Mart Muller's Weblog

Are you interested in working as a .Net developer, consultant or architect in the Netherlands? Don’t hasitate to contact me (by clicking the ‘email me’ link at the right) for a job at Tam Tam!

Colligo for SharePoint has gone into beta 2. Colligo is an offline solution for SharePoint and will be very useful for some cases. When you are interested in these kind of solutions, take a look at Organice as well.

“The key features of Colligo for SharePoint Version 1.0 are:

• A rich offline client that emulates the functions of SharePoint team spaces. The client enables users to download, create, organize, view, edit and save content on their laptop much like they can on a SharePoint server. Colligo for SharePoint 1.0 is tightly coupled with Microsoft Office® 2003 
• Enforcement of SharePoint authentication, permissions and security. Users can only access sites and create, view, edit and delete content that the site administrator has authorized.
• Two-way synchronization of SharePoint document libraries and lists, including links, announcements, contacts and tasks. One important note here: Colligo for SharePoint offers robust synchronization conflict resolution that eliminates the need for a user to “check out”, and hence tie up, content in a team space when they go offline. This enables teams to work on the same item offline and then synchronize later.
• Support for custom properties (metadata) and the ability to view, edit and synchronize changes to properties. Properties are used to manage such things as document approval processes.
• Support for custom SharePoint views – Colligo for SharePoint enables users to view list and document library items using custom views downloaded from the SharePoint server. The ability to organize content through custom views is a key feature used extensively by SharePoint site designers to simplify and personalize the presentation of information.

The second beta of Colligo for SharePoint is available now and the final product will be released in early April 2006.”

With thanks to Bil for mentioning.

Just like last year, I will be attending the Office DevCon in Redmond! I’m really looking forward to see interesting sessions about all the new things that come with Office 2007.

Let me know if any of you will go too, maybe we can meet over there.

Great post bij Carlos with his Webpart template project download for VS.Net 2005!

“Days ago I wrote about how to use msbee to do webparts with Visual Studio 2005, now the toolkit guys have a beta version, I have spent the weekend doing some tests with this beta release and now I'm doing my webparts using Visual Studio 2005. In the beginning I was using the external tools menu to launch the msbuild process with apropiate targets, and later launching other tool with the sign assembly process, finally I have modified the .csproj file because at the moment for SharePoint 2003 I only need use the Net 1.1 framework. Also I added at the Postbuild event the sign assembly process.”

In order to use this template you need install MsBee and the .Net 1.1 Framework.

 SharePoint_2003_VS2005_WebPart_Template.vsi V2 corrected version (537,63 KB)

Last Tuesday the very first DIWUG event took place in Barneveld (NL)! Two sessions (WWF and WSS3), a buffet and the attendees where the ingredients for this interesting evening. Thanks to Pieter and Bart for making this happen and of course everyone for attending!

Some impressions:

Diwug logo

Pieter about WWF


Some of the attendees

Bart (left) and me (right)

If you want to attend the next meeting, subscribe as member here or contact me by email.

Microsoft Webcast: Communicate Discussion Topics with Free Windows SharePoint Services Applications
Tuesday, March 07, 2006 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Microsoft Webcast: Keep Team Members Informed with Windows SharePoint Services Collaborative Workspace Applications
Monday, March 13, 2006 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)

Microsoft Corp. today announced the lineup of its upcoming 2007 Microsoft Office system products, previously code-named Microsoft Office "12," including new and improved suites, applications, servers and services to be available by the end of 2006. The 2007 release is designed to increase individual impact, simplify collaboration, streamline business processes and content management, and improve business insight. The product and packaging lineup is grounded in a deep understanding of how customers' needs intersect with trends in the workplace. Microsoft will make available both enhanced and new packaging options to make it easier for customers to purchase the solutions that best meet their unique business needs.

Details about the 2007 Microsoft Office system products, including press releases and white papers on new Office products, application naming, suite packaging, server lineup, and U.S. estimated retail prices, can be found online at:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2007office/default.mspx and http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview.

Fact Sheets

• 2007 Microsoft Office System Packaging (.doc file, 344 KB, February 2006)
• 2007 Microsoft Office System Pricing (.doc file, 300 KB, February 2006)

Develop and implement a business intelligence application quickly with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System, Microsoft Analysis Services, and Microsoft Office Excel 2003. In this FoodMart Analyzer Solution, you target the Document Actions task pane to provide users with a rich, context-aware user interface.

Read the full article here

Via various blogs (here, here) I ran into a very useful document about planning and designing solutions for geographically dispered sites. Is it a coincidence that I’m involed in a research project that described just about anything I need in here when it comes to centralized/decentralized deployments?

Download the document here

Teun has been working on a new version of his Gantt Chart webparts. Great work with some new features:

“I have been making some enhancements to the Gantt chart web part. There are basically 2 new features:

• Group by: if your underlying view uses groupings, the Gantt chart will show these groupings as black grouping containers. The start and end date of the grouping will automatically stretch to reflect start- and enddates of underlying items
• Other time partitionings: several people requested a week or year view. You can now choose between a MonthDay view (where the top bar shows the months and the second row the separate days), a MonthWeek view showing weeknumbers on the second row and a YearMonth view that shows years in the top row and months in the second. This will work better for longer time frames.”

Download here

It’s an old article to which Marwan Tarak refers, but could be extremely usefull. WSS 2.0 (only) does not support some sort of audience mechanism that SPS has, besides the thing that if a user doens’t have viewing rights, the webpart won’t show up or displays an error. In some custom webpart cases we did we, we would render a webpart, based on the persmissions a user has. From a user experience point of view, this is very usefull in stead of displaying content and link and when you click it, a logon box appears.

A while ago, Modonovan published code and a mechanism to create some sort of audience mechanism in WSS, based on roles. This mechanism is based on IRuntimeFilter and could be a solution an many cases.

“By implementing IRuntimeFilter you are essentially creating a rule or a set of rules that determine if a web part should be displayed or not. For example:

1. SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) uses a IRuntimeFilter for audiences. A user will setup the audiences that are allowed to see a web part (using the advanced section in the web part’s toolpane), then when a user visits the web page the filter runs and determines if the web part should be shown or not. If a virtual server is extended with SPS then the Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Audience.AudienceManager filter is installed by default.
2. You could create a custom IRuntimeFilter that determines if a web part should be displayed based on the WSS role the user is a member of. This is what the sample code in this document does
3. You could create a custom IRuntimeFilter that determines if a web part should be displayed based on any arbitrary property or rule(s) that you come up with.”

Read the full article here

If you’ve never had any problems with WSS, you probably haven’t used it too much . On the Microsoft site there is a document available that provides troubleshooting information for some of the most common problems encountered when using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.

Download here

Jan Tielens is working on SharePoint webpart code snippers for VS 2005:

“When you want to develop web parts for SharePoint the “traditional” way, it’s good idea to use the Web Part Templates for Visual Studio .NET. These templates will give you a start class to quickly build web parts. Unfortunately these templates are not (yet?) available for Visual Studio 2005. Since Windows SharePoint Services SP2 you can run your WSS sites on .NET 2.0, so you can build your SharePoint web parts with Visual Studio 2005. Given that copy/pasting code is rather cumbersome I’ve create a couple of code snippets for Visual Studio 2005 that will generate code for a SharePoint Web Part. Currently I’ve got code snippets to create:

• C# Web Part (shortcut wp)
• C# Web Part Property (shortcut wpprop)
• C# Tool Part (shortcut tp)

I’m still working on the other items (provider and consumer web part) and the VB.NET versions (any volunteers?). You can download them from the GotDotNet site (http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/webpartcodesnippets), the ZIP contains a VSI package so you can easily install them in VS 2005. (Make sure you select the code snippets you want to install, see screenshot)”

Since WSS SP2, when installing SharePoint we get the option to choose between Kerberos and NTLM authentication. In some cases, Kerberos causes logon problems when accessing SharePoint through a client computer. It tell you access denied, even though you have all the rights you need. If you get this error for the first time, it can take a lot of time to determine what the exact problem is. Therefore this tip: when you install SharePoint using Kerberos authentication and you encounter logon problems, try to change to NTLM.

Some background information:

• NTLM. The NTLM protocol is a secure protocol that is based on encrypting user names and passwords before sending the user names and passwords over the network. NTLM authentication is required in networks where the server receives requests from clients that do not support Kerberos authentication.
• Kerberos. The Kerberos protocol is based on ticketing. In this scheme, a user must first provide a valid user name and password to an authentication server. Then, the authentication server grants the user a ticket. The ticket can be used on the network to request other network resources. To use this scheme, both the client and server must have a trusted connection to the domain Key Distribution Center (KDC). Additionally, both the client and server must be compatible with the Active Directory directory service.

How to change to NTLM (or Kerberos):

• First, get the virtual server ID using the following command in a command prompt:
  C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript adsutil.vbs enum /p w3svc
• Then, set the virtual server to NTLM:
  C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/[the id]/NTAuthenticationProviders "NTLM"
• Do an IISRESET and voila!

For full detailed information read the MS KB article.

Related articles:

• How to configure a Windows SharePoint Services virtual server to use Kerberos authentication and how to switch from Kerberos authentication back to NTLM authentication