SharePoint Designer – Free?

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!

Creating a multi-column search form in SharePoint v3 with SharePoint Designer

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!