July 13, 2009

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek !!!

Today Microsoft released some great videos highlighting the potential of the next release of SharePoint. There is some excellent material here include a full walk through showing live products in action.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/

Overview

Tom Rizzo, speaker
Robust cross browser support
AJAX calls for faster page loads
SharePoint Designer 2010 – Streamline interface, robust BDC features. No more Lightning Tool BDC Metaman?
SharePoint Workspace 2010 – Take lists and documents offline with a better than ever Groove client
BCS is the new BDC
Rich integration with Office 2010 – Sample BCS populated memo to regional sales representative.

IT Pro

Richard Riley, speaker
Professional productivity, Scalable platform, Flexible deployment
Release timeline
Central Admin cleaned interface. Similar to Control Panel in XP from Windows 2000.
Robust Logging. New dedicated database, runs BPA (Best Practice Analyzer) to give suggestions, granular detail never seen before. “Slowest Pages” insight.
Visual Upgrade. Allows site owners and users to preview before decided to switch browser interfaces.

Developer

Developer productivity, Platform services, Flexible deployment
Developer dashboard. Site feature provides browser output with detail rendering stack.
Visual Studio 2010 – MUCH improved developer experience. Detailed build options and project types.
Visual web part designer.
LINQ for SharePoint API
Client Object Model (OM) available in Silverlight and JavaScript.
Write quality solutions in less time.

July 7, 2009

Drag and drop .XML files to Excel 2007

Working with SharePoint daily I see a great deal of XML data. System configuration, user data, feature definition, list schema, usage, etc. SharePoint is a product that lives and breathes in XML format for nearly everything.

I personally find Excel 2007 very handy here.

If you didn’t know it is possible to drag a plain XML file onto a blank workbook and follow the Excel 2007 defaults to view in a grid layout (sample below). From there it’s …

Easier to read
Simple to filter and sort
Possible to create PivotTables or Charts to identify patterns

Try it out! Please leave a comment of any XML tricks you find helpful. Anybody work a lot with XML in SQL 2005 or InfoPath forms?

Import XML data (Excel – Import XML as Table)

June 18, 2009

Performance Point – Unable to Install on Domain Controller – FIXED

Today I had tried to load PPS on my handy SharePoint VM and it promptly fell on it’s face. Whoops! The workaround is very easy and came to me by looking at the Performance Point Monitoring Server install MSI (PSCSrv.msi) using the incredibly helpful Orca MSI editor tool.

Browse to the PPS install media folder
Locate the file named "PSCSrv.msi”
Open a CMD prompt window to the path in #2
Type “PSCSrv.msi SKIPREQCHECK=1” to launch the install and bypass the check
You’ll still see the error message but can click “Next” to skip and complete a full normal install
Enjoy!

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 — Monitoring Server — Failed Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003 SP1 (non domain-controller) or Windows Longhorn (non domain-controller)

June 10, 2009

URL Source= for Thank You on Submit

Many times I’ve been asked to adjust the NewForm.aspx (add record) experience for users to display a custom message after submit. A “Thank You” page for a survey is a great example. Other times in request forms people want to show a confirmation or instructions page.

Thankfully the SharePoint product team made this easy for us developers.

Action Steps

Visit the list or library you’d like to tweak
Click on New item to get to /NewForm.aspx
Take a close look at the URL and notice the word “Source=”
We’ll come back to this in a minute
To create a “ThankYou.aspx” page I like to duplicate the “DispForm.aspx” by going into SharePoint Designer

Right click Copy on DispForm.aspx
Right click and Paste
Edit the file to remove the main web part
Rename the file to “ThankYou.aspx”

Edit the part after the equals sign (=) from #3 and replace with a URL you’d like to take people to after submit

Often the destination page for #5 above doesn’t yet exist. So you’ll want to open SharePoint Designer 2007 and create a new ASPX page to hold a “Thank You” message. For this I always place the ASPX file in the same /Forms/ folder as the list I’m working on.

Why? By placing a custom ASPX in the same /Forms/ folder it will be including in any List template (.STP) creation and is easier for future admin and dev staff to locate for troubleshooting.