Mart Muller's Weblog

Some interesting links on the MS site:

“Learn about the key features in the 2007 Microsoft Office system and how you can benefit from the partner opportunities surrounding the new platform:“

( 1 ) Office 2007 New User Experience Part 1.wmv	10.1 MB
( 10 ) Office 2007 ECM Part2 - WCM.wmv	24.9 MB
( 11 ) Office 2007 Knowledge Mgmt.wmv	25.5 MB
( 12 ) Office 2007 BI.wmv	15.0 MB
( 13 ) Office 2007 Server Develoment.wmv	25.1 MB
( 2 ) Office 2007 New User Experience Part 2.wmv	32.7 MB
( 3 ) Office 2007 Developing In Word 2007.wmv	29.0 MB
( 4 ) Office 2007 Core Excel Advances.wmv	19.9 MB
( 5 ) Office 2007 InfoPath Forms In Outlook.wmv	32.7 MB
( 6 ) Office 2007 New File Format Overview.wmv	14.6 MB
( 7 ) Office 2007 Servers Overview.wmv	36.1 MB
( 8 ) Office 2007 WSS Collaboration.wmv	28.2 MB
( 9 ) Office 2007 ECM Part1 - Doc Mgmt.wmv	30.1 MB

Download here

update: link fixed

Via Mark:

“The Microsoft Knowledge Network Team are now blogging.

Knowledge Network is a social networking technology enabling organisations to unlock their tacit knowledge ... it will be a free download for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

Via Electronic Forms I ran into ‘SharePoint Forms’, a web based InfoPath client for SharePoint.

“SharePoint Forms provide out-of-the-box web forms for SharePoint. It allows organizations to deploy powerful yet simple electronic forms solutions with SharePoint without the need to deploy InfoPath on every desktop”

Seems like a useful product which should have been earlier available (2 years) . With Forms Server in Office 2007, this product will probably focus on existing and nearby SharePoint implementations.

View demo here

I’ve been playing around with a new MOSS 2007 feature called the Business Data Catalog on which I will give a presentation on friday (blog post will come). One of the biggest challanges was to create a working definition XML file.. using the xsd and of course the Office Server SDK finally made me integrate Tam Tam data into SharePoint, using it in lists and the search center (whohoo!). Screenshots will follow!

In my opinion it is one of the best improvements in the new version and I see lots of opportunities for our customers and ourselves.

Lawrence pointed on his blog to some interesting resources for BDC development to help writing the definition files:

Database Metadata Generator for the Business Data Catalog
The database metadata generator creates one system and one entity that corresponds to a table or view. Specifically, it generates:

• An LobSystem
• An LobSystemInstance
• An Entity
• A Finder method of the form "SELECT * FROM Table"
• A SpecificFinder method of the form "SELECT * FROM Table WHERE IdentifierColumn = @IdentifierColumn"

Business Data Catalog samples
This GotDotNet project is dedicated to using the BDC within MOSS and will provide Application Definitions samples for many common LOB systems.

Via Joe Friend and Chris Pratley we can read there will be a very cool feature in Office 2007 beta 2 (which will be available within a few weeks): blogging support!

So, first two thing that comes to mind are… right, clean html and images support. Good news form Joe about that:

“Publishing clean HTML to your blog

That's right. No more verbose Word HTML. The goal for this feature is not pure fidelity, but the right fidelity for your blog. The HTML for this post was created by Word. Go ahead, click View, Source in your browser and look at the HTML starting with "Word is a great tool..." We really are going pretty basic here. Bold become <strong>, Italic becomes <em>, Heading 1 become <h1>, Quotes become <blockquote> and on it goes. There are definitely kinks in Beta 2. For example we are encoding smart quotes incorrectly so I had to turn off that feature in Word, but the goal is to output just what is needed to make your blog post clean and readable (code and rendered HTML).

Pictures

When you set up your blog you can specify an upload site and Word will take care of uploading any pictures that you insert in the blog post. Also, we'll automatically generate & upload PNGs for the Office graphics (charts, diagrams, etc.) that you insert in your post.

In Beta 2 we have basic FTP support. We hope to add support for metaweblog API picture handling, SharePoint picture libraries, and one or two others. While we have a limited ability to add many more providers to this late breaking feature, the feature is extensible and other providers can insure that their systems work with Word even after Office 2007 ships.”

So, really looking forward to that.. I wonder if they also have dasBlog support

At May 23rd, the second Dutch Information Worker User Group (DIWUG) event will take place in Delft, The Netherlands. Like the last event, there will be 2 interesting sessions about IW solutions. Something to eat and drink will be provided.

This is the event to be for knowledge sharing, meeting interesting people and see some cool sessions!

Register at www.diwug.nl for free.

Sessions will be in Dutch.

Ramon and Stef have been working on the World Cup Soccer 2006 WebParts for SharePoint! Really cool for the upcoming event in Germany this year.

The webparts let you fill in your predicted match scores and automatically calculates the results from our public web service.

Manage your company's own WC 2006 Toto right on your own corporate intranet!

Surf over to http://wk2006.tamtam.nl/ to get your's today ! (registration required for match administration/calculation purposes).

Available in Dutch and English.

Dutch version, personalized score predictions

Fill in your scores!

More info. screenshots, rules and download here

We’ve been discussing this a long time ago already, but somehow it is hard to find out what the best mix is regarding this question: How Many Virtual Servers Should Be Associated with a Single Application Pool? We are running a few SharePoint servers that has many WSS sites (virtual servers) on them. We encountered (and here)and solved some problems regarding this question. Bill English published a very good article about this subject, which can be really usefull:

“First, you need to do some performance monitoring of the process that runs your SharePoint threads.  This will be the W3WP processes.  You need to *know* how much memory these processes are consuming on average.  There will always be spikes and valleys, but the overall average is what you're after.

Secondly, you need to decide if you're going to run the /3GB switch and perhaps the /USERVA switch to allocate more of the 4GB address space to UM, which is where SharePoint runs.

Thirdly, if you've never run SharePoint and are trying to predict the future without any past history, then your best practice here is to guess based on the numbers that Microsoft has provided.  What do I think?  Well, here's my take on all this, in a nutshell:

1. Do not run more than 10 virtual servers per application pool until you have some performance monitoring experience behind you and you can point to your own numbers which tell you that your app pools can handle more virtual servers

2. Do not plan to run more than 20 virtual servers on a single physical server without adding a second (or more) web server in your farm.  The reason I say this is because if you're running 20 virtual servers, you've got a growing, busy farm and chances are good that your best practice will be to scale out before you scale up. 

3. Always purchase servers with 4GB of RAM to give yourself maximum flexibility in memory allocation for your application pools.  BTW, I also recommend dual proc whenever you can get it.  Most are doing this these days, so this is nothing profound.

4. I recommend running a web garden of 2-3 for each application pool.  When stsadm runs, it locks one of the threads for it's own use.  Having other threads available to service calls during backup/restore operations is necessary in most environments.  In addition, if a thread becomes very busy, the other threads can pick up the slack.”

Read the complete article

I get a lot of questions how to take off with developing webparts in SharePoint 2007. This morning I gave a small quick demo here at Tam Tam to show which steps to take to get a web part working. Before I describe those detailed steps, there are a few things that you have to keep in mind:

• WebParts are now based on the ASP.Net 2.0 Framework en become part of the ‘System.Web.UI.WebControls’ namespace. This means the ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart’ has become ‘System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart’.
• This also means that the ISAPI filter in WSS 2 has become obsolete and will be handled by ASP.Net 2.0
• In the WebPart class, the ‘override void RenderWebPart(HtmlTextWriter output)’ method will naturally change to ‘override void Render(HtmlTextWriter output)’.

Ok, with this in mind we will go through the steps to take you first SharePoint 2007 webpart:

• Start VS.Net 2005 and create a new project (Class Library)
• Add the ‘System.Web’ reference to the project. this reference contains the webpart controls.
• Inherit the class with ‘System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart’
• Implement the ‘protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)’ method.
• To test, add a new line to the method, like ‘writer.Write("Hello Tam Tam!");’

Now, the webpart can be build. There are however two ways to deploy the dll in the sharepoint environment: using the ‘bin’ of the ‘GAC’. In this example we choose the Global Assembly Cache. Therefore, the assembly must be strongly named, which is very easy to do in VS.Net 2005.

• Open the project properties and go the the ‘signing’ section.
• Create a new key.
• Now, build the project

To let SharePoint know that the assembly is safe, we have to add it to the safe control list in the web.config of the SharePoint web. We need the public key token from the DLL for this.

• First drag and drop the compiled assembly into the GAC (by default c:\windows\assembly).
• Open the properties of the dll to get the public key token.
• Now register the safe control in the web.config. (i.e. ‘<SafeControl Assembly="WebPartToExplore, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=74e5f216d6256126" Namespace="WebPartToExplore" TypeName="*" Safe="True" /> )

New in SharePoint 2007 is that once a dll is registered in the web.config, SharePoint can automatically detect webparts from those dll’s. With the site settings page, we can now automatically populate the webpart gallery.

• In SharePoint, click ‘Site Actions’, ‘Site Settings’ and then under ‘Site Collection Administration’ click ‘Go to top level site settings’.
• Under ‘Galleries’, click ‘Web Parts’. Then click ‘New’.
• Now, the new webpart(s) will appear in the list. If not, try an IISRESET and refresh the page.
• Select the webpart we’ve just created and click ‘Populate Gallery’.

Now, we can go the the page in SharePoint where we want to add the web part.

• On the SharePoint site, click ‘Site Actions’ and the ‘Edit Page’.
• Click on ‘Add a WebPart’ in the zone you want to add the webpart.
• Select the webpart to add, and click ‘Add’.

If everything had gone well, the webpart is there!

Creating webparts like descibed above is very basic. There will be some tools available to make things a lot easier. One of those tools is ‘Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services’.

NOTE: this example is based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 1 TR. Things can change in other versions. Example is made on a Virtual Server with SharePoint 2007 installed including Visual Studio 2005.

I’ve been working on a project lately with a SAP to SharePoint import mechanism. Basically, an SAP export to SQL will be imported into a SharePoint environment daily. During test sessions we’ve tried to import this database and created 13.000 site collections with a total number of 16.000 sites into a single server farm. During this import, about 200.000 list items were inserted across those sites as well.

All sites were based on STP template files, which meant an increasement of the content database of 40GB. It took about 4 days to import, and still the server was running fine and quickly as well. Quite impressive that a large number of sites and listitems is still supported and runs fine.

No maximum numbers are set fixed, but there are some guidelines available for SharePoint limitations. I’ve never imported this many sites before, and I’m quite happy with the test results so far. Just wanted to share that .