Office 12 Servers

Hosting InfoPath 2007 forms in WSS v3 / MOSS 2007 pages.

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 06:13:00 GMT

One of the great things you can do with the next version of InfoPath in combination with the InfoPath Forms Server is that you can embed an InfoPath form in your own Web or Windows application. Hosting the form in a Web page requires your page to be hosted on the same IIS Web application (a.k.a virtual server) as your SharePoint site where the InfoPath template is made available. But if you use SharePoint pages, that is no problem. Just create a Web Part or use the Son of the SmartPart for that matter, and drop the Web Part on one of your pages. On the example below, I have a MOSS 2007 page layout with the Web Part already on it. The Web Part has one property called InfoPath template location and when setting this, a form based on the template is rendered by the ASP.NET 2.0 InfoPath Form server control delivered as a child control of the Web Part.

All of the validation and submitting is done in the InfoPath template itself. I used a second view to display a small message when the submit was successful.

Using the ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter Framework in WSS v3 or MOSS 2007

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 05:54:00 GMT

I refer to my previous post for an explanation about the underlying reasons for using the ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapter Framework in SharePoint next version. Frank (from Tam Tam) started a new blog and the first article is a general walk-through on how to configure a site with the control adapters. The result is that the navigation controls' rendering behaviour is changed from TABLE elements to DIVs and nested ULs. Great work Frank!

Avoiding TABLE elements in your SharePoint pages

Patrick Tisseghem — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 07:36:00 GMT

Yesterday, I spent a full day talking about the Web Content Management features delivered with MOSS 2007 here for the Tam Tam guys (and girl). One of the issues they are facing is with government policies requiring them to have no table elements in the design of their Web pages. Question of course was, what is happening with SharePoint next version and very specifically in Internet-facing sites. There was some disappointment when looking at the HTML-sources generated by SharePoint. All of the navigation controls dump their stuff as a set of TABLE elements. Not good!

So, the question came of course how to change this behaviour and how to tweak SharePoint to let the navigation controls generate DIV and nested UL tags. A big ‘Duh?’ from me to be honest at the start. I have trained a lot of people on SharePoint but I can’t remember this issue coming up in any of my classes. Anyway, after a G-search and a small discussion with the students I found out that their question was not so uncommon as it first seemed. It looks like speech engines have problems with the TABLE and prefer DIVs when reading out a page for blind people and there are also problems with crawling engines not behaving at their maximum with TABLE-style layouts. So the ‘Duh?’ ended up in ‘Jeez..this looks an interesting challenge’.

Now the solution is luckily provided by ASP.NET 2.0. First of all, the AspMenu navigation controls used by SharePoint (and for that matter by ASP.NET 2.0 itself) cannot be tweaked to spit out DIVs and nested ULs instead of TABLE tags. It looks like it is kind of hard-wired in the controls.

There is however the possibility to make use of the Control Adapter framework in ASP.NET 2.0. The general idea here is that the output of the rendering of a control is intercepted by the adapter and then transformed in basically anything you want before it is flushed to the client. It is an interesting approach and useful for a lot of scenarios. And good news is that the ASP.NET guys have provided us with a clean adapter framework to get us quickly up-and-running.

There is an out-of-the-box Menu Adapter that we were able to activate for the SharePoint pages and yes, all of the AspMenu navigation controls didn’t spit out TABLE tags. Unfortunately, the result were not DIVs and nested ULs but SPANs. Bummer!

After looking a little further, we found a couple of other interesting resources on the Web that could help us (also thanks to our ASP.NET girl @ U2U). The most interesting one is the CSS friendly ASP.NET 2.0 control adapters beta 1.1 tool you can download. It has good documentation and some samples to work with. Take for example a look at this page to see what you can do with the adapters. Scott Guthrie has also a good posting on it. Exactly what we were looking for and after some work, one of the ‘brightest’ students in the class got it working for a SharePoint internet site. No more TABLEs, only DIVs and nested ULs. I leave it up to the TAM TAM guys to decide whether they want to make the procedures public :)

Interesting day yesterday. Let’s see what today brings!

Ted Patisson on .NET Rocks

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 08:40:00 GMT

First thing I did this morning was to download the latest .NET Rocks show featuring Ted Patisson talking about WSS v3 and MOSS 2007. On my way from the hotel to the Tam Tam offices here in Den Haag I listened already for half an hour and it is always a delight to hear Ted speaking. It was an awesome experience working on and delivering the Ascend and Touchdown material with him. So, listen to the show.. and then subscribe to the TechEd pre-conference workshop we are doing on WSS v3. There are still places left :)

Is it a bug or is it not a bug?

Patrick Tisseghem — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 13:59:00 GMT

I get many questions from people who are trying out all kinds of things in the beta 2 of WSS and MOSS 2007. Lots of times they hit the wall because it does not work. They ask me then whether it is a bug or not. These questions are often very hard to answer :).

Mart (via Joris) has posted a couple of useful links in case you first want to check out whether the wall you hit is actually a bug or not. And often there is a workaround described that maybe allows you to continue with your experiments.

Office 2007 clients - http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/products/FX101517941033.aspx

2007 Microsoft Office Server - http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/products/FX101517541033.aspx

Windows SharePoint Services - http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/products/FX101517981033.aspx

Future of Commerce Server

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 12:34:00 GMT

Commerce Server 2007 is available for download from the Microsoft site. There is a free evaluation version targetting developers who want to get started with it. The story of Commerce Server is a bit fuzzy to me. I don't see any plans in the recent talks about the roadmap to bring the product on top of Windows SharePoint Services 2007 and delivered as a set of MOSS features and solutions, like the what happened with CMS.On the contrary, it seems that they move in the other direction and keep it apart from it. That's a pitty to my opinion. It would be nice to have a number of commerce-type of features (shopping basket, product catalogs, ...) available for MOSS 2007 to enrich for example the Internet sites you can build with it. My thinking is that if Microsoft is not going to offer this, one or more partners should build this. So, if you have time and money to invest :), go ahead and create an e-commerce MOSS 2007 site definition and dozens of little features that enable us to do e-commerce in our SharePoint sites. I am pretty sure it is going to be very profitable. Would love to hear if some partners are already thinking in that direction!

Office 2007 Sales Enablement Resources

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 06:31:00 GMT

I am currently compiling new Office 2007 Sales Enablement seminars for BDM's and TDM's plus a small 'Discover what Office 2007 can do for you' technical workshop for Microsoft EMEA. The delivery starts next month and it will bring me again in a lot of countries in EMEA (Turkey, Russia, Sweden, Norway, France, Prague,... all the way down to South-Africa). During the prep of all the material to cover I stumbled upon this site that provides a good overview of the kind of stuff I will have in the seminars and workshop. It is again on the US Partner Readiness site.

By the way, if you are a partner and you have Office 2007 based solutions, case-studies, POCs or whatever that you think might me be interested for me to include in the sales talks, let me know. I am looking per area in Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 for some compelling demos or cases to talk about. Send me the stuff!! (patrick@u2u.be)

Gorilla goes bananas!

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:19:00 GMT

Ted Patisson has started a new adventure with his new training company called Gorilla Training dedicated to SharePoint 2007 trainings. Asking him for an explanation about the choice of the name he replied that it would offer him a lot of marketing potential. I am sure it does :)

To amuse you SharePoint geeks, he created a number of screencasts that are so typically TP. I am really looking forward to the two of us on the same podium at TechEd Europe. He in a monkey suit and me in a ? suit. Fill in the ? yourself :)

Office 2007 WebCasts

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 06:59:00 GMT

Interesting webcasts scheduled the next coming weeks:

Introduction to Visual Studio Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System by Eric Carter (8/8/2006 10:00 AM)
Integrating Your Solutions with the 2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface by Savraj Dhanjal (8/9/2006 10:00 AM )
Developing, Deploying, and Hosting Rich Office InfoPath 2007 Client and Browser Forms by Pradeep Rasam (8/15/2006 10:00 AM )
Building Collaborative Applications Without Code Using Office SharePoint Designer 2007 by Rob Mauceri (8/22/2006 10:00 AM )
Extending the Web Content Management Features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 by Jim Masson (9/5/2006 10:00 AM )