December 2006 - Posts

• Full exposure to SharePoint Enterprise 2007

  Last week has been a good week for me because it has been the first full week that I’ve been exposed to SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) GTM outside of my company.  There has been so many things that I have learned that I can’t even start explain.  The one thing that is evident about SharePoint 2007 is that it has grown 2 to 3 times the size and it has a lot more complexity than it predecessor SharePoint 2003.   There are a lot of underlining things that are completely the same but there a lot more items that are brand new and require a lot more planning than before.  A big problem that I recognized over the last 2 years is that most companies under plan there deployment of SharePoint and after a year or so it becomes unmanageable or no longer supplies a benefit because information is too hard to find through navigation and search.    For the new release Microsoft has tried to help in this situation by supplying additional planning information.  Some of the information that I have found very useful are the supplemental documents for MOSS and WSS which can be found by using the first to links.  These Visio documents give great examples and information that any company planning to do a MOSS or WSS deployment.   MOSS http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/49cf7edd-14ee-445b-8ab0-1d1339f2435f1033.mspx   WSS http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/bcbae7bd-656b-4003-969c-8411b81fcd771033.mspx?pf=true   Another set of great content that I have found is the worksheets that Joel posted links for on his blog.  These worksheets will give you a great start on getting all the planning organized and help everyone see the big picture.  These worksheets will definitely help create the road map that can be used for a successful MOSS or WSS deployment.  The link to the worksheet are posted below.   Worksheets http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/386a641c-3c07-46e8-a25d-bfdcc55bfacb1033.mspx   This week and the next I’m in Seattle working with another company doing MOSS discovery and planning.  I’m very excited about these 2 weeks because it is going to give more real world experience with the new versions.   So far Seattle has been a little windy, wet and cold but I guess that is expected for the middle of December.  I'm off to work for the day and looking forward to another adventures day. Posted Dec 12 2006, 05:16 PM by mlotter with no comments

• In Seattle for 2 weeks any suggestions on things to do

  I was just informed that I will be traveling to Seattle on Sunday, December 10th for a 2 week SharePoint 2003 engagement and I decided to stay over the weekend because home sweet home is Raleigh, NC. Does anybody have any suggestions on things to do in Seattle at night or over the weekend?  If anybody wants to meet up for a couple of pints and shoot the breeze then I would be game for that.   Posted Dec 07 2006, 04:15 AM by mlotter with no comments

• InfoPath 2003 .NET managed code solutions with learn curve for me

  Just got finished with a 12 week SharePoint and InfoPath project and I learned a interesting thing about the “System.Environment.UserName” attribute, IE security zones and InfoPath 2003.  We all know that InfoPath 2003 and IE is joined to the hip and it was definitely reinforced when I discovered the newest scenario.   The customer wanted us to develop a couple of InfoPath forms that would pre-populate information pending on their user identity.   My co-worker and I worked on creating 2 InfoPath forms that would pull information from SharePoint Profile Database per their identity.  The forms were developed and my co-worker created the forms and deployment documentation and I went on to the client site and deployed the forms.  To my surprise the forms didn’t work correctly on all the PC’s and was returning strange manage code errors that I couldn’t really explaining initially.  After doing a week long InfoPath and .NET knowledge transfer with the customer I decided to spend the last day trouble shooting the errors with the class.  After about 1 hour looking at all the InfoPath client settings it finally dawned on me that the problem could be occurring because of the IE explorer settings and sure enough I was correct.  When the InfoPath form was published to a SharePoint site that was part of the “Trusted Sites” security zone then the “System.Enviroment.UserName” attribute didn’t return a value but if the InfoPath form was published to a SharePoint site that was part of the “Local Intranet” security zone then the “System.Environment.UserName” attribute returned the username and the InfoPath form worked correctly.   What I just explained might be a very common thing but it was something that I just learned and thought I would pass along by doing this hoping that it might help someone else.   Posted Dec 07 2006, 04:11 AM by mlotter with no comments