MOSS 2007

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/

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!

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.

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.

Custom XSLT for the Search Core Results Web Part

Patrick Tisseghem — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:21:00 GMT

Yesterday, I described the steps to drop the Search Core Results Web Part on a page of a WSS 3.0 team site and have it configured with a fixed query. Let me continue with that example but go a step further and customize the way the results are displayed to the user.

The list of results returned by the search service is in XML format. This XML output can be reviewed in the Search Core Results Web Part itself by replacing the default XSLT (using the toolpane with the properties exposed by the Web Part) with the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

<xsl:template match="/">

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

If you run the query now, the output will look like this:

Creating a custom XSLT for this XML can be done in a number of ways. If you are an XSLT geek, open NotePad and start writing your pattern-matching rules. There are however plenty of XSLT editors available that can help you in this and possibly even come up with a nice transformation without writing any line of XSLT.

What I will demonstrate here is how you can make use of the SharePoint Designer 2007 to come up with an XSLT for this XML.

First of all, just copy the XML in a local file since you'll need it in a minute.

Next open the SharePoint Designer 2007 and the site containing the page you are working with. The Search Core Web Part is like many other MOSS 2007 Web Parts (for example the Business Data Web Parts) based on the Data View Web Part. This is a Web Part you can only create in the SharePoint Designer. Before doing this however, you have to create a data source. The data source to create is one that connects to the file containing the raw XML outputted by the search Web Part. There is a menu called Data View in the SharePoint Designer. Use it to open the Data Sources panel. In that panel, you'll see a link to create a new XML data source. Just point to the XML file and import it in the site. You'll not need it anymore later - it is just needed as the sample XML for the generation of the XSLT.

In the Data Sources panel, select to option in the context menu of the XML data source, to show the data. A new panel is activated showing all of the XML nodes available in the XML file. Use all of that information now to insert a Data View Web Part on one of your pages. Again, you do not need that Web Part to stay on the page. We'll simply steal the generated XSLT from this one and use it to replace the XSLT of the Search Core Results Web Part.

The Data View Web Part allows for many customizations. For example, you can configure it to show the results grouped by author. Many other formatting and styling configurations are possible.
Bottom-line is that you can have a peek in the code view and copy all of the XSLT that is generated by the Data View Web Part.

Go back to a page where you have the Search Core Results Web Part (this can also be the search results page in the Search Center) and replace the active XSLT with the copied one.
Here is a possible outcome:

Message to take away from this posting is.. there is a quick way to come up with XSLT or the Search Core Results Web Part by making use of the Data View Web Part in the SharePoint Designer.

Fixed Query in the Search Core Results Web Part

Patrick Tisseghem — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:59:00 GMT

Today, I am going through a second revision of the chapter on MOSS 2007 search. I was under the impression that I knew something about search, written some MSDN articles for the previous version of SharePoint on search. But after really diving into the subject for about a week now, I found out a lot of new stuff. The chapter itself is very dev focused with a discussion on the new search admin object model, the customization of the search center, customizing the search Web Parts, of course the different techniques of executing a search query programmatically, the search Web Service and then not to forget the new option to built custom security trimmers. More than 100 pages... I hope that doesn't get trimmed :)

One of the things that has been improved a lot with MOSS 2007 is the option for administrators to customize the behavior of the search Web Parts that are available on the search page and the search results pages. Take for example the Search Core Results Web Part, one of the most important ones displaying the search results to the user:

There are a couple of options to feed the query string into this Search Core Results Web Part. One is the obvious one where the user enter the query in the Search Box (at the top). Another way of telling the Search Core Results Web Part what query to execute is the Fixed Query property exposed by it. This is interesting when for example dropping the Search Core Results Web Part on a page of a normal team site and you want to have a certain type of query executed all the time.

The setting of the Fixed Query property is done by opening the tool pane (and yes, there are a lot of options here!). The following picture shows for example how the query can be set to show the documents containing Microsoft in the text or metadata. Don't forget to set the Cross-Web Part query ID property to something else than User Query. Other properties you can set are the paging and the amount of search results you'd like to have in the list (for example 10). I also have modified the Default Results View to Modified Date so that the resuls are sorted by date. You can also turn off all of the different possible actions and links that are normally displayed.

When done, everytime you go to the page you'll get to see 10 documents related to Microsoft, sorted by date - so the newly indexed ones always are listed first. Tomorrow, I'll show you how you can quickly come up with a custom XSLT to replace the out-of-the-box look and feel for the display of the search results.

Have a good one today!

Ordered First SharePoint 2007 Book

Patrick Tisseghem — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:16:00 GMT

Yesterday, I decided to spend some money on Amazon ordering a number of books and audio CD's, including of course some SharePoint 2007 books. Todd Bleeker's Developer's Guide to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is the first one that is already available. Congrats Todd. I am looking forward to reading that one. Others that I pre-ordered are Ted Patisson's book titled Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Version 3, Bill English's famous Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion (definitely a must) and Goran Husman's Beginning SharePoint 2007 Administration: Windows SharePoint Services 3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I know there are more but hey... I also ordered about 6 CD's. Next time on Amazon, I'll shop for more :)

For the book I am writing, Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you'll have to wait a couple of weeks for pre-ordering it. MS Press promised me that it will be published before TechEd US (that's first week of June). I am starting my final 3 chapters tomorrow.

UPDATE: Thanks Peter for pointing me to this URL where the book is advertised. Not a lot of info yet, but it is a starter :) And, the book will probably be about 700 pages, not 448.

Arrived in Dubai Internet City

Patrick Tisseghem — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 05:03:00 GMT

Yesterday I arrived in Dubai for my last international SharePoint 2007workshop this year - an excellent place to end an exciting year in which I have seen many many places and met a lot a lot of people. Apart from a painful contused rib I managed to end myself up with last week while falling from the stairs at home (nope, my wife did not push me as a punishment for all of the travelling!), it is going to be fun to go through all of the SharePoint development stuff again. Next week I have one more of these workshops, in good old Belgium itself, and then it is family and Xmas time.

It is my first time in Dubai and I heard a lot of great stories from my colleagues at U2U who have visited it already. I am staying at the Radisson in the Internet City area close to the Microsoft office where the training takes place. So, if the rib allows me, I am definitely planning to visit some of the exciting places here. Anyway, in more than a month I will be here again, so I can catch up if I fail in playing the tourist this week.

I'll keep you updated on my week here (which by the way starts today - so no weeked for me).