Eric’s Sharepoint Adventures

Looking for feedback, 3rd party add ins

Looking for feedback about your one product you would want to include in a new Sharepoint deployment. I’ll keep this open as long as needed. Check out the Polls page at the top.

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Running WebDAV on your WFEs

So I’m going to start this blog post with a rant about SSRS, make reports outputtable to Excel 2007 format!

So with that said, we encountered a question poised to us from some of our users, “we have a report that is generated from SSRS that’s send to a file share. This has some KPI information we use in Sharepoint. It’s a manual process to get it converted and uploaded. Is there anything you can do to simplify this?”

If the SSRS was configured in Sharepoint Integration Mode, our lives would have been much simpler, but it wasn’t, so this is what we did.

AutoIT to the rescue. We created a script that will map 2 network drives, one to the network share where the files is sent from SSRS and the other to the Sharepoint document library where the file is to reside. Oh snap, can’t do a WebDAV connection to your Document Library in a SSL environment from the server! What to do?

We scratched our heads for a while and this is what we did, configured an AAM to point from localhost to our Sharepoint address. In IIS we added an additional entry in the advanced web site identification screen for the Sharepoint website that uses SSL. Then if we opened a command prompt and did a net use Z: \\localhost\sites\site\doclib, a successful mapped drive is created. Score!

After the drives are mapped with the AutoIT script, we excute a CMD file that copies the file from the file server to a temp directory, executes a VB script to convert the file to Excel 2007, copies the file to Sharepoint, then unmaps the drives and deletes the local files.

If you’d like to see examples of the script, let me know. What a pain in the…

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Back at work

Back at work after being on paternity leave. I have some ideas for blog posts and should be writing them soon I hope.

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On hiatus

Taking some time off to enjoy time with the new family. See you all again in mid January 2010.

eric

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Request for Sharepoint developer bloggers

I’ve got a request for the Sharepoint Developers out there that blog. A blog article or series I’d like to see is a simplified step by step process on how to take a simplistic javascript content editor web part solution and turn this into a globally deployable web part with a configuration screen when in edit mode.

We see a lot of good CEWP solutions out there that serve a particular function for a particular user. What would be great to see in detail is how to take that idea, make it user definable without having to crack open the javascript and edit settings, package it, and make it into a WSP file for global farm deployment.

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Using authenticated RSS feed to Serve Public Data

I can only a little bit about this project now since we haven’t completed it but it’s really neat.

Currently Departmental phone numbers are tracked on a Sharepoint list and then once a year, formatted and sent off to the printers for publication. Some people decided we should make this information publicly accessible in an online version. The problem is the Sharepoint data lies in an authenticated NTLM environment, how do we get it out there for the public?

We, being Brian and I, created a simple AutoIT script that fetches the RSS feed of the list and saves it as an XML file. We added a service account to the Sharepoint site as a reader so it can access the information. The AutoIT runs as this user on a scheduled basis on a web server. With the XML file saved, it is passed through a ColdFusion script that parses the XML data to get the information we need and writes it into a SQL database. When users update a number in the list, the RSS feed sends this information along, the script gets it, processes it and dumps it into the database.

It’s probably a round about method of doing it and I’m sure there’s a more elegant Object Model method for this. As a non-developer, I relied on Brian’s ColdFusion ability to handle the data conversion.

We had a student programmer code an interface and it’s going to be rolled into our publicly searchable data soon.

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Goodbye Zoe, you will be missed

I don’t normally post personal things on my professional blog, but many readers and Twitter followers have had a sincere interest in the happenings of our black lab Zoe. Last night my wife and I faced the inevitable. We had to put our black lab Zoe down. The below is a brief summary of our life with Zoe.

Elissa and I decided to get a puppy right after we had purchased our first home in Toledo prior to getting married. We both agreed we should do the responsible thing and adopt a puppy. We turned to a local organization called Planned Pethood who rescue and foster pets and adopt them out. They take in the animals, take care of medical needs, spay and neuter the animals and place them with foster parents until adopted. We found a lovely litter of black labs and picked Eriko who we renamed Zoe.

She was a fun puppy but really tested our resolve. She kept trying to show dominance over Elissa and kept nipping at her pretty much until she grew out of the puppy phase. It was getting so bad we considered returning her, but we kept on and she stopped. She still didn’t listen to us very much but she was no longer biting. She loved playing in the backyard where she would play ball, chasing it until she wouldn’t have the energy to run after it anymore. Sometimes that was nearly an hour.

As a puppy/juvenile she was really a chewer. She at 3 small shrubs in our backyard down to the main trunk as well as eating a huge hole in the arm of our leather chair. For 4 years, we had to cover that arm with a blanket to hide the missing leather. She loved to play with 2 liter bottles. On the hardwood floors she would chase it everywhere until she finally chewed the cap off and had it deflated.

She loves those bottles

In February 2008 as we were packing up the house to move to North Carolina, we felt something strange in her neck. We took her to the vet before we left and they said to follow up with a vet after relocating. They thought it was cancer and did some biopsies and aspirations to confirm. Tests concluded she had lymphoma. We started her on a chemotherapy treatment at Riverside and she tolerated the whole process pretty well. The day after treatment she as back to her normal self, you wouldn’t know she had cancer by her attitude. This went on for several weeks and we stopped after the lumps had disappeared and everything was seemingly normal.

She was cancer free, or so we thought. The lumps reappeared an about 4 months. We knew this probably wasn’t a good sign but we decided to go through another regimen of chemo and pray that this time it would be eradicated. It wasn’t the same treatment plan as the last time, but one that proved to be effective. Or so we thought. The lymphoma came back a third time after a few months of remission. This brings up up to this summer. We had decided that we weren’t going to do another round of chemo and keep her comfortable as we could for as long as we could. We’ve been giving her the steroid Prednisone to help suppress the cancer.

It worked for a while, at which point we had to up the dosage and the lumps shrunk again. Last week her lumps were very large and she had developed what looked to be a water sack or cyst of somesort in her throat as well. We lovingly called her “Turkeyneck” until we got her dosage increased. The increase in dosage shrunk those back to nothing. The whole time though out this year long struggle she has been very tolerant of the process and medications up until this week. Her attitude and demeanor has changed and we realize her time is almost up. She is not comfortable and is not really interested in eating. Last night we gave her a special dinner in anticipation of putting her down this afternoon. Things seemed to be ok until between 9 and 10 she threw up her dinner 3 times and her breathing became different. We went to bed with the assumption that we were going to have to go to the vet in the morning, not the afternoon.

Elissa slept with Zoe downstairs, I use slept lightly because we didn’t sleep all night. At 1:30 am she came upstairs asking me to look at her. She was really declining and the cancer or Prednisone was ravaging her liver, she had taken on a jaundice color. We took her to the emergency vet and at 2am she passed as comfortably and peacefully as we could make her

Zoe we love you and will miss you. Hopefully now you are comfortable and running through the Lord’s backyard, mangling all his shrubs. You’ve made our lives an adventure and we will remember you fondly. We hope to find your spirit in the next dog we bring into the family, your sister Libbey will miss you.

Zoe relaxing on the couch

Smile

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Sharepoint Saturday Raleigh registration open

For all maybe 10 of my readers in the North Carolinas, registration for Sharepoint Saturday Raleigh is now open! If you’d like to attend, please go register, these events fill up quickly so be sure to sign up early.

Some great speakers are lined up and am looking forward to meeting them. Some I have already met from SPS DC and Charlotte. Really looking forward to the Sharepoint 2010 session as the cover will have been blown off the NDA because of the Sharepoint Conference.

I’ll be a volunteer helping out and sitting in on some sessions. Hope to see you there!

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Removing HTML Person Group Fields in Sharepoint

Over on Stump the Panel, Sasha wanted to change the message being displayed on a Tasks list when no one had a task assigned. The hyperlinks for the Assigned To user on the DispForm and EditForm.aspx pages should also be removed.

First, the Disp/Edit forms. In order to make changes to these pages, we need to employ the tool pane URL hacking method. You’ll need to have a tasks list populated with some data or you won’t be able to see this in action. Click on one of the items to go to the DispForm page. Employ the tool pane hack by appending &PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2 to the end of the URL in the address bar and hit Enter. Success, we’re in Edit mode.

Add a content editor web part. Click the source editor button and paste in the following:

Substitute a local path to jQuery if it exists in your environment. You may be thinking to yourself that this script looks familiar, well it should. It is the same script from the employee training admin page modifications only repurposed slightly. I have changed the selector to ms-formbody to isolate the HTML Assigned To field. This makes the hyperlink disappear.

Next step, change DispForm to EditForm in the URL. Add a content editor web part to the page like before. Click the source editor and add the following into it:

Now the underline will be gone from the people picker control.

The original problem was solved by converting the view to an XSLT data view and entering in the default message to be displayed when no items were found. Then Sasha noted that the Assigned To name hyperlink should be removed. This again involved more recycled jQuery code. The XSLT Code for the Assigned To filed looks like this, note we added person as the selector:

<td class="{$IDADW2OC} person">
	<xsl:choose>
		<xsl:when test="@AssignedTo=''"></xsl:when>
	<xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select="@AssignedTo" disable-output-escaping="yes" /></xsl:otherwise>
	</xsl:choose>
</td>

And the jQuery to remove the HTML:

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Access 2007 and sharing data

It’s been a while since I’ve posted something. The last few weeks were extremely busy with your avergae run of the mill Sharepoint tasks, answering questions, provisioning sites, working in our new test environment.

This week we had a data access problem to tackle. Someone wanted a database on a SQL server. This database was going to be linked to from Access and needed to be accessed by people off site and or not affiliated with us. No easy task with VPN and security concerns. We thought “What about Sharepoint?”

My initial thought was ok, ya, maybe let’s see how it works. I knew accdb files could be uploaded unrestricted to Sharepoint, that’s all well and good. I decided to publish the database to Sharepoint just to see what would happen. The tables were created into lists automagically, pretty slick. The database I was working with was pretty basic so I obtained 2 more robust databases and published these.

Again, my tables were converted to lists and I still had full functionality of the Access forms, reports, switchboards, and queries. This was pretty awesome.

By using Access as the database engine instead of SQL Server, we can provide a database for users to share data and not have to worry about firewall rules and VPN accounts. We can create accounts specifically for user not affiliated with the university to get Sharepoint access already, why not utilize that functionality?

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