Microsoft SharePoint 2007 - WSS and MOSS VPCs

I just discovered Microsoft provides VPC's for SharePoint evaluation. If you are a little lazy and don't already have a VPC, these maybe a good starting point:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 VHD (24 July 2007):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&DisplayLang=en

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 Developer Evaluation VPC Image (3 July 2008):
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1BEEAC6F-2EA1-4769-9948-74A74BD604FA&displaylang=en

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 - Changing service accounts and service account passwords in SharePoint

I was trying to change passwords for my VPC and I stumbled across these very nice articles.

This Microsoft KB talks about changing the service account/service account password for WSSv3 and MOSS2007:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838

Joel Oleson's article talks about some additional tips including updating Search Service credentials:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/22/712945.aspx

Microsoft CRM 4.0 - Browsing documents more effectively in Microsoft CRM 4.0

Ever thought browsing thru attachments in Microsoft CRM 4.0 was painful? You had to open the Entity window (ie. Contact/Account/Quotes...) and then go to the Notes tab, then scroll down to the attachment you need. Seems like alot of clicks to me.



Luckily, the guys at mscrm-addons.com released a tool a tool called "Document Summary". The "Document Summary" is available in the "Documents Core Pack for MS CRM 4.0", which includes a range of other tools such as WordMailMerge, SharePoint Integration, Send to PDF, and more.

I haven't used it myself yet, but I've seen the demo video. Here's how it looks like:


So far it looks pretty good. Point, click and browse. Simple, and very nicely done.

I don't work for mscrm-addons.com, so I'm not trying to sell their products.

For more information:
http://www.mscrm-addons.com/Products/AddonsforMSCRM40/DocumentsCorePack/tabid/130/Default.aspx

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 - Including/Excluding a list in the Search Index

Have the search results in your WSS/MOSS environment been ugly with all that list data? Did you want the content source to include content excluding list data?

In SharePoint, the content in each list can be configured to be included or excluded from being indexed in search crawls.

Through the SharePoint UI, this option is called "Allow items from this list to appear in search results?" and is located in the Advanced List Settings:



Through the SharePoint API, this option is exposed as a property called "NoCrawl" (for the list named "Hidden From Search List"):


SPSite site = new SPSite("http://siteurl");
SPWeb web = site.RootWeb;
SPList list = web.Lists["Hidden From Search List"];
list.NoCrawl = false;
list.Update();


After this property has been updated, the next time SharePoint Search crawls, it would skip indexing the list with a NoCrawl value of false.

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft CRM 4.0 - Custom Field Types for MS CRM 4.0

I came across a great article by Karine Bosch and Patrick Tisseghem about creating custom field types in SharePoint that exposes CRM 4.0 data via BDC. The first article includes a link to download the sample.

Here are the links:
Overview - http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/Patrick/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1789
Detailed How To - http://www.u2u.be/Res/Article.aspx?ART=CRMSharePointCustomField

The highlight here is the ability for the user to search for a CRM record (whilst checking details on the record) to attach to a SharePoint list item.

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 - Sample Event Handler to set Permissions

I recently had to dig up something I learnt in the past so, here it is - a good example posted by Ishai Sagi to show a great example for:

• Getting a list item in the event handler
• Impersonating another user totally (without using RunWithElevatedPrivilages)
• Changing permissions for an item
• Creating a new permission role in a web site
• Checking if a role exists or not

http://www.sharepoint-tips.com/2007/03/sample-event-handler-to-set-permissions.html

IIS - Web Application Proxy Settings for internet access

This post is to remind myself the configuration settings required in web.config to enable a web application to access the internet via a proxy.

Within the Configuration node in web.config for the web application...

<system.net>
       <defaultproxy>
              <proxy bypassonlocal="true" proxyaddress="http://ProxyAddress:PortNumber">
        </defaultproxy>
</system.net>