Tech-Ed Australia 2008

If you are going to Tech-Ed in Sydney this week, you can catch a few very interesting SharePoint/Search sessions:

• OFC315 - Why Findability Should Be an Organising Principle for Your SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment. Presented by Ivan Wilson (SharePoint Gurus) and Ben Curry (MindSharp)
• OFC301 - Form Processes in Minutes, not Months. Presented by Ivan Wilson (SharePoint Gurus) and Ben Walters (SDM).
• MVP307 – SharePoint Monitoring – How to measure the success of your SharePoint implementation. Presented by Ivan Wilson (SharePoint Gurus)
• OFC302 Stop Searching... Find it! With Microsoft Enterprise Search. Presented by Gayan Peiris (Microsoft)
• OFC405 Creating Solutions with the Business Data Catalog. Presented by Ishai Sagi (Unique World)

Also another interesting one with Silverlight and SharePoint:

• OFC303 Enhance the SharePoint User Interface with Silverlight 2.0. Presented by William Cornwill and Craig Harrowfield

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>

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Saving a Site as a Site Template

There's a page in SharePoint that allows you to save a Site directly as a Site Template to the Site Templates Gallery. The URL is http://(sharepoint site)/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx

Apparently, there is no link in the settings page to this url in SharePoint.

With this, you can customise a site, and then save it as a template for future use. This serves as an alternative to using the stsadm backup and restore command.

Here's a screenshot of what the page looks like.

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 - SharePoint Branding Tool v1.7.0 (Custom tool for themes, masterpages, site logos...)

This is an update for this article.

I've been quiet busy recently but I was still able to squeeze some time into improving this tool. I can't think of anymore to improve on without over-doing it. That being said, feel free to send me a post on my blog for suggestions. I hope it will be a useful tool.

You can get the tool at codeplex

http://www.codeplex.com/BrandingTool.

Here is the readme:

SharePoint Branding Tool v1.7.0 Released

This tool can be used apply the following actions for multiple Site Collections, and Child Sites:

-modify Themes,
-modify MasterUrl (Master Page),
-modify CustomMasterUrl (System Master Page),
-modify SiteLogoUrl (Site Logo),
-modify SiteLogoDescription (Site Logo Alternative Text),
-modify AlternateCssUrl (Custom CSS Style Sheet)
-view various properties of sites and themes at a glance

Selection of sites can be filtered by the Site Template used.

In this version I have made the following enhancements from feedback:
-UI Improvement: Less intrusive messages
-UI Improvements: Status Strip for operation reporting, etc
-Different SharePoint language version support (Dynamic install path support - for Spanish support)
-Improved error message reporting
-Improved operation reporting
-Configuration file support


And here are some screen shots of the new app:






Remember the tool not only does the job using the SharePoint Object Model, but it also allows you to do it through the SharePoint UI:


You can get the tool at codeplex

http://www.codeplex.com/BrandingTool.