Mart Muller's Weblog

Microsoft just published an announcement about the code complete status of OCS 2007 and Communicator 2007. This means it will be released very soon.

"During his address at Microsoft’s Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, announced that Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator are code complete and will release to manufacturing (RTM) tomorrow. With this milestone and launch around the corner this fall, the Unified Communications Group is one step closer to fulfilling the UC promise and helping customers streamline business communications, increase productivity and lower costs."

In the annoucement Gurdeep Singh Pall tells about the vision and future of Unified Communications. Also check out the whitepaper about the ROI for UC. Read the complete article here.

A while ago I found a list on the net with solution providers that have some sort of integration with SharePoint technology. I would like to share that with you: 

"Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers a complete set of functions and tools for interfacing with data and application logic provided by line of business systems, including many features that work right out of the box. Our partner community is also engaged in building connectors, protocol handles, and interoperability solutions using the BDC and .NET technologies. Below is a short list of partners with solutions for Enterprise Search, data integration or data migration for specific Business Applications. This list will expand and change as new solutions are released."

So, a good start with a posting today about one of the chalanges we've been dealing with the last couple of weeks. For our customer we want to create a customized wiki definition, with some additional fields and layout. Normally you would think to copy the wiki site definition and change the onet.xml and the list dinition for the additional fields. So this is what we did, and it turns out to work ok. But changing the layout of the wiki page itself is something different...

If you dive into the Wiki content type (I used sharepoint inspector to easily see the properties), you will see that when you create a new page, the 'CreateWebPage.aspx' page is called on the layouts directory.

This page makes sure the wiki page is created and a template file is connected to it called 'wkpstd.aspx' in the DocumentTemplates directory (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\DocumentTemplates). This page takes are of the layout of the wiki page.

So, changing this page will change the layouts of all wiki pages, which is not supported and probably not what you want to do. Therefore, you have to change the onet.xml of the wiki site difinition to mention that the template that will be used is another one. In out case a copy stored on the same directory (i.e. wkpstd_custom.aspx). In the onet.xml we've changed the wkpstd.aspx to our custom page.

<Module Name="DefaultWikiPages" List="1119" Url="$Resources:core,WikiWebLibPages_Folder;" Path="" SetupPath="DocumentTemplates">
     <File Url="wkpstd_custom.aspx" Name="$Resources:core,nav_Home;.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary">
       <Property Name="WikiField" Value="$Resources:core,WikiHomeContent;" />
       <NavBarPage Name="$Resources:core,nav_Home;" ID="1002" Position="Start" />
       <NavBarPage Name="$Resources:core,nav_Home;" ID="1010" Position="Start" />
     </File>
     <File Url="wkpstd_custom.aspx" Name="$Resources:core,nav_HowToUseThisWikiSite;.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary">
       <Property Name="WikiField" Value="$Resources:core,WikiHowToUseContent_Part1;$Resources:core,WikiHowToUseContent_Part2;$Resources:core,
WikiHowToUseContent_Part3;$Resources:core,WikiHowToUseContent_Part4;$Resources:core,WikiHowToUseContent_Part5;$Resources:core,
WikiHowToUseContent_Part6;$Resources:core,WikiHowToUseContent_Part7;$Resources:core,WikiHowToUseContent_Part8;" />
       <NavBarPage Name="$Resources:core,nav_HowToUseThisWikiSite;" ID="1010" />
     </File>
   </Module>

But now the pages that are created by this site definition will have the new layout, all new created wiki pages stange enough not... So what happens? Somehow, in the CreateWebPage.aspx file, the wkpstd.aspx is 'hardcoded' used and there are two options to avoid that:

1. Create a new CreateWebPage.aspx file with your own custom code. This page will create new pages based on the new custom aspx file as a template
2. Create an eventhandler that will activate with the site definition that programatically sets the template page for each new created wiki page.

Personally I would prefer the second option, but that's up to you. Anyway learning something new everyday! Also thanks to my colleague Wouter for also researching this. :)

Some more info on the net can be found here.

Over the past 3 years my blog has grown a lot from 0 to 6000 pageviews a day. It's very nice to get in contact with people from the community, customers and other people that have to deal with SharePoint as a platform. It's good to receive lots of questions and weblog comments, it makes you feel that the postings are usefull :)

Anyway, last month you might have noticed you that it's been silence on the blog. Some people asked me why and I do not have a clear explanation for that. I've been moving to my new house and spend a lot of time to make it comfortable there. Our internet connection still doens't work, so I haven't been able to post from there as well. There hasn't been much news, but on that other hand we've been doing a lot of cool SharePoint things lately. So a short summary:

• Some colleagues and I have passed SharePoint exams! I did the WSS Application Development one and passed it with 891. We're now the first Dutch MS partner with the Search Competency, whohoo!
• We did a lot of work building solutions for one of the biggest project that is currently running. Real cool stuff!
• We found out a lot about the Wiki template, and how to customize it, and how not.
• I did work on a chapter of a Office Server book (more about it later) which will be published soon.

So, a lot of good ingredients for interesting content. I promise that it will post more often again from now on and show you more code and examples!