Ed on Office

Get serious about policies and procedures publishing and management

2012-01-18T11:02:00.000+11:00

This post is cross posted in the MBUG blog.

Let’s face it! You know you’ve been putting it off over and over. Many small and medium sized organisations are dealing with their policies and procedures in an unstructured and hap-hazard way. You are only making it worse by not doing anything about it. It’s time to bite the bullet in 2012 and start using the powerful tools you have invested in, such as Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and implement a managed, structured, compliant and easy to use repository for policies and procedures (P&P).

The advantages are numerous, to name a few;

· Centralised and secure

· Standardised, consistent and easy to update

· Browser enabled, with access to search, taxonomies, metadata

· Automated, supported by workflows and reporting

· Always the correct version and access to previous versions

· Relevant and presented in context

· Return on investments in software and training

· Improved communication and monitoring of users understanding and use

· Environmentally friendly

In this post I’ll try to identify the various capabilities and features of Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 that make it such a great platform for a managed P&P repository. In following posts we’ll dive into the details and provide more information on the use of each one in the context of the entire solution.

Centralised and secure- where better than in SharePoint can you implement your central P&P repository?

Sure, lots of Intranets using SharePoint have some way allowing access to policy and procedure documents. In reality though, management is often delegated to (sub) site owners, departmental solutions or simply by ‘migrating’ files into SharePoint based document libraries with an attempt to assign metadata and usually a rudimentary form of access permissions. More often than not some users in the business use those SharePoint document libraries and others have not made the leap and still access the old file shares or have their own copies of the documents stored locally. Typically I’d say although the intention is good, the end result only makes things worse as there are now even more copies floating around unmanaged.

The challenge for the business is to provide a structured well organised repository that all users will use and trust, arguably the key success factor is to make it friendly, easy to use and offer business users a managed change process that will ensure they trust the new facilities and feel confident it is a better solution and saves them time and effort. For this to be successful, a project would certainly need to look at the existing content and provide a migration option into the new repository. I think all of us have at some point in time thought about this and considered what that would mean for our organisation, our documents typically being in binary word format (.doc) or even pdfs making this a daunting task to see the least. There is light at the end of the tunnel though, Microsoft has definitely made platform changes such as the OpenXML fiele format (.docx, .xslx etc.) and Enterprise Content types that will allow you to migrate to greener pastures and at the very least make these tasks easier in the future and ensure re-usability of the structured information that is hidden now in your existing policy and procedure documents. So it is for sure worth your while to improve the situation so that the organisation will benefit going forward and not keeps digging deeper and deeper holes. You owe to your employer and successors and need to make steps in the right direction now. This brings me to the next topic.

Standardised, consistent and easy to update – how to turn bits and bytes into structured information that can be used from various angles?

Much of the information captured in policy and procedure documents is only truly accessible by humans reading the documentation, at the very best relevant pieces of information such as a review date, a process owner, a description will have a set style but seldom is it structurally stored and accessible (and therefor manageable through automation) by computers or workflow processes. Because of this, it’s hard to ensure changes are consistently implemented which leads to problems with documents not being accurate or only partially accurate.

Let me give you an example of how SharePoint 2010 and Word 2010 could help solving these types of issues. SharePoint 2010 introduces a concept called Document Sets, basically a folder on steroids. The steroids being not just the ability to manage a set of documents as a whole, but also the ability to add behaviour (implemented as workflows) and metadata that can be managed at the set level. So, for example a document set for a business process would store the process diagrams, the related policy and procedures and retain consistent versioning so all the elements are all ‘in sync’. Also metadata would be managed top-down making it very easy to manage, a chance to the Business process owner at the set level would also change that information in all contained documents, completely transparently so instead having to open and change all documents a user would just update a value in one place. Structured documents written in Microsoft Word based on SharePoint content types and using content controls would contain and display those metadata elements and would automatically be updated. These documents would be saved using the OpenXML file format so that the structured information not only shows up consistently in the documents but can also be accessed by automated processes such as custom applications or workflows. Content controls can also be protected and have logic so that editing a document will be more like an electronic form (as a whole or partially) easily ensuring consistency and compliance. It does require an upfront investment in creating the right templates and content types but individual users will benefit immediately by the ease of use and efficiency and the organisation will directly benefit from happy users, consistent documentation and a better manageable central repository.

Browser enabled, with access to search, taxonomies, metadata – making SharePoint earn its keep.

Once you have invested in designing a structured repository and structured documents, it’s time to make all that richness available to your users, pick the low hanging fruit so to speak. One of the interesting features worth being aware of is that SharePoint 2010 and it’s Office Web Applications make all this functionality available right from within your browser, and not just with Internet Explorer, SharePoint 2010 is compatible with a range of industry standard browsers and keeps improving that compatibility with updates and service patches. So it is important to keep you SharePoint environment updated and in good shape.

Another aspect of empowering your users and improving the acceptance and usage of the repository can be achieved by making the most out of managed metadata, taxonomies and improved search capabilities. It is also very important to make use of search monitoring and analysis that is a standard component of SharePoint 2010 and augments the site statistics. Synonyms, keywords and best bets are essential to making the user experience a rewarding and fun one, A happy, satisfied user contributes positively to the organisation and is not wasting time on the hunt for important instructions.

Automated, supported by workflows and reporting – delivering the true return on investment.

Once the information management is in place and the repository is populated you’ll need to ensure the content is kept up to date and reviewed. Your compliance relies on having a process around that. Obviously now that we have everything in the SharePoint environment this becomes a relatively straight forward exercise. Using the managed metadata, workflows keep track of review dates, manage and monitor the running workflows and report through SharePoint based dashboard so business process owners and senior managers can at a glance assess progress and compliance according to self-applied policies. Microsoft Visio is a great tool to visualise the processes and workflows and provide business intelligence in a visual context.

Always the correct version and access to previous versions – document management tools in action.

This one comes ‘for free’ doesn’t it? It’s straight forward to enable versioning, approvals and use the version history, combine this with new 2010 features such as Document IDs and better policies for records management and the low hanging fruit is just dangling in front of you. Basics that are extremely valuable and don’t require a lot of effort, just a little careful planning and some good instructions to your users.

Relevant and presented in context – how to make it easier for users.

For sure, SharePoint has great search capabilities and makes it easy to create views, still it can be difficult for users to find what they, when they need it. This is where knowing your users and making use of that information adds value, and the use of pictures or other graphical user interfaces can make a world of difference. In SharePoint 2010 we now have Visio Services at our disposals allowing us to create appealing diagrams that can be made to interactively filter lists or navigate to the right policy or procedure, based on for example the current users’ role (stored in the profile) we can further present relevant documents easily. This would allow you to present only the documents a specific user needs in the context of for example a particular business process, modelled off course by a Visio BPM diagram.

I hope I’ve made you think a bit about going beyond merely storing your documents in SharePoint, I will follow up this post with posts going into some detail for each and very feature I have touched on above. Please stay tuned and check out the bog in the following weeks and subscribe to the RSS feed.

MBUG is keen to help our members on this journey, please feel free to let us know how we can help you.

If after reading all this you can’t wait and don’t have the time or resources to seriously approach this challenge, please don’t hesitate to contact e-Agility. We have a vast experience in custom solutions using Microsoft Office and SharePoint and a framework to get your organisation off to a flying start. Alternatively we can provide coaching and training sessions to get your staff up to speed with building and maintaining a P&P repository by themselves.

Announcing our first MBug Meeting for 2012

2012-01-11T11:59:00.000+11:00

This is your opportunity to share in the power of business users discussing Microsoft Office SharePoint as Business Strategy. This month we delve into Azure, explore a case-study from Australia's Largest Technology Consutling Organisation Oakton who have recently launched Ozone and a look at a demonstration of Business Process Visualisation.

The focus will be on live demonstrations and again a 20 minute challenge to our speakers.

Here is the agenda:

Business Process Visualisation

This session will show how Business Process Visualisation can be used to manage Policies and Procedures in a process context. It brings policies, procedures and people together. The methodology will be based on the Business Process Modelling Notation ( BPMN). This session will allow users to get a taste for the Business Process Visualisation Coaching that MBug is offering to its' members. The session will show how following simple process functions end users can create their own visual business processes.

Speaker: Ed Richard

SharePoint 2010 creating a vibrant culture and competitive intelligence.

When Oakton wanted to address their need for real-time collaboration and information sharing via a secure and private company wide information platform, the solution was a SharePoint 2010 platform now known as “Ozone”. It allows Oakton staff from different teams to be constantly connected, and communicating across functional and location boundaries to solve the more complex problems. With over 1100 staff in Australian and 160 in India, Ozone has proven to be improving the quality and timeliness of information. This presentation will show a live demonstration and provide supporting ROI for the solution.

Speaker: Rita Arrigo

What SharePoint Business & Technical Decision makers need to know about Windows Azure Cloud Platform?

“Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information”describes top IT Priorities for 2012 and beyond that will transform IT landscape for many businesses.

Microsoft Cloud Landscape consists of Two Cloud Offerings broadly categorized as Software As a Service (SaaS) and platform as a Service (PaaS). What’s does this means to you as a SharePoint technical or business decision maker?

This is a no code big picture session to show why you should care about Windows Azure Cloud Platform and what opportunities it brings on to the table to bring SharePoint Application’s reach to the Cloud.

Speaker : Nalaka Withanage

All about MBUG http://www.mbug.net.au/Pages/default.aspx

A few more sleeps and the book goes on sale

2011-11-10T16:34:00.000+11:00

Expert SharePoint 2010 Practices

By Sahil Malik , Dan Bakmand-Mikalski , Razi bin Rais , Darrin Bishop , Matt Eddinger , Brian Farnhill , Ed Hild , Joerg Krause , Cory R. Loriot , Matthew McDermott , Dave Milner , Ed Musters , Tahir Naveed , Mark Orange , Doug Ortiz , Barry Ralston , E. Richard , Karthick Sethunarayanan , Steve Wright

Expert SharePoint 2010 Practices is a valuable compendium of best practices, tips, and secrets straight from the most knowledgeable SharePoint gurus in the industry.

Learn from the experts as you dive into topics like multitenancy, solution deployment, business intelligence, and administration. Our team of carefully chosen contributors, most with Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) designation bestowed upon them, shares with you the secrets and practices that have brought them success in a wide variety of SharePoint scenarios.

Each contributor is passionate about the power of SharePoint and wants to help you leverage the capabilities of the platform in your business—but in the proper way. Go beyond procedures and manuals, and benefit from hundreds of years of combined experience, which the authors of Expert SharePoint 2010 Practices provide in these pages.

Workflow for SharePoint using Visio - How to overcome validation issues

2011-11-03T19:14:00.000+11:00

Today, I'd like to make a bit of a point about the technical content on Office.Microsoft.Com

I was looking for some info on how to circumvent some issues with Workflow design for SharePoint using Visio 2010 and found this article Very useful information from the Office team. Amongst other things presenting a good workaround for using Custom Actions and Conditions.

Here's the copied intro:

"When exporting a SharePoint Workflow from Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 to Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, the diagram must first be validated. If the workflow diagram is not valid, an Issues window appears which includes a list of issues that must be repaired before the workflow can be exported. For more information about creating and exporting SharePoint workflows in Visio, see Create, import, and export SharePoint workflows in Visio
This topic includes a description, example, and suggested action for each of the workflow validation issues that you can receive in Visio Premium 2010. If you receive notice of an issue during validation, find the issue name in the list below, use the example to help identify where the problem is, and then follow the suggested action to resolve it."

PLease join me for the MBUG Learning Session 26th Oct

2011-10-19T10:50:00.000+11:00

Your Invitation to our Second MBUG Learning Session

and share in the power of business users discussing Microsoft Office SharePoint as a Business Strategy. Our Lunch Presentation 2.0 will be held at Pitcher Partner's Theatrette, 15 William Street Melbourne Wednesday 26th October.

You are invited to join us for our second learning session with a 20 minute challenge to our speakers

Knowledge Management and Collaboration @Telstra

Sharon Brennan, Manager Collaboration & Knowledge Telstra Enterprise & Government will be discussing the Our Knowledge enterprise collaboration portal. The presentation will focus on the way the knowledge collaboration portal was developed and the learning's along the way.

Delivering an Integrated Intranet and Internet Service using SharePoint

Brett Coster will present a client case-study. Bendigo Regional Institute of TAFE used SharePoint 2010 as an opportunity to dramatically improve their online presence and deliver a new integrated intranet. A simpler streamlined approach to content management was achieved as well as:

Prospective students to see multimedia examples and student testimonials of the experience of students who have studied with Bendigo TAFE.

An online course application form which is processed internally by Bendigo TAFE staff using a specific Student Journey Management System using SharePoint 2010 on their intranet.

Building Mobile SharePoint applications

With so much talk about the cloud, how can you leverage it to build real world applications, Joshua Haebets will present a live demonstration and show how you can utilise the cloud capabilities of Nintex Live and Nintex Forms to build applications in SharePoint available anywhere and on any device.

Q&A Networking Lunch

including plenty of chat about SharePoint for Business Intelligence, Business Process and Collaboration.

11 am start followed by Networking Lunch

About MBUG

All business is looking for efficiency - ways of ensuring continuous improvement and innovation in information management for both employees and customers. Today SharePoint and Office fulfil many of our productivity and innovation needs and provide a platform for collaboration and knowledge management.

The new user group with a focus on business issues of SharePoint projects specifically for content publishers, content owners and content creators. MBug will engage with SharePoint power users in organisations, ie knowledge managers, intranet managers, community managers etc..

WHEN 11am- 1pm Oct 26th 2011 & Networking Lunch

WHERE Pitcher Partner's Theatrette, Level 19, 15 William Street Melbourne

JOIN MBUG at

www.mbug.net.au

RSVP YES to

admin@mbug.net.au

@melbbug

Directions

http://tinyurl.com/3n5h6af

Presenting at SharePoint Saturday Melbourne

2011-10-19T08:58:00.000+11:00

Most of the Melbourne crowd would have noticed, but if you haven't. Mossig has been dismantled and split up in two new user groups.

One for a technical audience, MSPUG and the second for a Business Oriented approach is called MBUG. Please have a look and sign up at both groups so we can keep in touch with you.

This month, the regular Wednesday night meeting for MSPUG is being skipped (would normally have been on 26th Oct). Sorry ‘bout that – you can have the night off !Instead, we’re having a FULL DAY of top-quality presentations, both for a technical as well as a business oriented audience. I'll be doing an introduction to Visio 2010 and Visio Services.

This coming Saturday (Oct 22nd) is “SharePoint Saturday Melbourne”.SharePoint Saturday has become an institution around the globe, with the community very strong and active – and always a meeting happened somewhere.In fact – there are meetings this Saturday in far-off places, not just Melbourne – Manila, Belarus (near Russia), and Minnesota.Instead of the normal 1-2 sessions at MSPUG – SharePoint Saturday Melbourne has 15 sessions – and the best bit, is that it’s FREE to attend (including lunch !)

There are 15 sessions – across BUSINESS, DEVELOPMENT and IT PRO tracks – as well as an ASK-THE-EXPERTS panel – and then a prize draw (and THEN SharePint !)Here’s the schedule (PDF) – make sure to have a look and ‘plan your day’.

Many thanks to Brian Farnhill (Canberra) – and our own Elaine van Bergen for organising the speakers, venue, sponsors, catering – and all the other bits that will make it a great day.It’s looking like it will be a great day – so make sure you RSVP – don’t miss out.

There are only a few tickets remaining – so click here to register.

See you there Ed

Get ready for the Australia SharePoint Conference

2011-01-17T14:01:00.002+11:00

This great conference will be even better and bigger this year.

Energise your whole SharePoint Team by attending the Australian SharePoint conference. With great content, great speakers, great exhibitions, and great networking, everyone is sure to go away with something worthwhile from the SharePoint event of 2011.

Gain insightful knowledge from SharePoint experts, including SharePoint MVPs, well known and respected local and international SharePoint community representatives, Microsoft attendees and many others. Have your SharePoint questions answered by the best to help maximise your own SharePoint experience.

You will find greatly improved structure around how to find the right sessions for you. All sessions fall into four main tracks, as listed below. They are also categorised by Specialty Area, Audience and Level. Click on the relevant link below to see the related sessions and special activities, or view the full agenda.

Ups and downs with Excel Services

2010-12-17T16:06:00.005+11:00

Recently I've been dabbling with using Excel Services and Power Pivot for some dashboard reports in SharePoint 2010. Cool technology, and when you start reading the Excel team blog you can't help but have respect for the detailed, valuable information posted there.
Just after reading, I quote "The thing worth calling out in this blog article is that the error messages in this space have gotten much better." this happened:

and I was just telling the Mossig user group this week how I felt software was starting to work, after all those years.....

Speaking at Tech.Ed and Office Devcon 2010

2010-08-18T12:58:00.002+10:00

I'll be presenting next at Tech.Ed, topics are Visio, Visio Services, SharePoint and automated document generation options.

In November we'll have the opportunity to attend the Office Developers Conference in Sydney. This is a FREE event organised by Graham Seach. Do check this unique opportunity out!

At Tech Ed I'm starting as a panel member in the AvePoint Theatre on Tuesday 18.30pm

Adam Clark, Dan Holme, Ed Richard, Ivan Wilson, Roger Carran
Do you have questions about how to implement SharePoint without creating a mess , want to ask how best to use search, when/how to use metadata or any other SharePoint questions? Come along and pose your questions to a Panel of SharePoint experts. All questions welcome !

Wednesday the 25th 3pm, I'm back in the Theatre to chat about generating documents;
Creating Word documents on the fly, using Client or Server, what are the options?

Automating generating business documents - invoices, letters, reports - is something many companies wrestle with. This interactive session will present an overview of all the options available on the Microsoft platform, from Office 2003 XML/XSD based template solutions, via OpenXML, to the highly flexible and scalable Word Services in SharePoint 2010. Ed will prepare demo's for all options, go through the pro's and con's and interactively explore the options of most interest to the audience. Ed will also have some examples of Office 2010 and VSTO Add-ins to demonstrate a more interactive approach a user might take.

An finally this is the abstract for the breakout session at Tech Ed on Thursday in meeting room 8 at 3.30pm:

End to end solution for business process management using out of the box Office and SharePoint 2010 features - “Visio and SharePoint, better together”

This session will start by looking at an operational solution for Business Process Management that is built using Visio, SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight. The client involved during the Early Adaption Program with Microsoft has been featured in a Case study and appeared on stage during the Office 2010 Press Launch. The client has gone on record stating “This is going to change the way we work”. After looking at the actual solution we will go through discussing the different technologies used and how they fit together with a focus on Visio 2010 and the new BPM templates and Visio services in SharePoint 2010. We’ll also look at enterprise taxonomies and document set as featured in SharePoint 2010. We will conclude the session with a discussion of some more advanced technical customization required to make this solution really user friendly with an emphasis on the client side script required to interact with the published diagrams in Visio Services.

SharePoint 2010 certified

2010-07-10T19:19:00.002+10:00

It's been quit on this blog, and with good reason, Office and SharePoint 2010 has kept me extremely busy over the past year or so and so has my employer with some exciting SharePoint 2010 projects.
The good news is I learned a lot and should now be in a better position to start sharing.

As MVP's we were given the opportunity to participate in the beta certification exams for SharePoint 2010, the exams will be publically available in July 2010.

I'm proud to say I passed the 70-576, Designing and developing SharePoint 2010 Applications.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-576&locale=en-us#tab1 for more information.

Office Developer Pages on MSDN have a new look and feel

2010-03-05T14:00:00.003+11:00

I just noticed today that the Office corner of MSDN has had a facelift, and for the better!

Check it out: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx I'm very impressed with the level of documentation and detail about Office and SharePoint 2010 when the product isn;t even released yet, can't wait to see what it will look like towards the second half of 2010.

Obviously I need to point you in the Visio direction, those of you that know me have probably seen me present on a few occasions now and I am very keen to share the knowledge and power of Visio 2010 and Visio Services; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/office/aa905478.aspx. I'm building some exciting solutions using Visio 2010 and SharePoint 210 and will be sharing all about that soon.

I have seen, and get the question about the Visio Mash-up API a lot, this is what you would use to implement great interactive solution with Visio Diagrams published to SharePoint. Which brings me to aim the spotlight on the Visio Team blog where they have been extremely busy posting all of the little nuggets you'll need when you want to get serious about using Visio in custom solutions.

Lastly I'd like to share the news that I have been invited to speak about SharePoint and Visio at the SharePoint Conference in Sydney, Australia.

Day 3&4 @SPC2009

2009-10-23T07:03:00.001+11:00

It was a bit tough getting started Wednesday morning in Las Vegas after the Beach Party Microsoft threw us at the Mandelay Bay Hotel but after a slow start it was all about my favorite topics. I concentrated on OBA's and the really cool BCS features they are introducing for 2010. First of all there is the good news that we longer have to wrestle with XML or complex tools to define our Business Entities. This is now all the domain of SharePoint Designer 2010 and all done through a mature UI and Wizards. Just create External lists and configure things like the crud options and off you go. This is all extremely powerful and allows for far more rapid development of OBA's. Great news is that the basic infrastructure and functionality is part of the SharePoint Foundation (formally known as WSS) so there's nothing stopping us from making full use of these possibilities. We'll also see some demo's and articles around IBF like scenario's now available through using SPD and XML (I'll endeavor to post on this as well). What is probably the highlight of SPC2009 for me is a much better understanding how things like 'Connect to Outlook' or 'Sync with SharePoint Workspace' works, it made me realize that there a full data cache sitting in the local user store and again, more good news, Office comes with documented API's to make full use of that for OBA's. There are different assemblies for use with WPF, Silverlight or Java script, for those interested, when the beta comes out, check out the Microsoft.Office.Businessdata Namespace.

Day 4 started with some useful guidance on how to approach Load testing and it's good to see Microsoft is now sharing best practices that were developed based on their internal load testing processes and results. Next Mike Ammerlaan presented on Architecture best practices for 2010 based on what's new or has changed as a result of better insight on how organizations have been using SharePoint and the road blocks they ran into. Obviously this is one of the 'you should have been there' type of sessions, one thing I'd like to point to especially because of my enthusiasm about BCS and External lists is to keep in mind that the new REST interfaces and SPLinq do not work on External lists, certainly something to keep in mind when architecting solutions. Lastly I attended a session on SSIS and SharePoint and the important take away there was that there is a connector for SharePoint lists available on Codeplex.

That's it from Las Vegas, now going for some shopping before wasting the weekend travelling back home ;-)

Day 2 @SPC2009

2009-10-22T04:32:00.001+11:00

Today we got into lots of details, no more generic overviews, it was all down to the juicy code samples. I selected mostly Developer oriented sessions today. I knew the potential of Visio Services, by having looked at it during the early visits to Redmond this year, but now that the bits are pretty much backed, we got to see some of the finished very impressive demos. I have to say Visio 2010 and Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 continues to amaze me. The Dynamic Data Driven scenarios we can start implementing in 2010 are mindboggling. I urge the interested readers to make their way over to the Visio Team blog to get as excited as I am!

Another interesting session today presented by Zeyad Rajabi was around the new Word Automation Services announced here at SPC 2009. No longer do we need to rely on running lengthy processes through (illegally) installing Word on the server. We can now simply write an event handler or workflow action that performs a range of typically operations, like save as PDF or XPS, at lightning speed. Combine that with the power of the Open XML SDK 2.0 and it opens up so many scenarios for updating and generating documents. I'll throw in another plug for a blog here, so you can go and read all about that on MSDN.

Those of you that know me, know how passionate I am about both these topics, so expect some posts and presentations from me before the year's over.

After lunch time things got slightly more technical (makes you wonder if we'll survive the Wednesday, and keep in mind the beach party is tonight :-) ), the first afternoon session by Paul Stubbs was focused on the new Client Object Model, you heard it right, in 2010 you no longer have to resort to Web Services to access SharePoint Data. From WPF, JavaScript or Silverlight you now have Client Side libraries available that give you 'direct' access to your lists and libraries. There are some things you need to be aware of, like when you actually call to the server to do the work, and that JavaScript and Silverlight do things asynchronously but still this delivers a very powerful model for Client side programming. The next session I attended was by Eric Shupps around the improved Business Connectivity Services (BCS, formally known as BDC), Eric delivered a great session that provide a lot of confidence for me when it comes to using SharePoint as the Application Delivery and Development platform. The day ended on a high when the Patterns and Practices guys gave us the insight around Development best practices in 2007 and how they apply to 2010 as well as what the new testing capabilities in VS 2010 combined with TFS can deliver to provide a good end to end Application Lifecycle Management process.

Day 1 @SPC2009

2009-10-21T04:28:00.001+11:00

Today was the day the SharePoint community finally got to see what SharePoint 2010 is really going to be about. Microsoft, in its keynote note session didn't make a big deal out of it. But for a large number of community members, the SharePoint MVP's in particular it was like liberation day. Finally the NDA is lifted; we can freely talk about SharePoint 2010! And it was really good to see how slick the demo's went, I must admit I was nervous, the build they gave us in July was great to get your feet wet but also had a lot of rough edges. I go on record having been very positive about the ribbon in the Office Client applications but not feeling all that pumped about the ribbon in SharePoint through the browser. After today, I feel much more comfortable, I still have to get my hands on a recent build (did not have time for any hands-on labs yet) but what I've seen so far looks really slick and performs great.

This morning's keynote was largely about taking the covers off and the sessions today were all overviews on a high level, tomorrow we'll get into the real details. I'm sure the net by now has plenty fo news around 2010, but here's a few announcements that caught my attention.

I'm not sure how to interpret it just yet, but Steve Balmer put a lot of focus on SharePoint 2010 for Internet sites, which according to him would be at an attractive price point next year, it will be interesting to see how that pans out. Windows SharePoint Services is now longer named as such as an SKU but is now called SharePoint Foundation and remains part of Windows Server, 'for free'. What also stood out is the impressive effort that's been put into the Developer story in Visual Studio 2010 which is released today as beta 2. We'll have to wait a few weeks until we can use it with SharePoint though, the public beta, with which the beta 2 bits of Visual Studio will work from a SharePoint perspective will be available in November.

Another great improvement is the End User customisation story, after seeing so many clients and users struggle with simple things like putting images on their homepage or laying out their Web Parts the way they want it, it is good to see that the default homepage for sites is actually a WiKi page. The functionality WiKi pages deliver now allow for very easy customisations, like drag, drop and resize a picture from anywhere, easy editing and just adding lists and views precisely where you need them without the need for Web Part zones or SharePoint Designer. Very cool stuff! What also interesting to note is that there's full REST access to lists, list items and Office documents. So adding a chart from an excel sheet on your team site homepage is as easy as copy and pasting a hyperlink in the middle of your text how's that for ease of use. I'll see if I can find some time in the few weeks to post some examples of that type thing.

Anyway, I'm off to enjoy the Las Vegas nightlife and to prepare for another session packed day tomorrow.

Wrapping up at Tech Ed Australia

2009-09-11T13:53:00.002+10:00

I'm on my last legs doing Office Booth duty @ the Exhibition Center. It's been a great Tech Ed this year with so mayne new and exciting things to hear and learn about. I've had the opportunity to present to an overflowing room about Visio, with a focus on Data Linking and 2010. I'm really looking forward to applying the functionality of Visio 2010 for Data visualisation and Workflow design over the next months getting ready for the public beta of Office and SharePoint!

I've also made my arrangements for SPC2009 and hope to see many of you in Vegas come October.

I'm also proud to say that my first Video interview ever is now on-line, I've interviewed Rai Umair here at Tech Ed and you can watch us on Tech Ed Online, the episode is called SharePoint Secrets form the Master.

Slide deck from yesterday

2009-07-10T09:12:00.002+10:00

Presented on Office 2007 and SharePoint integration yesterday, deck on Skydrive

Stay tuned for more detailed blog posts on Office Integration features.

Office 2010 Info on SQL pages

2009-06-23T16:09:00.003+10:00

Here's some interesting facts on what's coming in Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2

Add-in for Microsoft Office Excel 2010
Build Robust Analytical Applications
Combines native Excel 2010 functionality with an in-memory, column oriented processing engine to allow users to interactively explore and perform calculations on millions of rows of data at lightening speeds
Streamlines the process of integrating data from multiple sources – including corporate databases, spreadsheets and external sources
Access PivotTables, slicers, and other familiar analysis features in Excel to create reports and perform advanced analysis

Add-in for Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010
Share & Collaborate with Confidence
Enables users to publish reports and analyses to SharePoint to make them available to others in the organization
Applications and reports can be refreshed automatically while also maintaining version control and tracking
Central, secure location where users can easily control who has access to sensitive data while also maximizing the number of people who can view the reports

SharePoint 2010 Management Console
Manage User-Generated Analytical Applications
Provides a single, comprehensive management tool through Microsoft Office SharePoint that gives IT administrators the ability to set server policies and monitor Self Service BI activities
IT can manage and secure all BI assets, freeing the original authors to focus on business priorities
Dashboard views to monitor access and utilization of analyses and reports as well as track patterns of hardware usage to help ensure the right security privileges are applied and user generated solutions are continuously available, up-to-date, and secured

Read all about it and look at some screenshots here:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/r2.aspx

Presenting at Joel Oleson's Seminar tour in Melbourne

2009-06-23T09:40:00.002+10:00

You've probably picked up by now that Quest has organised SharePoint Seminars around Australia in July.
Joel Oleson, SharePoint Guru and ex Microsoft SharePoint Team member will present on how to turn your SharePoint deployment project into a success and what you can do to prepare for the next version.

I don't think deployment of SharePoint 2007 is as successful as it can be without considering the added value of Office 2007 and the integrated features it offers users. So I'm presenting a breakout session during the Melbourne event about just that, how and why Office 2007 is a perfect fit to complement your SharePoint environment. I'll go beyond the obligatory Connect to Outlook action and demonstrate the power of Access, Visio, Word and Excel.

Please come and join us at this free seminar, but hurry, spaces are limited.

Click here to register for the Melbourne event on July the 9th.

SharePoint Designer will be a free download as of 1 April 2009

2009-03-13T15:35:00.003+11:00

Microsoft has decided to make SharePoint Designer available for free, as of the 1st of April 2009 you will be able to download a free version from the SPD site. Note that this does not mean SPD is 'end of life', the next version fo SPD (which I have seen at MVP Summit) will ship when the next version of SharePoint is released.

(more details on this blog post)

MOSSIG and Stargate Global Consulting thought this was a good reason to offer a free introduction training for SharePoint Designer, you can sign up for this 2 hour workshop here.

Each workshop will be limited to 12 people, so sign up quickly!

For questions, just leave a comment.

I'm a PC

2009-03-09T14:31:00.001+11:00

The world knows MVP's are PC's now...

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/6d53ed7b-f784-4c00-b145-3c1123debc40

BTW, I'm in the first shot wearing a black SharePoint cap.

Free SharePoint Developer Training

2009-03-02T03:32:00.004+11:00

Microsoft has just made it very easy for you to step up to the plate and access a generous amount of training resources for free. Start at the Ramp Up page on MSDN and find your way through the maze guided by Microsoft Learning. The courses provide a nice managed way to work through a list of topics applicable to SharePoint as well as Visual Studio developers and help you prepare for certification if that's what your goal is.

Check it out now at http://www.myrampup.com/

VSeWSS 1.3 CTP Now delivers 64 bit support

2009-01-13T09:50:00.002+11:00

Good news for those of you developing on 64bit hardware, the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services is now available in a 64 bit version. And that's not the only improvement, but don't take my word for it, head on over to the SharePoint Team blog and check out the feature list.

Note that this is still a CTP and there are still developers on deck to fix any issues so it's important to download this version, give it a good workout and report any issues you find (through Connect , go to the forums) so they can be fixed before the official release.

Accessing Document Libraries through UNC paths using ports

2008-11-27T11:11:00.002+11:00

'Tip of the day' ;-)

You're probably all aware SharePoint Document Libraries can be accessed in Windows Explorer by using a UNC name like \\MyServer\MySite\Document .

I've always been in the dark about how that would work for document libraries in sites running on other ports. All of a sudden I was browsing through the Net work places and I saw a server appearing with an @ followed by a port number. So that's how you can add a portnumber to a UNC path and it will give you direct access to your document libraries:

\\MyServer@55555\personal\edr\Mydocuments would give me access to a MyDocument library on my MySite runnig on port 55555 for example.

Some blog love

2008-11-26T09:04:00.001+11:00

Now that I've moved on to Stargate fulltime and run the SharePoint practice my desk is next to the CRM Practice Manager, Mark Fowler. Mark has just started a new blog on Windows Live about Microsoft CRM. Here's his first post on CRM Accelerators.

For those of you unaware, Stargate is building and interesting range of Consulting Services and Training utilising the 'Microsoft Stack' now ranging from Project Management, via BizTalk and SharePoint to CRM.

PDC 208: Microsoft unveils Office Web Applications

2008-10-29T09:49:00.002+11:00

I wasn't sure I should blog about this, there's heaps of posts on-line already, yet I want to make sure you don't miss it, so strong advice, checkout the news at the PDC site or do a search for "Office Web Applications" to see what Office 14 will deliver in the browser.

Can't wait for the big event in Sydney next week, Steve Balmer should have plenty to talk about!

Office Devcon 2008 Sydney

2008-10-14T08:35:00.003+11:00

Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, Outlook, VSTO, SharePoint are the main topics for the many sessions presented at the Offce Devcon 2008 on 15 and 16 November in Sydney. Just like last year I'll be presenting and my new employer, Stargate Global Consulting is one of the gold sponsors for this event. Having the sponsors on board means we were once again able to keep this event free of charge so head over to the site and register before we run out of space.

Just going through the speaker list you'll notice that the majority of them are experienced speakers and MVP's, Graham Seach has managed to get together a group of specialists that will put on a terrrific range of interesting sessions. Below are mine:

Title: Context driven action panes

Type: Deep-dive

This session will be an introduction on how to develop and deploy VSTO based action panes in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. It will also demonstrate a project based approach in Visual Studio that allows re-use of application resources throughout the various Office client applications through the use of Class Libraries and User Controls.
Target audience is developers that would like to see how to move from VBA to VSTO or Visual Studio developers who would like to know a bit more about VSTO. The session will demonstrate concepts as well as technical detail so non-developers that would like to see the potential of what VSTO can do are invited to join and won’t be bored by too much technical detail.

Title: Getting the most out of Word Building Blocks and Content Controls

Type: Deep-dive

Word 2007 has introduced a new way to embed controls in documents called Content Controls, this session will demonstrate how this can be used to build compelling, professional and efficient data driven business documents such as invoices, reports etc.
A special Content Control is the "Building Block Gallery" control which of course is driven by Building Blocks stored in templates and galleries. We will focus on this control and the building block gallery, how to make the most of that and how to manage building blocks beyond what OOTB Word has to offer.
The session will demonstrate a project built using these technologies so you can see all of this in action in a word solution being used on a daily basis to efficiently generate reports.

Presenting on Word Content Types for MOSSIG

2008-09-23T11:14:00.003+10:00

Tomorrow, september the 24th the Mossig meeting is all about Word '07, SharePoint and Content Controls. Definitely high on my list of favorite topics.

Tag Driven Information Customising the Document Information Panel in Office
William Cornwill, SharePoint Technology Solutions Professional – Microsoft

Join William Cornwill from Microsoft as he creates a SharePoint document library, defines a new Site Content Type and customises the Document Information Panel.
William will demonstrate the following;
• Create Word Template
• Create Site Columns
• Create Site Content Type
• Create Document Library
• Add Content Type to Doc Library
• Show default Document Information Panel
• Create a new Document Information Panel
• Extend the Document Information Panel

Increasing business productivity by making good use of OpenXML, SharePoint Events and Word Content Controls.
Ed Richard, SharePoint Solutions Principle – Stargate Global Consulting – MVP SharePoint

Join Ed as he talks about setting up MS-Word templates and make SharePoint events generate or change Documents using the OpenXML SDK.
Ed will show a range of options using real life projects demonstrating the power an capabilities of Word and SharePoint working as a team. He’ll also show some VSTO integration and explain how to make clever use of Document Building Blocks and Word Content Controls.

Please rsvp to info@mossig.net so we can arrange the catering, pizza @5.30pm

Patrick, we will miss you

2008-09-06T13:51:00.003+10:00

My sincere condolences to Patrick's family, friends and collegues.

http://www.u2u.be/

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/09/05/we-ll-miss-you-patrick.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/09/05/patrick-tisseghem-one-of-a-kind.aspx

Patrick has inspired me as I am sure he has many others in the SharePoint community.

The above posts say it all...

Please pick up your MVP Logo wind-up generator torch-key ring

2008-08-18T15:44:00.003+10:00

If you are registered for Tech Ed Australia this year, come along to MVP Theatre to watch MVPs delivering sessions ranging from 20 minutes to the full 75 minutes. There are only 20 seats in MVP Theatre, so you need to be quick getting to the Expo Hall if you’re serious about catching an MVP Session. The Agenda for MVP Theatre is here (please watch it for last minute updates). To attend, you must be a registered delegate, so if you haven’t bought your Tech Ed ticket yet, you can register here.
I’m presenting on Wednesday from 16:00-16:30 on my pet topic generating Word Documents from LOB systems using the OpenXML SDK.
Seated attendees to MVP Theatre each receive an MVP Logo wind-up torch keyring (no battery!), so you need to be quick!
You can’t pre-register for MVP Theatre sessions; it’s first in first seated.

SharePoint Professionals, now's the time to harvest

2008-08-05T08:14:00.003+10:00

We all know it, SharePoint is hot and judging from what I'm hearing through the grapevine vNext is going to be even hotter. What I'm also seeing and hearing is that SharePoint ranks very high amongst the skills companies and head-hunters are looking for so now would be a good time for that career change!

SharePoint certification would be a good move as well obviously, especially now that the industry recognizes that the MOSS and WSS 3.0 exams are not to be taken lightly. So, act now, go and find a good training, read up, practice and sit in on the exams, how about at Tech-Ed next month?

To seriously prepare I'd like to point out that fellow MVP's and SharePoint experts Todd Bleeker, Ben Curry, Steve Smith and Kathy Hughes are hosting a 'SharePoint Summit' in August in Sydney and that will be the perfect opportunity to get trained up and ready to go for those certifications! I highly recommend this course, check out the details here.

BTW, I'll be attending Tech Ed in Sydney this year and you'll find me presenting in the MVP Theatre and assisting in the Hands-on labs.

Cya in Sydney!

SharePoint is maturing

2008-07-17T08:52:00.005+10:00

What's a product without a dedicated magazine? And in this day and age, it should really be a nice on-line one don't you think? And what about a globally oriented association so that we can all join and share experiences?

This week this has all been established, after long planning and preparation the ISPA is finally launched and at the same time an on-line magazine dedicated to SharePoint has gone live! Great news for the global SharePoint community.

If you want to know more about ISPA, read this detailed post by Bob Fox about the ambitious aims for this organisation.

As board member of MOSSIG I am proud and excited to be involved in this project and I hope I can keep contributing and help grow this initiative.

SharePoint Developers can switch to VS 2008 now

2008-06-12T09:30:00.002+10:00

The WSS team has released version 1.2 of the Visual Studio Extensions and it works with both WSS and MOSS. If you want to read all about it go to the team blog here. If you just want to download, here it is.

This version is for Visual Studio 2008 only, it contains Project Templates, Item templates and a solution generator that allows you to generate a Visual Studio solution based on an existing site template.
They have also written a great user guide which can be downloaded as a .chm file (this is still the 1.1 version for 2005).

The other good news on the dev front for SharePoint is that there is a new site, all in silverlight pointing to heaps of resources and samples: http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com worth the look just for the Silverlight experience ;-).

Cheers to the SharePoint team!

Never noticed this, content types on folders

2008-05-13T16:57:00.003+10:00

You may know that I'm keen on Content Types, I really like this feature of SharePoint. Someone in a newsgroup pointed me to this blogpost by Ton Stegeman , I can't believe I never noticed that you can actually set what content types are showing up in the new button 'at the folder level'.

Makes you wonder how many other gems are hidden in SharePoint.

Good stuff ! Thanks for pointing that out Ton!

Free Office System seminar in Melbourne

2008-04-21T13:26:00.003+10:00

Friday the 2nd of May: Office System Forum 2008

Amongst the speakers:

Mike Fitzmaurice, Microsoft
Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS
Brian Cook, CEO of OBS
William Cornwill, Microsoft - SharePoint Technology Solutions Professional ( http://blogs.msdn.com/williamcornwill )
Karim Erradi, Readify - Senior Software Engineer ( http://aerradi.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/ )
Tim Wragg, Professional Advantage - Board member of Mossig
and others

The Office System Forum is a unique chance to discuss and be informed on the present and future of the Office System as a platform in small and large companies.
Industry experts from Microsoft and the Melbourne IT community will be presenting and available during breaks and networking sessions. As an Office users, IT-Pro or Developer this is an event you can’t afford to miss out on.

Attendance is free but due to space constraints strictly limited to 75 seats, so hurry up and register at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/MOSSIG/OOSF2008/default.aspx

Mossig is proud to organise this event with the cooperation of the La Trobe Microsoft Centre at La Trobe Uni R&D Park.

Look what I found in my inbox this morning

2008-04-02T09:08:00.001+11:00

"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. We appreciate your extraordinary efforts in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year."

Thanks for the support guys!

It works on my machine (and a test environment) ... part 2 of VSTO deployment

2008-03-20T09:42:00.002+11:00

I just wanted to post this because when I did a search I got only 1 hit ! Luckely it contained the solution.

Here's the story of me trying to deploy a VSTO 2008 Word template to a laptop with Office 2003;

I figured out, using the VSTO trouble shooter (see my previous post) what was going on on the machine, and on the actual target laptop everything checked out ok. But, still an error:

"File or assembly name Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Runtime, or one of its dependencies, was not found." when loading the VSTO 2008 based word template in Office 2003.
Now what? I desperately googled the exact error (see above). It resulted in 1 hit, a post on a forum and 1 reply (the guy answered his own question! thanks Viking!). Turns out there was indeed a word.exe.config on that laptop, I'm still wondering how/why it got there. Removing the config-file solved my problem, the template now loads, I wonder what I've broken that required the config-file in the first place.

Here's the link to the post: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=453951&SiteID=1

I hope this will help someone else in the future....

VSTO Deployment for 2003

2008-03-17T12:08:00.003+11:00

Last week I had some significant trouble creating an install for an Office 2003 template created in Visual Studio 2008 using VSTO 3.0 (but it works on my machine...) . Although there's a lot of docs on MSDN the information is not easy to figure out (guess there's just too much info...). Anyway today I noticed some new tools that were made available during the ODC 2008 and the trouble shooter in particular saved my day. So if you are into VSTO dev, go and get these tools!

Here's how MS describes them:

"A set of developer tools that provide additional functionality useful in Office-based development. These tools include Visual Studio add-ins as well as standalone Windows Forms and console applications. The VSTO Power Tools also include a set of re-usable class libraries to simplify Office development."

Andrew Whitechapel has blogged about this and explains in a bit more detail:

http://blogs.msdn.com/andreww/archive/2008/02/21/vsto-vsta-power-tools-v1-0.aspx

I hope these do end up as fully supported tools either seperate or as part of a Visual Studio service patch.

Labour Day - WebCasts Day!

2008-03-10T19:39:00.002+11:00

Labour Day: One of these days that you can spend a little time exploring the stuff you had on the todo or to look at list...

I just finished looking at the SharePoint Conference Keynote one of the interesting bits to me was the announcement of a toolkit for using Silverlight in SharePoint solutions. I happen to have done some experimenting with Silverlight and SharePoint last week and there's lots of potential in that area. Just look at how the folks at General Mills have customised their search! Tafiti tailored to their business model all inside SharePoint. Here's the new toolkit:

http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/

I'm working on a personal site which has a lot of picture viewing, I hope to publish a link in the near future, but gimme some time to play with these Silverlight controls first!

LINQ 2 Outlook - Part 2

2008-03-07T15:22:00.002+11:00

Last night after looking at what's available on LINQ and Outlook and after trying to find some info on the web on what MS might have in mind I decided to experiment with a bit of code myself.

I noticed that most samples use the Outlook collections, which are known for their not so optimum performance when they get bigger and you need to filter out a few items (basically you have to iterate through all of the items).

In Outlook 2007 there's a new class; Outlook.Table (and Row) which allows you to get to the items in a folder and apply an SQL-like filter. This is a very clean and fast way of accessing your items. Combined with LINQ here's some code I came up with, I'm looking to further optimise that using types etc. but wanted to share this simple example anyway.

static void TableTestUsingLinqAndExtensionMethod()
{
Outlook.Application outlook = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();
Outlook.MAPIFolder folder = outlook.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox);

string filter = @"@SQL=""urn:schemas:httpmail:subject"" like '%devcon%'";
Outlook.Table table = folder.GetTable(filter, null);

var mailitems = from mitem in table.mailitem() select mitem;
foreach (var item in mailitems)
{
if (item[2]!=null)
Console.WriteLine("{0}", item[2].ToString());
}
.....

public static class OutlookTableExtension
{
public static IEnumerable mailitem(this Outlook.Table source)
{
if (source == null)
throw new ArgumentNullException("source");
while (source.GetNextRow()!=null)
{
yield return source.GetNextRow();
}
}
}

Try it out on some large collections and you'll see it is surprisingly fast!

LINQ 2 Outlook

2008-03-06T20:52:00.002+11:00

During the keynote at the Heroes Happen {2008} launch event in Melbourne last Tuesday Jason Zander, the General Manager of the Visual Studio team made a quick reference to what he called Linq 2 Outlook which would come out of Redmond in the near future. On the search for info on this I stumbled upon many bloggers already using Linq against the Outlook object model. A very interesting approach comes from Belgium, good stuff from Stefan Cruysberghs. Seriously worth having a look at if you're into Linq (and /or Outlook 2007). He also wrote a class for accessing OneNote 2007.

Out Of The Box

2008-02-23T15:56:00.002+11:00

I always like using Out Of The Box features, pre-tested, reliable and quick to deploy and start using for the customer.

I've often wondered about this aspect of SharePoint, I know of the 40 or so Site Templates for SharePoint but that only scratches the surface about what could be done in this space. Lately I've been experimenting a bit with Office Live and it's very interesting to see the developments there (an example).

Last week MS published new Document Library templates for SharePoint that come pre-configured with appropriate templates. I'm particularly glad to see the use of Content Controls and how they link to the Document Library properties. From my perspective, just reading the .docx that come with the new templates is reason enough to spend some time investigating them and think about how you organisation could benefit from a similar approach.

Following up on my presentations of last week

2008-02-01T10:44:00.000+11:00

If you want to know more about VSTO v3 and it's role in developing Office Business Applications you should really read this recent article by Erika Ehrli and Steve Fox.

Here's a link to Erika's excellent blog.

Hooking up to an Item Changed Event in VSTO

2008-01-24T15:22:00.000+11:00

After last night's mossig meeting and my Outlook/VSTO presentation someone asked me about the following scenario:
"I want to capture the fact that a user changes an email address in the Outlook contacts list and call into a custom Web Service to update my LOB-system recording that change." For those that have used the Outlook object model before that is probably not a difficult task, for those new to Outlook and tempted by VSTO to give Office Integration a go it may not be so obvious so I decided to write a little bit of demo-code in C# to show how to setup the event handler, I'll leave the actual call to a Web Service or updating a database using .net classes up to the student as an exercise ;-). Start by creating a new Outlook Addin project, open ThisAddIn.cs and add the code below.

.....
using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;
.....
public partial class ThisAddIn
{
Outlook.MAPIFolder contactfolder;
Outlook.Items items; // This on is important, keep the reference at the addin level, a local var in the startup method will get garbage collected and the events will stop firing.

private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Outlook.NameSpace ns;
ns = this.Application.GetNamespace("MAPI");
contactfolder = ns.GetDefaultFolder
(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts);
items = contactfolder.Items;
items.ItemChange +=
new Outlook.ItemsEvents_ItemChangeEventHandler(ItemChanged);

}
private void ItemChanged( object item )
{
Outlook.ContactItem contact;
contact = (Outlook.ContactItem)item;
// This is were you do your thing......
System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(contact.Email1Address);
}
.....

The same is available for ItemAdd, for delete events you would have to hookup an ItemAdd to the DeletedItems folder.

More on Social Networking with SharePoint

2008-01-24T10:20:00.000+11:00

Rai Umair presented a great session on the concepts of Social Networking within an organisation and how SharePoint can be used in that context. Following up on that I found this post by Lawrence Liu through SharePointPedia which is a great article to read if you want to recap on what Rai told us last night.
Rai's powerpoint can be downloaded here.
Another great way to get the most out of SharePoint for your organisation!

Presentation File uploaded

2008-01-24T08:55:00.000+11:00

The presentation I delivered Tuesday (v.net Dev Sig) and Wednesday (Mossig) has been uploaded to the mossig site for you to have a look at. I've added some brief notes to each of the slides with some background. Both meetings were well attended (over 100 people in total), no doubt not just because of my sessions ;-), there were 4 other great seesions. We've covered WF and WCF in Visual Studio 2008, Social Networking in SharePoint and Windows Rights Management. Thanks for coming guys!

I'll post some code samples and how-to's over the weekend.

What's new in VSTO v3 for 2008

2008-01-22T09:24:00.000+11:00

That's the title of my presentation tonight for the Victoria.net Dev Sig. Here are the details for the meeting, please join us if you can. I'll go into:

Document Level Add-ins
Visual Designers
Ribbon
Task Panes
Form Regions
Workflow
SharePoint
CLICK ONCE!
Word Content Controls

Tomorrow, Wednesday Jan the 23rd is the next Mossig meeting where I'll show you how to build custom Outlook Form regions in 10 minutes. I've got an example of how to show data from your LOB-app based on the email address of the sender of a received email message (wouldn't that be appreciated by your helpdesk people?) and how to convert the html-body of an email into C# code for sending using SMTP. This will all fit into my Show and Tell session of 10 minutes! For the other sessions on wednesday's agenda check out the mossig website.

Tools galore from Wouter!

2008-01-09T14:03:00.000+11:00

If yo are into Word customisation (like me) and deal with Content Controls and Custom XML you are probably aware that the tooling MS provides is not very mature.
Luckily with VSTO there's much you can do to improve that yourself. So I decided just before Christmas to write a little task pane that allows for editing of custom xml-parts and the XML mapping to Content Controls. Much like the tool on Codeplex (www.codeplex.com/dbe) but from within Word.

It turns out Wouter van Vugt had the same idea around the same time....

Here's a quote from his blog:
"The Databinding Toolkit for Word 2007 allows you to store custom XML parts and create data-bound content controls all from within the comfort of the Word user interface. I've developed this Word extension myself because I and some of the people I speak to found this feature to be missing from the default Word user interface. If the old model of xml-mapping has a taskpane, why not the newer and in parts cooler model of data-binding content controls! (You can open the task-pane from the developer tab.) "

In the meantime he's been very productive and worked on WSS 3 and Workflow and another Word Solution for viewing the actual Document in XML. Very nice tools and a very useful blog so do yourself a favour and go and check it out.

Very good stuff Wouter, and thanks very much!

I just discovered another great SharePoint resource

2008-01-03T16:02:00.000+11:00

A bLog was launched that I completely missed. To be sure I don't forget about it again and because some of you might also have missed it:

Official Blog of the SharePoint Developer Documentation Team

I stumbled upon it after searching for information on how to write a custom workflow activity and make that activity available in SharePoint Designer. Thanks Rodney !

VSTO 3.0; They have actually made it too easy

2007-12-27T10:53:00.000+11:00

In the near future I will present the new VSTO features in Visual Studio 2008 for the MOSSIG crowd. But I want to share this bit of info with you now, just to wet your appetite.

A new publish feature has been added that allows for very smooth and clean publish/click-once experience for Office 2007 Add-ins and the other 2007 Project types such as document templates with code behind.

So I went ahead and published to our local network and logged on to a virgin XP-machine to run the setup. All went well and the solution (and it's pre-requisites) were installed as I expected.
But, when I tried to create a new document using the Word template from my solution I was presented with the following error:

It Indicates that the network location was not 'trusted'. The developer I am and drawing upon my previous experience with .net security I set about finding the caspol commands to fix this, and that does require running an elavated command prompt in Vista etc. Note that this is the day after christmas so I may not have been as alert as I usually am ;-). Anyway, now for the too easy part; all I should have done was go into Word and using the Office button, Word Options, Trust Center add the location as a trusted location..... I know this may strike so of you as very obvious, but I'm assuming most will have the same Aha experience I had, so that's why I'm posting it here. Here's the link to the Office On-line help page that explains the whole thing in detail.

I'll get back to you with more on VSTO 3.0 in the very near future.

Happy New Year,
Ed

Is this using SharePoint?

2007-12-18T11:58:00.000+11:00

http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com/

Cool stuff, hope non-US people will get access soon.

For those who want to Share some great work they’ve been doing with Office System

2007-11-30T13:58:00.000+11:00

Office System Solution Showcase at the next MOSSIG meeting (dec. 12th)

As we only have 5 spots available to present we ask that you could please email a short synopsis of your 15min presentation to Tim @ tim.wragg@pa.com.au
This should include
• An outline of the solution,
• technologies used & why (must have an Office System Component)
• key take-aways for MOSSIG members. - your peals of wisdom (or war stories) : so no sales pitches, we want the good stuff.

Remember: The more interesting & informative your synopsis is the better your chances of being selected in the 5 presentations for the night.
We are looking for solutions using a range of Office System technologies that are real implementations for clients.

• Entries close by COB Wednesday 5th of December whereby the Top 5 will be selected.
• All entries will have correspondence back by the 6th so the top 5 have time to prepare before the Christmas Party on the 12th Dec.
• 2 Prizes (Office 2007 Ultimate – worth $1000) will be awarded on the night for the best solution and the most informative. This will be judged by the audience.

MOSSIG Christmas Party

2007-11-28T21:06:00.000+11:00

5.30pm on the 12th December @ Microsoft
Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place
Melbourne, Australia.

We will have drinks and nibbles over the night for a casual end to the year topped off with some great presentations of the work done by our MOSSIG members over the year.
For more information check our website at www.mossig.net or register for our monthly newsletter at register@mossig.net

Not how you want to start your Monday

2007-10-15T10:01:00.000+10:00

So there I was minding my business and getting my coffee; I walked into my Office and I got a "Good Morning, we have a problem 'our SharePoint sites are down....'".

We got 404 errors on all our sites. After some interrogation tactics I found out one of my colleagues was in on Sunday and decided to run all security patches on the servers and go for the re-start. After that everything was black, so I started digging into event logs and log files. I noticed entries about SharePoint not being able to access the content database and schema inconsistency after running the configuration wizard. (we didn’t run that wizard but it seems some update did).

After some googling I decided to try:

Stsadm –o upgrade –inplace –url http://<...>

And that brought everything back!, Pfffff, earned myself another cuppa. And I will make sure that backup can be restored when I need it.

Have a good week!

Ed

Outlook Add-in and SharePoint: Getting Started

2007-10-02T11:00:00.000+10:00

As some of you might know I was involved with the CA Visual Objects community in a previous life. "VO" as we passionately call it is a Win-32 bit environment with good OO-support and an xBase (Clipper) background, somewhat like Visual Foxpro. And soon there will even be a .net version called Vulcan!

In the VO forum I was requested to write some articles about how to save e-mail into SharePoint. So I've done some research and came up with a few really basic articles that explain how to create an Add-in for Outlook 2007 using VSTO 2005 SE, how to save items to SharePoint, how to add context menu items etc. All in C#.

The articles are posted here: http://www.softwareobjectives.com.au/VoConversion/Article%20Archive/Forms/HomePage.aspx (this is Part I and II, more to follow soon). The objective of the articles is to keep the code limited to a few lines, each time expanding a bit more. The first deals with how to hook up event handlers and save send mail to SharePoint automatically, the second how to add a context menu item and save incoming mail manually. Next I will add some info on how to process multiple Items, introducing the new Table/SQL queries for Outlook, add dialogs on Save and set item properties so that mail can be 'tagged' for the correct client, staffmember, order or whatever kind of context you would like to add.

If you have any questions or requests of other functionality you would like to know about just leave a comment.

Office DevCon 2007. Sydney, Australia 3rd-4th Nov 2007. Will you be there?

2007-09-19T10:31:00.000+10:00

How about a free two day Office Developer Conference?

Check out the details quickly and register before they run out of space.

Another MOSS Site goes public

2007-09-18T08:52:00.000+10:00

I know, it's just an out of the box site, but that's the point. With MOSS you can have a good looking fully content managed site up within a day or two. Obviously most of the time getting the content right takes a bit longer ;-) so we are still working on that.

Check out www.SoftwareObjectives.com.au .

Mossig September meeting: Enterprise Search Extravaganza

2007-09-13T20:01:00.000+10:00

26th Sept 2007 at 5:30pm
To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 25th September 2007.

This month MOSSIG will be presenting a series of Enterprise Search related topics, so come along and find out how Enterprise Search can help you unlock your businesses data and improve productivity.

Show and Tell Session
Contact Selector Control in InfoPath (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath

Ben Walters from Strategic Data Management will be providing a brief overview of the Contact Selector control available in InfoPath 2007.

Business Session
Search possibilities in your Enterprise (Tim Wragg)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

According to IDC (Content Technologies Study 2004-2005), workers spend 9.5 hours per week searching. Join Tim Wragg from Professional Advantage as he discusses the Enterprise Searching capabilities of SharePoint 2007 and what it means for business.
The presentation will include,
· positioning of the current search landscape from desktop to the web and where its going,
· search features including documents, people, business data and other sources,
· tips and tricks for an effective implementation , and
· the gotcha’s in features and licensing.

Technical Session
How to access and search business data (Matthew Cosier)

• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 • Windows SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Tool

In this half-hour session Matthew Cosier from Readify will step you through the means of integrating external data with the Business Data Catalog, and exposing it via search. In particular he will take you through the process of writing a BDC web service, generating the application definition using the new Microsoft Business Data Catalog Definition Editor tool, and finally exposing the data to SharePoint search.

Are you into VSTO 2005 Development?

2007-09-07T13:19:00.001+10:00

If you are you may want to update your VSTOR. As I understand it has been updated with support for Office 2003 and 2007 under Vista but there isn't much detail on what was added and fixed "This version is a July 2007 update that contains enhancements and bug fixes to the original VSTO 2005 SE runtime; for example, it contains fixes related to add-in support for Microsoft Office Outlook." is all the doc that comes with it.

Note that there are two different updates, one for design time (adds support for VS 2008!) and the VSTOR itself.

Design time update

Runtime update

Also updated are the instructions for deployment of VSTO Solutions on MSDN:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332051.aspx

While you are in VSTO mode you may also want to watch this video of Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs on OBA and VSTO they made at Tech-Ed 2007.

Office Development News

2007-08-24T08:57:00.000+10:00

I'm normally not posting about other Blog posts but these are hot and very important to those of use in the realm of Office Business Applications. So here I go:

The first one is about the release of both a new MOSS SDK as well as a WSS SDK.

"The latest and greatest MOSS SDK release just went LIVE with an exciting new tool: The BDC Application Definition Editor! This tool abstracts the way you create entities in the Application Definition File by giving you an easy to use UI. "

Read more here. And make sure you scroll down to read everything.

The second one is by one of my favorite MS-Bloggers Erika Erhli, she's got a great post on my favorite subject, creating documents programmatically.
Excellent stuff, thanks Erika!

Lasty, make sure you are subscribed to the OBA team Blog as they continue to produce high level documentation and case studies about how Office System is and can be used.

MOSSIG Agenda for next week

2007-06-21T21:31:00.000+10:00

We have some very cool sessions scheduled for next week.

Show and Tell Session
Using mapping in to assist productivity (Daniel Colarossi)
• Microsoft Virtual Earth • Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office Outlook

Daniel has been developing some cool Virtual Earth based solutions and this month he will be showing us how to get Virtual Earth inside Outlook and SharePoint and hopefully how to behave itself while in there.

Business Session
Successful SharePoint Adoption (Brian Cook)
• Windows SharePoint Services • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Brian will talk about the issues affecting SharePoint adoption and provide strategies that can be used to increase usage and ROI.

Technical Session
Deploying InfoPath forms using Outlook 2007 (Ben Walters)
• Microsoft Office InfoPath • Microsoft Office Outlook

Ben will be showing us how to deploy InfoPath 2007 forms using Outlook 2007.

27th June 2007 at 5:30pm To register for this meeting please email register@mossig.net by COB Tuesday 26th June 2007.

Interactive Office Developer Map

2007-06-04T09:30:00.001+10:00

Here's a little gem I picked up from the Office Business Applications Team bLog a nice WPF based application that gives you a nice way to drill down in to features and tools that are available for Office Developers. Get it here and spend a few minutes discovering WPF or should I say Silverlight?, One Click deployment and the Office Developer Eco-system. BTW I would not mind reading the article explaining how they built the map!

The Ultimate Gadget, start saving!

2007-05-31T09:07:00.000+10:00

Picked this up on Don's blog, I want more than one I think want one in the loo, in the living, in the kitchen.... I remember a video of a guy doing a demo on stage of this technology but had no idea it was already this far advanced. Check it out !

Astoria, Yet Another Programming Model?

2007-05-29T16:00:00.000+10:00

There I was reading up on Astoria, David Lemphers was using it, so it must be worth a few minutes of my research time.
I did not get it, to me it looked like just another way of accessing data over http. What's wrong with with WebServices and Datasets? So I popped the question to David while I was visiting last night. And I re-read the site on Astoria today because what he was telling me was much more of a compelling reason to start looking at the technology (or platform?). My data in the cloud, not having to worry about a server, a database, backup's, scalability etc. I like the idea, not for all data of course, but I can certainly see some applications. I hope they quickly get around to offering us a way to start exploring this. I'm beginning to like the cloud, now I need to figure out how I can make some money by making good use of it.

Keep us on our toes David!

MOSSIG Making people happy

2007-05-24T10:48:00.001+10:00

Congratulations Andy,

You were one of the lucky winners of the MOSSIG door prize last night. You have won a full version of Windows Vista® Business and a 60-day trial version of Microsoft® Office Professional 2007.

Isn't that cool?, not only do you get lots of free training and information, but people walk out the door with copies of Vista! Last night was all about Outlook Add-ins, Custom Task pane development (in Outlook and Word) and what Microsoft CRM looks like for an Office user. Very interesting presentations. You can download the ppt's at mossig.net in the Archive section.

The next meeting will be Wednesday the 27^th of June 2007, read all about it in the next newsletter or on the Web Site.

Configuring Reporting Services Reports in SharePoint

2007-05-18T14:10:00.001+10:00

Getting started with the SharePoint Reporting Services Add-in in SQL Server 2005 SP2

Update Jan 2008: MS has finally posted a good article about RS and SharePoint integration on msdn. SQL Server 2005 Integration with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Troubleshooting Integration with SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SharePoint Technologies

After installing and configuring SQL Server 2005 SP2 and the Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint your Office SharePoint Server can be used for delivering and managing Reporting Services Reports. This assumes you have installed Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode. This article won't be about installing and configuring SP2 and Reporting Services because that is described pretty well in the various readme's that come with SP2 and books on-line. This article will start with how to setup your document libraries, how to create data sources and reports and focus on how to create pages in your site that access those reports. We'll have a look at how to simply execute Reports but also how Filter web parts can provide parameter values and how you can use Business Data Catalog field values for filtering.

The target audience for this article is designers or developers that have some experience using SharePoint, Web Part pages and connectable Web Parts looking for a quick introduction in how to integrate Reporting Services Reports.

Installing the Add-in installs Reporting Services specific content types, what you will need to do is add these content types to a document library that you will use to store the actual Report Definitions.

In the Document Library settings first enable management of Content types in the Advanced Settings page of the Document Library Settings. After doing this you will have a section called Content Types and a link 'Add from existing site content types'.

Figure 1, Accessing Document Library Settings

Figure 2, Adding content types to Document Library

Click that link and on the following select the 'Report Server Content Types' from the top combo box, now add all content types, you screen should look like the figure 3.

Figure 3, Selecting the Reporting Services Content Types

Now click ok and your Document Library is ready to start storing, managing and executing reports. If you have created a Document Library with no other goal in mind, now would be a good time to delete the default Content Type (Doc) and make Report Builder Report the default. Strictly speaking if you are not going to allow users to build their own reports you do not need the Report Builder Model Content type.

Figure 4, Content Types for a Document Library after configuring it

Come release time you should be able to deploy Visual Studio Report Projects directly to a Reporting Services server in SharePoint integration mode. In the CTP build I found it less problematic to go through the deployment process manually and also gain the insight in the different pieces of the puzzle.

The first piece is a Data Source, you might have noticed this type of file as one of the available content types. Create a new Data source by opening the Document library and selecting Data Source from the 'New' dropdown in the toolbar.

Figure 5, Adding a DataSource Item

Fill out the fields just like any other Data source using a conventional connection string and the authentication method you would like to use. Click ok, this will save an. rsds file in the Document Library.

Next create a Report Definition file (.RDL) using the Business Intelligence Studio. Don't use the Content type Report Builder Report just yet, this will install and launch the user friendly Report Builder application but will rely on a previously uploaded Report Builder Model which we don't have yet.

After uploading right click the uploaded file and look at the various options. You'll see that the Add-in has all the Report Management options available on the RDL File Type.

Figure 6, New options added for the RDL Content Type

We can make the Report use the previously created Data Source by choosing Manage Data Sources. Click on the Data source, choose Shared Data source and point to the previously created Data Source file.

Figure 7, Modify the Datasource to use a Shared Data Source

Using a Shared Data Source is convenient because this will enable you to modify the connection settings for multiple reports in one place but you can obviously use custom Data Sources for each Report should you need that.

Clicking on the Report actually executes the Report by opening a new page containing a Report viewer control created specially for SharePoint (the RSViewerpage.aspx) another component installed by the Add-in.

Figure 8, A Report executed by simply clicking.

Now add another report that uses a Report Parameter.

Figure 9, Default Report with a Parameter

Figure 10, Configuring the Filter.

This (Figure 9) is what the default Report Viewer page generates for a Report with one Parameter. Using the connectable Web Parts infrastructure in SharePoint we can do a lot better. First of all we need to create a Web Part page that will show our Report using a Report Viewer Web Part. In a full blown site you probable have a specific Document library to create those kinds of pages in, or you create them using SharePoint Designer. For the Demo I have added the Web Part Page content type to our Document Library and created the page here in the same Document Library as the reports. Go ahead and open the page and choose Edit Page from the Site Actions. Click Add a Web Part and add the Reporting Services Viewer part from the miscellaneous category. Open the tool pane and open select the appropriate Report. Click Exit Edit Page and you will see pretty much the same Report View as in the previous version using the RSReportViewer page only this time the actual Report is nested in a Web Part. This means we can now add other Web Part that can communicate with our Report. You can for example opt for a 'Choice Filter' Web Part from the Filter category and configure it as demonstrated in Figure 10.

Next connect it to the Viewer Web Part using the context menu for the Web Part in Page Edit mode.

Figure 11, Connecting the Filter part to the Viewer
You can click the grey bar next to the Report to collapse the viewers' parameter panel as the parameter now gets the value from the filter part. If there are multiple parameters in a Report, SharePoint will show a popup allowing you to choose how to hook them up. Beware that you have allowed Popup's on the site you are configuring.

It is even possible to use a Filter Part that displays a list in SharePoint using a filtered view that provides the Report Name to the Viewer Part. Or use a Business Data Catalog filter to use a lookup from a Line of Business System to control Report Parameters. They all work pretty much in the same consistent way.

Mixing and matching the right Web Parts this way allows you to quickly build reasonably complex dashboards without any programming. Note that you can have one Filter Part controlling multiple Report Viewer part at the same time! Combining this with some of the other Web Part types allows you to build sophisticated dashboards. There are Web Parts for Analysis Services, Excel, KPI's and Business Data forms and lists. More than enough options to impress the boss or clients I would think.

Download inks:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1e53f882-0c16-4847-b331-132274ae8c84

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=47&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=1e53f882-0c16-4847-b331-132274ae8c84&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3dD07219B2-1E23-49C8-8F0C-63FA18F26D3A%26displaylang%3den

Accessing SharePoint content illegally

2007-05-18T13:00:00.000+10:00

I know Fitz, just in case you read this, I should not be doing this. But fact of the matter is, I had a WSS 3-content database and no easy way to restore the sites. We have migrated to a different server months ago and some obscure deep down sites were not migrated over. But I did need some files from the Document Libraries. So I wrote a little .net app that accesses the content database directly (I figured Fitz wouldn't mind because that database is not in use anymore) and am now able to see what files are there and restore them to disk.

Just (b)logging this and letting the world know it can easily be done. If anyone has a need for the code they can contact me.

Ed

Presentations galore

2007-05-17T15:29:00.000+10:00

I have just delivered a talk on Office 2007 and Vista for business users for the Computer group of CPA Australia. I think it was as useful for me as for them, amazing to hear what business users think of Microsoft and Office and I think it was as amazing for them to hear what Office 2007 can do for them. Although I spend a fair amount of time on Content Types etc. I got the most positive feedback and questions about the workflow features I touched on discussing Word and SharePoint. They also loved PowerPoint 2007.
It looks like there's still plenty of work for us and MS to get the message across.

Next week I will be presenting the technical session of the monthly Mossig meeting in Melbourne. It will be all about using Custom Task Panes (or Document Action Panes) in Word accessing live Line of Business data and inserting that into template and schema driven documents. I've got an interesting demo of context sensitive panes that show different options and data depending on where a user is in a document.

If this interests you don't be shy and come to our free meeting, just send me a note at register@mossig.net so that we can order enough pizza's.

Creating Word-XML document in Office 2003

2007-05-17T15:07:00.000+10:00

By now you have probably noticed I am very much into Documents with smarts, long time ago I wrote an article about how to create business documents with schema's and xml. Below is the intro and link to this article on www.voconversion.com.au which actually is a site dedicated to developers that need to bridge the gap between Win32 apps., .net and Office. Many more articles there!

Using Word as an Automation server to insert data in a document is good enough for small documents that need a few data-elements. As soon as the amount of data grows or multiple documents have to be generated, the speed is generally not good enough.

Further more, while such a process is in progress the application is usually blocked and the user can only wait, or abort because they do not understand what is happening.

Using XML as the file format for generating Business Documents will deliver flexibility, scalability, and simplicity for the developer and End users alike.

This article presents a way to write the data part of documents without even starting Word, yet it will use Word for display and/or print and allow the users to alter the appearance of the documents without the need for developers. As long as the data and schema contains the information that is required, users have more or less complete freedom to apply formatting and layout as they need to. Documents like this can have several different appearances for different purposes. A user could decide to view the details of an order, or an overview of sales in that day all using the same generated XML data. Different kinds of views can be defined by developers or users or existing ones can be modified on the fly. The documents can be generated on a server without installing Word which is a big bonus. This is also a very convenient option for websites that let users download data or Word documents.

Read the full article here: http://www.voconversion.com.au/VoConversion/Article%20Archive/Generating%20business%20documents%20using%20XML%20and%20MS.mht

Mossig and SharePoint certification and training

2007-03-30T09:09:00.000+10:00

Last Wednesday night we had another good user group meeting hosted by Microsoft and Mossig.
Topics covered where an interesting Office Add-in by one of the group members, Kevin Ramsey who demonstrated how the Custom Task Pane in various Office application can be utilised to show Line of Business Data and provide users with customised actions. For example quickly creating Outlook tasks relating to specific Business Data. Marc Dimmick gave us some good reasons to consider using Groove from a business perspective and Elaine van Bergen presented the low-down on WSS and Office Server developer exams.

Mentioned was the fact that MS just released a new Developer portal on MSDN for Groove so here's a link in case you are looking for it.

I would like to add to Elaine's information that there is now a great offer for e-Learning for WSS available (6 courses for under 200 $US) which will be of good value if you are preparing for the WSS-development exam.

Some more news from the Office Development front:

Maybe a bit late, last week the release version of Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was made avalable for download.

Also of interest to MOSS-developers will be the VSTA SDK that Paul Stubbs bLogs about.

BTW, I'm reading VSTO for Mere Mortals at the at the moment and it is very refreshing to see that there is now an entry-level book available for those of you who just get started looking at VSTO or want to move from VBA-programming into VSTO. My compliments to Kathleen and Paul on releasing this great resource, I like it a lot.

Note that we have decided to move the next Mossig meeting to the 2nd of May because of a publi holiday on our regular meeting date.

Eating your own Dogfood

2007-02-17T10:52:00.000+11:00

Would you like to see a big, live SharePoint site?
Here's one Microsoft is running:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.aspx they state it's an experiment. Let's see where they go with this. I've only had a quick look, is that a SharePoint page with a newsgroup/forum interface on the Forums tab, or just heaps of links?
And what's that Live QnA thing?

Certainly looks like a site I'm going to explore and a good aggregation of what's hot in SharePoint 3.0.

Another site built using WSS 3.0

2007-02-05T08:49:00.000+11:00

Introducing www.VOConversion.com.au

Geoff Schaller and I are offering VO’ers a new and comprehensive resource to help launch themselves into the Dot Net world. Through the resources of Software Objectives and our user group community we are providing, white papers, blogs and RSS feeds for a range of key conversion and integration topics:

DBF to SQL
VO to C#
VO with Visual Source Safe
VO and MS Office and MS Sharepoint
Web services
RSS feeds

The basis for this material is for developer who needs to keep VO for the long haul but must get into Dot Net now. Our aim is to migrate your mind, not your code, so the implicit objective of this material is to get your VO apps working right now with many aspects of the Dot Net framework. We don’t care what Dot Net language you choose to use: SQL C#, VB or Vulcan, the aim is to show you how you can leverage your existing application code with this new environment.

Many of the articles and papers describe the underlying Dot Net or Microsoft product and many provide coded samples to show you how to implement some feature directly from VO right now. For example, one of the first candidates is how to deploy or consume RSS feeds. Not only will you learn the XML involved, write a C# web service to manage it, you will also have all the VO implementation code to integrate RSS right into your VO apps immediately. The SQL material comes heavily referenced to our SQL classes but practical sample code is also provided.

Our aim is to prove to VO’ers that they are capable of utilising the latest tools and features of SQL, Dot Net, MS Office and MS Sharepoint right now. You don’t have to wait to give all these great goodies to your clients.

The website is new and we are using it as a learning experience ourselves so there may be bugs and issues with it. For instance, site searching is not yet enabled. If you have comments or suggestions, please email them to me. We are keen to provide the best resource possible.

Content Types are everwhere

2007-02-01T12:16:00.000+11:00

You might have noticed, there's a lot of buzz around Content Types in Word and SharePoint 2007. Now they have made it to MSDN: Have a look at this great new Content Type on MSDN about.... you guessed it, Content Types :-), well actually its about Content Controls, but you wouldn't use them if it wasn't in the context of a Content Type now would you?

Read more about what's coming up in these Visual How Tos on Erika's blog.

Very nice work Erika, Lisa and Brian !

SharePoint on-line 'support'

2007-01-18T08:16:00.000+11:00

Important news for SharePoint implementors and developers. This was posted on the SharePoint Team bLog which was sometimes used as a communication channel to the Dev. Team:

" I hope that you’ll agree with me that once a blog entry gets beyond 15 or so comments, the conversation becomes difficult to follow. Yes, we’ve long had newsgroups as a channel for these types of conversations, but their lack of scoped/filtered search, moderation, HTML support, and tagging has limited their usefulness. Hence, following the lead of other product groups such as SQL Server and Exchange Server, I’m pleased to announce the SharePoint Products and Technologies forums on MSDN, which are mirrored on TechNet. As I mentioned in one of my “Welcome” messages, these forums are being positioned and managed (with MVP and product group participation) as the de facto channel for community Q&A and discussion going forward. The newsgroups will continue to exist for the benefit of those who simply cannot give up the 2-way offline synchronization functionality, which is the only significant shortcoming of forums. "

Clippy is back

2007-01-15T09:29:00.000+11:00

No more Clippy in Office 2007. It seems that Microsoft gave Clippy the sack (if you want to know why, read this or the more graphic version.) , the good news is that he (or is it a she?) has bounced back and started a life without Microsoft. Here's the new home. Lots of tips and good introductions to Office 2007 features. This site also looks like a good starting point when you are looking for books. It seems to focus on the Client applications.

To bLog or not 2bLog

2006-12-29T13:51:00.000+11:00

Now that WSS 3.0 is RTM a lot more people are exposing SharePoint sites anonymously. Chris Hewitt actually decided to run his new bLog on WSS. This got me thinking, I will try to find as many bLogs running on WSS as I can and post them here.

So Chris is first: http://endintiers.com/default.aspx BTW, great post on Forms Authentication in WSS by him. Definetely worth a read.

And here's another: http://www.wssdemo.com/blog/default.aspx and one more for today: http://www.pptspaces.com/sharepointreporterblog/default.aspx

We plan on offering bLogs on our MOSSIG SharePoint server in the near future, keep tuned.
Cheers,
Ed

Give your apps or forms the Office 2007 look and feel

2006-11-16T20:13:00.000+11:00

Last night we also discussed how we could make our Add-ins look like Office 2007.
Here are a few links to third party libraries that make this possible.

DotNetBar, SyncFusion and Infragistics. I have not tried out any of them yet, please contact me with your opinion, maybe we can do a show and tell on one or more of them during our next Mossig meeting.

VSTO Details

2006-11-16T11:56:00.000+11:00

Last night at the MOSSIG meeting I demo-ed a few VSTO Add-ins I've created recently showing how to expose business data in Word and how to save an email to SharePoint from a context menu in Outlook.
A few questions where about where to download VSTO etc., I came across this MS-page that actually has nice recap of all new stuff for developers.

The seperate VSTORuntime is here. I'll be bLogging a few code samples in the next few days.

Lots more info and updated documentation on the new Office Developer Centre. Be sure to check that out!

Getting Ready for Launch

2006-11-01T22:02:00.000+11:00

Update 3/11/2006: Now On-line http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX100647101033.aspx?pid=CL100569831033 (no more beta...) Not only looks very cool, but also has lots of new content that get you up to speed with the new version quickly. Don't forget we've got free courses on Office 2007 on the e-learning site. Just search for Office 2007 there and you'll find a whole bunch of free courses that do a good job at introducing you to the new UI and Features.

You can tell we are close to launch date, even the Office On-line Site has a 2007 look and feel: http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/sharepointserver/FX100492001033.aspx

While you are there be sure to check out the Additional Resources (Bottom Left on page) with links to (now free!) e-learning courses on Microsoft Office System 2007 for developers and users.

Ready for take off?

2006-11-01T21:45:00.000+11:00

According to the Belgians the launch of Office 2007 is November 9th, check out the count-down here:

http://www.moss2007.be/Pages/Default.aspx on this cool SharePoint 2007 Site.

We are having a party at the Crown about a week later.

MOSSIG is still working on organising the next meeting, we are targetting the 15th of November after the event at the Crown but we will be in another location.

VSTO SE Rocks!

2006-10-10T14:01:00.000+10:00

Last week I spend three full days submerged in Office 2007 development while attending the 2007 Touchdown training for ISV's in Melbourne. The first day was entirely dedicated to VSTO and the XML file formats. Now that VSTO SE is available you can actually do some really interesting stuff in Word, Excel, Outlook etc.

Eric Carter, one of the authors of the Visual Studio Tools for Office book I highly recommend has posted some interesting examples on his bLog. The last one particularly interesting as one of the students in the room with me last week was looking for info on how to display Item Context menus.

Some good getting started documentation here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5467323 and here http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5467322 .

If you prefer videos: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=237144 , http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=237142

Note the following remark on Eric's bLog:

"Also, a small comment on VSTO Second Edition. Some have assumed that VSTO second edition is a super set of VSTO 2005 as the name kind of implies. This is not the case. You will want to have both VSTO and VSTO second edition installed at the same time in most cases. VSTO has the document projects for Word 2003 and Excel 2003. VSTO SE adds application add-ins to target Office 2003 and Office 2007. The two products should be installed together to get both document and application level customizations."

I'll try to bLog about some Sharepoint dev experiences next week, I have been experimenting with generating documents containing sharepoint list data automatically using event handlers and that seems to be a really cool way of using Sharepoint for data collection (using Infopath) and reporting.

MOSSIG Meeting Wednesday the 23rd

2006-08-17T09:21:00.000+10:00

The meeting next week (the usual 5:30 at Como plaza) is going to be an informal one, totally devoted to show and tell by the members, Q&A on Office development and Office 2007 features and lots of networking. We will not have formal presentations this time around because the meeting overlaps with Tech-Ed Australia and most of the presenters and organisers will not be there.
I am going to be at the meeting however and we have some members that will introduce themselves and show and tell about the solutions they are using or have developed.

For september and october we already have a full schedule with a show and tell session, a business oriented session and a developer session, stay tuned for the official agenda.

Ed

Document generation on servers, with data from any source

2006-08-17T08:57:00.000+10:00

Erika Ehrli, the site manager for the Office Developer Centre posted two great new posts with code samples on how to quickly generate Word 2007 Documents using content controls and xml-data. Worth checking out!

Office UI Design at Microsoft

2006-07-20T10:54:00.000+10:00

For those of you interested in the new design for Office 2007, the ribbon and the artwork after the great presentation William did at the first Mossig meeting last month: here’s a link to a site that introduces the team behind this and the other work they are doing. It also shows the new icons for Office 2007 and a third theme.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/office.html

As a reminder: the next Mossig meeting will be next Wednesday, the 26^th For this meeting^h we have scheduled a presentation on on how to create documents using XML and XSL, deep diving into the XML features of Word and Excel and also a development overview of Web Content Management in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) - the new MCMS replacement. Both presentations will be of value for developers and end-users and cover the current version as well as the upcoming 2007 features. We will also reserve some time for discussions, questions and other networking opportunities.

Hope to see you all there!

SharePoint v3 Discussion Groups

2006-06-29T11:12:00.000+10:00

One of the features I’ve always been keen on to use in SharePoint is the discussion lists. I think having the concept of a newsgroup at your disposal, in particular for small communities and using an html interface is a really useful thing to have. Especially if you can set one up quickly so it can also be used on a temporary basis and for groups of dispersed people that just happen to have a common need, such as the MOSSIG members ;-).

Unfortunately, in version 1 and 2 discussion lists in SharePoint were very limited.

With Office 2007 however, the situation is much better, not only are the discussion lists more feature rich in the SharePoint environment itself, but the addition of exposing them using RSS-feeds and the ability to manage them from Outlook 2007 really works for me. What Outlook adds automatically is read/un-read settings on an individual level, where the previous version of SharePoint only gave you an arbitrary ‘NEW’ indication that was not personalized. And Outlook adds all its rich management features to flag and categorize items, set reminders etc.
What it also allows you to do is add new posts or reply to existing ones from within Outlook, and obviously you have a complete off-line copy of all the items making it much easier to search the information posted in the lists whenever you need to.

How to go about using these features?

It’s all pretty straight forward, in your SharePoint site, create a discussion list. Now open the list, and in the actions menu pick Connect to Outlook, a wizard will pop-up from Outlook guiding you through the process. The list will now show up in a special folder called SharePoint lists and you can start using it as any other folder in Outlook.

As promised during the MOSSIG meeting last Tuesday I have setup a discussion list on my hosted SharePoint server so ‘MOSSIG members’ can participate in this mini on-line community while exploring the new SharePoint discussion lists and Outlook 2007 at the same time. I encourage you to try this out and use the lists as a means of communicating with the other group members on matters MOSSIG related.

You will have to let me know you want to participate, as it cannot be an anonymous list, I actually have to add you as a user to the SharePoint site. So either drop me an email using the email address you want to use for the login, or leave a comment here on this post and I will quickly add you to the site. Be aware that it is actually a beta environment, so don’t be surprised if the site is not available sometimes, or there are issues with posting. I have seen several, especially when you post using the html-interface in the site itself (not using Outlook 2007).

LOBi == IBF Version Next???

2006-06-23T14:59:00.000+10:00

When MS lifted the NDA for Office 2007, there were a couple of things that were still under NDA, LOBi being one of them. It intrigued me very much, it was the first time I saw that acronym and I've been wondering ever since, wondering if it might be related to IBF and on that topic what will happen to IBF when Office 2007 and BDC in SharePoint is available as there seems to be a lot of overlap.

At Tech-Ed 2006 MS finally released some info, annoucing OBA a more descriptive, technical document can be downloaded from a new portal on MSDN.

Here's what I found on the new, mostly still empty OBA-portal:

"LOBi is a set of services designed to support and enhance Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Business Application Services. It provides specific support for:
Surfacing reusable line-of-business data in the Microsoft 2007 Office Suites. Business data and processes can be surfaced as objects in Office rich-client applications. Write once and reuse objects anywhere across the Office Suites.
Providing deep interaction with line-of-business applications. Processes can be surfaced in Office and results can be written back to underlying applications.
Taking existing processes offline. Processes in a line-of-business application can be surfaced in Office and taken offline, and then synchronize with the business application when re-attaching to a network."

Sounds very interesting, and nice that MS has actually started with certification and learning links this time, can't wait to see what else surfaces here as LOBi seems to ust what I've been doing in Office and SharePoint for a while now.

Developing in or for Office 2007?

2006-06-21T11:03:00.000+10:00

The sparse documentation and resources for beta2 have just been updated. Go and get the new content : updated developer content for the beta 2 release

MOSSIG Launch

2006-06-21T09:22:00.000+10:00

Directions on how to get there are here on Local.live.com . It seems that the maps of Australia are very much up2date now and you can easily get directions from Office or home using the pushpins (they say it takes my 43 minutes, which indeed is pretty accurate), have fun:

http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=aN.8pt6jkx2gpjt_644%2520Chapel%2520St%252c%2520South%2520Yarra%252c%2520VIC%25203141%252c%2520Australia___

LAUNCH OF MICROSOFT OFFICE SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
27 JUNE, 6PM

The 2007 Office release is the most significant release of Office for a decade, adding further servers, applications and services to expand and enhance the Office System.
The challenge for us, our businesses and our clients is to collectively know and apply the features that the Office System brings.

Introducing the Microsoft Office Server Special Interest Group (MOSSIG) which has been formed specifically with the Victoria.NET members as a community to learn and share their experiences whether they be application, server or solution based.

We will be kicking off our inaugural meeting next Tuesday the 27th June at 6pm with a jam packed session for Office Users and Developers alike, so please consider passing this invitation on to your non-developer colleagues as well.

PRESENTATIONS:

A Lap Around The Office 2007 System
Join Tim Wragg (Professional Advantage) as he gives us an overview of the new & updated servers, applications and services for the Office 2007 System

The new Microsoft Office 2007 Interface - Business Focus Topic
Join William Cornwill (SDM) as he discusses why Microsoft has changed the interface and the new features

Developer view of Microsoft Office 2007 - Business Data - Technology Focus Topic
Join Ed Richard (Software Objectives) as he talks about data storage of Sharepoint 2007 and using Line Of Business data in applications like Word and Excel.

Open Forum
A chance to Network with each other and open up the floor to discuss their thoughts and experiences with the Office System

TO REGISTER: E-mail Ed Richard at Ed@SoftwareObjectives.com.au, by COB on Monday 26 June.

The First Gig

2006-06-19T14:04:00.000+10:00

Last Saturday was the Victoria.net regional conference in Ballarat. I delivered two presentations on Office 2007. One aimed at developers, the second from a business perspective. It turned out most of the people who attended my developer one also came to the business one so I think they got a pretty good overview of how, and why Office 2007 is important as a development platform. BTW, we mentioned PDF as the one of the export formats for saving files, here's the latest on that: http://www.microsoft.com/persspass/legal/06-16-06AdobeStatement.mspx , looks like it's still very much up in the air.

For those of you waiting for articles and presentations, the powerpoints were sent to Victoria.net this morning I'll update here as soon as I know the location where you can download.
I'm still working on them, but I plan to have some published by the time we do the Office group launch the 27th. If you are into Office development, think you should be, or are using Office and are looking for ways to be more productive with Office make sure you are in Melbourne the 27th and join us at the Microsoft premises in Como Tower (pizza around 17:30).

The first article will be about how to write XML files, create and use Schema's and XSLT to generate Word documents. this will be a solution that works with Office 2003 (and 2007). I also have almost finished the same for Excel and an article on Content Controls and XML which is Office 2007 specific.

If you would like to proofread or 'beta-test' the articles, post a comment here and I will contact you.

It's a GO

2006-05-28T11:41:00.000+10:00

We have set a date for the Launch, MOSSIG will happen. The 27th of June will be the first meeting of our new User Group for Microsoft Office System users and Developers. Yes Users and Developers. We will present topics of interest for users, and tell developers how they can build, deploy and develop their business (make more money ;-)) using Office System. Obviously right now the focus will be largely on the release of 2007 Microsoft Office System (what a bad name....) as this has been released as a public beta last week. Tim Wragg has got all the links of interest in his last post.

Last week was an interesting one, I was at the Mobile DevCon here in Melbourne and was very impressed with what MS is doing in both the Mobile space (we all got a copy of CE 6.0) and for XP embedded. Did you know there is actually a POS for .Net? A set of .net classes to work with all kinds of point of sale devices like cash drawers, card readers, line displays etc. A very nice way to make use of these devices without having to know all about serial connections and escapes codes. You can download the SDK, it works on XP so everybody can use it.

That same day I also did my first talk in public here in Melbourne talking to the Sharepoint User Group people about what Software Objectives used Sharepoint and VSTO for in our custom solutions. A small crowd, no wonder because of all the conferences going on that day and the soccer match between the national teams of Australia and Greece, but enthousiastic response to the talk.

My next gig is at the Developers Conference in Ballarat on June the 17th, actually I will do two talks there. I will present on 2007 Microsoft Office System for developers and from a business perspective.
The business talk will be about how businesses can save money using the 2007 version, the developers talk will be about how developers can make money providing the solutions for their users and customers.
Last I heard was that registrations are coming in in large numbers so be sure to register now for this excellent free conference. You'll find the details at the link above.
Now I'm off to install the new beta on our servers here, I'll let you know what my experiences with that exercise were like in the next week or so.

Stay tuned,
Ed

Wintertime in Melbourne

2006-05-18T09:07:00.000+10:00

Microsoft's timing couldn't be any better, now that winter is coming to this part of the world.
After all it is only around 18 degrees these days here in Melbourne, I've got all the time I want ;-) to spend on researching new technologies. Beta2 for 2007 Office is just a couple of days away so it seems so if you haven't signed up to receive the public beta go and do so now! On this site you will also find a lot of news, videos and interesting case studies.
I will be talking about how we at Software Objectives use SharePoint for document management and workflow in our projects at the next user group meeting may 25th in Como Plaza in Melbourne. We will also discuss how this will migrate into 2007 and what things can be done more effectively in the new version, in particular regarding task tracking and workflow processes.

And stay tuned for news about our own Office System User Group...

bLogging from Mount Dandenong

2006-05-05T09:14:00.000+10:00

Hi All,

I finally got around to creating a bLog. I never thought I had anything special to bLog about, but I've found a reason now!
2007 Office System! I've found a couple of great guys, Ben Walters, Tim Wragg and William Cornwill, to hang out with and share our experiences with Office.
We decided to start a user group in Melbourne dedicated to Office usage and development. Obviously Development will be one of my main interests ;-). So we are currently in the process of getting organised. If you feel like you'd like to contribute, let us know!

Read more about Office 2007 and the group on the bLog's of the others: Ben , Will, Tim .

For now, wait for more news and the release of beta 2 ;-)