vivi's SharePoint Space: SharePoint 2007

Y.A.S.R.: RSS In SharePoint 2007 - Jan Tielens

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:21:09 GMT

RSS feeds are great to keep you up to date without the hassle to go and look if information is updated; the new/updated stuff is pushed towards you. In the previous version of SharePoint, there was no support for RSS feeds out of the box. Although it’s possible to add RSS functionality to SharePoint 2003 by installing add-ons, it’s not very straight forward. Luckily in the new SharePoint 2007 RSS feeds are available, and the good news is: it’s enabled by default! When you navigate to a list or document library, you can select the View RSS Feed item from the Actions menu.

This will navigate to the RSS feed’s URL, but you’re not going to see the raw XML; it’s transformed into a nice web page using a XSLT. From this page you can click the Subscribe to this feed link which will send the feed to your favorite RSS reader (for example Outlook 2007).

This is what you get if you do not change anything, of course you can also customize the RSS feed for each list. For each list’s RSS feed you can specify the title, description and image url. Additionally it’s possible to choose the columns which should be included and the number of items to show in the feed (optionally limited by the age of the items). The default RSS feed of a list is based on the default view of that list. But each list view also has a RSS feed which can be retrieved from the view’s settings page. Great!

So is there still room for improvement and/or opportunities? I do think so! One of the nice features of the U2U RSS Feed Generator for SharePoint, is the ability to create a feed that aggregates more than one list. This enables the users of a site to subscribe to one feed which bundles all the important information of a site. Maybe exposing the OPML for all the lists of a specific site could be a workaround. Let’s see if there will be any improvements in RC1, otherwise we’ll have to built something!

Y.A.S.R.: Alerts in SharePoint 2007

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:44:50 GMT

Jan Tielens' YASR series:

One of the more popular quirk in SharePoint 2003 (remember the YASQ’s?) was the alerting mechanism. The alerts in SharePoint 2003 are OK at first sight: you can create an alert for a complete list or document library, or just for one item. The problem is that you can only create an alert for yourself. This makes sense if you think of alerts as ‘RSS-avant-la-lettre’. But lots of people would like to create alerts for other users as well. Unfortunately this was not available out-of-the-box, although you could customize SharePoint by installing various (free) web parts to overcome this issue.

Recently I discovered that this YASQ has become a YASR (Yet Another SharePoint Relief): in SharePoint 2007 you can create alerts for other users! Just navigate to a list or document library, and from the Actions menu choose the Alert Me item.

On the New Alert page you can specify the details about the alert: title, type and destination. The new (and exciting) thing is here that you can enter multiple user accounts to which the alert should be sent.

Further down on the page there are more innovations. In SharePoint 2007 you can create an alert which is based on a specific view which opens quite some interesting possibilities. Finally you can still choose the interval to sent the alert (immediate, daily and weekly). New here is when you select the daily or weekly summary that you can specify the exact time when the alert should be sent (e.g. a daily summary at 7.00 am in the morning).

So are alerts perfect in the release? I think there’s still some room for improvements: when you create an alert for multiple users actually multiple alerts are created. This is a disadvantage when you would like to delete or update the alert that you’ve created for multiple users at the same time (you can’t push forward those changes). And finally it’s not (yet?) possible to create an alert for all the content of a site. But don’t get me wrong, I still consider this as a major YASR!

Y.A.S.R.: User Account Look-ups in SharePoint 2007 - Jan Tielens

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:36:13 GMT

Jan Tielens' YASR series:

Sometimes a very small feature in SharePoint 2007 can mean a big relief for SharePoint users. Do you know the “pain” to add a user to a SharePoint site for example: you need to know the exact account name or the email address. One small typing mistakes will result in an unrecognized user. In the next version of SharePoint this scenario is drastically improved, and resembles a lot the experience that you get in Outlook.

First of all SharePoint will actually tell you if you have entered a correct user name. When the name is recognized it will get underlined just like in Outlook. You can trigger this recognition process by clicking the Check Names icon (left one) or you can use the Outlook shortcut CTRL+K.

That’s already nice, but what happens when you enter only a part of a user name can’t be recognized because more than one user names matches? You’re text will be underlined with a red line.

That’s not everything, if you click on the red line you will get a context menu that will allow you to select a user account from the list that’s recognized.

And if that’s not enough, you can also use the Browse icon to get a full blown people and group dialog box. This functionally is available for all the fields in SharePoint in which you need to enter a user name. Besides that you can also use this in your own lists and document libraries when you create a new column and use the column type Person or Group.

Y.A.S.R.: Editable List/Document Library Pages - Jan Tielens

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:20:50 GMT

Jan Tielens' YASR series:

One of the more common things to customize in SharePoint 2003 (both WSS and SPS) are the pages that display lists or document libraries. Users end up on those pages when they click on the list/document library in the Quick Launch, or on the web part title that’s displaying the list/document library data. Those pages can be customized but you need to build your own site definition or you need to use FrontPage.

The good news is that in SharePoint 2007 (both MOSS and WSSv3) those pages are editable from within the web user interface. Just navigate to the page and click Edit Page in the Site Actions menu.

Once you are in edit mode you can customize the page by adding web parts to it. Or you can choose to edit the web part that is displaying the list/document library data!

Y.A.S.R.: Navigation in SharePoint 2007, Part One - Jan Tielens

Thu, 11 May 2006 19:43:32 GMT

Jan Tielens' YASR series:

YASR: Navigation in SharePoint 2007, Part One

[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] One of the pain points of SharePoint 2003 (especially Windows SharePoint Services), is the lack of navigation possibilities. It’s quite hard to find out which sub sites are created under a WSS site. Also when you’re on a WSS site, you don’t have any clue or way to navigate to the parent site hierarchy. With a small amount of customization however, it’s possible to solve these issues. In my SharePoint classes I always show how to create a breadcrumbs web part and drop-down navigation web part. For a pre-fabricated solution, check out Tom’s tree navigation web part. In SharePoint 2007 these web parts become obsolete, navigation is available everywhere. First of all, breadcrumbs are everywhere! Take a look at the screenshot below; it’s displaying a Contact list on a site. Notice the breadcrumbs to navigate back to the site.

When we drill down to the list item itself and edit the list item, the breadcrumbs will allow the user to navigate back the list item, the list and the site! I’m not going to display all the places where you can find those breadcrumbs, but they are really everywhere!

On site level there are also a couple of new options. First of all you can specify if you want to show the quick launch on the left hand side of the site’s home page. Additionally you can enable a tree view.

When you enable this tree view, it will show all document libraries and lists of the current site. The screen shot below is taken from a sub folder in a document library; notice that the sub folder item is bold in the tree view.

This is the first part of the navigation features in SharePoint 2007, in the next part I will focus on navigation between sites. So for now, navigation in SharePoint 2007 yet another SharePoint relief!

Y.A.S.R.: Forcing Check Out in SharePoint Document Libraries - Jan Tielens

Wed, 10 May 2006 21:54:40 GMT

Jan Tielens' Y.A.S.R. series:

Y.A.S.R.: Forcing Check Out in SharePoint Document Libraries

[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] Document Libraries in SharePoint are great for doing document management. Once of they key concepts in document management is the ability to check out documents while editing the document. This will prevent other users from making changes at the same time. Check out functionality is available out-of-the-box in SharePoint 2003 Document Libraries. The only problem is that users are not forced to check out a document when making changes. There is however a workaround, but it involves editing the ows.js JavaScript file. (for more information see the MSD2D tip).

In SharePoint 2007 by default a Document Library doesn’t force checking out the document either. When you click on a document, you’ll get a pop-up asking if you want to open the document in read-only mode, or if you want to make changes.

But the good news is that you can make the check-out required before being able to edit a document. It’s very easy to do so, just navigate to the versioning settings page of the document library and set Require Check Out property to Yes.

When a user now clicks on a document, another pop-up will show where can be specified to open the document in read-only mode or to check out and edit. When the user chooses to edit the document, optionally he can specify to make the document available offline.

From the dropdown attached to a document, the user can also choose to edit in Word …

… which will bring the following pop up. So; forced check out: yet another SharePoint relief!

Y.A.S.R.: SharePoint 2007 Versioning - Jan Tielens

Wed, 10 May 2006 21:38:11 GMT

Jan Tielens' Y.A.S.R series:

Y.A.S.R.: SharePoint 2007 Versioning

[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] In SharePoint 2003 you can enable versioning for a Document Library, so SharePoint will store for each document in that library previous versions when the document gets edited. That’s nice, but that’s about it what you get out-of-the-box. Since each version of the document is in fact a complete document (it’s not the delta that’s stored for a version) big documents can take up more space than desired. Just imagine that you have a 1MB Word document for which you have 15 versions, the total size that the document item will use, is 15 MB (15 times 1 MB). So a very common request is to limit the number of versions that is stored in a document library. In SharePoint 2003 there is no out-of-the-box functionality to do that, although it’s quite easy to write a Document Library Event Handler to accomplish this, but you do need to write some code and deploy the solution.

In SharePoint 2007 however, you specify the number of versions that should be kept quite easily. In the Document Library Settings page, you can navigate to the Versioning Settings, where you can enter any number of versions to keep.

Another thing on this page that may get your attention is the fact that you can either choose to only create major versions, or you can choose to create major and minor (draft) versions. A little bit further on the page you can specify who can read the draft versions of the document.

So when you enable major and minor version a possible scenario could go like this: you create a new Word document in the document library. This document will become version 0.1. When you edit the document again, you will create version 0.2. When you decide it’s time for other people to see your hard work you can decide to publish the document as a major version.

This action will promote version 0.2 to version 1.0, so the version number 0.2 will change into version 1.0. The version history also reflects this:

Another common complaint for SharePoint 2003 is the fact that versioning is only available in document libraries. In SharePoint 2007 versioning is also available for lists (although only major versions). For example editing a list item will result in the following version history:

Document and list item versions in SharePoint 2007: yet another SharePoint relief!

Y.A.S.R.: SharePoint 2007 Site Columns - Jan Tielens

Wed, 10 May 2006 20:40:09 GMT

Jan Tielens's Y.A.S.R series:

Y.A.S.R.: SharePoint 2007 Site Columns

[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] If you know a little bit about SharePoint 2003 you probably are aware of the fact that you can add custom columns to a SharePoint List or a Document Library. For example you can add an Importance column to a Document Library so each document in that library can have an Importance value. Probably if you want to do this nicely, you create Choice column so users can select the value for the Importance field from a couple of predefined values (e.g. Important, Very Important …). So far so good, this works fine in SharePoint 2003. But suppose you would like to have this Importance column also in another Document Library or in another List. The only option that you have in SharePoint 2003 is to repeat the creation of the field for the other Lists or Libraries (including defining all the different Importance values). In SharePoint 2007 you can avoid this repetitive work by using a new feature called Site columns. When you navigate to the Site Settings of a site, you’ll see a link called Site columns.

Clicking this link will bring you to the Site Column Gallery. This gallery contains all the defined Site columns, as you can see there are a bunch of columns that you get out of the box. Because this list can get quite long, you can divide the Site columns into groups.

From this gallery you can also create a new Site column, by clicking the Create link. Creating a Site column works exactly the same as creating a column for a Document Library or List. In this example I’ve created the Importance column and I’ve put it into the YASR group. The Source of the column is identified as YASR1 which is the name of the site.

When you want to add the newly created site column either to a Document Library or List, you need to navigate to the Settings of the Library or List. In the Columns section you’ll find links to create a new column, or to add a column from existing site columns.

Selecting a site column is quite easy: the groups are listed in a drop down and it’s possible to add more than one column at the same time.

When you’ve added the column to a Document Library or List, the library or list will have the Imortance column right away, including all the settings that have been chosen for this column (e.g. different values). Of course it’s possible to add the same site column to multiple Document Libraries or Lists. That’s already quite nice functionality, don’t you think? It gets even better: just imagine that you’ve added the Importance field to a bunch of SharePoint 2003 lists and libraries (which involves doing some repetitive manual actions) and you realize that you forgot to add a Importance value (e.g. Critical). There was no other option for you to go to each SharePoint Library or List and to manually update the Importance field, so the new value was added. However in SharePoint 2007 Site columns, update a site column that you have added to libraries or lists already. When you make the update you can specify if you would like to update all the lists and libraries that make use of this site column, or not. Yet another Sharepoint relief!

Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:08:58 GMT

via SharePoint Team Blog

Today we announced the naming and packaging for the next release of the Office system products including Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Please check out the press release materials.

Most of the stuff in the materials is self-explanatory, but I thought I'd talk about the evolution from "Office SharePoint Portal Server" to "Office SharePoint Server" as people might wonder about it. First, we thought simpler was better - it is one less word! Second, the features above WSS are expanding so much - the new CMS \ SPS integration and other portal, content mangmenet, collaboration, search, business process and intelligence features - that we thought "portal" was a little narrow to be the umbrella name. We also made the investments I talked about the Light-Up Not Just Roll-Up post to make sure these features applied to all the sites in your organization not just top-level portals.

I do want to make sure thought the support for portals does not get lost in the change. In particular, I would particularly highlight the new CMS features (err Office SharePoint Server Web Publishing features - gotta get used to that), personal and MySite capabilities, LOB integration and enhanced internet and extranet support (things like pluggable authentication) that expand SharePoint's position is the leading enterprise portal solution.

The other thing that I get asked about a lot is the different between SPS and WSS. There is a good overview here but I think think this gets simpler in the next release with all the extra features and light-up support. We did think about not using "SharePoint" in both Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server but we felt that would caused confusion because Office SharePoint Server is so clearly built on WSS.

Lastly, since it is a common post, Beta 2 will be available in the first half of 2006 - please register for that at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview - with final release by the end of 2006.

It has been a busy week - I was going to try to get another post up about the Office Live service for small business and its use of Windows SharePoint Services but that will have to wait a couple of days.

-- Jeff

Tracking List in WSS V.next

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:34:22 GMT

Via P.J. Hough

A very common use of WSS lists is to track important information. Lists are really useful as a tracking tool; they can easily be sorted, filtered, grouped. They can be easily edited and the Datasheet control can be used for bulk list operations. By subscribing to a list for alerts, individuals can easily identify when important changes happen to the list items they care about.

In WSS V3, we have added some additional features to our list infrastructure that are both useful in their own right, and also make it easier to build more sophisticated tracking applications. The main tracking features that we have added include list item versioning, append-only field type and workflow. However, the features are not unique to a particular list type in WSS – we decided to build these features as core platform extensions. Each one of these capabilities has a myriad of uses in WSS – we have combined them to enhance WSS as a platform for tracking applications, but they also benefit our Document Management and Content Management capabilities, as well as opening up a wide array of scenarios to developers and partners building on WSS.

In addition to building the underlying features that enable tracking applications, we will also ship an Issue Tracking list template out of the box. This template will have all of the tracking features enabled by default and will be a great starting point for customers who want to experience all the enhanced tracking features in one place.

List item Versioning
Many tracking applications rely on being able to see the evolution of an item over time. This can be easily modeled using list item versioning. By enabling versioning, WSS will keep track of all edits to the list item and display a rich view that shows the changes that have occurred for each version. Here’s a small example of how it will appear.

You can see that for each version, we show the fields that have changed, when the changed happened, and who made the change. As an aside, we’ve used this view as the basis for improvements to our email notifications, but more about that in another post. One important change we've made for task lists is to allow the list owner to determine if all task owners should receive email notification when a task is assigned to them. This will help overcome the problem of task owners not knowing that a task (perhaps on a list that they don't visit regularly) had been assigned to them.

Append-only field type
The append-only field can be used to append comments to an item that's being tracked without the possibility of changing previous comments. We’ve made this ‘append-only’ capability a property of the multi-line text field, so that you can include such a field in any list.

The ‘description of change’ field in the form above is an example of such an append-only field. When the item is edited, new data can be appended in this field, but none of the earlier remarks can be edited or deleted. For issue tracking and helpdesk applications, this type of field is very useful. It preserves the history, yet it makes it easy to see the latest status.

Tracking and Gantt views
One of the common visualizations that we have seen to present data stored in WSS is a Gantt view. Often, this visualization is simply used to quickly communicate the status of the project and to provide a high-level view of the main tasks. Our Gantt view combines the Gantt chart of the project with the associated list data.

This Gantt view is simply that; it’s a view (one that can be enabled on any list that has start and end dates for the items in the list). We don’t model or calculate dependencies or resources; customers requiring such capabilities should continue to use Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server. For more sophisticated tracking scenarios, it will be possible to associate approval workflows with each item that's being tracked in the list. I’ll write more about workflow in a later post.
Its also worth pointing out that it will be possible to synchronize WSS tasks into Outlook 12. The synchronization is 2-way – changes made to the task within Outlook will be sync’ed back to WSS, allowing users to consolidate tasks from Outlook and multiple WSS sites into a single view in Outlook to better manage their time and priorities. Our Outlook 12 integration is quite extensive, and I’ll save that also for another post. In the meantime, you can check out Melissa MacBeth's blog posts on Task and Time Management in Outlook 12 http://blogs.msdn.com/melissamacbeth/

Also, the Microsoft Access 12 team has built a tracking template that interacts directly with Issue Tracking template that will ship in WSS. The schemas for the two applications are identical, and the Access solution can be used as a rich front-end against WSS data. Here's a screenshot of how that application will look in Access 12.

All of the features I’ve described above can be applied to any list that you create in WSS V3, and even to lists that you upgrade from WSS v2. So, if you’re already using a list for tracking purposes, you can easily enable these features when you upgrade.

SharePoint vNext Screenshots

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:03:55 GMT

Here is some screen shots of SharePoint vNext via Daniel Drinhausen:

Breadcrumb Menu:

Menus:

Gallaries:

Add Web Parts:

Build-in Workflow:

First look at next version of SharePoint

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:15:54 GMT

Via Mark Harrison:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=115383

SharePoint V3.0 Workflow

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 20:40:41 GMT

PDC 2005 SharePoint "Next Version" Workflow Demo:

http://216.55.183.63/pdc2005/slides/OFF415_Hatoun.ppt

SharePoint V.30

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 20:44:10 GMT

From PDC, SharePoint V3.0 new features via Dustin Miller:

UI / UX

WSS will have an entirely new user interface that includes better navigation controls and built-in breadcrumb trails.
Pages will derive from “master pages“, meaning that you could re-skin an entire SharePoint site by modifying just one template file
More professional out of the box themes
FrontPage can directly edit each site's CSS file(s)
Workflow built-in all over SharePoint, with tight integration with Outlook 12 tasks
Individual documents can have document-specific workflows
Item-level security on lists and libraries
FrontPage has evolved further into a SharePoint designer tool (I read that as: the only SharePoint designer tool), and apparently, ghosted/unghosted pages won't be a problem any longer
Recycle bin with user and administrator restore features for document libraries and list items
InfoPath forms can be filled out with only a browser when published as (to?) a SharePoint site (even with FireFox)
Customizable and extensible search (and search API), including “did you mean“-type search term corrections
Lists can be viewed on mobile devices

Integration

All lists and libraries have RSS feeds, and each list's feed can be customized to include whatever fields you'd like
Event list RSS feeds include iCal files as enclosures
Each site has a master “aggregating“ RSS feed
Outlook 12 can perform 2-way online/offline syncronization of the following list types:
- Contacts
- Events
- Tasks
- Discussion Lists
- Document Libraries (!)
Discussion lists can create their own e-mail alias in Active Directory, allowing you to e-mail that alias to automatically archive that e-mail (and its attachments) to a SharePoint discussion list
ALL lists and libraries have version history capability, and only “diffs“ are stored (differences from one change to the next)
Access treats SharePoint sites as honest-to-goodness data sources

Developer-oriented news

Existing web parts will “just work“ in the new SharePoint web part page framework
Site definitions/templates will ship in the box for blogs and wikis (blogs can be built directly on your “My Site“!)
All lists and libraries will have synchronous event handlers (not sure how these work with other interfaces to SharePoint data, like OM, WEBDAV, SOAP, etc., if the event handler has to raise an exception)
List/library version history is exposed programmatically by way of the OM
Multiple “content types” (sets of metadata, or “metadata templates“, if you will) for document libraries and lists, that include view information, workflows, bound events.
FrontPage can edit workflows
Business Data Catalog (datasource catalog on steroids, apparently). This doesn't seem all that new to me, so I'll reserve commentary until more details emerge after the expected PDC sessions)

Dustin Miller

SharePoint "V3.0" Features

Eli Robilard

SharePoint v3 Collaboration and Tracking Features

Mike Fitzmaurice

The Kimono Is Open, The Veil Is Lifted, The Gags Are Removed.....