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TEDx San Antonio will be on October 16th at Trinity University’s Stieren Theater. Only 350 attendees will be selected, so read more and apply today at tedxsanantonio.com The speaker lineup will be announced soon, but I know there will be some top local leaders presenting their ideas. |
| MCM Keynote - I talked on Business Connectivity Services | 
| I returned early to San Antonio from DC, but I really enjoyed the SharePoint Best Practices Conference while I was there. The keynote “What Microsoft Certified Masters think about SharePoint 2010” increased awareness of the MCM program. I received a lot of questions from attendees who are interested in pursuing the certification.
There is a nice write up on the keynote by John Anderson on the Bamboo Community Site. | Thanks Mom! During my BCS portion of the keynote, I thanked my mom for all she’s done for me. I got a lot of feedback about that. For example: 
MCM Answers Program fee: US$18,500 (includes the price of all three attempts of all required exams, including the final lab exam) Upcoming Rotations for Microsoft Certified Master: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 - October 11 – 30
- January 24 – February 12
- April 25 – May 14
The People | 
| The best part of a conference like this is the people. Rick Taylor, who spoke at SharePoint Saturday San Antonio last fall, sported an “I am the Best Practice” T-Shirt and great smile in the speaker lounge. I was flattered to have “Wonder Laura”, “The SharePoint Ninja”, Asif Rehmani and 2 other speakers attend my Mapping Mashups in SharePoint Designer Presentation. Asif’s name rhymes with Awesome and he gave away DVD’s from Sharepoint-Videos.com for correct answers to SharePoint Designer Trivia while my laptop rebooted 3 times before my first breakout session.
I learned that Cathy Dew runs 3 User Groups and has been a part of 19 SharePoint Saturday Events. I also learned that Michael Doyle, aka SharePoint Ninja, had written a great follow up article to my mapping mashups series. He also attended our SharePoint Saturday last year. | |
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As an organizer of the San Antonio SharePoint User Group, I get the opportunity to meet lots of new members of the SharePoint Community. For vendors new to me, one of the first things I do after visiting their website is check SharePointReviews.com for their listing. To me, that is a measure of SharePoint awareness at the company producing the product. If you make a product for SharePoint, I recommend submitting your product to SharePointReviews.com. It won’t make your product more mature with it’s interaction with SharePoint, but it will give you a better look to the community. When you visit the site, check out the Top Rated Products. You can find out what other people think of SharePoint Products and you might even find some ideas to improve your own work! |
| Do you ever forget things that you’ve learned before? I do. Case in point, last week I was looking at a page similar to this: 
begging the question at the top of the post. The above snip of a SharePoint 2010 site gives me almost no clue what that permission level, Limited Access, might mean. In my case, it was a SharePoint 2007 site, but they act very similar. Drilling down to edit the user’s permission gives a little more information, as shown below, but I’m still left wondering, how miwise was given this Limited Access. More to the point, How do I remove it? I clearly can’t use that greyed out checkbox to take Limited Access away. 
The answer to why is clear when you read the documentation | | - Limited Access Can view specific lists, document libraries, list items, folders, or documents when given permissions.
Note You cannot assign this permission level to users or to SharePoint groups. Instead, Office SharePoint Server 2007 automatically assigns this permission level to users and to SharePoint groups when you grant them access to an object on your site that requires that they have access to a higher level object on which they do not have permissions. For example, if you grant users access to an item in a list and they do not have access to the list itself, Office SharePoint Server 2007 automatically grants them Limited Access on the list, and also on the site, if needed. | In other words, if you’re looking to understand why a user or group has limited access, look first at the places permission inheritance has been broken, then you may find an escalated permission. To remove limited access, restore inheritance or remove the higher level permission given to the item or items. |
|  Yesterday, Paul Andrew announced availability of the VSeWSS import tool from MSDN.
This tool compiles on machines running Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and have the SharePoint 2010 SDK installed. If you are developing in SharePoint 2007 today, this tool can be an important step in your eventual upgrade to 2010. Personally, knowing I can develop with the Visual Studio Enhancements for Windows SharePoint Services today and import directly to VS2010 and SharePoint 2010 tomorrow gives me a feeling of comfort with the upgrade process. Reference Import Tool Prequsites |
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One example of how PowerShell can help you in your SharePoint migration and upgrade tasks is directory comparison. I’ve used many tools for directory comparison before, but this is hands down the easiest when PowerShell is already installed. In three lines, you have a list of Features installed on one web front end but not the other. PowerShell Basics The solution is based on two out of the box PowerShell commands and one PowerShell principle. - Dir command – lists the files and folders in a directory
- Compare-Object command – given two lists, display the differences
- $variables assignment – assign the directory listing to a variable for use later
My Scenario Starting a new project, I was faced with the challenge of reproducing some of an existing farm on my development machine. I was given installation instructions and a copy of the 12 hive. After following the instructions, the customizations were failing on a missing feature. Using the powershell script above to compare my new SharePoint Root Template\Features directory to the copy from production, I was able to identify the missing features and subsequently locate the Solution Package that hadn’t been included in the installation instructions. Applications for Upgrade and Migration Besides development, SharePoint upgrades and migrations are both common scenarios when directory comparison is important. Through some trial and error, you may be able to determine SharePoint Root Directory modifications that were made manually versus those deployed through SharePoint Solution Packages. Install a package, compare to the root you are trying to reproduce and repeat, until you’ve added all of the solution packages you have available. The Features that still show are the ones deployed manually or by packages you don’t have. Create a package for the new features and you will be ahead of the game next time you need to add a Web Server to your Farm or upgrade to SharePoint 2010. |
| I'm excited to try out SharePoint 2010 Foundation hosted by fpweb.net. What do you think of my new blog location? It certainly feels right to me! |
| Reposted at new location. Orginally published 20-Oct-09 If you are a SharePoint Developer and are not using Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services yet, please read Paul Andrew detail how VSeWSS 1.3 March 2009 CTP addresses all common SharePoint Developer requests. When you are using the extensions, the first thing you might try to do after watching Kirk’s video is use the MOSS SDK Empty SharePoint template to create a very basic feature whose Element Manifest might look like this: 
Download ElementManifest1.xml Warning: Don’t User Add New Item to Create your Manifest! When adding a new Element Manifest in VSeWSS, the method you use is very important. Don’t use Add | New Item to create a new xml file and type in the above code manually. You will be able to add the new xml file to the project, but WSP View will not pick it up when you add it this way. If you edit the feature.xml to refer to it, your change will be reverted automatically. 
Method 1: WSP View Create New Feature Step 1 is the same for both Methods. Create a new Visual Studio Project using the SharePoint SDK Empty template. This will give you an empty project with the correct SharePoint References and just a manifest.xml in WSP View.
 Step 2: From WSP View, hit Refresh to show the Solution name in the window and expand the solution to see the Manifest.xml. Click the Create new feature button to open the create new feature dialog.
 Step 3: For the simplest custom action feature, select Web scope and check “Add default element.xml file.”
 Result: A new feature and a new element in your WSP View with the corresponding .xml files created. And, you will see a new Element1.xml file in your Solution Browser. Double click Element1.xml to open in the text editor to add your action. You can paste the code inside my ElementManifest1.xml CustomAction Element for a quick example of a new Site Action. Make sure that you don’t remove the Elements ID attribute that was generated by VSeWSS .  
Method 2: Add | Exisiting Item - Repeat Step 1 from Method 1, then download ElementManifest1.xml to your local hard drive.
- Right click the project in Solution Explorer and select Add | Existing Item.
- After you select ElementManifest1.xml, you will see it appear as in the results above for Method 1.
- The ID Attribute will be generated by VSeWSS and inserted into Elements element of the file
- A reference to the manifest will be added to feature.xml.
Result
 Notes Double click on the feature or element name in WSP View to rename the feature or solution.
 Right click Deploy from the Solution explorer and your new solution will be added, deployed and your feature activated on localhost:80 by default.
 VSeWSS 1.3 always deploys an assembly in the manifest.xml even in cases like this where it is not necessary
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| Originally posted 7/2/2008 at my old blog host.
Summary
Demonstration of a SharePoint Contacts List displayed on a Google Map.
Key Points
- The Contacts List Template in SharePoint provides fields for addresses
- Google Maps provides a mapping service
- SharePoint integrates easily with web services
Overview
Part 1
- Create a new contacts list
- Create a new Page
- Add a Google Map to the page
Part 2
- Add a Data View of the contacts list to the page
- Modify the Data View to show the contact's locations on the map
Demonstration
Create a new contacts list
Open the Site Actions Menu and Select Create
Select the Contacts Template
Name the new list Map Contacts
Add a couple of contacts
I've chosen to add a SharePoint MVP who lives in Houston, Texas. For this example, I'm just mapping the city and state, but with a little more work you could map a street address.
Create a new Page
This is similar to the first step, but Choose Web Part Page.
Name the page, then pick any layout and select a Document Library.
Note: If you don't have a Document library to use, you can add one from the Create button and then come back to this step.
Add a map
On our new page, select Add a Web Part
Select the Content Editor Web Part
The next part is a little bit complicated, but I have tried to make it a little simpler by providing this download GoogleMapsGeocodeExtract.txt.html. The one modification required to the html file is to change the API key. After you edit the file, upload it to your Document Library and put the URL in the Content Link property of the Content Editor Web Part.
Note about the API Key: Google Maps API Keys are linked to your domain name of your website. To acquire a key, signup by entering your website URL.
At this point you will have a working map displayed on a SharePoint page (demo link on blogs.microlinkllc.com). In Part 2, you will display the contacts on the map.
Note: If you have any trouble following the steps in this post, I just found a excellent post on SharePoint Blogs with a 4 step process to get just a basic map running in a content editor web part.
Update 9/9/08: I added the demo link and the reference to SharePoint blogs for added detail. |
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| Tom is a Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint 2007. I write an average of 2 posts a month on topics I have interest and experience on. |
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