Mart Muller's Weblog

Next week (September 25th) there is another DIWUG event scheduled. Please check our web site and register for a cool evening session about Office Business Applications (OBA) and SharePoint!

This session will be hosted at Enigmatry in Rotterdam

Yesterday we received a very useful tip from someone during a intake about logon with AD users on a SharePoint site, but with a custom email address.

For a lot of out extranet users (project spaces, team spaces, team sites) we use domain specified logon names (domain\username). The users are non employees and therefore they get another login account to remember.

To avoid the domain name, you can also use the UPN name (user principle name) of the user to login into SharePoint, for example: username@domain.com.

Again this is the email address with the domain name in it, which is not very user friendly for the user. Ideal situation is when the user can use its own email address to logon!

To achieve this, you can set the UPN name programmatically, and also with your external user's custom email address. To test this I used a script from 'The Scripting Guy'. After adjusting the script a bit and after testing it, the UPN name was set to my custom email address! Using this email address I can login to the SharePoint environment.

I noticed that it is possible to set the same email address to multiple user accounts which is not recommended of course (the AD gets confused a bit).

Anyway, great tip from the guy at the intake! :)

Yes, I'm going to the PDC 2008 this year in LA. There is some more information available about the sessions at the PDC site.

Not much SharePoint and Office this time (last time was like heaven for the SharePoint people!), but a lot about Live and 'the cloud'. But enough interesting sessions to fill the days!

I just read that Patrick Tisseghem, one of the most remarkable persons in the SharePoint community, has passed away. I'm shocked to hear this and wish his colleagues and of course his family and friends all the strength in the world.

A while ago I did an unsuccessful posting about how to avoid the 'read-only' problem with Office 2003. Ton Stegeman however, did not leave it that way and created a great feature that gets rid of the very un-user friendly behavior of Office 2003 and SharePoint:

´Users then make changes to the document, hit the save button and get the Save As dialog. If 'Require checkout' is enabled, they need to save the document using a new name, because the document cannot be overwritten. It is pretty hard to explain and for users it is hard to get used to it.

...

I have called the document library an "Edit Document Library". You can download it from our CodePlex site. Before you install it, please note that you will only benefit from this when you use Office 2003. Office 2007 behaves like you would expect. After running the installer, and deploying the solution to your web application(s), your top level sites have a new site collection feature called "Edit Document Library":´

Kudo's to Ton!

The Dutch Information Worker User Group will have a new session (in Dutch) at October 21. This session will be held at Microsoft NL where they will tell something about the 'New world of work' concept they have adopted and Office Communicator.

Two interesting sessions and a tour through their new building are excellent ingredients for a great evening!

Check the agenda and subscribe here. Note that there is a limited number of seats available.

Oh and don't forget to join the LinkedIn DIWUG group ;)

I'm not a big fan of just quoting other blogs and things the whole community is blogging about, but I do want this blog to be a complete knowledge base for everything that has to do with SharePoint.

That's why this posting contains a summary of resources from the last few weeks (with thanks to Bart):

• SharePoint administration toolkit v2.0
  The Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit contains functionality to help manage Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0. This toolkit contains the ability to perform bulk operations on site collections, an Stsadm operation to update alert e-mails after the URL for a Web application has been changed, and a User Profile Replication Engine tool. For new functionality, see New Features.
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=263cd480-f6eb-4fa3-9f2e-2d47618505f2&DisplayLang=en
• 2007 Office Resource Kit Technical Library in Compiled Help format
  Downloadable CHM version of 2007 Office Resource Kit content on TechNet.
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=57909f68-7f7d-42d8-a868-e518f7edf726&DisplayLang=en
• SharePoint Server SDK v1.4
  The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK contains conceptual overviews, “How Do I…?” programming tasks, developer tools, code samples, references, and an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) starter kit to guide you in developing solutions based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&DisplayLang=en
• Best practices resource center for MOSS 2007
  To avoid common pitfalls and keep your Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment available and performing well, follow these best practices based on real-world experience from Microsoft Consulting Services and the product team.
  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx

After my last post I got some positive comments on the LinkedIn custom field type I wrote. One of the issues with LinkedIn is the way they expose their data for mashups. The only thing you can use directly is the script widget for embedding company information (see previous post).

This weekend, I expanded the custom field types with a LinkedIn userprofile page:

Which generates a LinkedIn icon with a link to the profile of the user:

and

I got a tip from my old colleague Jasper about someone who built an application that grabs the LinkedIn information from profile pages. Dirty way, but it works for now and it gives a nice XML file with all the profile data.

A nice opportunity to build some more functionality: a LinkedIn Webpart!

Now it only shows some user data, but it can easily be extended with blog postings, job history, groups etc, etc.

Like I promised, I will post the WSP later on :)