I’m on a project where we need to collect metrics around a function named "Share a Story." The idea is very simple — Se está mirando para un artigo interesante sobre a intranet e quero compartir isto con alguén, click a link labeled "Share this story" correo-e para o seu amigo.

Nós tocamos por aí con un formulario personalizado para esa finalidade, pero ao final, sentido común gañou o día e nós só usar o familiar <a href = mailto:…> technique. (<a href mailto:…> é un pouco sorprendente robusto HTML; como un extra, ese link me trae de volta ao meu vello UNIX home páxinas días; aqueles eran os días!).

Esta técnica ofrece unha excelente interface para os usuarios finais, xa que comeza a usar a súa coñecida cliente MS Outlook (ou calquera cliente de correo electrónico que teña instalado).

Isto fai as cousas máis difíciles para nós tipo creador pobres, xa que o cliente * Tamén * quere realizar un informe no futuro que mostra como moitas veces os usuarios comparten historias e mesmo que as historias son compartidas con máis frecuencia.

We whiteboarded a few potential solutions. My favorite is to carbon copy (CC) a SharePoint list. That way, the end user still gets the outlook client while we get to capture the event because we’ll get a copy of the email ourselves. There are some obvious drawbacks. The main problem is that the user could simply blank out or otherwise mangle the CC address. E, we need to manage that event library of emails. We have a scheduled job on the white board responsible for that cleanup.

Se ten algunha visión intelixente para solucionar este problema, por favor, dicir.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Siga-me no Twitter http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Segundo proceda e prometido, I’ve uploaded my presentation on how to obtain "great" requirements from end users for SharePoint projects and implementations. It’s here: http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/Paul% 20Galvin% 20Great% 20Requirements.zip

Eu presentei iso no SharePoint conferencia de Mellores Prácticas en febreiro 2009 (www.sharepointbestpractices.com). If you attended the conference, tamén se pode obter tanto na conferencia de DVD.

The presentation includes a lot of notes with most slides. It’s not just bullet points.

(See here for my other presentation on a governance case study: http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1CC1EDB3DAA9B8AA!3099.entry

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Siga-me no Twitter http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Cantos tipos de consultoría SharePoint, I’ve been exposed to a lot of SharePoint functionality. Algunhas veces, I dive pretty deep. Other times I just notice it as I’m flying by to another set of menu options. One of those is "self-service site creation." I haven’t had a need for it until this week.

Esta semana, I need to solve a business problem which I think is going to become more common as companies loosen up and embrace more direct end user control over SharePoint. Neste caso, I’ve designed a site template to support a specific end user community. Folks in this community should be able to create their own sites at will using this template whenever the urge strikes them.

I recalled seeing "self-service site creation" before and I’ve always tucked that away in the back of my head thinking that "self service site creation" is SharePoint lingo meaning, obviously enough, something like "turn me on if you want end users to be able to create sites when they want to."

Así, I turn it on, try it out and for me, it’s not creating sites. It’s creating site collections. Pretty big difference. That’s not what I want, not at all.

It is possible to let end users create new sub sites via a custom permission level. This is exactly where I would have gone in the first place except that the label "self-service site creation" label deceived me. Via twitter, I learn that it’s deceived others as well 🙂

I’m still working out how to provide a little bit of a more streamlined process while staying purely out of the box, but there’s a definite path to follow. Just don’t get distracted by that label.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Siga-me no Twitter http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Eu era un dos 20 ou 30 (ou que 100?) painelistas onte á noite no New York SharePoint Grupo de Usuarios meeting. Instead of the usual presentation format, iso era todo sobre Q&A between the audience and the panel members. Early on, Michael Lotter presentouse a unha nova idea e eu quería compartir.

An audience member described how his company had paid a consultant to write an application for his company. The consultant wrote it as a console application using the SharePoint object model. Como resultado, this meant that the program had to be run on a server in the farm. This meant that anyone that wanted to use the app would have to log onto the server, do the work and log off. A principio, este non foi un problema, mais pronto, cada vez máis (non técnico) users needed to use the utility. His question was (parafraseando):

"Cales son as miñas opcións? I don’t want to keep letting users log directly onto the server, pero precisan desa función."

Michael Lotter suxeriu que configurar unha nova máquina virtual, join it to the farm as a WFE and let users run the application from there.

This is a pretty stunning idea for me. Generalizing this solution brings to mind the notion of essentially temporary, almost disposable WFE’s. I think it’s a pretty neat concept. This temporary WFE can run a console application that uses the SharePoint object model. You could also use it to run stsadm commands. It doesn’t have to be part of regular local balancing. If it goes down or gets wrecked, you can just spin up a new one. I repeat myself, pero eu só teño que dicir que eu penso que é unha idea realmente puro.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Siga-me no Twitter http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Esta semana pasada, alguén fixo unha pregunta sobre a creación dun ambiente SharePoint que ía xestionar un gran volume bastante de novos documentos (10,000 +/- neste caso). I don’t know much about this, pero grazas a este papel branco, Eu me sinto moito mellor informados.

Para min, este white paper é practicamente só unha marca de libro no momento, but I did start reading through it and thought I’d highlight my main take-away. SharePoint can be scaled to handle, como mínimo, esta carga:

• 50k novos documentos por día.
• 10 total de millón de documentos.

I write the 50k/10MM figures because they are easy enough to remember. As long as you know they are minimums, you won’t get into trouble. The maximums are at least 10 por cento maior que iso e con extrema sintonía, posiblemente moito maior.

Grazas, Mike Walsh, unha vez máis para a súa semanais WSS actualizacións FAQ e correccións post. If you’re not subscribed to it, ten que pensar seriamente en facelo.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Durante a semana pasada, meu compañeiro and I were doing some work for a client in NYC. We were testing a different aspects of a MOSS implementation using their "standard" estación de traballo de construción (por oposición aos nosos ordenadores portátiles). While doing that, que funcionou nalgúns erros, seguindo estes pasos:

• Abra un documento de MS Word a través de Windows Explorer (que utiliza WebDAV).
• Fai un cambio.
• Salvalo.

Nós vimos a entender que algunhas veces (xeralmente a primeira vez) que salvo o documento, the save didn’t "stick." Save did not save. We would pull that document back up and our changes simply were not there.

Non entender a raíz do problema neste momento, but we figured that we should make sure that the latest MS Office service pack had been installed on that work station. The IT folks went and did that. We went through the test again and we discovered a new problem. When we saved it, agora teño ese erro:

Este tempo, parecía que cada cambio foi, de feito, salvo, whether we answered Yes or No to the scripts question.

Finalmente tivemos un ollo á versión actual do Office e verifícase que a estación estaba correndo MS Office 2000 con service pack 3 que aparece en Help -> About as "Office 2002".

A moral da historia: Sempre vou usar o Office 2003 como a miña versión mínima oficina de base ao usar WebDAV e Moss.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

(Para fins de investigación, este é o texto do erro):

Liña: 11807

Carbonizar: 2

Erro: Obxecto non soporta esta propiedade ou método

Código; 0

URL: http://sharepoint01/DocumentReview/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?location=Documents/1210/testworddocument.doc&dialogview=SaveForm

Desexa continuar a executar scripts nesta páxina?

Nunha ou miña primeiros artigos, I describiu o proceso no seu conxunto, seguimos para migrar un cliente do SPS 2003 to MOSS. A reader left a comment asking for more detail and here it is.

Para que o proxecto de migración, tivemos de atopar unha boa forma de mover unha gran cantidade de SPS 2003 documents over to MOSS. The initial load was easy enough. Create a new target document library in MOSS and use windows explorer to move the documents.

Esta é unha nova biblioteca de documentos:

Open up two windows explorers. Point the first at SPS 2003 and the second at the new document library in MOSS. The following screen shot shows this. Note that the top browser is actually pointing at my c:\temp drive, but you can imagine it pointing to an SPS 2003 document library:

After that drag and drop operation, my target looks like this:

Now it’s time to deal with the metadata. Assume we have just one column of metadata for these documents named "location." We can see from the above "all documents" view that the location is blank. It’s easy enough to use a data sheet view to enter the location, or even go into each document’s properties one by one to add a location. Let’s assume that there is no practical way to assign the location column a value automatically and that end users must do this by hand. Ademais, imos supor que hai centos de documentos (quizais milleiros) and that it will take many many days to update the metadata. As we all know, no one is going to sit down and work for four of five days straight updating meta data for documents. Pola, they will break that out over a period of weeks or possibly longer. To facilitate this process, we can create an "untagged data" ver como se mostra:

Agora, cando alguén se senta para pasar a súa hora diaria alocados ou dous para marcar documentos migraron, they can use the "untagged documents" view to focus their effort:

As users tag documents, they drop off this list.

This notion of an untagged data view can also help with a class of data validation problem people inquire about on the forums. Fóra da caixa, there’s no way to prevent a user from uploading a document to MOSS and then not enter meta data. We can specify that a particular site column is mandatory and the user won’t be allowed to push the save button. Con todo, if the user uploads and then closes the browser (or uses windows explorer to upload the document), we can’t force the user to enter meta data (novo, para fóra da caixa).

This approach can be used to help with that situation. We can use a "poorly tagged data" view to easily identify these documents and correct them. Couple this with a KPI and you have good visibility to the data with drill-down to manage these exceptional circumstances.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Esta semana, I’ve struggled a bit with my team to get MOSS installed in a simple two-server farm. Having gone through it, Teño unha maior valoración para os tipos de problemas que as persoas relatan foros MSDN e noutros lugares.

A configuración final granxa:

• SQL / Index / Intranet WFE dentro do firewall.
• WFE na DMZ.
• Algún tipo de devasa entre o servidor interno e DMZ.

Antes de comezar o proxecto, we let the client know which ports needed to be open. During the give and take, adiante e cara atrás ao longo dese, nunca dixo explícitamente dúas cousas importantes:

1. SSL significa que precisa dun certificado.
2. The DMZ server must be part of a domain.

O primeiro día, we showed up to install MOSS and learned that the domain accounts for database and MOSS hadn’t been created. To move things along, we went ahead and installed everything with a local account on the intranet server.

Neste punto, descubrimos a confusión sobre o certificado e SSL, tristemente, decided to have our infrastructure guy come back later that week to continue installing the DMZ server. Nese medio tempo, nós, arquitectos de solucións avanzou co material de negocios.

Un fin de semana pasa e que o cliente obtén o certificado.

Nosa infraestrutura cara aparece e descobre que o servidor DMZ non está asociado a calquera dominio (ou un dominio de perímetro con confianza limitada ou o dominio intranet). We wasted nearly a 1/2 día en que. If we hadn’t let the missing SSL certificate bog us down, we would have discovered this earlier. Oh well….

Outro día pasa e as distintas comisións de seguridade, partes interesadas e (non tan) inocentes todos coinciden en que non hai problema en unirse ao servidor DMZ co dominio intranet (este é un POC, ao final, non é unha solución de produción).

Infrastructure guy comes in to wrap things up. This time we successfully pass through the the modern-day gauntlet affectionately known as the "SharePoint Configuration Wizard." We have a peek in central administration and … Yee haw! … DMZ server is listed in the farm. We look a little closer and realize we broke open the Champaign a mite bit early. WSS services is stuck in a "starting" Estado.

Longa historia curta, it turns out that we forgot to change the identity of the service account via central administration from the original local account to the new domain account. We did that, re-foi o asistente de configuración e listo! We were in business.

</final>

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Aínda que non é literalmente certo, Como unha cuestión práctica, unha Internet dedicado a web front-end nunha DMZ debe estar nun dominio (i.e. non un servidor independente no seu propio pequeno grupo de traballo). It doesn’t need to be in the same domain as the internal WFE(s) e outros servidores (e probablemente non debería), but it needs to be a domain.

My colleagues and I spent an inordinate amount of time on a proposal which included SharePoint pre-requisites. This included a comprehensive list of firewall configurations that would enable the DMZ server to join the farm and so forth. Desafortunadamente, we failed to add a sentence somewhere that said, to the effect, "the whole bloody point of this configuration is to allow your DMZ WFE server, in a domain, to join the internal farm."

A perfect storm of events, where we basically looked left when we might have looked right, conspired to hide this problem from us until fairly late in the process, thus preventing me from invoking my "tell bad news early" rule.

Sigh.

Rexístrate para o meu blog.

Os usuarios do foro a miúdo como preguntas como esta:

> Ola,
>
> Por favor, me diga se hai posibilidades de construír unha lista personalizada con
> Tipo de mestre e de detalles (como facturas) sen usar InfoPath.
>

SharePoint ofrece algúns fóra das características da caixa que soportan tipos de requisitos de negocios coma este.

En xeral, one links two lists together using a lookup column. List A contains the invoice header information and list B contains invoice details.

Usa as listas adicionais para manter o número de clientes, números de produtos, etc.

Usar a consulta de contidos web part (en só Moss) and/or a data view web part to create merged views of the lists. SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) tamén está dispoñible para o lado da mesma comunicación.

Con todo, there are some important limitations that will make it difficult to use pure out-of-the-box features for anything that is even moderately complex. These include:

• Tamaño da investigación relacionada listas vs. "smartness" of the lookup column type. A lookup column type presents itself on the UI differently depending on whether you’ve enabled multi-select or not. In either case, the out-of-the-box control shows all available items from the source list. If the source list has 1,000 items, that’s going to be a problem. The lookup control does not page through those items. Pola, it pulls all of them into the control. That makes for a very awkward user interface both in terms of data entry and performance.
• Lookups "pull back" one column of information. You can never pull back more than one column of information from the source list. Por exemplo, you cannot select a customer "12345" and display the number as well as the customer’s name and address at the same time. The lookup only shows the customer number and nothing else. This makes for an awkward and difficult user interface.
• No intra-form communication. Eu escribín sobre iso aquí. You can’t implement cascading drop-downs, condicional activar / desactivar campos, etc.
• No cascading deletes or built-in referential integrity. SharePoint treats custom lists as independent entities and does not allow you to link them to each other in a traditional ERD sense. Por exemplo, SharePoint permite que cree dúas listas personalizadas, "customer" and "invoice header". You can create an invoice header that links back to a customer in the customer list. Entón, you can delete the customer from the list. Fóra da caixa, there is no way to prevent this. To solve this kind of problem, usaría normalmente manipuladores de eventos.

Pode parecer sombrío, but I would still use SharePoint as a starting point for building this kind of functionality. Though there are gaps between what you need in a solution, SharePoint permite cubrir esas lagoas usando ferramentas como:

• Event handlers. Use them to enforce referential integrity.
• Columnas personalizadas: Create custom column types and use them in lieu of the default lookup column. Add paging, buffer e os recursos AJAX para facelas sensibles.
• BDC. This MOSS-only feature enables us to query other SharePoint lists with a superior user interface to the usual lookup column. BDC can also reach out to a back end server application. Use BDC to avoid replication. Rather than replicating customer information from a back end ERP system, use BDC instead. BDC features provide a nice user interface to pull that information directly from the ERP system where it belongs and avoids the hassle of maintaining a replication solution.

  BDC é unha característica Moss (non está dispoñible no WSS) and is challenging to configure.

• Formulario web ASP.NET: Crear un formulario habilitados para AJAX completo que utiliza o modelo de obxecto do SharePoint e / ou servizos web para alavancar as listas do SharePoint, que proporciona unha interface de usuario moi sensible.

A última opción pode sentir como se está empezando de cero, pero considerar o feito de que a plataforma SharePoint comeza fóra coas seguintes características principais:

• Modelo de seguridade co mantemento.
• Sistema de menú co mantemento.
• "Master table" (i.e. Contraer personalizadas) con seguridade, built-in de mantemento e auditoría.
• Procurar.
• Volver acabar ferramentas de integración (BDC).

Se comeza cun novo proxecto en branco no visual studio, ten unha morea de infraestrutura e encanamento para construír antes de chegar preto do que o SharePoint ofrece.

I do believe that Microsoft intends to extend SharePoint in this direction of application development. It seems like a natural extension to the existing SharePoint base. Microsoft’s CRM application provides a great deal of extensibility of the types needed to support header/detail application development. Although those features are in CRM, the technology is obviously available to the SharePoint development team and I expect that it will make its way into the SharePoint product by end of 2008. If anyone has an knowledge or insight into this, por favor, deixe un comentario.

</final>