Welcome!


Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint and .NET. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog.


  • Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

    This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

    Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8
  • Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

    This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

    Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3



Latest Posts


SharePointDevWiki.com comes alive

December 3, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

Don't take my word for it....check out the new site! As promised I have managed to pull some strings and get a Atlassian Confluence license and also some hosting space on Tatham Oddie's boxes. Please feel free to submit your comments on the proposed approaches to the content on this wiki...its a community affair after all! Please spread the word on this site by every means possible! Rather than more...
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Where to draw the line between SharePoint Customisation and SharePoint Development

November 25, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
5 Comments· 2 Links to this post

I was recently on a client site where they have spent the best part of a year going through the process of making the decision and getting approval to purchase Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition. Part of that presales process actually included attending one of my discussions on Enterprise 2.0 along the lines of "Facebook for the Enterprise" with a 15 minute segme more...
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The SharePoint Development Community need our help!

November 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
2 Comments· 0 Links to this post

As any seasoned SharePoint Developers will point out, SharePoint has come along way in the Development journey since it's beginnings in 2001 to what it is today. It has still got a long way to go for a variety of reasons, some of which I have covered in my 8 part series. vNext Hype There is much hype surrounding Visual Studio 2010 starting to be spun by Microsoft after PDC with regards for its more...
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TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint Announced

November 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Testing SharePoint was always an issue, because SharePoint has number of classes that are sealed and/or does not have public constructors. SharePoint's API consists heavily of sealed classes and classes with internal constructors. None of existed unit-testing frameworks provided ability to mock such classes. Guys from TypeMock (http://www.typemock.com) did fantastic work, providing really powe more...

 

Shared Services Provider Provisioning Failure

November 12, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 1 Link to this post

I'm building a completely new farm with all the latest patches and when I create the SSP it lets me create individual Application Pools for MySites and the SSP itself and I can confirm creation which gives me the lovely spinning icon: And it just sits there for 10 minutes...I didn't want to close it so I opened another window with Central Administration. Finding the error The SSP link in Q more...
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WARNING: Joining a SharePoint Farm with updates already installed

November 12, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 1 Link to this post

    1: 11/12/2008 10:00:40 8 INF Creating connection string for config db SharePoint_Config server SOMSQL01\SQLMOSS 2: 11/12/2008 10:00:40 8 INF Creating connection string for admin content db SharePoint_AdminContent_c6b34e10-9f32-4fae-bfc1-50b489e58913 server SOMSQL01\SQLMOSS 3: 11/12/2008 10:00:40 8 INF more...
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MCP Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

November 11, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
3 Comments· 5 Links to this post

So the SharePoint Team Blog announced two new certifications around SharePoint. The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) and the Microsoft Certified Architect. Resources We were having discussions internally about this at Readify just today and what we look for in an individual. There was hot debate around whether we should mandate configuration and administration skills for a SharePoint Developer/ more...
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SharePoint Development Tools future and give them your opinion!

November 11, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

New Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Development tools were announced at TechEd EMEA last week. Paul Andrew discusses what features will be available. You can actually provide feedback on the current Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.2 at the Visual Studio Gallery site which Paul also announced in October this year. I have noticed that Ishai Sagi made a comment that he more...
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SharePoint Developer Resources not to be missed! Not just a repeat announcement of SharePoint Guidance ;-)

November 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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SharePoint Guidance : P&P The new SharePoint Guidance was released last week. There's a whole CodePlex source control project that covers how the team have implemented particular areas Leveraging the SharePoint Platform. They have taken a Contoso scenario to show how the solution could be implemented using the SharePoint platform. It covers off so far: Content types Custom actions C more...
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Developing a InfoPath Solution using a Solution Package

November 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've had a request from @julioc for my Solution package that deploys: Site Collection Feature InfoPath Form Automatically to Central Administration Forms Templates Site Feature InfoPath Form Library Provisioned by a Feature Includes the Form Content Type automatically hooked up to it more...
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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Surveys and Mobile Limitation

November 6, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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So I had a SharePoint Bat Phone call today about a client of Readify's that had created a Survey in WSS 3.0 with two simple questions and wanted it to be viewed on a Windows Mobile Device. They were aware that SharePoint had a out of the box Mobile view of all it's pages. It's one of the top 10 reasons to use SharePoint from the marketing site. The MSDN homepage for SharePoint Mobile Development more...
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SharePoint Link bait

November 3, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

So I've noticed a few people now are starting to post their favourite daily/weekly links: Michael Gannotti EndUserSharePoint.com Steve Pietrek Bamboo There's also a community one called SharePointPedia that Lawrence Liu tried to get running but I think with the ease of some of the other tools out there it never quite made it. I'm currently subscribed to over 350 RSS feeds covering SharePoin more...
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SharePoint Development Best Practices Presentation

October 30, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I ran my SharePoint Development Best Practices Presentation at the Readify RDN session last night in Perth, Australia. Thanks for the 60+ attendees that turned up to hear me and Hadley Willan present. I have published my slides online and sample code for you to look at if you couldn't make it, or if you could but wanted to read through it at your own pace and take advantage of all the link love i more...
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Azure and SharePoint Online

October 28, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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So, unless you've been unplugged from the Internet for the last 24 hours you would have seen all the stuff going on at PDC 08. Ray Ozzie announced Azure, which is basically there solution for Cloud Computer. My interest lies in SharePoint Services which sits as one of the platforms that will be in the Cloud/Azure platform. The developer centre doesn't have a dedicated Platform Technologies secti more...
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InfoPath Form Services: Manage Form Templates stuck on Installing

October 28, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
99 Comments· 1 Link to this post

I was having an issue with a InfoPath Form I had deployed wrapped up in a Solution Feature that just wouldn't budge from a FormTemplateStatus of "Installing". I tried deleting it in the UI in Central Administration and also via STSADM and get the old chestnut of 'Object Reference not set to an instance of an Object: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Mic more...
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InfoPath Form Services error message

October 28, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I've built a clean MOSS development environment deployed an InfoPath form using Sahil Malik's technique of wrapping it up in a feature and leveraging the Receiver Class. Works great. It seems to register the form as a fully trusted form. I then add the generated content type (same name as form) to a Form Library and force it to open in web page. Then I select New | My Form in List View Web Part more...
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Microsoft Office activation

October 27, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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So I had some fun today with Microsoft Office and having to ring up to activate the product as it was hosted in a Virtualised Machine and the host was my new Tablet PC. I couldn't activate online as it didn't like doing this over a proxy that requires authentication! When I rang and read out the numbers, yes read out - not typed them in like Windows activation...I got told the installation ID more...
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Perth Special Event - Tag Driven Information – Customising the Document Information Panel in Office

October 22, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I'm really looking forward to finally getting to meet William Cornwill (aka CodeJedi) when he presents in two weeks for our Perth SharePoint User Group! Should be really good to see him show off the deep integration in Word 2007 with SharePoint! Would strongly advise all spectrums of the SharePoint Community to attend this whether your a business sponsor, administrator or developer to get a bette more...
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Readify SharePoint RDN RSVPs at 75! and 45+ at Perth SharePoint User Group!

October 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

Wow, we've got over 75 people registered for the Readify RDN on SharePoint! I'm really pleased with this response and am looking forward to the discussions over a pizza and a beer afterwards on my presentation and Hadley Wilan's also. If you're not registered yet and can make 17:30 in Perth on the 29th October, please register your interest now! If there are people you think may not know about more...
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Noticed a drop in my RSS subscriptions

October 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've noticed a bit of a dive in RSS feed subscriptions and think it is because I was interleaving my diigo social book marking in there. I've deactivated this feature, but if you are still interested in what I'm bookmarking...please take a look at my extensive collection which I update as I read through my 300+ SharePoint feeds daily. I find this a valuable resource to pin point paticular areas o more...
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SharePoint Podcasts - Start listening!

October 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I was extremely dubious at first with the whole podcast scene, I'd rather read about it than listen to someone discuss it. But recently I moved closer to the city here in Perth, Australia and walk to work and have found myself listening to some podcasts. I have found them extremely informative and a great way to hear about what else is happening out there in the SharePoint Community. There are b more...
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Perth SharePoint gurus getting kudos in the big pond

October 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
2 Comments· 0 Links to this post

So I woke up this morning and saw a great set of tweets between Joel Oleson and Arno Nel (of SharePointMagazine.net). These mentioned both myself and Paul Culmsee as people to watch in SharePoint space, which is a great honour as I have a lot of respect for all three of these guys! Made my weekend! My missus is away for two weeks in Brisbane so in my lonely nights in I'm hoping to get out some gr more...
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SharePointMagazine.net: Leveraging the SharePoint Platform (Part 3)

October 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Arno Nel has just published my latest article on SharePointMagazine.net please go and check it out and let me know what you think! Starting to write the next one already which will also coincide with my RDN presentation at the end of the month! more...
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Limitations of SharePoint Wikis

October 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was at a client site yesterday and they wanted to set up a Wiki. Now I knew from reading various posts over my time that they weren't as great as some of the open source wikis out there. For me, Wikis certainly are a "tick in the box" as I discussed in my articles on SharePointMagazine.net. Some of the limitations I found were: Insert Image Something that seemed so simple wa more...
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Free Readify RDN Perth Presentation by yours truly

October 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I'll be stepping up onto the Readify pedestal on the 29th October to present 'SharePoint Development Best Practices'. After the presentation we'll be uploading our slides for those who can't make the Perth event. Hadley Wilan will be priming the audience and I'll be going into depth on SharePoint Development. My series of posts on my blog will be covered along with things I haven't yet got round more...
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Microsoft SharePoint ISV Partner Ecosystem

October 3, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was amazed at the amount of ISV's in the SharePoint marketplace that I hadn't heard of. I am subscribed to well over 300 SharePoint Blogs and thought I was covering enough SharePoint ground, but clearly there a few lurking in the darkness. I didn't actually make it to the Australian TechEd this year, but a few new names cropped up for me there in the Replication space which seems to be a big a more...
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Perth gets it's first SharePoint MVP - Sezai Komur

October 2, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

Congratulations to Sezai Komur out at Ignia. Sezai has presented a few times now at our Perth SharePoint User Group and specialises in Web Content Management Systems on top of both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.   Sezai wrote an excellent White Paper on Web Content Management and this led to him being invited to present alongsid more...

 

Perth User Group Meeting: Presenting external data sources using SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) and SQL Reporting Services.

October 1, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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It's the first month I've put my hand up to help with the Perth User Group with organisation. I've presented a few times in the past and I've managed to convince (bribe with beer) my good friend Richard Greene to present. He will be talking about "Presenting external data sources using SharePoint Business Data Catalogue (BDC) and SQL Reporting Services". The presentation is on the 21s more...
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Best Practices for deploying to the 12 HIVE

September 26, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've had yet more discussions in the office about best practices, this time referring to deploying to the 12 Hive. Here are some hard and fast rules. Don't modify out of the box (OOTB) files There's always a way around modifying OOTB files...even if it does mean selling a extra step to the Business Users. Just explain the risks of making them! You can extend with new file more...
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SharePoint Site Templates VS. Solution Features

September 25, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I've been putting a few development standards together recently to drive the way things are done in a SharePoint development environment. One of the discussions that introduced discussion was Site Templates. Site Templates can be created from the Web User Interface or SharePoint Designer. A Site Template is a .stp file, that renamed to .cab file contains various elements that make up a Site Ins more...
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SharePoint + Silverlight = ?

September 16, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I attended the Perth SharePoint User Group meeting today kindly presented by Young Oh of ReachPoint title "SharePoint + Silverlight = ?". Young covered: Silverlight – What, How, and Why? Silverlight for SharePoint – extending SharePoint capabilities with Silverlight SharePoint for Silverlight – developing Silverlight applications using SharePoint object model and content datab more...
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SharePointMagazine.net: Leveraging the SharePoint Platform (Part 2)

September 2, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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So I've posted the second part in my series on SharePointMagazine.net. Big thanks goes out to Richard Greene and Ryan Liu for reviewing my post before I submitted it to Arno Nell's online magazine. Looking forward to some great debates that hopefully are triggered from me putting my thoughts on Quick wins etc. out there into the SharePoint wild! Starting to write the third part now, so wishing more...
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SharePoint is not all of the problem, it's People too!

August 31, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I have been writing an article for Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net and have been repeating some things I've said in User Groups over the last two years of working with SharePoint 2007. The biggest thing for me is how oversold SharePoint 2007 is as a solution, for example, how Organisations can take it on without getting in expert help to implement it. EndUserSharePoint also has a post that p more...
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SharePoint Error: HTTP/1.1 404 Connection: close

August 25, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
3 Comments· 1 Link to this post

Had this little error recently and thought I'd blog about it just incase anyone goes Googling for options on resolving it. HTTP/1.1 404 Connection: close Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:40:55 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 12.0.0.6039 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET   In my case it was because I was getting an error in the Event Log: Event Type: Error Event Source more...
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Readify SharePoint Training in Perth, Australia

August 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Since arriving in Perth Readify have noticed the strong demand for SharePoint services locally and have reacted quickly to this market need. Readify have brought me onboard as their SharePoint Senior Consultant as of the 1st September so Readify can better address the SharePoint consulting demand locally. Readify have also initiated their own Readify SharePoint Architecture course internally so more...
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First Article on SharePointMagazine.net: Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

August 14, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Arno Nell has published my first of a six part series on Leveraging the SharePoint Platform. Have a read and let me know what you think! more...
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Joining the Perth Readify Team!

August 6, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I've just accepted a position as a Senior Consultant at Readify and will be located here in Perth. I'm really excited about the role and having the chance to work alongside people I have respected in the industry for a long time: Mitch Denney, Joe Sango, Paul Stovell, Paul Glavich, Chris Burrows, Peter Sullivan to name just a few of the 40+ team. My role will focus on my expertise in SharePoint more...
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Error: Failed to compare two elements in the array

July 27, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I tried to do an stsadm -o export today on our Production farm and got this lovely error: [7/28/2008 11:53:56 AM]: FatalError: Failed to compare two elements in the array.    at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.QuickSort[TValue](T[] keys, TValue[] values, Int32 left, Int32 right, IComparer`1 comparer)    at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.QuickSort[TValue](T[] k more...
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SharePoint MSDN Forums and SharePoint Community Trends

July 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
3 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I'm really impressed with the new forums that have been migrated to MSDN Forums v3.0, changes are listed here. One thing to note is the "proposed answer" functionality which I think will help people mark answers easier than the last interface. Of interest was the fact that the SharePoint topics balance between Answered and Unanswered Threads. Take these examples: InfoPath - Answered: more...

 

Perth SharePoint User Group Presentation Slide Deck: SharePoint Governance

July 16, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Thanks for those who braved the rain to come and listen to my presentation on SharePoint Governance. I've uploaded the slide deck here. Some of the key areas that came up during the talk I've noted below: SharePoint Designer is the Evil I've mentioned it before, but I finding it's dangerous enough to allow Business Users lose on SharePoint web interface, without letting them loose on Sh more...
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Perth SharePoint User Group Presentation

July 13, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I'll be doing a presentation at lunchtime in Microsoft's Perth office on Tuesday 15th July 2008 at 12:30 for the Perth SharePoint User Group. Last months presentation by Sezai pulled a big audience and he has put his presentations up on the User Group web site. My presentation will be on the articles I've been blogging on of late from a End User perspective, IS Owner perspective and also Develop more...
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Approved Page Layouts not showing in PublishingWeb

June 11, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

Had a "great" morning this morning involving releasing to our SharePoint 2007 Production environment which has been in place for nearly 18 months now - 6 server farm. Our UAT environment was built by myself last month which "matches" Production as closely as possible in terms servers etc. but it's been hard because the documentation of how Production built is incomplete. So more...

 

Solution Development for SharePoint 2007 Part 8

June 9, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
3 Comments· 0 Links to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 OK, so there's plenty of hype at the moment for ASP.NET developers to "leverage the platform"...being SharePoint and a really flash (I mean silverlight) interface for them to click around on with the title "Do Less. Get More. Develop on SharePoint". This made me cringe after the last couple of weeks I've more...

 

Solution Development for SharePoint 2007 Part 7

June 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 1 Link to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 "Event Receivers and Page Creation" In the last week or so I've been doing a lot of work with creating pages with content on it automatically based on event receivers firing when items are created on Lists. To follow on with the TV show Schedule scenario when a new schedule is created, I want to create a page in t more...

 

Solution Development for SharePoint 2007 Part 6

June 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 So far I've shown you guys how to deploy web parts and add them to pages with all of the related files. What I haven't shown you is how to deploy these things in a UAT or Production environment where STSDEV in Visual Studio won't be available. So how should it be done? Well there are a few approaches, but by far the newest more...
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Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 5

June 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
2 Comments· 1 Link to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 So the next part in my series will basically show you how to deploy a Content By Query Web Part (CQWP) and also it's associated elements. The screenshot below shows the structure of my project file now. The Solution package can be downloaded here.   Deploying the Content By Query Web Part As I mentioned in my previous more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 4

June 6, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 Adding extra assemblies to your Solution Just had to post about this because it's been driving me crazy. I've got various Solutions now that have been built using STSDEV 1.3 in Visual Studio 2008. There are common classes I've been using and was scratching my head to get the dll to deploy with the solution and was hacking more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 3

June 4, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
2 Comments· 82 Links to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 As promised I've uploaded the 3rd webcast to show how Chapter 3 is implemented. I've also posted the sample code below for you guys to pick and chose as you please. Click here to watch the webcast (NEW 32MB swf - 40mins) . The .zip of the solution can be downloaded here. Site Collection Feature.xml <?xml version=&quo more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007 Part 2

June 3, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
4 Comments· 0 Links to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 "Previously on 'Prison Break'...I mean 'Solution Packages for Developers'" My blog got quite a few extra visitors over the last couple of days since writing about SharePoint Development and "doing things the right way". A few people have been giving me "gentle" and "subtle" hints to more...

 

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

May 26, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
10 Comments· 58 Links to this post

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 I was scouring over my feed reader this morning and came across this post on the MSDN forums asking:"Any one please give me a step by step implementation of deploying a SharePoint application...(Modifying the SharePoint website content and deploying it to the SharePoint server)?" Now, all platforms are tricky whe more...

 

Leveraging the Platform

May 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I attended the Perth SharePoint User Group today and we were lucky enough to have Andrew Coates (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) presenting. Before I begin, I'd just like to say what an amazing presenter Andrew is and that hopefully one day people will say those things about me when I'm out Evangelising. Andrew was presenting something that had been presented at the SharePoint Forum in Sydney more...

 

Empower Users to manage Workflow (Part 1)

May 18, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I've repeatedly stated that there are certain areas of the SharePoint 2007 stack that are not true Enterprise level features. Workflow is one of them and various other bloggers and reports have stated this, my research links are a testimony to this. I believe Microsoft have confused the SharePoint community by giving two options with SharePoint Designer (SPD) Workflows and Visual Studio (VS) more...

 

How to prevent derailing SharePoint

May 7, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
1 Comment· 0 Links to this post

I've read Paul Culmsee's articles with great interest on Project Failure and will be helping him continue his series in the next few days on Development Failures. Joel Olsen, SharePoint God, also has found keen interest in it and has written some of his own experiences with it. It's interesting to see Joel write externally from Microsoft and it really does show a more open, less reserved appr more...

 

SharePoint and Service Desks - Organisational Responsibilities

May 5, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
2 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I attended a great Information Management morning in Perth last week and bumped into a fair few clients that I had engaged with in my previous Pre Sales role working for a Solution Integrator before moving to the dark side working internally in a SharePoint team. One of the guys asked me a question around "What do we need the SI to actually quote on to get SharePoint up and running?" more...

 

SharePoint 2007 SSP User Profile Import Connections Limitations

April 23, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

The organisation I am working for at the moment has an Active Directory set up of Users and Contacts. Running a ldifde query to output all Users and Contacts (below) provides me a list of 936 items. ldifde -f usersindomain.csv -r "(&(objectCategory=Person)(|(objectClass=User)(objectClass=Contact)))" If I use this query within the Import Connection in the SSP in Central Admini more...

 

The description for Event ID ( 27745 ) in Source ( Windows SharePoint Services 3 ) cannot be found

April 22, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Got a beauty of an error on our Production farm every few seconds: Event Type:        Error Event Source:        Windows SharePoint Services 3 Event Category:        General Event ID:        27745 Date:                23/04/2008 Time:                9:23:24 AM User:                N/A Computer:        CENTRALADMINSERVER Description: The description for Event ID ( 27745 ) more...

 

Errors when deploying Software Updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007

April 17, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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These errors are mentioned on the Deploy Software Updates for Office SharePoint Server 2007 right down the bottom. The Error Finding Cause Look in the linked log and search for 'ERR' matching case. 04/16/2008 16:37:17 6 ERR Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies. Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products and Technologies. Further information regarding this failure can b more...

 

Server X does not have any search query servers associated with it to serve queries

April 17, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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more...

 

Shared Services Provider: The operation completed successfully...but didn't

April 15, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I was configuring a User Profiles and Properties Import Connection today and kicked off a Full Crawl. As you can see from the above screen it states 'The operation completed successfully'...but it did not obviously crawl my entire domain as there are only 4 user profiles. I viewed the Import logs and found this error 'The profile import default access account is set to use the default more...

 

Shared Services Provider: Access Denied

April 15, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I had an interesting error yesterday regarding access to the 'User profiles and properties' page in the Shared Services Administration stating the generic "Access Denied" SharePoint site access denied. Now my first approach was to look who was the Site Collection Administrator, which was ... yes you guessed it me! And I can access the front page of the Shared Services Provider Pa more...

 

InfoPath Error on Resubmission

April 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I've been using the UDCX files for my Data Connections in my InfoPath form and for the Form Submit Action it came up with an error if I resubmitted the form: A value in the form may be used to specify the file name. If you know the value in the form that specifies the file name, revise it and try again. Otherwise, contact the author of the form template. At first I didn't know where to start more...

 

Solution Deployment stuck on "Deploying"

April 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I found a post on the MSDN forums because I have the same problem and it recommended the SP1 upgrade to fix the Day Light Savings issue which we have here in Perth Australia. The Day Light Savings actually finished last week before we could get all our ducks in line to test the SP1 patch on our Test Servers and I really couldn't wait for our SharePoint SP1 rollout to happen and needed a solutio more...

 

The Pain of Deploying InfoPath Programmatically

April 9, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
0 Comments· 0 Links to this post

I've been doing a lot of work around Governance of SharePoint within our organisation and have been hitting brick walls with regards to InfoPath. Especially with regards to Environmental differences when using Forms with Data Sources. I've found lots of articles pushing Data Connection Libraries with .udcx files which is fine to a point but this is the best one. With this being the best explan more...

 

SharePoint Australian Records Management

March 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was doing some research into InfoPath Forms Server and came across references to UniqueWorld's InfoView and SharePoint Forms product. Following the link took me to a message stating: Unique World Software (UWS) is changing our focus and will shortly be release exciting news about the work we’ve been doing bringing a VERS compliant ‘add-on’ to the Records Management capabilities of Microsoft more...

 

Programmatically deploying an InfoPath Form Library

March 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was finding it hard to find a specific answer on how to write a Solution Package with a Feature that would create a InfoPath Form Library with the associated template working when you click the New button. This approach allows for the most "hands-off" governed approach. Having to publish the form manually from the InfoPath client seemed overkill and error prone. In taking this approa more...
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STSADM Import: FatalError: Could not find WebTemplate

March 24, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Being new to the environment I'm currently in, I wanted to move some of the Sites into a development VM. I used stsadm -o export to backup the files and then wanted to run stsadm -o import to restore them into my VM environment. I came across this error: [3/12/2008 7:25:11 AM]: Start Time: 3/12/2008 7:25:11 AM.[3/12/2008 7:25:11 AM]: Progress: Initializing Import.[3/12/2008 7:25:12 AM]: FatalErr more...
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SharePoint stsadm -o import FatalError resolution

March 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was trying to import a Site Collection from one environment to another. I fired of the import command from a backup file created from stsadm -o export command. Then I created a new web application and a new  Blank Site Collection. I then ran the stsadm -o import command but received this error: "FatalError: The specified user [username] could not be found" There wasn't much on this, r more...
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SharePoint Debugging: No symbols loaded

March 10, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been reading a lot of posts on how to get debugging going when attaching to the w3wp.exe process. Disable 'Enable Just My Code' in Visual StudioThis blog post started me off in the correct direction by setting the Tools | Options | Debugging setting correctly. Modify the web.config Furthermore, it prompted me to change the web.config value from debug="false" to debug="true&q more...
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Working with SharePoint 2007 logs

February 27, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The SharePoint 2007 logs are by default found in the 12 Hive: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS\ I found this article here on throttling MOSS logs to pick and chose what you want. The interface in the Central Administration is not the best in terms of drop downs...would have been a lot easier if it was just all check boxes and power options to select all more...
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SharePoint 2007 ContentTypeID's

February 27, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Had some "great fun" with SharePoint over the last few days, basically when I copied some code on creating a Content Type to test in my environment. I noticed that the Content Type wasn't available on a Form Library and looked at the Parent Content Type in the user interface and noticed it was Item and someone told me it needed to be Form. I couldn't see a property to set what the Paren more...
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Content Query Webpart fun!

February 21, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been poking around an existing web part and have been having real troubles in pulling fields from a SharePoint List. I found this article extremely useful and basically found that this XSLT snippet saved me hours of debbugging:<xsl:for-each select="@*"> P:<xsl:value-of select="name()" /> </xsl:for-each> This basically outputs all the fields being par more...
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Solution stuck on 'Deploying' status

February 19, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Have spent some time looking around trying to work out how to change a Solution that is in 'Deploying' status to anything else. You can only Retract a solution when it is deployed. I found an article here which mentions the stsadm command 'canceldeployment' where you have to pass in a timer job guid. Anyway, another post showed me how to find this guid with the stsadm command 'execadmsvcjobs'. Al more...
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Access Denied to Master Pages and everyone using Site Administrator Account!

February 19, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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We have a fairly big team of developers working on a MOSS 2007 implementation. I'm always dubious of everyone using the Site Administrator account in any environment, be it Dev, Test or Prod, to make changes to Master Pages. If something goes wrong, we can't go and ask the person that made the change as multiple people would use the account. I found a thread online which walks you through givi more...
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The project type is not supported by this installation

February 19, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've just come on board at a new mining organisation in Perth, WA called CITIC Pacific Mining as the Senior SharePoint Consultant. As with all new client sites, when you rock up it's interesting to see how different everything is. Especially as this project started over 18 months ago when MOSS 2007 was extremely new and documentation and the community was no where near its saturation now. I ca more...
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I have moved

January 29, 2008 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've finally moved off of webhost4life.com to a Aussie born and bread server thanks to GoGlobal.com.au. more...
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Microsoft's Search Server 2008...very cunning plan

November 8, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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This was announced at the DevConnections event last night in Las Vegas. Basically they've rolled out the MOSS search in a free Express version and a Enterprise version. Check out the blog announcement and the product page. Entry market This will drive businesses to install WSS 3.0 with the new Search Server 2008. It can map to many content sources and also create various Search Scopes. The inte more...
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SharePointPedia, great for community, but not groundbreaking

November 6, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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There's a lot of noise out in the SharePoint space around SharePointPedia which is something that Lawrence Lui has been championing within Microsoft. There is screencasts here and here. Personalization I've created my profile and have added some content to various tagged areas. Be interesting to see if I get recommended ;-) The My Tags feature is very clever in terms of showing you the tags you'v more...
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SharePoint hotfixes

November 6, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I subscribed to the OzMoss.com listserve, reluctantly at first because I am so used to RSS feeds for managing my content and not my inbox. So far I've found it very useful, especially as GMail groups the emails together as the thread builds which makes it easier to manage. The RSS feed available for the listserve does not do any grouping of threads which can make it hard to follow especially if more...
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SalesForce.com - Force Platform

November 5, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Rather than me go into it too much, this video covers what SalesForce are doing in the SaaS space with a new Platform called Force. The blog also covers this is some detail and the press release covers it also. They've really thought it through in terms of scalability, security and performance. It's something managed by them, my biggest question is what Enterprise companies will pick this up or w more...
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Google OpenSocial storm brewing

November 5, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The OpenSocial site went live on Thursday and I'm sure will cause quite a stir once the whole blogging community starts discussing this. I've already subscribed to the OpenSocial blog that has some good coverage of who was at the launch event last week. The video of the launch is a good introduction to it all. Features TechCrunch talks about it in some detail after attending the event. They sum u more...
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Links for 4/11/2007

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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  » OpenLink Virtuoso: Open-Source Edition: Main.OdsIndex / socialnetworking » Google launches open APIs for social networks: News - Software - ZDNet Australia / google opensocial socialnetworking » » Did Google bluff Microsoft into over paying for Facebook? | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com / socialnetworking OpenSocial Google facebook Microsoft » Open Social Web / socialnetworking google » W3C Semant more...
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Social Bookmarking tool - Diigo

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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  Ok, I've been a big user of del.icio.us for the last few months and found a great add-on service called Diigo that allows you to extend the detail stored in social bookmarking but has backwards compatibility with del.icio.us with new features such as note taking etc. It allows you to not only bookmark the site but also for it to remember any sticky notes you add to the page etc. which is awe more...
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Facebook Enterprise 2.0 community

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I'm a big believer in 'eating your own dog food' and I'm a heavy user of RSS feeds, forums and social networking sites to keep up with my areas of interest. I've just been reading a forum thread on 'Do Enterprises WANT social networking?', there are plenty of experts in the field putting their views across which is excellent. The thread is part of the 'Social Networking in the Enterprise' Facebo more...
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Using SharePoint 2007 to implement Enterprise Social Networking

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I presented to a group of our Alphawest client base on Friday in Perth at QV1 this morning. Thank you for everyone who attended, it was a great turn out and I got some valuable feedback. Some great questions were asked: Should we wait for Microsoft to enhance SharePoint 2007 In terms of whether it is worth backing Microsoft to enhance existing functionality in SharePoint 2007 or whether to go out more...
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OpenID bandwagon and SharePoint

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Based on discussions I've been reading in my social networking feeds I've decided to get on the OpenID bandwagon, mainly because I don't want someone else to steal my user name that I always use of 'jthake' ;-) It's my branding! There are heaps of sites already supporting OpenID which can be seen at the OpenID Directory. WikiTravel On my travels I found wikitravel.org and decided to check out my more...
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SIOC Project

November 4, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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The SIOC project is evolving very quickly and has submitted to w3c in February 2007. One great use is notitio.us which allows you to view del.icio.us links in a tree form. This tool is awesome for breaking down tag clouds from social bookmarks. What it did show is the typos in my tags and the need for me to go through and clean them up and amalgamate them as I've got better at tagging since st more...
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Enterprise Social book marking and SharePoint

October 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've just started reading Bill Ives blog which focuses on Portals and Knowledge Management. One article covers what IBM are doing in this space. I've been preparing for another presentation on Enterprise Social Networking and have been approaching it in a way of describing the consumer space and then how the Enterprise could leverage this. Bill mentions David Millen's demonstrations on Enterprise more...
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Links for 10/10/2007

October 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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jthake's del.icio.us Bookmarks: Wednesday, 10 October 2007 to Thursday, 11 October 2007Joel Oleson's SharePoint Land : Default Install Configuration tags: configuration deployment sharepoint Community Kit for SharePoint - View Release - World Clock and Weather tags: sharepoint webpart www.Syntergy.com, Inc. tags: DocumentManagement partners shaerpoint tools Records and Document Management P more...
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Records Management Overview

October 11, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I got notified by the RMMA New Zealand branch that they were presented an awesome slidedeck from Mark Orange. It covers the New Zealand Public Records Act, the Records Center capabilities and integration with Exchange and Outlook with SharePoint. Mark highlights some key points, of which the main is around the fact that most of the talk on Records Management is based on the American acts such as more...
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Web content management approval workflow walk thru

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've found a lot of value recently in seeing blog posts with a complete walk thru in them as SharePoint is so huge you just don't get to see all of this stuff without configuring each individual bit of functionality. So I thought I'd quickly run through the approval process in a Publishing Site relevant to Web Content Management. Once you've created your Page and saved it you can click on &quo more...
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WCM Content Editing Overview

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been putting together some presentations on WCM and the functionality that SharePoint provides. So below I've walked thru the key areas within the Publishing sites available in MOSS 2007. I've tried to highlight where it falls short on other WCM products in terms of functionality on the way through also. Above is a screen shot of a out of the box Publishing site. You can see the Page Tool more...
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RSS Viewer Web Part

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was trying to construct a demo to show someone building up a My Site and sucking information from SharePoint List RSS feeds from various team sites. To my horror I got the error message "The RSS webpart does not support authenticated feeds." So does this mean that you can't consume RSS feeds from within it's own SharePoint environment or any authenticated source? There seems to be p more...
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SalesForce to enter ECM market

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Following up on the Google Apps approach to ECM, SalesForce has jumped on board for the ride also. They are going to go head to head with IBM, EMC and Open Text in Winter 2008 with a product called SalesForce Content. Also I was just reading over at ContentManagement365 that IBM are now in the Leaders Quadrant of the ECM Magic Quadrant. more...
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SharePoint Personalisation MySites

October 3, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I have been continuing my demonstration prep for a talk I'm doing later this month. I've decided to theme it on a well known UK TV Show called the Office. Everyone is familiar with the show and the organisation so it makes it easy to talk through scenarios. I have just done some quick notes on the useful web parts that I will be demonstration for everyone's reference. My Colleagues Web Part more...
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SharePoint ECM-Portal : S2

September 26, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Well, my French is a bit rusty but according to this post there is a new release of an ECM-Portal : S2 coming out in later 2007. This is further confirmed from Mary Jo Foley who seems to be well in the loop with all things Microsoft. Mary wrote a good post on what's coming in Office 14 here. The main feature here seems to be around MDM (Master data management) which she explains in her post, the more...
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SharePoint Licensing Changes

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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Was asked another curly question about Licensing on Friday, and was reading this during my daily reading about Internet facing (MOSSIF) sites and requiring CALs for internal connections. Basically, you weren't allowed to deploy an Intranet and Extranet in the same SharePoint farm because of licensing. CodeJedi.net has posted a new article stating that the licensing has been reworked to allow a d more...
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SharePoint InfoPath

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I've been getting some curly questions around InfoPath of late due to our organisation already using various other products in this space. It's great to compare these feature for feature to get a better understanding of what they do and what things can be done in them. I found a good post with a video of InfoPath features. It basically describes hooking up a form to a SQL Database Table for query more...
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SharePoint for Web Content Management (WCM)

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was reading an article over at Provoke about SharePoint and WCM. The main discussion was around what knowledge you need to implement this and the post does a great job of breaking these things up. We have a designer at our work that understands CSS better than anyone I've met and he's currently working on a RedDot CMS implementation. I think he'll be able to switch products with no problems and more...
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SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF)

September 25, 2007 · Posted by Jeremy Thake
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I was reading an article on WWF vs. LiveLink Workflow and remi