Ever have one of those days? It's miserable weather when you wake up, and the day just gets worse the more you get into it. The dog bites you as you leave the house, you tear your suit on the fence as you run to catch the bus which you end up missing, you're working on a problem for an hour that does not exist...

So here I am working on a problem for the better part of an hour. Why won't the fields in the SharePoint document library appear as Document Properties under the Quick Parts button in the Word 2007 ribbon? For that matter, why oh why is the Document Properties button greyed out altogether? The document properties exist - I can see them when I look at the "Properties" in Windows File Explorer... When I view the Document Information Panel, I can see the fields I want to insert in there... and there's nothing funny going on in the Document Library with the Content Type or Library Security... and I can save values from the DIP and live on the SharePoint site... and like all good developers I'm a Site Admin... so what gives?

It turns out that even though the word document is saved with the .docx extension, it does not necessarily mean that you can use the integration features with SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3, such as Quick Parts. In fact, if you can see the phrase [Compatibility mode] next to the file name in the title bar of the window, you cannot add any type of Document Property into the document at all.

The solution is pretty easy - click on the Office Pearl (the blob with the office logo on it in the top left of the screen) and choose the "Convert" option that appears (it will only be present if you are running in compatibility mode). Voila - now you can add columns from the Document library into the document's content and update them from the Document Information Panel!

Hey all!

There's been some information published around External BLOB storage in Technet - you can look at the information here. Also, Kaneboy has uploaded some code to CodePlex that allows the user to merely install and activate the feature. I'm glad someone wrote some code I could use in a demo :)

You activate the feature at the farm level and you have to activate it across all WFE's in order for the operation to be consistent throughout the farm. Thanks for sharing Kaneboy!

Brad

Hi all.

There's an article on Technet that goes over the procedure required to create data from custom fields in the Content Query web part - it's very comprehensive and will be useful to anyone who wants to collect data from (for example) the same list in multiple sites with a custom field and has been having trouble...

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb850574.aspx

Brad

Microsoft have released a white paper on Social Networking in general and how to implement MOSS as a social networking platform. It's a real pity that the Knowledge Networks add-on never got past RC 0 - it would have been the ultimate enabler for building up people's knowledge profile. Ah well, at least it'll be in the next version.

From the page...
Learn about the importance of social networking in an organization and how to properly implement Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a social networking platform. This white paper discusses why it is important to design a solution that encompasses the inclusion of data into Office SharePoint Server 2007 as part of a user's profile. The white paper also presents strategies that can help to ensure that data from various sources don't conflict, overlap, and cause inconsistencies in the social mining involved in creating colleague matches.

Link to the page publishing the white paper...

Brad

In large organisations, there is always more than one source of information that needs to be presented within SharePoint - often these are pre-existing portal applications from other vendors or even from Microsoft.

Jose Barreto has written a blog entry on the various ways integration can be achieved with SharePoint 2007 or WSS 3 that is worth checking out, especially when looking at an implementation and integration proposal for a prospective client - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/10/26/integrating-sharepoint-with-other-portals-and-applications.aspx

Cheers!

Hey all.

Never thought this was possible, but it looks like someone with even my limited programming expertise could set up a spreadsheet on ECS that allows the user to edit the data contained within Spreadsheet cells - This blog post by Dan Parish walks you through the setup of such a configuration - http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/10/29/excel-services-combining-the-ewa-and-api-using-ajax.aspx

Not Bad - I have a customer that will want this tomorrow :)

Brad

I was deploying a solution one of the dev guys in the office built at a client's site as part of a much larger application. The deployment was being driven through a Batch file using stsadm.

So the part of the script comes around that says this particular feature was "Successfully Deployed"... but none of the expected changes were happening to the site (It was adding a button to a document library item menu). IISRESET didn't make it start working, manually executing that particular string under the guise of the MOSS Administrator... all activities were returning a "success" message of one kind or another, but the feature just was not coming up!

Eventually we went to the Farm features in the UI to see if we could discover anything else in there... no, in central admin it was showing up as "Not Deployed" as well. So we tried to deploy it from there (because we hadn't tried that yet) - that worked fine... but hang on, what's it deploying to this other server for???

At the end of the day, we were trying to use the -local switch to deploy to a farm that had 2 active Web Front end servers running (the Excel Calculation Server had the web front end active on the server, although it did not need it). My problem was the error message and the success message were both exactly the same "Successfully Deployed" alert...

30 seconds later, we used the -immediate switch which kicks off a timer job on all WFE servers, snoozed the batch script for a few minutes while sptimer did it's thing, then continued on our merry way. Thanks go to Arjan one of the livePoint developers who happened to be onsite at the time for helping me troubleshoot this one... sometimes you just can't take a successful message at face value!

Cheers!

Karine Bosch has released an updated version of her CAML builder web part page. This feature (when deployed) allows you to build a CAML query to return data from a specific list or library. New Features include:

• Filtering results on a property (eg Someone's name)
• Returning Dates and reformatting them, subtracting 5 days, stuff like that
• Queries are stored in a list now, and there's a preview section in the Query builder page

Download the latest package here - it is part of the U2U SharePoint Solutions package.

I was at the Sydney SharePoint user group on Tuesday when the presenter mentioned that you couldn't update lists using Excel 2007... and in the back of my mind, a thought bubbled up through the primal ooze that too much booze will make of your brain and whispered to me... "I think it can..." :)

I remembered reading a blog article about this and struggled to find it, but true to form a Blog post that I flagged in June last year was still flagged in my Google Reader (thank-you Google, where would I be without you).

Sure enough, there's a free Microsoft add-in for Excel 2007 that allows you to create a list and publish it to WSS 3 / MOSS 2007 (you can't save it as an XLSX, you still need to store it as an "old-skool" XLS format file, but it's better than nothing). Here's the Blog entry in the SharePoint Team blog, here's the MSDN article that talks about the issue as well as the add-in, and here's the add-in download. This is all thanks to Jon Adams (a Developer from Microsoft) - Thanks Jon!

There's also some additional info on how to reattach a linked list if it was saved as an XLSX file type here.

Ton Stegman has a recent blog post that points out that you can set content types at the folder level (something I didn't know - in fact, I did not think there was any functionality associated with a document library folder). Handy to know for MOSS / WSS sites like Project sites, client engagements, training manuals... Thanks a ton, Ton!

Here's a video of what Bill Gates's last day at the office might be like - http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&tab=soapbox&vid=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26#

Very funny, worth watching (play spot the celebrity - Steven Spielberg, Bono, Hillary Clinton all make cameo appearances).

Cheers!

Hi all.

TechSmith Studios (makers of SnagIt & Camtasia Studio, both excellent applications which I have used to create Multimedia DVD's for clients) have a new product out called Jing which allows you to instantly take a screen-shot (like SnagIt) or Create a video of an area or Screen (like Camtasia) and publish it for free. The cool thing is you can then send someone the link to the published image, incorporate it into emails, etc.

Nice. Cool tool. Free, no spyware, but they would like to see how you use it. Eventually they'll monetise it I guess, but it's got a slick UI and it's familiar to users of the other 2 applications mentioned.

Cheers (Back to blogging about MOSS)

Brad

It looks like Microsoft wants to buy some search market share - They've offered to buy Yahoo at a 60% premium to the Friday Closing price.

Dude! When was the last time you want to the shop and said "Nah, that's cheap at Twice the Price - here you go, here's 45 Billion" :)

Anyway, this will make the next 6-12 months very interesting. We've now got the first place getter (Google, 53%) being chased by the third place getter (Microsoft, 13%) who's just made an offer to buy a company that holds nearly 20% (Oh yes, Yahoo also own the AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi brands and uses a hybrid search engine made up of these acquired technologies). These numbers are based on the Nielsen August numbers (the first result when I googled the words Search Engine Ranking. Microsoft have indicated that they want to finalise the deal by June and seem confident that there'll be no arguments on their offer :)

The offer is an unsolicited offer (read: Unfriendly takeover if Yahoo Board do not recommend shareholders go forward with the sale).

Hopefully they'll start to strip out some of the load that is on the Yahoo site and make that damn home page a bit cleaner. I wonder how much of the "Live Search" pie is the "Default Search Engine" setting in Windows & IE? Out of the 12.9%, how many people actually go to Live.com to do their search vs those blissfully unaware their poorly typed url has just incremented the numbers for live.com?

Search engine rankings:
Nielsen - http://searchengineland.com/070921-105613.php
Hitwise - http://searchengineland.com/070920-110121.php

Articles discussing the takeover:
http://searchengineland.com/080201-064343.php
http://searchengineland.com/080201-093007.php