Mart Muller_s Sharepoint Weblog - SharePoint, XBOX, .NET, Technology

8/3/2007 Disable size limits for wsp (cab) files

Mikhail Dikov"s post covers it all :) We"ve been struggling with half deployed SharePoint solutions a for an hour wondering why not all the files are added to our WSP file. 1424 KB sounds a lot like a 3,5" floppy... Anyway, the tip of the day is:

"Couple of days ago we added a big zip file to our SharePoint deployment and out of the sudden the solution started behaving strangely. After some trial and error Robin found out that every time we cross the 360KB limit we have a problem. Wait, 360KB this rings the bell, but it was such a long time ago. What was it? You guessed it right the default limit for file size of makecab.exe is 360KB the size of 5.25 inch diskette. Talk about legacy support... To disable all kinds of limitations I added these lines to my DDF files and everything worked fine again."

ddf

.Set CabinetFileCountThreshold=0
.Set FolderFileCountThreshold=0
.Set FolderSizeThreshold=0
.Set MaxCabinetSize=0
.Set MaxDiskFileCount=0
.Set MaxDiskSize=0

Lucy, thanks for Googling!

PS: did I already mentioned out free downloadable Tam Tam solution management tool of remote deployment?

7/27/2007 Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator RTM"ed

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

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

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

7/26/2007 Solution Providers for MOSS

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

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

Business Application	Solution Provider (search, migration, integration)
ADERANT	Handshake Software
Baan	BA-Insight
BEA PlumTree	Tzunami
Documentum (EMC)	Casahl, EMC, KnowledgeLake, Metalogix, Tzunami, Vorsite
Dynamics	Microsoft
EMC Centera	EMC, Meridio, KnowledgeLake
eRoom (EMC)	Metalogix, Tzunami
FileNet (IBM)	Casahl, KnowledgeLake, Metalogix, Tzunami, Vorsite
HyperWave	Tzunami
IBM Workplace	Metalogix
InterAction	Handshake Software
Interwoven	Casahl, Metalogix, XMLAW, Interwoven, \| Handshake Software
JD Edwards	BA-Insight
LiveLink ECM eDOCS DM (PC DOCS / Open Text)	Handshake Software
Livelink ECM eDOCS (Hummingbird / Open Text)	Casahl, itsystems AG, KnowledgeLake, Metalogix, Open Text, Tzunami, XMLAW, Handshake Software
Lotus Notes/Domino (IBM)	Casahl, Metalogix, Proposion, Tzunami
Meridio	Meridio
Mobius ViewDirect	Mobius
OnBase	Hyland
Oracle Financials	BA-Insight
PeopleSoft	BA-Insight
Plumtree	Tzunami
SAP	Casahl, BA-Insight, ERP-Link
Siebel	Vorsite, BA-Insight
Stellent	Casahl, KnowledgeLake, Metalogix
Thomson Elite	Handshake Software
Vignette	Casahl, Metalogix, Vignette

7/26/2007 How to create your own custom wiki site definition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some more info on the net can be found here.

7/25/2007 One month of blog silence...

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

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

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

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

6/27/2007 Content Types and Site Columns when it comes to Versioning

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

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

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

required

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

dropdowns

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

dropdown2

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

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

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

When diving into the SharePoint SDK we discover the following:

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

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

Version: reserved fo furture use

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

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

6/27/2007 MOSS and Search

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

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

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

6/12/2007 New community site focusing on Enterprise Search

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

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

6/11/2007 SharePoint 2007 limitations

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

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

Site object	Guidelines for acceptable performance	Notes	Scope of impact when performance degrades
Site collection	50,000 per Web application	Total farm throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.	Farm
Web site	250,000 per site collection	You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100 sites, each with 1000 subsites, is 100,000 Web sites. The maximum recommended number of sites and subsites is 125 sites with 2,000 subsites each, for a total of 250,000 sites.	Site collection
Subsite	2,000 per Web site	The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000.	Site view
Document	5 million per library	You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders, using standard views and site hierarchy. This value may vary depending on how documents and folders are organized, and by the type and size of documents stored.	Library
Item	2,000 per view	Testing indicates a reduction in performance beyond two thousand items. Using indexing on a flat folder view can improve performance.	List view
Document file size	50MB (2GB max*)	File save performance is proportional to the size of the file. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB.	Library, file save performance
List	2,000 per Web site	Testing indicates a reduction in list view performance beyond two thousand entries.	List view
Field type	256 per list	This is not a hard limit, but you might experience list view performance degradation as the number of field types in a list increases.	List view
Column	2,000 per document library 4,096 per list	This is not a hard limit, but you might experience library and list view performance degradation as the number of columns in a document library or list increases.	Library and list view
Web Part	50 per page	This figure is an estimate based on simple Web Parts. The complexity of the Web Parts dictates how many Web Parts can be used on a page before performance is affected.	Page

Read the complete article here.