Sezai's - SharePoint Server 2010 - FAST Search for SharePoint - MOSS 2007 Blog

Display a Web Part as a Visual Best Bet in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

2011-10-26T22:51:00.001+08:00

FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint has a number of nice visual enhancements you don’t get with regular SharePoint Server Search, such as document previews and visual best bets. This blog post provides a walkthrough of making use of Visual Best Bets to display a SharePoint Web Part.

How do Visual Best Bets work?

MOSS 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010 provide Best Bet functionality that lets you specify some HTML to display as a Best Bet. A FS4SP Visual Best Bet on the other hand lets you specify a URL, the web page for the URL is then displayed in a web part using an iFrame.

If I setup a Visual Best Bet for the keyword “SharePoint” and specify a document library as a Visual Best Bet I get this:

The document library displays in an iFrame above the search results. If we edit the page you can identify the web part that displays the Visual Best Bet.

There’s one useful property you can edit for the ‘Search Visual Best Bet’ web part. The very first web part property displayed for the web part is called iFrame Height.

The default for this is set to 150 pixels. You can edit this property to allow you to display your Visual Best Bet with a higher height, as an example if I increase this to 300, I get the following.

So that’s how Visual Best Bets work… so I’ve been thinking of the best way to make use of Visual Best Bets to display some truly awesome looking dynamic content.

Well SharePoint can display dynamic visually rich content can’t it?

Here’s a page displaying a video using the Media Web Part.

Here’s a page displaying an Indicator Details web part for a KPI in a status list.

Here’s a page with a chart web part.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could display Web Parts as Visual Best Bets?

If we try that, if I create a keyword for “FAST Search” and use the video page as a Visual Best Bet I get this:

The page chrome, ribbon, banner, navigation etc. is getting in the way – wouldn’t it be nice if we could just display the Media Web Part as a best bet?

This is possible in SharePoint, you can selectively hide what is rendered on a page using CSS. A quick way to remove a large amount of page chrome is to use the IsDlg=1 query string parameter. So where my Video Page URL is:

http://portal.sezai.com/Pages/FAST-Search-Video.aspx

If I edit the Visual Best Bet, and change the URL to this:

http://portal.sezai.com/Pages/FAST-Search-Video.aspx?IsDlg=1

I get the following in search results:

Much better! IsDlg=1 is used by SharePoint when displaying popup dialogs, the query string parameter hides page chrome. We still have an issue regarding not all content being displayed. There are two options with this:

1) Reduce the web part height in the video page.

2) Increase the height of the iFrame for the Visual Best Bets Web Part in the search results page.

Both will work, If I go with option 2 – I get this:

That looks sweet, it is displaying an inactive scroll bar… but let’s just ignore that :)

If we do the same with the KPI Web Part page we get:

Here’s what the chart web part looks like:

So you can quite easily setup Visual Best Bets with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint to show a visually stunning Web Part if you:

1. Create a page and add your desired web part to it.

2. Ensure the web part height is less than the Visual Best Bets web part height, by either reducing the height of the web part you want to display, of increasing the iFrame Height property on the Visual Best Bet web part on the search results page.

3. Create a Visual Best Bet to your web part page and add the ?IsDlg=1 query string parameter to the end of the URL.

With all of the various types of dynamic web parts you get with SharePoint, you now have no excuse for not making good use of Visual Best Bets in FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.

Slide Deck from SharePoint Saturday Melbourne - Developing a Custom FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Solution

2011-10-23T17:27:00.000+08:00

I'm back home in Perth from SharePoint Saturday Melbourne. I had an awesome time in Melbourne, spent most of the time with my sister, brother in law and four neices.

My presentation on Developing a Custom FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Solution went really well, I did an overview of my FAST Spatial Search Toolkit solution.

Slide deck below:

Developing a Custom FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Solution - SharePoint Saturday Melbourne 2011

View more presentations from Sezai Komur

FAST Spatial Search Toolkit Installation

2011-10-16T02:26:00.000+08:00

This post contains installation steps required to deploy the FAST Spatial Search Toolkit.

Execute the createspatialmanagedproperties.ps1 PowerShell script via the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint shell as a FAST Search administrator on a FAST Search Server.

This script will create six managed properties – north, south, east, west, latitude & longitude.

After these managed properties are created, you need to map data that either has longitude & latitude pairs stored as numeric or decimal values, or map data that has north, south, east & west bounds as numeric or decimal values. Spatial data must be based on WGS84 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System)

Ensure you run a full crawl after mapping your crawled properties to these managed properties.

Add the Sezai.FastSpatialSearchCenter.wsp farm solution to your farm (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262995.aspx#DeployFarmSolutions) and deploy the solution to the web application where you want to create the FAST Spatial Search Center site.

Navigate to the site collection where you want to create the FAST Spatial Search Center.

Two Site Collection Features need to be activated before creating the site.

Activate FAST Spatial Search Center Layouts and FAST Spatial Search Web Parts.

Now create a new site based on the FAST Spatial Search Center template.

Before you can use the new FAST Spatial Search Center site, you need to enter your Bing Maps API Key in three different pages default.aspx, results.aspx and bigmap.aspx.

Edit default.aspx and edit the properties of the Bing Maps Silverlight Web Part. Expand the Other Settings attribute section and edit Custom Initialization Parameters. Replace YOURAPIKEY with your Bing Maps API Key.
Check in the page.

Ensure you then Publish the page.

Repeat this process on results.aspx and bigmap.aspx.

Download - FAST Spatial Search Toolkit

2011-10-16T00:54:00.001+08:00

The FAST Spatial Search Toolkit v1.0 contains a custom site definition based on the FAST Search Center site definition and incorporates a Bing Maps Silverlight Control to provide spatial search.

Download FAST Spatial Search Toolkit v1.0

For installation details check out: FAST Spatial Search Toolkit Installation

FAST Spatial Search Toolkit v1.0 - Search for Spatial Data with FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

2011-10-16T00:22:00.000+08:00

I've been working on a custom FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Solution which is an extension to the FAST Search Center site template that allows you to search for data that is spatially referenced.

Many organisations deal with data that is spatially referenced, this solution provides the ability to search for data with FS4SP using a map control to zoom in on a specific piece area of interest so you can focus on finding data specific to that area.

For v1.0 of the FAST Spatial Search Toolkit I've developed a custom site definition based on the out-of-the-box FAST Search Center site definition. The FAST Spatial Search Center incorporates a custom Silverlight 4 application that uses the Bing Maps Silverlight Map Control to allow searches to be refined spatially and for visualisation of spatial search results.

The out-of-the-box default.aspx and results.aspx pages have been customised to incorporate a small map control for spatial filtering and visualisation. A large full screen map page is also included that queries FAST Search via the search web services for returning and visualising thousands of search results across an area.

Check out the following video for a demo of the solution:

The FAST Spatial Search Center supports searching for points and bounding boxes. Point data is represented by Longitude and Latitude coordinates and bounding box data has a North, South, East and West bound which represents an area.

If you would like to deploy and test the solution out yourself, you will need your own Bing Maps API key and will also need to create six FAST Search managed properties to allow the solution to query search results spatially.

It's FREE (requires a Bing Maps API Key) to download you can download the solution from the Download - FAST Spatial Search Toolkit page.

For detailed steps on setting up the solution, check out the FAST Spatial Search Toolkit Installation post.

I'm Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne - FAST Spatial Search Center Overview

2011-10-10T09:24:00.000+08:00

I'm flying from Perth to Melbourne for SharePoint Saturday Melbourne on the 22nd October 2011. My buddy and coworker at CSG, Bhavik Merchant will also be there to present a talk on PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010.

My session will provide a technical overview of my FAST Spatial Toolkit solution.

Developing a Custom FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint Solution

Full Event Schedule

SharePoint Saturday Perth 2011 - April 9th

2011-04-06T00:42:00.000+08:00

There's 3 days left until the SharePoint Saturday Perth event on April 9th! More info and registration here: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/perth/ I'm presenting a Technical Overview of FAST Search Server 2010 http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/perth/speakers/31/SezaiKomur.aspx I will also be helping out with running the event on the day. There are some AWESOME raffle prize giveaways up for grabs at the event!

Creating FAST Search Managed Properties and Mappings to Crawled Properties with Powershell

2011-03-13T08:11:00.000+08:00

My presentation at the Australia SharePoint Conference went really well last week. As part of the demos I completed five search crawls. After the initial crawls I mapped some new Managed Properties to Crawled properties and then concluded with configuring some refiners in a FAST Search Centre.

To help speed up this process I performed the property creation and mappings using Powershell. A few of the attendees has asked for these scripts, so here they are:

Example One - Create a new 'category' managed property, and map it to two crawled properties

$categorymanagedproperty = New-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name category -type 1 -description "SPCAU Demo Property"

Set-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name category -Queryable $true -StemmingEnabled $true -RefinementEnabled $true

$categorycrawledproperty1 = Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledProperty -name "productcategorydescription"

$categorycrawledproperty2 = Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledProperty -name "searchviewread listelement.productcategorydescription"

New-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping -Managedproperty $categorymanagedproperty -crawledproperty $categorycrawledproperty1

New-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping -Managedproperty $categorymanagedproperty -crawledproperty $categorycrawledproperty2

The New-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty command creates a new managed property.

Set-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty allows us to update settings on the managed property, such as enabling querying, stemming and refinement.

Running Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledProperty will output all of the crawled properties in the index, so this command is typically executed with parameters that filter down the property to retrieve one crawled property.

Finally the New-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping command takes a managed property and crawled property as parameters and maps the two together.

It's as easy as that!

Another pattern I had in my scripts is to map a crawled property to an existing managed property.

Example Two : Map a crawled property to an existing managed property

$titlemanagedproperty = Get-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name title

$titlecrawledproperty = Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledProperty | where-object {($_.Name -eq "productname") -and ($_.CategoryName -eq "JDBC")}

New-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping -Managedproperty $titlemanagedproperty -crawledproperty $titlecrawledproperty

The above example maps the productname crawled property to the title managed property. The Get-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty command is used to get an existing managed property instead of creating a new one. Note also that the Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledProperty in the above example differs from the previous, where-object is used to apply filters on not only the crawled property Name but also the CategoryName, I found I had to do this as the specific crawled property name was not unique for some reason, this is quite a common situation, by also specifying the crawled property category we can ensure we're picking up the correct property.

Example Three - Undo Properties and Mappings

This final example includes commands to delete managed properties or property mappings.

Remove-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name category -Force

$titlemanagedproperty = Get-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty -Name title

$titlecrawledproperty = Get-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledProperty | where-object {($_.Name -eq "productname") -and ($_.CategoryName -eq "JDBC")}

Remove-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping -Managedproperty $titlemanagedproperty -crawledproperty $titlecrawledproperty -Force

The first command Remove-FASTSearchMetadataManagedProperty will delete the managed property and all it's property mappings. The next three commands involve deleting only a mapping of properties - you wouldn't want to delete the title managed property!!! So you need to get the specific managed property and crawled property and then run the Remove-FASTSearchMetadataCrawledPropertyMapping command to remove the mapping. Note the -Force parameter executes the command without prompting the user for confirmation.

I recommend creating, configuring and mapping FAST Search properties using Powershell as its quicker than doing the same using the FAST Query SSA. More importantly it's repeatable! So this is particularly useful when you need to repeat the same work between environments from Dev --> Test --> Production. Leaving this to be done manually is too time consuming and prone to human error. A word of warning though - don't develop your Powershell scripts in production! You could inadvertently alter some out of the box managed properties or other settings as you're trying to work out your scripts.

Searching Database Content with FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 - Part 3 - Using the BCS

2011-02-14T23:54:00.000+08:00

The third part of this article series involves using the BCS (Business Data Connector) to search the same data in the Contoso_retail_DW database.

To help with the BCS example, I first create an SQL View using the following SQL.

SELECT

p.ProductKey,

p.ProductName,

p.ProductDescription,

p.Manufacturer,

p.BrandName,

p.ClassName,

p.ColorName,

p.UnitCost,

p.UnitPrice,

psc.ProductSubcategoryName,

pc.ProductCategoryDescription

FROM Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProduct p

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductSubcategory psc

 on p.ProductSubcategoryKey = psc.ProductSubcategoryKey

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductCategory pc

 on psc.ProductCategoryKey = pc.ProductCategoryKey

Next we fire up SharePoint Designer to create the External Content Type.

Click the External Content Type ribbon action.

Click the Click here to discover external data sources and define operations.

Select SQL Server as the data source.

Enter the connection info

Right click on SearchView and select New Read Item Operation

Enter details about the operation

Then Finish

Now create a New Read List Operation

Enter operation details

Next, note the warning regarding specifying a limit filter.

Finish

Now click Summary View in the Ribbon, select ProductName from the Fields List and click the Set As Title ribbon action.

Now save your external content type

Now if we browse to our site collection, there's a Contoso Product list and we can see the BCS in action!

The BCS option has a nice feature that the JDBC connector didn't have - Profile Pages.

You can create a site to host profile pages, and then in your Business Connectivity Services Service Application, you can create Profile pages for your external content type

If I browse to the profile page, I get this error.

That's a good error :) because I haven't specified a product id as a query string parameter the error tells me it can't find the item, that suggests that its at least querying the DB.

Now navigate to your FAST Content Search Service Application

Create a new Content Source and specify Line of business data as the content source type, and select Contoso_Retial_DW

Now start a crawl! When a crawl is running you can check if it's working in the crawl log.

If crawls fail to work you can get a useful message through the crawl log

I also suggest you fire up ULSViewer to see what the cause is. ULSViewer is THE BEST TOOL for troubleshooting BCS and FAST Crawling using BCS.

Now that it looks like our crawl has successfully finished, lets try a test search

I get two results, the first is from the BCS and the second item is from the JDBC connector. I wonder why the teaser description is different between the two? The BCS also has a different icon due to search resolving the JDBC item target as a folder.

Thanks to profile pages, I can actually click the BCS result which takes me to the profile page for the product.

This is one area which would require a bit of extra work and development if you go with the JDBC connector approach.

Finally, we want to map some search properties. The managed properties from the previous demo are still setup, so I'll map the new BCS crawl properties to these same managed properties.

Now when you are in the FAST Query Search Service Application, don't click on the Metadata properties link in the left menu, 'these aren't the search properties you're looking for' /waveshand.

If you mess with property mappings in there you won't see your BCS properties, instead click on the FAST Search Administration link.

Then click on the Managed Properties link.

Click on Crawled property categories

You should notice the Business Data category with a larger number of properties, click the Business Data link.

There's a list of our crawl properties!

You can map crawled properties through to managed properties through here too.

After mapping all the crawled properties to managed properties, perform a full crawl.

Now retest the same search

Note the refiner counts have all incremented compared to the previous test search, so the property mappings and refiners are now setup, it's as easy as that!

Thanks for reading! I've got one more post to go for this series, I'll perform a closer comparison of the pros and cons of the the JDBC Connector and BCS Connector and why you might use either depending on your requirements and priorities.

Presenting at the Australia SharePoint Conference on March 8+9 and I'm off to the Democratic Republic of Congo

2011-02-04T14:12:00.000+08:00

That's right folks. I'm presenting at the Australia SharePoint Conference in Sydney on March 8+9.

More info here:

My presentation topic is related to searching databases with FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010!
http://www.sharepointconference.com.au/AU2011/SolutionPages/AllSpeakers.aspx

I'll also be in two 'Ask the Experts' panels
http://www.sharepointconference.com.au/AU2011/SolutionPages/ATE.aspx

So if you're attending the conference, come up and say hello!

This Sunday I am flying out to Africa! for 1 week.

I'll be flying over to South Africa, and then the Democratic Republic of Congo to a copper mine in the south of the country to run some SharePoint Server 2010 demos and to gather requirements for a system we're implementing for the mining company. It should be an experience :)

Configuring Security with the FAST Search for SharePoint Server 2010 Lotus Notes Connector

2011-01-11T23:00:00.000+08:00

I recently had the pleasure to configure the FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Lotus Notes Connector. An attempt had already been made to get the connector working and the connector allowed the FAST Search server to connect to Lotus Notes and crawl the content, but it seemed only anonymous content in Lotus Notes was being returned in searches.

When configuring the connector, the Content Collection created for the connector to feed was filling up as expecting, running the Get-FASTSearchContentCollection PowerShell cmdlet displayed tens of thousands of documents indexed, which suggested crawling and indexing was working just fine, but I wasn't getting anywhere near this number of documents returned in any searches.

In order to configure security trimming for the connector, you need to configure user aliasing. This involves a number of steps and running numerous PowerShell cmdlets.

You start with editing the lotusnotessecuritytemplate.xml file in %FASTSEARCH%\etc folder and set the UseSSOMapping property (Turns on or off the generation of an XML-aliasing file) to true and after which you run the Lotus Notes user directory connector, see: Start a crawl (FAST Search Lotus Notes user directory connector). This will generate an ssomapping.xml file based on the Lotus Notes user directory.

You then create a Lotus Notes User Store using the New-FASTSearchSecurityLotusNotesUserStore cmdlet, then enable the CCTK server to accept requests by running the Set-FASTSearchSecurityCCTKServer cmdlet and then create a Fast Search Security XML Aliaser by running the New-FASTSearchSecurityXMLAliaser cmdlet

The theory behind user aliasing is that SharePoint users usually authenticate with Active Directory accounts to run FAST Search queries, Lotus Notes on the otherhand handles its own security, and authorisation to content is governed by Lotus Notes users and groups. So the connector can be configured with an XML file that maps AD Users to Lotus Notes users, simple as that.

This is where the fun starts, the system I worked on had all sorts of random formats for Lotus Notes users and Active Directory users.

The following TechNet page Configure the FAST Search Lotus Notes connector describes how the ssomapping.xml file is populated.

'The Lotus Domino Administrator should make sure that all the Windows Active Directory (AD) domain names are added to the user documents in Domino to enable mapping between the Domino domain and the AD user who performs the search query from SharePoint.

This should be done prior to running the user directory connector. The AD domain names should be placed in the multi-value field called “User name” and it should be the bottom value in that field.'

I had over 5000 Lotus Notes users output in my ssomapping.xml file, updating the last value in the 'User name' field for each Lotus Notes user is a massive task :(

You run the Set-FASTSearchSecurityXMLAliaser command and specify your ssomapping.xml file to configure the XML Aliaser. Using the ssomapping.xml file with the dodgy formats didn't work, so a new ssomapping.xml file was created with only a hand full of AD accounts mapped to Lotus Notes users.

An advantage of the aliaser is I could map the account I was using for search testing to a Lotus Notes user with unrestricted access to Lotus Notes.

The Prepare FAST Search Authorization for use with the FAST Search Lotus Notes connector in TechNet lists an example of account mappings:

<user name="AD\user1">
<domain prefix="lnx" username="cn=<Domino User 1>/ou=department/o=company"/>
</user>
<user name="AD\user1">
<domain prefix="lnx" username="cn=<Domino User 2>/ou=department/o=company"/>
</user>

I tried this format for user accounts, but it didn't work. So I was stuck. After many hours of despair I came across this section in TechNet:

Troubleshooting (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint)

Which links to this page in it's 'Troubleshooting item level security' section:

A FAST Search query is not returning one or more expected documents

The article title exactly describes my issue :) So following the article, I set the FAST Search Security Log Level to 'info' with the Set-FASTSearchSecurityLogLevel cmdlet

I then executed a search query and went into the %FASTSEARCH%\var\log\syslog folder on my FAST Search server and had a look at the authorisation worker log file produced, it output the folling related to my search query (edited).

[2010-11-22 09:13:39] INFO : authorization-worker@FASTSERVERNAME: systemmsg: Claims.dll:GetClaimsPrincipal - 0#.w|AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER claims info :Total Claims Count:14:1:ClaimType:http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier:Value:AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:2:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/primarysid:Value:s-1-5-21-1515894698-2064606462-2977944764-22409:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:windows:3:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/primarygroupsid:Value:s-1-5-21-1515894698-2064606462-2977944764-513:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:windows:4:ClaimType:http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/upn:Value:USER@COMPANYDOMAIN.com.au:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:windows:5:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/2009/08/claims/userlogonname:Value:AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:windows:6:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/2009/08/claims/userid:Value:0#.w|AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:securitytokenservice:7:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/2009/08/claims/identityprovider:Value:windows:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:securitytokenservice:8:ClaimType:http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/claims/2009/08/isauthenticated:Value:true:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:securitytokenservice:9:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/2009/08/claims/farmid:Value:32ec3884-aa1c-4d68-a98a-2fafa9430b15:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:claimprovider:system:10:ClaimType:http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/claims/2009/08/tokenreference:Value:0#.w|AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER,129348965939086857,wumemu6suqhfbvq2cnnf4p4n6zuwdap3czeptdzrfdfwyu99x0ildbj4j7fzj/pji21jdghqnjoy0uay+hzxqq3fzyip0f4dltrbx9ap4rl9kbtfa3lo/42ajoyvy+xfvbax8uqilrpevunwmqyykg3wcrf/kjuqauesxoiu1wi/dlsdxfr7qjeypd/r+ql0fwhglkoo8m7nxipzru90oo3v8/yd1ojgn24t7x3zybvauxbphohbmqow1ewdfxtvea5q==,urn:schemas-microsoft-com:sharepoint:service:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:sharepoint:11:ClaimType:http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name:Value:0#.w|AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:securitytokenservice:12:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/2009/08/claims/sidcompressed:Value:s-1-5-21-1515894698-2064606462-2977944764;513;6295;10477;15654;7542;11123;18030;6917;6631;1286;11120;6334;18122;11930;10516;2095;6349;18053;7593;22625;19911;6243;22606;1133;22437;2060;18050;13968;20135;5928;10227;10351;10478;512;11822;22332;7475;7932s-1-1;0s-1-5-21-788211482-3310490024-2036062914;1008s-1-5;11s-1-5-21-2108236516-395065666-114579206;11937;12023;12839;13852;4327;2327;11384;14459;12715;12702;2218;7828;10932;11072;2408;12735;14452s-1-5-64;10:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:windows:13:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationmethod:Value:http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#string:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:14:ClaimType:http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationinstant:Value:2010-11-22t00:49:51.846z:ValueType:http://www.w3.org/2001/xmlschema#datetime:Issuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:OriginalIssuer:cn=sharepoint security token service, ou=sharepoint, o=microsoft, c=us:

One thing stood out to me in the log was the references to claims based authentication, and a new format for specifying user accounts I could try in the ssomapping.xml file:

0#.w|AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER

This is the claims based username format, reminds me of this guys blog, check out the blog title.

Claims based authentication is actually referenced in the following TechNet articles:

FAST Search Authorization (FSA) overview

FAST Search Authorization (FSA) data flow

About principal aliasing

The problem is claims based authentication isn't referenced in the Prepare FAST Search Authorization for use with the FAST Search Lotus Notes connector article, worse still it contains an incorrect ssomapping format example!

So I then tried specifying ssomapping.xml account mappings as follows:

<user name="0#.w|AD_DOMAIN\AD_USER">
<domain prefix="lnx" username="cn=<Domino User 1>/ou=department/o=company"/>
</user>

It worked!

Security trimming when performing queries conformed to the aliases I specified, and I was getting tens of thousands of secured documents returned in search results.

I think the level of configuration and logging you can tweak in FAST Search is truly awesome, and this time security logging saved the day!

Technet Links:

Configure the FAST Search Lotus Notes connector

Start a crawl (FAST Search Lotus Notes user directory connector).

Prepare FAST Search Authorization for use with the FAST Search Lotus Notes connector

FAST Search Authorization (FSA) overview

FAST Search Authorization (FSA) data flow

About principal aliasing

Troubleshooting (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint)

A FAST Search query is not returning one or more expected documents

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 JDBC Database Connector

2010-11-28T23:00:00.000+08:00

Searching Database Content with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 – Part 2

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 JDBC Database Connector

FAST Search has a JDBC Database Connector that can be used to crawl and search across data from a database. As explained in Part 1, this connector is a port from FAST ESP. You can also use the BCS with FAST Search to crawl database content, which will be detailed in Part 3.

This examples was produced on the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM) downloaded from - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=751fa0d1-356c-4002-9c60-d539896c66ce&displaylang=en

If you don’t have your own FAST environment setup, and you want to run through these examples, download the IW Demo VM as it contains a completely functioning FAST Search server.

The IW VM also has a series of SQL Databases that you can have a play with. To work through these examples I’ve selected the Contoso_Retail_DW database, this database contains a table called DimProduct with 2517 rows of product data. The Products fall into the following main categories:

Audio
TV and Video
Computers
Cameras and camcorders
Cell phones
Music, Movies and Audio Books
Games and Toys
Home Appliances

For search purposes I always like to create a denormalised SQL View or SQL Statement. The following SQL Statement only returns the columns of data I want to use for this demonstration, it’s typically worth creating a stored procedure or SQL View at this point.

SELECT

p.ProductKey,

p.ProductName,

p.ProductDescription,

p.BrandName,

p.ClassName,

p.ColorName,

p.UnitPrice,

psc.ProductSubcategoryName,

pc.ProductCategoryDescription

FROM Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProduct p

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductSubcategory psc

on p.ProductSubcategoryKey = psc.ProductSubcategoryKey

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductCategory pc

on psc.ProductCategoryKey = pc.ProductCategoryKey

The data is quite handy for demoing FAST Search capabilities, as we should be able to setup some nice Refiners for Brand, Class, Colour and Price.

So now we have our SQL Statement, the next step involves getting FAST to execute this SQL and then feed it into its search Index so we can search over it.

Create a New Content Collection

This step isn’t mandatory, you can choose to use the default sp content collection that is setup by default in FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. When crawling content outside of SharePoint using a different connector, I like to create a new Content Collection, as you can clear this Content Collection and still leave the default content collection intact. You may have millions of items already crawled in the sp content collection.

To create a new Content Collection use the New-FASTSearchContentCollectionPowershell cmdlet in the FAST Search Powershell console.

Note: FAST Search has its own Powershell console for executing FAST Search related cmdlets, make sure you use the Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint shell for all FAST Search related configuration.

PS C:\FASTSearch\bin> New-FASTSearchContentCollection -name ContosoProducts -Description "A collection for Contoso Retail Product content from the Contoso_Retail_DW SQL Server 2008 database"

Name : ContosoProducts

Created : 2010-11-20T23:06:59

Cleared : 2010-11-20T23:06:59

LastInput :

DocumentCount : 0

Description : A collection for Contoso Retail Product content from the Contoso_Retail_DW SQL Server 2008 database

Pipeline : Office14 (webcluster)

Note that the maximum name length for a Content Collection is only 16.

The next step involves creating a JDBC Connector configuration file. Navigate to the \etc folder in your FAST install directory. This is C:\FAST\etc in the IW VM. The etc folder contains a series of configuration files for configuring FAST Search, there are a few example files that can be used for connectors, the one we are after is called jdbctemplate.xml. Make a copy of this file and rename it, eg. ContosoProduct_jdbctemplate.xml.

Now edit the file in your XML editor of choice. Some of the settings you want to change are:

The connector can connect to a variety of database servers, enter the Microsoft SQL Server specific driver in the JDBCDriver setting.

JDBCDriver com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver

Enter the DB Server and Database in the JDBCUrl setting

JDBCURL jdbc:sqlserver://DEMO2010A:1433;database=Contoso_Retail_DW

Enter the SQL Select statement for the JDBCSQL setting.

JDBCSQL

p.ProductKey,

p.ProductName,

p.ProductDescription,

p.Manufacturer,

p.BrandName,

p.ClassName,

p.ColorName,

p.UnitCost,

p.UnitPrice,

psc.ProductSubcategoryName,

pc.ProductCategoryDescription

FROM Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProduct p

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductSubcategory psc

on p.ProductSubcategoryKey = psc.ProductSubcategoryKey

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductCategory pc

on psc.ProductCategoryKey = pc.ProductCategoryKey

]]>

Now specify the primary key column to use

JDBCPrimaryKeyField ProductKey

and the content collection we created earlier.

Collection ContosoProducts

For testing purposes you can also make the connector output FAST XML files containing the data of the content crawled by setting ExportToXML to true.

ExportToXML True

Now run the connector by executing the jdbcconnector.bat file as follows:

PS C:\FASTSearch\bin> jdbcconnector start -f ../etc/ContosoProduct_jdbctemplate.xml

23:46:03,516 INFO [JDBCConnector] Starting the connector!

23:46:03,523 INFO [JDBCConnector] Validating config.......

23:46:03,742 WARN [JDBCConnector] Empty parameter Input/JDBCPassword in config

file

23:46:03,926 INFO [JDBCConnector] Testing connections to external systems

23:46:03,961 WARN [JDBCConnector] Empty parameter Input/JDBCPassword in config

file

23:46:03,994 INFO [JDBCConnector] Checking if connections to source and target

work....

23:46:04,617 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Opened JDBC Connection

23:46:04,621 INFO [JDBCConnector] Connection made to source system

23:46:04,632 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Publisher :Initializing: com.fastsearch.

esp.cctk.publishers.CCTKDocumentFeeder

23:46:04,750 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Using Content Distributor(s): demo2010a.

contoso.com:13390

23:46:04,764 INFO [FASTXMLOutputHandler] Creating output Directory: ..\var\jdbc

connector\ContosoProducts\fastxml

23:46:05,121 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Initiated CCTK Document Feeder:

23:46:05,122 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/ActuallyPublish:true

23:46:05,123 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] XMLExport/ExportToXML:true

23:46:05,125 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/Collection:ContosoProdu

cts

23:46:05,128 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxActiveDocuments(MB):

23:46:05,130 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxBatchSize(KB):1000

23:46:05,132 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/BatchSubmissionTimeoutS

ec:30

23:46:05,134 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/TimeOut:60

23:46:05,136 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxDocsInBatch:100

23:46:05,138 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxRetries:3

23:46:05,139 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/ContentDistributors:dem

o2010a.contoso.com:13390

23:46:05,143 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/CallbackType:Secured

23:46:05,145 INFO [JDBCConnector] Connection made to target system

23:46:05,147 INFO [JDBCConnector] Initializing.......

23:46:05,195 INFO [JDBCConnector] Starting crawl.......

23:46:05,199 INFO [JDBCConnector] Will start up publishers......

23:46:05,202 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Publisher :Initializing: com.fastsearch.

esp.cctk.publishers.CCTKDocumentFeeder

23:46:05,229 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Using Content Distributor(s): demo2010a.

contoso.com:13390

23:46:05,239 INFO [FASTXMLOutputHandler] Creating output Directory: ..\var\jdbc

connector\ContosoProducts\fastxml

23:46:05,338 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Initiated CCTK Document Feeder:

23:46:05,339 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/ActuallyPublish:true

23:46:05,341 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] XMLExport/ExportToXML:true

23:46:05,342 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/Collection:ContosoProdu

cts

23:46:05,345 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxActiveDocuments(MB):

23:46:05,348 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxBatchSize(KB):1000

23:46:05,350 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/BatchSubmissionTimeoutS

ec:30

23:46:05,353 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/TimeOut:60

23:46:05,355 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxDocsInBatch:100

23:46:05,356 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/MaxRetries:3

23:46:05,358 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/ContentDistributors:dem

o2010a.contoso.com:13390

23:46:05,360 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] FASTSearchSubmit/CallbackType:Secured

23:46:05,362 INFO [JDBCConnector] Starting publisher thread 0

23:46:05,390 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Opened JDBC Connection

23:46:05,411 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Running PRESQL

23:46:05,413 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Finished running PRESQL

23:46:05,440 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Running SQL: SELECT

p.ProductKey,

p.ProductName,

p.ProductDescription,

p.Manufacturer,

p.BrandName,

p.ClassName,

p.ColorName,

p.UnitCost,

p.UnitPrice,

psc.ProductSubcategoryName,

pc.ProductCategoryDescription

FROM Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProduct p

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductSubcategory psc

on p.ProductSubcategoryKey = psc.ProductSubcategoryKey

LEFT OUTER JOIN Contoso_Retail_DW.dbo.DimProductCategory pc

on psc.ProductCategoryKey = pc.ProductCategoryKey

23:46:05,465 INFO [JDBCAdapter] The time taken to execute SQL is : 0m 0s

23:46:09,089 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Publisher instance: 0 published: 1000 (3

33.33334 docs/sec)

23:46:09,097 INFO [FASTXMLOutputHandler] Publishing 1000 documents to: fastxml5

969913899608785081.xml

23:46:15,557 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Publisher instance: 0 published: 2000 (2

00.0 docs/sec)

23:46:15,564 INFO [FASTXMLOutputHandler] Publishing 1000 documents to: fastxml7

360425706418517311.xml

23:46:21,197 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Running postSQL

23:46:21,199 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Finished running postSQL

23:46:21,201 INFO [JDBCAdapter] Closed JDBC connection

23:46:21,621 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Publisher 0: Last document in queue has

been read

23:46:21,622 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Publisher 0: Shutting down: com.fastsear

ch.esp.cctk.publishers.CCTKDocumentFeeder

23:46:21,625 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Waiting for FAST Search feeder to comple

te.....

23:47:45,411 INFO [JDBCConnector] All tasks done. Telling publishers to stop wa

iting for items....

23:50:19,078 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Feeding to FAST Search completed.....

23:50:19,376 INFO [FASTXMLOutputHandler] Publishing 517 documents to: fastxml65

8648051932195231.xml

23:50:19,657 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] At shutdown, the following statistics ha

ve been collected:

23:50:19,660 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Total number of extracted documents...:2

517

23:50:19,663 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Rate of extracted documents...........:9

.890447

23:50:19,665 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Total number of published documents...:2

517

23:50:19,668 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Rate of published documents...........:9

.890252

23:50:19,671 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Total number of successful callbacks..:2

517

23:50:19,674 INFO [CCTKDocumentFeeder] Total number of failed callbacks......:0

23:51:05,415 INFO [JDBCConnector] Calling shutdown method on adapters

23:51:05,417 INFO [JDBCConnector] All adapters have completed

23:51:05,419 INFO [JDBCConnector] Stop listening thread has completed

23:51:05,422 INFO [JDBCConnector] Crawl finished

23:51:05,425 INFO [JDBCConnector] Finished running the connector!

PS C:\FASTSearch\bin>

That should be it folks, based on the output the crawling of the database has completed successfully. Now look for the Output folder setting in the XML file and inspect the output folder.

C:\FASTSearch\var\jdbcconnector\ContosoProducts\log

Will contain a log file with similar output to the Powershell console.

C:\FASTSearch\var\jdbcconnector\ContosoProducts\fastxml

Will contain the FIXML files with crawled content.

Inspecting these files shows the data being successfully crawled.

You can also check the content collection for documents by executing the Get-FASTContentCollection Powershell command

PS C:\FASTSearch\bin> Get-FASTSearchContentCollection -Name ContosoProducts

Name : ContosoProducts

Created : 2010-11-20T23:06:59

Cleared : 2010-11-20T23:06:59

LastInput : 11/20/2010 11:50:10 PM

DocumentCount : 2517

Description : A collection for Contoso Retail Product content from the Contos

o_Retail_DW SQL Server 2008 database

Pipeline : Office14 (webcluster)

On inspection of the ContosoProducts Content Collection we now have 2517 items in it, that’s great news!

Now lets perform a searches to see if the DB data is returned in a FAST Search Centre.

So it looks like our database data has been crawled and indexed, and it’s being returned in search results in a FAST Search Centre.

The job’s not done. The search experience could do with a bit of work:

The ProductKey primary key is being used for the Title field in search results.

The Search interface could do with Refiners

Search result URL targets are also of the following format http://intranet.contoso.com/search/Pages/2401 you could resolve this by adding column to your sql query to create the desired URL to a product display page. This is another benefit of the BCS which helps generate this for you.

Mapping Managed Properties to Crawled Properties.

To map properties and create refiners, go to FAST Query SSA Service Application in SharePoint Central Administration, Click on FAST Search Administration in the left hand menu, if you get an error at this stage, the central administration application pool account might not have FAST Administrative priveliges and the account needs to be added to the FASTSearchAdministrators group on the FAST Search Server.

First we need to map a crawled property to the Title managed property such as the Product Name. Find the Title managed property in the list and edit it.

Map a crawled property by clicking the 'add mapping' button.

If you select the crawled property category and perform a search it makes it easier to find the right property.

Now that the Title property is mapped, map the productdescription crawled property to the Description managed property. This will improve search relevance as the managed property has stemming enabled.

next we will create new Managed Properties for category, subcategory, brandname, colour & price.

Be sure to tick the Refiner Property and Deep Refiner options for these Managed Properties so you can use them as refiners.

After creating the properties and setting the mappings, execute the connector again for the mappings to be picked up.

The next step is to navigate back to your FAST search center. Refiners do not automatically show up in a search center, they need to be added to the refinement panel web part.

So edit the page and sitting in the Left Zone edit the properties of the Refinement Panel web part.

It's important to untick the 'use default configuration' option if editing these web parts for you changes to take place.

Edit the Filter Category Definition XML.

You can copy existing refiner definitions and changed the MappedProperty setting to your own. The following Category nodes were added to the XML and the page was checked in.

Now when searches are performed, refiners based on the Managed Properties and the Crawled Properties they've mapped to will display in search results.

Below are some test searches and screenshots of the custom Refiners in action!

Searching Database Content with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 – Part 1

2010-11-28T22:43:00.000+08:00

Searching Database Content with Fast Search for SharePoint 2010 – Part 1

The search story is much better in 2010 for SharePoint. There’s a new Search Engine available deploy with SharePoint Server 2010 – FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP). I really could have used FAST Search for SharePoint in my past Enterprise SharePoint Search projects. It produces significantly better relevant results than the MOSS 2007 search engine. It has many more options available for tweaking the search UI and search engine. It also has better options available for developers developing and extending custom search solutions.

Why is this quality search engine now available to deploy with SharePoint? Microsoft acquired FAST Search & Transfer and its FAST ESP product for $US 1.2 Billion in early 2008. This is a common Microsoft approach at getting ahead in a market, acquire an innovative company with a quality product. The same happened with MCMS 2002 (the forerunner to SharePoint WCM) which was based on a product gained from the NCompass Labs acquisition.

Microsoft Announces Offer to Acquire Fast Search & Transfer.

Microsoft Completes Tender Offer for FAST Search & Transfer

Artistitic re-enactment of the acquisition.

Since the FAST acquisition, Microsoft has had the time to bake in a version of FAST ESP into the next version of SharePoint, and it’s time to make use of this awesome new enhancement to the platform.

Options for Searching Database Content with FAST Search for SharePoint 2010

So you want to search custom SQL Server databases using FAST?

If you have never indexed anything other than SharePoint Sites with FS4SP, I recommend first checking out this page on TechNet:

Plan and design for content collection (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint)

It gives a great summary of the options available to you, and links to further TechNet pages containing step-by-step details on connecting FAST to File Shares, Exchange, People Profiles, Web sites, Lotus Notes and more.

This page on TechNet lists two options for using FS4SP to crawl and search databases:

Business Data Catalog-based indexing connectors

Use if the preferred configuration method is using the Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010.
Use when you want to use time stamp based change detection for incremental database crawls.
Use when the preferred operation method is using the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Central Administration.
Use when you want to enable crawling based on the change log. This can be achieved by directly modifying the connector model file and creating a stored procedure in the database.

FAST Search database connector

Use when the preferred configuration method is using SQL queries.
Use when you want advanced data joining operation options through SQL queries.
Use when you want to use advanced incremental update features. FAST Search database connector uses checksum based change detection for incremental crawls if there is no update information available. The connector also supports time stamp based change detection and change detection based on update and delete flags.

That’s right, you’ve got not just one, but two approaches that you can use with FAST Search for SharePoint to make this possible. Why are there two ways to do this?

The preferred method of integrating database content and LOB systems with SharePoint 2010 is using the BCS. You can also use the BCS to crawl databases to use in SharePoint 2010 Search and FS4SP. It also provides extra goodies for use in SharePoint such as external lists. It also provides a nicer user interface to get the job done.

The second option available to use is a port of the FAST ESP JDBC database connector. FAST ESP had to have a way to connect to databases before a port of FAST ESP was implemented in SharePoint, it had the JDBC connector. In comparison to the BCS, the JDBC connector doesn’t have as nice a gui to setup the connection and crawling. It also requires installation of the 32 bit Java JRE, That’s right folks, you need to have a JVM on your FAST server to get the JDBC connector to work! A few other ‘FAST Search specific’ connectors include the web connector and Lotus Notes connector.

More on these 'FAST Search Specific' connectors:

Plan to deploy FAST Search specific connectors (FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint)

Parts 2 of this series details steps to get FS4SP to Index a SQL Server 2008 products database using the FAST Search JDBC Database Connector.

Part 3 of this series detail steps to get FS4SP to Index a SQL Server 2008 products database using the BCS Connector.

Part 4 Comparison of the BCS and FAST Search database connector. [stay tuned...]

Working on FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 - Watch this space

2010-11-19T15:14:00.000+08:00

I've been busy on a number of FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP) projects recently and I'm planning on blogging about some of my experiences in the comming weeks and months, so stay tuned folks.

Perth SharePoint User Group Webcasts!

2010-06-14T13:14:00.000+08:00

We've been recording our recent Perth SharePoint User Group meeting presentations.

Jeremy Thake is encoding and uploading these to the Internet for the world to see what we're getting up to in our user group here in Perth, Western Australia.

Upgrading from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010 Sezai Komur

http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SPPodCasts/2010/05/14/SPWebCast+014+-+SharePoint+2010+Upgrade+at+Perth+SharePoint+User+Group

Build SharePoint 2010 Solutions with Visual Studio 2010 Michael Hanes

http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SPPodCasts/2010/05/28/SPWebCast+017+-+Build+SharePoint+2010+Solutions+with+Visual+Studio+2010

Annual Leave Form - InfoPath 2010 BCS SPD 2010 Workflow and SP2010 Matt Menezes

http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SPPodCasts/2010/05/28/SPWebCast+016+-+Annual+Leave+Form+-+InfoPath+2010+BCS+SPD+2010+Workflow+and+SP2010

SharePoint 2007 and HP TRIM 7 Integration Overview Jeremy Thake

http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SPPodCasts/2010/04/17/SPWebCast+011+-+SharePoint+2007+and+HP+TRIM+7+Integration+Overview

You can view a variety of other web casts on the SharePointDevWiki here: http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SPPodCasts/Home

My New Job at CSG

2010-04-28T15:08:00.000+08:00

I've just started a new job as a SharePoint Solutions Architect working at CSG http://www.csg.com.au

CSG is a large Australian IT company and I'm looking forward to implementing some big SharePoint Server 2010 projects here.

I'll also try and focus more time on blogging and community stuff which I've been neglecting in recent months.

Wish me luck!

Perth SharePoint User Group - September Presentation

2009-09-15T15:46:00.001+08:00

I presented at the Perth SharePoint User Group September meeting.

The PowerPoint for the presentation can be downloaded here.

It was a blast! thanks to everyone who attended and the questions about SPDocGen, Database Management, Creating Explicit Managed Paths, Database Autogrowth settings and SharePoint Object Model Disposal.

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator - Full Source Code Uploaded

2009-09-03T22:38:00.000+08:00

I've done some minor tweaks to SPDocGen, added some console output and a little error handling.

I've also uploaded the full source code for the solution, so feel free to modify it as you need.

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator

Here's some ideas I have for further improving and building on the solution:

1. Implement command line parameters to let users specify what is output.
2. Create a winforms UI to allow users to specify what is output, and specify the XML, XSLT and DOC filenames.
3. Document even more Farm level information...
4. SPDocGen currently produces Farm Level documentation, the next step is to produce detailed Site Collection level documentation with detailed reporting of Site Collection specific info such as Content Types, Site Columns, Lists etc. etc.

Post a comment here if you're interested in being involved and collaborating on this further.

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator

2009-09-01T10:06:00.000+08:00

I've just created this project on CodePlex http://spdocgen.codeplex.com/

SPDocGen aka. SharePoint Documentation Generator is a console app that generates WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 farm documentation or reports using the SharePoint object model api. It produces an XML file, which is then transformed into a .doc file using XSLT and WordML.

I started this project to save myself time, because I've been tasked with documenting SharePoint Deployments quite a few times, and its usually a time consuming process of clicking through Central Admin, running batch commands of STSADM or using SharePoint Manager then copy and pasting the info into a word document. Service Pack 2 also has a preupgradecheck command that can produce some documentation for you. It might also be worth having a look at the SharePoint Admin Toolkit, SPSReport, SPDiag or MOSSRAP

Hope it saves everyone some documentation time so you can get back to spending your time on more worthwhile tasks like SharePoint dev or SharePoint admin.

Get SPDocGen

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek

2009-07-14T08:01:00.000+08:00

Microsoft have released some sneak peek info on SharePoint 2010!

Go check out the movies and info here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek

Microsoft plan to release a lot of info at the SharePoint conference in Vegas in October, http://www.mssharepointconference.com it's nice to get this sneak peek info while we wait for the conference.

Can't Crawl Sites, Can't Access Sites on Server 401.1 Access Denied

2009-04-30T19:42:00.000+08:00

I hit this nasty problem recently.

I could access central admin fine on http://servername:port but when trying to crawl sites locally, the crawler failed on sites with a custom host header, returning access denied messages. That's strange I thought, so launched up IE on the server and tried to access the sites, get prompted to login 3 times then boom access denied 401.1. These same sites work just fine when accessed on other client machines in the network.

Something definetly aint right here!!!

Luckily Todd Klindt saved the day for me, he blogs this issue nicely here. Further to that Ishai Sagi also has a blog post on it. So have a read of those awesome blog posts and then check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 for a resolution, the cause is stated in the hotfix as:

"A loopback check security feature that is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer. Therefore, authentication fails if the FQDN or the custom host header that you use does not match the local computer name."

The resolution involes a little bit of regedit.

Phew disaster averted!

Perth SharePoint User Group Lead

2009-04-30T19:18:00.000+08:00

I am the new Lead of the Perth SharePoint User Group !

http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Perth/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=23

Rick Rosato of Connected Systems resurrected the Perth SharePoint User Group in early 2007 and has done a great job of running the user group since then, we’ve had some great sessions in the last two years and many people have benefitted from the user group. Rick has decided to hand over the presidency to me so he can focus on other things, and I gladly accept the position and all the responsibility that it entails – cheers Rick !

Recent Meetings & Presentations

Late last month, on the 25th March Jeremy Thake of Readify presented an excellent talk on unit testing in SharePoint, check out the webcast here.

For this months meeting, on the 21st April, the infamous Paul Culmsee of Seven Sigma Business Solutions graced the Perth SharePoint User Group as a speaker for the very first time, to present a talk on "Wicked Problems and SharePoint - Rethinking the Approach" you can view the presentation slides on Paul's blog.

If you are based in Perth and working with SharePoint, you've got to come along to our meetings!

Check out the user group website regularly for up and coming events. If you are keen on sharing your SharePoint adventures with others, get in contact with me, as we need speakers! We'll slot you in as a presenter so you can share your experiences with the community.

10 New Themes for SharePoint!

2009-03-20T11:26:00.000+09:00

Noticed this post on Randy Drisgills blog regarding 10 new awesome themes recently released by Microsoft
http://blog.drisgill.com/2009/03/microsoft-released-10-new-sharepoint.html

They look great - best themes for SharePoint I have ever laid my eyes on. I also agree with Randy that these should have been released in Solution package(s). Still the format they are released in are better than those extra Master pages released by Microsoft a year or two ago.

Download the 10 new themes here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a

Update
Daniel Brown - SharePoint MVP based out of Adelaide, South Australia has "solutionised" the themes. Check them out here - http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=256

Go and download SPDisposeCheck !

2009-01-31T11:28:00.000+09:00

If you are into WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 custom development go and download the SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool (aka SPDisposeCheck) -
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck

Announced by Paul Andrew at Microsoft -
http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2009/01/29/spdisposecheck-v1-3-1-is-released.aspx

Proper disposal of SharePoint objects in custom code is very important. If you are causing memory leaks you will create memory pressure problems in production Farms, which can result in serious side affects and system downtime.

Announcing SharePoint Site Configurator

2008-12-01T08:48:00.000+09:00

http://www.codeplex.com/spsiteconfigurator

One controversial topic of late is - should you develop with custom site definitions? A lot of people argue no - they are too complex and will cause upgrade problems into the future.

The majority of SharePoint developers should be familiar with the SharePoint Solutions and Features framework for developing and deploying customisations to SharePoint. A smaller number of developers work with and are familiar with custom site definitions - they are complex and difficult to master. This can cause problems with resourcing as some SharePoint developers will not be productive having to sort out and work with another developers site definition.

To complicate things further - when developing with custom site definitions one can go for the miniminalist approach where most work is implemented in Features, and these Features are simply referenced in the site definition for activation purposes, or you can go ahead and build the work straight into the site definitions. Another problem is developers use the OOTB WSS and MOSS site definitions as examples, and many of those implement functionality in the site definitions themselves instead of in Features.

So it's great to see MCS release the SharePoint Site Configurator on codeplex which will hopefully help to do away with complex custom site definitions.

Isolator for SharePoint !

2008-11-25T09:11:00.000+09:00

If you are a big fan of TDD and you develop on SharePoint then you need to check out Typemock Isolator for SharePoint - develop and test SharePoint code without a SharePoint server - how cool is that!!!

Head over to Andrew Woodward's blog - http://www.21apps.com for some more TDD goodness - specifically these two posts that link to whitepapers and code for download.
http://www.21apps.com/agile/beginners-guide-to-test-driven-web-part-development/
http://www.21apps.com/agile/unit-testing-sharepoint-getting-into-the-object-model/

Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.
The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.

Anouncing SPDisposeCheck for SharePoint Developers

2008-11-13T09:15:00.001+09:00

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/11/12/announcing-spdisposecheck-tool-for-sharepoint-developers.aspx

So what is SPDisposeCheck

"SPDisposeCheck, will open your custom compiled assemblies recursively and validate them against the Microsoft published guidance. The output from the tool will contain messages that may indicate the SPSite and SPWeb Dispose() methods guidance is are not being followed in the customers source code. While these messages need expert evaluation in order to determine if the software is not performing properly, in some cases just running the tool on your custom code can lead you to simple fixes that improve the quality and performance of custom code on SharePoint. "

"This tool is planned for release during the coming North American Winter. Customers who are currently experiencing difficulties with memory management in their custom applications should review the guidance listed above. Customers who are currently experiencing difficulties with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 should contact their regular Microsoft Customer Support Services contact, or refer to http://support.microsoft.com/."

Disposing of SharePoint objects correctly is a big problem in custom developed code, if your SharePoint implementation is constantly "Dieing" ie, after regular use the memory and cpu max out and you need to reboot your server to get things going again then its highly likely you are running custom SharePoint Object Model code that is not correctly disposing of objects causing memory leaks. The rate of memory leakage can be significant.

I have since this ugly problem rear its head in a number of projects I have been involved in. So yeah when you finally do fixup the problem and dispose of objects correctly you will notice the improvement of system performance and your server should run as if it has a simple vanilla install of SharePoint.

Another major problem with this is that.... These Dispose() rules are COMPLEX. The biggest problem faced is the difference in coding patterns depending on where your custom code is running.

ie. If your SharePoint OM code is running in a Web Part or Custom Control then you have access to the SPContext.Current object which is your starting point to get to your SPSite, SPWeb, SPList, SPListItem, SPFile etc. etc. its important to note that objects accessed from the current context should not be disposed of. The SPContext.Current.Site and its SPWebs that hang of it are singletons and should not be disposed as SharePoint makes use of these and will need to possibly use these objects after your custom code executes. That means the using(SPWeb =...) pattern will dispose of objects you are not meant to, you will get an error.

BUT - if you are running the code in a console app or 'out-of-context' then you should always dispose the objects as you are the one creating them.

Confused? Complicated? Yeh it is but it is important to understand the issues if you are writing custom SharePoint Object Model code.

SharePoint MVP Blogs OPML

2008-11-07T09:51:00.000+09:00

If you're big on RSS and use it to keep track of the latest SharePoint news out there, then here's a link to the SharePoint MVP Blogs OPML.

http://services.newsgator.com/sharepoint/opml

My friend Jeremy Thake also has a nice collection of SharePoint links on his Diigo that he seems to update quite often. Here's the RSS feed for Jeremy's SharePoint Diigo links - http://www.diigo.com/rss/user/Jthake/sharepoint

Patterns & Practises SharePoint Guidance and Ramp-Up Program SharePoint for Developers

2008-11-06T13:03:00.000+09:00

Microsoft Patterns and Practices - SharePoint Guidance

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx

Guidance at a Glance
This guidance helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications. The guidance contains a reference implementation (RI) that demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and lifecycle management challenges.

Ramp-Up !

(http://www.myrampup.com/) has just launched a brand-new learning track: SharePoint for Developers, Part I today.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/rampup/dd221355.aspx

Free Open Source CMS / WCM on WSS 3.0 - CompleteSharePoint.NET

2008-11-03T21:53:00.001+09:00

My old buddy Tommy Segoro recently released CompleteSharePoint.NET a free, open source CMS / WCM system that sits on top of WSS 3.0
http://www.codeplex.com/completesharepoint
http://www.completesharepoint.net/Home/Pages/Default.aspx

Tommy is a great buddy of mine and we've worked on some cool projects together in the past - Nice work Tommy! I miss working with Tommy because he's probably one of the fastest developers I have ever worked with.

Enabling the Word 2007 Developer Tab in the Ribbon to Always Show the Document Information Panel (DIP) When Opening a Document

2008-11-03T12:32:00.001+09:00

Last Friday I went to a special Perth SharePoint User Group presentation hosted by William Cornwill of Microsoft. The presentation was excellent and provided a nice overview on Custom Content Types, Templates and Document Information Panel interaction between SharePoint and Word 2007. Awesome presentation!

One question that came up in the user group presentation that a number of people wanted answered was –

"How do I always force the Document Information Panel to show on opening a document"

I had some trouble with this a few weeks ago until I figured out that you can add the Developer Toolbar to Word 2007 which provides the facility to configure quite a lot in the document.

I came across this excellent blog post by Andrew Coates also another Australian Microsofty like William Cornwill – and just like William, Andrew presented at the Perth SharePoint UG a few months ago.

So to enabled the Developer Toolbar in Word following the steps in Andrew's post :

Enabling the Word 2007 Developer Tab

http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat/archive/2007/02/28/enabling-the-word-2007-developer-tab.aspx

You basically go into Word 2007 options to enable the Developer tab in the Ribbon – fairly simple but it took me AGES to figure this out until I came across Andrew's blog.

After enabling the Developer Tab follow these steps to always force the Document Information Panel to show, click on the Developer Tab and then click on the last icon – Document Panel.

And then tick the Always show Document Information Panel on document on open and initial save checkbox to always show the DIP.

Its as simple as that! If you tick that checkbox and save the word document – and then use this word document as a Content Type template in a SharePoint Document Library – then every time a user creates a new document or opens a document they will be presented with the DIP showing.

UPDATE: You need to set this in the Content Type's settings page, there's a link to Document Information Panel Settings.

See - http://stephenmuller.com/2008/07/17/using-the-dip-and-quick-parts-with-office-pt-1/

The developer tab has a bunch of other useful goodies you can play with one of which is adding various content controls such as Picture content controls.

Another important function of the developer tab is Formatting quick parts. Have you ever wanted to change the date format of a Date Quick Part? Add a Quick Part to the page that is based on a Date and you get it formatted as dd/MM/yyyy.

With the quick part selected switch to the Developer tab and click the Properties button in the Controls section of the ribbon

You then have the following options available for configuring this Quick Part (Content Control).

Click Okay – and you now have applied a format to your Date Quick Part ! Other options available such as the Content cannot be edited forces users to always updated the DIP instead of the word document. Ie. By default users can type into quick parts/content controls in a word doc and changes are reflected in the DIP – with this option set users must edited this content in the DIP.

Another fine blog post on Andrew's blog that helped me recently is –

Linking Word 2007 Content Controls to Custom XML

http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat/archive/2007/03/01/linking-word-2007-content-controls-to-custom-xml.aspx

Andrew gives a nice overview of how to make use of the Word 2007 Content Control Toolkit to manipulate custom XML stored in a word document, the tool allows you to add ANY custom XML to a document and then bind it to a Content Control.

Finally in summary I came across the following EXCELLENT resource if you are implementing this sort of advanced document management in SharePoint –

Using Office Open XML Formats to Support Electronic Health Records Portability and Health Industry Standards

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb879915.aspx

By the Ted Pattison Group – if those guys are involved then you know this is going to be top class.

And the Visual Studio Solution for the article is downloadable here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B36AEBDC-8217-4D64-BFD0-187E58B708BD&displaylang=en

Cloud Computing - Announcing Azure Services Platform and Microsoft SharePoint Services

2008-10-28T09:56:00.000+09:00

Ray Ozzie opened the PDC 2008 by anouncing Windows Azure - Microsoft's big solution to Cloud Computing.

To learn more about Azure go to - http://www.azure.com/

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/10/27/pdc-2008-announcing-azure-services-platform-and-microsoft-sharepoint-services.aspx

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/windows_azure.php

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_azure_redefine_os.php

One problem is the name, I think it sounds too much like Azureus - http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Azure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_blue "Commonly it refers to a bright blue, resembling the sky on a bright, clear day"

"The term azure derives from the Persian لاژورد (lazhward), which was the name of a place in modern Turkestan known for its deposits of lapis lazuli (“stone of lazhward”). The word was adopted into Old French by the twelfth century.
From the French it was adopted into English as a near synonym for "blue". The first recorded use of azure as a color name in English was in 1374."

Other than the name, this is exciting stuff people and likely to be the way to do work in the not too distant future.

What are you working on Sezai ?

2008-10-14T15:07:00.000+08:00

You may know me from my work with MOSS 2007 WCM Internet sites - which I enjoy working on a lot. MOSS 2007 is an AWESOME platform for powering an Internet site - no matter what the nay sayers say.

I have been involved in quite a number of varying and complex Internet website projects in the last few years - and I have learned quite a bit in the process.

So what is the next Internet site I am working on?

I'm NOT working on a WCM project!!!

I am working on a custom Document Management System. I am building a system to migrate a paper based Business Excellence Framework system into SharePoint.

What is a Business Excellence Framework or BEF ?

Read up on it here - http://www.saiglobal.com/Improve/ExcellenceModels/BusinessExcellenceFramework/default.htm

I must mention - if you come across an organisation that implements a BEF as a management system they are EXCELLENT candidates for SharePoint implementations.

Why?

They are already VERY organised and follow structured methods, including workflow, so they already have their act together and it makes a big difference implementing business processes - as their processes ARE ALREADY DEFINED AND PROVEN TO WORK !

Compare that to implementing SharePoint for a disorganised organisation - and yeah SharePoint won't automatically instill a sense of process and organisation if they don't have that in place already.

PhotoSynth of the 2009 MVP Award Trophy

2008-10-12T10:34:00.000+08:00

I bought a new Sony CyberShot Digital Camera yesterday and thought I'ld test it out by snapping some pics of the MVP Award and creating a PhotoSynth of it.

Check out the Synth Here - http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=00D9A997-BBF7-425A-8A42-318FBD75E36F

Designing SharePoint Implementations - Visio Templates and Stencils for SharePoint

2008-10-11T14:52:00.000+08:00

When building any system for an enterprise it is best practise to initially scope the project to gather requirements and then commence writing a Functional Specification. The same should apply to SharePoint projects, no one should let you to start development without first designing and planning what you intend to build (I hope! ).

When designing and planning a system, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Good diagrams and illustrations can make a seemingly boring specification document into something that looks visually stunning and very appealing to the eye, more importantly good diagrams can impress project stake holders. A good looking diagram can also convey a lot more information to the reader with a lot less reading.

So what diagrams do you need?

The success of a SharePoint implementation depends a lot on the Infrastructure that is setup to support it. I have seen implementations result in failure in the past, not due to the SharePoint or development side of things, but because the infrastructure was poorly planned and cannot support the load that results from regular use of the system. So to help plan out the logical infrastructure you should check out this page on at Spence Harbar's blog - http://www.harbar.net/archive/2008/09/17/Investing-in-Logical-Architecture-Design-Samples.aspx

and this -
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/stopcollaborateandlisten/archive/2008/02/11/visio-shapes-for-moss-2007-amp-wss-v3.aspx

Every SharePoint site collection is made up of a hierarchy of subsites. So to help document the structure of a site collection before you even start creating a site you need a Site Map diagram which clearly documents the hierarchy of subsites in a site collection. You can then go into further detail and list out any specific lists or libraries in the site and if needed annotate these libraries with information related to their use and security access. Have a look at this Visio Template on Maxime Bombardier's blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/maximeb/archive/2007/10/27/updated-visio-stencils-for-sharepoint-2007-site-structures-documentation-version-0-2.aspx

With the site map defined you then go in for a little more detail – in order to convey the functional differences between various pages in a site, you should put together some Wireframes of any important pages such as the home page and landing/welcome pages for subsites. Any highly custom pages containing custom web parts or server controls are also good candidates for producing wireframes. Any custom forms such as list edit forms or custom page layouts in edit mode that use custom field controls are also good wireframe candidates. Wireframes are excellent for conveying what each specific page does in the site and lets project stakeholders visualize the layout of pages – they may have ideas and preferences for laying out screens, it’s better for them to request these changes in the design phase instead of much later on when they’re already developed. Have a look at this Visio template -

http://www.siolon.com/blog/sharepoint-wireframes/
http://www.siolon.com/wp-content/uploads/MOSS.vst?PHPSESSID=0ceb4003a8538463cd82af9c27608202

and this one -

http://blogs.msdn.com/roberdan/archive/2006/03/05/543967.aspx

If your SharePoint implementation makes use of any custom workflow, then it may be worth illustrating these in a diagram as well. You can put together nice workflow diagrams to illustrate how workflow functions in the site. Have a look at these Visio templates -

http://www.nickfinck.com/stencils.html or any others that lets you document workflow process flow

Awesome - so now you have a set of diagrams clearly illustrating the logical infrastructure, site map / site structure, wireframes of important pages and how workflows… well - flow. A bunch of diagrams alone is not going to be a good spec. So you need to put these all together and start writing one.

If you are looking for a great example of a functional specification which makes use of nice Visio diagrams have a look AT THIS AWESOME FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION I came across prepared by Microsoft Consulting Services.

http://solshare.net/files/folders/funcspecs/entry1328.aspx
http://solshare.net/files/folders/1328/download.aspx

Happy documenting!

Always takes ages for me to make these diagrams and move shapes around though :(

I would also much rather be coding :)

If you come across any other nice Visio templates or stencils online - or any other good examples of Specifications for SharePoint Projects then please post a comment here to let me know about it !

Update -

Check out Jeremy Thake's Diigo http://www.diigo.com/user/jthake/visio for some more templates.

I am a Microsoft MVP !

2008-10-05T00:16:00.000+08:00

That's right - I got the news yesterday from Nick Ellery Aus/NZ MVP Lead - I have been awarded the MVP Award for 2009 which makes yours truly the only SharePoint MVP in Perth and Western Australia

It's been quite a journey working with SharePoint and it's great to get this award, I can now look back at all the time and effort I spent learning, working, blogging, writing and presenting with SharePoint over the last few years and it feels like it was all worth it. I thank my wife Tanya for being so patient with me spending so much of my spare time learning and messing around with SharePoint.

Now that I have won the award I need to do more to pass on my knowledge to others to make their time working with SharePoint a little easier.

SO yes this blog has been RESURRECTED!!! Stay tuned for some long and detailed posts... Might be a few days before the first one, they take time to write :)

I also started at my new job last week - I now work for Ignia - http://www.ignia.com.au/ Microsoft Gold Partners in Perth (so nice to be back on the terrace again). I am excited about this job as there's some really awesome projects lined up, but more importantly there's heaps of opportunity to grow and learn from some really capable and specialised .NET, CRM and SharePoint people.

Blog going into hibernation mode - no more blogging for a while

2008-09-12T22:33:00.000+08:00

Until further notice I won't be blogging any more and this blog is going into hibernation mode.

It's been fun blogging but I need to spend more time on other things and may decide to start up another blog months (years?!) from now....

bye.

Sezai.

The New Central TAFE Website - Powered by MOSS 2007 developed by the Vivid Group

2008-08-12T10:50:00.000+08:00

Vivid Group finished development of a new website for Central TAFE, which is one of the TAFE colleges in Western Australia.

Check it out here - http://www.centraltafe.wa.edu.au

The site contains font resizing, print friendly mode, RSS, Videos and more.

A custom course search was also developed which searches across Central TAFE's course database.

Perth SharePoint User Group Presentation June 2008

2008-06-18T11:08:00.000+08:00

I presented at the June 2008 Perth SharePoint User Group meeting.

The topic was - Optimising MOSS 2007 for the Internet

The turnout was great, standing room only and the presentation went very well.

You can download the presentation here

I demoed customising Master Pages and Page Layouts and inheriting from custom base classes which allow you to add advanced custom functionality.

The easiest thing to implement is BlendTrans meta tags in your master page which stop refresh flicker in IE. These are great and were mentioned in the SharePoint Team Blog Post we wrote recently.

I first learned of these awesome BlendTrans tags from Stefan Sedich who sits next to me at work.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The VS Project Templates used for the presentation are based on these - http://blogs.msdn.com/gderun/archive/2008/01/11/sharepoint-visual-studio-project-and-deployment-templates.aspx

Publishing Feature Properties

2008-06-05T09:41:00.001+08:00

Various Features referenced in ONET.XML site definition files can be activated with Properties.

One example is the publishing feature which makes use of properties like ChromeMasterUrl, AvailablePageLayouts, SimplePublishing etc. etc.

I've tried looking online for a listing of these feature properties but there's not much out there.

One example I found was someone making use of a EnableApprovalWorflowOnPages feature property.

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/niklas/archive/2007/09/06/using-scheduling-of-pages-but-not-the-authoring-workflow.aspx

So where can I get a full listing of the properties I can specify in ONET.XML ?

I fired up Reflector and had a look into the Publishing Feature Receiver code and came up with the following list -

AlternateCssUrl
AvailablePageLayouts
AvailableWebTemplates
ChromeMasterUrl
EnableApprovalWorkflowOnDocuments
EnableApprovalWorkflowOnImages
EnableApprovalWorkflowOnPages
EnableModerationOnDocuments
EnableModerationOnImages
EnableModerationOnPages
EnableSchedulingOnDocuments
EnableSchedulingOnImages
EnableSchedulingOnPages
MigrationOverride
PagesListUrl
RequireCheckoutOnDocuments
RequireCheckoutOnImages
RequireCheckoutOnPages
SimplePublishing
VersioningOnDocuments
VersioningOnImages
VersioningOnPages

Some property names are descriptive enough to work out what they do.

List of SharePoint Features with GUIDs

2008-05-27T13:09:00.000+08:00

I came across this useful page which lists out all the MOSS 2007 Enterprise Feature names, their GUIDs and scope.

http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2007/05/16/list-of-features-with-guids.aspx

Hopefully I won't have to go hunting through the Features folder in the 12 Hive as much to track down feature names and guids.

National Native Title Tribunal - MOSS 2007 WCM Website Launched - Developed by the Vivid Group

2008-05-02T11:33:00.000+08:00

We've finally finished development and launched the NNTT website - http://www.nntt.gov.au

Check it out ! It's the largest and most complex MOSS 2007 project we have been involved in to date.

This website proves MOSS 2007 as an Enterprise WCM platform the website contains over 20,000 pieces of content in the form of publishing pages, documents of various types and data integrated from back-end systems.

I thought I would write this quick blog post because others are linking to the website already - http://www.wssdemo.com/redir.aspx?ID=1713

Special Thanks go out to the people at Vivid Group that made this project a reality -

Richard Bloodworth - Project Manager and a very patient man :)
Tommy Segoro - Tommy developed entire sections of the site including ALL the mailing list integration with Microsoft CRM, InfoPath and also significant work on Master Pages, Page Layouts, Content Types, Site Columns and other advanced functionality such as flash integration, font-switching, print mode and text mode.
Mark Payne - Implemented and developed advanced custom approval workflow for managing the publishing process. If Mark wasn't on the job we'ld still be working on the workflow now!
Damian Worrad - Damian put together the Business Data Catalog application definition which is used to integrate back-end systems data.
Me - Page Layouts, Content Types, Site Columns and custom lists as well as all the custom search pages.
The Design Team - Brad Carpenter, Simon Mateljan, Jonathon King and Will "FLASH" Harvey - These guys did all the design work, html, flash and pretty stuff, the site looks awesome thanks to them.

I'ld also like to mention Gerald De Run (http://blogs.msdn.com/gderun) who helped us to implement advanced caching and reviewed our code to help refactor it to significantly increase performance, scalability and better memory usage. Thanks Gerald !

Last but not least I would like to thank the professional staff at the Tribunal who pushed us to produce such an awesome website with great functionality.

That's it for now - We have plans to do a detailed "how we did it" blog post which will feature on the SharePoint Team Blog and there are plans underway for a detailed Case Study.

Our First - Visual Studio 2008 - ASP.NET 3.5 - LINQ to SQL - ASP.NET AJAX Site Goes Live!

2008-04-03T20:50:00.000+08:00

The latest technologies... and no I had nothing to do with the developing the site, I just sit next to one of the guys, Stefan Sedich who built it.

He's blogged about it on his blog -----> http://weblogs.asp.net/stefansedich/archive/2008/04/03/our-first-asp-net-3-5-site-goes-live.aspx

How your permissions affect what you can see

2008-02-10T14:47:00.000+09:00

When logged in to a SharePoint site as different users you have different options available to you depending on the site group you are in and the permissions that you have.

Here's a simple overview of why -

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=8d9e2a99%2Df288%2D47c2%2D916b%2D2f32864f7b82&ID=60

STSDEV is AWESOME

2008-02-05T08:38:00.000+09:00

I recently had a look at a great new SharePoint developer tool on CodePlex called STSDEV

http://www.codeplex.com/stsdev

It's excellent and generates SharePoint code for you, it will also save a lot of development time. I advise all SharePoint developers to watch the video's on this page

http://www.codeplex.com/stsdev/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10119

Start with -

1. STSDEV_01_Introduction.wmv: A basic introduction to the STSDEV utility which covers setup and usage including an exploration of the basic Visual Studio project structure that is generated for all STSDEV-generated solutions. You should view this screencast before any of the others.

Learn to talk to your CFO in their language - SharePoint 2007 Project Costing, Feasability, Planning and Governance

2008-02-04T23:30:00.001+09:00

My good friend "Mr Cleverworkarounds" (I call him that because of his awesome blog - http://www.cleverworkarounds.com) has completed a series of articles where he transforms analysis of technical considerations into a costing model that will make sense to a CFO (Chief Financial Officer).
What am I talking about?
How much will this SharePoint 2007 project cost?
How much will this SharePoint 2007 project make/save me in the future?
When implementing massive SharePoint 2007 Projects there is a great deal of risk involved. SharePoint is great software, but at the end of the day its all about money, what is more important is how much will it cost? and how much will it make/save me in the future, you may not care about this if you are a technical person, but I bet management and the people paying you to work with SharePoint do!

Here's a rundown and the links, keep an eye out for my name in the WCM Scenario :)
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/17/learn-to-talk-to-your-cfo-in-their-language-part-1/
Assessing the value of an investment, the time effect on money, the concept discount cash-flow and some of the related calculations like Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR)

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/25/learn-to-talk-to-your-cfo-in-their-language-part-2/
Introduction to the various scenarios over this series Collaboration, WCM and Web Application. Explanation of methodology used, and assumptions made

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/28/learn-to-talk-to-your-cfo-collaboration-scenario-part-3/
The Collaboration Scenario

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/12/08/learn-to-talk-to-your-cfo-wcm-scenario-part-4/
The Web Content Management Scenario

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/12/09/learn-to-talk-to-your-cfo-web-application-scenario-part-5/
The Custom Web Application Scenario

Small Font Size in SharePoint Discussion Board

2008-02-04T23:28:00.000+09:00

This has come up in a few SharePoint sites I have worked on, and I am not the only one experiencing this issue. This is a common issue which sometimes occurs when using a custom Master Page and custom Style Sheet in a site. I’ve seen this occur on at least 2 or 3 separate sites using non-default master pages and page layouts. The font size displays with 0.7em, you need to override it so its at least 1.0em

To fix this you need to identify the SharePoint CSS classes which are setting the Font size, I like to use the FireBug plug-in with Firefox (right-click and Inspect Element) to identify the overrides required then implement the CSS overrides in your custom Style Sheet to increase the font-size.

Vivid Group Launches Another MOSS 2007 WCM Public Internet Website - http://www.amanaliving.com.au

2008-02-04T23:11:00.000+09:00

http://www.amanaliving.com.au

Features :
Low page weight, no core.js - This makes the site faster than most MOSS 2007 WCM websites
Completely custom Master Pages and Page Layouts primarily comprising custom server controls (including custom navigation controls) and SharePoint web controls
Font size switching, page print mode
Custom Search Center, Site map page
Random "Our People" (staff profiles with images) featured on home page, randomly loaded from a site list
Latest News and Upcoming Events on home page automatically rolled up from most recent dated pages in news and events subsites respectively.
Most of the website is configurable via use of site lists, including header and footer links, home page service profiles and facility features
Service Profile Pages (http://www.amanaliving.com.au/Information_and_Service_Centre/highcare/Pages/St_Georges_Home.aspx) hooked into Facility Features site lists with the use of Lookup Fields, to make editing content easier.
Developed in record time =oP with the use of a custom site definition ( well 2 custom site defs if you count the custom search center custom site definition ), custom list features, content type binding features, List Lookup Field re-creation, fields and content type features, master page and page layout features, custom site provisioning of sites and pages from an XML file etc. etc.
The best part of it is, it's all in source control, which helps provide greater re-use of code in future projects.

A nice easy MOSS 2007 WCM Project, a simple site without too many content types, or too many page layouts. Still, the site shows off what MOSS 2007 WCM can do, the site architecture is primarily built on custom site lists, and page layout content types and it makes use of Search.

Special Thanks to the great team at Vivid Group, especially -
Leah Dent (Project Manager)
Matt Cahill (System Planning and MOSS Farm Hosting Environment Infrastructure Setup)
Brad Carpenter (Designer)
Simon Mateljan (Designer)
Jonathon King (Designer)

Locking Down Styles in the MOSS Publishing HTML Field Control

2008-02-04T23:07:00.000+09:00

In SharePoint Designer, open a page layout and select a HTML field controlYou should then be presented with a series of properties in the Tag window.There are a series of AllowBlahBlah properties which you simply set to false if you want that specific validation enabled on the field control.You can also set these properties in code view on the page layout
Descriptions of these field control properties from the MOSS SDK - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.publishing.webcontrols.richhtmlfield_members.aspx

Name
Description
AllowExternalUrls
Gets or sets the constraint that allows external URLs in the HTML when validating the value in this RichHtmlField object.
AllowFonts
Gets or sets the constraint that allows font element tags to be added to the HTML.
AllowHeadings
Gets or sets the constraint that allows heading tags to be added to the HTML.
AllowHtmlSourceEditing
Determines whether you can switch the HtmlEditor object into a mode where the HTML can be edited directly.
AllowHyperlinks
Gets or sets the constraint that allows hyperlinks to be added to the HTML.
AllowImages
Gets or sets the constraint that allows image tags to be added to the HTML.
AllowLists
Gets or sets the constraint that allows list tags to be added to the HTML.
AllowReusableContent
Gets or sets the flag that enables the reusable content picker button when editing this field.
AllowTables
Gets or sets the constraint that allows table handling tags to be added to the HTML.
AllowTextMarkup
Gets or sets the constraint that allows explicit text markup tags, such as bold and italic, to be added to the HTML.
What happens when they are set to FALSE?Eg. If I set AllowFonts="False" and AllowTextMarkup="False"It disables the font and text colour buttons on the HTML Editor.
If a content author pastes in HTML with Font tags or text mark-up in the field control and now attempts to save or check in the page :You get this on the Page Editing Toolbar -
And the HTML Field Control now contains an Auto Correct button and a message related to ‘unsupported formatting’Now simply click the Auto Correct button, and the content is cleaned up client side with javascript, nice What happens to the HTML?BEFOREFONT color=#ff8000 size=5>WesTrac has a huge range of reliable low hour used equipment, all meticulously prepared for resale. If you can’t find exactly what…AFTERWesTrac has a huge range of reliable low hour used equipment, all meticulously prepared for resale. If you can’t find exactly whatOne more thing…If you set any of these properties to false it won’t automatically go through and clean-up the content in your site, but if a page contains content with these tags, the next time a content author edits the page and tries to save or check-in this validation will kick-in and it won’t let the user save the page unless they click the button to clean up the HTML.
Copy and Pasting Content from Word DocumentsYou can still paste in content from Word Documents, and this won’t automatically clean-up that HTML, these settings only seem to affect explicit font tags or other text markup, not in-line styles…
You get the following icon showing up in the field control You can also access remove inline styles from the floating tool-bar BEFORE

Sezai’s pasting this content in from word!

AFTER

Sezai’s pasting this content in from word!

ConclusionThere is no AllowStyles or AllowInlineStyles property! That’s dumb because I can paste in content from word that is setting Font and Font Colour with inline styles !That means even though I have set the following properties to false AllowFonts="False" and AllowTextMarkup="False" I can still set different fonts and font colours in Word, then paste it into a page, and save and check-in the page !!! and MOSS will let me… you need to remember to always click the Remove Inline Styles explicitly.

Creating a Standards Compliant MOSS 2007 WCM Public Internet Website With Low Page Weight

2008-02-04T23:05:00.000+09:00

The standards compliant and small page size MOSS 2007 websites keep rolling out - http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/Pages/default.aspx
Some of you may wonder how in heck are people making MOSS 2007 render these sites with such small page weight, that are compliant?
We're currently developing a Federal Government website that is required to be XHTML Compliant and we (http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tommysegoro) have spent heaps of time investigating various ways to reduce page size and unnessesary rendering.
A public WCM website rarely needs to make use of web parts so you don't need most of what is in the HTML of a standard MOSS master page such as that 200kb+ Core.JS! Why make everyone who browses to a site download 200kb .JS file that they don't need or use! That's just dumb.
You can simply wrap and hide most MOSS CSS and JS references using a custom panel control so they don't render when the user is anonymous, a SPSecurityTrimmedControl can also be used for this purpose. You still need all of that SharePoint JS and CSS if the user is authenticated and authoring, so the Site Actions, PET and Field Controls render and function correctly, but all that heavy JS and CSS is not required for the anonymous user.
The Master Page and Page Layouts are developed from a minimal.master (that has been further minimalised) and starts off completely empty and FULLY compliant, then start adding field controls and custom controls. All controls make use of the MOSS object model to get data from Page Fields for content specific to the page and Site Lists which provide an easy way for content authors to configure common elements across all pages in the site, like header and footer links. Ensure each custom control added renders its html nicely and doesn't break compliance in the page! You can also do some funky .NET code in Master Pages and Page Layouts to further strip out HTML on rendering to have extra control to ensure compliance for the anonymous user.
Think about page 'Modes' to help make it easy when developing, the anonymous user just needs a simple html page, where as someone running the site and authoring content needs all the SharePoint stuff to work. You can check the page mode programatically and also make use of Edit Mode Panels to control rendering in edit mode and display mode.

PAGE AND AUTHENTICATION MODES
1. Edit Mode and Authenticated
In Edit mode authors need to be able to interact with field controls on the page to change content on the page. You also need the Site Actions menu, PET, and the SharePoint JS and CSS to be in the page for the author to do their job. You can forrget now about making Edit Mode XHTML compliant, but that's okay because the public won't ever see edit mode, only the web authors will, and this page doesn't need to be compliant, it needs to primarily be functional to facilitate entering content and configuring the page, so feel free to use whatever html you want to. Page size will also be massive with core.js but that's okay
2. Display Mode and Authenticated When the author checks-in the page after editing or they browse through the site authenticated they aren't presented with field controls, but with a page that looks fairly similar to what the anonymous users will see, with important exceptions, the Welcome Sign-In, Site Actions menu, PET and the SharePoint JS and CSS must be in the page for the author to do their job. Depending on security, this mode will see present the current edited page that is pending approval, so authors can trigger page workflows by clicking the PET buttons to approve pages.
3. Display Mode and Anonymous
Must be compliant, with nice html and small page size. You don't need any of that SharePoint JS or CSS, and the anonymous user defanetly aint gonna be clicking the site actions menu, PET or entering content because they won't be there! This should render as close to the HTML/CSS Design provided by the Designer (which should probably be compliant!) If you are still having problems with compliance, you can also kick in some further in-line custom .NET code in the Master Page to further manipulate the HTML rendered by overriding the Page.Render method.

So you basically need to build three seperate and independant web interfaces, by developing with page modes in mind it frees you to do what is required for that specific page mode, I have previously been frustrated with MOSS WCM Development and trying to produce clean html while still, at the same time make all the SharePoint controls function correctly, by thinking about page mode you can free yourself of the dirty rendering that OOTB SharePoint web controls when in anonymous mode and get rid of dependencies on MASSIVE un-needed JS and CSS that fatten the page size. If you are building a public internet web site, then page size should be small with simple html, css and js so that its FAST, because no one likes a SLOW website!
A problem with this approach outlined is it involves extensive development work on custom .NET controls, you need to build a lot more yourself, because guess what! The OOTB search center needs that SharePoint JS for buttons and stuff to work :( and all the Search controls are Web Parts, So you need to build a Custom Search Center site yourself that uses custom page layouts with no web parts.
I'm a big fan of going fully custom, because in the real world requirements for a standards compliant public Internet website aren't met by MSFTs cookie-cutter approach to MOSS web controls, and page rendering, you can save time when developing with custom controls because trying to configure and mess with sharepoint web controls and web parts will waste a lot more time than coding simple controls that use the object model to get Page Field data and Site List data, and then render what you want them to (for me anyways) BE CAREFUL!!! custom code means you can potentially code something nasty that will hammer sql or the cpu, be sure to dispose of objects properly. If you write custom controls you need to take responsibility for their efficiency and what they do to server resources. Also remember to enabled BLOB cache to further improve performance and try and investigate application caching when custom controls take long to do their work to get the data they need to render.
Lists can help improve productivity compared to classic ASP.NET development against a database data layer, I love lists because of all the cool free stuff that comes with them, but that development time saved is quickly eaten up by a lot of the other time wasting aspects of MOSS 2007 development such as deployment. Win Some Lose Some.

Some Code
How do you tell if you are in edit or display mode?
Get SPContext.Current.FormContext.FormMode and check this against the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SPControlMode enumeration.http://www.sharepointblogs.com/sezai/archive/2007/08/29/spcontext-current-formcontext.aspx
How do you tell if the user is authenticated?
HttpContext.Current.Request.IsAuthenticated
For an example see the RegisterCoreWhenAuthenticatedControl here http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2007/02/21/building-a-new-page-layout-which-does-not-reference-core-js-but-downloads-it-while-the-page-is-being-viewed-thereby-optimizing-response-time.aspx

More Linkage
Excellent and Inspirational Blog Posts on MOSS 2007 Compliant websites, with heaps of steps I followed!http://zac.provoke.co.nz/archive/2007/04/19/guide-to-making-sharepoint-xhtml-compliant.aspx http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/05/01/another-day-another-accessible-moss-website.aspx http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/05/08/getting-sharepoint-to-produce-the-html-you-want.aspx
Blog Post on using custom HTTP-Filter to clean HTML output to reduce page size and possibly enforce compliance http://www.ie-soft.de/blog/CommentView,guid,968b0588-f306-467b-be51-54f7a8f2079d.aspx
see sections Get the Space Out – Reducing Page Size Over the Internet Pipe JavaScript Weight Reduction – The Client Browser http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/07/19/moss-has-got-game-glu-mobile-s-website-www-glu-com-how-we-did-it-part-3-of-3.aspx
How to Optimize a SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Site for Performancehttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727371.aspx
Definetly something to look out for AKS Accessibility Kit for SharePoint - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/09/05/pre-announcing-the-accessibility-kit-for-sharepoint-aks.aspx

Going Down The Rabbit Hole - The MOSS 2007 Publishing Site Definition

2008-02-04T22:56:00.000+09:00

It has been well over a year since I started developing on MOSS 2007, I started development with just using SharePoint Designer, and manually deploying assemblies and artifacts without features and solutions.
Soon after I realised the trouble and pain you could get yourself into if you don't use the feature and solution framework. In the aim to work 'fast' and finish your development tasks quickly, you can fall into a massive trap and realise that although it takes plenty of effort to develop Features, in the long term you are better off because of RE-USE of features and ease of DEPLOYMENT. All developers love reusing their work, it saves time in the long run, and you don't have to constantly re-do the same thing like a robot. When you deploy you customisations to a production system, you don't always have SharePoint Designer available to hookup to the site, and you don't want to have to remember a dozen manual steps to repeat, more robot action, it also leaves room for human error, and the Network/Systems Admin guys won't be happy with you, they want an atomic deployment process.
You can go one step further, develop your own Custom Site Definition, so you can allow users to create *custom* sites pre-populated with your Lists and other files, and the sites can have YOUR features enabled AUTOMATICALLY, sounds nice hey?
In the last few months I have been doing just that, so I thought I would document the following to help myself (and now YOU) understand what happens when sites are created in SharePoint and how the Features are enabled.

So what actually happens when you create a new Publishing Site ?Whenever you create any site in SharePoint, XML files in the 12 Hive are used in the process to create the site, the various XML files contain information and settings needed to provision sites as well as references to dependent Features that are also activated on Site Collection creation or Web Creation. The Folder ’12-hive’\TEMPLATE\1033\XML Contains the file webtempsps.xmlThe file contains some of the following related to Publishing Sites, the BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER template is used to create a new Publishing Site Collection
What is VisibilityFeatureDependency ?
There are Feature IDs referenced in the VisibilityFeatureDependency attribute
The F6924D36-2FA8-4f0b-B16D-06B7250180FA Feature ID refers to the PublishingSite feature and Feature ID 97A2485F-EF4B-401f-9167-FA4FE177C6F6 refers to the BaseSiteStapling feature. F6924D36-2FA8-4f0b-B16D-06B7250180FA - PublishingSite
This is the PublishingSite feature. This feature does nothing more than Activate four other features, it has the following ActivationDependencies
More feature IDs to lookup !A392DA98-270B-4e85-9769-04C0FDE267AA - PublishingPrerequisites
This is the PublishingPrerequisites feature which hooks up a Feature Event receiver. AEBC918D-B20F-4a11-A1DB-9ED84D79C87E - PublishingResources
This is the PublishingResources feature which provisions Site Columns, Content Types, Files and Resource settings
89E0306D-453B-4ec5-8D68-42067CDBF98E - Navigation
This is the Navigation feature which provisions custom actions and controls for Navigation D3F51BE2-38A8-4e44-BA84-940D35BE1566 - PublishingLayoutsThis is the PublishingLayouts feature which provisions files into the site. It provisions all Publishing Page Layouts, Master Pages, Page Layout Preview Images, Style library Images and Style Library CSS 97A2485F-EF4B-401f-9167-FA4FE177C6F6 - BaseSiteStapling
This is the BaseSiteStapling feature, it will staple several features to site definitions listed in the feature, it contains dozens of FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation nodes, it is interesting to note that :
Feature B21B090C-C796-4b0f-AC0F-7EF1659C20AE (BaseSite) is stapled to the following site templates :STS#0 , STS#2 , MPS#0 , MPS#1 , MPS#2 , MPS#3 , MPS#4 , WIKI#0 , BLOG#0 , BDR#0 , EAWF#0 , OFFILE#0 , OFFILE#1 , PWA#0 , PWS#0 , SPS#0 , SPSMSITE#0 , SPSTOC#0 , SPSTOPIC#0 , SPSNEWS#0 , SPSNHOME#0 , SPSSITES#0 , SPSBWEB#0 , SPSCOMMU#0 , SPSREPORTCENTER#0 , SPSPORTAL#0 , SRCHCEN#0 , PROFILES#0 , CMSPUBLISHING#0
The BaseSite Feature is an ActivationDependency feature and activates the following Features LocalSiteDirectorySettingsLink Feature LocalSiteDirectoryControl Feature PortalLayouts Feature WebPartAdderGroups Feature
Feature 99FE402E-89A0-45aa-9163-85342E865DC8 (BaseWeb) is stapled to the following site templates :STS#0 , STS#2 , MPS#0 , MPS#1 , MPS#2 , MPS#3 , MPS#4 , WIKI#0 , BLOG#0 , BDR#0 , EAWF#0 , OFFILE#0 , OFFILE#1 , PWA#0 , PWS#0 , SPS#0 , SPSMSITE#0 , SPSTOC#0 , SPSTOPIC#0 , SPSNEWS#0 , SPSNHOME#0 , SPSSITES#0 , SPSBWEB#0 , SPSCOMMU#0 , SPSREPORTCENTER#0" , SPSPORTAL#0 , SRCHCEN#0 , PROFILES#0 , CMSPUBLISHING#0
The BaseWeb Feature is also an ActivationDependency feature and activates the following Features
RelatedLinksScopeSettingsLink Feature AnalyticsLinks Feature FeatureStapling Feature

Feature 541F5F57-C847-4e16-B59A-B31E90E6F9EA (NavigationProperties) is stapled to the SRCHCENTERLITE#1 site template with the following properties within the FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation

Which explains why the Search Centre Lite Navigation is different to navigation in all other site templates!
We have now traced through the VisibilityFeatureDendencies in webtempsps.xml, let us now get back to this file and continue this journey down the rabbit hole by exploring the SiteTemplates referenced.
The Folder ’12-hive’\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates Contains a folder for each Site Template in the site. One such folder is BLANKINTERNET which contains an XML folder that contains a ONET.xml file.
This file contains the following configuration nodes, which contain Feature ids, so even more features can be activate on site creation, there are Site Features activated on Site Collection Creation and Web Features activated on Web (sub-site) Creation. NOTE : THIS SPECIFIC CONFIGURATION HAS SITE FEATURES AND WEB FEATURES Publishing Site Features
The following are site features activated on Site Collection creation
C85E5759-F323-4EFB-B548-443D2216EFB5 ExpirationWorkflow Feature
02464C6A-9D07-4F30-BA04-E9035CF54392 ReviewWorkflows Feature6C09612B-46AF-4B2F-8DFC-59185C962A29 SignaturesWorkflow FeatureC6561405-EA03-40A9-A57F-F25472942A22 TranslationWorkflow FeatureA392DA98-270B-4e85-9769-04C0FDE267AA PublishingPrerequisites Feature7C637B23-06C4-472d-9A9A-7C175762C5C4 ViewFormPagesLockDown FeatureAEBC918D-B20F-4a11-A1DB-9ED84D79C87E PublishingResources FeatureF6924D36-2FA8-4f0b-B16D-06B7250180FA PublishingSite Feature7AC8CC56-D28E-41f5-AD04-D95109EB987A OSSSearchCenterUrlSiteFeature Feature Publishing Web Features
The following is a list of all Web Features in the onet.xml file00BFEA71-DE22-43B2-A848-C05709900100 CustomList Feature00BFEA71-E717-4E80-AA17-D0C71B360101 DocumentLibrary Feature00BFEA71-52D4-45B3-B544-B1C71B620109 PictureLibrary Feature00BFEA71-A83E-497E-9BA0-7A5C597D0107 TasksList Feature00BFEA71-4EA5-48D4-A4AD-305CF7030140 WorkflowHistoryList Feature22A9EF51-737B-4ff2-9346-694633FE4416 Publishing Feature541F5F57-C847-4e16-B59A-B31E90E6F9EA NavigationProperties Feature94C94CA6-B32F-4da9-A9E3-1F3D343D7ECB PublishingWeb Feature
Summary

This investigation demonstrates what actually happens when you create a publishing site in MOSS 2007. In summary, a series of features are enabled on the site collection, in a specific order. Features are also enabled when creating subsites.Why do we need this information ?

To create YOUR OWN Custom Publishing Site Definitions, so you have full control over what features are activated in your site, you can get into trouble if you do not activate features in the correct order, such as activating a feature that contains Page Layouts referencing a Content Type, if the Page Layout feature is enabled before the Content Type feature then the pages created will not be created correctly because of the dependency issue.

Extend The PublishingLayoutPage Class - Create Your Own to Run Code in the 'Page'

2008-02-04T22:53:00.000+09:00

This is powerful stuff, and thanks to this I can do a lot more powerful MOSS WCM custom development.
This will let you run your own custom code in the context of a page.
Do you miss putting code in the Page? I do!
This will kinda give you back some of that 'lost power'.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jannemattila/archive/2007/04/14/adding-functionalities-to-pages-by-inheriting-publishingpagelayout.aspx (awesome post that started me on this!)
microsoft.sharepoint.publishing.publishinglayoutpagehttp://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.publishing.publishinglayoutpage_members.aspx

You may notice that all MOSS WCM Page Layouts start with the following Inherits="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingLayoutPage,Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing,Version=12.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"
So if you create your own custom class, which inherits from PublishingLayoutPage you can then define your own methods and properties in it, do page level code like we used to do in MCMS !
You then switch the reference in you Page Layouts to use your new custom PublishingLayoutPage as described in Janne Mattila's EXCELLENT post.
I have tried this out and it works like a charm, I can now run code code when the page initialises, such as switch the Master Page used on loading the page, awesome.

Many Custom PublishingLayoutPage Classes, One for Each Page Layout ?
If you develop your own custom PublishingLayoutPage class then you can reference it in All your custom Page Layouts. The same custom code will now run in All Page Layouts.
To go one step further, develop many custom PublishingLayoutPage classes, one for each page layout you have, you can then run independent code for each Page Layout!
Even create your own Base PublishingLayoutPage class and inherit many custom classes from your base, this will give you the ability to run independent code for each page layout, AND also run common code for all Page Layouts in your Base PublishingLayoutPage class.
The possibilities are endless. My only regret is not trying this out sooner =o(

SPContext.Current.FormContext

2008-02-04T22:51:00.000+09:00

SPContext.Current.FormContext is my new best friend !
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spformcontext_members.aspx

FormContext has this super Method
1. SetFormMode Use it to change the current SPControlMode (haven't tried this out)

FormContext has two awesome Properties
1. FieldControlCollection - Get a collection of the Field Controls.
2. FormMode - Get the Current SPControlMode

What is SPControlMode?
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.webcontrols.spcontrolmode.aspx
Editing content in a MOSS Publishing Site is done “in context” ie. You navigate to a page, and “Edit” the page, after which the page "mode" switches and you are presented with data entry controls that let you enter data into page fields.

So a Page can be in different modes, very similar in concept to how MCMS 2002 functions.

So we need a nice way to determine the “SPControlMode” programmatically in custom code so we can control rendering (do cool stuff) when in different modes.

The SPControlMode enumeration contains these values -
Display, Edit, Invalid and New

Some example CODE that makes use of FormContext.FormMode -
' If Me not in Display Mode, Hide Me
If (SPContext.Current.FormContext.FormMode <> Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SPControlMode.Display) Then
Me.Visible = False
End If

Feedback from the August Perth SharePoint User Group Meeting

2008-02-04T22:45:00.000+09:00

I presented a session on MOSS 2007 WCM at the August Perth SharePoint User Group Meeting

Here is some feedback I have received since :
“The guys came back from your talk impressed with your depth of knowledge and experience on SharePoint.”

"I heartily endorse this product or service"

“It was a bit boring first 15 mins (it was just like Microsoft promotion) but the rest was fun. You did very well with Q&A at the end I think. Great job!”

"Man, this MOSS 2007 is the best thing since sliced bread, I guess that makes you a Bread Maker or some other type of Bread Machine?"

“its nice to see someone as passionate about MOSS and .NET development as you are.”

“Sezai, Sezai your so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, Go Sezai !”

“It was great to meet someone who is so enthusiastic and passionate about his work.”

"Dude, you are so sad, you need to find something else to get excited about instead of software, especially Microsoft software - Uber Nerd !"

“You are the Steve Irwin of SharePoint.”

It's hard work being such a Guru/Expert/Boffin/Grand Master/Legend in MOSS 2007 WCM, but someone has to do it !

Manage Solution Development Easier and Faster

2008-02-04T22:42:00.000+09:00

When you develop a Solution in Visual Studio 2005 for WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007, you need to build everything into a Solution package using MakeCab.exe
This is done by manually updating two files, Manifest.xml and the .ddf file. So whenever I need to add a new file to a feature, or a new assembly, or anything new I want deployed with the solution i need to manually edit and update the Manifest.xml and the .ddf file.
This can be time consuming !
Then I came across this on Code Plex - WSP Builder
http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder built by the Carsten Keutman
If you setup your Visual Studio Solution folder structure to match the '12 hive' then this baby will generate a new solution ID, the Manifest.xml for you as well as the .wsp !
No more manually creating the manifest.xml file.No more manually specifying the DDF file.No more using the makecab.exe application.
Therefore you do not need the knowledge of how to create a solution manifest.xml and wsp file any more.
http://www.keutmann.dk/sharepointblog/wspbuilder/wspdemo.jpg
http://www.keutmann.dk/sharepointblog/wspbuilder/wspbuilderconsole.jpg
http://www.keutmann.dk/sharepointblog/wspbuilder/buildresult.jpg

AND ....
Head over to ACs blog! He has just started a new 5-part series about saving even MORE time when working with features and solutions.
Part 1: Announcing AC's VS CodeRush/Refactor Tools for SharePoint Devs
Although you need to purchase CodeRush/Refactor first, but if it will save me time, and make MOSS 2007 Custom Development easier, then it's worth considering purchasing the awesome tools.

Save Time => Increase Productivity => Get More Work Done => =o)

Sezai is Presenting at the August Perth SharePoint User Group Meeting

2008-02-04T22:39:00.000+09:00

Details are here : http://www.connectedsystems.com/news/Event%20Library/Perth_SharePoint_User_Group_Meeting_August_2007.aspx

Event Information
Event:
Perth SharePoint User Group
Topic:
Web Content Management in Office SharePoint 2007
Date and Time:
Tuesday, 21st August 2007 - 5:00 pm(GMT +08:00, Perth)(3rd Tuesday of every month after May)
Where:
Microsoft Perth – Presentation RoomLevel 14, QV1 Building (http://www.qv1perth.com/qv1/location.htm)250 St George’s Terrace, Perth

Event Information
Event: Topic:	Perth SharePoint User Group Web Content Management in Office SharePoint 2007
Date and Time:	Tuesday, 21^st August 2007 5:00 pm (GMT +08:00, Perth) (3^rd Tuesday of every month)
Presenter:	Sezai Kömür
Duration:	1 hour
Description:	MOSS 2007 is a powerful platform which can be used to provide a wide range of solutions. One of which is to use MOSS 2007 as a CMS to power a public Internet website. Microsoft has discontinued it’s previous CMS product, MCMS 2002 (Microsoft Content Management Server) and specifies MOSS 2007 as the upgrade and migration path for existing MCMS websites. This session will provide an overview of the WCM features in MOSS, and what is required to develop a custom public Internet website solution powered on MOSS. The session will be led by Sezai Kömür, Senior Developer at Vivid Group.

Sezai Passes Exam 070-542 - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Application Development

2008-02-04T22:36:00.000+09:00

YES I did it !

I just passed the MOSS 2007 development exam with a score of 959 / 1000 !

I completed the 3 hour exam in only half an hour.

For preparation I searched the internet and read other similar blog posts, then did what they did as far as getting test exams, and then studied the night before for about 5 hrs.

I might do one of the other WSS / MOSS exams to get MCTS SharePoint.... it would be nice to put into my email signature.

The Exam

Visit this http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-542.mspx it broadly describes what the test is about.

I think the exam is tough because MOSS is MASSIVE, and depending on your experience in developing solutions, you might only have worked with one slice of the MOSS Pie?(http://www.freshfromtheoven.co.nz/pages/home.aspx)

You might have only been involved in an Intranet project, or only a public internet wcm project etc. Depending on the specific MOSS solution, a single project would not make use of the entire pie.

Records Center, Information Management Policy, Excel Services and some InfoPath questions were tough because I haven't done as much custom dev in those areas, it was good to study for the exam because I now know more about MOSS as an entire development platform.

So the best advice I can give is focus on all of the Pie slices of MOSS especially the Pie slices with which you have had least experience working with. Mastering only one Pie slice won't be enough to pass. Eat the whole Pie, leave no slice untouched! Mmmmm Pie.

Still it was a tedious exam because a lot of the questions tested whether or not you know specific declaratives, methods and properties (meh what else would they test in a development exam?). Why, but why did I have to memorise the different nodes and structure of a BDC application definition? that wasn't fun at all.

When anyone is developing with Visual Studio .NET working on a MOSS development project in the real world, you have fast and easy access to information like this, you can easily look through the MOSS SDK or other documentation. With the advent of intelisense, classes that have methods/properties with comments, and due to the general size of the MOSS API, every developer wouldn't naturally try to wrote learn the entire class reference !

This leads me to believe exams are not a good way to test the ability of a developer, you can only learn this about someone by working with them for a while, the proof is in the work they produce.

Caterpillar Dealer WesTrac Launches THREE MOSS 2007 Public Internet Web Sites

2008-02-04T22:35:00.000+09:00

Vivid Group developed three public internet websites for WesTrac powered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Umbrella site for the world - http://www.westrac.com/
WesTrac Australia - http://www.westrac.com.au
WesTrac China -http://www.westrac.com.cn (In Simplified Chinese)

The cool stuff
Virtual Earth Location Finder
http://www.westrac.com.cn/locations
http://www.westrac.com.au/locations

Caterpillar Product Content
http://www.westrac.com.au/Products/Equipment
http://www.westrac.com.au/Products/Equipment/Off_Highway_Trucks
http://www.westrac.com.au/Products/Equipment/Off_Highway_Trucks/Pages/770_Off-Highway_Truck.aspx

Caterpillar Applications hosted in a page viewer web part
http://www.westrac.com.au/Online_Services/Pages/Parts_Store.aspx

Chinese English Language switching
http://www.westrac.com.cn on the home page and a few other pages where there is dual

Search
http://www.westrac.com.au/Search/Results.aspx?k=770

Random Backgrounds for home pages
The home page of each website loads with a random background image. The image is loaded randomly from a Picture Library, so if the background needs to change it's easy to add and remove new background images, very user friendly.

Use of Lists
Practically everything in the website runs off Lists. The Home Page Flash Movies, Links, Header Links, Footer Links and much more.
Lists are awesome because you get the nice List Management UI to add, edit List Items in a list, a lot easier than developing something similar from scratch.

As well as the usual functionality you get from a MOSS WCM Website.

These websites were also completed in record time, a lot less than any MOSS 2007 project I have been involved in so far. An excellent effort by the people at Vivid Group, and also the professional staff at WesTrac.

If you happen to be in Western Australia, New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory or China, then browse the Product catalog in the websites and contact WesTrac for some quality equipment !

MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server) to MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007) Public Internet Website Migration

2008-02-04T22:29:00.000+09:00

I migrated this site from MCMS to MOSS 2007 back in February 2007,
http://www.ggs.wa.edu.au/
Download my migration White Paper in which I detail the whole process -
http://vividgroup.com.au/docs/MCMS2002ToMOSS2007Migration-WhitePaper.pdf

Deploying Managed Properties and Crawled Properties for Search Between MOSS 2007 Servers

2008-02-04T22:27:00.001+09:00

Shared Service Providers are where you create Managed Properties for use in Search for MOSS 2007. If you want to search back-end LOB system data, you need to crawl the BDC application for the SSP to create Crawled Properties.
The next step involves manually creating Managed Properties and mapping them to Crawled Properties.
Working on our westernaustralia.com redevelopment project we need to create over 25 Managed Properties and map them to crawl properties, this is a time consuming (at least half an hour) task, an their is room for error, you could select wrong Data Types, map to the wrong properties etc.
I have repeated this manual process many many times, not the best use of anyones time.
There is an API provided in Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration that allows you to automate creation of these.
Last week we had a visit from Angus Logan of Microsoft, after the visit he went back and whipped up a little console app demonstrating creation of Managed Properties and Mapping them to Crawled Properties.
Sahil Malik of winsmarts then picked it up and created an even better application that :
- Accept relevant inputs from the user- Export Managed Properties- Export Crawl Properties and relevant categories- Import Managed properties and map relevant crawl properties.
If you are working with creating Managed Properties and mapping them to Crawled Properties this will save you alot of time, and your sanity.
Check it out here

ORIGINALLY Published Thursday, November 16, 2006 3:50 PM

Securing MOSS 2007 Publishing Sites with Lockdown Mode

2008-02-04T22:13:00.000+09:00

You can use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for different types of purposes. MOSS 2007 is replacing MCMS, so people are starting to build custom public anonymous websites with MOSS 2007, this involves creating a site using the Publishing Site Template.

MOSS 2007 can also be used for collaboration, so users may need to view the list Forms, AllItems.aspx, DispForms.aspx etc. for a list so they can navigate through data in the site.
BUT You don't want people access to those forms if you are using MOSS 2007 for a public publishing internet site, you only want users to access Publishing Pages not to view all site content or to view lists.
So there is a feature you need to enable to keep anonymous users out of Form pages in your site, you also may want to restrict anonymous people from using remote interfaces which this feature also provides.

The feature is called ViewFormPagesLockDown, the details about this feature can be found on TechNet :
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f507f5d6-4c9d-4f98-909f-069c53b9a3f61033.mspx#section6 - Use Lockdown Mode
The above page is handy and has alot of planning info for providing external anonymous access in MOSS 2007.

To Activate the Feature :
stsadm -o activatefeature -url -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml

ONE IMPORTANT TIP :
I recently had this enabled on an anonymous site, but there was no effect, it was not working
It didn't seem to kick-in, I browsed the site anonymously and I could still get access to the Form pages, and view list data.
I didn't know what to do, finally the kind people at Microsoft suggested I try something to get it working.
What was the trick?
With the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature Enabled, I disabled Anonymous Access in the site, then re-enabled it.
After toggling anonymous access in the site, the feature started to work and anonymous users cannot access the Form pages anymore!

Setting up a Multilingual MOSS 2007 Farm - English and Chinese (Simplified) Websites Running on the same farm

2008-02-04T22:11:00.000+09:00

A lot of multi-national corporations require hosting multiple language websites for their respective national branches. With MOSS 2007 you can do this, you can host different language websites all on the single server farm.
I am working on a project to develop two websites for the same client, an English Language MOSS site and a Simplified Chinese MOSS site. The tough part is none of the developers on our team know Chinese, so this project will be an interesting one.

So you want to run different multilingual websites in the same Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm?
Below are the steps I took to get this working, I can now create English as well as Chinese (Simplified) Websites in my MOSS farm.

Step One : Install operating system language
For Simplified Chinese I had to install the East Asian Language Files on the web front end servers via Control Panel --> Regional and Language Options then click the Languages tab and in the Supplemental Language section tick the Install files for East Asian Lanuages checkbox.
You then get a messagebox that tells you installing these files will take 230mb, after which you need to specify the locations of your Windows Server 2003 disk that contains the East Asian Language Installation Files. Once this has finished installing, you can start the MOSS install.

Step Two : Install MOSS 2007
Install MOSS 2007 as you usually would, and run the configuration wizard.
Once the configuration wizard has completed, STOP don't configure anything in central administration yet, you will be running the configuration wizard again shortly, after installing your sharepoint language packs.

Step Three : Download Your Specific SharePoint Server 2007 Language Pack, and burn it to disk or extract the files out
Navigate to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2447426b-8689-4768-bff0-cbb511599a45 and select your language.

It's a little tricky, because the page language switches to Chinese when you want to download the Chinese Language Pack, so I needed to guess what I should click in order to start downloading it.
Click the change button and then click the download button to download your specific language pack.
This downloads as a file called ServerLanguagePack.img and in my case the Simplified Chinese Language Pack was 195mb in size.
It's annoying this is an .img !
I did not want to burn to disk so I looked for image mounting software online, I downloaded the free DAEMON Tools 4.09.
Step Four : Install the language pack.
Go ahead and run the Language Pack on every front end web server.
It will pop-up the following :
TIP:
If you can't read the specific language you are viewing in sharepoint, a general rule of thumb is that links, checkboxes etc. and other UI controls are usually positioned in the same locations as the English MOSS, so I am able to navigate to Site Settings etc. on the Chinese site, even though I can't read a word of it, or instead remember the URLs to all admin pages and type the - '/_layouts/whatever.aspx' manually.

Step Five : Re-Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard, Again
Now go back and run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard again,

Once this is complete it is a good idea to check the TEMPLATE folder in the server "12 Hive"
In my case I have a new folder below TEMPLATE called 2052, You should already have a 1033 folder for English.
If you try and open the files within folders of the 2052 directory they contain Chinese content.

So this process has created Chinese Site Definitions in your "12 Hive" in your web server's file system.

Step Six : Create New Websites and Site Collections
If everything is successful you should now have an extra option when creating a Top Level Site Collection.
You will notice something new, there is now a drop-down list box that lets you select the language for your new site !

If you select Chinese, then your new MOSS site will be fully chinese, all menus, site settings, InfoPath 2007 approval workflow forms everything.

Programmatically Accessing BDC Data in Custom Web Parts or User Controls in MOSS 2007

2008-02-04T22:07:00.000+09:00

The use of BDC columns in lists is a powerful out-of-the-box feature. But what if you want to do it your way and make your own custom BDC user control, or custom BDC Web Part ?If you need access to data in another system programatically to populate various controls, drop down lists etc. to be used in various pages of your MOSS 2007 site, then the BDC will help you to do just that. If you are working on custom ASP.NET user controls and using them in MOSS 2007 Page Layouts like I am you need to make use of MOSS APIs and assemblies.
I want to programatically access data in a SQL 2000 Database using the BDC!
So I checked out the MOSS 2007 SDK and followed this example http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms560143.aspx
following the example I will populate a DataTable with 2 string DataColumns, Town and the Region the town falls within. I have already created the BDC Application Definition to return the Town data from the external system. The following classes (and their properties or methods) will be used to retrieve this data and get it into my DataTable.

ApplicationRegistry
GetLobSystemInstances()
NamedLobSystemInstanceDictionary
LobSystemInstance
GetEntities()
Entity
GetFinderFilters()
FindFiltered ( FilterCollection, LobSystemInstance )
FilterCollection
IEntityInstanceEnumerator
MoveNext()
Current

NamedLobSystemInstanceDictionary sysInstances = ApplicationRegistry.GetLobSystemInstances();LobSystemInstance warehouseInstance = sysInstances["WarehouseListDataInstance"];Entity town = WarehouseListDataInstance.GetEntities()"Town"];FilterCollection fc = town.GetFinderFilters();IEntityInstanceEnumerator townEntityInstanceEnumerator = town.FindFiltered(fc, warehouseInstance);while (townEntityInstanceEnumerator.MoveNext()) { DataRow row = dt.NewRow();

IEntityInstance IE = townEntityInstanceEnumerator.Current;
row["Town"] = IE["Town"].ToString();
row["Region"] = IE["Region"].ToString();
dt.Rows.Add(row); }

Now I have access to the data I need to use in my User Control.

BUT... I could have also got that data by :

1. Hard coding it somewhere, saves time but then you have 2 lists and 2 places to keep data synchronised, depends on the data. (this is may also get you busted and some may shower you with curses)

2. ADO.NET it still works and I can still use it in my user control, it may actually be faster to use ADO.NET (hehe). You can still use the classes you all love and have been using for years instead of learning something new. (hey, it takes TIME to learn new stuff!)

In comparison to using ADO.NET,
All the backend system connection strings and actual method used to access the backend external data is all within that XML file, the BDC Application Definition file you either hand crafted or used some tool to create.
This provides a programming experience where you access that data through MOSS 2007.

Check out the MOSS 2007 SDK for more http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms549009.aspx

MOSS 2007 Custom Search

2008-02-04T21:56:00.000+09:00

Out of the box search in MOSS 2007 is very powerful, what if you have very specific requirements? Use the classes in the Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Query namespace in a custom Web Part or User Control and add it to your SharePoint page layout. You may have specific requirements for rendering or specific search filters that are not provided by the out of the box search.
A small suggestion : Try your best to use the Out of the Box Search, you will save alot of time, and it is very powerful and comes with alot of goodies.
I have previously used SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Search Web Service to provide website search functionality in a CMS 2002 web application. Search gets complicated when you need to integrate searching across different content sources, there was a CMS / SharePoint connector that allowed you to register Meta properties on CMS pages, sourced from an external system (a database containing Tourism data, rendered in web pages), you then use SharePoint to crawl your CMS site and the Meta propeties are also indexed and you can then use them to provide more advanced search capabilities.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes that whole process alot easier, using the BDC. If you want to provide search across different systems, then MOSS can be used to index that data, so you can search it.

1. Create the BDC Application Definition file, and import it into your SSP.
In order for Search to 'Crawl' your BDC application, the application definition must contain a ProductIDEnumerator method. This method is used by search to return ALL the Identifiers (primary key, unique record identifier) for all records in the backend system. SharePoint then loops through all the IDs and returns a detailed record for each ID. Each record is then indexed and can then be used in search.
On importing your application definition, profile pages are created for your BDC Entities, browse to these pages and see if you can get data to display, if it does, then crawling the data in your external system may work.

2. Create a Business Data Content Source in Search Settings
Use your Shared Services Provider. Your SharePoint farm must have an SSP for search to work. When creating the Business Data Content Source, select your BDC application as the source. Then run a full crawl.

3. Populate Search using the Content Source
At this stage the items in the search index will increment to the total number of items that can be read from your external system. If that is not happening, you may be getting errors in the crawl process, fix them. (easier said than done, this can be a painful, time wasting process).
On the first crawl of your BDC application in search, the various fields you have defined will be detected as crawled properties.

4. Create the Managed Properties and Map them to Crawled Propeties
"... Mapping Crawled Properties to Managed Properties
To make a crawled property available for the Search experience, you must map it to a managed property. Mapping the crawled properties to managed properties makes them available for Search queries and makes them appear in Advanced Search and search results. You can map multiple crawled properties to a single managed property or map a single crawled property to multiple managed properties. If a managed property has multiple crawled properties mapped to it, and a document contains values for more than one of the crawled properties, the order in which the properties are mapped and their priority determine the managed property’s value... "
In search settings, click on Meta Property Mappings then, on the left hand menu you can switch between viewing managed properties and crawled properties.
So go through and create Managed Properties, and associate them to crawled properties detected when crawling your BDC. What's cool is that DataTypes are recgonised ! So if you define an integer or boolean or datetime as an attribute of a BDC entity, you create a managed property of that type. A cool feature is the ability to map more than one crawled property to a managed property.

5. Re-Crawl
You need to re-crawl your BDC content source now, as after associating the crawled properties to managed properties, a fresh crawl is required to populate them in the search index. If you don't re-crawl their won't be any items in the properties, and if the properies are used in search queries, it won't work.
When you view individual managed properites, the number of items in the search index which use them is listed on the page, so after crawling, check your newly created property and it should be populated.

6. Search has indexed the data, time for some programming
Get the MOSS 2007 SDK, or browse to Creating Custom Enterprise Search Applications for the online version.
The SDK states the three different Search Query types that can be used.
Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports three types of search syntax for building search queries:
Keyword Query syntax (search terms are passed directly to the Enterprise Search service)
SQL syntax (extension of SQL syntax for querying databases)
URL syntax (search parameters are encoded in URL, and posted directly to the search page)
I have decided to go with the second option (SQL Syntax) the Enterprise Search SQL Query Language is a SQL style language used to build search queries. I say SQL style, coz it aint regular SQL! Also, I have used SharePoint 2003 SPS Query Language, and I found this to be fairly similar.
What is cool about building SQL Syntax search queries is you can use those Managed Properties mapped to crawled BDC properties, so that you can create an "Advanced Search".
I have done this, and for example, created a search User Control on "Accommodation" data.
In my custom search you can search for accommodation in Western Australia, and specify :
Type : Hotel, Motel, Resort, Cabin etc.
Price Range : $100 - $200
Disabled Access
Are Pets Allowed
Are Children Catered For
In a particular town : Perth
In a particular region : Australia's South West
With facilities : Bar, Fridge, Air Conditioning, Internet acess etc

We also needed Search across Event data, this required alternate criteria to be specified.
The Type of Event
Specify a Start Date Range for Events
Specify an End Date Range for Events
etc.
or for Tours, users need to search for
Towns Tour Visits
etc.
So I built a User Control which allows a user to specify combinations of the above criteria. The dude I sit next to at work was working on an awesome Suggest style ASP.NET User Control, it looks cool, I needed to use that control, and I was able to, by placing it in my User Control. I then placed that control in a MOSS 2007 Page Layout.
After the search is triggered and rendered users can then :
Page through results
Change Results Per Page
Re-Sort again based on Title, Price, Location etc. or by Date for Events
Click another link to filter results to a specific category

How did I provide all that filtering, and ordering functionality ?
By using the Search Managed Properties, which were mapped to BDC Crawled Properties in my Enterprise Search SQL Query.
The WHERE and ORDER BY clauses work similar to SQL, you can filter and order your results using data from the Meta Property Mappings.
For example, a the following query includes Managed Properties which are mapped to BDC properties, The query uses those BDC properties to both restrict the search to a particular category and domestic region, and also uses another BDC property to order the results first by the products' membership level, then by Rank (Pay us more $ and we'll rank you higher?)

SELECT Title, Path, Description, HitHighlightedSummary, Rank, ProductMembershipRank, DomesticRegion, ProductCategory
FROM SCOPE()
WHERE FREETEXT(Description,'Fun') AND ProductCategory = 'Accommodation'
AND DomesticRegion = 'Australia''s South West'
ORDER BY MembershipRank DESC, RANK DESC

The code needed in your custom web part or user control to execute the search query is :

FullTextSqlQuery ftsq = new FullTextSqlQuery(ServerContext.Current);
ftsq.ResultTypes = ResultType.RelevantResults;ftsq.QueryText = ;
//Return the search results to a ResultTableCollection
ResultTableCollection results = ftsq.Execute()
You can get a DataSet of results from the ResultTableCollection of search results. Then render this DataSet or get the XML representation and render that.
There are also other useful data you can get from ResultTableCollection such as ElapsedTime so you can also get the time taken to execute the search and render that to the user. The HitHighlightedSummary is very cool, it returns fragments of the content in a search result, and the term searched for can be highlighted so you can render search results that look cool, like a real search engine.
I created a "wrapper" class around search. it has an execute method, and alot of properties which you assign filter values to. My Execute method calls other private methods which build the Search SQL Query based on the properties set on the object and then use the FullTextSqlQuery class. but it also has Query properties, such as SelectProperties, WhereClause, OrderByClause which are created in the process.
So I can "chop up" and build search queries from existing ones, and do other cool OO stuff. it takes some time to code (any fans of dynamic sql generation code out there?) a wrapper class, but some investment like that is worth it, and allows other developers you work with to use Search to get data a little easier, without having to mess with queries if they don't want to.
One very cool feature you can provide in search, if your backend system entities have specified a URL path to a thumbnail image, you can use that to render image thumbnails in search results, looks very cool. That was actually a requirement for rendering which I had to provide, and could not using the OOTB search, also the requirements were very picky on searching across specific columns of data and not others, as well as specific weightings for columns, by generating queries myself I have full control.

It all depends on your data and requirements
So should you go Out-Of-The-Box or Do It Yourself for search?
Depends on whether or not you need to provide many advanced search filters and have very specific requirments on the rendering of the search results. You also have the control of building the queries and getting the data back from search and doing what you want with it. If your backend system requires very advanced specifc fine control searching, then build your own search queries and take more control over the search process. DIY also lets you use AJAX style search controls, and do pretty much anything else you want to because you have full control over the rendering of the Search Criteria UI and the Search Results.

My blog has moved....

2008-02-04T21:52:00.000+09:00

I've moved my blog over from http://www.sharepointblogs.com/sezai

to here ---------> http://sharepoint-sezai-moss-2007.blogspot.com