I’ve been working on some InfoPath forms this week in MOSS in an FBA environment and learned, when I went to deploy the forms to a production environment with an FBA zone that the username() function function does not work.  I was using it to generate unique file names.

Well, that function doesn’t work in an FBA environment (at least, not out of the box).  And, upon reflection, using username in the way I had planned wouldn’t have guaranteed a unique file name in any event.

My solution was to use the now() function and a rule that fires on loading of the form.  I assign the file name to data element when it’s blank:

The advantage of this approach is that the file name is set only once.  (I don’t show it in the screen shot, but put a condition on the rule to only fire when “myFilename” is blank).  I used to set the file name at the data source level.  Typically, I would do something (bad) like this:

The problem with that is that if user A opens the form on Monday and the user B changes it on Tuesday, you’ll end up with two different forms since two different users saved it with different user names.

So, as annoying as FBA can be in general and with InfoPath in particular, it made me re-think a small but really important technical detail and approach that I wouldn’t have done otherwise!

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint.
If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.

One of the first things I thought, once I started to play around with jQuery, was whether we could use it to secure a SharePoint view.  The answer is “no” (or at least, I’m not claiming it’s possible).  However, it is certainly possible to make it difficult for people to see a particular view. 

I started with my sandbox environment when working on this.  I wrote about that environment here: Quick and Easy: Create Your Own jQuery Sandbox for SharePoint.  

To “secure” a view, follow these steps:

1. Create a view you want to secure.  I did that and called it “Secured View”.
   
   This is what it looks like when it’s not “secured”:
   
    
   
2. Add a content editor web part to the view’s page using the trick described in the sandbox article (i.e. add “PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2” to the URL).
3. Figure out  your SharePoint _spUserId by following these crazy steps, believe or not:
   1. Log into your SharePoint environment.
   2. In the web browser’s address field, type: “javascript:alert(_spUserId”).
   3. Record the result (it’s “13” in my case).
      
      
4. Add the following javascript to your CEWP in code view:
   

   <script type="text/javascript" src="../../jQuery%20Library/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() { alert(_spUserId); var theSecuredView = $('iframe[FilterLink*=Secured%20View]'); if ((theSecuredView.length > 0) && (_spUserId == 13)) $('iframe[FilterLink*=Secured%20View]').parent().parent().parent().html("<tr bgcolor=red><td>No view for you!</td></tr>"); }); </script>

I’ve included that alert(_spUserId) line in there to demonstrate how this is not really a “securing” a view, but simply making it more difficult to see.  More on that in a moment.

Basically, jQuery is looking for an iFrame on the page who has an attribute that contains “Secured%20View” in its value.   Once it finds it, we check to see if the current user is “13”.  If it is, we walk up the DOM to a <TR> tag (which I figured out by viewing source and tracing it) and then replacing that TR tag with my message. I really don’t know how robust this is (I’m very suspicious, in fact), but it worked in my sandbox.  If I find a better way, I’ll blog about it. This is the result:

I click the OK button and the data is replaced with a big red message:

As you can tell, the way I’ve implement this “security” solution is to allow the web part to render itself.  After it finishes, I overwrite its content with my “No view for you!” message.

Despite the fact that it’s not really a “secured'” view, it’s potentially useful and with some clever work, it may eventually be securable in a more formal sense.  The fundamental issue is that the client is getting all the data and then, only after it gets the data, it wipes it out.  If the client is getting the data, a clever user can prevent the jQuery from running at all and see what he/she wants to see.

There are other drawbacks.  This “security” approach is based off a _spUserId.  We’d want to really secure based on the full SharePoint security model, or at least by user name.  That becomes progressively harder, but I see some good stuff written on this subject, so I’m hopeful there’s a good answer to that problem.

The list of views themselves should be trimmed, if possible.  I haven’t tried to figure that out.  I assume it’s possible, but doesn’t really solve the fundamental security issue because someone could still just type the URL of the view they want (if they knew it).  However, trimming makes sense.  It’s a good usability feature and it helps to obfuscate things.  If an end user doesn’t know that the view event exists, they probably won’t try to use it.  Sometimes, that’s good enough.

With luck, I’ll have more to write on this subject over time.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint.
If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.

Previously, I wrote about how to use jQuery to locate and hide a text field on a form.  I didn’t care for the specific approach (I was chaining parents – that’s simply isn’t done these days, at least in families of quality). 

When I first started to think about it, I knew I needed to find a <TR> to which I could invoke the hide() method.  My early effort to find the correct <TR> was something like this:

$('tr:has(input[title=Hide Me!])');

The problem with that is that it would find every <TR> tag that had any parent relationship to the Hide Me! field, even if Hide Me! is nested many levels deep in <TR>’s.  It turns out that on my sandbox form, that expression finds 9 different TR’s who have Hide Me! as a child somewhere in its DOM tree.  I realized that I could walk back up the tree from the input field itself, so that’s how I ended up abusing parents, but it didn’t sit well with me.

I gave some thought to this and one of the things I read finally made sense: I could use the not() method to trim out <TR>’s I don’t want in my wrapped set.  That led me to this:

$('tr:has(input[title=Hide Me!])').not('tr:has(tr)').hide();

The first bit finds all the <TR> tags that have the Hide Me! field anywhere in their own hierarchy.  It then strips out any <TR> that also have a child <TR>.  This leaves us with a single <TR> that:

1) Has no <TR> child records

2) Does have the input field as child. 

We can then apply the hide() method to the resulting set and we’re done.

I’m still a bit nervous about this, but not as nervous as chaining parents.

I don’t know if this is a best practice or not.  There may be a more appropriate way of identifying just the <TR> that we care about in a SharePoint form.  If you know, please post a comment.

</end>

This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint.
If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.

UPDATE (already!): I did think of a better way to locate the <TR> tag I want to hide and wrote about it here.  You may still find this article interesting anyway so I'm leavnig it up.

I want to hide a text field, “Hide Me!” as shown:

‘

The following jQuery does the trick for me:

<script type="text/javascript">

  $(function() {
 

    $('input[title=Hide Me!]').parent().parent().parent().hide();

  });

</script>

The code is saying, “find me all input fields whose title = Hide Me!.  Then, get its parent and then next parent and the *next* parent (phew!) and invoke the hide() method on that thing, whatever it happens to be.

I figured out that parent structure by viewing the HTML for the form that SharePoint created as shown:

<TR>
    <TD nowrap="true" valign="top" width="190px" class="ms-formlabel">
        <H3 class="ms-standardheader">
            <nobr>Hide Me!</nobr>
        </H3>
    </TD>

    <TD valign="top" class="ms-formbody" width="400px">
        <!-- FieldName="Hide Me!"
                 FieldInternalName="Hide_x0020_Me_x0021_"
                 FieldType="SPFieldText"
        -->
        <span dir="none">
            <input 
                name="ctl00$m$g_bdb23c2c_fde7_495f_8676_69714a308d8e$ctl00$ctl04$ctl02$ctl00$ctl00$ctl04$ctl00$ctl00$TextField" 
                type="text" 
                maxlength="255" 
                id="ctl00_m_g_bdb23c2c_fde7_495f_8676_69714a308d8e_ctl00_ctl04_ctl02_ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_ctl00_ctl00_TextField" 
                title="Hide Me!" 
                class="ms-long" />
                <br>
        </span>
            
            
    </TD>
</TR>

This picture shows the same, but marked up with the parents:

The first parent (1) is a span tag.  Span’s parent (2) is a TD tag and then finally we get to the real parent I want to hide (3) which is the TR tag itself.

This is a pretty terrible approach I think because it’s extremely dependent on the very specific structure of this form.  When SharePoint 2010 comes out, this whole structure could change and break this approach.  What I really want to do is craft a jQuery selector that is along the lines of “find me all the TR’s (and only TR tags) that have somewhere in their child elements an input field whose title = Hide Me!”.  I starting from the bottom and moving up.  Assuming I figure this out, I’ll post an updated “quick and easy’ post.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint.
If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.

Getting started with jQuery in SharePoint is surprisingly easy (to me).  (I do have serious questions about a “best practices” approach to deploying these things to production, but that’s for another day).  I’ve just started playing with this technology and to that end, I created a sandbox environment to use.  If you’re looking to get started with jQuery, you may find this approach useful.

1. Create a Blank Site

Create a blank site somewhere in your site and call it something clever like “jQuery Sandbox”.

2. Download jQuery

You can download the jQuery javascript library from here: http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery

Save that to to your desktop.

I have been using the “minified” version.

3. Create a SharePoint Document Library

In your sandbox site, create a document library. 

4. Upload the jQuery Library to SharePoint

Access the doc library you just created and upload the jQuery library.

5. Create a Custom SharePoint List

I’ve started with a custom list because I want to muck about with standard SharePoint forms.  You could also create a page in a pages library or web part pages and probably a lot of other places. 

Add some columns to the custom list so that you have something to run jQuery against.  My initial objectives were to:

1. Hide a field.
2. Assign a value to a field.

With that objective in mind, I added two text fields.  Over time, I’ll be playing with links, images, lookups, etc. 

6. Modify the NewForm.aspx Web Part Page and Add a Content Editor Web Part

This is a little black magic-ish , in that it’s a new concept to me.  I first learned about this from Paul Grenier, SharePoint jQuery Superstar, at his CodePlex project site: http://spff.codeplex.com/. 

Follow these steps to add a CEWP to the same page that shows NewForm.aspx for any custom list:

1. Access the custom list and click New.
2. Append the following to the URL: PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2

That will transform your boring vanilla data entry form from something like this:

To this:

Add the content editor web part to the page.

7. Write Your First jQuery Code

Open up that CEWP in the code view and add the following:

Here’s the actual code if you want to copy/paste:

<script 
    type="text/javascript" 
    src="../../jQuery%20Library/jquery-1.3.2.min.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(function() {
 
    $('#resultsID').html('There are ' + $('a').size() + ' a tags tags on this page.');

  });
</script>

Result:
<div id='resultsID'></div>
/result

Note that the first <script> tag is referencing the actual jQuery library.  Presumably, these things change over time, so you’ll want to make sure you a) use the right name and b) point it to the correct SharePoint document library.

Bask in the Glory

If you did it correctly, you’ll see a result similar to the following:

Wrapping Up

This isn’t the only way to get started, but it’s quick, easy and isolated from your existing SharePoint environment. 

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I started playing around with jQuery yesterday.  I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, ever since Paul Grenier started writing his series about jQuery for End Users at the venerable www.endusersharepoint.com web site.  As I use it, I hope to add a series of “Quick and Easy” posts like this one.  This post describes how to set a known text field’s value to anything you want.

In this scenario, I have created a custom list whose “new” form looks as shown:

This is the new form for a custom list with the default Title column and two list columns (not site columns; I don’t think it should make any difference).

The objective is to assign an arbitrary value to the field, “DefaultMeFieldNoSpaces” (you can tell I’m a bit of a coward with the “no spaces” thing going on, but I do spice it up at the end of this article).

This bit of jQuery worked for me:

<script type="text/javascript">

  $(function() {
 
    $('input[title=DefaultMeFieldNoSpaces]').attr(
        {value: 'You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.'});

  });

</script>

As I understand it this bit of jQuery is saying, “find me any input tag whose title = DefaultMeFieldNoSpaces.  Then, set all of their values to a famous phrase from an old computer game.”

Since there will only be one field on the form with a title equal to “DefaultMeFieldNoSpaces” we are assured of assigning a value to that field and no other.

What about a field whose name has spaces in it?  It’s nearly the same:

<script type="text/javascript">

  $(function() {
     $('input[title=Assign Field With Space]').attr(
        {value: 'You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.'});

  });

</script>

I think this is a fairly safe approach, meaning that we should be able to find the field that we want and only the field we want.  If you look at the HTML SharePoint is giving us, it’s sort of messy:

<input
   name="ctl00$m$g_bdb23c2c_fde7_495f_8676_69714a308d8e$ctl00$ctl04$ctl02$ctl00$ctl00$ctl04$ctl00$ctl00$TextField" 
   type="text" 
   maxlength="255"
   id="ctl00_m_g_bdb23c2c_fde7_495f_8676_69714a308d8e_ctl00_ctl04_ctl02_ctl00_ctl00_ctl04_ctl00_ctl00_TextField" 
   title="DefaultMeFieldNoSpaces" 
   class="ms-long" 
/>

“title” stands out as a recognizable and hopefully unique attribute to help us identify the specific column to which we want to assign our arbitrary value.

This is a foundational concept.  Setting a field in an arbitrary way like this isn’t going to win any awards.  However, if we want to do more interesting form level stuff (which all of us always want to do, of course, right after we finish washing the dishes), like change the value of “field b” automatically based on the value of “field a”, we (I) need to learn these things.

I think our best chance to get a real useful value here is via the title, at least for text fields.  There may be a better, more reliable approach.  If I find it, I’ll update this post.  If you know a better way, please leave a comment.</end>

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

[Note: I want to straight away say that I have a financial interest in the desired outcome of this demonstration, which I mention in the interest of full disclosure, etc.  This is actually the first time I’ve ever blogged about an event where I stand to benefit personally in this way.]

This web demonstration takes place Thursday, 06/04 at 12:30 EDT, ending at 1:30PM EDT.

In cooperation with my excellent business partner, Integrated Systems and Services Group (ISSG), I have been working to develop a vertical business application using SharePoint as the platform.  In this case, we’re building an application that serves the needs of manufacturers that make customized product for their customers.  In these cases, a great deal of collaboration needs to take place between the customer and the manufacturer.  There’s also a great deal of collaboration required between different groups within the manufacturer, including sales, engineering, research and development, legal and other groups.

The demo is going to show an application that facilitates that kind of collaboration, along with a discussion on how all of those collaboration bits need to integrate with a backend ERP system.

Lastly, this isn’t going to be a SharePoint demo.  This is a demonstration of a solution for a specific niche problem that happens to use SharePoint as the platform.

So, why would you bother to sign up and see this demo?  I don’t expect too many readers of my blog to be all that interested in a solution for make-to-order manufacturers :)  Your take-away would be the concept itself – using SharePoint purely to deliver a business solution without regard to SharePoint itself.

If you’re interested, please sign up here(https://www323.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=skmqfwbr5smmlx20).

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

My latest article is up at www.EndUserSharePoint.com.  I wrote about SharePoint Designer, End Users and the outline of a strategy that End Users might try and follow in order to demonstrate competence and build trust around this tool.

The comments are more interesting than the article itself.

Check it out.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I have been following MSDN forums for well over a year (and possibly almost 2 years at this point) and every now and then I hear from someone how “hard” it is to do that.  I find it quite easy and thought I’d share my “technique”.  This technique also works for www.endusersharepoint.com (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP).

Taking MSDN as an example, I first go to standard forum page such as the General Questions for SharePoint main page here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/threads

You should right away notice that the forums are RSS enabled, as shown:

I’ve been using Google Reader for managing my RSS feeds for a long time now (www.google.com/reader).  I go there, add the RSS feed for the forum and now I’m getting all new forums posts via RSS.  My Google feeds for SharePoint forums look like this:

Google provides me a nice view of the posting itself:

And finally, Google lets me use the keyboard to scroll through the postings in the forums this way.

I can quickly scan through posts and focus just on those I feel I can make a useful contribution.

Alerts close the loop.  Updates to posts don’t come through RSS (though I think they used to a long time ago).  However, if I post a response to a forum posting, the forums alert me via email and IM that someone responded in turn.  Or, if I can’t make a useful contribution but I want to know what others have to say, I can drill into it and explicitly request alerts when others do respond.

In an hour or less you can set this process up and and in a week of regular use, learn the various keyboard tricks and shortcuts so that this becomes second nature.

I use the exact same technique for End User SharePoint.Com’s “Stump the Panel” forums.  This is their RSS feed: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP/rss/.

Forums are an awesome way, possibly the best way short of direct personal experience, of learning the product and getting a nice survey of how the world, at large, uses SharePoint.  Give it a try!

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I’ve reorganized my life a bit and found some time to submit an article to www.endusersharepoint.com.  My latest article is up here: Use Custom Lists for More Effective Workflow Auditing (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1658).

This is the opening ‘graph:

SharePoint Designer workflow doesn’t give us a lot of visibility into what’s happening with our workflow solutions.  And, the visibility that we do get is hampered by a relatively poor interface and 60 day time window.  This 60 day window can be a major disappointment to new SharePoint Designer users because it’s not advertised by the tool itself.  It’s not at all uncommon for someone to fire up SharePoint Designer, create a workflow solution that leverages the “Log To History List” action…

The problem is that after 60 days, any messages that you create this way are deleted from the workflow history list!  After a bit of teeth gnashing and “what were they thinking?” arguments, the bottom line is this: it happens and it needs to happen.  The question is, how can we get around it?

The official answer is to rely upon SharePoint’s built-in auditing feature.  From an end user’s point of view, however, that’s very weak in WSS and not much better in MOSS.  Fortunately, we can still leverage the familiar SharePoint Designer tool to create a durable workflow history and audit trail which is an order of magnitude more useful to boot.  Here’s how.

I describe how to create a more friendly and useful audit solution for declarative workflow created in SPD. 

I was inspired to write this article from a recent project for a client that had developed nine technical SPD workflows in support of one logical business process.  Assuming for now that nine is a reasonable number, it was certainly a challenge to debug it or view the overall status of the process in one simple view.  Each of these separate technical workflows has its own independent workflow history list and that’s just not manageable.  I was able to combine all of them into a single audit list using the technique I describe on the site.

Check it out.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Today, I’ve been working in an environment that uses a Bamboo calendar web part for some improved collaboration.  This a standard medium/small farm with two load balanced WFEs, a “application server” for indexing and InfoPath and a clustered SQL back end.

The client installed some disaster recovery software onto one of the WFEs and that resulted in a broken WFE for a specific site in the site collection.  Whenever load balancing pointed at the affected WFE and that site, users saw a largely blank white screen with the sentence “An unexpected error occurred”.  No other info showed, just that sentence.

They asked me to look at it.  I easily reproduced the problem and then added a ?contents=1 to the end of the URL.  This is how I learned they were using the Bamboo web part.  I went back to the page and now, suddenly, it showed me a nice orderly error message:

I don’t know what was happening or what I did to get the controlled error message to display other than appending the ?contents=1 bit of the query string. 

This is probably a very rare edge case but if you get that message, “An unexpected error occurred” go ahead and add ?contents=1 to the query string and see where that leads.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I picked windows live spaces back in July of 2007 as my blogging platform.  For the most part, I don’t have any regrets and Microsoft certainly extends it over time (though I mainly find out about new features by accident).

My biggest complaint right now is blog spam.  This person / account (http://cid-82b0534bceed9881.profile.live.com/) (among others) frequently adds a lot of spam comments to my blog in the form of comments.  MSFT added a nice feature to show “recent comments” so at least I can fairly quickly identify them (whereas before, I had to go into each blog entry separately) and clean them up.  It’s still time consuming.

I wish that:

1. MSFT would put some better filtering for spam.
2. That I could block specific people from adding comments.
3. Failing the above, I could more easily identify and delete spam.  Right now, I need to do it comment by comment and it’s slow, especially when some spam robot person/program adds 25 to 50 comments in one session.

If you’re a windows live user and have some useful tricks to share, I’d be grateful.

</endGripe>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I returned from Washington DC yesterday after attending the latest SharePoint Saturday.  What a remarkable event!  Continuing the tradition of other SP Saturday’s, it was very well run.  The environment, the overall organization, the flow, vendor area, food … all of it was terrific.

Of course, the best part is the content and I don’t think anyone was disappointed.

It’s really quite amazing to me how so many people are rousing themselves out of bed early on a Saturday to go and listen to people talk about SharePoint for 8 hours :)  Amazing.

Odds are, there’s a SharePoint Saturday event coming your way and if there isn’t, why don’t you start one?

I presented at the conference with the tongue twisting title, “Using the SharePoint Platform to Build Vertical Business Applications.”  You can get the presentation here: https://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public.  It’s not my usual sort of presentation and I had fun with it.  I’ll be giving this again in June at the North VA user group conference at the end of June.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

The reason we spend so much time (or should, anyway) working out governance plans is because we want the SharePoint solution to be as effective as possible.  We want good infrastructure and rules to keep it humming and safe in case of disaster.  We want good security processes to both properly secure the environment but also make it reasonable to manage.  We want a good information architecture that will stand the test of time, ideally managing to survive a major organizational change in the company. 

To achieve that desirable objective, a governance document and plan can devolve into a bunch of “thou shall” and “thou shall not’s”, as in:

• Thou shall not create SharePoint security group; use AD instead.
• Thou shall not create folders in document libraries; use content types and views instead.
• Thou shall create all document content types based off a specific custom base type.
• Thou shall not create an information taxonomy based off today’s company org chart.

“Thou shall” and “thou shall not” certainly have their place in the governance plan.

A more successful governance plan will also have a strong marketing angle.  It should sell and justify itself to the maximum extent possible.  A truly successful governance plan relies upon the voluntary cooperation of all SharePoint users.  (There are fringe cases where community cooperation is not needed, such as when SharePoint is used by a very small number of tightly managed users; I’m sure you can think of others).  If the user community doesn’t buy into your governance plan then it will be partially successful at best.

I use that word “buy” deliberately.  The community will buy the governance plan if it’s fundamentally sound and you go to some effort to sell them on it.  Selling leads to marketing and that’s why I think that a governance plan should be considered a marketing plan too.  Convince your end users that they need to follow the governance plan and they will voluntarily follow it.  If you can get a critical mass of people following the governance plan then the plan’s benefits follow and you’ll have a stronger environment for it.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Bottom line: if you want to use a profile property in a rule for creating audiences, the property must be visible to “everyone.”

I was working with a co-worker yesterday and he was building out a MOSS audience based on a custom user profile property in MOSS.  In this case, the audience property is named “SITECD” and by convention, stores a 3 character code. He had defined the audience and a rule that said that if “SITECD equals ‘ABG’”, then include that user profile in the audience.

He set up a single user profile with that value and compiled the audience, but MOSS simply wouldn’t add that user.  I noticed that the privacy setting for that profile was set to “me only” (the most restrictive form) and I remembered reading somewhere that property profiles used in rules must be visible by “everyone”.  He made that change and that solved the problem.

The really funny thing about this is that I “remembered” reading about this.  It was nagging at me this morning for some reason and I realized that I had written a chapter in this book, MOSS Explained: An Information Worker's Deep Dive into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and that I covered this point in the very chapter I wrote :).  I would have thought that every word I wrote in that chapter would be seared into my memory.

Matt Morse writes this up in beautiful detail here and I referenced it in the chapter: http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/morse_matt/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=50

</end>Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I could write on at great length about MSDN forums, etiquette, naming conventions, search, etc.  I may do that, in fact.  I wanted to point out a small thing which may help people have a better overall experience.

I’ve lately been telling people that if you run into some kind of problem with your SharePoint environment, development project or other SharePoint related activity, post a question to the forums earlier in your action chain rather than later.  I know for myself that when I have a problem, a number of potential solutions present themselves right away.  I order these potential solutions in terms of likelihood, applicability and how easy they are to investigate.  I go through that list and by the time I’ve gotten to #10, I’m making registry changes to a key “/foo/bar/almostThere/isThisIt/noThisIsNotIt/iCantBelieveIAmDoingThis/finallyThere!” on the advice of a blog found on page 8 of a Google search.  When that doesn’t work, I finally post a question to MSDN (e.g. here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/threads).

I suggest that you reverse that approach.  Post the forums much earlier in your investigation because:

• It’s free to you anyway.
• There’s no guaranteed SLA (of which I’m aware, at least).
• Therefore, it can take a long time for people to respond.
• People often do respond eventually.
• If you wait until 2 or 3 days after the problem first surfaced, you’re frantic for a response and forums are not a good place for emergency help (unless you’re lucky).

So, basically, it’s easy and free and you have a good shot at getting some kind of answer, but it will take a while to get that answer (again, unless you’re lucky).

I used to think that I should hold off on looking for community help because I don’t want to waste someone’s time asking for help when I could find it out myself.  Some forum moderators and active participants may feel that way, but I don’t (at least, I don’t feel that way any more).  I don’t see any downside.  The worst case is that you post a question and then answer it yourself some time later, possibly “wasting” some one’s time.  I don’t see a big risk in that and there’s value in the researching of questions like that in any event.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I started to work with Microsoft’s Small Business Productivity Online Suite several months ago, but now I have some better reason to be using it. 

I’m still working my way around it, so I may be getting some of the terminology wrong, but basically there are two major interfaces: the administration center and the services themselves.

The system was telling me that I had to change my password, so I went ahead and did that.  That allowed me to proceed and work with the services part (SharePoint, email, and live meeting).  However, when I went to the administration screen, it wouldn’t let me in by telling me that it didn’t believe my password was correct.

The behavior was a little odd.  If I entered the password I *thought* it should be, it would blank out the userid and the password and tell me the password or userid was incorrect.  If I entered a blatantly wrong password, it would tell me the same, but keep the user ID field intact.

I’ve been playing around with this for a little while and finally called (yes, on a Sunday morning).  Incredibly, a fellow, Ben, answered the phone right away.  And, I didn’t have to enter a credit card.

Long story short, the administration center password uses different password rules than the services password.  Admin password must contain alpha, numeric and special characters.  When I changed my admin password the first time, I didn’t follow that rule (nor did it warn me!).  I was able to change it to a valid administration password and got back in.

If you experience that kind of problem in future, you know what worked for me and hopefully it will work for you.

</end>Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Ever since I heard a quote, reportedly during a Q&A session with Steve Ballmer in March 2007, I’ve sort of been holding my breath for something to happen.  The quote was basically this: “SharePoint is an operating system for business applications.”  Knowing a fair bit about SharePoint and a middling bit about operating systems, I thought it was really apt.  I’m holding my breath, waiting for companies to really buy into that concept and start to build applications within the SharePoint “operating system.” 

I’ve devoted a lot of thought to this subject this year (going back to my 2009 predictions) and I’m going to speak on this at the May 2nd SharePoint Saturday event in Washington.

This is my presentation’s abstract, entitled “Using the SharePoint Platform to Build Vertical Business Applications”:

“Horizontal?” “Vertical?” What do these words mean in a SharePoint context?  SharePoint, as we often hear, is a “platform” for building applications. This fact is often lost on us since the so-called horizontal platform features, such as document management and search, are so easy and useful in and of themselves.  However, SharePoint is even more powerful and will return greater value when used to create vertical applications tailored to meet your business’ day to day requirements. This session describes how to assemble platform features into a verticalized solution using a real world business example – a sales quote management process and customer gateway. The speaker’s goal is to open your eyes to the possibilities of the SharePoint platform and to leverage its horizontal platform features to create specialized business solutions for your vertical organization.

If that subject doesn’t float your boat, there are a bunch of other good topics.  And DC is a great venue in and of itself to visit.

Registration opens this Thursday, 04/16.  Keep on top of the site and grab a seat before it’s too late :)

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

This time last week, I was in Montreal, attending the highly recommended SharePoint Summit 2009.  I gave a 3.5 hour tutorial on installing and customizing SharePoint.  It was a scary subject on many levels.  I’m not really a SharePoint admin, but I know enough to give a tutorial on the subject. (Thankfully, Geoff Schaller from Software Objectives in Australia, among a few others, was in the crowd to answer some of the deeper questions [I don’t know what they put in the water down there, but we need some of it here in the U.S.]). 

But, back to many levels of scariness…  It had a lot of potential to be very boring.  I actually installed WSS and then upgraded it to MOSS.  In front of a room full of people.  Canadian poeple.  There were long 5 and 7 minute gaps where we were watching the installation process chug along.  I needed to fill that time with something useful and interesting.  I’m not sure I succeeded.

Finally, it was loooong.   Three and one half hours.  That’s a long presentation.   I made a little joke of it, saying “We have a long presentation ahead of us.  Three and one half hours.  That’s 210 minutes.  And I don’t even know how many minutes that is in Canadian.”

Everyone laughed and as a result, Montreal is officially on my Good Places list :)

Even if they hadn’t laughed at my joke, I would love Montreal.  I try very hard to be open minded and not take my cues from South Park, but I admit, to my chagrin, that I had no idea how great is the metropolis of Montreal.  I can’t wait to go back in a few months, when it’s a little warmer, to visit again.

On a sort of related note, I also sat through Erik Swenson’s first public presentation entitled “IA and Branding Process: Sketches to Wireframes to Hi-Fidelity Designs.” (Erik is my EMC colleague).  Check out the abstract here: http://www.sharepointsummit2009.com/conference_day2.htm.  I even recorded it for for him.  I tried several times for some “action shots” and zoomed in on him when he paused to drink some water.  I didn’t always succeed, but I tried :)

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

I’ve been working with SharePoint SSO and learning as I go.  One way in which this works is that you tell SharePoint about external applications.  Users log into that application via some SharePoint function (e.g. iView web part).  The first time the user performs this action, it prompts them for the correct user id and password to use for that system.  It’s setting up a mapping between your SharePoint credentials and your credentials for that backend system.  Thereafter, the user won’t have to enter their ID when they hit up that system.

That part worked well for me.  However, it begs the question, “how does the user change that user id or password?”  The user might have made a mistake, or maybe you’re doing some testing in a dev environment and need to quickly switch between accounts.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that you can go into Central Administration and manage the user’s credentials:

Central Administration –> Operations –> Manage Single Sign-On –> Manage Account Information for an Enterprise Application Definition

From there, you can specify the external application (e.g. SAP) and the account you want to delete.  You can also change the mapping.

If you know how to allow end users to directly change their credentials, kindly post a comment :)

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin