Friday, September 22, 2006

Sharepoint Comparison chart : 2003 vs 2007

Via Mart I stumbled upon this Sharepoint 200X comparison chart. The chart compares the differences between functionality in 2003 and 2007 using the following key-areas where Sharepoint is used as a solution :

  • Collaboration
  • Business Intelligence
  • Search
  • Portal
  • Content Management
  • Business Process and Forms
  • Management
  • Platform

This is a very handy chart for us consulting people ;)
So thanks to the creator of this chart Steve Caravajal!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Sharepoint 2003 : Unlocking longterm checked-out documents

An user asked me if I could take care of a document that was locked, being the sharepoint administrator that I am, I figured this could be solved by checking in the document and discard the changes. But Sharepoint told me that the document was not checked out and if I wanted to check it out it gave the following error :

"The file [filename] is checked out or locked for editing by [username]"

After some googling I found out that there were two types of checking-out:

Long term check out
This is the explicit check out . 
This holds a lock on the document whether you have it open for edit or not.

Short term check out
You get this feature implicitly. 
If you open a document for editing, you get a short term lock on the document to prevent other people from editing the doc while you are. 
The Office client applications refresh this lock periodically as long as you keep the document
open.  Once you close the document, your short term check out is released

Kudos to Mike Walsh's FAQ for the info!

Also, mentioned in the following KB-article, if your application crashes a short term lock of 10mins will occur

Unfortunatly I could not check in the file and the user who did check out the file could not do it either.
So I wrote some code to force the check-in.. only problem is that a new version will be written and the 'modified date' and 'modified by' metadata will be overwritten.

 

 

SPSite mySiteCollection = new SPSite("teamsitelink");
SPWeb web = mySiteCollection.RootWeb;
SPListCollection lists = web.Lists;

foreach (SPList list in lists)
{
	if (list.Title == "Document Library")
	{
		SPListItemCollection docLibItems = list.Items;

		foreach (SPListItem docLibItem in docLibItems)
		{
			if (docLibItem.File.CheckOutStatus == SPFile.SPCheckOutStatus.LongTerm)
			{
				Console.WriteLine(docLibItem.File.Name.ToString());
				try
				{
					docLibItem.File.CheckIn("");
				}
				catch (Exception error)
				{
					Console.WriteLine(error.Message.ToString());
				}
			}
		}
	}
}
web.Dispose();
mySiteCollection.Dispose();

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Update : B2TR not yet released!

Update: My mistake folks, i misread the information. Only the documentation regarding B2TR is released (guess I got carried away when I read "b2tr" and "released") ;) Thanks to Ishai Sagi for pointing that out. Well the moment we've all been waiting for is here! B2TR is ready to download ;) Make sure you read the the following documents before patching (or installing) you're fresh copy of the B2TR of Sharepoint 2007.

SharePoint Server 2007 B2TR Update Guide – This includes all of the update steps, known issues, workarounds and planning guidance. SharePoint Server 2007 B2TR Readme – This includes workarounds and fixes for less common issues for specific configurations.
Check the Sharepoint Team's blog and Lawrence Lui's blog for more details

Friday, September 08, 2006

Still better off with STSADM?

So you decided that you only want a simple template for your site-collection. But then after a couple of days you want to active the feature Office SharePoint Server Publishing, so you can do some WCM stuff. What happens when you do that? Well this happened to me : Then what you do? Well being the google-depended person I am, I found the solution ;) Instead of using the webinterface, we must use our good ol' STSADM!

stsadm -o activatefeature -id AEBC918D-B20F-4a11-A1DB-9ED84D79C87E -url http://mysharepoint.com
Much kudos to Tariq ! Thanks mate :)

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Workspace templates

Ok, so what's the deal with workspace templates and titles? Check out these screenshot and tell me how many times the screen tries to tell me that I'm on the 'tabbed test site' ? Example 1 : Example 2 : And the funny thing is that you cannot left the title blank. Another funny thing is that I only see this behaviour on workspaces. Since this type of template became very popular on our 2003 environment (better navigation capability, more information can be put on one site, etc), migrating these sites will not have the desired effect if the title of the site will be displayed more than once ;) Or is Microsoft hoping that this template will not be abused for any other thing than real workspaces ?

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Yet more workflow examples

Go checkout SharePoint 2007 Workflow with Visual Studio 2005 and Deploying a custom MOSS 2007 workflow from Nick. Great explanation and a very detailed step-by-step walkthrough to create workflows in combination with Infopath.

I'm just figuring this stuff out, I just want to create a workflow where a user creates a task for a specific subsite and that task must be pushed to the tasklist of that particular subsite. Now I want to achieve this using workflows (since I already have built it using the objectmodel), and I'm guessing this is not that tricky to built ;)

Monday, September 04, 2006

More workflow thingies!

From David's blog :

A couple of weeks ago David Chappell wrote a white paper "Introducing the .NET Framework 3.0" which is available from MSDN. Today I found another of David's white papers. One on "Understanding Workflow in Windows SharePoint Services and the 2007 Microsoft Office System".

This white paper provides a big-picture view of Microsoft’s support for human workflow in Windows SharePoint Services and the 2007 Office system.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows SharePoint Services are useful on their own. They become even more useful when you have the ability to create human workflow applications on the document-oriented features of Windows SharePoint Services. Windows SharePoint Services version 3 makes this possible.

Table of Contents:

The Value of Human Workflow

Technology Basic

Workflow and Windows SharePoint Services Version 3

Workflow and Office SharePoint Server 2007

Making a Technology Choice

Conclusion

Resources

David Chappell will also be one of the many speakers at TechEd: Developers in Barcelona where he will cover these (and other) topics during breakout sessions and panel discussions.

And I can also recommend going through the ECM starter kit workflows to see how it really works! You can download it from Microsoft

Alpha version released of "Community Kit for Sharepoint"

From Lawrence, Shane and Amanada comes the first Community Kit for Sharepoint. As Lawrence mentions in his post :

I’m very happy to announce that the Alpha release of the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) for review and feedback at http://cks.inetium.com/sites/sckalpha. The folks at Inetium did most of the work for free even though the company is a for profit Microsoft Certified Solution Provider partner. I applaud Eric Raarup, the VP of IT Strategy and Planning at Inetium and a member of the CKS core team, for recognizing the importance (and eventual benefits if not from increased sales then at least from better karma) of contributing to the SharePoint Community. I’m currently working with a couple of other community savvy Microsoft partners to make potential contributions to the CKS.