January 2008 - Posts

• Audience Targeting in Sharepoint

  Audiences and audience targeting provide a nice compliment to user profiles. The idea of an audience is that it provides a basis for targeting content on a Windows Sharepoint Services site page to one group of users. For example, suppose there is an announcement or weekly sales figures that only sales people would be interested in seeing on the home page of a portal site. Audience targeting allows you to add content to a page that is displayed to some users but not others. First, you must create audiences through the SSP admin UI which involves defining criteria that can be AND-ed or OR-ed together. For example, one audience can be defined as all users in the Active Directory group named Sales. Another audience can be defines by defining criteria on user profile properties such as all users with the word "sales" in their Title or their Department as defined within their Active Directory profile. The process starts by navigating to the admin web site on Sharepoint and then opening the SSP admin console. One of the options available on the SSP admin web site, should say "Audiences". Select this option. The "Manage Audiences" web site provides a number of options that allow you to create and maintain audiences. There are basically three steps in implementing an audience: Create the audience and define the rules. Compile the audience to determine which users will form part of this audience based on the rules. Use the audience by connecting it to a web part like a document library. Therefore the first step is to select the option called "Create Audience". In the "Create Audience" configuration screen specify an logical name that will define whom will be part of this audience and provide a brief description. The other important thing is to select a user account that will have the right to redefine and maintain this "Audience" in the future. On the next screen we are going to define the rules that will determine how the users are selected to join this audience. This can either be done on an inclusion or exclusion basis. The last two options buttons on the above screen shot is what will determine this. Once you done select "OK". The rules that are used in audiences can be defined in two ways: User accounts and groups from Active Directory - this is done by selecting the "User" option button. Profile information stores in the SSP database - this is done by selecting the "Property" option button. My explanation will be based around the profile database as this will be the more common use of audiences. There are a number of assumptions made at this point: An SSP has been define to import user information from Active Directory or another source into the SSP database. This is called profile imports. The "My Site" option has been enabled and users have all updated their profiles using this. The drop down list box that appears below the "Property" option lists all the metadata fields as defined for the profile import. This therefore allows you to select the field that will contain data used for the comparison. Select the operator for comparison from the next drop down list box and then type the value into the textbox that you want to compare it with. Once you select "OK" then the rule will be defined. Multiple rules can be defined and the stringed together using "AND" and "OR" operators, thereby allowing you to create very complex rules. The last aspect of using audiences is configuring Web Parts to use them. On a Web Application that's configured with Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server and an SSP, each Web Part has an audience targeting setting at the bottom of the Advance settings section. To do this, navigate to a Sharepoint Site that already has a document library defined or a similar web part. Complete the following steps to apply the audience: Switch the page into "Edit Mode" Add a web part into a "Zone" Select "Modify Shared Web Part" from the edit drop down menu on the web part itself. On the toolbox that opens on the right hand side, navigate down to advanced settings. Select an Audience in the "Target Audience" textbox by browsing for it. Apply the settings to the web part by selecting "OK" Exit "Edit Mode" of the page to test. You should notice that the web part should disappear from the page if you are not a member of the audience that you applied to the web part. Of course, Web parts do not provide the only means to make use of an audience. You can also write custom code against the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server object model to programmatically determine whether the current user is in a specific audience or not. From that information, you can create a custom Web Part whose output is customized depending on what audiences the current user is in. Also, Targeting now works with Windows Sharepoint Services sites that have been created in a Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server environment. Related Blogs: Overview of User Profiles in Sharepoint Overview of Shared Service Providers in Sharepoint Posted Jan 29 2008, 03:12 PM by Neil with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Sharepoint

• Offline Sharepoint documents in Groove

  I have been asked by many people over the last couple of months on how to make Sharepoint documents more mobile. When you think about mobile applications, there are normally three options that come to mind: Remote mobile web sites utilizing GPRS, Edge and 3G to browse them (at least in South Africa) Installing applications on a mobile device that runs locally without a permanent Internet connection. Smart clients that use remote XML web services and applications installed on the device. Unfortunately Sharepoint doesn't do any of these very well, but there is an alternative in the format of Office Groove 2007. The only problem standing in the way is that Groove 2007 only ships with the Enterprise or Ultimate editions of Office 2007, but then again, if you are facing this particular problem then you most likely have these editions installed in any case. The focus with Groove 2007 is to take the documents stored in Sharepoint and create an offline copy of them that can be synchronized back to Sharepoint. It will not take a copy of the entire site with lists and web parts, only the contents of document library's. In the following explanation of how to do this, a number of assumptions are made: Groove 2007 has already been configured with a user account. This can either be peer to peer or connected with a Groove Server installation. There is already a site configured in Sharepoint that has a document library in it with some content. The process starts by opening the Groove 2007 Launch Bar: The Groove Launch Bar is divided into two parts: Contacts - this gives you the capability of connecting to people. Workspaces - they allow you to share files and applications with your contacts. To take Sharepoint documents offline we have to create a workspace to store these documents. Select the "New Workspace" hyperlink at the top of the launch bar.     Give the workspace a name and then choose the type. If you want to use the workspace for Sharepoint documents then the option must be "Standard Workspace". Select "OK" Once the workspace has been created, select the "Add Tools" option in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.   This will open a dialogue box that will allow you to select various tools to add to the workspace. One of the tools that we can choose is "Sharepoint Files". On the selection of this tool a wizard will be initiated that will guide you through the rest of the process. Select the "Setup" option on the wizard dialogue box to get the browse options that will allow you to select a document library on a Sharepoint site. Type in the URL to a document library on a Sharepoint site into the "Address" textbox and then click the "Select" button. This action will then create an off-line copy of the document library in the new workspace in Groove. A number of options are available to manipulate the documents that are very similar to those found in Sharepoint: New, Edit, Open Read only, Delete Check In / Check Out Synchronize Now - this will synchronize your off-line copy with Sharepoint. Advantages of Groove: Bit Synchronization - Groove works very similar to a download manager for the Internet. If the connection is dropped during synchronization, it will remember where it left off and continue from this point when the connection is re-established. This becomes a very good solution for sites with limited bandwidth or connection problems. Protocol usage - Groove will use any protocol to its disposal to connect to a remote site. This can range from HTTP, FTP, WebDav, SMTP, SNMP and many more. This increases the likelihood of almost always being able to connect. The disadvantage is that it consumes a large amount of bandwidth in the process. Related Blogs: The importance of Outlook 2007 as a user interface into Sharepoint Rendering Sharepoint sites to Mobile Devices Posted Jan 19 2008, 05:16 PM by Neil with no comments Filed under: Sharepoint, Office 2007

• Rendering Sharepoint sites to Mobile Devices

  Many people are not aware of this, but Sharepoint has the built-in ability to take any site, list or document library and render it to mobile devices without any additional development required. It might not be as pretty as you might like, but it works and that is all that matters to a lot of people where budgets are concerned. The process is so simple it is actually scary. I will start by showing you a normal Sharepoint site and then we will render it to mobile. This is a sample site that I have created, but the important thing to note is the URL used to navigate to the site. To render the same site into a mobile Internet page just add "/m" to the end of the existing URL and the result should look as follows: You will immediately note that not all items on a site are rendered into mobile links. Only lists , document library's and picture library's are supported. Web parts are too complex to render. Select a link to a list like a calendar. List items will then be displayed below each other and filters and views will also be available to make navigation easier. A new item can also be created by selecting the link on the page. Once again, the layout might not be as elegant as you might like, but it works. I will leave you to explore the rest of the options available using your own implementation. Related Blogs: Offline Sharepoint documents in Groove Overview of the .NET Platform Posted Jan 11 2008, 02:16 PM by Neil with no comments Filed under: Sharepoint

• Publishing an Infopath form to Forms Services in Sharepoint

  We have been trying to create the "Paper-less Office Environment" for almost 30 years, or have we? There are many applications in the market place that have the ability to create electronic forms and workflow them through the organization and they have existed for years. Until recently it seemed that their was a lack of will to actually implement these solutions in the enterprise, but with the dawn of the information age we are being overwhelmed with information and now we have no choice. Even Microsoft has had a go at this with their previous release of MS Office that included Infopath 2003 and before that we had e-forms in Outlook. All of these failed for various reasons, but I think that with the advent of Infopath 2007 and Sharepoint Forms Services, Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction. Lets take a look at how it works and then you can make up your own mind. The process starts by launching an instance of Infopath 2007. The first dialogue box that you will see, provides you with options to create a new Infopath form, but for illustration purposes I will be using a sample template to speed up the process. It is not my intention to explain all the in's and out's of Infopath, but to explain the purpose behind Forms services in Sharepoint and where Infopath fits in. Choose the sample "Expense Report" from the list by double clicking on it. This will then create a form with a layout already in place. It is also possible to take a MS Word document that has already been created and covert it to an Infopath form. After all, most of these documents already exist, just not in Infopath. On the right hand side if the IDE you will notice a toolbox that provides many options for building the form. In the next section of this blog I will briefly explain the purpose behind each section of the toolbox: Layout: The Layout section of the toolbox is used to create the main design of the form. Like most HTML pages used on the web, we use tables to create different areas for content. As illustrated in the screen shot on the left, there are a number of standard layouts that can be chosen, but it is also possible to build it manually from the toolbar. In this example the layout has already been established.  Data Source: The ultimate point behind an Infopath form is to capture information that will be stored in some kind of database. To facilitate this we need to connect the form to the back end database and that is what a Data Source is used for. The data source can be connected via an Ole_DB , ODBC , XML web service or even store the data natively as XML. The best results are achieved via an XML Web service as the form will ultimately be rendered as HTML via Forms Services and then direct database connections are not supported. Once the Data Source is established, it is a simple matter of dragging and dropping the fields onto the form. They will automatically become data bound controls to stored the data. This example stores the data in the form as XML. Controls: Dragging and dropping controls from the data source only creates text boxes and labels, but sometimes more advanced controls are required. Using the control toolbox you can add date controls, checkboxes and even buttons. The buttons allow you to attached script to them written in VSTA that allow for more complex validation and workflow solutions. Views: An Infopath form is effectively and Office document that needs to conform to the standards imposed by the organization. This implies that although we might design the document to be user friendly when entering data, this is not how it's allowed to be printed. Creating different views allows you to control different layouts of the controls depending on whether the forms is viewed on the screen or whether it is printed. Now that the design phase of the form is completed, it is time to upload the form to Forms Services running in Sharepoint. This is done by selecting the option called "Publish Form Template" from the toolbox. The first thing that will happen is a request to save a local copy of the form before uploading to Sharepoint. Note the file extension of an Infopath form is XSN. After saving a local copy somewhere on your machine, a wizard will launch guiding you through the rest of the setup process: Step 1: The form can be uploaded to a number of locations, but the one we are interested in is "Forms Services on Sharepoint". I might just point out that you can only publish a form this way if it contains no code. If any code has been written in the form, then you need to save it to a network location and upload it into Sharepoint using the Admin Console for Sharepoint. This is purely a security mechanism. Step 2: The next steps requires a URL to an existing Sharepoint site where you would like to make the form available for use. This normally depends on the purpose behind the Infopath form and the site that is best suited for this purpose. Copy the URL from IE and paste it into the wizard. Step 3: This form will be published into a "Form Library" in Sharepoint so that users can instantiated infinite amount of copy's and store them. If you want to use the same form in multiple document library's across multiple sites in a site collection, then you need to publish it as a "Content Type". Step 4: Assuming that you selected "Document Library" in the previous step. The next question would be "New" or "Existing" document library. It is typically a good idea to create a separate "Forms" library" for Infopath documents as they do not fit in well with other document type in a shared library. Step 5: Assuming you selected "New" document library in the previous step. Provide a name and description for the forms library. Step 6: Document library's have columns displaying meta data about the content type's and documents stored in them. It is therefore possible to expose some of the fields in the Infopath form as meta data columns in Sharepoint by adding them to the list. Step 7: On the last dialogue box the only thing left to do is "Publish". If all the options have been configured correctly, then Infopath will contact Forms Services in Sharepoint and "Publish" the form into a document library. To test that the solution worked, navigate to the Sharepoint Site in IE and refresh the page if you already had it open (This is the same URL that we provided in the wizard). You should notice a new shortcut on the "Quick Launch" bar that represents the name you chose earlier for the Document Library. Select the link and open the library. On the menu bar of the document library, select "New". Notice that a new document template appears called "New Document" that represents the Infopath form built earlier. If you want to give a proper name to the shortcut then you will have to convert it to a "Content Type". By default, if you have Infopath installed on you PC and you select "New" from the menu then it will open the template in Infopath. If not, then then the form will be converted to HTML by Forms Services and displayed in IE. I will illustrate both. Once you select "New" from the menu bar, the form will open in Infopath 2007 and allow you to complete all the fields. When complete, there are two options available on the toolbar: Submit - this will commit the information to the data source configured during the creation of the form. At this point you can close the form without saving a copy to Sharepoint as the data has already been committed to the database. Save - this will save an actual copy of the form into the document library in Sharepoint. This is quite useful if you are applying workflow rules to the document library. To illustrate the form in IE, you need to save a copy to the document library. Navigate to the form in the document library and select the drop down arrow next to it. In the drop down menu you will find an option called "Edit in Browser". By selecting this option the form will be converted to HTML by Forms Services and displayed in the browser. Everything that you could do in Infopath can now be done using IE without having Infopath installed on the users PC. This allows only "Forms Designers" to have Infopath installed and the rest of the user base uses IE. This was a major problem in Infopath 2003 as everyone required a copy of Infopath installed. I hope this blog was informative and that you are starting to see where Microsoft is going with this technology. Related Blogs: Differences between WSS and MOSS MOSS - Enterprise Content Management Architecture Posted Jan 10 2008, 02:15 PM by Neil with no comments Filed under: Sharepoint, Office 2007, InfoPath

• Records Management in Sharepoint

  Determining which documents and other physical or electronic items in your organization are records is the responsibility of corporate compliance officers, records managers, and lawyers. By carefully categorizing all enterprise content in your organization, they can help you ensure that documents are retained for the appropriate period of time. A well-designed records management system helps protect an organization legally, helps the organization demonstrate compliance with regulatory obligations, and increases organizational efficiency by promoting the disposition of out-of-date items that are not records. The Microsoft ECM solution also includes integrated records management capabilities that give organizations the capability to store and protect business records in their final state. Expiration policies applied to these records help ensure that the records are retained for the appropriate time period to comply with regulations or corporate business polices, thereby mitigating legal risk to the organization. Audit trails provide proof to internal and external auditors that records have been retained appropriately. Holds can be placed on specific records under legal discovery to prevent their destruction. Records management is the process by which an organization: Determines what types of information should be considered records Determines how active documents that will become records should be handled while they are in use, and determines how they should be collected once they are declared to be records Determines in what manner and for how long each record type should be retained to meet legal, business, or regulatory requirements Researches and implements technological solutions and business processes to help ensure that the organization complies with its records management obligations in a cost-effective and non-intrusive way Performs records-related tasks such as disposing of expired records, or locating and protecting records related to external events such as lawsuits Microsoft’s records management capabilities are built into a central repository template; the central repository is the place for an organization to store all its business records. The repository template is based on the common repository architecture and is typically configured by the organization’s records manager, who sets up the repository according to the organization’s file plan. Once the repository has been configured, records can be submitted to it from various locations, including document management/e-mail systems as well as the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client. The submission process is designed to be very easy for end users so that they have the ability to declare records without depending on a central records manager. This is a more scalable process for declaring records. A user is prompted for any missing metadata that has been deemed required by the records manager. Records are submitted into the repository using its SMTP and SOAP interfaces, and the context of the document, including metadata and audit history, are sent as well. Physical assets can also be handled by the repository, either by scanning paper documents or by creating stubs for assets that are stored in another location. What constitutes a Records Management System: A content analysis that describes and categorizes content in the enterprise that may become records, provides source locations, and describes how the content will move to the records management application. A file plan describing, for each type of record in the enterprise, where they should be retained as records, the policies that apply to them, how they need to be retained, how they should be disposed of, and who is responsible for managing them. A compliance requirements document defining the rules that the organization's IT systems must adhere to in order to ensure compliance, along with the methods used to ensure the participation of enterprise team members. A method for collecting records that are no longer active from all record sources, such as collaboration servers, file servers, and e-mail systems. A method for auditing records while they are active. A method for capturing records' metadata and audit histories and retaining them. A process for holding records (suspending their disposition) when events such as litigations occur. Related Blogs: Records Management in Sharepoint Why do we need to Archive information into a Record Centre? Setting up a Record Centre in Sharepoint Posted Jan 09 2008, 02:15 PM by Neil with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Sharepoint

• Microsoft Search Strategy

  With content on desktops, corporate intranets and public web sites, companies require a number of solutions – desktop search, intranet search and web (Internet) search. Microsoft offers solutions for all three search areas. Multiple disconnected search tools are the norm today. Microsoft’s strategy is to deliver an integrated user experience for desktop, intranet and web search – allowing users to quickly find information regardless of where it’s located. This not only means integration between various search tools, but also making Search pervasive across familiar applications and interfaces – letting users find information in-context of where they are working – whether that be on their Windows desktop, on their portal or team sites or within their Microsoft Office applications. A second tenet of Microsoft Search solutions strategy is to unlock the vast amounts of data and expertise that exists in your company. 80% of a company’s information is stored in unstructured form – documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. This information is spread across the enterprise on file shares, web sites, Sharepoint sites and in repositories like Exchange public folders, Lotus Notes databases and others. Though users may have access to these common repositories, the sheer amount of information makes it so difficult to find the right information that it may as well be unavailable. The other 20 percent of a company’s information – financial's, inventory, customer records and so forth – is stored in structured repositories like relational databases and LOB applications. While users may be able to access various unstructured sources, structured resources like LOB applications are often either restricted to a few users who must provide information to others through manual reports or requires information workers to learn and use application-specific search tools to find the information they need. We know that common business processes require information workers to use information from multiple structured and unstructured repositories; so with Microsoft Search solutions for intranets, Microsoft delivers Search technology that can search across various structured and unstructured repositories and return a unified set of relevant results in familiar interfaces and applications. But data is only half of the equation. Some sources suggest that up to 80% of the knowledge that exists in an organization is considered to be “tacit knowledge”—information that is undocumented and therefore difficult to access. People leverage tacit knowledge by tapping into their social networks to discover who can help them. In a sense, people are the gateways to tacit knowledge. Microsoft Search solutions brings together the worlds of social networking and expertise location to solve the tacit knowledge problem. By providing the ability to search for people inside and external to your company based on skills, areas of expertise, social distance to you or those you know and a host of other criteria, Microsoft Search solutions help you tap the most valuable resource you have – your people. Today Microsoft offers a set of integrated Search solutions with these products: Windows Live Search for the web, a new version of Windows Desktop Search built into Windows Vistaâ„¢ (also available as a separate application for Windows XP) and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 for the intranet. Federated results from the desktop, intranet and web that can be easily viewed, managed and acted upon. In response, Microsoft is delivering Windows Live Search for the desktop – an application that provides one view of the information you need – no matter where it’s located. In a more graphical format the Microsoft search offering looks as follows: Windows Vista is a search engine that indexes all the information on your local PC, therefore allowing you to search for anything located on you local machine almost instantaneously. All the information stored on you corporate network is indexed by Sharepoint and therefore allows you to search for information located anywhere in the company without having to know where it is stored. Microsoft now has an alternative to "Google" called "Live.com" that is their Internet search engine. Most of the information and text was gathered from an Microsoft Presentation on Search which I aquired from the Microsoft Training in Athens. Related Blogs: Installation Procedure for MOSS Course 50048A: Enterprise Search Solution Architect Workshop Posted Jan 05 2008, 09:52 AM by Neil Filed under: Sharepoint