Mart Muller_s Sharepoint Weblog

Obviously, SharePoint developers have a lot of fun when using the SharePoint API!
I"ve been having fun with SharePoint (2003) error messages a while ago and after seeing Joris playing a game of SharePoint trivia last week, this week we have the mystery of the the invisible nation! Check it out here, here and here.

SPhaha...

As announced before, the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint will be provided on codeplex the end of this month by HiSoftware. There is some updated information available on their website: http://www.hisoftware.com/MOSS/aks.htm

"The AKS will deliver a kit that can significantly reduce the time, knowledge, and effort required to implement a SharePoint-based Web site that conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints, which are collectively known as WCAG 1.0 AA. The AKS can also be used to address the exceptions that have been identified in the U.S. government’s Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act’s Voluntary Product Accessibility Template or VPAT documents for
MOSS 2007.

The kit will provide templates, master pages, controls and Web parts along with technical documentation to advance the accessibility of MOSS based web sites and applications for people with disabilities, especially those who are vision impaired. All of the source code will be provided via the Microsoft Permissive License this year for customers and other Microsoft partners to download, reuse, and extend. "

.. I can"t wait!

Finally! :) Running MOSS and MOSS for Internet Sites in the same farm has been impossible from a licensing point of view. This was causing many problems when integrating intranet/extranet/internet functionality in one farm.. in reality a common scenario. Today, I was glad to hear that this limitation is taken away. Although financially it"s still a "do I want to do this" question, but at least it is not limited anymore.

From the /folder/sharepoint.htm Team blog:

"The same software is licensed under Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites under different use rights.  Office SharePoint Server 2007"s use rights support private intranet sites and require CALs for licensed access, while Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites does not require CALs, but does require that all content, information and applications be accessible through the internet to non-employees.  Please refer to the Product Use Rights (PUR) document for these products" use rights.

As an accommodation for possible deployment scenarios, customers wishing to consolidate their SharePoint needs under a single deployment may acquire licenses for both products, assign those licenses to the same server, and use the same running instance of the software simultaneously under both licenses.  However, customers must acquire CALs as required under the Office SharePoint Server 2007 use rights for users and devices accessing content in any manner not permitted under the Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites use rights."

Read the complete posting here.

New Service Packs are released for WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003:

• Microsoft® Windows SharePoint® Services Service Pack 3 (SP3) represents a major evolution in security for Windows SharePoint Services. It further hardens Windows SharePoint Services against potential attacks and other security threats. This service pack also includes fixes that have been previously released as separate updates for Windows SharePoint Services.
  You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (923643): Description of Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 3. Download here

 

• Microsoft® Office SharePoint Portal Server® 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) represents a major evolution in security for SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It further hardens SharePoint Portal Server against potential attacks and other security threats. This service pack also includes fixes that have been previously released as separate updates for SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
  You can get specific information about this update in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article (923644): Description of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Service Pack 3. Download here

Registration is open for two upcoming Microsoft conferences beginning of next year:

• The Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference 2008 - March 3-6, 2008 in Seattle. Sign up here.

• The Microsoft Office System Developer Conference 2008, February 10-13, 2008 in San Jose (CA). Sign up here. [UPDATE: changed link]

Don"t miss them!

Tam Tam is the first Dutch Microsoft partner with search specialization. We"ve been working with Ontolica search for MOSS 2007 for a while now. The product solves many of the usability issues that the default MOSS search center is coping with. For example, drilldown, boolean search and a well thought user interface, are a few examples that make Ontolica a good option for enterprise search.

Although a lot fo things going on about search at Microsoft, and the effort being made in the community, Ontolica added some valuable features in version 3.2 which makes the product worth looking at.

Feature Overview - key features in Ontolica for MOSS 2007

• Wildcard search
• Search across WSS and MOSS
• Metadata search
• Federated search
• Drill down search
• Improved Best Bets
• Image Search
• More languages
• Load property values from web service.
• Simple export/import of configuration settings.
• Improved integration to My Sites

Added features in Ontolica 3.2 (released September 14):

• Import/Export of configuration settings
• Property Value Selector: Lookup field (dynamic lookup + browse dialog).
• Audience targeting of Ontolica Search settings
• Search result grouping
• People search: A-Z
• People search: Find all
• Save search
• Improved loading of property values from a SharePoint list
• Show/Hide inherited configuration items

 

I wrote a little console application to create large numbers of audiences and rules in different environments. You can download the source on codeplex.

Also check out the other Tam Tam free webparts/tools for MOSS here: http://www.codeplex.com/tamtam/

For a big customer we had to create about 80 different audiences, which should be deployed on multiple server (test, acceptance, production, etc.). Each audience have rules to describe if a user is part of the audience or not. Creating audiences is very easy, just provide a name and description. Rules however need some more attention.

Time to write a script for that! So, first of al, I searched the SDK for some more information about the way rules are used within the audiences. Basically you can add rules programatically like this:

using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://servername"))
    {
          ServerContext context = ServerContext.GetContext(site);
          AudienceManager AudMgr = new AudienceManager(context);

          AudienceCollection ac = AudMgr.Audiences;
          Audience a = null;
          bool ruleListNotEmpty = false;

          try
          {
               a = AudMgr.Audiences["John and Joe Connection"];
          }
          catch (AudienceArgumentException ex)
           {
               //your exception handling code here
           }

          ArrayList aRules = a.AudienceRules;
          if (aRules == null)
          {
              aRules = new ArrayList();
          }
          else
          {
              ruleListNotEmpty = true;
          }

          try
          {
              //if the rule is not emply, start with a group operator "AND" to append
             if (ruleListNotEmpty)
             {
                  aRules.Add(new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null));
             }

             AudienceRuleComponent r0 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);
             aRules.Add(r0);

             AudienceRuleComponent r1 = new AudienceRuleComponent("FirstName", "Contains", "John");
             aRules.Add(r1);

             AudienceRuleComponent r2 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null);
             aRules.Add(r2);

             AudienceRuleComponent r3 = new AudienceRuleComponent("WorkEmail", "Contains", "example.com");
             aRules.Add(r3);

             AudienceRuleComponent r4 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);
             aRules.Add(r4);

             AudienceRuleComponent r5 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "OR", null);
             aRules.Add(r5);

             AudienceRuleComponent r6 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);
             aRules.Add(r6);

             AudienceRuleComponent r7 = new AudienceRuleComponent("FirstName", "Contains", "Joe");
             aRules.Add(r7);

             AudienceRuleComponent r8 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null);
             aRules.Add(r8);

             AudienceRuleComponent r9 = new AudienceRuleComponent("WorkEmail", "Contains", "someexample.com");
             aRules.Add(r9);

             AudienceRuleComponent r10 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);
             aRules.Add(r10);
             a.AudienceRules = aRules;
             a.Commit();
           }
           catch (AudienceException e)
           {
               //Your exception handling code here
           }
     }
}

Quite a flexible way to deal with rules. However, there are three parts that you have to deal with:

• LeftContent (AudienceRuleComponent.LeftContent Property), this is the part where the property is defined. In the example above, this is "firstname" "workemail". etc. Not documented, for a "member of" operator you need "DL".
• RuleOperator (AudienceRuleComponent.Operator Property), this is the operator, that could be "contains" or "=". Again, not documented, for "member of", this is "Member of".
• RightContent (AudienceRuleComponent.RightContent Property), this is the value, that can be the email address for example. Not documented, for a user it is the full AD path. for example: cn=SecurityGroup,ou=Groups,ou=AnotherGroup,dc=domain,dc=com

This way you can add change and construct audiences easily.

After the latest requirements were met (SharePoint certifications), Tam Tam has become the first  Gold Partner with search specialization in the Netherlands! Great news after doing a lot of hard work on cool projects with enterprise search technology.

From the official press release (in Dutch):

"Rijswijk, 6 augustus 2007 - Tam Tam behaalde als eerste Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Nederland de "search specialisatie" . Deze search specialisatie is een uitbreiding op de Information Worker competency en werd verworven met het succesvol realiseren van een drietal projecten op basis van Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Daarnaast behaalden zeven medewerkers van Tam Tam de voor de specialisatie benodigde examens. 

"De verwerving van de search specialisatie past binnen de focus van Tam Tam," aldus Arjan Nataraj, manager Information Worker Solutions, "om op basis van de nieuwste technologieën zoals MOSS 2007 oplossingen voor klanten te bedenken en te realiseren. Onze projecten hebben als doel informatiewerkers efficiënter samen te laten werken en meer waarde uit ongestructureerde informatie en daarmee uit zichzelf te halen. Met de aandacht voor "het nieuwe werken" is ook "enterprise search" onderdeel van onze oplossingen. Wij zorgen er met een intuïtief zoekmechanisme voor dat informatiewerkers op eenvoudige wijze toegang krijgen tot alle informatie, zowel de gestructureerde als de ongestructureerde."

Tam Tam behaalde de search competency ondermeer met de realisatie van projecten voor Twynstra Gudde, Isala Klinieken en VanderLande Industries. Op dit moment werkt Tam Tam aan SharePoint projecten voor onder meer Meeus, Tebodin Consultants & Engineers, Gemeentelijk Vervoerbedrijf Amsterdam, NIBC, ENECO, Sodexho, The British School, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam en Royal Haskoning."

When using the content editor web part, in some cases you can receive the following message when editing the content, or saving the content: "cannot retrieve properties at this time"

This problem is caused by :

• You configure an Internet Information Services (IIS) virtual server that has an assigned IP address, and then extend that virtual server by using Windows SharePoint Services.
• You configure an IIS virtual server that has a host header name, you extend that virtual server by using Windows SharePoint Services, and then you install Web Part assemblies in the Bin folder instead of in the global assembly cache.

(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830342)

There are some workaround described by that KB article but in some cases they are not advisable (for example when using SSL).

Another thing you can do (as described by a MS tech) is to remove the <clear /> tag in the web.config file in the ‘HttpHandlers’ section.

 

UPDATE: removing the tag can cause problems like an access denied page when you enter the root url (without /Pages/Default.aspx) under a non administrator user. The redirection could possibly not work anymore.