Mart Muller's Weblog

• Generate SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services key performance indicators (KPIs) from Business Scorecard Manager KPIs.
• Generate Business Scorecard Manager KPIs from SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services KPIs.
• Save a configuration file that contains parameters (including the connection information to the SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services server and the Business Scorecard Manager server) that you entered by using KPIUtil.exe. You can use the saved configuration file either to generate KPIs from a command prompt or to open the configuration file in KPIUtil.exe at a later time.

download here

VSTO offers developers an opportunity to create applications within Office. Although there is not much around (yet!) except from Microsoft itself, I really think VSTO is a way to really improve productivity for Information Workers. John R. Durant, which is one of my favorite Office bloggers, wrote an article on MSDN about an Outlook Business Contact Assistant add-in. I think this arcticle is a good way to start your way into VSTO.

The Business Contact Assistant

“Learn to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System to create a managed add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. This add-in creates associations between contacts and Inbox items, and reports on Inbox activity in a user's contacts list. You use the development tools and programmable aspects of Outlook 2003.“

Read the complete MSDN article

Long time ago I mentioned the weblog package in FrontPage 2003 for creating weblogs in WSS environments (such as MySite). This package has to be deployed with FrontPage. One of our customers wanted to have this blog functionality in their portal for internal blogging, so there had to be a way to safe this site as template and add it to the Site Template gallery.

The standard blog option in FrontPage

Not that hard, but somehow this package cannot be deployed as Site Template; internal references are not set properly and the template just breaks… Also becasue it didn’t contain all desired features, I had to do it the custom way!

It was not that hard, all data that is stored in a blog can be stored in lists, and views and rights can be set quite easily. For some functions however, I created custom webparts to give the blog some more power. This is the result:

Current features:

• Add/Edit/Delete postings options (depending on user rights)
• Monthly archive
• Comments (enable/disable option)
• Author Info (no. of postings/comments/first post/picture)
• Admin webpart for admin functions

More features (catagories, rss, atom) will be added soon.

Jan Tielens did it again!   Son of SmartPart version 1.0 for WSS on ASP.Net 2.0 supporting UserControls and ASP.Net 2.0 WebParts. Great work!

Here’s some good news for everybody that has been waiting for it: I’ve just uploaded the brand new Son of SmartPart to the GotDotNet site! First of all, what is the Son of SmartPart? This version of the SmartPart will allow you to run ASP.NET 2.0 Web User Controls and ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in SharePoint sites. Since WSS SP2 you can run your SharePoint sites on the .NET Framework version 2.0, and from now on you can use the power of the new platform to extend SharePoint.

• Download the latest release from the GotDotNet site here
• Watch the screencast demonstrating the deployment

What is working and what is not?
Not all features that I would like to be in v1.0 are available yet, so what is already working and what’s not? The Son of SmartPart (SOSP) comes in two flavours: one to run ASP.NET 2.0 User Controls (SOSP-UC) and one to run ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts (SOSP-WP). For the SOSP-UC version, all the features from the previous version of the SmartPart are working, so you can expose custom properties, toolparts, create connectable web parts and so on. The SOSP-WP version only has the basic functionality to run ASP.NET 2.0 web parts. Advanced stuff like connections are not yet supported. Support for these advanced features will follow.

How do you install it?
If you download the release from the GotDotNet site, you will find an Installation Guide. I’ve also created a small screencast to guide you to this process. There is no automated installation yet because the current version of the deployment tools (STSADM and WPPackager) do not support .NET 2.0 assemblies (yet?).

What's next?
This is not the last release of the Son Of SmartPart! I'd love to hear your feedback so we can make the coming releases even better. For now: go get the latest version on http://www.smartpart.info and unleash the power of ASP.NET 2.0 on your SharePoint sites!

Together with this, Jan also wrote an article with a Quickstart for SmartPart, showing how to create ASP.Net 2.0 UserControls and show it in SharePoint.

This article will show you how you can create your first .NET 2.0 user control and show it in a SharePoint site. First you need to deploy the Son of SmartPart to your SharePoint server of course. Check the Installation Guide which you can find in the zip file that can be downloaded from www.smartpart.info, or watch this installation screencast. When this is done, open up your brand new Visual Studio 2005 and create a new ASP.NET Website. In the Website menu choose “Add new item”, and add a new Web User Control to the project, named DemoControl.asxc.

Now let’s implement the desired functionality! Drag-and-drop a Calendar control from your toolbox on the newly created Web User Control. You can do this both in design and source view, but in the source view you immediately see the result. You can use the SmartTag to Auto Format the control, I’ve selected the professional look of course.

It’s time to write some code so switch to code view, and in the Page_Load event write following code:

public partial class DemoControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Calendar1.Width = new Unit("100%");
        Calendar1.SelectionMode = CalendarSelectionMode.None;
        Calendar1.TodaysDate = DateTime.Now;
    }
}

Optionally you can test your user control by putting it on your default.aspx page for example. But lets immediately fast forward to the deployment of your work to SharePoint. Open the folder in which your web site is located (typically \My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\WebSites\NameOfSite) and copy DemoControl.ascx and DemoControl.ascx.cs to the \UserControls folder of your SharePoint site (check the installation guide if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Next you can open the SharePoint site where you’d like to add the user control as a web part. On the top right of the page, click “Modify Shared Page”, “Add Web Parts”, “Browse” and drag-and-drop an instance of the SonOfSmartPart UC web part to your page.

Click the “Open the tool pane” link on the SmartPart and select the “usercontrols_democontrol_ascx” from the top drop down. Additionally you can also choose a title for your web part. When you’re done click the OK button at the bottom of the page. Now you’re ASP.NET 2.0 UserControl is displayed in a SharePoint site!

BI is hot, also at Tam Tam. A few Tammo’s have set up a Business Scorecard blog to spit out all their BI knowledge

“This blog is about making scorecards from the cardboard to the server. It is fed by the Tam Tam Business Scorecards Knowledge Group. This is a group of employees from all of the organisation of Tam Tam that are afiliated with Scorecards, from scratch to the final version.

The final version of Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager was released earlier this month and that was the sign for us to start off with this blog.”

Via Office Rocker:

Lim Mei Ying, Stefan Gosner, Andrew Connell and Angus Logan did a great job on their new MCMS book “Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development”

Patrick mentions that chapter five (Searching MCMS with SharePoint) is free to download. A great chapter and a trigger to order the whole book!

There is not much documentation of best practices on this topic, but on MSDN there is an article about how to deal with SharePoint development environments, finally! This article is based on how to deal with internal development. There are some area’s however that still have some need for attention according to me:

• What about offsite development? We often work at the customer location because it’s good for user adoption and because it’s a very easy way to communicate. How should we deal with VSS, testing and developers that have no internet access at the customers office?
• What about styles, area/list structures and site definitions? SharePoint development is not only about webparts and webservices. It has also a lot to do with how to design the environment. In many cases, lists are used as source for data in webparts. Also area structures can be important for development scenario’s. I posted a little about deploying structures before here.

Besides that, a good article in the good direction! We are currently redesigning out development achitecture and this article is some usefull input.

From MSDN:

“Learn to conduct team-based development of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003–based applications. These applications can include customized Web Part Pages, Web Parts, supporting Web applications, and Web services.”

Read the complete article

Microsoft published a KB article telling which character cannot be used in sitesnames, folders and filenames. This overview can be usefull when creating bulk import scripts, site creation tools or just finding out which charaters caused an upload error

Read the article

With the Office 12 beta 1 in sight, Jensen Harris wrote an article about the Office build numbers. Apart of the usage of this story, it is nice to read

“In Office 2003, the "11" that precedes the build number is simply to denote that Office 2003 was version 11 of Office.  Similarly, the 12 in Office "12" means... well, you get it.  Office XP was version 10, Office 2000 was version 9, Office 97 was version 8.  You get the idea.

The most interesting thing to watch for is the first 4-digit number you encounter.  In the examples above, 5608 and 3417.  These are what we refer to as the "build number."  Every few days during the development cycle, we compile all of the code in Office and turn it into a "build": essentially an installable version of all the work everyone's done up until that point.  Eventually, a build becomes "final" and that is the one that ends up on CDs and in the store.

The 4-digit build number is actually an encoded date which allows you tell when a build was born.  The algorithm works like this:

• Take the year in which a project started.  For Office "12", that was 2003.
• Call January of that year "Month 1."
• The first two digits of the build number are the number of months since "Month 1."
• The last two digits are the day of that month.

So, if you have build 3417, you would do the following math: "Month 1" was January 2003.  "Month 13" was January 2004.  "Month 25" was January 2005.  Therefore, "Month 34" would be October 2005.

3417 = October 17, 2005, which was the date on which Office 12 build 3417 started.

For Office 2003 and XP both, "Month 1" was January 2000.  So, the final build of Office 2003, 5608, was made on August 8, 2003.”

Read the complete build number philosophy

The Office 12 Beta 1 testers have received an ‘approval’ email for testing Office 12.

“You will be provided with access to the Office "12" Beta software, documentation, and support within the next 2-3 weeks.”

MCMS 2002 SP2 is ready for download.

Download here

AimingTech Company announces the version 1.0 of JPEG IFilter for Microsoft Indexing Service. The software component is free for non-commercial use and 30-day trial for commercial use.

JPEG IFilter is a content indexing filter for JPEG (JFIF) image files. The IFilter is compatible with indexing services based on the Microsoft Search technology: Microsoft Indexing Service, Windows Desktop Search, Microsoft SharePoint Portal. JPEG IFilter extends the services capabilities to index the JPEG files (extensions JPG, JPEG, JPE, JFIF) and to perform content search for them.

JPEG IFilter is a software component that provides benefits together with other Windows applications. With AimAtFile Fast File Search the IFilter helps users quickly find photos in their home collection. With Microsoft Indexing Service under Internet Information Server or with SharePoint Portal the IFilter provides site or portal visitors with a powerful search for image files.

There are several standards that determine methods of storing text information (metadata) in the image files: EXIF, IPTC/NAA, XMP. The IFilter is EXIF standard compliant. Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) is a Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (JEIDA) standard. It is supported by the most of digital cameras manufactures and it is supported by Windows XP. The JPEG files summary properties that you can edit in Windows Explorer are stored in the EXIF format.

The current build 1.0.0.112 of JPEG IFilter extracts the Windows XP JPEG file properties: Title, Subject, Author, Keywords, Comments and standard EXIF properties: PropertyTagImageDescription, PropertyTagArtist, PropertyTagExifUserComment, PropertyTagDateTime, PropertyTagEquipMake, PropertyTagEquipModel. The filter treats them as text contents. Some properties are mapped to the well-known Indexing Service properties: Title and PropertyTagImageDescription to DocTitle, Author and PropertyTagArtist to DocAuthor, Comments and PropertyTagExifUserComment to DocComments.

Web Site: http://www.aimingtech.com/jpeg_ifilter/index.htm
Download: http://www.aimingtech.com/jpeg_ifilter/jpeg_ifilter.exe

Other IFilters: http://blogs.tamtam.nl/mart/SharepointSearchIFilterOverview.aspx
How to deploy: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555209

Over the last year we have had several “weird” problems with our shared WSS server. Things like problems with the explorer view, mixed languages, memory leaks and some other weird behavours. Some of them are known issues an could be (temporary) fixed. The more the server was used, the sooner the problems reoccured, which is something really frustrating. We did some tests regarding those problems, but somehow it is very hard to reproduce them.

One of my colleagues however, Frits, ran into a page in the WSS admin guide about WSS 2.0 arhictecture. This article talks about the number of virtual servers that can be created on one front end server:

“Windows SharePoint Services supports many fewer virtual servers per front-end Web server (approximately 10). This difference is a result of the use of ASP.NET, which creates a separate set of compiled DLLs for each virtual server. Because Windows SharePoint Services uses several large DLLs, it is not practical to have them all in memory at the same time. (When you extend a virtual server, approximately 50 MB of memory is taken up by the base working set of processes, including ASP.NET.) “

(http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsb02.mspx)

According to the article, it is ok to create about 10 virtual servers per box; more could be bad for memory management. I get the idea this could be the cause of our problems. Anyone out there who has ran into similar problems when deploying a larger number of virtual servers then 10 on a front end server? I would really like to hear your experiences with these problems.

With thanks for Patrick for mentioning:

Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow-enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a Microsoft® WinFX® name space (System.Workflow), an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently as Beta) for both client and server versions of Windows. Windows Workflow Foundation supports a wide range of scenarios including workflow within line-of-business applications, user interface page flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite workflow for service-oriented applications, business rule-driven workflow and workflow for systems management.

There are two downloads on this page:

• The Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1.2 runtime components are required for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services "3.0" (Beta 1), Office "12" servers (Beta 1), and "FrontPage 12" (Beta 1).
• The Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation are required for customers who are designing workflows in Visual Studio 2005 and/or require the Windows Workflow Foundation SDK.

download here

Last week, Tam Tam won the “ComputerPartner's Innovative Business Partner Award” in the “Portals” category. This award is choosen by the readers of ComputerPartner (online knowledge platform for business partners) and a professional jury. This jury was impressed by the way Tam Tam implements innovative portal solutions with Microsoft SharePoint.

Anyway, nice to hear and thanks for all the people that voted for Tam Tam!

Today, Microsoft published a press release with a preview to ‘Windows Live’ and ‘Office Live’ services, online (internet) versions designed to deliver rich and seamless experiences to individuals and small businesses.

“These new offerings demonstrate how software is evolving through the power of services in ways that enable more dynamic and relevant experiences for people,” Gates said. “Our goal is to make Windows, Office and Xbox® further come alive for our customers at work, home and play.”

Check out Windows Live at  http://ideas.live.com/.

About Office Live:

“The company today also previewed Office Live, a new set of Internet-based services for growing and managing a business online. Designed to help companies establish an online presence, automate key internal and external business tasks, and collaborate with employees, partners and customers, the initial Office Live offerings are targeted at the approximately 28 million small businesses worldwide that have fewer than 10 employees. These services can be used independently but also integrate with Microsoft Office programs used regularly by more than 400 million people around the world, including Microsoft Outlook®, Microsoft Excel®, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Small Business Edition. Over time, the scope of Office Live services will expand.

“A key objective of Office Live is to provide small businesses with the power to easily and inexpensively manage their business in a way that large enterprises already enjoy today,” said Rajesh Jha, general manager of Information Worker Services at Microsoft. “With Office Live services, we make complex technology affordable and easy to use for small businesses, empowering them to reach their business goals.”

There are multiple Office Live offerings. Office Live Basics helps a small business establish an online Internet presence including a domain name, a Web site with 30 MB of storage and five Web e-mail accounts at no charge through an advertising-supported model. Office Live also provides a set of subscription-based services with more than 20 business applications to help automate daily business tasks such as project management, sales and collateral management, customer management, expense reports, time and billing management, and secure internal and external collaboration. Built on Windows SharePoint® Services, these applications can be customized and extended to specific customer needs by an extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem.”

Sign up for Office live beta at http://www.officelive.com.

For download from MDSN:

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies uses a common set of Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 services named Windows® SharePoint Services, to take advantage of the performance, stability, and security features of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Use Windows SharePoint Services to create and maintain team sites. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, a server product, is built on Windows SharePoint Services, and adds features used to build and manage integrated, large-scale portal solutions.

The Service Pack 2 (SP2) release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 adds a supported API that you can use to update SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with changes to user accounts. When a user is migrated in the Active Directory directory service, the security identifier (SID) changes for that user. Additionally, the logon information for that user might be changed. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 store user information based on both the user's SID and the user's logon information. When the user's SID or logon information changes in Active Directory, Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 must be updated with the new user information before that user can successfully access SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Using the new, supported account migration APIs, you can update SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with new user information.

Following are the new object model topics added in the SDK refresh for SP2:

• PortalAccountMigrationManager Class
• MigrateAccount(String, String) Method
• MigrateAccount(String, String, Bool) Method