Marwan Tarek's blog [MVP SharePoint]

What is ECB?

marwan.tarek — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:16:00 GMT

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

10 things to know before you pitch a VC for money

marwan.tarek — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:08:31 GMT

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:

Integrity
Passion
Experience
Knowledge
Skill
Leadership
Commitment
Vision
Realism
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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

My Site link changed to to My OWA

marwan.tarek — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:06:00 GMT

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

Originally the link was like this

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)

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

SharePoint Performance optimizations

marwan.tarek — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:09:00 GMT

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:

ciao

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Relation between ViewFormPagesLockDown feature, LayoutsPageBase and UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase

marwan.tarek — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:24:25 GMT

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.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Products over SharePoint webinar: Catalyst MLG Provisioning Suite and Exams Expert

marwan.tarek — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:36:00 GMT

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Presenting @ DotNetWork.org: SharePoint WebParts development

marwan.tarek — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:55:00 GMT

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

The SharePoint Era: Egypt SharePoint User Group, International SharePoint Professionals Association and SharePoint Magazine launched

marwan.tarek — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:37:28 GMT

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.

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Major Update: Availability of Infrastructure Updates

marwan.tarek — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:46:44 GMT

Microsoft released major updates apply to:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office Project Server 2007

Microsoft Search Server 2008

Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007

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

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Presenting @ CuttingeEdge: "Demystifying SharePoint site definitions, What and How?"

marwan.tarek — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:43:00 GMT

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

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Saving common configurations for SharePoint components

marwan.tarek — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:40:27 GMT

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.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Presenting at .network.org 4th gathering

marwan.tarek — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:52:00 GMT

I will be presenting on 31th May in .network.org 4th gathering.They are active user group in Egypt and doing a great efforts in their gatherings, i will start with a series of MOSS sessions and my first session will be "SharePoint Development" an overview about SharePoint developmenti will talk about:

What is SharePoint
SharePoint Architecture
Web parts development

It will be pretty much like my session in CuttingEdge club In the same gathering Hussien Zahran will be presenting about Silverlight which will be nice mix Waiting for you there, the details below and facebook event

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=29073191800

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

The Amazing MVP summit

marwan.tarek — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:53:54 GMT

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

MVP summit 2008 - I will be there

marwan.tarek — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:39:19 GMT

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

SharePoint for Quality Engineers

marwan.tarek — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:55:37 GMT

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.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

SharePoint Products and Technologies Customization Best Practices

marwan.tarek — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:10:40 GMT

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

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Preformatted document libraries for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 [MS download]

marwan.tarek — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:52:00 GMT

[Download from Microsoft]

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

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InfoPath form viewer webpart

marwan.tarek — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:54:11 GMT

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:

<h5>form title</h5>

</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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

SharePoint Podcasts

marwan.tarek — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:40:33 GMT

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

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The SharePoint Battle

marwan.tarek — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:23:06 GMT

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?!!!

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Configuring People search

marwan.tarek — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:15:30 GMT

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Great New Year, I am MVP

marwan.tarek — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:21:00 GMT

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

thank you all.

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

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

marwan.tarek — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:55:30 GMT

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

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

SHAREPOINT PLATFORM: CuttingEdge club First Public Event [Mission accomplished]

marwan.tarek — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:23:00 GMT

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.

Posted on SharePoint Blogs

Set the return page when InfoPath form is closed on the browser

marwan.tarek — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:20:50 GMT

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?

Posted on SharePoint Blogs