Mart Muller's Weblog

Last week, Office 12 was show to the public for the first time. One of the big changes in the Office applications is the layout. In fact Word 12 will have no new features, only a new UI. New blogger Jensen Harris goes into depth on this on his blog. Some impressions from his blog:

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Last day was the final PDC day and after that we had a great time in Santa Monica! So to summarize, I’ve seen some great things here, so my top 5 at PDC05:

• Office 12 with complete new UI
• SharePoint v3 (I love the ContentTypes and Applications part!)
• The server structure based on WSS as a foundation for about everything
• WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation)
• WCM (Web Content Management)/ECM (Enterprise Content Management)

Then I met some people I’ve had contact with via my blog like Pedro, Mads and the Belgian guys Jan, Patrick and Joris. So it was fun to see them in real life instead of email/blogs/msn.

To before I take the 11 hour plane home, some pictures of yesterday:

On the way back to the hotel

Santa Monica Beach

So, what we’ve seen at PDC05 so far is that a lot of server aspects will have WSS as a foundation. Like I’ve told before MCMS will be part of this foundation (in specific, it will use the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace). We have a lot of solutions built right now using MSIB, the integration between MCMS, Commerce and SharePoint (search). So, if MCMS and SPS is part of the WSS foundation, what about Commerce?

Right now, there is little told about how the Commerce team is in this. It seems like they do not move with the Office 12 wave at this point. The WCM guys couldn’t really tell what’s going to happen and in fact the experts at the “Ask The Experts” stands didn’t tell us either.

So, this will be a gap probably in the foundation? Maybe not entirely. There is a lot of Commerce funtionality that will be available by the standard WSS foundation. Think about targetting, connecting to external datasources and rich editing of (list) items. Although I’m not an expert on Commerce I think we should be creative at this point about how to use it in Office 12 Server. So, lots of things to be thinking about in the next months.

Maybe Microsoft could give us a hint on this one?

Many question about what will happen to MCMS in the new Office 12 wave. Well there is a lot that will change where WSS will be the foundation for about everything. I just did a session on Web Content Management and Web Content Management will shift to WSS as well (as expected). How will this relate to MCMS 2.0?

• Web content management will migrate to WSS, using the MasterPages mechanism as the templates.
• Channels will be Area’s subwebs
• Postings will be pages in a document library
• Placeholders will be ContentTypes
• There will be a 100% content upgrading support from MCMS 2.0 to WSS

So, exciting things will happen in the next version and I really can’t wait to test it out with SharePoint 3 beta 1 that will be available in a few months!

There is a lot of new stuff coming up with SharePoint v3, so a brief overview of some of the new features:

• List item security
• Recycle Bin (user and admin level)
• Workflow! (using Windows Workflow Foundation)
• Other data source lookup columns
• UI improvements like better menu’s treeviews and configurable options
• RSS support
• (Custom) ContentTypes
• MasterPages (ASP.Net 2.0)
• Improved Definition structure
• Two-way Outlook integration
• Eventhandlers in every list
• Version history in every list
• Minor and major versioning
• Security on versions
• Email to lists
• Different authentication methods per domain (url)

A much longer list can be found here

For you that have seen my blurry photo of SharePoint V3 and who want to know more, there is a video on channel9 with an interview with PJ Hough and others about SharePoint v3. Go check it out here.

So it’s been a few days since my last posting, but we’ve been really busy doing the 4d Shrek and Jurrasic Park rides in Universal Studios, playing mini ping pong, oh and yes, attend some very cool sessions 

We did so some cool stuff like Windows Vista (I’ve been struggling to get it running on a VPC in my laptop) and Office 12, which has no new features, but a whole new improved GUI. It looks really good. The major changes:

• The got rid of most of the menu en toolbars in which no one can find his way.
• They built in a cool ‘ribbon’ with contextualized items, which scales with the client screen resolution. Very cool!
• Many new and easy looking styles which can be previewed before applying it.

Too bad we have to wait for a fews months before beta 1 is out!

Anyway, day two was really amazing. I’ve seen a lot of new cool IW things that will change a lot.

• Integrated infopath forms everywhere (also web based) using a Forms server.
• New WSS version with some major improvements (I will talk about that later, because it is too much)
• ECM (enterprise content management), which is not totally clear yet, but basically is a foundation based on WSS for search, collaboration, BI, business processes, Portals and content management.
• Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a foudation over all products integrated and with VS design options.

New SharePoint version

I just arrived in L.A. at The Standard (nice hotel!) after a 11 hour flight from Amsterdam. I met my other colleagues at the top roof swimming pool/bar which was quite nice.  Anyway, first day is fine so far and looking forward to tomorrow when PDC starts.

For now, some pics:

The Standard hotel

Some of the other Tammo’s

My hotel room

And the swimming pool

SharePoint 2003 web parts for implementing a tabbed interface. One web part provides navigation among pages using tabs, the other allows different web parts on a single page to be controlled using tabs.

download here

What? 3.0? Ok, before 2.0 is released, they’re going to talk about version 3 of VSTO at PDC! 3.0 will work for Office 12 and they’re showing an early build at session OFF417, including a handson lab which is great.

Some more info at Eric Carter’s and John Durant’s blog

Paul Schaeflein has written an article about reading and writing RSS with SharePoint. There are many examples on RSS with SharePoint, but Paul gives a good overview on how to deal with it. So, a worth reading!

“A popular request for intranets is inclusion of current news or sports headlines. Microsoft addressed this request in its Online Web Part gallery with some Web Parts that display content from MSN. These Web Parts provide the basics from a single provider. On today's Internet, there are many other choices for information. This month, I will review a few different solutions for including part of this vast information on a SharePoint site.

Syndication technology has grown very popular over the last year or so. This technology is called RSS, and it allows content publishers and consumers to exchange information very simply. At its core, RSS is an XML file that follows a specific schema. A publisher produces an "RSS feed" and makes it available at a location (URL). Consumers (which are usually computer programs) read the feed via the internet and re-format the information for display. Since SharePoint understands XML, it is well suited to process RSS. RSS on the internet

RSS is used in many places on the internet. Major news publishers (The New York Times, CNN, USA Today) provide RSS Feeds. The primary Web portals (My Yahoo!, My MSN and Google's Internet Gateway) allow visitors to add RSS Feeds to their personalized home page. There are also many Windows (and Mac) programs that consume RSS Feeds. These programs, called aggregators, are also being merged into forthcoming versions of internet browsers.”

Read complete article

A few days to go until PDC05 and today I’ve clicked my schedule together for the sessions I’m planning to attend. I’m not sure about every one of them, but most of them are fixed. Please drop me a line if you are planning to go to to one of the sessions as well!

The Site Permissions System provides integrated SharePoint management that can help you address your company's business needs and increase productivity. When IT managers are faced with large SharePoint installations, permissions management can be time consuming and cumbersome; Site Permissions Manager can help. With one common interface an Administrator can delegate Active Directory permissions to their sites easily and quickly, whether its one site or twenty. Site Permissions Manager can also provide “Top-level Site Administration” for each of the sites listed, cutting down management time with other SharePoint administrative tasks.

Download here

Fabian Moritz (via Michael Greth) wrote a usefull tip about how to synchronize folders in SharePoint with your local system. The just released free application SyncToy 1.0 has been the trigger for finding out.

Very usefull with for example Private Documents in My site in SharePoint.

But be aware, when synchronizing SharePoint folders, checked-in documents will be overwritten and replaced!

Many cases I know where this has been an issue. Microsoft published an article about how to automate the InfoPath template deployment. I hope InfoPath vNext will be a lot easier…

Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 enables you to publish form templates to a specific location, such as a Web server or a network file share. In this article, learn how to update part of a previously-published form template and move it to a new location.

When moving a form template to a new location, there are a number of items within the form template component files that need to be changed, such as the publishUrl in the manifest.xsf file. While you could do this within the InfoPath design mode, it is often more convenient and safer to use a script to modify these properties. In general, the following list represents the most common items that you may need to change:

• The publishUrl
• The wsdlUrl and serviceUrl of the Web service adapters
• Database connection strings and other Data Connection parameters
• The caption for the name of the form template
• The form template URN

It is not necessary to modify all of these attributes for every form template deployment. In most cases, the script used to deploy a particular form template contains specific information about the form template itself, and where it is deployed.

Modification of the Processing Instructions (PI) in the template.xml file, which represents the default data for the form template, may also be necessary to avoid the conflict resolution dialog box when opening forms of the same name and version. This article does not address this specific issue, but the script could be modified to open this file and update the PI. For example code that provides a similar operation, refer to the SolutionFileModify, SolutionFileModifyVersion, and SolutionVersionUpdate functions in the xdown.js script code. This code file is used for the Downlevel Tool and can be found at Using the Downlevel Tool.

Read the complete article

Pedro Serrano from CaveDigital has started blogging about SharePoint. A long time I have waited for this, so join the club Pedro!  

update: My colleague Ferry started as well, whahoo! He’s interaction designer and has some usefull thing to say about IA, IxD and content management. He’s doing a lot of SharePoint IA, so keep an eye on him as well!

Via Patrick:

Jan has been busy working and finishing a new version of the SmartPart. We have been using version 1.1  in a couple of projects over the last months and like the new features:

• support for custom ToolParts
• easy access to the underlying web part
• support for custom properties without exposing them in the property toolpart
• various minor improvements

Great work Jan!

Via Mark and Igor:

To register for the beta program, take the following steps

1. Go to http://beta.microsoft.com and sign-in with your Microsoft Passport Network credentials.
2. When prompted, enter the Guest ID “MaestroTester” (one word) and follow the instructions.

Nice post by Bart Bultinck (new blogger) about his script to automate parts of the SharePoint Portal Server setup! He’s going to work it out to script even more procedures, so if you have a tip you can drop it.

Right now, the script does:

• adding a user to the local admins group
• find cdrom drive to kickstart setup (you can place these lines in comments if your run the setup over network drive
• create needed directories

Great work!