Are reading books/blogs/articles about SharePoint. sometimes we face the acronym ECB, What does it mean?

ECB = European Central Bank

KIDDING

ECB = Edit Control Button

This is a menu appears for items in SharePoint list/library, sometimes we call it context menu.

This ECB

This ECB

I have a lot of passion towards the art of presentations and watching great presenter around the world, one the great sites that I like in this is TED.

I have came through a great presentation though Garr Reynolds blog "10 things to know before you pitch a VC for money"

here are the 10 tips:

1. Integrity
2. Passion
3. Experience
4. Knowledge
5. Skill
6. Leadership
7. Commitment
8. Vision
9. Realism
10. Coachability

Garr Reynolds also did a great job on converting the video into presentation summarizing it find it here Pitching Tips: presentation tips from The Pitching Coach

Out of nothing the My Site link changed (inside the My Site itself) to My OWA and redirects the user to his personal mailbox.

Then suddenly it changed to look like this

 

after tracing the issue I discovered that the control shows My Site link check if the user has in his profile a value for the Outlook Web Access URL, the control changes the link to My OWA (below image for the property in the user profile)

Performance is perspective that all the developers forget during development and it pops up and the end of project (worst time). for SharePoint development there are a lot of areas to tune the performance (Code, caching, farm network design..etc)

Below a set of good white papers and posts which puts in on a track for performance optimizations:

1. SharePoint Performance Optimization:How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites
2. Optimizing Office SharePoint Server for WAN environments
3. Optimizing custom Web parts for the WAN
4. Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects
5. SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Dispose Patterns by Example
6. Building a new page layout which does not reference core.js (but downloads it while the page is being viewed thereby optimizing response time)
7. Dealing with Memory Pressure problems in MOSS/WSS
8. [Update] Case Study: Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to implement a large-scale content storage scenario with rapid search availability

ciao

Recently i was reading the blog post Public-Facing SharePoint? Here's something scary... Please activate ViewFormPagesLockDown!!! and i want to highlight one piece of information when you activate ViewFormPagesLockDown feature (can be activated only through stsadm) you are securing all the pages inherit from LayoutsPageBase, so if you want to add your own pages to be still accessible let them inherit from UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase

MSDN documentation for UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase

In general, use UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase as a base class for pages to which even unauthenticated users must have access; such as a login page.

For a page base control to which access can be limited to users that possess certain rights, use LayoutsPageBase.

Typically, you create a class in a code behind (.aspx.cs) file that derives from UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase. Your .aspx file, in turn, inherits from your custom page class. For example, the c:\Program Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extenstions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\login.aspx page that ships with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 inherits from an internal class named LoginPage which itself inherits from UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase.

WOW!!!

I am glad to announce the launch of Egypt SharePoint User Group this is the first user group in Egypt dedicated for SharePoint, we will be focusing to SharePoint development, administrations and customizations, all what you need to know about SharePoint.

We are going to organize sessions to talk about SharePoint and invite speakers from the different companies in Egypt or the world to share their expertise in the SharePoint world.

Register now

Egypt SharePoint User group is one ISPA children and one the regions ISPA support Thanks to Bob Fox who helped on establishing the group and the one of the ISPA board members.

So what is ISPA? It is a newly established association dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world.

Bob Fox announced its launch

"The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together."

ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists and I am glad to be one of them and dedicated for Egypt.

In Parallel and the same day Arno Nel has launched SharePoint Magazine

This is great day and i think this a turning point in the SharePoint user groups and communities.

Stay tuned

Viva SharePoint

Microsoft released major updates apply to:

I really encourage all SharePoint admins/devs to have a look on these updates as this will have a lot improvements according to Microsoft wordings

All three updates contain fixes and product performance updates driven by customer feedback which have resulted in significant platform performance improvements in several areas.  There has also been a focus on several core platform components, including improvements to upgrade, future patching and servicing, several targeted updates for workflow, the Business Data Catalog and inter-farm server authentication with Kerberos.  For more detailed information please read the KB articles listed further on in this post.

More details
Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates

Pizzzesss: Heros Happen Here DVDs incldues Windows Server 2008, Visual studio 2008 and SQL server 2008

One of my colleagues has consulted me what is the best way to save common configuration for web parts provided that this configuration can differ from site to another.

And my answer was create a custom list in each site has two columns key and value, the administrator can set the values and the web parts in the site read from it.

After while I found this great blog post Introducing the SharePoint Config Store for developers which introduced the SharePoint config store which this functionality in a neat and clean way.

This the description from project site on codeplex

Project Description
The SharePoint Config Store is intended for SharePoint developers, and provides the framework to be able to use a SharePoint list for application configuration values. This is useful when there are certain values used in a site or application's code, but we don't to hardcode them or even store them in web.config. Storing such values in a list means they can be easily updated (possibly by end users if you choose to allow this) without requiring access to the web server's filesystem.

It has been my first time in the MVP summit and in Seattle, the experience was fantastic developers from all the over world, passionate about technology and very professional.

It was really amazing meeting all the great SharePoint MVPs face to face talking with them, play with them Paintball , everybody is talking the same language SHAREPOINT.

Also meeting the product team and talking with them (unfortunately I will not able to blog about the topics as I am under NDA).

Hopefully I will be there next year.

Some photos’ links I borrowed from my colleagues the SharePoint MVPs

Andrew Connell

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewconnell/sets/72157604610417326/

SS Ahmed

http://picasaweb.google.com/saifullah.shafiq/Paintball2008
http://picasaweb.google.com/saifullah.shafiq/PartyWithPalermo
http://picasaweb.google.com/saifullah.shafiq/MvpAttendeeParty
http://picasaweb.google.com/saifullah.shafiq/ProductGroupDinner
http://picasaweb.google.com/saifullah.shafiq/PaintballLunch

SharePoint Team blog feedback

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/04/17/sharepoint-mvps-know-how-to-have-fun-and-give-constructive-product-feedback.aspx

Next week I will be traveling to Seattle to attend the MVP summit, this is my first there and I am totally excited about it.

Unfortunately at the same time in Egypt the Egypt developers conference will start www.edc2008.com I wished that I could attend to present there but the MVP summit wins

c u in Seattle

I have delivered a session for quality engineers in ITWorx, this session was main target to raise the quality engineers awareness level to be able to analyze if the reproduced issues are development issues  or SharePoint misuse also to enable the quality engineers to simulate more scenarios by changes the SharePoint different settings and configurations.

Topics discussed

• SharePoint Architecture
• Web parts
• Site and lists
• Multilingual support and language packs
• SharePoint permissions
• Sites settings 
• Features
• Solutions

There was no presentation in session, it was mainly depending on demos and open discussions between me and the quality engineers and I think was really help for them and will increase their vision when preparing the test cases.

Microsoft had released a set best practices for many common types of customizations Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Microsoft says:

"Customization, as used in this section, means any addition to, change to, or removal of the settings, content, and templates provided by SharePoint Products and Technologies."

check it here

SharePoint Products and Technologies Customization Best Practices

Brief Description

Add preformatted document libraries to your Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. Each library is configured with a Microsoft Office Word 2007 template that generates a new document and binds data in the library with data in the body of each document.

This download contains templates for the following document libraries:

• Invoices
• Specifications
• Press releases
• Customer site visit reports
• Meeting notes

Download Here

MOSS 2007 now provides a great service, InfoPath Forms Services

"InfoPath Forms Services is a server technology that makes it possible for users to fill out InfoPath forms in a Web browser. Users don't have to have InfoPath installed on their computer to fill out this type of form, nor are they required to download anything extra from the Web. All they need is access to a browser, such as Windows Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, or Mozilla Firefox."

The published InfoPath forms are rendered and white blank page which most of the time will not follow your portal main theme, there are ways to integrate the form inside the portal

• Using XmlFormView web part
• Use my webpart InfoPath form viewer webpart

InfoPath form viewer webpart main features:

• render the InfoPath form in iframe
• ability to add html code to be rendered
• set query string keys to be appended to the form url and consumed by the form

Required configurations:

• Html code: html code that contain iframe with macro that will be replaced by the form URL
  for example:

<div class="EForms">

<div class="EForms2">

<div class="EForms3">

<h5>form title</h5>

<div style ="text-align:center;margin-top:10px;">

<iframe src="%formurl%" width=99% scrolling=no frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 height=600 >info path here</iframe>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

• Form URL: the actual form url
  for example:http://moss.dep/English/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XsnLocation=http://moss.dep/English/Meeting%20Request%20English/Forms/template.xsn&SaveLocation=http%3A%2F%2Fmoss%2Edep%2FEnglish%2FMeeting%20Request%20English&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fmoss%2Edep%2FEnglish%2FMeeting%2520Request%2520English%2FForms%2FAllItems%2Easpx&DefaultItemOpen=1
• Form parameters: query string keys to be read comma separated

Package contains:

• InfoPathFormViewer.wsp: solution file for the webpart
• setupInfoPathFormViewer.bat: batch file to be executed from one web front end node (edit the batch file and replace http://londonmoss with your portal url)

you can download the package from here

if anyone have comments please send to me.

Hope you like it

very nice podcasts by Mike Gannotti

Podcast series covering topics like SharePoint, Office, Knowledge Management and Collaboration, Web Based Training, Streaming Media, The Digital eHome, Wine, Travel, and more.

Michael on the Go Podcasts

With every product or technology rises a battle some people attacks the product and others defend it, and for MOSS it is one the most debatable products due it huge success, below i gathered some posts from both sides.

With:

SharePoint is not the Holy Grail

I don’t care if you don’t want to develop on SharePoint, and neither does your boss

SharePoint is a good development platform for applications

Joel Oleson's recent post

Is SharePoint Going To Die?

Against:

Why SharePoint Portal Server is Terrible

SharePoint is not a good development platform

SO WHICH SIDE YOU ARE?!!!

In my current project all of the sudden the people search stopped working and the number of items in the scope were zero.

I did some research and found that to enable the people search you need to add the following url to the content source (if your portal url is http://www.demoportal.com)
then you need to add sps3://www.demoportal.com

check this post talk about Crawling SharePoint sites using the SPS3 protocol handler

c u

Hello SharePoint lovers, i recieved email saying that i am now SharePoint MVP 

i would to thank all who supported me to read this

• CuttingEdge club in ITWorx
• Mohamed Wahbi from MS Egypt
• my friend Mohamed Yehia
• also SharePointblogs.com for enabling me to share my knoweledge online

also i would like to congratulate my colleuge Mohamed Samy for being MVP also now we have ITWorx MVPs

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

I would to thank all who attended CuttingEdge club first public event – SharePoint platform and their great reviews.

It went very nice for the first event and audience liked the topic, since no public session for SharePoint in the IT community in Egypt.

Find the presentation here

Waiting for you in the next sessions.

In many secinarios i needed to set the page i want to open when the user closes the InfoPath form (browser enabled), after invistigating the browser enabled forms URL i found an intersting parameter, it is "Source".

the standard form url will be in the following form

http://londonmoss:36969/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XsnLocation=http://londonmoss:36969/Forms/Forms/template.xsn&SaveLocation=http%3A%2F%2Flondonmoss%3A36969%2FForms&Source=http%3A%2F%2Flondonmoss%3A36969%2FReports%2FForms%2Fcurrent%2Easpx&DefaultItemOpen=1

you can just change the value for the "Source" paramter to whatever URL (must be in the same site collection) and in encoded format.

that's it

any comments?