Category Archives: SharePoint

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SharePoint workflow status: How to use a workflow status in a view (based on a Nintex workflow)

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
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I wrote a post about how to use the workflow status in another workflow or in a view.
When I was changing views on a custom workflow that was created by Nintex I ran into issues.  I wanted to display all items were the workflow was not Approved. So as a logical next step, I would just need to change my view and filter on the status (filter on “is not equal 16″).  But this didn’t work. It showed all items, even the ones that were approved.

I then edited the list in Datasheet and found out that Nintex is using other numbers then SharePoint (or the Workflow Foundation) does.

Apparently Nintex uses these status indicators:

2 In progress
3 Error occurred
4 Cancelled
5 Completed

Best practices on working with documents and SharePoint.

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint
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When you work with documents there are some best practices, and it will make yours and your colleague’s collaborative life a lot easier when you follow these simple guidelines. In this post I’ll try to explain what you better try to avoid when you work with documents and SharePoint. Whenever it is possible, I also advice you what to do

1. Give your document a reasonable filename, avoid long filenames.

Use the TITLE field in the office applications to give your document a title (and subtitle and keywords, .) The title column can be used in a view in a library. You can get to the document properties by clicking on Office Button/Prepare/Properties. (Office 2007). This is metadata that is stored with the document, and will remain in the document (even if you exchange this document via e-mail, via an external hard drive …)
The filename cannot be longer than 128 characters. (and that is IMHO far beyond reasonable)
You cannot use any of these characters: ” # % & * : < > ? \ / { | } ~ 

2. Don’t use spaces in your filename.

While it is allowed to use spaces in your filename (and maybe it seems even logical to do so), don’t use them if your file will end up (or is born on) SharePoint.
When you use the “download a copy” functionality, SharePoint will replace the spaces with an “_”. This might (will) result in inconsistency when you upload the “same” file again, since SharePoint will see this as a different file (since the filename is different).
I recommend using a filename with Capitalization style naming guideline. For instance: the document “Overall governance model.docx” would be named “OverallGovernanceModel.docx”

3. Don’t store the version as a part of the filename, but use the build in versioning functionality.

SharePoint has a built-in versioning system. You can work with major (published) versions, and minor (draft) versions. Of each of these two document types, you can store a numbers of versions that are kept. Watch out, each version is saved, not only the delta between 2 versions, and this counts to your Site Collection Quota. (Example: you have a Word document with a size of 2 MB. When you keep 5 Drafts this will result in storing (and consuming) 10 MB.
So, don’t call your document “NewUserAccountProcessDRAFTv1.docx”, but “NewUserAccountProcess.docx” and use versioning setting in your library.

  • You can enable views on your library to display the version number.
  • You can enable the version number to be displayed in a Word document.

4. Use SharePoint as a Document Management Platform.

And I mean Platform, not just a secondary file storage location.
The file stored here is the “one version of the truth”. This is your starting and ending point. DO NOT send this document to people, but send links to the document. This way you’ll keep just 1 version of the truth

Use the Out Of The Box workflows to

  • Collect feedback
  • Make sure your team knows how to work with documents (Check Out, put comment in the document directly (Track Changes), Check in), and that they can complete a workflow task from within the document
  • Get a document approved (Approval workflow) (same here, you can approve/reject the document from within the Office Client)
  • Publish major versions

5. Use Metadata

Use metadata to assign other properties to documents, so it can be easily identified, sorted- or grouped by. I would like to refer to a post on “When (not) to use folders”. (this post is currently not posted yet).

How to add a Google or Bing map to your Collaboration Site

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
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In this article I will explain you how you can add a Google or Bing map to your Collaboration site. Actually, you can use this for all kinds of sources.
Prerequisite: You need to have Site Owner rights to modify pages (adding web parts)

  1. The first thing you need to do is to add a Content Editor WebPart
  2. Click on Site Actions and then on Edit Page


  1. Select the Web Part zone where you want to display the map
  2. Scroll down to the Miscellaneous section and select the Content Editor Web Part and press ADD
  3. Then click on the Edit / Modify Shared Web Part

  4. In the right part of your screen the you’ll see the Content Editor Web Part details. You can set your own title in the title field under Appearance. Now you have to copy the code of your google/bing map into the webPart. Click on Source Editor and the editor will popup.
  5. Paste your source (which you can find somewhere on the google of bing page (mostly under embed in website) Copy the HTML code
    1. For Google :
    2. For Bing:

You can of course customize your map by clicking the customize and preview link.

  1. Paste the HTML code in the Editor and click on Save

  2. Then depending on ‘where’ you created this page, you need to click on Exit Edit mode in the right corner (under Site Actions) or Check in and Share Draft on the top of the page

Note: If you are doing this from within a HTTPS site, you will get a popup when you access this page to inform you that some information that is displayed isn’t secure and it will ask to display the secure data. If you select yes here, the map will be displayed, of you choose no, it won’t be displayed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Using filtering in the DataviewWebPart

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint
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As a result of the great interaction of the SharePoint community on twitter, I created this blog entry. 140 characters are definitely not enough to ask my questions, and Stump The panel doesn’t allow screenshot (I think). The content I provide is fictive, but the setup is real J. Please note, that the screenshots are from the test environment, and I blurred some thing due to confidentiality.

My current setup. We’re working with MOSS 2007. There is a site collection with a root site, let’s call it rootsite. Under the rootsite, there are several subsites, let’s call them subsite1, subsite2, ….
The members of subsites will only have access to their subsite. We can say that the subsite=registrant (so metadata hereunder)
In the root site I have a list. Let’s cal this list registrations. This list has several columns (metadata) Registration date,
Registrant, visible4all, material, unit,…

  • Registration deadline (date)
  • Registrant (lookup to a list called registrants)
  • visible4all (Yes/no)
  • material (single line of text)
  • unit (single line of text)
  • ,…

What would I like to have.

On a subsite, I would like to have a page with a view on the registrations list in the rootsite. The filter should be : Show items where (registrant=xxx or visible4all=Yes)
I created a dataviewwebpart to get that data. This will give me a list with all the registrations for that registrant. (I added the filter in the DVWP in the common dataview tasks) In this list I would like to use some extra filtering. For instance, I would like to filter on material, and would like to be able to filter even more , for instance on unit. (so the existing filter of the DVWP would be filtered on material, and then on that filtered data I would like to filter a unit) When I want to use the filter possibilities in the DVWP I click on DV properties (in SharePoint designer) and select Filter

This gives me a lousy implementation of the filter possibilities (click on filter, then select a filter). But entries appear multiple times in the dropdown list of that filter (for instance, when material wood is used in multiple entries in that list, it would appear multiple times in the drop down box). This results in a highly user-unfriendly way to filter data.

I installed the instantfilter from Jaap Vossers. I thought this would be a great solution, but the users say they don’t know the filter values by heart, hence they can’t use a system like this. They would really like to pick something from a dropdown box or something.

So, the actual question:

What possibilities do I have to setup a decent filter in the DVWP? A decent filter system would be something that you have by default on a document library or a list. Other solutions are also welcome. (must say, I rather new to XSLT and Jquery, but I’m a good searcher and am aware of the CTRL-C/CTRL-V keys of my keyboard J, and until now, I most questions I received coud be solved with other things than Jquery and or “copy-pastable Jquery” stuff ….

 

Suggestions are welcome in the comments, but if you need some more rich text, you can email me at . When you email me, I will do my outmost best to make an overview and create a blog post with the answers.

What I intend to ship in 2011.

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | GTD, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
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A new year, which has already been there for about 3 weeks, now gives me the opportunity to set some goals. While you could also do this on another date, the New Year seems to be the perfect timing for New years resolutions.

I didn’t document my shipping list for 2010 so I can’t do a retrospective, but I’ll not make that mistake twice. So for all my loved ones, all people that know me, and also all readers of my blog I will have a shipping list for 2011. But it will be a SMART Shipping List. SMART stands for

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time bound

 

 

While I know not my whole shipping list will be SMART, I’ll try to create an as SMART as possible list.

Participate more in the SharePoint Community

By creating blog posts, tweeting, present at the BIWUG. This is a continuous process and is easily measurable by the number of blog posts and presentations I delivered. I would like to present the first time at the BIWUG before the summer holiday.

Find and have more peace of mind.

While I understand and realize this is a really difficult objective, I have put it on the SSL. I would really like to have more peace of mind, and need to rebalance my work life with my family life. This will not be easy since I will participate more in the community and insist on participate more in my family life. I’ll know when I have more peace of mind when I’m more relaxed, happy in life and not too stressed. And I would like to reach this by what I will (try to) ship in 2011 Valentine’s Day.

Lose some weight and do more sport.

I would like to weight around 73 to 74 kg again (that’s about 161 lb). My current weight is around 76 kg (167.5 lb) now. To get that result I’ll eat healthier and will start running again. This year will not be a marathon-running year, but I would like to set a good time for 10 km (6.2 Miles) by September. And that good time would be around 50 minutes.

Get certified CMAS 2* diver

There is a relation with the previous objective and this one. Although you don’t need a real good condition, I see that if I look at a lot of other scuba divers, I’m pretty sure that it will help. My target date to have the certification is September, but I must assure myself that I’m a 2* worthy before summer holidays.

Read more books.

This year I would like to read 1 book every 3 weeks. I might read more, at least that’s what I hope, but I set the limit of 1 book per 3 weeks to have a achievable objective. I consider audiobooks also as a book and since commute quite a lot (about 3 times a week for 2,5 hours), this seems like an achievable target.

Do a SharePoint 2010 project.

While I’m working on a very interesting project at this time (preparing the global deployment and starting up SharePoint governance) in the chemical sector, I would like to do a SharePoint 2010 project. The timeline is very clear, it has to be this year, and I mean to start it, not to deliver it.

Get back on the GTD train, be more productive.

While I am convinced that GTD (Getting Things Done®) is a very good system to manage my actions, I fall of the train regularly. This year should be the year that I stay on board and actually become a good GTD practitioner. I’ll do my best to stay on board by rigorously do my weekly review since I discovered this is my weak point. I’ll perform the weekly review every Friday after lunch. A part of this weekly review is cleaning up inboxes, so an extra sub-objective is to achieve on a regular base #inboxzero.

 Use Bing as a default search engine.

While Google rocked for ages, Bing seems to be a good alternative. So starting this week, I am using Bing as my default search engine. I will force myself to use Bing for at least 1 month.

Why I joined BIWUG as an active member last year.

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint
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Last year (2010) I joined BIWUG as an ”active member”. BIWUG is the Belgian Luxemburg Information Worker User Group. A lot of people (including myself) had some criticism  on BIWUG. Mainly on their on-line presence, the website (which is a WSS 2.0 website at the moment of writing) but also on the topics and subject that were presented during the BIWUG sessions.

The reason I started talking with the current board members was because I was a little disappointed in the content of the sessions. Just like Microsoft, BIWUG is focused on developer and IT PRO’s. and actually even a little more on developers. The actual members are also mainly developers and IT-PRO’s. And they also work for consulting or outsourcing companies, so this makes it a select group of IT professionals. While SharePoint is so much more then developing and administrating. See also my blog post Why Microsoft is wrong in their SharePoint bring to market approach.

So instead of just complaining, I joined BIWUG together with Peter Cattersel and our mission is to start a third track next to SharePoint development and Administrating tracks. We currently name it Information Worker track, but it might be renamed to Knowledge Worker track or Functional track. We are also going to try to broaden the members of the user group. We would like to have more functional consultants joining BIWUG and also business (super)users.

What is going to change? Peter and I created a list of topics that we think should be presented during on of the BIWUG sessions, and most probably we will deliver some sessions ourselves. We will also try to find channels to reach to the SharePoint customer base in Belgium, and I’m silently hoping Microsoft is willing to help us with this. I know they have a GREAT marketing department in Belgium and I think we might collaborate very well without exchanging customer names and contact details :-). There are also some structural things I would like to change in the BIWUG organization, but I can’t disclose that in a blog post.

In a meanwhile, since this is the first time for me that I engage myself to a user group, it will require some personal organization and if other user groups would like to share experiences, best and worst practices, PLEASE DO SO. You can comment in this blog, direct message me on Twitter or if 140 characters is not enough, you can email me directly at .

Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2010 presentations are available online

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
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Some of you readers were fortunate to attend Tech-Ed Europe last week in Berlin (8-12th November 2010), others, like me, did not had the opportunity to attend. I consider Tech-Ed as a broad-based conference, while I (try) to focus on SharePoint only. So you’ll rather find me attending a SharePoint only conference like the European Best Practices SharePoint Conference, which is hosted by Combined Knowledge in London from April 11th-13th 2011. I’m also really interested in attending SharePoint Conference 2011 hosted by Microsoft on Anaheim, CA on October 3rd-6th 2011.

Anyway, for everybody who didn’t attend Tech-Ed Europe, or who would like to see sessions (s)he didn’t follow, there a lot of presentations and sessions available online at the Tech-Ed website.

SharePoint and Office specific presentations can be found via this link : http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/Tracks/OfficeSharePoint

Or an overview of all sessions : http://www.msteched.com/2010/Europe/Browse

Have fun watching these presentations and I hope you learn some things :-)

Mails got delivered 3 times in SharePoint enabled discussion board when using an automatic rule in Lotus Notes 7.0.3

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint
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Today we encountered a strange issue sending emails to SharePoint. This is the configuration:

  1. A Incoming Email enabled discussion board (disboard@collab.company.com)

    alt

  2. A Lotus Notes mailbox (mailbox@company.com) Email Client with a rule to forward ALL documents to the Discussion board, hence auto-forward everything to disboard@collab.company.com
     

When we send an email from Lotus Notes directly to the discussion board, it worked perfect. The mail is delivered once and displayed like it should be.
When we use the forwarding rule in Lotus Notes, the (forwarded) email is delivered 3 times as you can also see in the screenshot.alt

At this point I was puzzled and started troubleshooting. To test the pure email forwarding functionality, I created a extra forwarder for all documents to my @hotmail.com email address. This worked fine, the (forwarded) email was delivered once into my hotmail inbox. But on the SharePoint site, these mails were delivered 3 times. I noticed when I opened the "triple entries" that the subject had another identifier.

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One of the other 2 subjects displayed nothing extra, and the second had 1736 attached to its "subject".

Of course I was thinking about issues with this forwarding mechanism, and more specific the communication between the SMTP servers,(hence the Domino server and the SMTP connecter of the IIS servers) so I decided to do extra test so I can exclude (or point out) SharePoint as the cause of this issue.
I created a email enabled Document library. When I initiated tests to this Email enabled document library, the test results were all as they should be, even when using the auto –forward rule from Lotus Notes to this Email enable Document library. The email was delivered to the SharePoint Document Library once.

So my first thought of this being a problem with the Domino server got redirected to SharePoint, more specific the settings of my Email enabled discussion board. I compared t
As I noticed when sending a mail directly to the Email Enabled Discussion Board, the original email was saved as an attachment. The emails that appeared 3 times, did not had any attachments, except the original email who got attached to the item….

So, after changing the Save original email setting to NO, it worked just fine.

I tried to create a schema of this, so It would be a little more easy to understand:

alt

SharePoint Connections PreConference day

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
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For the first time I have registered for a pre conference day. Actually I registered for the pre and post conference session.

The pre-conference workshop was delivered by Dan Holme ( and the topic was : “SharePoint Collaboration Masterclass”. It was an interesting session with a few new items for me but it definitely triggered some ideas.

Dan talked about the “administrator jumpstart”. Basically he explained which accounts you better create (actually you’ll need them) before you start installing and configuring SharePoint 2010. Also it is a best practice to use Powershell scripts to install and configure your farm(s). Especially when you have an Acceptance, Pre-Production and Production environment, by scripting the installation and configuration, you can be sure that they are installed and configured the same way. Another interesting point he mentioned, was that the Cumulative Updates are handled differently in SharePoint 2010 then in SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). Now, when you have SharePoint server 2010 installed, you don’t need to install the CU OF SharePoint Foundation prior to the installation of the CU for SharePoint Server. So you can install the SharePoint Server CU directly. This will save some time and reboots.
Also, when you don’t configure the outgoing email settings, all the features that use this (like alerts) will not be activated on you sites.

After the first break, the subject was Creating the Collaboration Application. Interesting to hear was this advice. Don’t use (or configure) Claims Based authentication, unless you are really sure you will need/use it.
Dan also mentioned that it is a best practice to use A record in your DNS server setting and not C Names.
When creating your top level Site Collection, the Publishing Site might be a very good choice if you would like to brand your sites. (via the masterpages). The publishing site has more masterpages ‘installed’ and this would make it easier to apply some custom branding on these sites.  Oh yes, of course when you used the Publishing Site template, you will not be able to create a subsite other then another Publishing site,unless you activate these Site templates in the Look and Feel section / Page Layouts and Templates. You can access these pages via the Site Settings.
Today, there were no sacrifices done to the Demo Gods, so some of his demos didn’t work well. Like the one where Dan would show how you can adopt users by creating shortcuts in the Network Locations. But he explained it pretty good.

After Lunch Security was the topic. Claims based authentication can store extra attributes  or properties, so you can use these properties to target content . (For instance country)
Dan also told you don’t need to extend WebApplications anymore when you want to use multiple authentication providers.
Another best practice explained. To allow a user (even a visitor) to see a certain site in his or hers Mysite, you can create a new “default” group. You give this group very restricted permissions on the site, and you add ALL the site users to this group (besides the other groups like members or visitor). By doing this, these users will see the site appear in their MySite. Oh yes, small remark, this will only work with individual user rights, not when adding an Active Directory group.

Dan also gave a demonstration of the Office integration and SharePoint, but again, the demo gods weren’t our friends.

After the break, Dan talked, while you could really see him fighting his jetlag, about the Remote BLOB Storage . What I remember and noted was that the default RBS (Filestream provider) can only use local drives, and that you can also use AvePoint DocAve extender for this. A good advice was that when you use SQL backup, you should also backup your BLOB location manually. This is not needed when you use the backup procedures in Central Admin, and I presume third party tools will also tackle this.

The last topic was Managed Metadata and the Taxonomy living together with the Folksonomy. Dan also showed the metadata based views and filters.

We had a really nice chat after the session, with some additional Q&A, and then I went out to diner with Marcel Franke. Because diner took more time then I thought, I wasn’t able to attend the DIWUG session.
Arriving back at my hotel I saw Karine Bosh (MVP and also known for some of us as ‘The CAML girl’) and I sacrificed myself to go out for diner with her, although I just drank a few Grimbergen beers, but we had a really nice conversation about SharePoint, U2, Phil Collins and job satisfaction.

Why Microsoft is wrong in their SharePoint bring to market approach.

  By Patrick Sledz | %A %B %e%q, %Y - %I:%M %p | SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
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Since a few years I execute the job of SharePoint consultant. SharePoint seems to be one of the most successful product, maybe even the most successful product Microsoft has launched. Then why should a guy like me complain about that Microsoft is wrong in their bring to market? They probably earn billion$ with SharePoint. And they should, because it is a great product! But at the end of this post, in the quote you can see my worry.

During the SharePoint Evolution conference SPEVO held in April of this year, my memory was refreshed of something that was said during one of the analyst sessions in the SharePoint Conference 2009 (SPC09) in Las Vegas.
The SPEVO was actually the SharePoint Best Practices Europe Conference, but because of the launch of a new version called SharePoint 2010 there were not a lot best practices to share on SharePoint 2010. BUT the organizers of this conference really got the message I’ll talk about in this blog post. They organized a IW (Information Worker stream) In fact, they organized even 2 parallel streams. Well done Steve Smith!

During a session from Symon Garfield, he explained why 70% of all projects fail. There are several reason, like unclear requirements, scope changes. One of the main failure reasons is that a SharePoint project can’t be driven only by IT.
SharePoint is a business driven product. IT can install, deploy and support it, but it can not solely drive it toward long term success.
You also need to have a good user adoption plan, and some corporate guidelines (let’s call them governance) to make sure that when people really start using SharePoint, it doesn’t get a maze where you can’t do or find anything. If you take a look at the Microsoft Press books, about 99% of the SharePoint books are technically focused. There is a lack of business side books. (Thank you Michael Samspon for representing this 1%)

During that analyst panel session at SPC09 there was a discussion about having a third pillar next to the Developers and IT PRO’s. The name was not specified, but lets call this group Functional people, or Functionals.  For me, but also for all SharePoint projects in general, I thought that was good, no even great news.

But until now, nothing has changed. From Microsoft’s opinion you are or a developer, or an IT PRO.There is no new group. Or you write code, or you have access to Central Admin.

A good example of this are Ignite Sessions. They are organized for IT Professionals and Developers, but not for Functionals. Even with such a huge release of  SharePoint 2010, where a lot extra power is provided to PowerUsers, and it very important to have that link between Business and IT.

Or the Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Developer and IT Professional Learning Plan.

In my first conversation with Karine Bosch (a Belgian SharePoint MVP) right after a BIWUG session  we were talking about what we did in the SharePoint world. When she explained what she does I replied, “Oh, you’re a code sh|tter”, without being disrespectful. That’s good because we need SharePoint code writers I replied, (you can also read developers)  to cover non ‘Out Of The Box’ functionality , When I explained what I do, I summarized it with “I’m a document sh|tter”. And We also need them (I guess). Actually that’s also what Karine confirmed.

That’s why in my humble opinion that Microsoft is acting wrongly. Until now, they don’t provide any special documentation or support for these Functionals. Besides some sales and marketing information on how SharePoint will make your organization more productive, there is no specific information for the Functionals. They are just twilights. They act the “Build it and they will come” way.
And they should pay attention to this, because otherwise SharePoint might become one of these “Oooh darn, it’s a SharePoint” applications.

That’s also why I am so happy that guys like Michael Samspon, the author of Seamless Teamwork, a book on using SharePoint from a business perspective, Raymond Dux Sy , the author of SharePoint for Project Management: How to Create a Project Management Information System (PMIS) and Paul Culmsee take a different approach on SharePoint. I will do my best to provide useful information like these guys do in their blogs, webcasts, books, … That will be my way to contribute to the grey twilight zone that Microsoft can’t fill.

On the other hand, I must admit that I know a few, but just a few guys that are good at coding, have a good knowledge of the the Out Of The Box functionality of SharePoint and are able to talk to the business and translate their requirements to SharePoint functionality. These are the golden egg chickens…

But to conclude, what I’m trying to explain is that Microsoft, and the Microsoft partners will be judged by their clients (the business) based on the return SharePoint gives to the business, not on it’s nice technical gracefulness.

Just for the record, here are my my questions to Microsoft.

What are your intentions to this issue? (When)Are you planning to setup a functional stream?