagement:

• A Strategy Briefing defines the vision for achieving technical and business goals and is part of all engagements,


• An Architectural Design Session introduces SharePoint technologies, solutions and concepts and is added in a 3 Day engagement,


• A Deployment Planning Session covers a specific SharePoint capability in depth and is added in a 5 Day engagement, and


• A Proof of Concept demonstrates the solution in the customer’s environment and is added in a 10 and 15 day engagement.

What is the value of SDPS to customers and partners?

For Customers

• SDPS enables customers to obtain a roadmap to understand how to effectively deploy SharePoint within their Organization and helps remove the customer perceived risk and cost of planning for a SharePoint deployment. 


• SDPS offers an engagement that is customized for each customer, addressing their specific business or technical challenges.


• SDPS enables customers to get more value out of their existing Software Assurance investment, and it’s available to them at no additional cost. 

For Partners

• Partners receive the SDPS tools, training, and support to help customers deploy SharePoint and increase their revenue in the process. 


• Microsoft pays qualified partners to deliver SDPS services.   


• Microsoft partners that currently have Competencies in Information Worker Portals and Collaboration, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), or Search specializations can now advance their skills and become certified to participate in the SDPS offering. In addition, SDPS certified partners will be able to participate in a new online community which Microsoft has established to enable collaboration and information sharing among partners on SharePoint deployment best practices. This private site gives partners an overview of the program, suggested tools for engaging with customers on SDPS, as well as examples of specific content that they will offer to customers in SDPS engagements of differing lengths.  Partners can register to be part of SDPS at http://www.microsoftSDPS.com. 

Here’s the screenshot of what a Microsoft partner would see on the SDPS Partner Center website for a 10 day engagement:

A fantastic team consisting of people from MCS and the SharePoint Product Management Group were so passionate about this new program that they dedicated many hours even in their “off time” to ensure we had the most useful best practices and other collateral for our pilot this past January as well as the full release today. I’d like to thank them (and they know who they are!) for their efforts in helping me launch this important program to customers and partners! I hope many of our customers will take advantage of this tremendous opportunity to jump start their SharePoint deployment. For more details, see the program’s FAQ at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/prodinfo/features/sdps_faq.mspx.

Deb Bannon
Senior Product Manager, Microsoft SharePoint

[A growing number of our customers has been asking for richer ways of creating blog entries to be posted to their SharePoint environment. To answer this FAQ, I’ve cross-posted below a blog entry by Mike Gannotti from several months ago. For more information about Word and Windows Live Writer, visit the Microsoft Office Word team blog and the Windows Live Writer team blog, respectively.

<Lawrence />]

I am often asked about tools for publishing to a SharePoint blog. There are two great tools that interface with SharePoint seamlessly. If you are a user of Microsoft Office Word 2007 then you have native integration with SharePoint that is simple to setup and best of all makes use of your primary publishing tool for blog publishing as well. Don’t have Word 2007? Not a problem. You can download the free Windows Live Writer tool. I have been using this versatile tool as my primary blog publishing tool as of late.

Below I have two separate videos available for viewing that demonstrate how to configure either of these tools for use against a SharePoint based blog.

• Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blog Publishing Setup
  (WMV duration 00:03:58 resolution 1024X768)
• Microsoft Live Writer Blog Publishing Setup
  (WMV duration 00:05:05 resolution 1024X768)

If you don’t have Windows Media Player (running a Mac for example) you can view a lower resolution version of the file via one of the links below.

• Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blog Publishing Setup
• Microsoft Live Writer Blog Publishing Setup

Mike Gannotti
Microsoft SharePoint Technology Specialist

Following popular demand, Kirk Stark from the SharePoint User Assistance team has created a set of useful posters that show the Stsadm command line parameters for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0.

The following files are available for download from this document library on the SharePoint Community Portal

Stsadm parameters poster for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007:

• JPG format (1,214 KB)


• PNG format (861 KB)


• Visio format (769 KB)

Stsadm parameters poster for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0:

• JPG format (944 KB)


• PNG format (719 KB)


• Visio format (578 KB)

If you prefer to see the official online reference for the Stsadm tool, go the following:

• For Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007


• For Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Lastly, Ian Morrish of Microsoft Consulting Services has posted a customized version of the Stsadm online reference that’s conveniently grouped by functional categories.

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