Installation, Upgrades, Customization

Love Bil's Application Template playground

Wayne Hall — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:10:00 GMT

Just wanted to quick-blog on Bil Simser's sandbox he set up so people can test drive the new Microsoft Application Templates. Very nice work, Bil - very useful to be able to see how the template works before going through the trouble of setting up our own testbeds.

http://sharepoint.bilsimser.com/pages/templates.aspx

Branding Sharepoint Portal Server for your own company

Wayne Hall — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 06:36:00 GMT

Since we're in deployment phase of SPS 2003 to the whole company, one thing of course we need to do is brand it for ourselves. I mean, who wants an out-of-the-box portal?

Matt McDermott, a consultant we brought in to do a lot of the heavy lifting (who just started blogging at Mindsharp) was an immense help. He has a great checklist and brought some great tips [below].

I also have to say that Daniel McPherson's article on branding was a fantastic resource.

Idea #1: use transparent .gif as logo

One of Matt's ideas I *really* liked was using a transparent .gif as the logo, but then having the logo embedded in the background. So imagine this header:

If you notice the upper left hand corner, you see our logo. Well, that logo is actually part of the background image, not the logo image. The actual logo that's a place holder right there is a transparent gif that just happens to be the exact height.

So assume your banner is 2000x65 pixels. You want 2000 pixels wide so that if they have a big screen it won't disappear. Then you make a transparent gif that's , oh, as wide as your logo and 65 pixels high.

That way when the users mouse over the logo, it's clickable and brings you home. But then you don't have to worry about making one logo overlap the other, or synchronizing the background image with your logo image. If you don't have a semi-professional graphics artist working for you, this can really help save time getting a good look and feel on the brand.

btw, you'd put your background image in a custom directory... I'd recommend

[drive]:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\Styles

and create your own directory, then put your images and css files in there. You can create your own .css file, put it in there, and then point the portal to your css file. You specify the background image to use in the css file, and you can specify this transparent gif by going to Site Settings > Change Portal Site Properties. Point the custom CSS to your file by using /_layouts/1033/styles/mega/mega.sps.css ( you would use your own directory and names of course). And you can also point to your own transparent gif here as well by putting that in like /_layouts/1033/styles/mega/images/sitelogo_trans.gif (again, assuming your own directory and names, and notice I created an “images“ directory under “mega“ under “styles“.)

The code used in the custom css file looks something like this:

.ms-bannerframe, .ms-GRHeaderBackground, .ms-storMeFree
{
background-color: #FFFFFF;
background-image: url('./images/sitelogobg.jpg');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

Idea #2: Changing the Watermark on the left hand side

You may also notice the change of the watermark on the left-hand side (see the graphic above). This can be done by editing

[drive]:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\SPS\default.aspx

(note the location may not be C: but it probably is. Also, do I really need to remind you to always save a copy of files like this so if you shnork your file and bring down your portal, you can easily bring it back? And.... the “1033“ assumes English, so if you're localized to something else, use your specific language directory)

In that file, look for the text that says “Sharepoint Portal Server” in the watermark section. Change it to what you want. Note that I haven't figured out all this stuff and how to more accurately define ways of making the watermark better, but I can see how to change the font and stuff.

Idea #3: Enhanced Search Web Part

Another great thing Matt supplied was an enhanced search web part for the WSS portion of things. He based it on Anthony Petro's article entitled Creating a Site Context Search Box that Uses SharePoint Portal Server Search Results on the MSDN site.

You know how SPS and WSS are really separate beings when it comes to searching? SPS uses MSSearch and WSS uses the SQL Full Text Indexing engine. That's just plain annoying! I'd rather give my users a consistent look and feel whether they search from the portal or from their team sites.

Matt's enhanced search web part replaces (or enhances) the built-in WSS search part.

Twist #1 - launch portal search instead of wss search

Here's the first thing it does.

Imagine I have a site collection called “STS“ and it has some sub sites and they have some workspaces, sites or whatever. When on a site collection or top level site, This enhanced search part gives the following choices:

(you can kind of tell that it's a top level site because it has a portal connection saying “Up to Megapath Intranet“, which is our portal)

But here's the twist -- when you initiate a search, it actually launches a Portal search, not a WSS search, and just returns results from this site collection and everything underneath it. Isn't that the coolest? Before this web part, your loser WSS search would just search that site, and not sites below it (I think this is correct... would hate to call it loser-ific if I was wrong).

So you can still do All Sources search, or you can search this site collection and all of it's subsites. [or google (see below)].

Twist #2 - search your site collection, not just this + subs

Well, there's another really cool twist. If you're on a subweb, it gives the following choices instead:

(notice that the portal-level connection now says “Up to STS” which was the top level site we were on before)

So now it has an “All Sources” and “This Site” which is the same as before, meaning it can search this site and all subwebs, but now it has a “Site collection” which means it will now search STS (the top level site that contains this site) and all subwebs.

So imagine if the top level site collection was “Human Resources”, then any subweb or team site underneath it would automatically give the user the ability to search all of HR instead of just the site they're on, and they don't have to try to navigate to the portal to do so.

I've been bugging him to modify the web part to actually put the top level connection name in the drop-down... maybe if I wait long enough I'll end up doing it myself :) That way, if you're in http://portal/sites/HR/policies/expenses/ sites, and you want to search HR, the drop down would actually give you “All Sources,“, “HR“ and “This site“ as options.

Twist #3 - Integrate with google

I know he's worked on a google dropdown too... we'll see if he blogs about that someday. I think it's basically that the last dropdown selection lets you specify google. I've tested it and it seems to work but I'll let him do the blogging on that one.

it looks like this when deployed:

Hope this helps!

Sharepoint Explorer view and Trend OfficeScan -- not good bedfellows

Wayne Hall — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:04:00 GMT

Ever just live with something and think that's just the way it is, and you just have to deal with it? Well, that's me in a nutshell when it came to Sharepoint's Explorer View.

Every single time, from every box in our network, using Explorer View was just a dog to use. Regular views were just fine, but accessing a document library through the Explorer View on the side or using UNC filepaths to access documents (\\server\sitecollection\site\DocumentLibrary for example) was just too slow to be usable, and I just thought... that's the way things are.

Then we had a consultant come in and help speed us up on our deployment. He immediately commented... “Wayne, that's just too darn slow”. We had him access explorer view from his laptop and voila! it was super speedy.

So I unloaded OfficeScan on my machine and re-accessed it, and voila! it was also super speedy.

In the meantime, we've opened up a ticket with Trend to ask how to either

configure it to “ignore“ our SPS server
get an update that's more sharepoint friendly
configure tweaks to speed performance in a sharepoint environment.

Importing only a specific group into sharepoint profile database (via LDAP)

Wayne Hall — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 08:19:00 GMT

Quick Answer

This will help you if you already know LDAP and how to configure sharepoint's profile import settings.

Create a custom connection source in profile import and specify the following in the User Filter field:

(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(memberOf=[distinguised name of the group]))

Overview

If your org is like ours, you might have a *ton* of accounts in Active Directory, and less than half of them are active employees that need to have a profile in sharepoint. Sometimes you might have a lot of service accounts, disabled accounts, test accounts, or you might like keeping accounts of old employees around because of legal or ease-of-restore needs. Or maybe you're just too busy to delete old accounts. Or, um, maybe you're lazy? :)

Either way, when you set up Sharepoint the first time and you do the import, you might realize... “whoa! we gotta lotta accounts!” Then you realize that not only are you taking up space in sharepoint (really, not that much compared to everything else), but if ever you want to enumerate the list and display it somewhere, you'd have some heavy filtering to do. Wouldn't it be cleaner if just active employees had profiles in Sharepoint? And what about CAL's? If you're paying by the CAL, it might be easier to justify 500 CAL purchase even though you have 1500 accounts in A/D when you limit the profile database to 500 or 600.

So I recently started looking for a way to limit this in the profile import. In our organization, all active employees are a member of a specific corporate mailing list / security group. This group in A/D is a Universal Security group that's mail-enabled, so we use it for granting reader rights on calendars, we use it as a filter for who gets imported into other corporate apps such as “Track-IT!” from Intuit, and I really wanted to use it to determine who to import into the portal profile database. For this example. let's call it “Corporate List“.

I saw a couple of posts here and there, but nothing solid or anything that could be construed as a how-to. Here's what I had found before tackling it with a consultant we had onsite (I hear he's soon moving to mindsharpblogs, right Todd? :) ).

http://www.sharepointwatch.com/top/ng/group~1/~1722~__Import-user-profile-from-Active-Directory-group/index.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/adsi/adsi/search_filter_syntax.asp
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/Logon/LDAP_attributes_active_directory.htm

But none of them really answered the question.

So here it is. First the background then the solution.

Background:

You configure profile imports by going to Site Settings > Manage profile database > Configure profile import.
By default, Sharepoint is smart enough to know your domain and can just select users from the one current domain. This is good for most organizations, and it's easy to do for quick out-of-the-box implementations.
Behind the scenes, what sharepoint is doing is an LDAP query to the first domain controller it can find and specifies the following as a filter on the LDAP query:

(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User))
If you've not been exposed to LDAP yet, here's your chance. There's a neat utility Microsoft makes called LDIFDE that lets you import and export content to and from Active Directory. It can be dangerous if you use import mode (-i) without knowing what you're doing. However, it can also shed light (like ADSIEdit, another dangerous tool in the hands of the foolhardy, but an amazingly useful tool to learn the innards) and be immensely helpful in troubleshooting)
You can see what sharepoint is doing by running the following command (say, on a domain controller)

C:\> ldifde -f usersindomain.txt -r “(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User))“
Connecting to "[domain controller].[domain]"
Logging in as current user using SSPI
Exporting directory to file usersindomain.txt
Searching for entries...
Writing out entries.............................................................
................................................................................
................................................................................
[snip] ...........
792 entries exported
The command has completed successfully

This writes the results into a file called usersindomain.txt.

You can also do some basic wildcarding -- so for example let's say I wanted just to get the records that had a CN (common name) that started with “Wayne“. I would run:

C:\>ldifde -f usersindomain.txt -r "(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(cn=Wayne*))
Connecting to "[domain controller].[domain]"
Logging in as current user using SSPI
Exporting directory to file usersindomain.txt
Searching for entries...
Writing out entries..
2 entries exported
The command has completed successfully

Never mind the fact that I just overwrote my file :)

What you learn from this is that you can “AND“ together arguments. In the first example, we're saying “pull the objects that are in the “Person“ category AND give me only the ones that are in the “User“ class.“. In the second example, we're also specifying that CN needs to start with “Wayne“.
If you take a look at the resulting file, you can start getting a headache, but after that passes, you get an idea of what's in the directory. What I care about, though, is... how do I specify group membership? I mean, this file has a HUGE amount of information in it (some of it pretty cool, actually), but I just want to limit by group.
So look in the resulting file and look for the group you care about. It will have an entry like the following:

memberOf:
CN=Corporate List,OU=Administrative,OU=Distribution Lists,OU=Domain,DC=domain,DC=local

This second line starting with CN is called the “Distinguished name“ of the group. With this label, you should be able to uniquely identify this object. You may also notice that there's an entry for every group that the user is a member of. What's neat about this is that Active Directory is attaching multiple properties to the object so that you don't have to search through a list of groups and find a match for yours. You can just say “if memberof equals this distinguished name, return it in the list“.
So it stands to reason that we should be able to use this as one of our “AND“ statements in the LDIFDE test. So we add it in there to find out:

C:\>ldifde -f output2.ldf -r "(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(memberOf=CN=Corporate List,OU=Administrative,OU=Distribution Lists,OU=Domain,DC=domain,DC=local))
Connecting to "[domain controller].[domain]"
Logging in as current user using SSPI
Exporting directory to file output2.ldf
Searching for entries...
Writing out entries.............................................................
................................................................................
................................................................................
..................................................
271 entries exported
The command has completed successfully

Cool. Let's say that number matches how many people should be in the list, and now we have a construct for importing just the right people into the portal.
[optional] If you wanted to specify additional groups, you could use the OR clause, implemented by a PIPE ( | ) symbol. However, be warned that LDAP prepends the operator to the arguments. So if you're used to perl or C or something that processes the operator BETWEEN arguments, you might get confused.

Do you remember how we AND'ed arguments together by doing (&(argument1)(argument2)) ? Well OR is the same way. Here's an example from above page

(&(objectClass=user) | (cn=andy*)(cn=steve*)(cn=margaret*))

gets all user entries with a common name that starts with andy, steve or margaret. Notice the OR comes before the arguments. If you wanted to select people of multiple groups... say you have three groups called “Corporate East,“ “Corporate West“ and “Corporate EMEA“, AND they're all in different OU's in your domain, AND you don't have a group that houses all of those people, BUT you want to import them all....

You can use the OR operator on the memberof property. It would probably look something like this:
(I'll try to show different colors to differentiate the clauses. note that this is not tested, just my hand-typed estimate)

(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User) | (memberOf=CN=Corporate East,OU=Administrative,OU=Distribution Lists,OU=East,DC=domain,DC=local)(memberOf=CN=Corporate West,OU=Administrative,OU=Distribution Lists,OU=West,DC=domain,DC=local)(memberOf=CN=Corporate EMEA,OU=Administrative,OU=Distribution Lists,OU=EMEA,DC=domain,DC=local))

Answer:

Go to Site Settings > Manage profile database > Configure profile import.
Select “Custom Source“. This will let you create import connections

By the way, this is also how you can configure to import from multiple domains in a forest without having to specify the entire forest
Also, this is how you get the “Manage connections“ link on the Manage Profile Database screen

It should ask you for the connection settings
Fill in User Filter -- For our purposes, we put in the parameter that we used in ldifde with the -r option (see Background above)

Format:
(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(memberOf=[distinguised name of the group]))

Example:
(&(objectCategory=Person)(objectClass=User)(memberOf=CN=Corporate List,OU=Administrative,OU=Distribution Lists,OU=Domain,DC=domain,DC=local))
You could also modify Search base to specify an OU, but I haven't tested that.
I didn't change any other settings. My settings have

Auto discover domain controller
Port: 389
Timeout: 120 seconds
Scope: Subtree
Page size: 10
Page timeout: 120 seconds

Hope this helps!

Pretty printing display of multi-item choice fields from Sharepoint lists (one per line)

Wayne Hall — Mon, 13 Jun 2005 07:42:00 GMT

I was working on a poor-man's customer information system... you know, a little replacement of sticky notes and little web pages all over the company that different groups use to keep track of current information about specific customers. You know how it goes in medium to large sized companies -- sometimes you have several different back-end operational systems scattered across the company; some are web-enabled and others aren't; some groups use part of this system, all of that system and none of this other system; people might not have logins or a license to use a client of that other system over there, etc.

So we had put together something very very basic -- just a big sharepoint list with about 30-40 fields. It contained 5-10 fields specific to about 5 different groups and the information or links to information about that customer specific to that group. Once we had the information in there, we needed an easy interface to view the information for all the different customers. I'll blog on that later.

In general (side comment) -- This is one of my first real uses of connectable web parts. The other blog will expand on that more, but this exercise gave me a great look into how to really use two webparts on a page as navigation. Also, I found out just how much more FrontPage can do for you when working with connected web parts.

One of the issues I ran into was how to display the information from a data field that was a Choice type, but configured so that multiple items could be selected with checkboxes. You know the one -- it's the one that says “allow multiple selections” and looks like this in the setup:

and looks like this in the data form view:

So when I created my List view web part and went into FrontPage 2003, imagine my horror when it actually printed out a list with semicolons and pound signs between fields, and all one big long string:

So I'm not an XSLT or XSL writer at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can mis-use XSL in a sentence and even might misspell it every now and then. But I *am* a Perl programmer, so I'm thinking something along the lines of a match, search, replace or translate function. I figured if I could replace the “;#” with a newline or <BR> tag, that would be exactly what I was going for.

Let me tell you I was in for a little ride, trying to learn XSL, templates, how to call the functions and escaping the characters. I'm guessing you don't care too much about the ride, but you'd like to see the result.

Well the good news is I was able to figure out and borrow code from others on how to get this to print like this:

How did I do it? Well, these are the general steps

I created a web part page that would house my navigation and data view web part (more on this in a separate blog to be written)
I already had the data source as a list. So I went to the web part page, Modify Shared Page, then Add Web Part, then dragged the list over into a zone. This created a sharepoint list view web part for me.
Then I used the built-in sharepoint web tools to modify the view of that part to contain all the different fields I wanted. Click the little triangle, modify shared web part, edit current view. I checked all the boxes for fields I wanted to display.
Then I launched FrontPage 2003 and edited that web part page.
I right-clicked on the list view web part and selected to convert to XSLT (I forget the exact wording).
Then I put all the fields in tables, rows, columns, changed fonts and display formatting and made the general data view web part look like I wanted.

I went into code view and found the WebPartPages:DataViewWeebPart section that was specific to this Data View Web part. That code starts off with the parameters and then has an xsl stylesheet. I went past the “xsl:param“ tags and found the templates. I added a template tag of the following: <xsl:template name="break"> <xsl:param name="text" select="."/> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="contains($text, ';#')"> <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, ';#')"/> <br/> <xsl:call-template name="break"> <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, ';#')"/> </xsl:call-template> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:value-of select="$text"/> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template>

This code I borrowed from several places out on the net, and it was a search and replace function. The primary thing that helped me was http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200310/msg01013.html

Then I went into the code and found where it was displaying my field. My field was called “List of Products“ and FrontPage had created code that looked like <xsl:value-of select="@List__x0020_of_x0020_Products">lt;xsl:value-of>nbsp; I replaced that with this:

   
<xsl:variable name="list_of_products" select="@List_x0020_of_x0020_Products"/>
<xsl:call-template name="break">
<xsl:with-param name="text">
<xsl:value-of xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" select="$list_of_products"/>
</xsl:with-param>
</xsl:call-template>


The resulting HTML is

   
<BR>
Access - MultiMeg (NxT1-DS3)<BR>
Hosted GRAS (CAAA)<BR>
Site-to-Site VPN (Private Network)<BR>



which is exactly what I wanted.

Hope this helps!

Hmmm... On-demand alerts? "email this item..." checkbox wanted

Wayne Hall — Mon, 02 May 2005 09:21:00 GMT

Typically before I try to tackle something, I first search around to see if someone's done it. Then, I'll post a blog describing the challenge to see if anyone has a good way of solving it and I either missed it in my search or it hadn't been documented yet. If I don't get any hits and solve it myself, I'll edit the post and we're all smarter :)

Today's question is on-demand alerts... and by this I mean the following scenario:

Let's say I have a list on a site that people use as a log of sorts. We call it the Work Blog actually, but all it is is a quick way for people on our team to log things of semi-importance. I wrote a blog on this itself already if you want more info. Just think of it as a storage place of log entries, some of which are menial and some of which are important.

Sometimes, on the more important log entries, I want the entry to be emailed to the team. Since this log entry journal contains stuff from the menial to the major, I don't want people getting alerts on every added item. Team members put in 3-10 log entries per day, but there might only be 1-5 per week that should get emailed to the team.

So what I'd like to see is a checkbox at the bottom of the new list form that says “email entry to team” and when you check it, sharepoint will send an email to the team with the log entry in it.

I find myself frequently adding an entry to the Work Blog, and then copying/pasting the info into an email to the group. I'd like to simplify it into one step.

So, questions:

I assume this requires coding, because I know of no alerts that let you specify a filter on which items get alerted on.
What area of sharepoint would handle this kind of check box? Is this an example of an event sink? [I'm not a developer].
I also assume this means needing to do more than just using FrontPage.

Keyboard shortcuts for WSS and Sharepoint Portal Server

Wayne Hall — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 08:28:00 GMT

I went about my way to try and find if there was an easy way to put the “Private Documents” and “Shared Documents” document library view web part on My Site. I mean, sheesh, I want My Site to be my official home page, and it'd be nice if I could put a view web part there so I could see, say, the last 5 documents added.

Anyway, I searched google and I ended up actually seeing a page for keyboard shortcuts. I love keyboard shortcuts! In general, I don't like using the mouse for things that I want to *do* vs draw. ie, I use vi a gazillion times more than notepad. In fact, I wish there was a ViM plug-in for IE so I could use it for entering in info in web parts. It has a steep learning curve for anyone who hasn't used UNIX systems, but it pays off big time with editing code, searching log files, and all sorts of things. gvim is the GUI-based form for Windows and is quite useful and is a default install on all my windows workstations and servers, as is Cygwin.

The link I found was at Greatwesthealthcare.com, but then I realized the url was very sps-like. So I just replaced that part with my own sps server and voila, it's a microsoft help file.

So just go to your own server, with this url:

http://portal/_vti_bin/help/1033/sps/html/KeyboardShortcuts.htm

Here are some of them listed out (my faves highlighted):

General Web Part Page shortcuts (press TAB before trying to use)

ALT+S
Move between search elements on the page, in the following order:

Advanced Search icon on the search bar
Search scope list on the search bar
Search box on the search bar
Search button (start search)
Any other search elements on the page, such as the search box in the Site Directory

ALT+W
Move between Web Parts
ALT+\
Modify My Page or Modify Shared Page in My Site and in certain views of other Web Part Pages
ALT+N
Add new link to the My Links Summary Web Part in My Site

These are good on the Site Settings page:

ALT+U
Manage users
ALT+S
Manage security and additional settings
ALT+B
Manage alerts settings
Manage crawls of Site Directory (press keyboard shortcut twice)
ALT+P
Change portal site properties and SharePoint site creation settings
ALT+M
Manage portal site structure
ALT+G
Manage top-level lists and document libraries
ALT+C
Use Topic Assistant
Enable or disable Topic Assistant (press keyboard shortcut twice)
ALT+I
Manage targeted links on My Site
ALT+J
Import SharePoint Portal Server 2001 data
ALT+W
Change document library settings
ALT+Z
Delete the document library associated with this portal site
ALT+X
Configure search and indexing
ALT+N
Manage search scopes
ALT+A
Use search scope from another portal site
ALT+Q
Manage keywords
ALT+K
Manage profile database
ALT+D
Manage audiences
ALT+R
Go to SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration

And these are in Sharepoint Central Administration

ALT+I
Select some of the server configuration links in the following order:

Configure server topology
Configure configuration database server
Specify component settings database server
Specify content database server
Configure e-mail server settings
Configure HTML viewer (in Component Configuration section)

ALT+N
Create a portal site
ALT+L
List and manage portal sites
ALT+C
Select the following links in the Portal Site and Virtual Server Configuration section:

Extend an existing virtual server from the Virtual Server List page
Configure virtual server settings from the Virtual Server List page
Configure site quotas and locks from the Virtual Server List page

ALT+G
Select the following links, most of which are security configuration links:

Configure alternate portal site URLs for intranet, extranet, and custom access (in previous section of page)
Set SharePoint administrative group account
Manage site collection owners
Manage Web site users
Manage blocked file types
Configure antivirus settings

ALT+S
Select some of the component configuration links in the following order:

Manage the Search Service
Manage settings for single sign-on
Manage shared services for the server farm
Configure usage analysis processing

ALT+D
Configure document libraries (Web Storage System-based)
ALT+R
Configure diagnostic settings

Configure Server Topology page tasks

ALT+C
Configuration database server
Change components (press keyboard shortcut twice)
ALT+N
Content database server
ALT+M
Component settings database server
ALT+O
Single sign-on credentials
Global e-mail server (press keyboard shortcut twice)
ALT+R
Remove Server

Manage Web Site Users page tasks

ALT+W
View Users
ALT+U
Update (New User)
ALT+I
View
ALT+P
Update (Enter Site User)

Enjoy!

[now back to finding a way to put eh document library views on MySite....]