You probably heard about the sudden death of Patrick Tisseghem.
Allthough I don't know him personally (I just followed a couple of his courses) I do wish to express my deepest condolences to his family and friends.

I'm working on a project where the customer wants to publish files from one SharePoint site to another. No prob so far. The challenge is in the fact that this customer is mostly working with Excel files that he wants to publish using Excel services. No prob, except for workbooks that have linked files, they wont publish through Exel services. But I found something to this.

I've created a SharePoint solution that adds a context menu-item "Publish File", where the code checks if it deals with an xlsx, xlsm, ... file or something else. If it is an xlsx file, the code uses the "breaklink" method in order to break all links with other workbooks and just keep the values, works perfect!. Functions like these I found in the "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll". I have no problem deploying the SharePoint solution in my development environment, but from the moment I want to deploy to the production server, it has problems with the reference to that interop dll.

Where do I put that interop dll best? I did have to install Excel on the production server....

After having a 27th different opinion on SharePoint Licensing, let's do a test. Below I specified the needs of a customer, you name the licenses that have to be bought.

You have a customer that wants an Intranet to be implemented. You propose to implement SharePoint Portal Server 2007 for all of the 900 users. The customer wants to use the BDC and forms server, no client InfoPath applications. Let us say that because of the business critical character and the volume of data we propose a 5 server farm (2 in front, 1 application and 2 mirrored or clustered database servers). We want an exact copy of this in the acceptance environment using virtualisation on 2 physical servers. The customer wants to develop with his team of 3 developers but they are not entitled to use MSDN licenses.
The servers have to be bought too, so all of the licenses have to be acquired (Win2003, SQL, MOSS, ....) from scratch.

Despite the fact that this is a very simple example, with even no MOSS for Internet included, I'm very curious about your reactions!

I must admit, the licensing model for SharePoint based solutions gives me a headache... and each time we ask Microsoft about the MOSS licensing model, we get a completely different story. The last update that I got was that licenses acquired for a production server (Win2003, SQL2005 and MOSS) can be used for any server in that environment (being acceptance and development).

Can anybody confirm this?

After a while, got back into blogging. Busy with lots of SharePoint projects, from which one I started today.
One of the customer requirements was to publish parts of excel files on a SharePoint site. No problem I said... untill the moment I took the customers file and tried to publish it.
"Cannot open workbook" the errormessage said. Appears you can't publish excel files trough excel services with linked workbooks...jeezes... Found an article where is described how to develop an UDF file, I'll try to publish the source tomorrow.

Finally back into the MOSS blog posting business. Got most of the content back using http://www.archive.org/web/web.php which is really cool!!

Hope to do some posting again.

The Explorer View is a feature of Windows SharePoint Services that allows you to access a document library as if you were manipulating a file system through a Windows Explorer window. This functionality leverages a feature of Internet Explorer known as the Web Folder Behaviors.

This document describes the feature as well as known issues and troubleshooting. Hope this helps for some of you.

Yesterday I attended the BIWUG meeting where we talked about "Records Management" and "BI" in Sharepoint. Quite interesting, I remebered following topics:

• Records management vs. Document management
• Documents become records after a period of time. Records typically live longer than documents.
• Documents are subject to change, records are subject to stay.
• Authors define the documents lifecycle, policies define the records lifecycle.
• Default there are 4 types of polcies
• Labels
• Auditing
• Barcodes
• Expiration
• It is possible to write extra policies customized for your company, Joris Poelmans showed us how to based on this article.

You can find some additional information on the Records Management Team blog, but they stopped blogging for now.

For the BI part Gunther Staes showed us how to use the Excel services and which things to take into account when implementing BI solutions. Beware of following things:

• When having existing Excel files be sure to check the macro's, they don't work in a browser based scenario
• When implementing Excel services, be sure to think thouroughly about security (Trusted locations, SSO, ...)

We ended with some questions, if anyone knows the answer please feel free:

• What is the "Reporting Calendar" about? It's got something to do with the scheduling of reports but not much known about it...
• Is there any news on the SQL Reporting Services functionalities on SharePoint lists?

The Offce Business Applications Team blog posted an interview with Jesse Shiah ( CEO Ascentn ). In this interview Jesse clearly makes a difference between "code-compiled" and "XML based" BPM systems, sit back and listen. You can find some additional product information on the Ascentn site.

Having InfoPath forms in SharePoint is great, but sometimes customers complain about how to open the form.
Most likely users have to navigate in a given site to the InfoPath form library, and there click "New" in order to start-up a new form. This little piece of code makes it a lot easier by putting a link on a page.

So, what you need to do is to add a "Content Editor" webpart on the page you want to have the link displayed. Open the source editor and paste/change following snippet:
I guess you can all see what to replace in your snippet . Might also be better to have a relative link instead of an abolute one, I just copied some code from the rendered HTML source of the given InfoPath form library AllItems.aspx page.

<script language="JavaScript">
   function NewAbsenceRequest()
   {
      createNewDocumentWithRedirect('http:\u002f\u002flocalhost:8040\u002fhr\u002fAbsenceRequests\u002fForms\u002ftemplate.xsn', 'http:\u002f\u002flocalhost:8040\u002fhr\u002fAbsenceRequests', 'SharePoint.OpenXmlDocuments.2', true, 'http://localhost:8040/hr/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XsnLocation=http://localhost:8040/hr/AbsenceRequests/Forms/template.xsn', 0)
   }
</script>
<a href="BLOCKED SCRIPT NewAbsenceRequest();">New Absence Request<a>

!!! Replace the "BLOCKED SCRIPT" by "JavaScript" and a ":", this is replaced by Community Server.

Have fun!

Normally I should do some "How To" postings, but I've got a question that I can't answer right away.

I did some implementations in SPS 2003 where I specified in the ONET.XML a section to apply a default theme using the ThemeSetter.aspx page.
This enabled us to create custom site definitions and apply another theme than the default one, works fine.

Do we also have to use this kind of scenario in MOSS2007 or is this improved?

Thanks in advance!

A nice feature for most of the SharePointers: a debugger feature! On the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog Lawrence wrote an article on the SharePoint debugger feature, you can find it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/04/10/debugger-feature-for-sharepoint.aspx

I received a number of requests on the AgilePoint features, presentations I gave, ... but could never anticipate on those requests.
I was really frustrated that I wrote posts on those things but could never share more information with you, well I finally can!
I've talked with Ascentn about this and they gave me a presentation that I could publish! The presentation is as attachment to this post.

So, what can you find in this presentation:

• Overview on BPM
• What is the difference between BPM and Workflows?
• Difference in tools that generate compiled code and those that generate XML
• To this you must pay attention!!! This difference makes that we can do a lot more with AgilePoint than with any other tool (e.g. migrating, rollback, ...)
• Conceptual overview
• The components in the AgilePoint suite. The most important ones are:
• Envision: This is fully embedded in MS Visio, and can be used by Business People, instead of the other applications that rely on IT people. When selecting a shape (e.g. Approval) you can specify the properties in a property pane. For who is the task, deadlines (taking business hours into account) possible notifications (by using mail templates), reminders, reassigning, ...
• Enterprise Manager: This is the place where you can monitor the processes. Here you can rollback, migratie, pause, cancel, ... processes, and do general administration tasks like user management, report management, performance monitoring, ...
• Workflow patterns
• Which patterns can be designed
• Integration
• SharePoint, Office, .Net code, Biztalk, WF, Java, ...

This presentation gives you a high level view on what BPM is and how AgilePoint deals with that. Imagine some kind of business process in your company, and how it can be translated with AgilePoint, we really can go very far with this tool.

If you should have any question or remark, don't hesitate.

Stef.

As most of you will know, SharePoint 2007 has a new cool feature "Accept Incomming Email" for libraries, which allows you to send e-mails to a sharepoint libraries (Except for the WIKI Library).

Generally there are 2 main things to do:

• Configure Incomming Email settings in the Central Administration.
• Configure the Incomming Email settings in your library.

In this document you can read how to configure this feature (Thanks to Steve Smith, MVP SharePoint Portal Server).

A nice thing to mention is that in order to send mails an Active Directory contact item is created. And it gets even better than that: When deleting the library the Active Directory contact item is... deleted!

Yesterday I did a presentation on MOSS and AgilePoint. Talked for 3 hours, my throat was killing me, but it was a real success; high rate of interaction, good questions, I was able to warm the attendees for this great story.

The MOSS concept was very usefull for them and the AgilePoint part was a big revelation. We have a demo with a mini SAP system installed. Whenever when we show the integration of SAP information in our MOSS/AgilePoint solution, people get very exited about the possibilities. Displaying products stored in SAP and consulted through communication with BAPI's (using SAP.Net Connector) in e.g. an InfoPath form, saving data to SAP re-using existing Business Logic, ... are just a couple of the "Real World" BPM examples. The user gets one single environment in SharePoint not knowing that he's retrieving data from different kinds of systems, which implies great efficiency, productivity and cost savings.

Next week I will be doing some BPM talking in a governement workshop, fortunately it's only 30min

As a presales consultant I often deal with Visio in order to draw some architectures, conceptual designs, ...
Got a link with a starter stencil customized for MOSS, hope this gets a bit extended.

Have fun!

Hi,

I'm currently taking a course about "AgilePoint", I've talked about it in my previous post.
Currently we are on version 4, which is MOSS2007 compliant.

I'm really thrilled about some new functionalities, especially about some that no other BPM product can offer --> Process Migration.
What is this about?
Well, let's take an example, the most classical one: Expense Report.
One starts by filling out an InfoPath form and waits for approval. In our current process it is the direct manager that gives approval.
Now we want to change something to this process; as from the moment the total value exceeds 1000EUR it is the financial controller that has to give approvel instead of the direct manager. So we change it nevertheless there is already one running process. Now, with the use of the "Enterprise Manager" we can suspend (pause) a running process and migrate the running ones. With an interface to map previous process steps to the current process steps we can easily migrate these running processes.

This is really a very cool feature that in my opinion none of the other BPM key players can offer.

More news will follow!

Stef.

Hi, I'm Stef, and as a Belgian SharePoint consultant I want to share my experiences with other SharePointers.
I'm mostly occupied with SharePoint presales, but I also do consultancy, varying from istallation, configuration and sometimes development. Most of the projects that I did were related to BPM (Business Process Management), and were realised in SharePoint in combination with InfoPath and AgilePoint (which is a Microsoft.Net based BPM System that allows you to modell your processes in MS Visio, really cool!).