Andy's Techie Blog

With everything that’s been going on personally and professionally the last few months the newest version of Office sort of skipped by me

Sure I installed the “alpha” when it was released on one of my machines but I wasn’t using it full time

Yesterday I had to do a rebuild of my main office PC so I took the opportunity to install the Beta

This post isn’t about the shiny new features though, it’s about the different suites you’ll be able to purchase

This time around we get four retail versions (from the Office 2010 engineering blog)

Office Home and Student1	Office Home and Business	Office Professional	Office Professional Academic
Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010	Word 2010
Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010	Excel 2010
PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010	PowerPoint 2010
OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010	OneNote 2010
	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010	Outlook 2010
		Publisher 2010	Publisher 2010
		Access 2010	Access 2010

On first glance I’m really pleased

OneNote for everybody!!!

However on second glance I’m a bit gutted as you’ll notice that once again there is no InfoPath unless you buy Office via licensing (Office Professional Plus for most businesses)

I commented before on how I think a lot of smaller businesses are missing out because InfoPath is inaccessible to them

It’s frustrating when we can sell Small Business Server 2008 with one of the key features being the inclusion of SharePoint and then not being able to create some really great solutions because a key piece of software isn’t as easily available. A quick search found Infopath 2007 box product to be somewhere in between £100-£140. Licensing is obviously different but if you’re going down that route you may as well just get Professional Plus

So it’s left to the SBS team to save us! Here’s my idea,

If you ever release SBS 2008 R2 (and I understand that is IF) can we get some InfoPath licenses added to the Premium CALS? 

I know that is unlikely to happen but a guy can wish right?

This isn’t new but I’m reproducing for my own benefit!

I blogged ages ago about needing to get at the Event content type in SharePoint which by default is in the _Hidden category

I normally get at the Event content type by creating a calendar, enabling content types and then following the links until I uncover the content type

Today I needed to use a Wiki Page as a content type but my usual method didn’t work as you aren’t able to manage content types in a wiki library

When editing a content type your URL will look something like this (I’m doing this on a SBS 2008 SharePoint setup)

http://companyweb/_layouts/ManageContentType.aspx?ctype=0×0102

The ctype parameter identifies the content type (in this case the Event type)

All I needed to do then was find the ID for the wiki page content type and a quick google search made this the easy part

There were a ton of pages with this information but i used this one as it also provided them in a useful CSV and XLS format (thanks!)

The table below shows all the items in the _Hidden group. The full list is on the post i mentioned but I’m only interested in the hidden ones as i can get at the rest via the UI

*(these lists also include types for MOSS)

There is also another post showing hidden Site Columns (here) which also has the spreadsheet formats (though i couldn’t get the page to open while i was writing this and ended up using Google’s cache of the page)

Once I’d changed the group of the wiki page content type i then created a new wiki page content type that inherited from the original to create my own base wiki type (as I don’t think you should mess with the built-in types!)

I was able to use the wiki content type in regular a document library so i could mix wiki pages with regular documents (which was the whole point of the exercise!)

There has been a rumour kicking around the last few weeks that Microsoft are to make SharePoint designer available for free

(Posts from various SharePoint based blogs here, here and here)

Any software announcement scheduled for April 1st always makes me suspicious (a couple of the blog posts I’ve mentioned have updated to say it’ll be the April 2nd now) but the post that made me think this could be the real deal was from the Lady Licensing blog (If you haven’t already subscribed to her blog do it…it’s very helpful!)

Product Licensing Changes to SharePoint Designer, PerformancePoint Server and Forms Server – April 2009

The post outlines that SharePoint Designer will become free (if you have software assurance you can get a copy of Expression Web 2 in replacement) and also says that Performance Point Server 2007 and Forms Server 2007 are to be retired

I’ve got a few thoughts on this so lets start with SharePoint Designer

If this is true then i think it’s a move that makes sense. When your working with SharePoint you have three ways to customise your site

1) Through the browser

2) With SharePoint Designer (SPD)

3) Using developer tools such as Visual Studio

SharePoint designer is sort of pitched as an advanced end user tool but in reality (based on my own experience) someone with specific knowledge would do this on your behalf (such as your IT consultant)

If you want to do anything more advanced then you’d get developers involved who would side step SPD completely so I’ll bet Microsoft aren’t selling too many copies of SPD and I imagine the people who are at this level are using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as opposed to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) so they are already paying customers

Since WSS is free making it a part of that adds to the overall feature set and wont make too much of a difference to the Microsoft bottom line

Just for the ability to create workflows alone i think SharePoint Designer is an excellent tool, that’s before you look at any of the other stuff it can do

While it can be quite a scary product (people worry about “breaking” their SharePoint sites) it is extremely powerful and worth getting to know (Penny Coventry’s book on the subject is great!)

Forms Server 2007 and PerformancePoint

According to the information on Emma’s post both of these products are being retired

PerformancePoint is being rolled up into the next release of Sharepoint and will be called “PerformancePoint Services for Sharepoint” (see here for official details). They did the same thing with Content Management Server which helps build on the feature set of MOSS

Forms Server though is an odd one which falls under the same category of InfoPath

I personally think Microsoft missed a trick with InfoPath and the small business market. InfoPath is a very useful tool when combined with SharePoint but it’s one of those products no one knows about. (I have the same argument about OneNote – but that’s for another time)

This is because of the way it is bundled. InfoPath 2007 comes with Office 2007 Professional Plus and Office Enterprise (we’ll just pretend “Office Ultimate” doesn’t exist) which means buying it under a volume license agreement. While we do have customers who buy office in this way lots of them prefer to buy their office software OEM with a new PC

You can buy InfoPath separately but that means boxed product (expensive) or via volume licensing but if you going to do that you may as well get Office Professional Plus right?

So if you don’t already know InfoPath lets you create electronic forms which are much more powerful than anything you could create in Word (which is where most people create their forms!)

They also integrate nicely with SharePoint so you can unlock the data within them and when combined with workflows you can create powerful solutions (timesheets and expense claims i always think are a good examples)

The downside to this is that obviously you must have InfoPath installed to work with the forms. This is where Forms Server steps in. You can create a form and then convert it into a web form so all you need to fill it in is a browser (you can even create forms for your mobile device!)

This functionality is “baked in” to MOSS so the product is aimed for those people using WSS but with the need for web based forms. Generally this means smaller businesses so as an example what costs more?

10 user system

1 copy of InfoPath  + Forms server 2007 and CALs

or

10 copies of InfoPath

I imagine Microsoft aren’t selling too many copies of Forms Server so i can see why this is being retired. I couldn’t find any official announcement so I’m not sure if that’s the end of Forms Server and if you want that functionality you’ll have to move to MOSS or if we’ll see some Forms Server functionality in the next version of WSS (fingers crossed!)

It’s April 1st tomorrow so i guess we’ll at least find out something then!

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Mark Wilson’s blog talking about CMDKEY. At the time I thought “that’s one to remember” but wondered if I’d ever actually need it

Turns out today I did!

CmdKey is used for managing cached credentials

Someone called today as they were working with the documents on their SharePoint site and the “created by” field was a different user to the one who was actually logged into the PC

What had happened was when the user had been created they initially didn’t have permissions to access the site so they were presented with a username and password prompt

They put in a username and password combination that DID have permissions to the site and put the tick in the box for “remember my password”

So I used the following commands

CMDKEY /List

This gave me a list of the cached credentials on this PC

I found the one I wanted and used

CMDKEY /Delete:TARGET – where target was the name of the server/site I needed to delete

I closed the browser and restarted and all was well!

The CMDKEY command is included on Server 2003 / Server 2008 and Windows Vista but NOT XP

However, you can copy it from a server 2003 machine onto an XP machine and it’ll work just fine

This post isn’t anything ground breaking or new but I remember the first time I tried to do this! Also every time I do it I always forget something

The requirement here is simple

Create a form that allows the user to enter some search criteria and have it search across specific, multiple columns

For example,

There may be a Customers list (which may not be too different to the Northwind database in Access 2007…wink, wink). This list holds lots of details including the customers name, address, phone number, post code, current balance, account number

When the customer calls you need to be able to call up their details quickly. To identify the customer you may ask for an account number, a post code, etc (even just a part of that information – first three digits of their post code for example) which is why this needs to work across multiple columns

You may be thinking “why don’t you just use the built-in search functionality?”

The built-in search functionality in SharePoint is still a great tool (and we’ll leave Search Server Express out of this for now!) but the main problem in this scenario it doesn’t work as we as I only want to search on specific fields

So to get this running first create a Web Part Page

Click “site actions”, “create”, “Web part page”

Enter a name for your page (We’ll use “customer search” here), select a layout template and select a document library to store the page in and click OK

Once you’ve done that you will be taken to the new page. It will be in edit mode ready for you to add some web parts!

Click “Add a web part”, select a “Form Web Part” and click OK

If you just wanted to search on one specific column you could add your list to the page, setup a web part connection and never have to touch SharePoint designer!

But why do things the easy way?

Open SharePoint Designer, then open your site and then open your Customer Search Web Part page (if you want to take a copy of that file, now is the time to do it before we mess with it!)

Click on the “Data View” menu and select “Insert Data View”. The data source task library task pane will open and ask you to choose a list.

Select your customer list and click “Show Data”

Hold down your CTRL button and pick some fields. I’m going to pick

First Name, Last Name, Company, Business Phone and Zip/Postal Code

Then click the “Insert Selected Fields as” menu and select the “Multiple Item View” option

  The data view will then be inserted into your page.

Click the > button for the data view so you get the common tasks menu and select the “parameters” option. In the Data View Parameters dialog select “New Parameter”

Give your parameter a name (i’m using “SearchValue”) and change the parameter source to CONTROL and the CONTROL ID to the ID of your FORM WEB PART (If your following these instructions or haven’t changed the ID it’s more than likely T1) and click OK

Then, from the command task menu of the data view select “Web Part Connections”. In the first page of the wizard select the “Get Parameters From” option.

On the second page leave the default “connect to a web part on this page” option selected

On the third page set the target web part to be form web part and the target action as “Provide form values to”

On the fourth page look for your previously created parameter on the right and match this up with your form web part ID

On the final page click finish

The last thing to do is to tell the data view to apply the filter. On the common tasks menu select the FILTER option

Add as many clauses as you need to customise how your search works. You can even work with fields that aren’t actually displayed

My example looks for text that contains my search criteria in any fields (using the OR option)

Remember to pick your previously created parameter as your value

Save the page!

Go to the page using your browser and test it out

Other things you may want to go and change on the common tasks menu include the sort order and the amount of items displayed per page

Finally, what point is there in displaying a limited set of fields if we can’t drill into the full record?

On the common tasks view click “Show Example Data”

Click on the one of the fields you want to have as your link and change the format as option to HYPERLINK

Select “Hyperlink Options”

Change the “text to display field” and the address field (you can you the function builder to help )

Build the Address field so that it looks similar to the example below

/{@FileDirRef}/DispForm.aspx?ID={@ID}

There may be a better way of doing this but it works for me. If you know of a better way please let me know!

You can also change DispForm to EditForm if you want to be able to go straight to editing the record

Keep an eye on the “Text to display field” as this tries to mirror the address field and this isn’t always what you want

Save the page again and marvel at your finished project!

The northwind demo data is a bit pants for testing this to be honest but it does the job

As you know the latest version of SharePoint (v3 / 2007) is going to be a part of SBS 2008 and there is a lot of potential for helping your clients make the most of the product so get learning!

Yesterday’s post talked about how I’d tried to apply the Infrastructure Update for WSS so that I could get workflow’s to start automatically from incoming emails (history here and here) and I ended up killing my server!

This morning I applied service pack 1 and then the update (after taking a complete backup of course    )

I was expecting it to all work this time around as I’m basically doing it on a brand new install and I’m pleased to report the updates applied ok!

So this then led me back to the original reason for applying the update in the first place.

In the Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: July 15, 2008 page there was another link, Issues that are fixed in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Infrastructure Update in here there was one specific issue I was interested in

A declarative workflow that is configured to start automatically when e-mail enabled items are created does not start automatically after you install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1

This describes the exact problem I was having.

When an e-mail arrives from an external source they are submitted as the system account. SP1 stopped the service account from being able to run workflow’s automatically

The fix is to use impersonation. The workflow will run under the account of the user who initially created the workflow association. As there may also be security implications to consider they don’t turn it on by default

The KB article I mentioned above (KB953289) states the following

“To enable workflow’s to start using the impersonation scheme, a network farm administrator must understand the impersonation scheme and its implications. The network farm administrator must enable the workflow with the following command by using the Stsadm.exe command-line tool:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn declarativeworkflowautostartonemailenabled -pv true

Administrators can also create a special user account for creating workflow’s that all workflow authors can use. By doing this, administrators can prevent other people from impersonating specific workflow authors.”

If your happy with that disclaimer run the command on your server

I’ve done it and I can confirm it works!

Finally!!

The joy after the pain

You can download the update from here – Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)

Yesterday I was supposed to be spending the day thinking about SharePoint at an event Combined Knowledge were running (Vijay posted the details here)

I did spend the day thinking about SharePoint but for different reasons

First a little bit of background

We run two SharePoint sites internally that pretty much run our business

There is the SBS “companyweb” SharePoint site (WSS v2) – we’ve been using this from the beginning and we have a ton of information in here. Contract details, company calendar, contacts, customer network information, etc (you get the picture)

Not that long ago I did the side-by-side install to get WSS v3 up and running

(David Schrag has an excellent post on this and there is also the official white paper on the SBS blog)

The idea long term is to move everything over to the WSS v3 site but we’re doing it a bit at a time with the main function of that site currently being our helpdesk system

So back to the story!

I’d blogged a couple of times about problems I was having with emails and workflows so when I saw the details of an “infrastructure update” on the Microsoft download site I thought this may be the answer I’d been looking for

So I eagerly downloaded the update and this is where I made a fatal error

I’ll hold my hands up and say recently I haven’t been treating our internal systems with the same attention we would one of clients systems. We keep drumming into our clients that their systems run their business and why you need to look after them properly so I’m really disappointed in myself

So I installed the update and it failed

The “friendly error message” message was MOST unhelpful.

“Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed”

I was then informed that nothing would be rolled back and that I should correct the problem and re-run the update

This is where I first failed. Instead of taking my time and trying to figure out what the problem was I did a couple of searches and found solutions that seemed to fit some error messages I found in the logs and tried those

It made it even worse. I couldn’t get to the WSS v3 site or the v2 site (I still don’t understand why that was the case)

So at this point you’d think. Ok go back to the backup you took before you started.

Second failure. I’d just jumped in at the deep end on this one. Very careless of me

However, the overnight backup had taken a full copy of the v2 site so it wasn’t too long before I was able to get that up and running

My main panic was over as so much data was in there. Since a lot of the WSS v3 stuff is still work in progress most of the data was available somewhere else. If the worst came to the worst I’d have to start over and build it from scratch

Then I realised my next failing.

I’d been getting some notifications from the backups recently telling me “backup completed with exceptions” – basically it couldn’t backup some files so just skipped over them

I’d had a quick look and added it to my “to-do” list.

This is when I wished I’d treated the problem the same as I would a clients system and given it immediate attention. The files it skipped just happened to be the WSS v3 SQL database files…..argh!

This was when I got lucky. Before I’d started the update I had SharePoint designer open as I’d been working on some workflows and even though I wasn’t expecting anything to go wrong I took a backup from here – just in case

The difference between this and the WSS v2 site though was that it didn’t matter that the site was down. The restore fixed that!

To restore my SharePoint designer backup I needed a working SharePoint site!

Since I’d been so careless up till now I decided to get back to doing things right

I fired up a virtual machine and configured a SharePoint installation from scratch, then connected to it using SharePoint designer and verified my backup would restore ok

Once I was happy with this it was just a matter of removing SharePoint and reloading it back onto the SBS where I was then able to create a blank site and restore my backup file

It may sound so simple but it took up the whole of my day and I did my final restore at 1am

My workflows are now broken and all the alerts have gone but it could have been a lot worse

So another lesson learnt. I’ve added our internal systems onto our help desk system so it will now be treated in the same way as any other system we look after. I won’t jump in head first “just because it’s our system” and treat it no differently to any other server we look after

The next question I asked myself is why I did I get into this situation?

Impatience I guess.Things have been very busy lately and there were a ton of other things I wanted to get on with instead of testing a patch in a controlled environment to then put it on our own server. My attitude to the running of our own network was very wrong here

As with any mistakes I make I’ve certainly learnt from this one

I was a bit dubious about posting this but I’m treating it as my punishment (even though I feel like I’ve been punished twice as I missed the SharePoint event as well!   ) 

I posted a while back about a problem I was having with my WSS workflow’s not working when I used an email to initiate them

I’ve been looking at it on and off since then and I’m still getting nowhere

I can confirm that other automatic workflows fire ok. The problem is to do with receiving emails

Interestingly I found a post on the MSDN Forums that describes exactly the problem I’m having

The author (J.Amen) managed to prove it was the service pack by creating two virtual machines with identical setups expect one system had SP1 and one didn’t

The thread then goes on to say Microsoft have been looking at it and it has “officially been verified as a bug” (that was on the 25th Feb 2008) and the thread is then filled up with lots “is the hotfix available” questions

I think I’ll perform the same experiment over the weekend with two different setups just for my own piece of mind

The problem I have now is that I don’t know if the MSDN thread is correct and I’ve got to wait for a hotfix or is there still something I need to do to my configuration

I wish I knew either way!

UPDATE:

Found another thread that confirms the same thing

Some very angry developers on the thread

I had such a busy day yesterday I didn’t get around to posting about this.

I spent Tuesday afternoon travelling down to Microsoft’s offices in London (Victoria) with Vijay to attend an event he had organised with Combined Knowledge

The idea behind the event is to help educate more about WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) as opposed to full blown MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). Especially in the SBS area as it’s already installed with your SBS server!

Something I certainly found out when first exploring SharePoint was finding WSS specific information wasn’t easy due to the fact that SharePoint – as a whole – generally means MOSS (or SharePoint Portal Server as it was!)

This is understandable as SharePoint experts will be dealing with MOSS more on a day-to-day basis (and from a Microsoft perspective it’s the product that makes licensing money!)

The event was kicked off by Craig Carpenter from Combined Knowledge who gave a demonstration of Search Server Express (eventually…as is always the way at these events someone’s demo usually does something unexpected and this time it happened to Craig but he managed to sort it out and do the full demo)

I’d read about Search Server Express (specifically over on Dave Overton’s blog) but not looked into any further than that.

The demo Craig gave showed how I do need to go back at look at it. The ability to ramp up WSS search capabilities is very compelling and features such as federated search (imagine including technet search results within your SharePoint results), custom search scopes and complete control over what is and isn’t crawled is all very cool

After this Steve Smith, also from Combined Knowledge talked about Content Types and document management. Since content types is something I only recently get my head around it was good to reinforce some of the things I’d been working with and also also show me some things I hadn’t given enough consideration to

The final speaker was Bill English. He’d flown in from the US to do a little bit of site seeing and speak at a couple of events about his product

I was really looking forward to hearing Bill speak. When I first started looking at SharePoint the first book I picked up was one of his books (Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit). I learnt awful lot from this book so this was like seeing a SharePoint celebrity speak to me

Bill was there to talk about his DeliverPoint product. The idea of the software is to give you a central location for managing SharePoint permissions. I can see on large installations how this could get out of hand so the product is certainly worth a look as it’s very easy to use and the feature list is very impressive. Take a look at the site for more information as I won’t do it just here!

As well as the usual networking opportunities we also got some great pizza! On the whole I really enjoyed the event and even though I didn’t get home until 1am it was thoroughly worth the trip

 Their is a SharePoint user group in the Midlands so I’ll be looking out for upcoming events in the Midlands!

Richard Tubb gave me a call a couple of days ago as he was having a problem with his user account in SharePoint (read about it here)

He mentions I’d had a similar problem

It was along the same lines but worthy of a blog post I think

I have a client who uses an Infopath form as a time sheet. On the form is a drop down list with all the staff members names to identify who the time sheet belongs to. I’d gained access to the user list via one of the SharePoint web services (I posted about this technique here) 

The problem was that some staff members had left the company and after I’d deleted their user accounts the names were still showing up in the Infopath form

This entry on the WSSFAQ site pointed me in the right direction

I had deleted the user from the SITE but not from the SITE COLECTION (e.g a site collection could be 10 sites but specific users only have access to 3 of them. Hence the need to remove them from both places – though I imagine deleting them from the site collection will sort out the other sites)

To do this I did the following

From the site at the top of the site collection click the Site Settings menu then Site Administration. In the “Site Collection Administration” section click  “View site collection user information “

From here I was able to delete the user and they disappeared from the Infopath list