Ever had to merge SharePoint lists? Typically you can open them in Excel, copy & paste from one sheet to another and bob’s your uncle. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in all cases, especially when attachments are involved or the data uses lookup columns.

I’ve been playing about with MS Access 2007. It has a handy feature in that you can open SharePoint lists directly, as shown below:

You can then get to do pretty cool things with the list as it’s pretty much a DB table within access, albeit still linked to SharePoint.

It’s simply a case of using the ‘External Data | SharePoint List’ option to open the lists you need merged and copying/pasting from one table to another. There’s a couple of caveats here to be careful of though, namely:

• Your content types have to match across lists, otherwise it doesn’t work. You’ll have to switch into the query designer and map the columns manually.
• Beware of lookup columns. They’ll cause a ‘data integrity error’ if your data doesn’t match correctly. What I tend to do is paste a row in at a time and manually select the lookup value from the relevant column. This seems to sort it.

The plus side of using MS Access is that you can build up queries and reports from your SharePoint list data. Pretty powerful and not often mentioned!

Anyone that’s worked with SharePoint 2007 knows it’s a pain to make accessible. SharePoint spits things out as tables and the Site Actions menu is grim to behold in HTML. The guys working on the NSPCC NSU site used the ARF toolkit to replace the standard SharePoint 2007 controls with ARF controls that basically pull the info from SharePoint, render it as XML and apply an XSL to this. The result is the NSU Safeguarding Unit site that’s fully accessible. (Cue Ciaran or Nicky for a full blog post! =) )

Andrew McConnell has recently blogged about SharePoint 2010’s rendering; namely that it’s WCAG2.0 AA compliant ootb and it even converts existing sites! His post is definitely worth a read and can be found here:

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/11/04/sharepoint-2010-changes-to-rendering.aspx

I wonder how accessible the admin interface is though? I’ve seen a few requests for accessible admin interfaces and I have a feeling it’ll be the next big thing.

I installed and configured SharePoint 2007 on a farm but ran into a problem accessing the site from the web front end servers.

When trying to navigate to the site, SharePoint would prompt for user credentials, no matter who you were logged on as and then return a 401 error.

Spence Harbar has a really good article explaining this issue which is caused by a security feature installed in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2003 (SP1). http://www.harbar.net/archive/2009/07/02/disableloopbackcheck-amp-sharepoint-what-every-admin-and-developer-should-know.aspx

He points to Microsoft’s KB article 896861, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/896861

which details two workarounds to resolve this issue.

 

 

 

I recently had to export a site and import it to a different server.  Everything worked well using the stsadm export/import command.  EXCEPT when I tested adding a new content type in a Document Library, the document opened in Word 2007, but I got an error saying the Document Panel will not load and I was not able to add in any metadata for this document.

It turns out that I have two lookup columns on the site which contain metadata for a content type and to resolve this problem, I had to delete and recreate these columns, then add them back into the content type.

Luckily I had set these columns up in a parent content type and was able to push down these changes to the other content types inheriting from this parent.

Here’s an interesting post (http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=305) from Maurice Prather on SharePoint 2010 Web parts.

It seems that now your web part will be stored against the page if check in/checkout is activated against the page library in a WCM site.

Sounds useful as in previous cases if you exported your site the web part settings were lost. Now hopefully your web part settings will stay with the page during export or the web part itself will reappear in a previous page version if inadvertently deleted from the current page version.

The one thing I’m curious to see is if the page differences / web part differences are visible to the user from the SharePoint UI, rather than having to revert to a version and manually check for differences Could be a useful WinDiff add on for SharePoint.

Found this new blog via the SharePoint Facebook group – http://blogs.msdn.com/vssharepointtoolsblog/ looks pretty good. The latest post has some info on SharePoint 2010 tools in Visual Studio 2010:

As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 was announced earlier this week and it contains a lot of cool features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

Configurable deployment

With all new SharePoint project templates you can leverage new configurable deployment feature which lets you configure the way you want to deploy or retract your project. Besides using provided, out of the box deployment steps (Run Pre-Deployment Command, Run Post-Deployment Command, Recycle IIS Application Pool, Retract Solution, Add Solution, and Activate Features) you can use SharePoint extensibility to create your own, custom deployment steps and deployment configurations.

Sandboxed and farm solutions

Some SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed or farm solutions. Sandboxed solutions run in a secure and monitored process that has limited resource access and with farm solutions user must have SharePoint administrator privileges to run or deploy the solution. You can read more about SharePoint sandboxed solution here.

Extending SharePoint Tools

Even though Visual Studio 2010 contains a set of project templates you can also extend them. You can create extensions for projects, project items, define your own project item types and create deployment extensions. You can read more about extending SharePoint tools on MSDN.

Feature and Package Designer

Feature and package designers give you the ability to customize features in your solution and with packaging designer you can customize which features are getting deployed and how. More about feature and package designer is here.

SharePoint Explorer

SharePoint Explorer is a new tool window that gives you a view into your SharePoint server. You can get a hierarchical view of lists, sites and workflows on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates

The following SharePoint specific project templates and project item templates are available in Visual Studio 2010:

Project Templates

• Empty SharePoint project
• Visual Web Part project
• Sequential and State Machine Workflow
• Business Data Connectivity Model
• Event Receiver
• List Definition
• Content Type
• Module Project
• Site Definition

Project Item Templates

• Empty Element
• Web Part
• User Control
• Application Page
• Association Form
• Initiation Form
• Business Data Connectivity Resource Item
• List Instance
• List Definition From Content Type
• Global Resources File

Besides above mentioned project templates, there are two import project templates for importing .WSP file contents and importing reusable workflows:

• Import Reusable Workflow
• Import SharePoint Solution Package

How to download, install and get started

If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download Visual Studio 2010 from here. Download will be available to everyone on October 21st.

If you want to know how to download and install Visual Studio 2010 watch Channel9 video.

To get you started, head over to MSDN and read some of the walkthroughs on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010.

I attended Spencer Harbar’s session this morning which was focused on the options available for implementing multi-lingual sites in SharePoint 2010.  In MOSS 2007, variations were difficult to use and were detrimental to the performance of web apps since the process of propagating site content between variations ran within the W3WP.exe process belonging to the web app.

The following were highlighted as some of the performance improvements in the 2010 release:

• Reliability – All operations now run in the timer service rather than in process
• Manageability and recoverability – ‘fix up tool’ provided to help manage the timer jobs
• Significant memory usage improvements
• Pause and resume timer job support

Some best practices were also presented in relation to planning for multi-lingual sites:

• If required, plan to implement variations right from the start – implementing later is extremely difficult and architecturally unsound
• Storage design needs to follow SQL Server best practices
• Navigation needs to be designed to that it works well on all variation sites – for instance some menu labels may be too long in some of the variation languages
• Plan what redirection logic will be used – the default behaviour is to change the language based on the locale of the user’s browser, but this can be changed to allow the user to select the language
• Plan for translation of user content – this is still a manual process and is a large overhead for an organisation
• Never use external redirection of any kind such as in IIS or with reverse proxy since this will interfere with the variation redirection functionality

One of the main developments in SharePoint 2010 is the provision of the Mulit-lingual User Interface (MUI).  This now allows a site to have alternate languages (based on the language packs installed).  The site settings give the site owner to decide which alternate languages should be available for selection on the site.  When this is enabled, a language selector becomes available in the user menu at the top of the site.  This provides multi-lingual chrome on the site as well as translating site menus and site settings pages.

This option is also available in the Central Administration site, allowing users to change the language of the site on the fly.

Multi-lingual sites are also aided in 2010 by the ability to create multi-lingual metadata terms within the term store so that metadata column names and options are provided in the appropriate language automatically.

The new enhancements definitely make the provision of multi-lingual sites more mangeable and a lot more performant, but the implementation of variation sites needs to be well planned to function correctly.

 The logical architecture of Sharepoint 2010 has changed significantly from MOSS 2007.  From the session I attended yesterday at SPC09 the key improvements were highlighted as follows:

• Flexible deployment model
  • Pick which services in which environment
• Improved security model
  • Claims based authorisation
  • Cross-farm communication via web services
• Simplified administration model
  • Managed via central admin and PowerShell
• Service isolation
  • Each service app uses separate database and optionally different app poll
  • Support for multiple service applications for a service with different accounts and databases
• Multi-Tenancy
  • Some service apps can be partitioned to handle multiple tenants

Also mentioned in the session was the fact that Microsoft have released a set of technical diagrams and models relating to planning logical and physical architectures in SharePoint 2010 and upgrading from MOSS 2007.

I’ve come across this post from MVP Reza Alirezaei’s blog. In his post he lays out how you can build a VHD and basically boot to it natively. Gone are the days of partitioning a hard disk for multiple windows installs. Instead you can now go off, build your VM, Sysprep it, run a few commands and boot to it on start-up.

There’s good points and bad points about this. First off, Reza makes a very good point about the upcoming Visual Studio 2010, namely:

VS 2010 Beta 1 runs much faster in a native boot from vhd than a VM. It’s partly due to VS 2010 being heavily based on WPF and emulating the graphics card in VMs forces WPF to run into software rendering mode and kills the performance big time. So far, every time I’ve fired up VS 2010 in a VM its taken 5 mins to get frustrated with the performance and give up! Obviously VS 2010 is still in beta and lots of improvements will be made in future , but in the interim, native boot from vhd is pretty much the only way that allows me to evaluate VS 2010 dev experience without having WPF running into software rendering mode, frequent crashes and performance headaches.

I’ve tried running VS2010 beta in a VMWare (Server) machine running Windows Server 2k8 and it’s truly abysmal. CPU usage jumped to 100% so frequently it was unusable. I am really starting to think that it might be a problem for us to have a VM with VS2010 and SQL Server 2008 running on it, never mind SP2010 when it arrives.  By the way the host machine I tried this on was running 3gb with Windows 7 and it’s pretty well specced too.

Ultimately it doesn’t bode well for SharePoint 2010 seeing as SharePoint Foundation (formerly WSS)  states that 2-4gb is required and SharePoint Server (MOSS) needs 6-8 GB ram!

Is it then time to look at a paradigm shift for development in that we have a number of development VHD’s that we boot natively from, and from within them we virtualise our common applications, such as email, word etc? It might even be reasonably straightforward as new Online versions of the Office Suite could be used.

Obviously there’s good and bad points about this.

• Overall performance will be better as the Development VM’s will utilise the machines hardware directly. VS2010 might even load before lunchtime.
• You might need to reboot to switch between VM’s, but this is no different from shutting down 1 VM to start another. Might even be faster than VMWare shutting down.

I hope to play about with the native boot stuff over the next few days. Stay tuned for feedback.

[Update] Apparently you need Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate to enable Virtual HD booting

SO I’ve seen one day’s worth of seminars about SharePoint 2010 at SPC09 and I want it now!!  I’ve collated a list of the new features that I’ve heard about so far below and I imagine this only scrapes the surface, but it will give you an idea of how far the product has come in the past 3 years.

Functional Area	Improvements/New features
General	· The Microsoft office ribbon is now being used across the pages and libraries to provide all user functions· Capabilities for compositing, Rapid Application Development and communities extended in 2010 · Better support for multiple browsers and phones
Workflow	· Out of the box workflows can now be customized via SharePoint Designer so that it is no longer necessary to start from scratch· SharePoint Designer workflows can now be deployed at list and site level · SharePoint Designer workflows will now be reusable · Workflow processes in SharePoint Designer can be imported from and exported to and from Microsoft Visio · Workflow visualisations can be displayed by Visio Services so that people can see clearly what stage in the workflow the document is currently at
Web Content Management	· Cross browser support is now provided for page authoring. XHTML support for accessibility · The ribbon provides a rich feature set when editing page content · Live preview is provided when formatting content style and positioning · Pictures don’t need to be uploaded to the picture library to be made available for insertion – pictures can be selected from a local drive and will be uploaded automatically to the digital asset library when added to a page · Ability to resize and reposition images on the page (with live preview) · Spell checking is now built into the WCM content editor when publishing the page – also checks for draft items on the page · Media web part available – silverlight based media player allowing streaming video to be delivered from the SharePoint rich media library - Ability to create custom skins for the media player - Streaming in BLOB cache (Maintains the health of the servers while content is being streamed · Host header can now be created for site collections (instead of at web application level) · Improvements to the Content Query Web Part     - The filter section of the content query web part has a new field to be able to specify a value relating to the page in which the web part is embedded    – No longer need to fiddle with XSL to make the values appear in the web part     – Now a UI for specifying which fields to show· Changes to the page layout in SP Designer will be brought through to all pages created from the page layout · Site branding via custom themes and master pages will now be applied to all pages – system pages will no longer be excluded
Document Management	· Web parts available to show newest documents, highest rated documents, modified by me· Unique document identifiers are now facilitated for all documents · Document libraries can have a million items per folder or 10s of millions of items per library · Ability for administrators to throttle lists to limit the number of items being viewed · Taxonomy can be used to navigate millions of items – improving user experience · Social context can be used to find documents using document ratings – who rated this document from my team· Metadata navigators provided on the left of libraries to drill down into library contents to help filter the documents in the library · New drag and drop ability within the Upload Multiple Documents interface· Hierarchical metadata and taxonomy for classifying content · New concept of Document sets- A document set is a document content type in itself that contains child document types     – Allows documents to be grouped together and managed together     – Enabled features such as multiple checkout and check in     – Can include instructional information for a document set including streaming video to give advice on processes     – Can manage entire set or individual documents within the set · Big investments have been made to enhance the interaction between office applications and SharePoint     – Ability to add notes to a document within Word     – Auto-complete available on property fields in Word     – Office is now aware of the content types in libraries and the templates associated with those content types, knowing where to store it and which metadata to capture · Office online applications allow documents to be opened and edited in the browser by multiple users · File Server co-existence is now possible using File Server Resource Manager (Provided by Windows Server 2008 R2)     – Provides the ability to apply metadata over existing file shares     – Content classifier and folder classifier     – Automatically applies metadata based on the content of a document (based on iFilters) – applied based on pattern matching within the documents     – Can decide what stays in place and what is promoted to SharePoint     – Powershell scripts used to send documents to SharePoint     – Content Organiser used to place the document in the correct location in SharePoint     – A link is left in the file share to the document in SharePoint     – A report is produced detailing what has been moved to SharePoint by the PowerShell scripts
Records Management	· Can now declare documents as record in place· Can lock the system down so only certain users or workflows can declare or ndeclared documents as records · Also still have the ability to send documents to the records centre (Can be done on any document, wiki item or blog entry) · In 2007, policies were applied to content types – Now, policies can be applied to both content types and libraries/folders· SharePoint 2010 allows the construction of hierarchical records repository · Can now have multi-phased disposition schedules · Content Organiser allows content to be sent to the correct part of the file plan     – Can set up organiser rules based on metadata properties and content types – can have multiple conditions     – Documents are routed to the appropriate location based on the rules- The content organiser can be used on any sites – not just the record centre     – Can have an auto-provisioned file plan based on the rules chosen · Can now send items to the Records Centre as part of a SP Designer workflow · Can leave a stub behind in the document library when moving to the records centre · eDiscovery and Holds     – Powerful new tools for discovery of information     – Hold capability is not being restricted to a records centre – items can be held in place or moved to another location depending on the options chosen when searching for items to hold     – Hold reports available for the sites
Content Classification	· New Managed Metadata Service makes it possible to define content types and hierarchical taxonomies across multiple sites and farms· Can import taxonomies from .csv format · Can specify if users can use taxonomy terms when tagging content· Can specify terms in different languages (which can be switched depending on the user) · Can provide synonyms for taxonomy terms · Allows users to suggest new terms to be added to the taxonomy · Metadata can now be used to drive discovery and navigation · Add hoc bottom up taxonomy management – ability to tag content and manage navigation via the taxonomy
Enterprise Search	Search Product Options· Search Server 2010 Express     – Quick, easy, powerful search for free-      Basic search · SharePoint Server 2010     – Complete intranet search     – Intranet-wide search     – People and expertise search · FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint     – High-end search delivered through SharePoint     – Visual experiences, extreme adaptability and advanced content processing     – Powerful platform to build on     – 360 degree views     – Research portals     – Reputation analysis·  Standard and FAST Search – unified set of connectors, improved user experience, wildcard searching, filtering, navigation, federation · Experience, relevance, navigation – new relevance algorithms for people, taking account of misspellings of people’s names (using phonetics algorithms) · Scale and flexible platform – increased programmability and scalability – FAST adds to the extensibility · Type ahead now provided in search box · Metadata extraction to provide faceted search criteria in the left nav to filter search results · Ability to save search to desktop to allow items to be searched later form windows explorer· Improved relevance rankings · Enhanced language support and word breaking· Ability to preview office documents in the search page (this looks really good) · User context – allowing relevancy to be based on user interests · Enhanced people search     – Ability to filter results based in job title, interests, etc in the navigator     – Extraction from the user profile returned in the search results to make it easier to find the right person · OOTB Sources for SharePoint Search now include File shares, Web sites, Databases, SharePoint, Exchange Server, Documentum and Lotus Notes
Social Computing	· Power of social computing has been harnessed in 2010 for the enterprise· Tag clouds available along with blog rolls · Ability to build networks and see what other colleagues are up to · Rating feature now available in lists and libraries (including blog and wiki entries) · New search capability – rich people search to find people by expertise, ability to view recent content published by a user from the search -queryless search, enhanced search results interface · Profile sites show lists of tags that users have applied to content · Note boards (walls) available on user profiles for colleagues to leave notes and questions·
Business Intelligence	· Performance Point Services is now an integrated part of SharePoint 2010- Provides the ability to drill down into graphical information and use decomposition trees from the graphs – allowing managers to breakdown information within the browser, slicing and dicing information    – Seamless integration, more advanced dashboards and visualisations · SQL Server PowerPivot (released next year) – empowering Excel workbooks to handle 100 million rows of data · Ability to build workbook views in Excel and publish information to SharePoint · RSS feeds available for Excel workbooks to see what changes are being made · Excel services, SQL Server support – slicers, capability for new chart types, new visualisations of data, exposing Excel formulas –Visio Services and Chart web parts – ability to bind Visio to live data and allow data to be sliced and dicedBusiness Connectivity Services – external line of business and SQL data brought in as SharePoint data·
Offline Content	· SharePoint Workspace is the replacement for Groove, allowing content to be taken offline and synched back when required· Workspace is aware of Document Sets so keeps documents grouped as they are in SharePoint
Administration	· Ability to have a mix of sites on-premises and/or in the Cloud· New web and Powershell Admin – improved central administration UI, better command line scripting ability     – PowerShell to replace STSADM(500 commandlets being shipped with the public beta with the ability to crack open and customise) · WhatIf command can be used with PowerShell commandlets to show what will happen when the script runs before it runs · Throttling, monitoring, analytics – proactively manage the health of SharePoint –more rules being produced and shipped with later releases. Ability to write own reports against the schema (for the usage analysis database – not the content databases) · Improved upgrade and availability – new model for visual upgrade – ability to run old UI pages as they are in the new environment or use the new UI when required, much less downtime required for applying patches with mirroring and log shipping
Development	· Developer productivity with VS2010 – beta released 19/10/2009· New tools for SharePoint· New list of templates for site definitions, workflow, web parts, content types · All available to run on Windows 7 and Vista · Don’t need to jump to explorer to view the SharePoint site – site explorer in the left nav of VS · Graphical designers built in to help build and package solutions · Drag and drop for building web part interfaces · Ability to map folders from file systems to publish through to SHarePoint – to use to embed images in web parts (uses relative URLs) – VS will package the folder and deploy it to the 12 hive · One click to deploy and debug – can set a breakpoint before deploying – F5 retracts, installs, deploys, etc with one click· New UI for adding web parts to pages · New developer dashboard in SP 2010 – shows all database calls, callstack of what was called (xray technology for web parts), shows event offsets – timings of each call     – can be used by developers and IT Professionals (this looks great)     – Provides a report of slowest to load pages within a site plus the time of each image load and databse roundtrip on the page