Shane Perran’s SharePoint Customization Blog

While I wish I had the time to respond to every question and comment I get, it’s not always possible.  Sometimes the more popular posts take on a life of their own and people from the community help to answer questions.

Unfortunately about 50% of the time someone posts a comment/question on one of the posts, they don’t always remember to come back and check up on it.

To ensure you stay updated on any comments you leave, you can use one of the two following options:

• You can subscribe to the posts individual RSS Feed.
• When leaving a comment, you will also now see a check-box which you can select to be “alerted” when a new comment is added to the post

One of the most powerful tools for customizing SharePoint 2007 is master pages. One of the most common stumbling blocks is understanding the many content placeholders and what they’re used for.

There have been several articles published detailing the placeholder which has been a huge help. For those that deal with SharePoint Customization on a frequent basis, I’ve created a desktop based on the placeholder articles which you can set as your windows desktop and use as a quick-reference. (The descriptions are not the greatest so I’ll update it again with better descriptions later). The following desktop outlines the default placeholders on a WSS 3.0 Master Page:

Information property of Jakob Nielsen, Usability Expert. 

Summary:
This year’s winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach to many hyped “Web 2.0″ techniques. While page design is getting more standardized, there’s no agreement on CMS or technology platforms for good intranet design.

The 10 best-designed intranets for 2007 are:

• American Electric Power (AEP), United States
• Comcast, United States
• DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany
• The Dow Chemical Company, United States
• Infosys Technologies Limited, India
• JPMorgan Chase & Co., United States
• Microsoft Corporation, United States
• National Geographic Society, United States
• The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), United Kingdom
• Volvo Group, Sweden

Technology Platforms

The 10 winners used a total of 49 different products for their intranets’ technology platforms. Clearly, intranet technology continues to be an unsettled field.The most-used products were: Windows Server, Google Search Appliance or Google Mini, SharePoint, SQL Server, Google Maps, Omniture, and Vignette.

Read the entire (2007’s best Intranet’s) article over at Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

This is a topic I have not seen a lot of discussion on so perhaps it could fall under a “did you know” category.

In Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can specify preferred templates, and page layouts.  Basically what this means is you can tell your site to allow only specific site templates, and page layouts, when creating new sub-sites, or pages.

This is a great way to enforce consistent workspaces in an otherwise free-for-all situation. 

You can configure the site templates, and page layouts to use by visiting: Site Actions -> Site Settings -> View all Site Settings -> Page Layouts and Site Templates.

The rest is very intuitive.  Good Luck!

I stand by the fact that one the best tools available for SharePoint Customization is the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.  This tool has recently seen a new version released (BETA3).

The IE Dev Toolbar let’s you do things like quickly view your pages in different resolutions, outline divs, images, or table elements.  One of the more useful features allow you to inspect the DOM by clicking on an element on the page to see what properties are applied to it, things such as what CSS class.

You can read all the juicy details or download the Internet Explorer Developer Toobar BETA3 here. 

For those that have asked, when testing pages in Firefox, I use Firebug another very useful tool.

I just realized how little I’ve been utilizing the “Manage Site Content and Structure” tool available out of the box with MOSS 2007.

While working on my most recent project I had templated a list w/ content types which I needed to roll out to a significant number of sub sites.

Using the Manage Site and Content Structure tool I have a birds eye view of all sites/sub sites where I can quickly roll out the lists.  The only minor quirk is it redirects you to the list/library you create afterward which makes sense most times.  In the event you are in mass creation mode however it would be nice to be able to set an option to remain in the tool.  None the less, it’s an awesome way to manage your sites!

You can access it via:
Site Actions, Manage Content and Structure.

A pet peeve of mine has long been the undescriptive errors SharePoint shovels out by default.  You know, when you change a line of code and now your page renders only “An unspecified error has occured”.  Pretty annoying right?

Turns out you can turn these into descriptive error messages which will actually help you identify the problem, what a novel idea.

Turns out I missed Tyler Butler mention this on his great post about his experience recreating his website using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Luckily for me, Andrew Connell brought this to my attention just a few days ago as I was ranting about useless error messages so I figure this deserves it’s own post.

To turn on friendly error messages in your web applications web.config (found via INETPUB).

• Disable Custom Error Pages by setting this web.config entry:  customErrors=off
• Enable Stack Traces by adding this property to the SharePoint SafeMode tag also in web.config: CallStack=”true”

Sorry for the lack of braces, my blog is not acting friendly to code display today.  SharePoint Safemode are tags, as is customerrors.

Each year several of these baton posts make their rounds.  This year I was tagged by Matt Ranlett to cough up 5 things you don’t know about me so here goes:

• When I was a teenager I wrote a pilot episode for a television program entitled “Life Like” for YTV.  The episode never went anywhere but it was a lot of fun and an interesting experience to write.
• During high school I was informed by a computer science teacher that I had no future in the technology field.  I later went on to win several technology related awards, one of which was a contest entered by individuals world wide to re-design the college website where that same person I understand was teaching.
• I am an avid Jim Morrison fan - I’ve read, watched and listened to about everything the doors have ever done or recorded.  I’ve had friends walk several hours across Paris to visit his grave and have been an avid fan of the Hard Rock Hotel/Cafe (rumored to be spurred by the Doors) - I been fortunate enough to visit several of them including the largest one in the world and of course I collect Hard Rock Cafe Tshirts.
• Given that I was tagged as part of an obviously Elite Canadian Contingency, I think it only fitting that I let everyone know that I think the greatest game ever played is Hockey, that it’s a Canadian Game through and through, that Don Cherry is a freakin’ Hero and that while the greatest player to ever lace skates is unquestionably Wayne Gretzky, my favorite players were Mike Bossy and Pavel Bure.  While I won’t admit to it openly, I may or may not secretly admire Brian Trottier’s mustache.
• My first experience with the internet came shortly after hearing about it - I managed to dig up an old X86 33Mhz PC w/ 4MB RAM, connect it to a 4400(or some random #) Baud External Modem and then Plug that into the telephone jack.  After several hours of frustration and troubleshooting, I learned that I would have much better success if I “actually HAD an internet connection(aka: Service Provider). (I guess that teacher wasn’t so far off after all!)

There you have it,

Now I’ll tag 5 random people that I know work in the SharePoint space at some level or other!

1. Andrew Connell
2. Heather Solomon
3. Michael Gannotti
4. Jason Medero
5. Liam Cleary

It’s officially been one year since I’ve quit smoking.  I have not mentioned the road to recovery on the blog mainly because I’m not a huge fan of publicizing my own stupidity. 

That being said today marks the official 1 year mark of being smoke free.  Statistically that means that if one smoked 1 pack of 20 per day every day for 365 days, well I would also be celebrating the anniversary of not lighting up at leats 7300 times.

In other news it appears I’ve been tagged by Matt to carry the “Things you don’t know about me” baton -  I’ll have to put a little thought into that before responding.

Creating a stylish page curl with CSS is pretty easy, you just need to create the curl and apply it as a background-image, position it properly and off you go.

This is one example of how you can get creative with WSS v3 sites using only CSS.

Here’s the code you’ll need to add to your style sheet. I recommend using the AlternateCSSUrl method if you are lucky enough to have a MOSS installation.

/* Page Curl */
.ms-bodyareacell
{
background-image:url(”/_layouts/images/pagecurl.gif”);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:top left;
/* padding should be a few pixels more than the pagecurl image height */
padding:30px;
}

Upload your pagecurl.gif to the images folder in the 12 hive: (Download a quick sample pagecurl.gif)
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

Before:

After:

You’ll need to modify the image background color to suit that of your site so I’ve included a large’ish version of the page curl in .PSD format for those that wish to modify it. Download the pagecurl.PSD file

Happy Customizing

I just returned home from our monthly .NET user group meeting. The presentation of the evening was by Mark Simms on multi-threading.

Earlier this month I managed to get my hands on some of those limited edition SharePoint Travel Tumblers which Lawrence and company produced.

To extend our thanks, I decided to spread a little SharePoint Cheer during the Holiday Season, and take a few photos with some members of the group underneath the mossletoe. (Ok that was cheezy).

Nothing says geek like a group photo with a 100 foot backdrop of Powered by MOSS 2007 Dual Projected onto a Massive Screen!

While customizing the Top Drop Down Navigation Bar, you might notice some of the drop down items do not stretch all the way when you hover over them.  You will get a “two tone” effect, not exactly desirable.

Since I’ve run into this several times I figured I would share the CSS I’ve been editing to get around this:

The problem child:
The *width and min-width seem to cause trouble when you have long items. 

.ms-topNavFlyOuts a
{
display:block;
*width:120px;
min-width:120px;
color:#3764a0;
padding:4px 8px 4px 8px;
}

The Fix:
Pretty straight forward, remove or comment out those two properties.  Use width:100%; instead.

.ms-topNavFlyOuts a
{
 display:block;
 width:100%;
 padding:4px 8px 4px 8px;
}
Happy Customizing

One common request from customers when it comes to SharePoint Customization is, How do I add my company logo to the site? This was common in V2, and it’s just as common with 2007.

You might be quick to point out that in 2007 “Hey that’s easy, you can do it from the browser by selecting Site Title, Description and Icon from the Site Settings page right?.

While you would be correct in saying this, what happens when the customer creates sub sites and while navigating through these sites realizes hey wait a minute, where’s my logo - you fraud!

While the OOTB functionality is great for specifying the logo on a site by site basis there is no way to have this inherited by all sub sites which are created there after. If you create 20, 30, 40 subsites, you would be forced to change the logo in the site settings of every site.

This easily forseeable crisis which you will inevitably face at some point is actually easy to deal with thanks to the power of .MASTER pages.

Getting started adding a company logo to the master page:

• Browse to the top level of your site collection in the browser.
• From The Site Actions Menu, Select View All Site Content
• Select the Site Collection Images Library
• Upload your Company Logo (companylogo.gif) - If required, approve this image.
• Open SharePoint Designer 2007 and Select File, Open Site. Type the URL of the top level of your site collection.
• Locate the master page gallery in the left pane. _catalogs\masterpage
• Double click the default.master (you may be prompted to check it out - if so choose yes)
• Search For: <SharePoint:SiteLogoImage id=”onetidHeadbnnr0″ LogoImageUrl=”/_layouts/images/titlegraphic.gif” runat=”server”/>
• Repace With: <asp:Image runat=”server” id=”logo” ImageUrl=”< %$ SPUrl: ~sitecollection/sitecollectionimages/companylogo.gif %>/>

What the above does is replace the default (site by site) mechanism for replacing the company logo with a hard coded reference to the company logo which you uploaded to the Site Collection Images library.

By doing this, all pages which inherit from the top level default.master will be updated to reflect this change. Each time you create a sub site, simply inherit the master page of the parent site to ensure this behaviour remains in tact.

Happy Customizing,

By now everyone has heard the tragic story of James Kim whom perished in the cold Oregon Mountains while searching for help for his wife and kids.

It’s hard to say how anyone would react in such a desperate situation, but in the unfortunate event you do find yourself facing such a crisis, a couple of important tips from the experts on surviving harsh conditions.

1. You can survive for three hours without shelter (in freezing temperatures)
2. You can survive for three days without water
3. You can survive for three weeks without food

It’s always easier to look back in retrospect of course so if nothing else, learn from this tragic event and remember that your best odds for survival are ensuring you have shelter.

If you deal with SharePoint Customization, you’ll likely be using SharePoint Desginer 2007.  This tutorial will help you get the most out of your workspace by creating a custom toolbar which will give you quick access to common tasks.

Create a Custom Toolbar

• Right click in a blank area next to your toolbar and select Customize.

  

• Select the Toolbars Tab and click New.
• Name your Toolbar anything you like.  In my case I chose SharePoint Workspace

  

• Click on the Commands Tab.  Notice that in the Categories list on the left you have all your available menus with the options each has showing on the right in the Commands section.  You can drag and drop commands on to your custom bar to add them.  In this case we want to create a bar that will give us the best options for Customizing SharePoint sites.

  

From the File Category Drag the following items to your bar:

• Workflow
• CSS
• New Website
• New Subsite
• SharePoint Content
• Document Library
• List
• Create from Master Page
• SharePoint Master Page
• Publish Selected Files
• SharePoint Site Template

We will stop here for the example but you can continue adding buttons as you see fit, moving through the categories and commands.

Drag your bar to the top of the screen until it snaps into place.  You now have your most common used items at your finger tips.

You can easily customize your bar further by selecting the Rearrange Commands Button.

Happy Customizing … Hope it Helps!

Direct Link from the ECM and SharePoint Team Blogs:

The AspMenu class that ships with WSS 3.0 (and by extension MOSS 2007) is nearly identical in behavior to ASP.NET 2.0’s Menu class (as the name implies). AspMenu derives from Menu and adds tweaks to work around a few reasonably well known annoyances and provides improved highlighting support.

Unfortunately, this class was marked sealed and is therefore not eligible to be used as the base class for derived types. Effectively, this means that customers cannot inherit the additional functionality of the AspMenu class when trying to provide further customization of the menu.

We realized this problem too late in the release process and were unable to remove the sealed marker from the AspMenu class that ships with WSS. However, we are instead providing the source code for that class here (as an attachment to this blog entry) under the name MossMenu.

Note: MossMenu is provided as is and will only work on sites built with WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007. MossMenu relies on some JavaScript which has been included along with the C# source. This is really just for completeness’ sake [aside: some trival about the use of the apostrophe for the possessive forms of nouns] as this script is automatically included on most pages through the core.js script include reference.

Issues with the ASP.NET 2.0 menu, which have been worked around:

1)     If the mouse pointer happens to be hovering over a menu item that exposes a fly-out as the page is loading, it is possible that an error dialog will appear stating: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site, Operation aborted” and a blank page will be shown upon clicking OK. It seems that the problem arises from attempting to append to the DOM before it is properly initialized.

2)     If SSL termination is employed on a site with a menu, users will be greeted with “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?” when hovering over a menu item which exposes fly-outs. (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=910444)

3)     In right-to-left locales, the fly-out indicator arrow still points from left-to-right.

Improvements to default highlighting behavior of ASP.NET 2.0 menu:

·         When hooking the menu up to a SiteMapProvider through a SiteMapDataSource, the menu automatically highlights the node that matches that returned by the provider’s CurrentNode property. However, if the particular node returned by CurrentNode is not shown by the menu nothing will be highlighted at all. The improved behavior determines if there is an ancestor of the current node which is displayed in the menu and highlights this node instead.Download the ASPMenu Source

Before you begin:

Download and install the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. This is a must have tool for SharePoint Customization. The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (get it here FREE)

You will also need your preferred text editor, if you don’t have one, Notepad will do just fine.

Overview:

Note: I wrote this using B2TR bits so there may be moderate name changes, or menu positioning changes but nothing that should totally throw you off.

There are many ways you can add and edit CSS in MOSS 2007, the method I will discuss here is lightweight and great to get a general understanding of how style sheets work, and get aquainted with some of the class naming conventions SharePoint uses.

Set up an Alternate CSS URL:

• Create a Publishing Site. Select Site Actions, Create Site. Then select the Publishing Tab and finally choose Publishing Site. It will take a few moments for your site to provision.
• Open your editor of choice and create a new file and add /* Custom Styles */ to it.
• Save it as “Custom.CSS”. If you are using notepad don’t forget to select “All Files” from the “Save as Type” drop down menu before saving, otherwise you will have a .txt extension.

Go to your website in the browser and select Site Actions, View all Site Content

• Select the Documents Library (create one if you don’t see it). Update:  The best place to store your CSS would be the Styles Library which is already created.  I have no idea why I said to place it in the Documents Library.  You can thank Amanda for reminding me.
• Select the Upload Drop Down, Then Upload Document. Select Browse and then browse to and select the Custom.CSS file you created to upload it.
• Go back to the Site Actions menu, then Site Settings, Modify all Site Settings.
• From the Look and Feel Section, Select Master Page.
• Scroll Down to the bottom of the page until you find the “Alternate CSS URL” section. Select Specify a CSS file to be used by this publishing site and all sites that inherit from it.

• Then Click Browse. Select Current Site Documents on the left and finally select your Custom.CSS file. Click Ok a couple of times to return to the site settings page.

• What you just did was set up an alternate style sheet for your site. Any style you add to this style sheet will take precendence. What that means is if you know there is a certain class applied to an element in your site and you want to change it, just add the class to your Custom.CSS style sheet and it will override the previous.

Identify and Overwrite Classes:

• Now that you are set up, you’ll need to figure out what elements of your pages you wish to change, and what classes are applied to them. That’s where the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar comes in. If you have not downloaded and installed the IE Developer Toolbar, you’ll need to do it now.
• Go back to the browser, and back to the default page of your website.
• From Internet Explorer Select View, Toolbars, Developer Toolbar. This will turn the bar on. Note: If you are using IE 7 you may need to hit the ALT key to expose your file menu.

• From the Developer Toolbar now exposed at the top of your screen, select View Dom. This will open a menu at the bottom of your screen.

• From the bottom menu, select Find, Select Element by Click. When this is enabled, you can click any element on the page to inspect that part of the DOM (Document Object Model) and subsequently see what class is applied to what element.

• As you hover over elements of your page, you will notice they highlight with a dark blue border. When you find the element you wish change highlighted, you can click it to show the information about it, such as the class which is applied to it.
• For this example we will assume we need to change the very top horizontal bar so that is has a yellow background, rather than the default blue.
• Hover over this element and then click it when it has a blue border. Notice that the class in the bottom tells you it’s using .ms-gloablbreadcrumb. That means that if we add that class to our Custom.CSS file, then edit it to have a yellow background, our site will update to reflect the change.

• To test this, Select Site Settings, View All Site Settings. Select the Documents Library and then Check Out the Custom.CSS file so that you can edit it. You will notice your ICON change slightly once the file is checked out. When it does click it to to open it in your editor.

• Add the following code to the style sheet:

.ms-globalbreadcrumb {

background-color:#FFFFB0;
}

• Save your style sheet.
• Back in the browser, check the style sheet back in, publish/approve it if necessary.
• You will notice now when you refresh the page that your top bar has changed to yellow.

This is the basis behind overwriting the custom CSS classes in a supported, non-destructive way.

Other Important Notes:

• These classes are originally defined in the CORE.CSS located in the 12 HIVE on the file system of the SharePoint Server.  Update:  To quickly copy/paste all properties set in the CORE.CSS file, you can “Control + Click” on any underlined class name in SharePoint Designer 2007.  Doing so will not only open the CORE.CSS file (or whatever stlye sheet your class is defined in), but also jump directly to that piece of code!
• If there is a theme applied to the site the CORE.CSS classes are overwritten by duplicate entries in the THEME.CSS. (It’s also important to note that Themes can be somewhat confusing as when you apply your theme, the THEME.CSS (and other styles) are actually added to a file called 1011-65001.css and then applied to the site).  If you were trying to personalize a theme by connecting to the site using SharePoint Designer 2007, you need to edit the 1011-65001.css file.
• I would consider it best practice to use the Alternatte CSS URL where possible and copy the classes “from the CORE.CSS (or theme.css)”, paste it to the CUSTOM.CSS and then modify the approrpriate properties, or add new ones.

The more comfortable you get with this the more creative you will find yours sites.

Good Luck and Happy Customizing.

Those involved with SharePoint 2007 have no doubt by now noticed that MOSS 2007 allows you to select a master page via the browser while standard WSS v3 installations do not.

Not to worry though, Renaud (AKA: Stramit) has written an awesome feature which gives you the ability to change the master page in WSS v3.  Good Job Renaud!

Get the WSS v3 Master Page Switcher Feature Here.

While browsing some of the self proclaimed “progressive” websites, I can’t help but notice it’s almost like walking through a house of mirrors - very few, if any unqiue qualities that make a company, product or service “really stand out”. This is partly due to a shift in how we consume information (via RSS). It’s easy to grab a ready made blog and start in (heck I’ve done it myself), but at what cost?

Have we forgotten about the Purple Cow already? If so I recommend a trip down memory lane to the website of Seth Godin.

We’re so blinded by the Hype of Web 2.0 that we seem willing to trade in our identity for a better user interface. I mean Web 2.0 is all about creating a better user experience right?

If we continue down this current path, we’re creating an even worse experience because while things “look” exactly the same - they are completely different. Imagine a can of Coke, but with Black Orange Crush inside.

Don’t be fooled, creating a better online experience isn’t really as hard as it seems, just follow some simple rules:

• Usable and Relevant Content - The more specific and refined your content is, the better chances it will easily fit on to your page, and the higher the odds are your viewers will both be able to find it, and actually read and understand it.
• Usable and Accessible User Interface - The easier your website is to use, the more people it is available to and the faster your users can find what they want so they can get the heck out of there, the better. Remember, time is very valuable.
• Plan for (and show) change - Let’s face it, it’s not Web 2.0 that will answer your problems, it’s planning for Web 3.0, 4.0 and beyond. Keep your site and products constantly updated. The moment you go stale is the moment people stop paying attention.
• Be Unique - Don’t be afraid to stand out, especially if you’ve done all the above properly.

Don’t forget to pay attention to the leading experts of visual presentation, usability, web standards, marketing, design and development, people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin and Jakob Nielsen. Take what they say seriously and as experience but not gospel. Apply a little common sense with a little experience and you should be just fine.

If you are nodding your head in agreement but simply do not have the time, resources or energy to see this through don’t worry. You can always hire me to do it for you. shane@graphicalwonder.com

There are several reasons I have been unable to post as much lately, but slowly I’m digging through a pile which I hope will lead me to being able do get back on a regular schedule.

First and foremost the main reason I have been unable to post as much as I would like lately is because I’ve been involved with two book projects which have really taken up a lot of time. 

My current project (Book), Beginning SharePoint 2007 is a joint venture between Amanda Murphy and I. 

We’ve been busy churning out what we hope you will find very useful as an introduction to SharePoint 2007 (700 pages of it in fact).  Not to worry I have not been sitting by idle, I have been pouring much of what i would normally write here into our book. 

Don’t worry though I will resume posting here much more frequently the moment my obligations there are complete.

On top of that I’ve been actively involved with the Microsoft RDP program where I helped to build a couple of pretty cool applications on top of the SharePoint 2007 beta and (TR) bits.  More on those soon also.

I hope everyone is enjoying opening new doors and creating even wilder opportunities on top of the RTM, and congrats to SharePoint Team, (and all other team(s)) involved on the release.

Joel and team(s) have released some much anticipated information on capacity and performance planning:

Planning for Capacity Boundaries, Estimating Performance & Capacity Requirements, Additional Factors, and Tools Within these docs you’ll find data on servers, server topologies, system sizing, figuring out requests per second, understanding performance characteristics and guidance around features, such as folders vs. no folders.

WSS: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/0e13e879-0156-4e9f-b6d5-abddcf326d211033.mspx?mfr=true

MOSS:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/eb2493e8-e498-462a-ab5d-1b779529dc471033.mspx?mfr=true
Head over to Joel’s SharePoint Land for More.

Last night I had a chance to take in INXS with the new lead singer JD Fortune as part of their Switch Tour.  All I can say about it is, AWESOME.  This show is intense, the energy is unbelievable.

The show ran about an hour behind schedule which left 1000’s of people flooding the streets outside Mile One in St. John’s.

The opening act, Brian Byrne (formerly the lead singer of I Mother Earth) a local boy from Newfoundland was great also which was a huge bonus.  Amanda and I had a chance to tell Brian face to face that it was a great show as we ran into him this afternoon at a local pub called The Ship Inn which is notorious for great food by day and local talent by night.

As for INXS, they exploded on to the stage and delivered pure energy for two solid hours.  JD was constantly interacting with the crowed, often leaving the stage and going to the far ends of the stadium.  The band was AMAZING.

The show was top-knotch and I couldnt possibly recommend it highly enough. A+++.  Sometimes the only thing you can say is WOW, this is one of those times.

Lets just say I NEVER expected to watch INXS sing “Burning Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash LIVE.

The only downside was the security trying to ream me on taking videos first w/ my camera, and later w/ my pocket PC.

If you get a chance to take in this show, do it.  Photo courtesy of the Telegram, it’s from the show last nite.

There has been much debate lately over how much value SharePoint 2007 offers to the enterprise out of the box.  Many are quick to point out shortcomings, some warrented while others are open to debate.

Sure, SharePoint 2007 cannot do everything you would like out of the box and there are very valid arguments for what consititutes a minimum initial out of the box offering but lets not lose sight of a few things:

• Regardless of many similarities, almost every organization (enterprise or not) is unique and as such they will have different needs.  At what point do you cut off out of the box functionality?
• There are many developers out there (including development organizations and partners) depending on the fact that SharePoint 2007 will need some extended development to better fit the corporate culture on an enterprise by enterprise basis.
• Microsoft has a pretty straight forward business model. They focus on offering platforms to build on, and the tools required to build on them.  I would think going “too far” in either direction would be bad for their personal interests from a business perspective.

I guess in the end it comes down to your own personal mantra, and business model.  Sure it’s not perfect and there is much to be desired especially from an architecture perspective, but that being said the (OOTB) value of this platform has always been to the average Information Worker while the other groups (IT Pro’s, Developers, Designers and Trainers) come in later, helping to extend the OOTB offering and educate people about it.

As the RTM launch nears there will no doubt be questions we cannot explain.  Remember, it’s easy to lose sight of the positive if we dwell on the negative.  I’m as guilty of it as anyone.

If you are feeling frustrated I have a challenge for you to re-introduce the value of the 2007 suite,  take a few days off 2007 and go back to using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0.

I am not sure how solid this information is but here’s what they’re saying:

A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that the planned release dates for Vista and Office are indeed November 30 after all, fulfilling Microsoft’s promise of delivering Vista in 2006.

In the US, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be at the launch event, to be held at the Nasdaq Stock Market in midtown Manhattan and the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

Ted Pattison pointed this out a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to mention it ever since as I was fairly suprised by the news.

Try these two things…

1) Go to the WSS Central Admin application and create a new Blank Site

2) Run STSADM -o CreateSite -url http://MyServer/sites/Site2

ownerlogin: your choice
owneremail: your choice
sitetemplate: STS#1

The one created through the WSS Central Admin application has the 3 standard groups for Owners, Members and Visitors. However the site created with STSADM has no groups at all.

The thought runs that since it’s possible to create groups via stsadm, e.g.,

stsadm.exe –o creategroup –url -name -description -ownerlogin -type

It’s preferable to give more flexibility and let the admin create their own custom groups.

I can’t help but hear, “The more you know …”

Direct Copy,
So, what is “Centro” you ask………..?
I am glad you asked….  
We are looking for a few good testers to help influence the direction of this new Microsoft® Windows Server Solutions Product. Do you have three 64 bit machines that you can spare to test some of the most exciting technology Microsoft is working on? I know the system requirements are a daunting one, but this is the only way we can test “Centro”. So, if you are already on the Longhorn Beta or the Exchange Beta, then you are already two thirds of the way there.

The “Centro” Product team is looking to you to help test the Beta of “Centro”. “Centro” is the code name for a new Microsoft® infrastructure solution that will help midsize businesses with less than 250 PCs in their environment.  Centro will bring together key server products for midsize businesses, including Windows Server “Longhorn,” Exchange Server 2007 and security technologies, plus a new, integrated management experience.  Centro is designed for IT professionals in midsize companies, helping them with server technologies that are easier to purchase, install and manage.

Details:

If you are interested in joining the “Centro” Beta please go to http://connect.microsoft.com click on Invitations sign in with your Windows Live ID (Passport ID) and enter the following invite ID; Extr-GHBC-JCJM. You will be asked to take a short Survey. Once you complete the survey look for an email from MsftConn@microsoft.com. If you don’t already trust this address, please add it to your trusted email addresses.
Microsoft MVPs:

Please contact me directly about this techbeta. I have a different invite ID to the Beta for you.
If you are really serious and would like to do the TAP, here is a message from Mike van de Merwe who is running the TAP for Centro:

You know you want to be more involved in Centro.  You even want to start using it to run your business!  Techbeta doesn’t let you do that but TAP does!  We are looking for more people to nominate themselves for the Centro Technology Adoption Program to do exactly what you want to do: run Centro in your production environments.  Why would you do something like this?  You get access to product support once you deploy Centro in production; you will have an assigned program manager from Microsoft who will work with you to mitigate risks in deploying and maintaining Centro; and you will be invited to participate in 1-2 onsite training sessions in Redmond.  Let me (mikevdm@microsoft.com) know that you are interested and we’ll get the ball rolling.

If you have any questions what so ever, please post a comment here or send me an email direct, kbeares@microsoft.com.
Centro press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-06Infrastructure.mspx 
Thanks,

Kevin Beares

WSSG
Centro and SBS Community Lead

If you are using managed paths and having trouble connecting to a site using a managed path in SharePoint Designer 2007 try the following steps:

• Check to see if the server you are connecting to is referenced in the Open Site Dialogue Box (ie: http://myserver)
• If so, delete this reference from the Open Site Dialogue Box and try again.

Note I have only received an error while running Windows Vista RC1.  The managed paths glitch is known as of B2TR and has already been fixed for the final. 

Good Luck!

If you have been creating custom themes in B2TR, you have likely come across the reapeating icon bug which shows up behind the lists/libaries in the quick launch menu.

This is a known (and very minor) issue in B2TR - The class which is causing this is table.ms-navitem.  It’s a simple case of a repeating background.

If you have access to SharePoint Designer 2007 and would like a quick, temporary fix complete the following steps:

• Connect to your site in SharePoint Designer 2007 (File, Open Site)
• Open the themename1011-6001.css file located the _themes directory.
• Locate the table.ms-navitem class and add the following property: background-repeat:no-repeat;

Alternatively just scroll to the bottom of the stylesheet and copy/paste this.

/* Quick Launch Repeating Background Fix */

table.ms-navitem {
 background-repeat:no-repeat;
}

There are four link states which can be specified and each one is equally important - especially when you have multiple link styles in your CSS.  If you miss a state, it can (and does) get picked up by a previous link style either in the same style-sheet, or another style-sheet which can cause issues. I run into a lot of these issues daily while editing SharePoint style-sheets. 

It may seem like you save time and or bandwidth by using shortcuts such as:

.blah a:link, .blah a:visited { color white; } and leaving out the hover/active states, but the fact remains if you use all states, all the time and in the correct order you have complete control at the exact point you need it and there will be no overlap either from styles within the same style-sheet, or other style-sheets.

So please, for the love of all that is holy start using all link states and in the correct order as listed below.  If you have trouble remembering them, think “LoVe HAte”. 

a: link
a: visited
a: hover
a: active

Today I said good-bye to someone very special to me, a great friend of 10 years - my dog Zhiva.  She was much more than a pet, she was quite simply a family member. 

While it’s hard to accept, and easy right now  to dwell on the pain, I want to instead acknowledge 10 years of sheer joy and the fact that if I had to do it all over again - I wouldn’t change a thing.

I’m thankful I was there at her strongest and most fragile points, including the very end.  I am glad I was there to comfort her and I will miss her more than anyone could possibly imagine.

Zhiva (Oct 27 1996 - Oct 7 2006)