Mart Muller's Weblog

Ok, so far so good when it came to site columns, content types and, if applicable, connecting page layouts to them. This stucture is really powerful and extremetly useful to implement your organizations metadata structure, document template and to control the usage and layouts. It's been a great improvement for ECM in SharePoint and there had been a lot of positive response about them during some presentations and demos I did. Ok, so far so good.

But then, there are like you would expect, some issues to deal with when implementing site columns and content types. There might be solutions of workarounds, but due to the lack of documentation it is hard to find out. Some of the problems we run into:

• Creating lookup site columns in features. The lookup link can be achieved by entering the lists GUID. But what to do when you want also want to create the list instance using a feature. The guid is randomly set, so the site column feature is never aware of the new GUID.
• Setting required fields in a site column feature. There is a tag called 'required', and the intellisense tells us to use 'True', 'true' or 'TRUE'. After trying 3 times it turns out to be 'TRUE'.. why are the others there?

• The rendering of Choice site columns in the page layout. It works, but why are the dropdowns rendered differently?

UPDATE: the rendering has something to do with the number of items in the list. The custom rendering enables filtering in the dropdown (see image below) Thanks to Matthew Cosier for mentioning:

• The Content Type ID property. After looking and searching, someone has found out that the content types inherit from other types using the ID, which is constructed in a very, lets say, interesting way. Check out the SDK how to construct them.

  <-- this is an ID, try to click it :)

But then, in my opinion one of the most important things for ECM, the lack on information about versioning of those site columns and content types. When happens when you want to update an existing content type, with a lot of documents based on that content type? Also for pagelayouts.. what happens if you remove a column or change the column type? You cannot expect an organisation to have its metadata structure fully cristalized and thought through. When updating pagelayouts using a feature (the best practice), it will simply not deploy...

When diving into the SharePoint SDK we discover the following:

The SPContentType class does have a version property. This MUST but the solution for different versions. Although there is no documentation, we did some testing using this version property and content types. Unfortunately, no results.

Then under the Content Type element in Content Type features (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa544268.aspx), the SDK says the following:

Version: reserved fo furture use

I hope they do not think that all of the MOSS implementations never need the versioning functionality right now.

So, does anyone of you have experience with versioning of site columns and content types using features? Please drop me a line if you do ;). Maybe you can also answer one of the other questions?

I've been doing some research lately with MOSS for Search installations. I came across some interesting blogs when it comes to search. One of them is Mike Taghizadeh's Blog, a useful resource.

Dan Attis mentions his latest post about MOSS Search boundaries. It seems like the SharePoint boundaries for search, but also in general have a lot of potention to grow big.

Of course, you already knew this. ;) But it is alway good to see the actual numbers. When you're busy planning your SharePoint deployment, these boundaries are very usefull.

Today Christopher dropped me a line to mention me about a new community site focussed on enterprise search: www.sharepointsearch.com.

Good initiative with a lot of usefull references and information about enterprise search. Check it out here!

I've had several questions lately about the limitations of SharePoint 2007. Numbers like the maximum document upload size, items per folder per document library and the maximum number of subsites per site collection are figures that must be taken into consideration when making a SharePoint architrecture.

There is some good documentation about these boundaries available on TechNet. Because it's hard to find, some details  from the article:

Read the complete article here.

My colleague Stef did some excellent work on the CruiseControl WebParts (v1.2). You can download them, including sources at CodePlex.

Also check out the other Tam Tam projects at Codeplex:

SharePoint Solutions Management

• Screenshot 1
• Screenshot 2
• SharePoint SolutionManagement 1.0
  

SharePoint Logging

• Screenshot 1
• SharePoint Diagnostics 1.0

SharePoint Workflow Activities

• WWF Short Delay Activity

SharePoint CruiseControl Webparts

• Screenshot 1
• TamTam.SharePoint.CruiseControl 1.0

"No more manually creating the manifest.xml file.
No more manually specifying the DDF file.
No more using the makecab.exe application."

Carsten Keutmann has created a SharePoint Solution (WSP) creation tool to generate solutions automatically. The tool can be downloaded on codeplex here.

"The idea for this tool was that the Solution file (WSP) is simply just a packed that transport files from development into SharePoint. Therefore I was able to build a folder structure that matches the SharePoint folder structure (%Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12) and put my features and other stuff in there and then run a program that traverse the folder structure to build my manifest.xml and WSP file automatically. This saves me a lot of work and time creating the manifest.xml and the WSP file."