New alerting options

Somewhere, some time ago, I read that it would now be possible to set an alert to an e-mail address. This would mean that you don't have to be in the activate directory to receive alerts.

I tried to do this but unfortunately it's not (yet) working. Maybe this feature will not be integrated whatsoever.

The only thing I can show you are new options on how the alerts can be sent.
You can either use the well known e-mail approach or, as you can see on the screenshot, send the alert via SMS. Not sure though how this needs to be configured.

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace is one of these really new, big and very exciting technologies in Microsoft Office 2010. Based on the Groove technology, it allows you to take your complete SharePoint environment offline, continue your work without a connection to the server and synchronize the whole thing when you are connected again.

In this post I will try to give you a quick overview of how this looks, how it works and what you can do with it.

When starting up this software, I was asked to create an account or use an already existing account.

I decided to create a new account and so I entered my name and e-mail address.

The software will then start creating your account.

After a while I will be presented with a, how I call it, MSN like application where I get an overview of all my workspaces. At this moment, I don't have any.

I will know create a new SharePoint workspace. So I click on new and select 'SharePoint Workspace'.

It will then ask my to enter the URL of the SharePoint site for which it has to create a workspace.

Then the initial synchronization starts. The software will recreate the complete site structure in my new workspace.

The syncing goes on for some time. I tested this with an almost empty, out of the box team site and it took quiet some time. As you can see in the following screenshot, you can see the sync process progressing. List already downloaded are in the top of the list. Lists that are still queued for syncing, are placed under 'Downloading'.

After a while, the complete site is synced and I can see the result. I clicked on the announcement list because an item was present there. As you can see, it is now also available in my offline workspace.

I will now create a new announcement in my workspace. You can also attach attachments to this offline list item.

As you can see, I have now two items in my workspace.

Keep in mind this second announcement is still offline data. If I go to my online announcement list, I still just have one item.

To see the new item online as well, I first have to sync. I can choose to either sync the list itself or sync the complete workspace. After the sync process, I can via the status see what list is synchronized and when the last sync took place.

If I then recheck my online announcement list, I will see my new announcement.

I hope this will at least give you a first impression of what this software looks like, how it works and what it can mean for you.

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010

When getting in touch with SharePoint 2010 you might also use SharePoint Designer 2010. The toowill, just as it's 2007 predecessor, be available for free.

SPD 2010 has been through a complete face lift and will now provide you with much more information about the site you are editing. This post is only meant to give you a first glance of how everything looks in this new version. In the following days I will go into more detail about certain aspects.

The main screen now looks like this. Right from within SPD you can now change your site's title, description and see information like how much space it is using, the different SharePoint groups and their permissions and navigational info.

Site pages give you direct access to all pages in the site. Clicking on a page will give you more information about it like title, author, check-in status and so on.

Masterpages give you direct access to the master pages folder. No need to go to it yourself anymore. As you can see you can create blank master pages, checkin, checkout, import and export files.

'Lists' gives an overview of all the lists of the current site. You can create new lists, create a list from a spreadsheet, save the list as a template, ... .

'Workflows' gives you an overview of all the workflows in the current site. You can create new workflows, import/export them from/to Visio, ... and create a reusable workflow. I will check this in more detail in the following days but I think you can now create SPD workflows that can be attached to more than one list which was a big limitation of the previous version. In this view you can also connect the workflow to a list or to a content type.

'Content Types' gives an overview of all the content types in the current site. You can get more details about a content type, information about the columns, create a new content type and attach them to a list.

'Datasources' gives you an overview of all the datasources and of course you can create new ones as well. You can make different sorts of connections (SQL database, SOAP/REST webservice, ... ).

'Entities' gives you the opportunity to manage your external content types. This way you can make a connection with a datasource and show the data in a new type of list, the 'external list'.

I skip right to 'All Files' where you see the all to familiar SPD 2007 view with all the files, folders and sites in the site.

As said before, in the coming days I will provide more details and screenshot about each different aspect of the views shown in this post.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

This night I downloaded the new Visual Studio Beta 2 Ultimate edition and today I installed it on my SharePoint 2010 test box.

During the installation, I saw that I could also install the new SharePoint development tools which of course added to the excitement. After the installation was finished I was ready to go to start creating some new SharePoint projects ... so I thought :)
It turns out that if you want to create a new SharePoint project, you will get the following message:

A SharePoint server is not installed on this computer. A SharePoint server
must be installed to work with SharePoint projects.

After searching a little bit, someone from Microsoft confirmed that this was built in by the Visual Studio Development Team. It basicly means you'll have to wait until the SharePoint 2010 beta before you can actually use the new SharePoint development tools. Darn!

Here are some screenshots showing the new Server Explorer. You can now browse your SharePoint site. Right within Visual Studio you can see things like your content types, features, list templates, ... .

As far as I know, this is read-only. So no direct editing possible.

First looks on some new SharePoint 2010 stuff

For developers, there's now Windows 7 and Vista support. Just so you know.

SharePoint as a portal to external data

Microsoft is really pushing forward the idea that you can also use SharePoint as a gateway, a portal to other backend systems. They want to make it really easy to show data, which resides in some backend system, in SharePoint. In SharePoint 2007, you could use the BDC but its successor, BCS (Business Connectivity Services), will prove to offer much more. It will offer CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and Enumerate operations from and to almost any kind of backend system. This works closely with 'External Content Types', which are defined using the new SharePoint Designer 2010. They define the datasource.

The external data can then be shown in a new type of list, the 'External List'. As said before, CRUD operations on the data are possible. You can even, for example in the case of contact information, connect to this list via Outlook and have the same CRUD operations available. The datasource will be updated accordingly as well as the external list.

Visual Studio 2010

You can download beta 2 from here.

The Visual Studio team has included a lot of new templates to ease the SharePoint development. You now can use templates for things like site definitions, content types, BCS models and visual web parts. There's also more Team Foundation Server support and you can see an overview of your SharePoint site directly in Visual Studio via the Server Explorer.

With visual web parts, a web user control is now automatically included in the template allowing you to drag and drop all available web controls so it's easier to create the web part GUI.

The developer dashboard can now be accessed on every page giving you more information about the custom web parts that are running on that page. You can see things like stack traces, which stored procedures SharePoint calls and how long each event (OnLoad, Render, ...) takes. This makes it much more easy to track the source of problems should they arise.

Sandbox solutions

You can now write these kind of solutions in Visual Studio. They are ideal to install in a sand box environment using the new solution manager. You can upload WSP files in each site collection. Each WSP solution will use resources. A maximum of resources can be set by the administrator. If this solution is causing problems, its resources can be immediately killed providing more control.

I will soon try to post screenshots and demo's to really show you what the new capabilities can be used for.

Microsoft's vision with SharePoint 2010 and beyond

During Bamler's keynote, he talked about how Microsoft sees the market now and in the future. More and more we will see that information can be shared between more and more kinds of devices like regular PC's, phones, TVs, ... . Microsoft wants it to be even more natural to bring along with you some kind of digital device which you can use in all kinds of different situations for gathering and sharing data. Of course cloud computing will also play a big role in this story. In the center of it all, Microsoft places its SharePoint technology.

In SharePoint 2010, SharePoint workspace will be introduced. This successor to the Groove technology, will allow users to take their SharePoint data offline, continue their work and synchronize when an Internet connection is available.

Microsoft will keep improving the extendibility and programmability of the platform so SharePoint can become a solution for a broad range of problems. Where in the past companies had to buy all kinds of different modules and solutions for search, BI, collaboration, ... SharePoint tries to cover all of these. This allows companies to respond to their business needs fast. As a consequence, Microsoft introduces the well know Office ribbon interface, improved cross browser compatibility and phone compatibility.

SharePoint 2007 Content Editor bug + solution

The content editor web part is a great OTB web part to add publishing content to a page. The problem is that even if you insert relative links to recources in your site collection, SharePoint will always make them absolute upon saving.
You could think: "What's so special/bad about that?". The problems start when organizations want to start using content deployment. This great publishing feature copies your content over farms (ideal for staging - production scenarios) and Microsoft has perfected the process all the time making it quiet solid at this moment (SP2).
Of course, when you start viewing your content on production, links could still be pointing to staging. In many of these scenarios, the production system will be anonymously accessible and they will be prompted for a login when they access staging material. To solve this you can use a Control Adapter which will override the render method of any control you specify.

Here's the code:

public class ControlAdapter: ControlAdapter
{

protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)
{

String appSettingFilter = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ControlAdapterFilter"];

if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(appSettingFilter))
{

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(new StringWriter(sb));
base.Render(htw);

// Make all URLs relative
//Regex regex = new Regex("((?:href|src)=\")https?://[^/]+([^\"]+\")");
string output = sb.ToString();

if (sb.ToString().Contains(appSettingFilter))
output = sb.ToString().Replace("http://" + appSettingFilter, "");

writer.Write(output);

}

}

}

As you can see, the class inherits from ControlAdapter and will override the Render method. In here you can put smart logic which will take care of the absolute links in your content editor web part.
I actually added two kinds of logics. The first one, which is in comment, makes any URL it finds, relative.
The second option, which uses the appSetting from the web.config, only makes URL's starting with this prefix relative.

Adjusting your web.config:
In the tag add your own assembly like:
<add assembly="MyAssembly" />

Adjusting the compat.browser file:
This file can be found in your web application's home directory in the App_Browsers folder. In there you specify which particular web control needs its render method to be overwritten. You can do something like this:

<browser refID="Default">
<controladapters>
<adapter controlType="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.ContentEditorWebPart" adapterType="MyAssembly.ControlAdapter" />
</controlAdapters>
</browser>

You can also add a line for example the RichHtmlField controls. In this case it can be that SharePoint will not be able to find the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll. Copying it to the bin folder solves this.

Hope it will come in handy some time!