Thanks readers

Thanks to all my readers out in the interweb. This month I’ve totally blown my unique visitor record out of the water. I hope you are enjoying the content I’m putting out there and hope you are enjoying the training template. The number of downloads is impressive.

Continue reading and I’ll continue to share my adventures in Sharepoint.

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Page viewer web part and UNC paths

No it isn’t what you think, I’m still at ECU and not a Tar Heel. This post comes about from an internal project that I had done and now we are reworking. A bit of history, we are trying out using Sharepoint to serve as a file server for various software packages.

Some concerns were raised about performance because these large files live in the content databases, which is valid I suppose. So I have been experimenting with trying to find ways to deliver the files from a different file server so the files stay outside the Sharepoint databases. Easy, I’ll use the page viewer web part and link to the file on the file server, problem solved. Or so I thought.

IE is the only browser that will allow UNC connections in a page viewer web part and serve up the file. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (horray for multi-platform environment) show the file path but don’t serve it. Searching for ideas on how to deliver the files, I turned to Tony and Brian, two web gurus I work with.

Trial and error later with little success, Brian had an idea to use AutoIt to build an installer with the UNC path embedded. This is then uploaded into a Sharepoint document library and linked to. This worked as desired. After some tweaking, we developed a little application that was all variable based and allowed us to create exe files on the fly. That AutoIt code is as follows:

Dim $uncpath;
 
$uncpath = InputBox("UNC Path", "Enter the UNC Path of the EXE");
If(@error = 1) Then
	Exit;
EndIf	
 
Dim $fileToWrite;
Dim $fileHandle;
$fileToWrite = InputBox("File to Create", "Enter the name of the desired executable (w/o extension)", "c:\fileName");
 
If(@error = 1) Then
	Exit;
EndIf	
 
$fileHandle = FileOpen($fileToWrite & ".au3", 2);
 
If($fileHandle = -1) Then
	MsgBox(16, "File Error", "Cannot open file: " & $fileToWrite );
 
	Exit;
EndIf	
 
 
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "If(FileExists(""" &  $uncpath & """)) Then");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "MsgBox(64, 'Please Wait', 'Loading setup files.  Please wait.', 20);");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "	Run(""" & $uncpath & """);");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "Else");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "	MsgBox(16, 'Sorry', 'You are either off-campus or do not have permission to access this program.')");
FileWriteLine($fileHandle, "EndIf");
FileClose($fileHandle);
 
Run("C:\Program Files\AutoIt3\Aut2Exe\aut2exe.exe /in " & $fileToWrite & ".au3 /out " & $fileToWrite & ".exe /icon c:\jr.ico ");

The advantage of this is that small files (280k vs 700 mb) can be uploaded to Sharepoint which will then go out and grab the actual setup files for the application to install. While StoragePoint would be great to have to remedy this, it isn’t available due to fiscal responsibility to our budget.

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Podcasting Kit

We recently got a new test server in our department, my initial thought was to install WSS on this so I could test solutions in that environment. Instead I installed MOSS standard with SP2 and applied the podcasting kit.

My first installation did not work at all. This was no fault of PKS but my own. This was the first install I had done of MOSS so I didn’t have all the service accounts and app pool accounts right. After getting those all configured, PKS deployed successfully and relatively easily. I tried it out with a few videos and WMA files I had, and I was impressed. I can see this as possibly being rolled out here.

My only concern so far has been opening this up to test with. The security permissioning in the documentation didn’t seem to jive with the install. I’d like to get all the permissions squared away before testing. If anyone has a matrix of what groups should have access to what, I’d love to see it. Or you can reply to the discussion thread I opened on the PKS site.

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Disregard, activating post rank

Trying to verify my blog at post rank.

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Employee Training template, official release!

After developing this custom template for an internal project, I knew I would have to do some work to be able to recreate and reuse this internally. After a couple weeks of tinkering, deploying and troubleshooting, I have what I believe to be an easily deployable template to manage internal registrations for employee training. After about 10 to 15 minutes of simple configurations, you can have this up and running in your environment.

All that is needed is Sharepoint Designer access and server access if you wish to deploy the STP file as a top level site in a collection. If not, the file can be uploaded to the Site Template Gallery on an existing collection and deployed as a new site.

This should be fully WSS compliant, if you have MOSS you can take advantage of the audience features and security trim things a little cleaner. Link to the original template, link to Dessie’s updates and bug fixes.

I have packaged this into 2 different STP files. Both contain configuration instructions and deployment batch files. One contains HTML emails the other contains more “stock” Sharepoint Designer work flow emails. Choose which ever you’d like.

• Training Template Non-HTML Emails version 1.1
• Training Template Non-HTML Emails version 1.2

P.S. – This looks great with the new Event Planning theme that was released by Microsoft. If you go that route, you’ll want to add some style tags to change the page titles to black so they are readable (and the reason why I included Heather Solomon’s clean calendar CSS file, that theme calendar isn’t styled).

Edit:7/15/09
I believe I have tracked down and resolved the problem people were having deploying the template and creating sites and site collections off of it. I have updated the zip file above. For support reasons, I am eliminating the HTML email version of the download. Please refer to this post on how to configure HTML emails. Sorry, it is too difficult to try and maintain 2 different installations and ensure they are all in sync with the bug fixes.

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Using Information Rights Management and Workflows

My new article posted on EUSP about how to use the Information Management policy to use a workflow in managing a contract list.

Enjoy!

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