Remember Sammy Jankis

Hi,

Hot from the press: The Windows Server team has decided to decouple its Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) collaboration/document workflow subsystem from Windows Server 2008. While previous Beta and RC versions actually contained WSS as part of the installation - this won't be the case for the final version of Windows Server 2008 which is slated to RTM in the first quarter of 2008. That surprising announcement came in Julius Sinkevicius' blog (the Windows Server Senior Product Manager) in October 29:

"This is how Windows SharePoint Services was available to Windows Server 2003 customers (pre-R2). With the beta and RC0 versions of Windows Server 2008, we offered it in the Windows Server 2008 software. Starting with RC1 and going forward, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 will have to be downloaded separately."

This is a major decision since the WSS platform was bundled in Windows Server or Office System since 2001. Of course it will be available as a free download but rumors are already suggesting that this is just the first step in putting a price tag on WSS and killing it as a free substitute for MOSS servers. Even if this will happen for WSS 4.0 - this will sure be a groundbreaking decision for a whole bunch of customers that used the free version. I guess we should just wait and see…

Interesting days are coming!

Adir Ron.

Hi,

Earlier this week, I had a customer that wanted to define a workflow for a Document Library. The workflow was very similar to an out-of-the-box workflow but had some minor variation. That's not the first time I heard this request. I guess you know the "Collect feedback", "Collect Signatures" and "Approval" and understand how powerful they can be. So, what can we do when we need exactly them - but with a twist? Can we customize them somehow?

Well, I have an answer but like everything in MOSS - it's not a simple Yes/No. I'll break it down to some good news and some bad news:

• The good news – Take a look at the MOSS SDK! There was a lot of buzz around the new BDC Editor and the added documentation but we actually got some more hidden surprises. The SDK shipped with workflows that are similar to the OOB ones but this time as actual source. You don't have to start from scratch – just use the SDK samples as a starting point. Look, it's not the source of the actual OOB ones so it's not perfect but it's still very helpful. I've managed to use them in order to create some workflows that very much resembled the OOB (even with similar GUI). After that, you can definitely customize the hell out of them…
• The bad news – Ok, the SDK is nice but basically it means you have to create a brand new workflow when all we really wanted is to customize an existing one. We can't do it. Even very minimal customization can't be done to OOB ones. That's pretty weird since almost everything in MOSS is available to some level of variation (especially using tools like SharePoint Designer or InfoPath) so I dug it up a bit with sources in Microsoft and got the same answer: no way around it. Furthermore, there are no plans on changing it for the current 2007 release.

But Alas! Don't let your spirit fall – It looks like the future looks much brighter. This is still very unofficial but it seems like Microsoft is making some major improvements in Office 14 regarding the OOB workflows. They definitely heard the "Why can't I customize your Workflows?" feedback very loud and clear so OOB workflows will become customizable to some extent. This means that customers won't have to recreate from scratch if they need to tweak a thing or two. By the way – that's not all. There is a bunch of work done on workflow in O14 with some very interesting new/enhanced features. I guess we can talk more in a few months...

Bye,

Adir Ron.

Hi all,

Recently, I had a customer that wanted to re-use the security badge photos from the employee's card to the My Site's user profile photos. This way, he can ensure a photo is available for all employees and provide a consistent, uniform size for all photos. But there is a catch: The badge photos are kept as BLOBs in an Oracle database. Well, I guess BDC comes into ur minds? That was our initial though as well but it seems that BDC does not support BLOB data types. This means another approach was needed to get the photos into the user profiles.

So what did we do? Actually, we used a rather classic approach that worked beautifully and was very easy to create:

• Build a simple ASPX page that accepts the employee id in the query string and load only the picture from the DB.
• Create a view that includes the employee's ID and return the constructed URL of the employee's page in the first step.
• Now, create a BDC application definition (use single sign-on to the Oracle DB – the photos should be available to everyone in the organization so no authorization is needed beside the basic authentication to the DB). The BDC will consume the view you've just created.
• Associate the URL to the Profile's Picture URL to the URL returned from the BDC according to the Employee ID.
• Et viola! All pictures are displayed in the profile pages, on My Site etc.

Pretty easy right? And keep in mind it uses only standard functionality so maintenance should be very easy as well! If you're looking for some more ideas and thoughts on this subject – be sure to also check this link: SharePoint/PowerShell 7: Put the User in the Picture – Could be useful.

Bye,

Adir Ron.

Hi,

A customer abroad has developed a logging tool to help review all of the MOSS server logs and event logs in the same console. This tool is much nicer and easier to read than the Unified Logs solution in codeplex. A beta copy is already on codeplex and the customer is actually looking for user testing so feel free to comment back on performance and bugs. You can download the tool here

http://www.codeplex.com/sharepointloggingspy/

By the way – Look at the picture taken from the tool. Do you see the place it uses to look for answers…?

Soooo naughty to publish this on codeplex!

Bye,

Adir Ron.

Here's a question I've dealt with for the last couple of days:

How does Word communicate with MOSS when a document is accessed from a document library? And better yet – How can we imitate/change this default Office Client-Server behavior? This is especially important for Offline Application that needs to preserve the MOSS-Word connection although the file is opened from the local cache (usually file system).

So what is the big Office secret you ask? Is it WSS? Perhaps RPC or FP RPC? Could it be Web Services or plain HTTP that does the trick? And does WebDAV have a part in this too?! Common Man - TELL ME!!! Well, the answer is pretty simple but nevertheless annoying - it uses all of the above. This is usually defined by the version of Word and the particular integration functionality that is being exercised.

Anyway, if you dig this issue and want to know more – you need to be familiar with the Windows SharePoint Services RPC Protocol. This protocol can be used in Win32-based applications or in ASPX applications to make HTTP POST requests to the server. Methods in this protocol that do not modify the contents of the database can also be used in URL protocol to make HTTP GET requests. I would suggest the following links to get started on this issue. Oh, and you should know your way around CAML if you want to accomplish anything with WSS RPC.

• Complete list of all available WSS RPC Methods
• How to: Post Windows SharePoint Services RPC Methods
• Error Message Format for WSS – Sadly, you will use this link a whole bunch of times.

This is not a very simple issue but it is a very powerful one. I highly recommend going over the links once just to see what can be done using the WSS RPC protocol. You could use it in pretty much everywhere in MOSS and sometimes it can be a a great alternative when all else fails. As some smart dude once said - the blue pill will open ur mind…

Bye,

Adir Ron.

Hi,

One of the many cool things in MOSS is probably the "M" feature – a way to view some of MOSS's contents with a mobile device (just add "\m" to the requested path and you'll see a Mobile-Targeted page). Not too long ago, I had a customer that wanted to use this feature to enable Mobile Searching and that's how I discovered the unfortunate true - the "M" feature was nowhere to be found when you're talking about Search. Pretty wired, isn't it? Come to think of it - Search in one of the few things I would do with my Mobile (apart from E-mails and Youtube of course). So, how come it's not in the product?

Well – the good news is that this is actually very simple to create a Mobile Search Center (should take you half an hour or so). Here are the steps that will guide you in your honorable quest for the illustrious Mobile Search:

1. Create a new search center site called MobileSearch with a URL of 'ms' (go to home and choose Site actions à Create Site and pick the search center template) (you can hide it from normal navigation if you want to later)
2. Then tweak the web parts on the default.aspx search page by aligning the web parts vertically so there's no horizontal scrolling (move the search box to the lower-left). You can also make the web part a fixed width, etc – check out the various web part settings. It is also recommended to hide the advanced link.
3. Then tweak the results page by aligning the web parts vertically in the top left zone à move best bets and paging far left above results, delete some of the parts you don't need (statistics, search action links, the lower paging part, etc) and limit the results web part to 3 results and 1 sentence. You can even limit all of the web parts to a width of x pixels or y inches to exactly accommodate the mobile device (if you can define the targeting device – you can also create Mobile Search Centers for each device and fit the page exactly to the screen size).
4. Create a minimal master page (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx) to remove all of the extra headers, etc that can't show up on a phone (not enough space). Make sure you check-in the page and approve it.
5. Apply that minimal master page to the site under site settings
6. Use SharePoint Designer to tweak the spacing on the results.aspx page.  Remove unnecessary whitespace on the page and to ensure no horizontal scrolling.

That's it! Fairly easy, don't you think?

Adir Ron.

Hi,

It's been a while since I wrote something. I know - It sucks. Especially since I've gathered around a couple of really cool stuff to publish. 24 hours is simply not enough! Hope we'll get more in the next SP/Release…

This post will deal with a huge issue in the Crawl Engine for MOSS or MOSS For Search: Crawling content for Form-Based authentication. If you ever tried it, you probably saw that we can actually use MOSS to crawl content that is saved on forms-based authentication sites (or cookie-based authentication of course). The problem is that it practically gives us nothing. In Most cases, only the logon page of a site is crawled and the rest of the site is deprived and never accessed by the Crawler. That's a real deal if you have a couple of ASP.Net Web Systems is your hand and would like to add some of their content to be available in Search. By the way, you'll get the same symptom even if the web site that is SSO-Based – still nothing gets into the Index. I have found a few workarounds to this matter up until now (usually crawling directly the Database of the Web System with the BDC feature) but this was time consuming and very annoying.

ALAS! No More! Microsoft finally came up with a hotfix for this problem that tweaks up MOSS and the Admin UI to support this issue. If you don't want to wait until the much-anticipated upcoming SP1 for MOSS (due to later this year) - Here are the details:

• AddRule.exe downloadable package: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D5090BC4-5B4F-411B-8CDE-E37D33F7EFDF&displaylang=en
• KB article for FBA/CBA hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934577/en-us
• Public downloadable location for hotfix: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B3C932A5-B3C0-4473-8EA5-62AE44190878&displaylang=en

I guess this means we can throw some of those really nasty-defined BDC's away. Well, this guy isn't planning on shading tears over it …

Bye,

Adir Ron.