Colligo: SharePoint Unplugged

One of the bigger issues with SharePoint is how to make it available to offline or remote users, such as frequent business travellers. There are many vendors working in this space including iOra (now Infonic) and Syntergy, and tools such as Groove are also very useful for this kind of requirement.

One vendor I've heard good things about is Colligo. Colligo has a product that presents SharePoint sites in a seamless online/offline manner so users don't need retraining.

This morning I decided to download the Colligo Reader. It provides a one-way sync from a SharePoint site to a computer or laptop, and is free for non-commercial use. It works for Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and 3.0 sites, for SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Colligo requires a .NET framework client install on the destination computer, and uses the SharePoint web services so it will be fully supportive of any upgrades and does not require any additional components or installs on servers or any other kind of tinkering.

Downloading it required a quick and painless sign-up at Colligo's website, and then a small install process taking only 30 seconds. Following that I had to quickly activate the program over the internet and I was off and running.

The user interface is spartan and SharePoint-like: this is a good thing as such a tool should be simple and effective at displaying and managing the site content rather than tossing up lots of bells and whistles. The SharePoint look-and-feel is also a must as it makes the whole experience seamless to end users. Here's a screenshot of the basic interface.

 

To create a sync to a SharePoint site, I used a personal WSS 2.0 site I've had for a few years. In the top left-hand side of the screen I selected the "Site" dropdown and clicked "Download Site". This popped up a very simple box that asked for the URL and the security credentials.

In only a few seconds I was connected and presented with the names of all the SharePoint lists in the site. Next to each was a checkbox so I could choose to synchronize with them. Having selected them all, it began to download the contents:

Sync options include sync'ing a particular site, sync'ing multiple sites, and sync'ing everything. At the bottom of the screen is a "Sync Issues" panel that helps manage any items that failed.

Following the successful download, I was able to read all the content on my WSS 2 website. Each list showed the appropriate views and metadata columns. Filter and sorting were enabled to help manage the content display. On the left hand side the Quicklaunch menu items were all present and there was breadcrumb navigation at the top of each list.

One thing I didn't see (at least in the Reader version) was a search functionality. This would have been very useful. One of my main criticisms of Groove is that its lack of search makes it virtually impossible to find offline content once you have a lot of content and folders. Although Colligo Reader does a much better job at presenting and organizing content (due to its SharePoint nature) search is a must-have in any offline synchronization tool.

Security is applied to the site and list content according to the credentials used to access the site. At least in the Reader version this means no switching between various user accounts for different permissions. Frankly I doubt anyone using the Reader would want to do that - that tends to be an administrator / developer activity. For the purposes of such a tool it only makes sense to manage the content using one set of credentials so I don't regard this as a drawback.

You can download Colligo Reader at their website. http://www.colligo.com/products/sharepoint/reader_how_it_works.asp. In addition to the Reader, there is a two-way Contributor version that allows offline modification of SharePoint lists. This is obviously the real value-add for Colligo. According to their website, pricing for this varies depending on the flavour of Contributor you buy - there are versions that integrate with Outlook and others that work on  PocketPCs.

All in all I was favourably impressed with the Colligo Reader - it is simple and intuitive and functioned exactly as I expected, and I plan to use it in the future.

Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint

The Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint is being released by Microsoft to make it easy for SharePoint developers to figure out how to embed Silverlight in their portals. The link to the blueprint site is here: http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/. It contains a variety of examples of how Silverlight code might be used with SharePoint.

Although it's still embryonic, there's definitely a lot of potential here. Of the examples, the ones that jumped out at me were the Content Types (you can have dynamic sliders for example) and the video How To, which would be useful for user self-training. The examples that made the most sense were video- or picture-related since this obviously plays to Silverlight's strengths.

Some of the examples seem like a fair amount of effort to duplicate functionality that works perfectly fine out of the box. What may be a more compelling use for this kind of graphical technology (Silverlight or, say, WPF) is building a completely immersive interface and only using SharePoint behind the scenes as a (hidden) repository and framework.

Anyone who wants to play around with Silverlight can get free hosting at Microsoft's site, Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/streaming.aspx).

MOSS: Microsoft Online SharePoint Server

Awhile ago I blogged about the experiment Microsoft was making providing SharePoint managed services to some of its biggest clients, what I called "SharePoint + Services". I guess the verdict was favourable - Bill Gates recently announced SharePoint Online.

The announcement took place on March 3 at the SharePoint Conference in Seattle. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/03/02/don-t-miss-the-announcements-by-bill-gates-to-kick-off-the-sharepoint-conference.aspx

Some key features include a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%, the regular out of the box SharePoint functionality, Microsoft Forefront AV scanning, SSL access, and (in the case of the dedicated environment) a data trust to the clients' Active Directory to allow AD integration. Templates will likely include the Fantastic 40 and each user gets 100MB of storage standard.

From an auditing perspective Microsoft offers the following:

• Sarbanes-Oxley self assessment and external audit support
• SAS 70 Type II self assessment and external audit support
• Security assessments
• Intrusion monitoring and detection

The auditing is a good way of reassuring nervous customers that hosting in the clouds won't present any legal threats.

I rushed to sign up for the beta but this is currently only available to some US-based customers. After a few months of beta testing hopefully they will release to the global market.

It remains to be seen what the pricing structure will be (Microsoft suggests they will follow the regular Software-as a Service model of "pay per user per month").

For small and medium organizations online SharePoint hosting may be very tempting as they will forego the complexity of planning, configuring and managing SharePoint in their environment and concentrate on using it. Larger organizations may be better placed / more interested in managing their own systems, or (depending on the price) may find it too expensive when scaled to thousands of users.

Current MOSS managed service providers include WebCentral in Australia, eMantra, and Altus in Canada and the United States.

Data In, Data Out

An important emerging web development initiative concerns "data portability", or how openly and transparently a website or application consumes and provides data. In a world of mashups, web services, and walled gardens like Facebook or MySpace, it is becoming an increasing concern for a variety of reasons.

To begin with, users want to know that the information they enter into a website is theirs to manage, share, and remove over time.  This matters for convenience (so they don't have to reenter it all the time) but also from a privacy perspective.

A famous recent example saw Robert Scoble temporarily banned from Facebook for breaking its terms of use by running a script to access his social graph (contacts). This focused a great deal of attention and debate on who "owns" this sort of information - the person entering the data, the website that hosts it, or the individuals whose information is being stored.

Developers also care about this as we are all tired of reinventing the  wheel every time we want to share data with another application. A major consequence of the recent wave of web development trends is the increasing importance of application integration and data integration standards. These days, "No Web App Is An Island".

To help address these needs, a community is coalescing under the banner of the DataPortability Group. Their website is located at http://www.dataportability.org/ and discusses the issues in detail. They define portability as

both physically moving data or simply porting the context in which the data is used

Their effort involves identifying and evangelizing existing data portability standards, rather than creating new ones. They also hope to encourage a trust framework that will benefit vendors and consumers.

The rapid adoption of this initiative shows how quickly things move in the IT world, if proof were needed. The project was first founded on October 11, 2007, and is already gaining a great deal of steam. The website has an interesting timeline showing how quickly support is building: http://groups.google.com/group/dataportability-public/web/buzz . 

Some recent events of note included Google, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Six Apart and Facebook joining the workgroup; Google, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign joining the OpenID Foundation board; and MySpace launching its Open Developer Platform.

Obviously most of the activity is driven by the Social websites as they have the most to win / lose. Issues of personal privacy and trust are crucial to their continued popularity (the Facebook Beacon PR disaster is a prime example of this). 

Nonetheless, I imagine within a few years every major Software vendor will have the DataPortability-compliant tickbox in their sales material, or their shareholders will demand to know why not. Case in point: Blogger, owned by Google, now supports OpenIDs on its blogs (such as this one), and Yahoo users can use their Yahoo! accounts as OpenIDs.

Interestingly enough, some of the standards the DataPortability group advocates are the ones that might lead to the long-envisioned semantic web - namely microformats, which can potentially add machine-readable "context" to data.

It's an interesting space to explore, and I plan to blog about it as I learn more.

Starlight Day SharePoint Site

Starlight Day is an annual event when volunteers from across Australia donate their time and money to give sick children a wish. This year Dimension Data Australia worked with Starlight Children's Foundation to create a new public Internet site that would allow the Foundation to sign up and track volunteers, as well as modify content on the fly, rather than going through the existing manual and laborious process.

For the last few months I've watched my colleagues working hard to create a MOSS Internet with some custom application development and last week their efforts were rewarded when the site launched. I thought it would be nice to profile the site as another example of what can be done in a short time frame with SharePoint, and to identify the challenges that they overcame.

The Solution

MOSS 2007 was used with the Internet Connector License to allow content updates by Starlight staff. In addition, a custom volunteer roster system allowed visitors to find and sign up for Starlight Day activities based on a postal code.

The Team

In alphabetical order, the Microsoft Solutions - Application Integration team members who worked on Starlight Day are:

• Slava Gorbunov (Roster custom web development)
• Hatim Hamid (Quality Assurance)
• Marianne Hidalgo (Quality Assurance)
• Abdul Khan (Deployment)
• David Langeder (Practice Manager)
• David Marsh (Deployment and web development)
• Karina Smith (Visual Design and Information Architecture)
• Viraf Wadia (Project leader)

Viraf: “I was responsible [for] delivering the project...It has been a fantastic achievement from the team. Makes me feel proud in helping Starlight achieve their goal of having an internally hosted internet site that they can manage from a content and branding perspective”

Hatim: "Basically, I have been testing, testing and more testing. Specifically, I have been [testing] the Starlight Day Roster...The other thing I have been doing is some performance testing."

David Marsh: "It went well - I could have made more structure and process around the deployment strategy. The best part was seeing the final design come together using all the WCM features."

The Challenges

Essentially Starlight Day presented the familiar challenges of any custom web application and website launch:

• Coming up with the Visual Design and site architecture
• Content development
• Coding and refactoring
• Deployment and change management
• Bug, integration, and performance testing
• Project management
• Timeframe: The entire project including planning, infrastructure, installation, customization, content delivery, and live deployment fell within a 3-month window.

Development

The idea was to use as much "out-of-the-box" as possible. The customizations were broadly limited to:

• Preventing core.js from loading for anonymous users
• Creating rotating list of images using Summary Links Web Part and JavaScript
• Preloading image scripts
• Storing images in separate libraries
• The Volunteer Roster was the most significant development piece

The team had to quickly come up with functional requirements to identify precisely how the process would work. The requirements had to be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". Then visual design had to commence to identify what pages were required and what the flow was like. At this point coding began in earnest using .NET 3.0.

Deployment

Deployment was carried out using SharePoint's Feature and Solutions model with some batch files to automate. The team used STSDev from CodePlex to help manage features and solutions. Content was updated live by Starlight's staff while work was still underway, so coordination and communication was critical.

They did a content migration using WCM instead of a database migration (using attach and reattach). David Marsh suggests that might have been better because some things in content migration didn't work such as some pages became corrupted and some options in SharePoint no longer worked since they were referencing the old development server's URL. Fixing this required some manual tweaking. In hindsight he suggested they needed to plan for more time to fully integrate roster functionality into SharePoint (via custom web part or as ASPX pages).

Bug Testing

Not all URLs were fixed up automatically during the migration to production. Database migration would have fixed this. The design layout and content needed to be tested in all browsers. Not surprisingly, older browsers had issues with the CSS - not a SharePoint issue, rather CSS-related.

Key Learnings

• More prototyping is required up front to verify and validate design concepts. This de-risks the project and nails down task deliverable times
• Plan deployment earlier - document and test each type of deployment
• Never underestimate the time it takes to test and deploy
• Use enough environments to adequately develop, integrate, test, and manage content approval and staging

Starlight Day is May 2, 2008. You can view the live site at http://www.starlightday.org.au/. The custom roster page is at http://www.starlightday.org.au/StarlightDay/GetInvolved/Volunteering/Pages/VolunteerForStarlightDay.aspx. Congratulations to the team for a job very well done!

Microsoft Developer Roadmap Documentation

On Saturday Microsoft released documentation outlining step-by-step roadmaps for some common SharePoint tasks. So far these include the following activities:

• Setting up SharePoint servers
• Deploying code and customizations
• Creating sites and subsites
• Page designs
• Document management
• InfoPath forms
• workflows
• Business Intelligence
• Records Management

Each section is a detailed, matter-of-fact outline of the tasks that should be undertaken and the order in which they should occur. The sections frequently reference content which already exists on MSDN, Technet, Microsoft team blogs or third party bloggers.

The SharePoint team hopes to fine-tune the content over time if the community marks these sections as helpful or submits suggestions or comments on them.

Full details are at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/01/25/announcing-design-and-build-sites-for-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx and the documentation itself can be found at the Technet site at http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/df6a8515-f49a-4792-8d51-dec4648415541033.mspx?mfr=true

So far in the last year we've seen the release of a mass of content, ranging from

• Microsoft's Interactive Development Map WPF desktop tool;
• End user training via desktop install or the SharePoint Learning Kit;
• SharePointPedia;
• The SharePoint and WSS SDKs;
• this latest MSDN and Technet documentation;
• and of course a multitude of blogs.

It's a full-time job to keep up on the platform, but I guess it keeps us out of trouble!

Anonymously Searching User Profiles in MOSS

I had a requirement the other day to enable anonymous access on an internal portal and allow users to search across the user profile database - to create what was essentially a corporate directory.

The anonymous "core requirement" was to ensure users didn't have to log in when trying to look up their colleagues (they are using the dreaded Novell e-Directory which does not play nicely with SharePoint). Anyway this time the issue wasn't importing the e-Directory accounts but rather a 401 - Unauthorized error that kept appearing when trying to view the people results.

I tried the following things:

• I enabled Anonymous access first on the Search Centre lists and libraries and eventually on the entire site collection
• I added IUSR as a member of Intranet Viewers and made sure that in the policy permissions for anonymous users they had a limited read policy setup
• I tried to add IUSR_ to the SSP Settings - "Process Accounts with access to this SSP"
• I manually turned on anonymous access to some of the individual mysite site collections that I was trying to view
• I modified the My Site settings in the SSP to allow IUSR to be part of the default readers group and for any existing My Sites. Then I had to go to that My Sites collection and give READ permissions directly to the IUSR account
• I created a custom permission level called "Anonymous View" in the site collection, added View Application Pages, View Items, View Pages, and Open permissions. Then I added the anonymous view permission in the "Intranet Visitors" group to ensure they could get these extra permissions.

Nothing worked. If I tried getting results back directly from the People Search page, the 401 error would instantly appear. For some reason though I could perform a user profile search if I used the regular All Items search with the People scope. However when clicking on the results the 401 error would subsequently appear.

The conclusion: anonymously accessing user profile data does not seem to be supported out of the box. I suppose some custom code might fix this but my goal was to adhere to the vanilla SharePoint as much as possible.

This issue seems to be by design - the user profile data includes colleague information, social relevance algorithms, and organizational hierarchies. None of that information would pertain to the anonymous user account. Additionally, the actual user profile data may be considered sensitive.

Has anyone else come across this limitation, and if so how did you resolve it please?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

2007 is almost over, and I hope it's been productive, successful, and happy for you. Best wishes for a great holiday season, and good luck in 2008!

Cheers,

Nick

Multilingual MOSS

I investigated MOSS variants briefly in the Beta days but the language packs weren't out so I never had a chance to really play with them, until today.

I'm still learning about the feature set but I hope these instructions will help other people who need to setup or manage multilingual SharePoint portals.

Installing SharePoint Language Packs

To install the MOSS language kits:

1. Change the Regional settings of your Web Front End, Query, and Index servers to support the additional languages by going to Control Panel > Regional and Language Option and adding the languages you intend to support.
2. Download the MOSS language packs (make sure you pick the correct language from the drop-down list first!). The URL is http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2447426b-8689-4768-bff0-cbb511599a45&DisplayLang=en
3. Install this on your MOSS server.
4. The installation, when complete, will prompt you to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard. Do not change any of the settings and click "Do not disconnect from this server farm" if you see that option.
5. All languages are installed in \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\template\[number of the language, eg 1033 is English)

Testing The Variants

To test the variants functionality I have installed the French language pack and set up variants for English (Canada) and French (Canada).

1. In your portal create a new site using the Publishing or Publishing Site with Workflow site template
2. Go to the site collection and in Site Actions > All Site Settings, click "Variations"
3. Browse to your publishing site (normally this will probably be your root publishing site, but this could be anywhere in your site collection). Leave the defaults and click OK.
4. Go back to Site Actions > All Site Settings and click Variation Labels
5. Create a variant label called en-CA and make it the source. Choose Publishing Site with Workflow.
6. Create a new variant label called fr-CA, with display of French (Canada) and culture French (Canada).
7. Go back to the list of labels (you should see both) and click "Create Hierarchies".
8. Now the hierarchy will be set so en-CA is our source and fr-CA is our target.

Now we need to start modifying content and seeing how the variants work in practice.

1. In Central Admin, there is a Variations Propagate Page Job Definition and Variations Propagate Site Job Definition that will run to publish any changes.
2. Go to the publishing source site and edit some content and publish it with approval. A reminder will tell you to check for unpublished items, if you forget.
3. After the content is published and approved, and the variation job has kicked in (usually a minute or two) the content will appear in your variant sites. You will still have to modify, translate, and approve those as normal.

Browser settings

When you visit a variant site in MOSS, the browser will try to default to your preferred language if it can detect it. You can experiment by adding a new French (France) (FR) variant  label  (in addition to the French (Canada) one) and then  adding French (France) and French (Canada) (FR-CA) to your internet browser's languages list.

Browsing to the root translation site will cause it to pick which label to use - if I put the France language first in my browser list of preferred languages, it will bypass the FR-CA site and show me the FR variant instead.

Gotchas

1. If you create subsites, they have to be publishing sites to preserve this language ability. If you make a team subsite for instance it won't handle the variants for you.
2. If you add new language labels later on, you have to create hierarchies again.
3. If you add a new language variant, it doesn't seem to pick up the existing content, so you might have to "force" the update by modifying the source content again, even if it's just to update it with no changes - so if you are going to use variants plan ahead and try not to add language packs over time!
4. If you update the source content, it seems to overwrite the target translations (although a version will be saved for them). This is a big GOTCHA!
5. The use of publishing approval workflows is a very good idea because this kind of content translation usually requires some level of publishing oversight. However if you're testing variants in development it can involve a lot of clicking and approving, and sometimes it's easy to forget to approve content.

Are any of you using this in production? What do you like about the system, what gotchas have you found, what tips and tricks have you come up with?

"Our World" - Free Environmental Site Templates

I thought it might be fun to create an environmental initiatives site template for MOSS 2007. The goal is to help organizations track the impact their policies have on the environment, in the hope of raising awareness around ecological issues.

I've tried to stay away from the political aspects of this kind of effort. There are links to several national environmental organizations, an RSS subscription to World Wildlife Foundation, and a link to a carbon footprint calculator, but I left out anything I thought might be too regional or controversial.

I've included an Excel spreadsheet I created asking some general questions about an organization's environmental policies. It's the standard 1 to 5, Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree questionnaire format, and no it's not very scientific!

There are also a handful of nature images in the picture library - you are free to use those inside your portal.

I started with a blank site definition and used as many MOSS web parts as I could. There are two versions of the site templates: the first is for MOSS Standard license and contains the basic site, called "Our World". Feel free to change the site template name if you find it too cheezy :)

The Enterprise License version includes a child site called the Environmental Initiatives Dashboard. It's got KPIs mapped to the questions in the Excel spreadsheet.

• To download the Standard .stp file contained in a zip file, click here. It is 4.8 megs.
• To download the Enterprise version, I've created a zip file  containing 2 site templates (5 megs). First install the OurWorldEnterprise.stp file into your portal. Then under it, create a subsite with a url of "dashboard" (otherwise the links won't work). Pick the OurWorldDashboardEnterprise.stp site template and you should be good to go.

SharePoint's so easy to customize that the total effort was only a couple of hours, including all content generation. This is only a starting point - I would really love to hear from you about the site templates, especially if

1. You are using them,
2. You are making improvements to them, and / or
3. You have other ideas on what can be done to them

Oh, last but not least - these site templates are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0. This means that you can use the template for business purposes (although you can't sell it), but you can only redistribute the template or derivative works under the same license terms. So you are pretty much free to modify and share as you like!

Enjoy!

SharePoint Service Pack 1 Released

SharePoint Service Pack 1 was released yesterday.

Joel Oleson has a detailed post on the update at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/sharepointteamblog/~3/198847357/announcing-the-release-of-wss-3-0-sp1-and-office-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx.

Joel mentions that a special page has been created on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb735839.aspx to help people evaluate and apply the service pack. He encourages everyone to look before they leap when it comes to applying the service pack.

The SP download is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9EC51594-992C-4165-A997-25DA01F388F5&displaylang=en

Quick and Dirty Web Parts

SharePoint is a joy for Rapid Application Development and prototyping. It's great fun to sit with clients and run up site hierarchy or document taxonomy on the fly, in response to their direct feedback.

When it comes to any custom development, there is a bit more heavy lifting - especially if there's a requirement for custom web parts. This starts to involve Code Access Security, custom control lifecycles, and change management.

What if you just want to do some RAD custom development?

There are some nifty shortcuts to help with web part prototyping. First of all, the SmartPart and Son of SmartPart are wonderful little controls created by Jan Tielens. They make it easy to create custom user controls with full design support and then make those work in a SharePoint context.

In a similar vein, MOSS includes the very useful Page Viewer Web Part. This is available right out of the box with no assembly required. Follow the steps of this example to use it with very little effort:

1. Create a basic web page, Default.aspx with the following script:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="CustomSharePointWebApp._Default" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
    <title>Untitled Page</title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        <asp:TextBox ID="Field1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
        <asp:Button ID="SubmitButton" runat="server" Text="Button" />
        <asp:Label ID="ResultLabel" runat="server" ></asp:Label></div>
        <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="Field1RequiredFieldValidator" ControlToValidate="Field1" ErrorMessage="Field 1 cannot be empty" runat="server"></asp:RequiredFieldValidator>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

2. Use the following code for the code-behind:

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Collections;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

namespace CustomSharePointWebApp
{
    public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (Page.IsPostBack)
            {
                ResultLabel.Text = Field1.Text;
            }
        }
    }
}

3. Now right-click the project file in the Solution Explorer and click "Publish". For target location, enter the full path to the _layouts folder as well as the name for your custom app, ie:

http://[Your Sharepoint Portal]/_layouts/[Your web app name]/

This will automatically migrate the code and create a folder in the _layouts directory.

4. Now create a test team site somewhere on your portal. Add a Page Viewer Web Part to the page, and point its link to your application's default.aspx page.

5. You should now see your application appearing in the team site, with full SharePoint context, Master Page, and site hierarchy. Notice that in the example we created, the default.aspx application lifecycle is handled completely outside of SharePoint. By deploying it in the _layouts folder we can lstill everage the SharePoint user context if we need to (for security trimming, user profile information and the like).

Happy prototyping!

Caution: The Page Viewer Web Part uses iFrames, which present some potential security concerns, such as cross-site scripting attacks. iFrames are probably safest if hosted internally; don't deploy these to public-facing sites unless you've closely examined the security implications!

SharePoint Kits

There's some cool pre-Christmas SharePoint gifts here or almost here:

First off, SharePoint Service Pack 1 is on the way. There are some new stsadm commands, a rollup of the various hotfixes that have come out, and support for creating custom web parts with the AJAX toolkit.

The SharePoint Team Blog dives into all the details at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/11/29/preview-into-wss-3-0-sp1-and-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx.

Just released is the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint from HiSoftware and Microsoft. I've blogged about this in the past and it will be important to many organizations that have been unable or unwilling to consider MOSS for public portals due to accessibility requirements. It's available on CodePlex. The nice touch with this kit is that it is intended to incorporate community contributions (as you'd expect on CodePlex) so the kit will improve as people contribute to it. The full details are at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/11/28/announcing-the-accessibility-kit-for-sharepoint-aks-1-0.aspx.

Finally, if you work with Business Objects, you'll be pleased to know they just released a free integration kit for SharePoint called the "BusinessObjects Enterprise XI R2 SharePoint 2007 Portal Integration Kit" (or BO E XI R2 SP 2007 PIK for short). You can download that here (5 mb zip file). The kit includes document and list view web parts to help create dashboards.

Each of these releases opens up worlds of development possibilities. The depth of SharePoint's integration capabilities continues to increase, and this is just Year One!

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Release

This week Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

Over the past month I've been running the Beta 2 in the Virtual PC Microsoft provided. This was an excellent way to evaluate the beta version since it isolated the code from my laptop - making it easy to remove now that I can upgrade to the RTM. I love this approach and hope to see more of it for CTP and Beta releases.

I remember upgrading from Visual Studio 2003 to Whidbey was a frustrating experience since there were a lot of incompatibilities due to the underlying changes in the .NET framework - particularly the change from the code-behind to the code-beside model. This time, the upgrade tool didn't seem to have too much to do. The code I was running in Beta 2 happily migrated to RTM without any problems, which was a nice little bonus. In fact I've always found the Visual Studio betas to be exceptional stable and this doesn't seem to have changed.

New Language Features

.NET Framework 3.5 introduces many new language features. These are powerful but sometimes a little hard to grasp. LINQ is probably the most significant change but it builds on existing .NET 2.0 functionality including Generics, as well as new language additions such as Lambda expressions and anonymous types.

Extension methods allow you to add static methods to add functionality to existing classes. This may be most useful when you need to add functionality to a library you can reference but not change (such as to someone else's code, or the .NET framework itself). Use with caution as extension methods are not a substitute for proper software architecture.

There are some nice new bits of syntactic sugar. One of these is Automatic Properties. Rather than creating member variables for parameters, I can now create parameters that look like this:

public String FirstName { get; set; }

public Int32 Age { get; set; }

Object and Collection initializers also make it easy to create and assign properties all on the same line.

Visual Studio 2008 and Training Kit

Visual Studio IDE itself doesn't seem to have changed too much. One nice new feature is the ability to target multiple version of the .NET framework within a solution. I used this to switch a couple of libraries in my custom framework to use framework 3.5 features (such as LINQ), while the rest of my class libraries stayed at 3.0.

Many of the changes in the studio target web development, which suits me fine. The split-pane window is a nice way of viewing the code and design views at the same time. CSS support is improved in the GUI by visually showcasing inheritance rules. The AJAX toolkit is included by default, as are WCF and Workflow templates (including SharePoint workflows, hooray!).

Testing is facilitated using Microsoft's MSTest framework which is now available with the Professional version (before it was only available with Team Studio). The online community is keener on MbUnit or Nunit but there's no harm in having a third option that's built-in.

There is a wonderful Visual Studio 2008 RTM Training Kit which provides tutorials and videos to help get users up to speed. From the kit's installed home page:

[The Training Kit] contains a full 5-days of technical content including 20hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos.   The technologies covered in the kit include:  LINQ, C# 3.0, VB 9, WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server.

Five full days of technical content? Better crack open that case of Jolt cola! The kit is publicly available at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397.

"Paying Off Debt"

There is an interesting article on eWeek about Microsoft "paying off its debt". Soma Somasegar who is the corporate VP of the Microsoft Developer Division explains how he shut down all engineering on Visual Studio for four months and set everybody concentrating on removing as many bugs as possible.

Following this period, known as "MQ" or Milestone Quality, each feature team was limited to a certain number of outstanding bugs at one time. These actions, referred to as an "engineering investment", resulted in an increase in quality in the product. In fact the Visual Studio team won an internal engineering award from Bill Gates for this effort.

It's an interesting insight into Microsoft's development efforts. Presumably this work will also really pay off for future release of Visual Studio.

What's Next?

Speaking of which, now that the current version is RTM, it's time to look ahead again. Programmers are never satisfied! The Visual Studios "futures" roadmap is posted at

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/de-de/teamsystem/bb407307.aspx.

Rosario is the upcoming Team Edition version and will be next on the block.

As well, Microsoft will be providing a window into the .NET Framework source code within a few weeks. This will prove helpful in debugging, especially with lower-level coding. Scott Guthrie explains exactly how this will work. Currently this sort of framework-spelunking is usually done with Lutz Roeder's Reflector.

The Visual Studio 2008 website is located at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/default.aspx.

SharePointPedia Is Live

The Microsoft SharePoint group has launched SharePointPedia, which is intended to be a community site for sharing knowledge around SharePoint. Although the name might imply a Wikipedia style wiki collaboration system, the site is really an easy way to link to, find, and rate articles that exist elsewhere on the net. As the site itself says:

SharePointPedia is not a wiki. It’s a “pedia” in the sense of being a compendium of useful content, but rather than being limited by just wiki functionality, it leverages the much broader set of capabilities in SharePoint. SharePointPedia is also about community, where you can find and connect with others, who have similar interests as you or who have recommended content relevant to you.

It is easy to submit new content and there are a variety of folksonomy tags such as "Collaboration", "Personalization", "Web Publishing" to tag against the article submission.

The value of the site will largely depend on the community submissions but since there is so much content out there it may prove to be a useful launching pad. Right now everyone spends a great deal of time tracking all over the net trying to research particular SharePoint issues and hopefully this compendium will help streamline that.

You log in using your Windows Live ID and get ratings based on your contributions. The 'pedia is built using MOSS 2007 (of course!) and is located at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/Home.aspx.

SharePoint Migration With MetaLogix

I recently had the chance to evaluate a number of SharePoint content and site migration tools. Past migrations I've done have been performed using the out-of-the-box content migration using the Pre-Upgrade scan, but I have an upcoming requirement to leave the existing SharePoint Portal Server 2003 site and content in place and migrate it slowly to the new MOSS 2007 server over time.

This required an evaluation of third-party site migration tools. One of the ones I looked at was the MetaLogix SharePoint Site Migration Manager. The evaluation license allows you to migrate 50% of the content for a few days, which is enough to run the software through its paces.

The Migration tool installs on a client desktop and this GUI handles 95% of the migration tasks. However if you want the migration process to do things like map the user accounts you'll also need to install a special service on the target server.

I liked MetaLogix Migration Manager's intuitive interface. After the installation it was easy for me to add a reference to both the test SPS 2003 portal and the test MOSS 2007 portal. This is done by typing in the URL and either using the default portal access account or manually specifying it.

The interface has three major views:

1. The default "Explorer" view, which is a complete site hierarchy view of the sites you have added;
2. "Browser" view, which renders whatever site node you have selected in the explorer view. It's a great way to quickly view the content of a site or list; and
3. "Item" view, which shows you the content of lists and libraries.

Migrating content or sites between portals was as easy as right-clicking the source node, clicking "Copy", and right-clicking on the target site and clicking "Paste". A dialog box shows the progress and the result appears in the Log window at the bottom of the screen, which you can always refer to. There is verbose logging in a text file.

Other nice features:

• Batch mode, so that all actions can be scripted to run at scheduled times. The batch file is in XML format so it can be programmed and is human-readable.
• Delta migration: You can choose to only migrate the changesets instead of all the content each time.
• List copy: You can choose to append and concatenate multiple libraries or lists together which helps merge them in the new portal.
• You can migrate versioning and security permissions
• Replace Within Field: This is a quick string search that allows you to replace text in content you've migrated, such as URLs. In the future I'm told this will be an automatic step in the migration.
• Mapping to site templates. You can explicitly map SharePoint 2003 site templates to the new MOSS templates (it will attempt to map them automatically by default). I noticed the mapping options seemed to include the Fantastic 40 site templates which was a nice touch.

The only issue I found with the product occurred when I tried to migrate the content on an SPS 2003 Area over to MOSS 2007. It brought all the content, web parts, lists, and libraries over with the exception of the Area Detail and Browse Area By web parts. However as those two web parts relate to the old SharePoint 2003 Area concept which no longer applies, I'm not too fussed. The MetaLogix staff were keen to help me investigate this, if I had been willing.

During the course of the trial I spoke to Julien Sellgren and Rasool Rayani at MetaLogix. They were helpful and responsive to my questions, giving me a walkthrough via a webcast and extending the evaluation period while I was testing area migration. Rasool also explained to me that they are releasing feature packs and updates on a 6-week basis so the product is evolving quickly.

You can learn more about MetaLogix and download the evaluation version at their website.

Microsoft Announces Search Server Express

Today Microsoft announced that it will be releasing a free search tool for enterprises based on SharePoint and SQL Server. Search Server Express for organizations can be installed on a standalone server and leverages Microsoft's SharePoint search engine.

The engine looks just like WSS and SharePoint Search. The administration console has many of the same options as the current MOSS Shared Service Provider search settings. These include content sources, best bets, and scopes. Alerts and RSS feeds are available on the results.

Some of the neat aspects of the new solution:

• It supports the OpenSearch standard. This will help integrate Microsoft's search crawl and integrate with a wide variety of applications from other vendors.
• Federated Security: Authentication against content sources can be done via NTLM, Basic authentication, Forms Based Authentication, Kerberos, and "cookies". Access control lists are applied to the indexes and security trimming is provided on queries.
• Continuous Propagation Indexing: No need to wait for the whole corpus to be crawled before searching can be performed; the index will now be incrementally updated and searches can be performed on that increment immediately.

The express version can only be installed on one server. Naturally there is an upgrade path to more expensive solutions for those organizations that require scalability.

In 2008 Microsoft will also release some free connectors for Documentum and FileNet.

Microsoft has adopted a similar approach in the past with the releases of Visual Studio 2005 Express and SQL Server Express. In this case Search Server Express will provide a useful, free solution to give customers a taste of some core platform functionality and get developers using it.

The Enterprise Search website is located at http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/. You can download the release candidate here.

SharePoint As a Development Platform Debate

There's a very heartfelt debate raging at CodeBetter.com over whether SharePoint is a good development platform. The breakdown seems to be between "developers" and "SPs" or "SharePoint People".

Jeffrey Palermo kicked the discussion off by discussing what he feels makes a good development platform and then contrasting those points with the current state of SharePoint 2007 development.

I can understand the concerns of those who don't feel it is an ideal development environment. One of their biggest issues is how to manage the artefacts that SharePoint generates, especially the settings that can be made via the browser but not easily replicated to a source repository for sharing and versioning.

Many of these changes only live in one of SharePoint databases and so are hard to track. It goes against a programmer's mindset when these things are intangible and hard to track and synchronize.

Microsoft and the community are releasing more tools that can help manage this and perhaps in Office 14 there will be some easy facility to export and import configuration settings as an XML file. This would make it simpler to do proper change management with SharePoint.

There is also the fact that SharePoint is good at glossing over a lot of very complex interactions. Running underneath the hood is a SQL Server database, web services, a complex object model, Windows Server interactions, office integration, ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation, a series of providers...it's very complicated but SharePoint makes it look easy. So when anything goes wrong somewhere in the stack it can be hard to figure out. In this sense it's a victim of its own success at abstracting the lower level plumbing.

The best SharePoint solution results occur when the customization points are kept in line with the core things SharePoint does well, such as workflow, collaboration, search, content management and publishing, and document management.

Whenever possible I recommend limiting SharePoint customization to things that can be done via the browser or through modifying XML or XSL properties (for instance for Search Results web parts). This also helps to protect the solution from service packs and future versions of SharePoint as any customizations are likely to be minor and easily tracked (and upgraded).

When new requirements come in, it's helpful to have the entire team of SharePoint developers compare notes on what the platform allows and how it can be customized. It's noteworthy how many times a 30-minute requirements-gathering discussion can end up with a shared agreement on how the out-of-the-box SharePoint components can be combined to deliver something that at first blush seemed to require half a dozen custom web parts.

The fact that so much can be done with so little effort actually makes SharePoint a killer development platform - the trick is to use a bit of imagination to align as much as possible to what SharePoint provides and go with the SharePoint flow. If SharePoint development is difficult and painful it's probably time to reassess the proposed solution to see if there's a more elegant, SharePoint-centric approach.

Anyway, there's a lot of fascinating insight being posted on Jeffrey's blog and anyone who hopes to develop on the SharePoint platform should at least give it a look. The full discussion thread is here. 

Don't Panic! The MOSS Market Opportunity

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 was released nearly a year ago now, and over the last few months I've started to hear people in the industry say things like "there is a 6-month window of opportunity for us to become leaders in SharePoint adoption!" or "the SharePoint wave is starting to crest and we need to ride it!". I find this attitude a bit puzzling.

It might arise because MOSS 2007 looks like any other packaged software product: you can double-click the .exe file and point and click your way to a portal that seems powerful and flexible enough to keep your end users happy. If someone thinks of it as just a product, it's easy for them to imagine that their competitors are scouring all the finite nooks and crannies of its feature-set and will corner the market "mindshare" on SharePoint work if they don't get there first. Hence the perceived urgency of early innovation.

However the real power of SharePoint is not as a packaged product, but as a platform. SharePoint-as-a-platform is the reason there won't be a cresting wave of adoption, but rather a rising tide that will lift all boats.

What makes the SharePoint platform most interesting, apart from its infinite scaling potential, is that the problems it addresses are enterprise problems. By this I mean the solution focus is on "30,000-ft level" concerns such as knowledge sharing, federated search, document and records management, team collaboration, and Line-of-Business application integration.

If you need a website, blog, or application built, then a thousand different software products or technologies could fit the bill. If you want any or all of those things plus a technology stack that abstracts away most low-level "plumbing issues" and allows you to address your enterprise problems, then the list of software you can standardize on becomes very small indeed.

The SharePoint platform is huge, and is only becoming more so, as Microsoft and third parties build upon it as quickly as they can. As one example, take a look at any of Microsoft's product line roadmaps, and see how many will be rerouted from standalone applications into SharePoint integration points and modules within the next few years. Over the short- to medium-term the platform will only become bigger and more complex, and the value-add potential will grow correspondingly.

There are an infinite number of ways a contractor or company can add value to a SharePoint deployment. Just to name a few:

• Document and Records management solutions
• Capacity, Performance planning and Disaster Recovery planning
• Portal branding and Look-and-Feel work
• Custom web part or feature development
• Custom workflows and electronic forms
• High-end consulting around building and maintaining a portal
• Portal migration and maintenance processes and tools
• Training for end users, administrators and developers
• LOB application integration
• Business reporting tools

Any one of these solution areas presents vast market opportunities in its own right. Each is also challenging and complicated because delving into it requires an equal-parts blend of domain expertise and an understanding of complex technologies. The enterprise issues that are raised require deep thought and effort to grapple with. Of course there is no requirement to concentrate on just one area, and therefore by working across these areas there is an unlimited number of potential combinations of SharePoint services and products.

Because no individual or organization can provide all of the pieces for a successful deployment, everyone is forced to share opportunities to some extent and can even choose to integrate some of their competitor's offerings without risking their profits or market mindshare.

I therefore believe that one of the consequences of competing on a platform rather than on a product is the creation of a surprisingly cooperative ecosystem. An economist would call this a virtuous cycle.

This is why I'm not worried about artificial "first mover" timelines in the SharePoint arena. Instead I foresee a long, upward trend of community growth as more and more SharePoint adoptions occur and the tools and knowledge to manage them increase.

So if you're worried about missing the SharePoint ride, just follow the Hitchhiker's advice, and "Don't Panic!"

OneNote and SharePoint: Better Together!

OneNote 2007 is great for note-taking. My colleagues and I have been using it for the last little while and we love it. There's always something new to learn about it.

After many months of using it individually, we decided to start sharing our OneNote notebooks with each other. Here's the cool bit: the notebooks can back onto a WSS 3 or MOSS library.

If you create a new document library somewhere on your SharePoint portal, you can choose a OneNote Section as the document template rather than the default Word template (although any library document template will apparently work just fine).

Now if you go back into OneNote, you can choose to share a notebook and host it in the document library you just built. It's easy to do; just click "Share" on the top menu and then "Create Shared Notebook". Give it a title and pick a template (we use "Shared Notebook - Reference Materials" or "Shared Notebook - Group Project").

Then when it asks "Who will use this notebook", just click "Multiple people will share this notebook" and choose to share it on a server.You will be asked to confirm the location: paste the URL of your site into the path textbox and then you can browse to the OneNote document library. 

Once created, you'll find a new folder in the SharePoint document library with the title of the notebook. Inside the folder there are OneNote files, one for each section (OneNote pages and subpages aren't actually individual "files").

You can invite people to the site just by giving them the library URL. Clicking on the OneNote notebook file will download a cached copy of it and open it in their OneNote client on their desktop.

We had a lot of fun adding content and pages, and watching as the clients synchronized changes first to the master files in SharePoint, and then down to each others' desktops. It's a very seamless process.

OneNote is very effective at synchronizing changes, although it doesn't use Groove apparently (Groove does file-based synchronization while OneNote seems to do more in the nature of content merging). 

You can view the standard Document Management panel in OneNote by clicking "Tools" and then "Document Management", which will allow you to view the site membership, see what's been updated, and set alerts if you want to keep on top of changes.

In order to search the OneNote content in MOSS 2007, you'll have to install OneNote 2007 on the Index server to get the OneNote 2007 iFilter, and then add the .one filetype to the Shared Service Provider's search settings. Instructions on how to do that are here.

This OneNote-SharePoin t combo is like a team Knowledge Base on steroids: fully searchable, disconnected, synchronizing, shareable, and with all the rich SharePoint functionality of any other library. Yet another example of the power of client software leveraging SharePoint's rich repository services!