Sharepoint

How to build a Sharepoint Silverlight Beta 2 Webtart?

2008-06-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

How to build a Sharepoint Silverlight Beta 2 Webtart?

If anyone is in need of the above topic pls add your comments.

Video: New Silverlight Web Part for SharePoint

2008-06-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

I think it is going to go way beyond Ajax in bringing rich application experiences to it in a way Flash can only dream of.

Check out this video on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yutAKSl-AY

Configure the primary Shared Services Provider

2008-05-20T04:28:00.000-07:00

Configure the primary Shared Services Provider

Create the Shared Services Provider
1. On the SharePoint Central Administration home page, click the Application Management tab on the top navigation bar.
2. On the Application Management page, in the Office SharePoint Server Shared Services section, click Create or configure this farm's shared services.
3. On the Manage this Farm's Shared Services page, click New SSP.

Note: If you have not created a Web application for the SSP administration site, you need to create one before you create the SSP. If you have already created a Web application for the SSP administration site, skip to step 14.

4. On the New Shared Services Provider page, click Create a new Web application.
5. On the Create New Web Application page, in the IIS Web Site section, click Create a new IIS web site , and do not modify the default settings in this section.
6. In the Security Configuration section, under Authentication provider, select the appropriate option for your environment, and do not modify the default settings in the remainder of this section.

Note : By default, the authentication provider is set to NTLM. Use the Negotiate (Kerberos) setting only if Kerberos is supported in your environment. This option will require configuring a Service Principal Name for the domain user account, for which you must have Domain Administrator credentials. For more information about configuring Kerberos, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB 832769: HOW TO: Configure Windows SharePoint Services to Use Kerberos Authentication (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=832769).

7. In the Load Balanced URL section, do not modify the default settings.
8. In the Application Pool section, click Create new application pool.
9. In Application pool name, enter the name of your application pool or use the default name.
10. Click Configurable, and in User name and Password, type the user name and password for the user account that you want to act as the application pool identity for your SSP Web application.
The user account must be a domain user account, but the user account does not have to be a member of any particular security group. It is recommended that you use the principle of least privilege and select a unique user account that does not have administrative rights on your front-end servers or on your back-end database servers. You can use the user account that you specified as the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 service account; however, if that user account is a member of a security group that has administrative rights on your front-end servers or your back-end database servers, you will not be following the principle of least privilege. The user name must be in the format DOMAIN\username.
11. In the Database Name and Authentication section, verify the database information and make sure that Windows Authentication (recommended) is selected.
12. In the Search Server section, do not modify the default settings.
13. Click OK.
Upon successful creation of the Web application, the New Shared Services Provider page appears.
14. In the SSP Name section, in Web Application , select the Web application that you created for the SSP, and do not modify any of the default settings in this section.
15. In the My Site Location section, do not modify any of the default settings.
16. In the SSP Service Credentials section, in User name and Password, type the user name and password for the user account under which you want the SSP to run.
The user account must be a domain user account, but the user account does not have to be a member of any particular security group. It is recommended that you use the principle of least privilege and select a unique user account that does not have administrative rights on your front-end servers or on your back-end database servers. You can use the user account that you specified as the Office SharePoint Server 2007 service account; however, if that user account is a member of a security group that has administrative rights on your front-end servers or your back-end database servers, you will not be following the principle of least privilege. The user name must be in the format DOMAIN\username.
17. In the SSP Database section, you can either accept the default settings (recommended), or specify your own settings for the database server, the database name, or the SQL authentication credentials.
18. In the Search Database section, you can either accept the default settings (recommended), or specify your own settings for the search database server, the database name, or the SQL Server authentication credentials.
19. In the Index Server section, in Index Server , click the server on which you configured the Search service.
If there is no index server listed in the Index Server section, then no server in your farm has been assigned the index server role. To assign the index server role to a server in your farm, follow the instructions in the "Configure the Search service" section earlier in this topic.
20. In the SSL for Web Services section, click No.
21. Click OK .
Upon successful creation of the SSP, the Success page appears.
22. On the Success page, click OK to return to the Manage this Farm's Core Services page.
For information about how to perform this procedure using the Stsadm command-line tool, see Shared Services Provider: Stsadm operations (Office SharePoint Server).

Create a new SSP

Note : To configure an SSP, you must have already configured an index server for the farm. Without an index server, creation of a new SSP will fail. For more information about configuring an index server, see the topic Chapter overview: Configure the primary Shared Services Provider.

To create and configure a new SSP:
1. In a Web browser, open the Central Administration page for your farm.
2. On the top navigation bar, click Application Management.
3. On the Application Management page, under Office SharePoint Server Shared Services, click Create or configure this farm's shared services.
4. On the Manage this Farm's Shared Services page, on the top navigation bar, click New SSP.
5. In the SSP Name section, specify a unique, descriptive name for this SSP. This name will be used to identify the SSP in administration pages.
6. In the My Site location section, select the Web application for this SSP.
7. In the SSP Service Credentials section, specify the credentials which will be used by SSP Web services for inter-server communication and for the SSP timer service to run jobs.
8. In the SSP Database section, specify the database server and database name for storing session data. Use of the default database server and database name is recommended for most cases.
9. In the Index Server section, select the index server which will crawl content in all Web applications associated with this SSP. You may also specify the path on the index server where the indexes will be located if you do not want to use the default path.
10. In the SSL for Web Services section, choose whether or not to use SSL to protect communications to and from Web services.

Note: If you choose to enable SSL for Web services, you must add the certificate on each server in the farm by using the IIS administration tool. Until this is done, the Web services will not be available.
11. Click OK to create the SSP.

Associate an SSP with a Web application

A Web application may be associated with only one SSP, but each SSP may be associated with multiple Web applications.
To associate an SSP with a Web application:
1. On the taskbar, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.
2. In the Quick Launch, click Shared Services Administration.
3. On the Manage this Farm's Shared Services page, on the top navigation bar, click Change Associations.

Note : In the SSP Name column in the SSP list, you will see all the Web applications with which each SSP is currently associated.

4. On the Change Association between Web Applications and SSPs page, under Shared Services Provider, select the SSP you want to configure.
5. In the Web applications section, select the Web applications you want to associate with the SSP.
6. Click OK to associate the SSP with the selected Web applications.

Steps of Installing MOSS 2007

2008-05-16T21:29:00.001-07:00

MOSS 2007 can be installed as a Stand-alone Server application or as a Server farm or as a Web Front End. MOSS 2007 installs WSS v3.0 automatically.

If you have only one server, you have no option but to install Stand-alone Type, this will install desktop database engine (SQL Server 2005 Express Edition) along. It will be an independent instance of SQL Server just for the SharePoint application. But this will result in very poor performance. And can only be used by a very small user group or just for learning purpose.

If you have to use it in a relatively larger setup you must install SharePoint farm (atleast one Complete - Install all components Server Type) with database on a different dedicated database server.

In this post I will show the steps for installing MOSS 2007 SharePoint farm:

Prerequisites: Please read this before installing Beta 2

Step 1: Start the installation by clicking the Setup.exe in the x86/x64(for 64 bit machine), and the installation starts with the following screen. Select the Complete Server Type option and click the Install Now button. This will take few minutes and will install the basic components.

Step 2: After the installation of basic components, it will automatically start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard. This Wizard can even be started from the Start-->All Programs-->Microsoft Office Server-->SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard link also. This will present a Welcome screen, Click the Next > button

Step 3: Next screen will be of Connect to a server farm, if it is the first server in the farm select the option "No, I want to create a new server farm" and if there are already one or more existing server, you can select either of the option "Yes, I want to connect to an existing server farm" or "No, I want to create a new server farm", Click the Next > button

Step 4: In this step specify the Configuration Database Settings. Do remember if your configuration database is hosted on another server, you must specify a domain accountNext > button (Global Domain Account), Click the Next > button

Step 5: Next step is to Specify the port number for the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application. details of Web Application and the port number can be read from the following screen shot, Click the Next > button

Step 6: Finally it will show the Configuration Successful screen, Click the Finish button

Step 7: This will open up the Central Administration homepage in the browser.

Step 8: In the Administrative Tasks as shown in the above screen-shot, Click on the "Initial Deployment: Assign Services to Servers" link, this will open-up the following page, Click the Action Link "Initial Deployment: Assign Services to Servers"

Step 9: It will open-up the following screen, just make sure you start all highlighted services in the list(or atleast the one shown as Started here) :

Step 10: Now go back to the Home-page as shown in Step 7 and click the "Application Management" tab, this will open-up the following screen, Now since Services on Server are started, "Create or extend Web application" will be displayed. Click the link.:

It will further show the following page, continue with the "Create a new Web Application" link:

Step 11: Now the Create New Web Application Screen will open. Fill the appropriate values. By default it will show some Port number but since I wanted to host the application on 80 port I changed it to 80. Also there please remember the following

Notes:

In the Load Balanced URL section change the name of the server to the IP of the server in the URL, by doing this you will not require do DNS settings, if otherwise you can continue with the server name also,
In the Application Pool section select a configurable security account. I have given my security account ID. In my case both Predefined options(Network Service/Local Service) didn't worked and gave error.

Step 12: You will get the following screen on completion of Step 11. Now Click the "Create a new Windows SharePoint Services site collection." link

Create the site collection and that's it.

You can create multiple Web-Applications(at different Port) and multiple Site-Collections in every Web-Application

What is SharePoint?

2008-05-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

What is SharePoint?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a new server program that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.

You can quickly create SharePoint sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management or business intelligence needs. You can also conduct effective searches for people, documents and data, participate in forms-driven business processes and access and analyze large amounts of business data.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow and leverage business insight to make better-informed decisions.
· Collaboration - Allow teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information through the use of wikis and blogs.
· Portals - Create a personal MySite portal to share information with others and personalize the user experience and content of an enterprise Web site based on the user's profile.
· Enterprise Search - Quickly and easily find people, expertise, and content in business applications.
· Enterprise Content Management - Create and manage documents, records, and Web content.
· Business Process and Forms - Create workflows and electronic forms to automate and streamline your business processes.
· Business Intelligence - Allow information workers to easily access critical business information, analyze and view data, and publish reports to make more informed decisions.

Top Ten Benefits of SharePoint
1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
5. Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
6. Connect people with information and expertise.
7. Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
8. Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
9. Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
10. Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

Working With the Data View Web Part

2008-05-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

Working With the Data View Web Part

What is the Data View?
Data View Web Part is the primary component used for data presentation when building data-driven Web sites using FrontPage 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services. When you create a data-driven Web site, you select data sources from a Data Source Catalog and use Data View Web Parts to present data. Data View Web Parts render data by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT).

Data-driven Web Sites

FrontPage 2003 has many features for building live, data-driven webs. Central to any data-driven Web page is the ability to collect and present live customer data on the fly on a page – that is, you are effectively building a page based on data (hence the term data-driven). These features fall into two categories:
· Sites based on ASP or ASP.NET: using the Database Results Wizard and the Database Interface Wizard. You can create Web pages that display interactive views of desktop-based or server-based data by using ASP code or ASP.NET controls.
· Sites based on Windows SharePoint Services: using the Data Source Catalog and Data View Task panes. You can access a wide range of data sources, including desktop-based and server-based databases, XML files, Web services, and SharePoint Services-based lists.
In this document, we focus on the second set of features.

Data Binding

When working with a Windows SharePoint Services-based site, FrontPage 2003 allows live views of customer data from a variety of different sources:
· SharePoint Services-based Lists and Libraries
· OLEDB data sources, including Microsoft SQL Server
· XML Web Services
· XML FilesThe key technology enabling this versatile data access is the data retrieval service, which is a new data binding mechanism in Windows SharePoint Services. A data retrieval service enables data consumers and data sources to communicate with each other through Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and XML. In essence, it is an XML Web service that returns XML data from different data sources or manipulates data against those data sources. A data retrieval service is installed and runs on a server running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Windows SharePoint Services includes a default set of data retrieval services for working with data in SharePoint Services-based lists, OLEDB, and XML data sources.

Data Views: XSLT-based Presentation of XML

The Data View Web Part is a special Web Part which acts as a client to the data retrieval service as it can retrieve and manipulate data from any data source supported by data retrieval services. As we mentioned before, the data retrieval service is a Web service, thus, it returns data in the form of XML. The Data View uses Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) on this XML to format the data.

A key feature of the Data View is that it provides WYSIWYG authoring of XSLT to produce formatted views of data. The visual editor produces XSLT; the XSL transformation code is inserted directly into the HTML of your page. Once inserted on your page, you can use any WYSIWYG formatting tools from within the Data View in FrontPage 2003, such as adding table columns with certain font formatting, and FrontPage 2003 will generate the new XSLT on the fly. You can also change or add to the XSLT in the CODE view of the FP 2003 editor
Because of the data retrieval services architecture, live data is available at authoring time; furthermore, data is available as XML regardless of how it is stored at the data source. Recall that the data retrieval service is an XML Web service.
Data Views can be connected to build rich pages that combine data from multiple sources, and/or provide rich views on top of hierarchical data (such as master-detail).

References
FrontPage 2003: Overview of Web Parts Framework
FrontPage 2003: Customizing Web Parts
FrontPage 2003: Working with Web Part Libraries
FrontPage 2003: Connecting Web Parts
FrontPage 2003: Working with Web Part Pages
FrontPage 2003: An Architectural Introduction to Web Parts and ASP.NET
Other Microsoft Resources
Microsoft FrontPage 2003 Customization Kit Web: http://www.sharepointcustomization.com
Microsoft FrontPage Web site:http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/default.htm
Microsoft FrontPage Add-in Center: http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/downloads/addin/default.asp
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies:http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.asp
SharePoint Products and Technologies Web Component Directory:http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/downloads/components/default.asp

Learn about MOSS 2007

2008-01-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

Slowly but surely more details are emerging from a variety of different types of implementations using Microsoft's new SharePoint, "MOSS 2007." I hope you can join us in Washington, DC this June for a couple of very useful MOSS sessions based on practical field experience. First, noted SharePoint guru Shawn Shell will deliver a 3-hour pre-conference tutorial, Taking advantage of the "new" SharePoint. Then, during the conference itself, two other MOSS experts (Randy Woods and Russ Stalters) will join Shawn to tell you, Everything you wanted to know about MOSS 2007 (but were afraid to ask). Hope to see you there.

MOSS 2007

2008-01-08T11:45:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organisational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet and web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility and interoperability.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows organisations to:
Manage content and processes
Improve business insight
Simplify internal and external collaboration
Empower IT to make a strategic impact

For further information on MOSS, please download Microsoft's Microsoft Office SharePoint Server datasheet.

How to Create a MOSS 2007 VPC Image: The Whole 9 Yards

2008-01-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

Now that I've finally completed my series of posts describing how to build a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Virtual PC image for demos and development work, here is a one-stop-shopping index of all 20 posts:

Part 1: Getting Started, Installing IIS, and Installing .NET Framework 2.0

Part 2: Installing and Configuring POP3 Email

Part 3: Installing and Configuring Outlook 2007

Part 4: Installing and Configuring the .NET Framework

Part 5: Installing SQL Server 2005

Part 6: Configuring SQL Server 2005

Part 7: Installing SQL Server 2005 SP1

Part 8: Creating the MOSS Accounts

Part 9: Installing and Configuring the MOSS 2007 Application

Part 10: Setting Up Internet Explorer Web Browser Security

Part 11: Starting Services

Part 12: Creating a Shared Services Provider

Part 13: Configuring Search Settings

Part 14: Configuring Outgoing E-mail

Part 15: Creating the Portal

Part 16: Installing SharePoint Designer 2007

Part 17: Installing Office 2007 Applications

Part 18: Installing Warm-up Scripts

Part 19: Optimizing the MOSS 2007 VPC Image

Part 20: Creating a Virtual PC Differencing Disk

MOSS 2007

2008-01-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007, or “MOSS” for short, is Microsoft’s first integrated server platform that aims to provide web content management, enterprise content services, and enterprise search, as well as shared business processes and business intelligence dashboarding to the small/medium enterprise.
Like its predecessor SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003/WSS 2.0, MOSS is fundamentally dedicated to unstructured document storage, structured list storage, and group collaboration. The word “share” has not been removed from the mission concept, which goes something like “connecting people, processes, and information.”