(Click the image to see it bigger)Did you ever try to deploy content types across multiple site collections in SharePoint Server 2007 and keep them in sync afterwards? If so, you probably now that this is not that easy – there is not standard support for this in 2007. Some of you will have tried the SharePoint cross-site configurator on Codeplex. Luckily this issue has been solved with SharePoint 2010 which has built in support for central management of content types from a master site collection and afterwards pushing out the changes to other site collections – this commonly referred to as content type syndication and the content types within the master site collection hub are called enterprise content types. Another great feature enabled by the Enterprise Managed Metadata (EMM) service application.
The managed metadata service in SharePoint 2010 provides a central store for keywords and a hierarchically organized metadata - think of lookup columns but then a lot better with hierarchy support and central management across site collections, web applications or even farms. If you’re new to the concept of the managed metadata service, managed keywords and the managed metadata field I strongly suggest that you take a look at the following links:
Content organizers allow for content submitted to SharePoint to be rerouted to the correct location based on a number of routing rules which use both content types and it’s metadata to provide a certain routing logic. It’s actually an improved version of the routing logic which was available in the SharePoint 2007 records center. There are some excellent blog posts out there if you want to learn more:
Some interesting links that I found when preparing my chapter about the new metadata features in SharePoint 2010 – it is sometimes refreshing to take a step away from the product and look at some theoretical background postings and articles. Have fun.
Anecdote about Subfolders versus Metadata – a story about resistance and changing jobs. Sounds familiar – take a look at these postings - Follow up – Folders in SharePoint document libraries - Why???
Luckily location based metadata in SharePoint 2010 will allow us to use the best of both worlds – keep the old school way of organizing information in folders while automatically assigning metadata linked to the folder location.
Check out - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/socialstatswebpart
This sample consists of a Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Visual Web part project. After you build and deploy this project on your Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 site, you can add this Web part to any page where you want to display statistics for the social tagging activities of your users. The Web part displays the following information in three tables:
The sample demonstrates how to use the new Social Data object model in SharePoint Server 2010. It also takes advantage of the SharePoint Visual Web Part template, one of the new SharePoint templates that you can use in Visual Studio 2010.
If you need to find the Application Data directory, just type %appdata% in the Run dialog box, the Start menu search box, or at the command prompt. This will open the correct folder.
BIWUG (The Belux Information Worker User Group) is giving away a free ticket for TechDays 2010. So how can you get this free ticket – very simple: please provide an answer to the following questions:
1.What is the coolest new feature in SharePoint 2010?
2. How many people will have send in their vote for the coolest feature by Friday 19th of February?
Send me an email at joris.poelmans@realdolmen.com and take your chance to win this ticket!
PS I will publish the results of this little survey afterwards ….
Lots of new SharePoint 2010 training material released in january:
This post in Webworker daily about the significance of corporate culture on collaboration within your organization reminds me of some other blog posts which I wrote a while back:
The author clearly makes the statement that you first need a corporate culture which embraces a new work paradigm where you empower people to organize work in their own fashion. This is similar to what I wrote earlier:
I think that you will first need to create a mindset within your company which is ready to embrace collaboration and knowledge sharing before you can start thinking about Enterprise 2.0 - a view which is confirmed by this guy - Enterprise 2.0 - Culture required? But on the other hand for those people in your company who get it, you want to provide the necessary tools.
With a new web savvy generation entering the work force companies will need to provide the necessary tools and freedom to allow people to work in ways that you probably did not imagine. This will mainly require a shift in management style from command and control to collaborate and connect
Our CEO once wrote – the culture of an enterprise is largely determined by the behavior of its leaders (for the dutch text – see De cultuur van een onderneming wordt bepaald door het gedrag van zijn leiders) – a quote taken from Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy. I could not agree more.
On Tuesday, the 9th of February 2010 BIWUG organizes the first sessions about SharePoint 2010 in the new Ordina offices in Mechelen. We have a great line up amongst which 3 Belgian SharePoint MVP's presenting.
Date and hours:
February 9th, 2010
(The event is free, but registration is required.)
Sessions:
Location:
Ordina HQ
Blarenberglaan 3B
2800 Mechelen
Route description to the Ordina HQ can be found here. Please print the itinerary, as most GPS devices have problems with finding this address.
Registration:
Click here to register for this event.
Did you ever wonder what the User Activity value means in the SharePoint site statistics? Apparently this is the total number of times the user accessed the site (or site collection) over the past 30 days, divided by 30 to give daily average.
Great explanation on MOSS Usage Reports Explained
The new user interface for uploading multiple documents to a document library is actually part of the Office 2010 clients – so if you install Word 2010 you will also be able to use the new “drag & drop” upload control together with SharePoint Server 2007.
A new version of the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and Powerpoint formats has been released for download .
By installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003, you will be able to open, edit, and save files using the file formats in newer versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint . The Compatibility Pack can also be used in conjunction with the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to view files saved in these new formats. For more information about the Compatibility Pack, see 924074.
I’m wondering if this works for Office 2010 as well …
If you want to try out some open source web applications but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up everything up yourself – BitNami is the place to be.
Here you can download complete setup packages or even virtual machines with Alfresco, Joomla, Drupal, SugarCRM and lots more … check it out.
Create a folder with the magic name “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}”. The folder's icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. Quite interesting but not really divine …
Update: I updated the script to check whether a specific site support multilingual capabilities using the SupportsMultiLingualUI property of a webtemplate – see SharePoint 2010 Meeting Workspaces and Blogs are not MUI capable .
Yesterday I talked about how the SharePoint 2010 Multilingual User Interface feature allows for multilingual collaboration scenario’s without the need for additional third party addons. One of the things which bugged me though is that you need to enable the multilingual feature on a per site basis. So I wrote this little powershell script to activate the multilingual feature for all sites in a site collection and to add a specific alternate language (in my case French). You can use this as a starting point for your own powershell scripts…
1: if($args) {
2: $siteUrl = $args[0] 3: 4: $snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell'}
5: if ($snapin -eq $null)
6: {7: Write-Host "Loading Microsoft SharePoint Powershell Snapin"
8: Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"
9: } 10: 11: $cultureinfo = new-object system.globalization.cultureinfo("fr-FR")
12: 13: $site = get-spsite $siteurl14: $site.allwebs | foreach {
if ($_.WebTemplate.SupportsMultilingualUI){
$_.IsMultiLingual= 'True'
15: $_.AddSupportedUICulture($cultureinfo) 16: $_.Update() 17: } 18: } 19: $site = get-spsite $siteurl20: $site.allwebs |foreach {Write-Host $_.Title + " " + $_.IsMultiLingual}
21: 22: }23: else
24: {25: Write-Host "ERROR: You must supply SiteCollection URL as parameter when calling ActivateLanguages.ps1"
26: }I also uploaded the powershell script to the SharePoint Extensions Codeplex project – SharePoint 2010 Powershell Snippets
I finished reinstalling my portable with Windows 7 over the weekend and I must admit it was a smooth experience. So what do I install on my Windows 7:
I have to admit that as a SharePoint guy I do most of my work within my virtual machines so all the dev tools are installed on these machines. Although SharePoint 2010 can be installed on my Windows 7 I still prefer to use virtual machines – see Setting up the Development environment for SharePoint Server 2010.
Any other tools you can’t live without on your machine?
SharePoint finally provides a decent out of the box multilingual user experience for collaboration scenario’s with the introduction of SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010. After you installed the necessary language packs you will have the option to enable the multilingual user interface (MUI) on a per site basis using site settings (this is also possible using the SharePoint Object Model – using SPWeb.AddSupportedUICulture).
Once you enable alternate languages, users will see a language picker control in the top right of the page where they can switch the site to the language of their choice - this is a huge improvement in comparison with 2007.
At the beta2 framework there are language packs available for German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian and Chinese (simplified) – see Language packs available for download
Remember that for SharePoint Server 2010 you first need to install the SharePoint Foundation language packs and afterwards the ones for SharePoint Server 2010 – see Deploy Language Packs (SharePoint Server 2010) for additional details.
So what parts of the SharePoint user interface are actually impacted by the MUI:
In a next post I will delve a little deeper into the multilingual experience and take a look at some powershell scripts to work with the multilingual settings.