Office 2010 beta and SharePoint Server 2010 beta available for download

Microsoft on Monday released the most awaited betas of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on MSDN and TechNet. Download link of each products on MSDN and TechNet is as follows.

Office Professional Plus 2010 beta

•MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=1:383


•TechNet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=1:383

SharePoint Server 2010 beta

•MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=42:393


•TechNet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=42:393


SharePoint Foundation 2010 beta

•MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=42:395


•TechNet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx?pv=42:395

Explore Infopath 2010 controls

Most of the controls are carried over from Infopath 2007. There are very few newly added controls, there is considerable enhancement to the existing controls.

Newly added controls

1. Date Control

2. Date and Time control

3. Picture Button

Enhancements

1. Hyperlink control

2. Formatting conditions

3. Rules can be configured through the ribbon, no more available as part of control properties.

Video talks more details on these controls.

Walkthrough of what’s new in Microsoft InfoPath 2010

Highlight of some new features added with Infopath 2010 are as follows.

1. Sections and Page Layouts

2. Ribbon interface

3. Control Tools allows to manage controls and their properties in the form

SharePoint Designer 2010 Components

This video gives a walkthrough of the sharepoint designer components.

SharePoint 2010 Timer Jobs changes

SharePoint 2010 Timer Jobs undergoes changes in the management and in configuration.

Firstly, the most significant change you will see with the new version of SharePoint is the number of Timer Jobs – 21 new jobs been added. If for an ordinary SharePoint 2007 application we had 39 Timer’s Job, then we would have 60 Jobs for SharePoint 2010.

So, those 21 new timer jobs are:

1.Application Addresses Refresh Job
2.Audit Log Trimming
3.Delete Job History
4.Document ID enable/disable job
5.Document ID assignment job
6.Enterprise Server Search Master Job
7.Health Analysis Job
8.InfoPath Forms Services Maintenance
9.Password Management
10.Prepare query suggestions
11.Product Version Job
12.Query Logging
13.Secure Store Service Timer
14.Solution Daily Resource Usage Update
15.State Service Delete Expired Sessions
16.Timer Service Recycle
17.Web Analytics Trigger Workflows Timer Job
18.Windows SharePoint Services Usage Data Import
19.Windows SharePoint Services Usage Data Processing
20.Word Conversion Timer Job
21.Workflow

We need to keep our fingers crossed to know more details about each of these new jobs when the public beta comes out in November. I am very excited to expose more about some of these new addition to SharePoint so do keep watching this space.

Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010

An interesting video about the Microsoft Sharepoint Workspace 2010 which was formely known as Microsoft Groove. This video gives an brief introduction to the Microsoft Sharepoint workspace 2010, it's capabilities and similarity to Microsoft Groove.

Watch out the video at Sharepoint Workspace 2010

Enjoy !!!

Building Solutions on SharePoint 2010

A sneak peek of building solutions in Sharepoint 2010.

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/efc1bbbf-123a-45bc-8145-c08545e29f2c?vp_evt=eref&vp_video=Building+Solutions+on+SharePoint

Custom Security Trimming in Sharepoint

Recently while working on one of the initiatives, I came across an developement need to restrict permissions on certain portions of an content page as against to the whole page itself. My scenario was I only needed people with Full Control and Contributors permission to see all contents of a page as against to Readers who see only some of the contents on that page. Another common example would be restricting some portion of the master page. I did explored object model role and roleassignment classes nothing looked to be promising and a complete solution for this situation.

Finally after reading through some of the msdn resources, I got aware that there is a security trimming control available to restrict permission on content page.

Wrap the following tag around the content that you want security trimmed, and SharePoint will manage security for you.

<SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl ID=”SPSecurityTrimmedControlName″ PermissionsString=”BrowseDirectories” runat=”server”>

content that needs to be security trimmed goes here.

</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

Please note that whats most important here is what goes inside the PermissionsString attribute. Following is a list of possible values:

List Permissions
ManageLists
CancelCheckout
AddListItems
EditListItems
DeleteListItems
ViewListItems
ApproveItems
OpenItems
ViewVersions
DeleteVersions
CreateAlerts
ViewFormPages

Site Permissions
ManagePermissions
ViewUsageData
ManageSubwebs
ManageWeb
AddAndCustomizePages
ApplyThemeAndBorder
ApplyStyleSheets
CreateGroups
BrowseDirectories
CreateSSCSite
ViewPages
EnumeratePermissions
BrowseUserInfo
ManageAlerts
UseRemoteAPIs
UseClientIntegration
Open
EditMyUserInfo

Finally I wanted to let everyone know that I would keep exposing some of these little custom developement tips and would also share some of my developement experience as an when I come across so do keep watching this space.

Progress Bar in Sharepoint Task List

My client makes use of most of the out of box features that are available with Sharepoint, many of the company managers frequently make use of the out of box sharepoint task list for resource assignment, tracking etc. Recently one of the group managers asked me if it is possible to create a visual indicator of the task, meaning he wanted a visual progress bar for the status of each task. After researching on the subject I discovered that Bamboo solution have a product for this need and can meet what exactly he was looking for. It would have done what we expected but the product does not seems to be more customizable so I started to look for doing this myself with some customization efforts.

I was able to do this using little html knowledge and a great javascript available from the pathtosharepoint website. Below are the steps that I did to achieve this.

1. Created a calculated column called "Progress Bar" and "Progress Bar 2" and then added the following formulas to each of the columns.

- Progress Bar:

=”<DIV style=’background-color:blue; width:”&([% Complete]*100)&”%;’>&nbsp;</DIV>”

- Progress Bar 2:

=”<DIV style=’background-color:red;’><DIV style=’background-color:LimeGreen; width:”&([% Complete]*100)&”%;’>&nbsp;</DIV></DIV>”

2. I downloaded a script from the pathtosharepoint site, added it to an content editor webpart on the same page as my task list. To download the code please click here

3.Once the content editor webpart is saved, you will see that the progress bar will start to show up in the columns Progress Bar and Progress Bar 2 as I have shown in the screen image above.

I also recommend my blog readers to visit http://pathtosharepoint.com , the author has really put great efforts to build and present some of the cool sharepoint custom components that are very useful in today's custom needs for Sharepoint.

I have always enjoyed working with sharepoint customizations and I am hoping that my research and these small tips help someone in Sharepoint development world.

Keep watching this space for more sharepoint development tips. Cheers to Sharepoint !!!

Is Box.net better than Sharepoint 2010 ?

Box.net claims that it is a better collaborative tool than Sharepoint or even better than the upcoming Sharepoint version Twenty Ten. Video below talks in detail what the product offers and how it is better product for collabration compared to Sharepoint.

How to hide view selector in list view webpart ?

I am working on an initiative where I have to present multiple views of a sharepoint list, these views have sensitive information in certain columns that cannot be shared among other views of the same list. Here the idea is create unique views for each group of users with their sensitive columns and then not allowing the users to switch to each others view, point to note is all of these views are public views.

I was scratching my head figuring out a solution to restrict the view selection from pages that are generated for each views. My theory was there has to be a way to handle the view selector ?? I opened sharepoint designer to see if I can figure this out. I opened one of the existing view page for a list (AllItems.aspx) and then was looking for some kind of view selector control in the list webpart that was displayed. It took me few hours to figure out that only converting the list view webpart to the XSLT dataview will generate a selector control in the XSLT code, something like the line of code below.

<sharepoint:viewselectormenu runat="server" visible="false"”> </sharepoint:viewselectormenu”>

The line of code is the view selector control that is responsible to cause the switch, I simply added the visible attribute setting it to false to make the control unswitchable.

Other way would be to completely get rid of the control to give a clean user experience. It took few hours for me figure this out, but I am hoping this will help somebody do this quickly in this amazing world of sharepoint.

NY Times article on Sharepoint

Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession

By Ashlee Vance

Hang around at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters for five or ten minutes and someone dressed in khaki pants and a blue shirt is bound to tell you about the wonders of SharePoint — one of the company’s most successful and increasingly controversial lines of software. Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.


Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields. It can’t do everything. Executives at Microsoft will readily admit that the bits and pieces of SharePoint lack the more sophisticated features found in products from specialist software makers.


“We don’t claim we do everything,” said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft. “If we do 50 percent of the functions that these other companies do, but they’re the ones customers really want, that’s fine. The magic is that end users actually like to use the software.”
This strategy seems to have worked even during the recession.


While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company. Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use SharePoint.


In many ways, SharePoint mimics the strategy Microsoft took with Office by linking together numerous applications into a single unit. This approach appeals to customers looking to save money and also represents a real threat to a variety of business software makers. Many of these specialists like Cognos, a business intelligence software maker, and Documentum, a content management software maker, have been gobbled up by larger players looking to create their own suites. I.B.M., for example, bought Cognos, while EMC bought Documentum. Other companies like Autonomy, a maker of top-of-the-line corporate search software, remain independent.


Crucially, Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.


“SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in,” said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.” Along these lines, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has talked about SharePoint as the company’s next big operating system.


Microsoft has managed to undercut even the panoply of open-source companies playing in the business software market by giving away a free basic license to SharePoint if they already have Windows Server. “It’s a brilliant strategy that mimics open source in its viral, free distribution, but transcends open source in its ability to lock customers into a complete, not-free-at-all Microsoft stack - one for which they’ll pay more and more the deeper they get into SharePoint,” Mr. Asay said.


A number of smaller software companies have been eager to piggyback on SharePoint’s success. Based in San Diego , Sharepoint360 provides consulting services and software development help around the product. The company started after employees at a construction company built some Sharepoint applications and decided to market the software to other construction firms. The start-up has help ed construction companies create systems for managing projects, allowing various people to check-in on the progress of a building and keep track of documents tied to the site. It has also expanded beyond the construction area doing work for NASA, Nestle and Toshiba, according to Paul West, a co-founder of SharePoint360.


The company offers to host SharePoint applications for customers. Microsoft too wants to host more software for companies as it moves toward the cloud computing model. Mr. West recognizes that Microsoft may begin stepping on its partners’ toes. “It may certainly come to pass that they pull the switch,” he said. “That would have implications for us.” In the meantime, however, Microsoft subsidizes training courses and consulting work for companies like Sharepoint360.


Next year, Microsoft plans to release a new version of the software packed full of more advanced features, including stronger ties to the corporate search technology it acquired in the $1.2 billion purchase of Fast Search and Transfer, a Norwegian start-up. Best Buy uses the Fast technology today to provide on-the-fly pricing information to customers performing product searches on its Web site.


By making these more sophisticated tools available to customers, Microsoft thinks it can keep pushing niche software makers out of the way and give business people, rather than just the tech folks, a way to work with business applications.

“We believe customers can turn off some of these point solutions,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, a general manager in Microsoft’s business software group. “With SharePoint, we can deliver a very, very approachable application to end users.”

Top Sharepoint sites around the world

While going through Ian Morish's WSS demo site happen to go through some of the best looking internet sites hosted around the world, Ian's website below gives a wonderful preview of these websites.

http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/topwebsites.aspx

I am simply amazed not to see these sites built with sharepoint but the core value that sharepoint is bringing to these websites in terms of Content Management, Enterprise integration etc. Thats why I always say SharepointAge Rocks !!!! I have been a follower of Microsoft since inception of dotnet 1.0 and have lot of faith that they are going to change the shape of technology with these cool platforms ..... happen to look at bing search looks very promising.

Office 2010 revealed in more detail

Since the launch of the Office 2010 technical preview, Microsoft has revealed most of the anticipated Office 2010 release in great detail way ahead of the expected official announcement that was expected to be done at the Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference 2009

To unfold the secrets watch out for the introduction videos office twenty ten videos available at

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/

Peronsally I was impressed with the new features in outlook 2010 that will help keep emails and our meetings more organized then what we have today, significant changes done to OneNote 2010, I always love OneNote whether it was 2003 or 2010, hats off to its online/offline capabilities. I was not much excited about office 2010 except for the fact that it allows live communication between users from a document management standpoint.

I was dying to know more about Infopath 2010 but was disappointed to know not much is available yet. Infopath 2010 is suppose to fix all the paint points that its preceeder 2007 version had specially with the forms services integration in sharepoint.

So I hope you all will find this information valuable and interesting. More secrets yet to be revealed ....... keep watching out this space.

Sharepoint 2010 developer document released

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 team has released a download for SharePoint 2010 developer documentation which contains white papers and help files. To review your copy, Please download zip file from Microsoft.com

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94afe886-3b20-4bc9-9a0d-acd8cd232c24&displaylang=en

Preparing for Sharepoint 2010 Upgrade Today

I was looking for new references available for sharepoint twenty ten on internet, I happen to look at this cool presentation by Joel Oleson that talks about high level task involved with the sharepoint twenty ten upgrade. Click here to look at the presentation.

Thanks Joel for sharing this great piece of information, I hope everyone will find this information interesting and valuable.

SharepointAge Rocks !!!!!

What is SharePoint 2010

What is SharePoint 2010? SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise & the Web that enables you to connect & empower people through an integrated set of rich features. Whether deployed on-premises or as hosted services, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut costs with a unified infrastructure while allowing you to rapidly respond to your business needs.



Watch out for a sneak preview here I am very excited to expose more about the sharepoint twenty ten so keeping watching .......

BDC Meta Man Web Edition Released

Lightning Tools has recently released a web edition for BDC Meta Man to generate the Business Data Catalog Application Definition file. The web edition is designed to address the user paint point about SharePoint can communicate with their Line-of-Business Systems, but why they need to use a desktop application(BDC Meta Man Desktop Version) to create the Application Definition File.

Other goals for the web versions are as follows.

• Allow users to create Application Definition File from within the browser (Figure 1 - BDC Meta Man Web Edition)
• Give the ability to create Application Definition File to Site Collection Administrators
• Give users functionality of BDC Meta Man from within the browser
• Streamline the process of creating an Application Definition File.
• Imitate BDC Meta Man desktop application (Figure 2 - BDC Meta Man)

Some screencasts and demos are available at their website Lightning Tools

Enjoy the great enterprise suites with sharepoint with the ease of these awesome tools.

Happy Sharepointing !!!!

How to disable edit forms fields with sharepoint

While working on one of the projects, an sharepoint edit form needed to have some fields to be disabled or readonly. I did not wanted to write custom code to achieve this, also was looking for a solution that would be quick, handy and would utilize the web developement experience, I thought of giving it a shot with Javascript ..... while researching more on this I saw Andrey Shchurov Blog where Andrey has discussed the similar solution using Javascript.

Thanks Andrey for pointing this out, you have saved lot of my developement time.

Service Pack 2 Update - Expiration Issue Fix

The public update for the Service Pack 2 expiration date issue is now available for download.

The update can be applied before or after Service Pack 2 installation. If the update is applied prior to installing Service Pack 2 it will prevent the expiration date from being improperly activated during installation of Service Pack 2, if it is applied after Service Pack 2 it will remove the expiration date incorrectly set during installation of Service Pack 2.

For more details on downloading the fix, refer the blog below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/06/25/service-pack-2-update.aspx

Signups for Office 2010 Beta is OPEN !!!!

Office 2010 Beta signups are now available. The survey doesn’t guarantee your entry into the program, but it does put you into a pool of other applicants Microsoft will invite to participate in the beta. Sign up, if you would like to participate for Office 2010 Beta.

http://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=3343&SiteID=160&InvitationID=Beta-PRJM-HVCM

Happy Sharepointing !!!

Exposing Enterprise Search in SharePoint Server 2007 by Using Internet Explorer 7 and the Office Research Pane

Recently while going through some MSDN articles, I happen to know a way of exposing enterprise search in sharepoint with Internet Explorer 7.0 and the Microsoft Office 2007. Following MSDN articles talk about it in more detail.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb625970.aspx

Enjoy this cool enterprise feature !!!

Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products - Sharepoint 2010

Since the announcing of SharePoint 2010 in may'09, the community has been buzzing with what we know about ‘10, we are still speculating lot about ‘10. There isn’t a whole lot of concrete information out there yet, but I’ve compiled a list below of what I’ve read and known from various communities so far.

1. Inline editing for list items : no need to hit the datasheet view

2. BDC will be a two way road : sp2010 may support inserting data from BDC

3. No IE 6.0 Support : SharePoint 2010 will be “targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems.

4. With same architechture as of MOSS 2007, the stress will be on intergarting the advanced UI features, watchout for office like ribbon control, ajaxed controls etc

5. Content Management Interoperability Services : This will allow SharePoint to communicate with other CMS.

6. PerformancePoint Monitoring & Analytics functions will be bundled into the Server license.

7. Users will be able to open/edit/save/collaborate on Office documents through a web browser.

8. Native support for ODF and PDF seems to be a safe confirmation as Office System SP2 will now support editing of both formats.

9. All Forms Server functions bundled with 2010 – There are clients who signed on for Forms Server standalone for WSS installs, so it would be nice if they bundled it with the next equivalent of WSS. I have an unofficial confirm from an MS employee that features will be available in 2010 but no solid details so far.

10. Standardized UI across all Office products, browsers, mobile devices.

11. Open API support

12. FAST Search for Server Enterprise owners

Does Operating System edition matters with powershell ?

Yes, it does matters when accessing Sharepoint Object Model through powershell.

Make sure that you use PowerShell 64 bit when you trying to manipulate the SharePoint object model from a script on a 64 bit OS machine.

If you try run a script that accesses the SharePoint object model in a 32 bit PowerShell window from a 64 bit OS, you will run into errors that are rather hard and confusing to diagnose: The error you will receieve will be as below which is totally misleading.

Error: “The Web application at http://servername could not be found. Verify that you have typed the URL correctly. If the URL should be serving existing content, the system administrator may need to add a new request URL mapping to the intended application.”At line:1 char:38+ $spsite=[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite]( <<<< “http://servername”)

I hope this post saves some time for someone in sharepoint world !

SharePoint Service Pack 2 released on April 28, 2009

I'm sure many of us stay on top of this, but thought I'd post in the event someone had missed it. Instructions on installing are included in this post.

Service Pack 2 is a cumulative update, and includes all major updates since the release of WSS3 & SharePoint 2007, and includes the hotfixes and improvements by Microsoft.

Updates Included in SP2: February 2009

Cumulative Update December 2008

Cumulative Update October 2008

Cumulative Update Infrastructure Update Service Pack 1

Instructions for applying Service Pack 2:

Please read the entire contents before proceeding to apply any service packs :

1. Install WSS3 SP2

http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emicrosoft%2Ecom%2Fdownloads%2Fdetails%2Easpx%3FFamilyID%3D79bada82-c13f-44c1-bdc1-d0447337051b&urlhash=XSi8&_t=disc_detail_link

This will run the automated SharePoint Products & Technologies Configuration Wizard (PSConfig).

For organizations running SharePoint Server 2007 (Standard & Enterprise), continue:

2. Install SharePoint Server 2007 SP2 .

http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emicrosoft%2Ecom%2Fdownloads%2Fdetails%2Easpx%3FFamilyID%3Db7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082&urlhash=dPCu&_t=disc_detail_link

This will run the automated SharePoint Products & Technologies Configuration Wizard (PSConfig) a second time, and will run a bit longer than the first.

If Language Packs are used within your organization, install the respective Language Packs Start with the correct version of the WSS3 Language Pack SP2. If you have a MOSS Environment, install the WSS3 Language Pack SP2 first, followed by the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Language Pack SP2 WSS3 Language Pack SP2:

32 Bit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=085e5ac8-58f6-4cf9-8012-33b95ee36c0f

64 Bit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2c2b6caf-b46d-45eb-ac4d-deaaa48c3a2c

Office SharePoint Server Language Pack SP2:

32 bit -

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=01c6a3e8-e110-4956-903a-ad16284bf223

64 bit -

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=66c5026f-9f47-4642-8378-2526918009fa

The Service Packs must be installed on all SharePoint servers in the farm, and remember to plan accordingly, as the update process will create approximately 1 hour of downtime per server. The patch created an issue in one of my farms. The Search Service Provider Database was missing stored procedures, and I was unable to open Search Admin). A new SSP was created successfully, and after changing default SSP and changing the associations I was in. Unfortunately this method meant losing settings such as crawl schedules & sources, and any other customizations to the SSP site.

Site Collection Inventory with Powershell

In my recent project I was asked to get site collection inventory between various enviornments. Requirement was to get a automated file with certain information of each site. Information that was needed for each site is as below.

Name
Title
Description
Theme
WebTemplate
Author
Created
Modified
Sites
Users
ParentWeb
Url
ServerRelativeUrl
ID

Requirement seemed to be simple but there was no easy answer who what my soluton would be.
Initially when I started to think of a solution various few things that came to my mind including copy and paste through Content and Structure under sitecollection settings, wirting object model code and then it clicked with check what powershell has to offer.

Using power shell I wrote useful script to get all the required information for each site and exported it to a .csv file. Following is the script where $url should be replaced with the actual site collection.

$Path = $pwd.ToString() + "\SiteInformation.csv"
$SiteInfo = Get-SiteInformation $Url $SiteInfo Export-Csv $Path -NoTypeInformation

function Get-SiteInformation ([string]$Url) {
$SPSite = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($Url) $AllWebs = $SPSite.AllWebs

$AllWebs ForEach {
if ($_.Theme -eq "")
{ $Theme = "Default Theme" }
else
{ $Theme = $_.Theme }

$SiteInformation = New-Object PsObject
$SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Name" -Value $_.Name $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Title" -Value $_.Title $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Description" -Value $_.Description $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Theme" -Value $Theme $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "WebTemplate" -Value $_.WebTemplate $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Author" -Value $_.Author $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Created" -Value $_.Created $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Modified" -Value $_.LastItemModifiedDate $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Sites" -Value ($_.Webs).Count $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Users" -Value $_.SiteUsers.Count $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "ParentWeb" -Value $_.ParentWeb $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "Url" -Value $_.Url $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "ServerRelativeUrl" -Value $_.ServerRelativeUrl $SiteInformation Add-Member -memberType NoteProperty "ID" -Value $_.ID
$SiteInformation }}

I am excited to expose more about PowerShell and the useful features it brings to the Sharepoint as an platform so keep looking for furture posts. Thanks !

Page Sizes and Browser Preview in SharePoint Designer

One of the most frustrating things about designing for the Web is the wide array of browsers and screen formats in which your site may be displayed. SharePoint Designer helps mitigate this problem by giving you several preview options.
First, you can fix the Design view to a set of dimensions. In the status bar, you can see the current dimensions of the window the Design view represents. Click the dimensions entry to see the menu shown in Figure 1-11, which allows you to choose from several page sizes.

Figure 1-11

If the selected dimensions are smaller than the current design window, the width of the working area is reduced to the horizontal dimension selected. The chosen vertical dimension is shown by a dotted line across the visible area of the page.
If the selected dimensions are larger than the current design window, the workspace is expanded horizontally, and the scroll bar at the bottom of the window is activated.
Note: The default page sizes represent Microsoft Internet Explorer in its default configuration. You can create your own set of dimensions to choose from.
When a fixed page size is selected, the dimension status shows the hash symbol seen in Figure 1-11. The Page Size menu is also available under the View menu.
Design view provides a close approximation of the rendering of your page, especially with the visual aids turned off. However, even with the fixed page size option, SharePoint Designer cannot perfectly reproduce the environment of a web browser. To resolve this, SharePoint Designer provides the option to preview your page directly in web browsers.
Not only can a page be rendered differently in a browser than within SharePoint Designer, but different browsers and even different versions of the same browser have their own ways of rendering pages. It is best practice, therefore, to test your pages in each of the browsers you expect to view your site. SharePoint Designer’s Preview in Browser function enables you to select an exact environment in which to test your pages. Figure 1-12 shows the Preview in Browser menu as selected from the icon in the Common toolbar.

Figure 1-12

Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are automatically detected by SharePoint Designer if they are installed on your workstation. In addition, you can select any other installed browser for live preview. Follow these steps to add another browser to the preview list:
1. Select Preview in Browser@@>Edit Browser List. The Edit Browser List dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 1-13.

Figure 1-13

2. Click the Add button. The Add Browser dialog box appears (see Figure 1-14).

Figure 1-14
3. Type a name to represent the browser.
4. Click the Browse button to open the Add Browser window (see Figure 1-15), and navigate to the .exe file that starts the application. (You may need to look at the properties of the application’s launch icon to find the file location.)

Figure 1-15
5. Click Open, and then click OK on the other two dialogs.

Microsoft® Commerce Server 2009 is Now Available on MSDN!

Over on the e-commerce blog (owned by the Commerce Server team), they announced the availability of Commerce Server 2009 on MSDN. Excellent!
So why is this so relevant to the SharePoint audience?

Commerce Server 2009 delivers an out-of-the-box shopping site that leverages SharePoint Commerce Services which provides a gallery of 35 web parts and controls that can be assembled within SharePoint.

Here’s a list of some of the functionality provided by SharePoint Commerce Services:

· Virtual Earth Store Locator, which integrates with Virtual Earth mapping software so that shopping sites have detailed maps of store locations.

· Attract a larger consumer base by using Live™ ID, allowing single sign-on to your shopping site.

· Search that searches both the e-commerce site and static content seamlessly.

· Display reviews and ratings for individual products, and ability for shoppers to submit their own reviews and ratings, with administrative workflow for management discretion.

· Display advertisements and discounts that are relevant to both the current shopper and current site context, and that work in conjunction with Marketing Manager and campaigns.

· Shoppers and managers can take advantage of Profile Administration features, including the ability to add and edit addresses, view and launch credit card information, a registration wizard, and the ability to reset passwords.

Change Item Order Menu

One of the benefits of the Links list type is that it comes with the ability to reorder the items in the list via a nice UI, as seen here:

takes you to page below:

One of the things that I notice is that this menu item only shows up for the "All Links" view. So, even if you have another view in the List, just navigate to the All Links view and the menu item will be available.

Understanding how SharePoint works : Customized vs Uncustomized Files

For developers getting into the world of SharePoint development, it can be daunting at first. I've always felt the best way to get around this was to simplify the product; make SharePoint easier to understand and not this big blue monster.

A big piece of this is understanding how the file system works in SharePoint sites. Armed with this knowledge, it makes it much easier to understand errors and issues you may run into with your custom components. To this effect, I recently saw an article published on MSDN that explains the concept of customized and uncustomized files which also covers the virtualized SharePoint file system:

» Understanding and Creating Customized and Uncustomized Files in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

I hope everyone finds this post valuable.