Patrick Tisseghem's Blog [MVP SharePoint]

Blog Moved! Time to update your RSS Feed!!!

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:22:00 GMT

My blog has moved to a SharePoint 2007 environment. All of the posts are moved too and you will be automatically redirected if you go for the old URL but you should update the RSS feed if you are subscribed to the blog.

New blog URL: http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/Patrick/default.aspx

New RSS Feed URL: http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/Patrick/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List={91F6455C-4448-4303-8A38-B1722E1522D1}

Chapters ready for copy-editing!

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:22:00 GMT

It is always a pleasure to be for a week in my favorite country Cyprus. This week has been very very good also because I was able to relax and finish the final two chapters of the Inside MOSS 2007 MSPress book. So everything is done now, more than 700 pages, a dump of everything I learned the past 2 years creating and delivering trainings, seminars, and workshops on all of this.

Now the second phase is starting, the copy-editing and proof reading. This should be over in 3 to 4 weeks and then everything is submitted for printing. I am happy about the flow, finished all of the chapters on time and hopefully will go through a smooth copy-editing phase so that the book will be in the shops beginning of May. That is the plan.

Update: I just noticed that the book cover has been published. Cool :)

European SharePoint Conference Day 3 + MOSS Gets Waxed!

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:42:00 GMT

Final day of the conference was filled up with prepping and preparing my job of being a 'demo darling' for Fitz's session on packaging, deploying, upgrading and maintaining SharePoint solutions. It is a very interesting topic that I have researched a lot the last couple of weeks preparing this session and the intend is to write this all down into a new MSDN paper published hopefully before TechEd US. During the session it became clear that Fitz had a lot to say and I had a lot to demo and we weren't going to make it if we pursued each of the options. So I could not demonstrate too much but remember that all of it will finally be put on paper.

A couple of highlights out of the session:

Developers should have their own sharepoint dev environment locally - we know it is often a pain to have Windows Server 2003 on your dev machine, or to use VPC, but you will be more productive. Interesting idea that Fitz is trying to push forward is to bring out a 'developer version' of WSS 3.0 that can run on Windows XP or Vista. That would be cool if that came true.
The VS.NET Extensions for WSS 3.0 are still a bit shaky since the CTP is not even beta. A beta and a final RTM will arrive in the coming months. For now, try to workaround the problems.
Half of the fantastic 40 templates will be delivered as STP files, half as pure site definitions. I demonstrated how to reverse engineer one of them but this will not be necessary anymore.
The story about solution deployment is good but there are a number of pitfalls that we have discussed, that I found out during the research and that we will document. One of them, the fact that you have to use embedded resources and cannot copy resx files during the deployment phase will be solved ASAP.

Well, that concluded for me the SharePoint conference. I experienced it as one of the best conferences I participated in. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. And hopefully MS EMEA will repeat this next year for those who missed this one. Or, there is an APAC version scheduled 14th of May in Sydney, so maybe your boss agrees for that one :)

Hey? MOSS gets waxed? Well, I am so happy today because my favorite girlfriend MOSS got waxed at Madam Tussauds in London. When is the next gig in London?

European SharePoint Conference Day 2

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:32:00 GMT

It was a quiet day for me, no sessions to do. But I have seen and talked to many people yesterday. I got good updates from the different vendors exhibiting that I can use within my sales courses. It seems that everybody is pretty much ready with the upgrades of their tools and products to the new SharePoint 2007. Excellent to hear!

I went to two sessions, one delivered by Lars from MondoSoft and the other one by Arpan Shah. Lars was a bit nervous but he managed to give a good overview of the new improvements regarding search in MOSS 2007. It has become one of my favourite topics too. Arpan, besides having some problems with its SharePoint Designer (we all have some time :)) did a great overview of the Web Content Management integration in MOSS 2007. Again a topic dear to me.

In the evening all Belgians/Luxemburgers were invited for a dinner organized and sponsored by Microsoft Belux. About 90 people accepted! Food was great, drinks also and the social chatting was entertaining! From there we took the bus to the party drinking a couple of beers before we took off to the hotel. Have a session today with Fitz so I need to be 100% alive and kicking. More on that later. For now... let's head to the conference center!

European SharePoint Conference Day 1

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:17:00 GMT

Wow! A lot of people here and a nice combination of suits and jeans since this is a conference where besides the geekie stuff one can also network with partners and attend sessions delivered by partners showing off their latest contributions to the world of SharePoint. SharePoint is hot in Europe and the conference is definitely demonstrating this. You actually feel the SharePoint vibes going through the building :)

Day started with breakfast with Fitz after having spent the night in our Kunst Hotel. It is a nice change to the traditional business hotels I see too much. Arriving at the convention center, I was expecting some chaos for the registration but everything went perfect. The organization of the conference is actually excellent. U2U has a small booth here near the Skelta booth. I brought my wife as the person to man the booth and she is doing an excellent job selling SharePoint trainings all over the world. Very fun indeed. She is making sure that the next half year is going to be packed again with travelling :)

I did not see too much of the keynote since I was prepping my VPC for the first session directly after it. As a trainer or presenter doing SharePoint demos, you better make sure that everything is in place before you start, otherwise there could be some surprises (like long waiting intervals). First session went excellent I think. Room fully packed, no seats left, people sitting on the floor .. that's what a presenter likes to see :). Throughout the day Mike Ammerlaan, Dustin Friesenhahn and I delivered a 4-part developer-focused series on what you should know to survive as a SharePoint developer. I kicked off with object model fundamentals, talking about Web Services, security and event handlers, Mike went deeper into the customization and branding topics. Dustin then with content types and the metadata and then me again with templates, features and solutions. If you were new to SharePoint 2007 as a developer and you followed these four, you must have enjoyed all of that information.

I certainly enjoyed the networking dinner and show last night. Food was excellent and unlike at most conferences in the States, you can have drinks as many as you want :). The Vegas-like show with celebrities like Madonna, Elvis, Luis Armstrong, and more was a good conclusion of the first day here in Berlin. As said, excellent organization. Congrats to Wim Dierickx and his team for pulling this together.

Today I am going to relax a bit. Talking to people, seeing the new tools partners have built, and maybe follow one or more sessions. My wife and I plan to sneak out of the exhibition hall around 2PM to visit Berlin a bit. So, if no one is there at the booth, just grab a folder and come back to us the day after.

First highlights on Ontolica for Search

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 06:34:00 GMT

I mentioned previously that if you are looking for a better search admin and user experience in MOSS 2007, you should have a look at the forthcoming new product from Mondosoft called Ontolica for Search. Lars (no, not the little ice bear) has just posted a good overview of what their offering will be. You should be able to learn more next week the SharePoint conference in Berlin.

Just copying the core piece of the posting here to spread the word:

Ontolica for MOSS 2007 will be available in the following two editions:

Ontolica Wildcard.
Ontolica Search.

The Ontolica Wildcard edition will come for free and will basically give you the same features as standard MOSS search plus wildcard search - hence the name. There will be a few more goodies in it that we don't bother to lock down. But there will be no email or phone support for this edition. We are instead working on setting up a community forum that the Ontolica team will monitor and provide assistance through.

The Ontolica Search edition is not free and will require you to purchase a license. But for that you get the complete feature set plus support and upgrade. It will, however, come with a free trial license for two users and no expiration date. This will allow you to do a technical evaluation without the need to request a trial license. A 30 day trial license with support for an unlimited number of users can be obtained when you need to include more people in the evaluation process on your test environment.

Here is a comprehensive list of features in the Ontolica Search edition:

All the standard search features to be found in MOSS 2007.
Improved Boolean search (AND, OR, NOT)
Wildcard search.
NEAR search.
Consistent search across MOSS and WSS sites. The scopes "This site" and "This list" are now fully configurable and will take the user to the Ontolica search center instead of the WSS search page in the /_layouts folder.
Site dependent search tab configurations. This is a quite pervasive new feature in Ontolica that deserves a posting of its own - I will blog about it soon.
Complete web based configuration UI. No longer any need to mess around with overly complex XML configuration files like you had to in Ontolica for SharePoint 2003. We took some beating for that one over the years ;-)
Federated search. This feature will basically enable you search multiple SSP's from within the same Ontolica search center.
Improved meta data search. Add your own meta data to the advanced search page with a few clicks. Select between a text box, a dropdown box or a lookup dialog for value input.
Display custom properties in search results with a few clicks.
Improved Bets Bets. Ontolica will add support for images and audience targeting.
Configurable action menu on results. Ontolica will include a fully configurable drop down menu on search results. The default actions that ship with Ontolica are:
- View Propeties (teleports the user to the document library list item representing the document).
- Edit in Microsoft Office Word / PowerPoint / Excel.
- Alert Me
- Add to My Links
- View Details.
Drill Down. Provides the user with a dynamic list of suggestions for refining his or her search. It basically works by analyzing the meta data on the search results. The list of meta data (properties) to provide suggestions for are also fully configurable. Ontolica will in the default configuration be able to provide suggestions for Sites, Authors, File types and Content types.
Quick filters. Will allow you to easily configure some expression based filters that appear as radio buttons below the keyword input field.
Document details page.
Improved people search. Basically nicer thumbnails and more info displayed on each result.
Image search. Ontolica will ship with a preconfigured search tab optimized for image search like you know it from Google / Live Search.
Search result grouping. Group you results by Author, Site, Size, Date or some custom property.
XSLT enabled web parts. All Ontolica search web parts are XSLT enabled to give you full control of the look & feel when required. Even the Ontolica search box in the upper right corner is XSLT enabled. You will, however, only need to worry about modifying the default Ontolica XSLT templates if you have needs that go far beyond common customization scenarios. You can really configure and customize Ontolica to a great extent before you need to worry about XSLT, which I know many of you do not really want to or have time to.
Configurable web parts. All Ontolica web parts have a dedciated configuration page where you can easily configure the various options og the web part.
Customizable search dialog. Create your own custom search forms.
Plugs into the SharePoint feature framework. Ontolica search can be activated/deactivated on the site collection level.
Site template for easy creation of new Ontolica search centers.
Solution based installation process. Ontolica installation and deployment relies on the new solutions framework in Windows SharePoint Services V3.

Arrived in Cape Town

Patrick Tisseghem — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:08:00 GMT

This week I am all the way at the bottom of Africa, in Cape Town staying at the e-Xtreme hotel with the famous Tafelberg behind me. It is summer here and up to 35° so that will be a big change compared to the rainy and cold weather in Brussels. I'll let you know how it goes here. But now I need some sleep. 11 hours flight in coach wears you down :)

Search with Swamii

Patrick Tisseghem — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 13:16:00 GMT

I discovered a very cool search engine called Swamii (read more about it here)
that allows you to very easily set up watchlists based on keywords.
It's fast, it looks very up-to-date. I like it.
Bookmarked!

Hosting the Windows Workflow Foundation

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:46:00 GMT

The first session today here in Zurich (cold!) is going to be about the Windows Workflow Foundation limiting myself to WF and the use of it in WSS/MOSS 2007. There is of course always a lot of interest in workflow and although it looks easy when you start exploring the OOB workflows and the design of new ones with the SharePoint Designer, you should not underestimate the effort it takes to create real-world custom workflows with Visual Studio.NET. So any resource to learn from is helpful, no?

One of the best resources in the blogging community is Carlos Segura Sanz who frequently has excellent postings on the topic. His latest one for example is an introduction to WF and the ways you can host WF in you own Windows application. It is in Spanish but hey.. no problem for me :). Take a look at the small sample app he has available as download illustrating the techniques.

Two other ones that are extremely useful if you are interested in how you can extend the SharePoint Designer with custom activies are:

The good and the bad news about MOSS 2007 Search

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:31:00 GMT

Recently I made some people nervous with the posting on the lack of support in the UI for wildcard search. I wrote that piece after consulting one of the experts in the field when it comes to SharePoint search. Lars has now written his own posting about what the good and the bad news is with MOSS 2007 search. Believe me, these guys have disassembled every class in the SharePoint dll's related to search.

I am sure we have good conversations again when I go back to Aarhus (Denmark) next month staying at hotel Lars. Very good hotel by the way :)

NME Awards - Time to vote

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:29:00 GMT

NME, the best music magazine around for alternative/indie lovers, is having their annual NME awards again. Here is how I voted:

Best British Band: Muse
Best International Band: The Killers
Best Solo Artist: Lily Allen
Best New Band: The Kooks
Best Live Band: Muse
Best Album: My Chemical Romance – ‘The Black Parade’
Best Track: The Killers – ‘When You Were Young’

I'll spare you the 10 other categories you can vote for. Oh wait! There is this villain of the year. Here are the choices: Tony Blair, Johnny Borrell, George Bush, Pete Doherty, Gerard Way. Well my choice is made :)

If you like this type of music, download WinAmp and tune in on NME radio, one of the best streaming radio stations.

Great Praga Kahn Concert

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:56:00 GMT

Yes it was excellent. I enjoyed my evening a lot. This was a great experience and I met a lot of new friends in Strawberry Estate tonight. Here is a snapshot of me and the CAML girl (another U2U guy was there also but probably chasing some girls while I took the shot :)) watching together an excellent streaming experience of one of the best bands in the world .. and they are Belgian :)

Live! The New Office Developer How-To Center

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 01:35:00 GMT

Check this one out! The MSDN Office Developer How-To Center has gone LIVE today.

The How-To Center consists of a set of “Visual How-To Topics” which combine a video demo, a conceptual overview, a code sample and related resources into a single content item. We expect that this will help developers learn how to work with specific new features of different 2007 Microsoft Office system programs, servers, services, tools and technologies by providing different flavors of content. The articles are as short as a blog entry (1-3 pages), the videos are about 5 minutes (but can be up to 10 mins) and the code samples can be anywhere from 4 – 500 lines of code. All this provides a wide variety of learning resources for people that have different learning styles and even time. It helps developers get right to what they need rather than having to search through entire projects.

There are currently 2 How-To topics but it will grow bi-weekly with information on WSS, Excel, OpenXML file formats, Word, MOSS, VSTO, and more!

Praga Kahn in Second Life Tonight

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:17:00 GMT

~~Tonight~~ Tomorrow night, there is a concert of Praga Kahn in Second Life. Looking forward to it :). Read more about the WOW experience on David's blog. If you are looking for me, I am the cute boy with the glasses called Neelix Kline.

Update: More info on Tom's site and some nice pictures.

What about WorkFlow in SharePoint 2007?

Patrick Tisseghem — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:26:00 GMT

Last week in Dubai I received multiple questions from companies regarding what the limitations are regarding workflow in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. As many people start to know, I am a big fan of the 'SharePoint as a developer platform' message. So I am advocating in my trainings that in the real-world, the custom workflows you get with WSS and MOSS are not going to be good enough. Sales people should not sell the message that creating custom workflows for the real world is an easy task. It is not. WSS 3.0 is giving you a good platform to work with, but a lot of work will come from you.

The SharePoint Designer can help, but the workflows created with the SPD are a one-shot thing and not meant to be a re-usable type of workflow. If you stick with the Microsoft products, you're only option is going to be to build custom workflows with Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2005, enhanced with the workflow extensions for WF and the the additional layer for MOSS 2007 provided by installing the Office Server SDK. Be aware though that creating workflows this VS.NET way will involve a lot of studying and learning since WF is not an easy topic. You can find plenty of samples and tutorials on wf.netfx3.com but basically it is not your day-to-day programming and many of the mainstream .NET developers within companies are not up-to-speed on it yet. Therefore, products coming from partners like K2, Captaris, Skelta, Nintex, and many others are still a viable solution for many organizations because they offer a layer on top of the WF that make it more accessible for everybody. Each of them have an offering that you should have a look at closely since they differ in their approach. The SharePoint conference in Berlin is going to be extremily interesting since many of them will show their latest offering.

In an upcoming BIWUG meeting (BIWUG = Belgian Information Worker User Group), we plan to cover workflow from all angles. The meeting is at the 8th of February, starting at 18:30 in the Microsoft building @ Microsoft. The agenda has, in my opinion, very interesting topics. First, there will be a more sales oriented session discussing what I wrote down above. One of the partners, AgilePoint, is going to talk about their latest products and then there will be a more technical talk about how to get workflow done in MOSS 2007. BIWUG has entered a new year with a lot of good intentions. Hopefully you'll support us. The group is driven by a lot of people working daily with the latest Microsoft technologies in the real world (having all a very very busy agenda but trying their best to get a community up-and-running around IW in Belgium), so you should come and register for the meetings. They are free thanks to our sponsors and Microsoft and there is a lot to learn. I would like to be there as well, but, it should not surprise you, I am Cape Town that week. Back to the sun actually. Yesterday I was enjoying a Cyprus coffee at a terras in Limassol at 9 AM in full sun, enjoying every minute of it. Now, I am Zurich 25 degrees less than yesterday... life can be strange. Now, which one do I prefer best? Yeah right ..

But it is going to be good here in Zurich this week. Full house for the 5-day dev course and lots of snow. Actually, my oldest daughter is also here in Switserland with her school on a skiing trip. Maybe I should visit her :). Although, I am pretty sure she is not going to like her dad visiting her! I would have not liked it when I was young :)

TechEd US .. yes guys .. get ready for it!

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:55:00 GMT

There is one guy I have a special connection with (no it is not you Fitz), a former COM+ geek somewhere in Orlando. He evolved into a more mature person by converting himself to a SharePoint geek. You have to give him credit guys! From COM+ to SharePoint.. it is a big step forward! Not only for mankind but also for Ted Pattison - the dude I am talking about.

Imagine? He and me together on stage? America and Europe? Is this really going to work out? Well, don't worry. We have proven over the past years (as in TechEd Europe last year) that we can have a good time on stage. And we are going to repeat it in Orlando (is equal to Mickey.. you know from Disney...hey.. European guy :) ).

Today, the first draft of the agenda for TechEd US is made available for the public and I am proud to say .. (shit.. really?) ... I am doing a SharePoint Dev pre-conf with buddy Ted. No, don't get me wrong! I am very happy that we can do this one together. I love him so much! Don't you?

SharePoint Conference Full Agenda

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:07:00 GMT

The agenda is almost final .. still time to register!

https://live.sharepoint-conference.eu/EN/AGENDA/Pages/FullAgenda.aspx

And if you're looking for a hotel, Fitz and I are recommending this one: http://www.luise-berlin.com/

5 things about myself

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:07:00 GMT

Oh boy! I've been tagged a couple of times. Trying to avoid this but now I've got tagged by Joanna and I have been encouraged by a very enthousiastic email. Well here we go. By the way, Joanna has an excellent blog you should add to your subscriptions - that is if you are interested in the Office Business Applications (OooooBAaaaaaaa!!!).

So what should you boys and girls know about me :)

1/ Education? Degree in business informatics. Kept on studying until the law stating that all young men should serve 1 year of their life in the army, was abolished. I know some readers will have difficulties with this but hey, I dislike the military. So, studied knowledge information systems (that is expert systems and artificial intelligence), did some work in virtual reality. Yes yes, crazy times, even tried to get ballet dancers virtualized 'A Hybrid Approach in Vart-Applications, the Design and Simulation of Ballet Choregraphies (P. TISSEGHEM) . You did not expect this of me, did you :). Studied psychology and then finally decided it was a good time to start a real job.

2/ Hobbies? You kidding? My work is my hobby and I guess I've made travelling a hobby too. But I like a good reading, mostly science fiction and Dan Brown-related historical books. And of course music. Couldn't miss that in my life. Love the iPod, hate the iTunes software.

3/ Favorite countries? Cyprus and Russia. Loved China too. Would love to go back down under though.

4/ Favorite drink? Of course, a good beer. Best beer? Well, not a Belgian one! Nope, Irish beer is the best in the world. And definitely also a single malt.

5/ Ambitions? Finish the book, make a lot of people excited about SharePoint, work for 15 more years, get lazy and die peacefully while looking at the see in Limassol.

I'm not going to bother others with more tagging. Everyone has been tagged already :). Have fun everybody!

New blog baby born: SharePoint Designer

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 15:42:00 GMT

Oh man, life is sometimes though when you are a trainer. This week I'm in Internet City (Dubai) again delivering training for Microsoft EMEA. It's always an experience (positive though) to deliver trainings in this region. People are so enthousiastic about technology and definitely about SharePoint. Yesterday, there was a day targetting the more business-oriented people. So many business cards to process :). What's my next destination? Qatar? Bahrein? Kuwait? I get the impression that here in the Middle East, most business folks are much more technology minded than anywhere else in the world asking many questions about the possibilities and the limitations of the products included in the 2007 Office System. Very interesting discussions by the way. One thing is for sure, there is a lot of opportunity to do training and consultancy here in the region.

Today started very chaotic with the technical training (I heard this is very normal). 28 attendees registered, about 40 showed up resulting in many discussions about the seats. You gotta keep your calm at that moment :). Fortunately, things got resolved and I finished the day without additional problems. Again, very enthousiastic students jumping from one question to the other. Key message today: 'WSS is a development platform'. I know many MS sales people don't like me saying this to partners :).

What's all this to do with the title of this post? Nothing of course, only that I got a question 'Where can I learn more about the SharePoint Designer?'. Interesting question because there is almost zero documentation, and I have not seen any real books ready for publishing on the subject. Luckily the SharePoint Designer product team decided to start blogging. I am expecting a lot from you guys and girls! Spread the message about your great product!

Reflections on this week

Patrick Tisseghem — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:25:00 GMT

This week was the first, of the many weeks, abroad in 2007. And I must say that the start was excellent. Croatia seems to be a very nice country, young and driven. I of course must admit that I was not able to see a lot besides the hotel, the training room, the restaurant, the Microsoft building, and yes, a little bit of the nightlife. But it was very nice to see participants from Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Roemania, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece and not to forget Poland :), having a good time together both in the classroom as well as outside of it. Thanks Roman for being an excellent host.

Yes, I will go back to Croatia. They have their annual WinDev conference end of April and it's on my agenda. Actually, the next couple of months are going to be filled with conferences: Berlin, DevDays in Belgium, SharePoint Advisor in Anaheim, TechEd US in Orlando, SEF 2007 in Sweden and WinDev in Croatia.

Fitz pointed me to a nice site: www.dropload.com. If you ever have to send a big file to somebody, you can use this site to upload the file, keep it there for max 7 days, and have somebody pick it up.

Of course the wildcard search posting is causing some debates but that is how it should be. Sometimes we have to be critical, even if you don't like to express negative feelings about something that means a lot to you. And believe me, everything flows ... also this one.. and it is going to flow in the positive direction.

Many many interesting questions this week and I have learned a lot of stuff. For example, I finally got around the problem in RTM concerning the variations label not getting displayed on a page that has variations. In the variationslabelsmenu.ascx in the \12\Template\ControlTemplates, the line responsible for showing the menu is commented out. Credits to this posting for solving the problem. Just remove the <%-- ... --%>.

And I have good news regarding the book. I got the permission from MSPress to go for the 700 pages instead of the 448 pages popping up on many sites. That is good news because I am way over that amount already and still have 2 more chapters to go. Trimming content is the thing I don't like to do.

Next week is Dubai and Cyprus.

My house is on sale

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:39:00 GMT

Oeps! What happened @ home? I should be there more often :) Yes.. we are selling our house and moving to a better location. The girls need more room! So we decided to move to a new location with the family (5 girls and one poor guy). A lot of green, sheep, cows, horses, around us in the new home.

Nope, no wildcard search support out-of-the-box with MOSS 2007

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:32:00 GMT

Do you know the number of times I got the question: what do we have to do to enable wildcard search in the Search Center with MOSS 2007? This week also, with the MS folks in my course, search and the customization was leading to a lot of discussions. And I got challenged again with the question. So I decided to drill down into it a bit more and talk to my good friend Lars from Mondosoft - the leading search company in Europe and probably in the world. Here is my conclusion, a harsh one for everybody that was looking for the easy change as was the case with SPS 2003: 'wildcards are not possible without either buying Ontolica Search or investing in a deep (read development extensive) customization of the search center'. The reason for this is that your search query is executed by a hidden object (Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.SearchResultHiddenObject) that you do not have access to. This will translate the query to a keyword syntax query execution by default unless you go to the advanced search page. A query initiated here will result in the use of the full text sql query syntax (making use of a lot of undocumented fields). And no, no intervention possible. No easy way of changing the template used by this object for executing the query.

I don't understand the reasons behind this that much. There are numerous properties exposed by the different Web parts. Was it so difficult to expose one more: Enable wildcard search where they internally replace the FREETEXT part with a CONTAINS part? Well, nope. Maybe somebody in Redmond can explain this more what the reasons were. Anyway, it is very very good news for Lars and his company Mondosoft because they are back in business :) (they would have been even if wildcard search was supported OOB). And to tease you to buy their new release of Ontolica Search, they are going to offer a free community version of it, and guess what, it will enable wildcard search!!! Good job guys, can't wait to see you in Berlin for the first public demonstration of the new product!

Update: It seems I raised some eyebrows on the other side of the ocean. Don't worry, I hoped it was going to. It all is going to end up with positive information. Lawrence wrote me to explain the support in the keyword syntax. Fair enough but not good enough for a customer I am afraid. And when you read the title of the posting, please know that 'out-of-the-box' for me is equal to 'directly available or easy to turn on or customize'. So, yes MOSS supports wildcards, but not in an easy way.

OOTB with the keyword syntax we don’t have full wildcard support. We do have prefix match, on property queries in the keyword syntax. However, it is not possible to query for a prefix on a multi-term.For example, you can submit the query author:Lawr and match on author=Lawrence. But you cannot specify author:(Lawrence L) and hope to match on all the people with a first name Michal and last name that start with “L” because we don’t have the equivalent of parenthesis
With a custom web part, using the SQL syntax, you can perform wildcard searching (you can use suffix wildcards in the contains clause, or you can use a slow LIKE clause with any wildcards for additional property matching). Note that replacing the freetext with contains will influence the ability to order by rank.

Bands you should know about

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:30:00 GMT

I was just IM'n with Fitz and he was very in doubt about who Joy Division was (one of my favourite bands). I was just listening to it when he called. Now don't blame him, maybe Ian Curtis and his gang were not that popular in the States (question: do Americans know what good music is? Dangerous question I know) but it gives me a good topic to reply to the many 'tags' I have received the last couple of weeks.

Update! Fitz told me that Joy Division became know when New Order was born.... Da!

I'll break the chain however and talk only about my favourite bands or better category of bands, if you don't mind. Here are the 5 I personally like the best:

When I was 18 (yes ... a long time ago) I was into the Manchester scene as it was called those days. I went every week to concerts of bands like The Charlatans, Ride, Slowdive, Galaxie 500, The Happy Mondays, The Farm, The Soup Dragons, My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses, The Chameleons, The Verve, (probably not mentioning a lot of them here) and all of that stuff. I must say, I still am a big fan of that kind of music.. lots of good memories.. aah. my favorite one and my motto of life ...Let It Flow by Spiritualized..Really love that band!
The Smiths! Yes, Morrissey is my hero and will always be my hero. Anything he brings out, I buy!
Godspeed You Black Emperor is a band most of you will say.. what's that all about. Well, listen to a song like Moya and you'll understand (or maybe not)!
Luna and Mojave 3 are kind of the survivors of Slowdive and Galaxie 500. Very addicted to Dean the last years.
And yes, I am always looking for new bands. To be included on my IPod, you need to be very alternative, no commercial stuff allowed. So, favorite current bands are Grandaddy (love the 'I'm on standby'), The Cooper Temple Clause (oh man.. promises promises promises!), The Artic Monkeys, Kean, Hope of the States, and many many more 'Indie' type of groups.

Oh boy.. so ashamed of myself.. best band of the last years is definitely Muse. Tx Muse Wunderlich!

Well, I am going to tag Fitz. I am very curious about his favorite music. Go Fitz .. go!

SharePoint Conference (Berlin) Sessions

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 07:51:00 GMT

This week I am in Zagreb (Croatia) delivering a MOSS dev course for MS internals from various countries. It's going to be an interesting week again. I noticed this weekend that the first version of the agenda for the SharePoint conference in Berlin is published and I am happy to see that my two sessions are all on day 1. So, I'll be able to attend some sessions day 2 and day 3. Here are the ones I will be giving. On demand, no MOSS sessions, but hardcore WSS dev session together with Mike Ammerlaan.

Title:	NET Development on Microsoft SharePoint Technology, Part 1: Object Models, Web Services, Document I/O, Event Receivers, and CAML List Queries
Description:	The first of four sessions on what .NET developers need to know to take advantage of SharePoint Products and Technologies to their fullest. This session covers key object models and related Web services, and focuses on how to add your own Web services, event handlers, and other custom code modules to SharePoint sites. Querying SharePoint list data using CAML XML queries are covered, as is how to adapt your own custom document editor to read from/write to SharePoint document libraries.

Title:	.NET Development on Microsoft SharePoint Technology, Part 3: Templates, Definitions, and Solution Deployment
Description:	The third of four sessions on what .NET developers need to know to take advantage of SharePoint Products and Technologies to their fullest. One of the biggest strengths of SharePoint site development is being able to create types of sites that users can provision on demand, sites that come ready to use with all the tools necessary for specific kinds of business needs. This session starts with how to create and customize site definitions, then moves on to the new Windows SharePoint Services (version 3.0) feature definitions, capabilities (usually comprised of lists, Web Parts, event handlers, content types, etc.) that can be added to any site as needed. It ends with coverage of how to deploy components, features, and site definitions onto Web farms and how to handle maintenance updates to them.

There is still room for more participants so go to the site and register yourself!

Google indexing SharePoint?

Patrick Tisseghem — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:44:00 GMT

Interesting news ... http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=E7918161-35DF-45E4-94C9-CCF4BBDABB73

It has also added new open source connectors for indexing content in SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007.