Sydney SharePoint User Group, Jan 2009

If you are in Sydney this Tuesday (20 Jan 2009) then drop into the SharePoint User Group session being held in the city at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts on Pitt Street.

This month, K2 will be showing off their blackpearl workflow solution. Unfortunatly I won't be able to make it, as I am stuck on a beach in south Sri Lanka. Not to worry, Brad Saide will be hosting the night's proceedings

Improving MOSS Search Accessibility

At one of my clients, we were looking at improving the accessibility of their intranet for sight impaired users. This was my first opportunity to work with someone that uses a text-to-speech and Braille reader as their only way of browsing a site. If you pardon the pun, this was eye-opening. It's fine to think about accessibility based on reading whitepapers or blog posts, it's quite another matter to watch a sight impaired user navigate through an intranet and try to make sense of it. One thing that we quickly learnt is that any content that describes the location of an item purely based on visual indicators is not enough (e.g. "just click on the blue button")

One area that we were able to improve quickly was in the search results. Our accessibility reviewer mentioned that it would be easier to jump between each search result if they were wrapped up in H3 tags. No problem – we had this implemented that afternoon. This required modifying a property in the Search Results web part:

1. Perform a search within your MOSS intranet so that you can get to the search results page
   
2. Within Search Results, select Site Actions – Edit Page. This will allow you to make changes to the web parts on the search results page
   
3. On the Search Core Results web part, select Edit – Modify Shared Web Part
   
4. Within the web part properties click on the XSL Editor... button under the Data View Properties section
   

This is the XML transformation code that is applied to our search results. It allows us to control exactly how they are formatted.

The section that you want to change begins with <xsl:template match="Result">. This controls the HTML written out for each search result. You need to put a <H3> tag immediately before the <span class="srch-Icon"> element and the closing </H3> tag immediately after the closing </span> tag for <span class="srch-Title">

You probably will also want to adjust the formatting of these H3 elements, as by default, they are rather large, and there is too much spacing between the search result title and the other details. The easiest way to do this is to apply an inline style to your H3 element. This is what mine looks like:

<H3 style="margin-bottom:0px; font-size:100%;">

Once you have completed your changes, don't forget to publish the updated page.

You can download a copy of my modified Data View XSL Property from here

Sydney User Group meeting – November 18th

If you have been working with SharePoint for some time, there is a good chance that you have one of Michael Noel's books on your shelf. He's the author of SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, SharePoint 2003 Unleashed as well as a number of Microsoft whitepapers. You might have caught one of his presentations at this year's Tech-Ed in Australia. Well, he's back – and for one day only. He's going to be presenting at the Sydney SharePoint User Group this month on one of his favourite topics – virtualisation and how it applies to your SharePoint environment.

The session will be held on Tuesday, November 18^th. Normally the User Group meetings are held in the evening, but this one is going to be a lunch-time session. We will be commencing the presentation at 12:30 and expect to wrap up the Q&A session by 2pm. The venue remains the same – Sydney Mechanics School of Arts at 280 Pitt Street in the CBD (close to Town Hall or Museum stations).

To read more and register your interest in attending, go to www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney

 

MVP Again

OK – this news is a bit stale now, but heck I thought I'd post anyway. I have been awarded SharePoint MVP status for another year! Well done to me. This will be my third year as a SharePoint MVP. This is particularly exciting with the next release of SharePoint on its way. I just need to find some spare time to devote to learning about the latest gizmos and widgets in vNext once those betas come out. Considering there is still so much in the current release that I'd like to know more about, I'm getting a bit worried about brain overload.

Remember the movie "The Matrix" – that cable they had that you could plug into the back of your head to download new info? I need to get me one of them.

MOSS Solution Day – Advanced Portals and Collaboration

I'm back in the classroom again next month delivering a one day training session for Microsoft called "MOSS Solution Day – Advanced Portals and Collaboration". This is going to be in Melbourne on Tuesday October 14^th and in Sydney on (updated) November 10th

These sessions are targeted at Solution Architects that already have experience with SharePoint but want to deepen their knowledge in the Portals and Collaboration components. If you'd like to register for either of these sessions, pop along to the Microsoft site at https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=523428&linvitation.

Tech-Ed 2008 Workflow Presentation

Whew, Tech-Ed Australia is finally over for another year. Boy, that was a hectic week. I came that close to winning a HP tablet pc in the Ask the Experts competition, did three presentations, and met up with a whole bunch of people.

I promised to post a link to my presentation on my blog. So firstly, here is the Form Processes in Minutes not Months     session that I co-presented with Ben Walters of SDM.

This session looked at building an InfoPath 2007 browser based form, and creating a SharePoint Designer workflow to process the request.

For a useful series of videos on how to build SharePoint Designer workflows, check out:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102564171033.aspx

For additional custom workflow actions that you can add to your SharePoint Designer workflows check out:
http://www.codeplex.com/SPDActivities

 

Tech-Ed Australia 2008 – I’ll be presenting

If you are going to Tech-Ed in Sydney this week, you can catch me presenting at one of three different sessions:

• OFC315 - Why Findability Should Be an Organising Principle for Your SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment. Presenting with Ben Curry from MindSharp
  
• OFC301 - Form Processes in Minutes, not Months. Presenting with Ben Walters from SDM.
  
• MVP307 – SharePoint Monitoring – How to measure the success of your SharePoint implementation. This one is all by myself
  

I'm looking forward to the event and getting to meet some people I haven't seen in a while.

Converting Word docs to the Sony eBook format

Hi, my name is Ivan and I'm a gadgetholic. It's been 15 days since my last gadget purchase. Of course, I'll argue that each one of those purchases represents an enhanced quality of life, a way to streamline my day-to-day activities, thus freeing me up to...well, go out and buy more gadgets I guess.

Take this one time earlier this year when I was in the United States. I happened to be passing the Fry's electronics store in Seattle, so I popped in for a browse. I left with the Sony electronic book reader. It's beautiful – it uses one of those special e-ink screens that looks almost like paper. It only uses power when changing the page, so battery life is very good (7,500 page turns in theory). My reasoning was that I have so much reading to catch up on, and this is a lot faster to "boot up" compared to my laptop.

The reader is capable of displaying PDF documents, the only problem is that scales them to fit it's screen size. So a document laid out for A4 doesn't look so good on the reader. I really wanted to catch up on all those SharePoint white papers and articles that I haven't had time to read, so I needed to figure out an easy solution for putting them on the Sony.

So I've put together a Word macro. This reformats a document to match the Sony screen size, adjusting both page dimensions and margins. I also adjust the dimensions of any images in the document so that they fit the page, its crude, but seems to work. Once it has been resized, I can save it as a PDF document and download it to the Sony reader. This also works for web articles – copy/paste to Word and run the macro.

I'm currently reading "The 01100 step programme to reducing technological dependencies".

You can download the macro code here

Filtering Calendar List Web Part Entries

Not sure if this is a well known fact, but thought I'd post about it anyway. When you add a web part for a WSS 3.0 Calendar list onto a web part page, the default view automatically filters items to only show those with an end date great than or equal to today, and a start date that is less than 2 years from the current date. The time value is not used for filtering these items.

This means that all current and future events that start within 2 years will be shown.

Also, the description will be truncated after approximately the first 255 characters. Truncation will happen at the end of a word, not half way through one.

If you don't want to show 2 years worth of future events, you can use the following technique to reduce the time span:

1. Add a new calculated column to your calendar list called Start Advertising.
   
2. Set the formula to "=[Start Time] – 60". Change the number of days to whatever you want to use. In this case I'm saying that I want see events that are starting in less than 60 days from now.
   
3. Set the data type for the formula result to Date and Time
   
4. Update the Calendar web part – Edit the current view
   
5. Add a filter for the Start Advertising field "is less than" [today]

Central Administration Regional Settings

Ever noticed that the timestamps within Central Administration are in US Date format? If you think in months, days and years, that's OK. But for the rest of us it can be a little confusing. Has it really been 4 months since the Usage Analysis timer job ran? Why would the last backup have occurred on the 13^th month of the year? And unless you live around GMT -08:00, you may also scratch your head at the times that SharePoint displays.

To banish this confusion, just change the Regional Settings within Central Administration. This is normally a piece of cake: Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Regional Settings. The problem is, the Regional Settings link doesn't appear in Central Administration. If you are feeling adventurous, you can access the settings page by going to /_layouts/regionalsetng.aspx on your Central Administration site.

Maybe there are a number of people taking care of the Central Administration site, and you are scattered across multiple time zones. Not to worry, to change just your own regional settings, go to /_layouts/regionalsetng.aspx?Type=User in Central Administration.

ISPA – Doing it for the community

The SharePoint Community around the world is made up of a lot of passionate, hard-working people. I've been lucky enough to meet my fair share of these people over the years. One of the most visible signs of this community are the various User Groups focussed on the SharePoint platform. Here in Australia you can find one in most State capitals at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au.

Well, now there is a world-wide group set up to support and share experiences between these User Groups – the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA). This will help strengthen and grow the existing groups here in Australia, and help any new SharePoint User Groups get up and running.

If you'd like to read more about this organisation, drop by their website at http://www.sharepointpros.org. As a User Group leader, I'm looking forward to sharing experiences with others and learning what else we can do for our members. I've also signed up as an ISPA Regional Evangelist. This means that I'm making myself available to anyone out there interested in setting up a new SharePoint focused user group within Australia. Thankfully, I'm not the only one – Ed Richards in Melbourne and Ivan Brebner in Brisbane are also ISPA Regional Evangelists – it is a rather large country after all. I have yet to find out whether we get any badges or hats.

Moving Site Collections between Databases

Microsoft has recently released an update to the Central Administration site that makes it easy to move a Site Collection between different Content Databases. The Batch Site Manager can be very handy if you need to break up your content across multiple Content Databases – possibly sitting on different SQL Servers. The same tool also allows you to lock and delete site collections:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508852(TechNet.10).aspx

An RSS feed for a View

One of my clients came across this neat trick while we were figuring out the easiest way to extract an XML representation of some list data. The default URL for the RSS feed on a list is in the format:

http://<ServerName>/<SitePath>/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=<guid>

Where <guid> is a unique identifier for the list or library that you are interested in. How do you find this value? Easy – if you access the site settings page for the list, you will see the appropriate value in the web address in your web browser.

Our issue was that this didn't return the set of records that we wanted. The client noticed some other URLs that I was using (based on using the owssvr.dll url protocol) had a View parameter, so he added it to the ListFeed.aspx link – and it worked!

So you can target a specific view in the list to get your RSS feed from. This makes your URL format:

http://<ServerName>/<SitePath>/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=<guid>&View=<guid>

Now, to get the unique identifier for the View, just go to the Settings page for the list and click on the name of the View. The web address displayed in your browser will include the View property. Copy and paste the whole address line into Notepad to extract the appropriate value – it's messy trying to do this directly on the browser address line.

Breaking Point

I'm just back from the Sydney SharePoint User Group session where I presented on how our company uses WSS to run the business. I showed how we do everything from invoicing, timesheeting, expense tracking and project management from within WSS. Particularly when it came to the financial tracking aspects, a common refrain was "Why Bother"? There are so many off-the-shelf packages that do this for you, why would you try building it yourself within WSS?

The answer is that we wanted to see if WSS could handle this. We wanted to know what the pain points are in trying to do this in a real-world scenario, using ourselves as the lab rats. Most of the time we are advising clients how they should be using SharePoint, but we never have to use those systems day-in-day-out. We felt that the experience we would gain from immersing ourselves in the product would stand to us when working with clients.

So what has it been like using WSS as a financial accounting system? Well, we like it, but we are biased. There are some elements that are clunky, but we hope to automate these in the near future. Granted, right now our requirements are relatively simple. This was another point that came up during the session – what happens when we reach "breaking point"?

I find this question particularly interesting. Quite a few people felt that as our business (hopefully) grows, we will reach a point where our WSS financial system will fall apart. I don't disagree. I'm not sure what that breaking-point is, but I think finding it will be a very valuable lesson. I think the biggest danger is that we won't recognize when we have reached that point and will continue this "experiment" beyond its best-before date.

Right now this lab-rat needs to get back into the maze and find out if anyone has moved my cheese.

Inside the Russian Dolls

The Sydney SharePoint User Group is having its July meeting on Tuesday the 15^th. In addition to a Heroes Demo contest (details here), I'm going to be presenting on how our company has used Windows SharePoint Services.

When we set up SharePoint Gurus last year, we decided to try to run the whole business on WSS. This is a bit extreme, but we wanted to see what worked, what didn't – how far could we push the platform. So at the July User Group session I'll be demonstrating how we use SharePoint and discussing the benefits and pains.

If you are in town, come along to the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts at 280 Pitt Street. Doors open at 5:30pm and presentations begin at 17:45. For more information see www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney.

CodePlex Project to create Sub Folders

I've just published a new CodePlex project. This is a utility application to create sub folders each month in a document library. You can schedule this to run each month against a particular document library. It will create a top-level folder with a name like YYYY-MM where YYYY is the current year and MM is the month (e.g. 2008-07). The year and month are based on the current date.

The application then reads an XML file to determine what subfolder structure to create underneath the Year-Month folder. This can include any number of folders and subfolders. You can also specify custom security for a particular folder. Here is an example of the contents within the XML file

<folders>

<folder name="Music">

<permissions>

<security
account="domain\my user name" access="contribute" />

<security
account="domain\group name" access="read" />

</permissions>

<folder
name="Favourites" />

<folder name="Classics"/>

</folder>

<folder name="Pictures">

<permissions>

<security
account="domain\my user name" access="design" />

</permissions>

</folder>

<folder
name="Videos" />

</folders>

 

I'm interested to hear if others find this useful and whether people have suggestions on how the application can be improved. The project is available at http://www.codeplex.com/WSSCreateFolders. Check out the other SharePoint related CodePlex projects – there is some fantastic stuff available here

New Microsoft White Paper – Data Protection and Recovery for MOSS

Microsoft has just released a new White Paper on data protection and recovery for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It's available here. This is a great guide on the various options for recovering content within your environment.

I was lucky enough to be able to review this during its final draft stages, which has earned me a mention on the acknowledgements section. Fame at last! Any errors or omissions in the white paper are the fault of the other reviewers.

June 08 Sydney User Group

The Sydney SharePoint User Group is on the move. We are now located at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (SMSA) at 280 Pitt Street. Map and details available from the User Group site.

The SMSA recently turned 175, which is pretty old for an Australian instituation. The SharePoint User Group is a young whipper-snapper in comparision, at almost 3 years old (our third birthday is on July 15th).

Still, I bet the SMSA doesn't have their whole back-catalogue of powerpoint presentations available online, now do they?

The SMSA's slogan is "Making a Difference through Learning". So I think we will feel right at home there.

Our first presenter at our Pitt Street location will be Alistair Speirs from Microsoft. His topic -

The Collaboration Spectrum: when should you use SharePoint, Groove, email or just pick up the phone?

Want to hear more? Come along to 280 Pitt Street at 5:30pm on Tuesday June 17th. Looking forward to seeing you.

For an e-mail update on the user group is meeting, sign up here, or subscribe to our RSS feed

While you are there - have a look at the new home page for the SharePoint Australian User Groups - what do you think?

Now available on video

The Sydney SharePoint Forum was held in Sydney on May 6^th. You can now watch videos of some of the presentations from the event site. Go to the Resources page and click the View link for the relevant presentation. My session with Allyson Skene is here – Find it faster with MOSS 2007 Search. It's true what they say about the camera adding ten pounds – I'm much slimmer in real life.

Tag – you’re it!

I was putting together an ASP.net page that was retrieving information from a database. This page is going to be indexed by SharePoint. So to make sure that the search experience could be as good as possible, I wanted to make sure that the page includes useful metadata tags.

While trying to figure out the best way of setting the metadata, I came across the HtmlMeta class. This allows you to programmatically add your meta tags to your content:

HtmlMeta metaTag = new
HtmlMeta();

HtmlHead head = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;

metaTag.Name = "DC.Title";

metaTag.Content = "Tag – you're it";

head.Controls.Add(metaTag);

 

Neat, huh?