Practical guide to the SharePoint 2010 Content Query Web Part (CQWP)

The Content Query Web Part is one of the most powerful web parts which is provided by the SharePoint Server Publishing Framework (it is not available with SharePoint Foundation). It allows you to roll up information within a SharePoint site collection for display on a web page by letting you build queries through simple configuration of the different available web part properties. The Content Query web part leverages caching and performance optimization techniques and avoids the use of custom code.

While the out of the box CQWP is quite powerful you will see some that in most cases you will need extra configuration and customization. This has however become a lot simpler in SharePoint 2010 by the introduction of slots. So how does this work. Steps to get going:

• Create a new item style template file e.g. customitemstyle.xsl and upload it to the style library – see How to: Customize styles in SharePoint Server 2010 for a more detailed description. In this example I created a new itemstyle template

• Configure your Content Query web part using the different properties in the web part pane

• Export the configured Content Query web part to your desktop and modify the .webpart file. Change the ItemXsLink property and point it to the previously uploaded customitemstyle.xsl

<property name="ItemXslLink" type="string">/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customitemstyle.xsl</property>

• Upload the web part definition again and add it to the page. Click “edit web part” and open the web part tool pane. You will notice that within the Presentation> Styles section, you are able to select the newly created itemstyle template that you added in customitemstyle.xsl. After selecting it and clicking apply you will notice that the “CreatedBy” marker that you specified in your custom item style template is now appearing within the tool pane. These markers within the item style are called slots and can be filled with content at runtime.

Once you define slots in the itemstyle.xsl these are picked up by the Content Query Web Part and shown in the web part tool pane so that you can map these to specific fields. Using the “slots” concept you can define reusable XSL templates. This also means that you don’t need to use the “CommonViewfields” property anymore as defined in SharePoint Server 2007 – this is a thing of the past (See Displaying Custom Fields in Content Query Web Parts in Office SharePoint Server 2007)

If you want to delve a little deeper and see some practical examples of the Content Query Web Part check out these links:

• What’s new with the Content Query  Web Part in SharePoint 2010
• Displaying a links lists in the CQWP (SP2010)
• Content Query Web Part – Common Enhancements
• http://spxslt.codeplex.com/
• XSLT Point – some XSL stylesheets to debug Content Query WebPart, Summary Links WebPart and Table of Contents WebPart
• Generating short description using the Content Query Web Part
• Adding table headers and or footers to a Content Query Web part
• Display News pages with CQWP – Part I

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,microsoft,development,CBQ,CQWP

Auditing in SharePoint Server 2010–Part I

The audit feature in SharePoint is used to track what actions users are taking within your SharePoint Server 2010 environment. It is typically activated to comply with compliance guidelines governing your business or the sector in which your organization is operating.

Compliance is the process of adhering to a set of established guidelines or rules established by external bodies such as government agencies or by internal corporate policies.

Auditing can be activated on multiple levels in SharePoint:

• At site collection level
• At list or library level (through list content types …)
• Across your farm using Enterprise content types

After activating auditing in SharePoint Server 2010 (SharePoint Foundation does not expose this functionality through the user interface) you will be able to generate reports on the audit data using reports which are generated in Excel.  These Excel reports typically contains two worksheets, one with a pivot table to provide reporting capability and a second one containing detail information such as the SiteId, ItemId, Item Type,User Id,Document location,Occurred (Datetime),Event (e.g. Security Group Member Add),Event source,Source Name,Event Data. The scope of the audit reports is the current site collection only.

You should be careful when activating auditing and just checking all audit event types since every action which needs to monitored will add a new row of audit data. Auditing data is stored in the AuditData table of the SharePoint content database (Remember that a site collection is stored in one database – so when you have multiple database):

Use the following guidelines to estimate the space you will need to reserve for auditing data:

• Estimate the number of new auditing entries for a site, and multiply this number by 2 KB (entries generally are limited to 4 KB, with an average size of about 1 KB).
• Based on the space that you want to allocate, determine the number of days of audit logs you want to keep

Source: TechNet Storage and SQL Server Capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2010)

Fortunately SharePoint also provides the ability to automatically trim audit logs and only keep audit data for a limited number of days with the option to either delete the audit data or export it to a document library in Excel format.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint+Server+2010,SharePoint2010,SPS2010

SharePoint 2010 Online Powershell Commandbuilder

Something interesting for people who want to start using Powershell and SharePoint 2010 - the Online PowerShell Command Builder Tool. The Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Office 365) is a Silverlight 4 application that is designed to help IT professionals and power users learn how to use Windows PowerShell for administrative tasks. You can also install it locally: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/TechNet/en-us/Office/media/WindowsPowerShell/WindowsPowerShellCommandBuilder.html

Business Insight Event @Vlerick Ghent June 21st

Join RealDolmen's Business Insights event and find out how to make information from your data.On 21 June 2012 RealDolmen organizes its Business Insight event @Vlerick in Ghent.

A huge amount of companies allocate significant amount of resources to manage growing data year after year. We explicitly mention data because most of those companies lack the ability to transform data into information and to create real insight. This makes it difficult to reach strategic goals and it undermines your core business capabilities.

During this Business Insight event RealDolmen will introduce you to a combination of practical business cases and innovation sessions. Each of these zoom into essential business insight elements and give you head start when you want to actually use those business insight elements.
This session will mainly deal with topics such as:

• BI – Performance Management
• Master Data Management (MDM)
• Big Data
• Discovery

Professor Dries Van Nieuwenhuyse, one of the gurus in the BI domain, will give a keynote address and all attendees will get a free copy of his new book "Systemisch Performance Management". Johnson & Johnson and Antwerp Gas Terminal will be presenting their business case. The event is tailored to issues faced by the modern CxO's and managerial level functions.
Registration is free via the RealDolmen website.

Technorati Tags: business+intelligence,BI,MDM,BigData,Big+Data,Vlerick,RealDolmen

Solve disabled insert picture from SharePoint option in SharePoint 2010

A couple of days ago I created a Wiki Page Library on a site created with the blank template. When I tried to insert an image into the wiki page – the “insert from SharePoint” option was greyed out. Luckily this was quite easy to solve by activating the SharePoint Server Publishing feature (Site level).

This will only work for wiki pages though – I noticed that when you use a field of type “Multiple lines of text (Enhanced rich text (Rich text with pictures, tables, and hyperlinks)” you will notice that although you see the Insert Picture option – the “Insert from SharePoint”  is still greyed out even when activating the SharePoint Server Publishing feature (Site level).

Tags van Technorati: SharePoint,SharePoint+2010,SPS2010,microsoft

Some things you probably did not know about about FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

• The FAST Query Language (FQL) supports both post & prefix wildcards – unfortunately the standard search box in SharePoint will only work with prefix wildcards.
• You can use up to 3 whole word extractors – these are a very efficient way to enhance your search refiners.
• FAST automatically recognizes the “primary” language of a document but it does not really do “translation” of search results.
• The native content processing pipeline stages have been written in Python.
• People search  in SharePoint Server 2010 is still powered by SharePoint and not by Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint – check out How to get SharePoint 2010 people search to work with FAST Search 2010
• Word document thumbnail preview and PowerPoint preview is not powered by FAST Search Server 2010 but by the Office Web Apis  (see Two little known facts about the thumbnail and Powerpoint preview feature in FAST Search Server 2010 for more details)
• There are already  a number of standard property extractors available in FAST – for companies, locations and person names.  Companies and Locations are activated by default but not present in the search result page. The person names extractor is not activated by default and you will need to modify OptionalProcessing.xml to allow for person name extraction – see Using the default property extractors in FAST and how it works with the search refinements
• If you want to try out FAST and SharePoint without having to do a complete install yourself, you can use the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM) image – which also includes FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint but … don’t forget to create a new certificate – see Having problems with FAST and the Microsoft Information Worker virtual image, try creating a new certificate.

Tags van Technorati: FAST,Enterprise+search,SharePoint,Microsoft,SharePoint2010,SPS2010

Setting up a development environment for SharePoint and Windows Phone 7

There are basically 3 flavors of setup that you can use for setting up a development environment when you want to build a Windows Phone 7 app that integrates with SharePoint:

• Physical single machine setup using Windows 7: install both SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7 on a physical Windows 7 machine. This will not work in a virtual environment since SharePoint requires a 64 bit machine and the Windows Phone SDK requires a 32 bit setup when installing in a virtual environment. Installing the Windows Phone SDK on the Windows 7 host and using VMWare is not an option either – see  Help – Windows Phone 7.1 emulator crashes my VMWare workstation. You can not install the Phone SDK on a Windows Server 2008 (R2) but there seems to be a workaround which you can use at your own risk (I did not test it).
• Single machine with Windows Server 2008 R2 hosting 2 VHDs – one with Windows 7 and one with Windows Server 2008 R2
• Two physical machines – one with Windows Server 2008 and one with Windows Phone 7
• Use a hosted solution for SharePoint such as Cloudshare

If you just want to experiment with integrating WP7 and SharePoint Server 2010 don’t not use Office 365/SharePoint Online since SharePoint Online uses quite a different authentication mechanism compared to an on-premise deployment of SharePoint. If anyone has a working sample of a Windows Phone 7 app connecting to SharePoint Online please leave a comment.

Tags van Technorati: wp7,sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,spsbe,development,microsoft

RSS Feeds are default not enabled in SharePoint 2010

Default RSS feeds for SharePoint lists are not enabled – you will need to enable it per site collection. On the RSS settings page you will also be able to add some additional info to include into the feed such as copyright statement, managing editor, webmaster as well as the time to live (in minutes).

Next you need to define on a per list basis whether you will allow RSS feeds. It is also in this screen that you can define whether you want to include additional fields/columns in the RSS feed. Be careful though, when you add additional columns outside of the standard fields in RSS (title and link), these will be exposed in formatted HTM and not XML which will make it difficult to parse.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,RSS,sps2010,microsoft

SharePoint Designer 2010 Custom Actions–Lock a SharePoint Discussion thread

I recently got a question whether it would be possible to lock a discussion thread in SharePoint 2010. The quickest (no code solution) according to me would be to use the new quick step/custom action features in SharePoint 2010. For a basic overview take a look at  SharePoint 2010 – Create a new quick step & custom actions .

My first idea was to hook a SharePoint 2010 workflow with just one workflow action to the new quick step – declare as record (part of the new records management capabilities in SharePoint 2010) – check out this full list of the available workflow actions in SharePoint Designer 2010 . Unfortunately a discussion thread is actually built on top of a folder content type and you can’t declare a folder content type as record.

Next I took a look at adding a workflow action to SharePoint Designer 2010 to change the security on the specific discussion thread. Unfortunately there is no such workflow action available out of the box in SharePoint Designer 2010. So two options – either built one yourself (this is pretty similar to what you did in 2007) – for a interesting rundown take a look at Make a custom activity available to SharePoint Designer 2010 or you can take a look at the SharePoint Designer Custom Workflow Activities project on Codeplex which provides the following custom actions:

• Send Email with HTTP File attachment - Allows sending emails with attachments retrieved using a web request
• Send Email with List Item attachments - Allows sending list item attachments as files attached to an email
• Start Another Workflow - Starts another workflow associated with a list item
• Grant Permission on Item - Allows granting of specified permission level on a specified item
• Delete List Item Permission Assigment - Allows deleting of specified permission level assignment for a given user
• Reset List Permissions Inheritance - removes any unique permissions assigned to an item by inheriting list permissions
• Is User a member of a SharePoint group - Checks if a given user is part of given SharePoint group
• Is Role assigned to User - Checks if a user role is already assigned on the current list item
• Lookup user info - allows to lookup properties in site's user information list for a given login
• NEW! Copy List Item Extended Activity - Allows copying/moving list items and files cross site.
• NEW! Send Email Extended - Enhanced version of the OOTB activity. Allows you to specify the sender. Also does not break links in body.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sps2010,spd2010,sharepoint+designer2010,codeplex,community,microsoft

Survey on SharePoint deployment in Belgium

Please take a moment of your time to fill in a survey around SharePoint deployment in Belgium organized by two students from the University College of Ghent:

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this survey. This survey is organized by the University College Ghent. It is aimed at measuring the deployment of Microsoft SharePoint in Belgium. Answering the approximately 25 questions will take about 5 to 10 minutes.

Try to be honest when you answer the questions, we can assure you that all the data is confidential and will only be processed by the researchers. No answer is right or wrong, we only want to know your opinion. Please try to fill in every question, even if you have doubts.

The survey is anonymous, but if you are interested in the result of our survey you can fill in your e-mail address at the end of the survey and we will send you the result. This e-mail address will only be accessible by the researchers and won’t be given to third-party companies. Feel free to send out the survey link to other interested persons or to distribute it through social media channels – the goal of this survey is to reach as many SharePoint users as possible within Belgium.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sps2010,belgium,microsoft,user+adoption

Accessing Microsoft CRM 4.0 data using web services

A couple of days ago I wanted to write a plugin for Excel 2010 which would allow me to do lookups in Microsoft CRM 4.0 for adding extra information to a worksheet.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this was. Microsoft CRM 4.0 exposes all of its data through the CrmService web service - http://[server:port]/mscrmservices/2007/crmservice.asmx which exposes a number of interesting methods ( see CrmService Common methods)  of which one is the CrmService.Fetch method which allows for retrieving CRM entities in XML based on a specified XML query syntax which is called FetchXML.

The only tricky part is creating this FetchXML but there are a number of  tools that you can use to actually generate this FetchXML:

• Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
• FetchXML Builder on Codeplex – free tool

There is however another simpler method – just open CRM 4.0 and use the Advanced Option to create a new search. Click CTRL+N to open a new window with the address bar visible – now build your query and click Find. When the search results screen appears – paste the following in the address bar - javascript:alert(resultRender.FetchXml.value);  and hit enter

Tags van Technorati: CRM,microsoft,visual+studio,MSCRM

Dear manager, why you should give me a touch-enabled developer portable … or a separate touch enabled tablet

If you look at  ATMs, automatic checkouts at grocery stores or even at the on board computing you will notice that there’s a change in how you interact with these devices: you touch the screen to start the interaction.

In 2008 Gartner analyst Steve Prentice predicted the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years  (see Say goodbye to the computer mouse), a statement which now seems a little bit exaggerated but maybe it is only the timeline were he was off.

Currently when you think about a great touch experience you think about smartphones and tablets (with the most notable examples the iPhone and iPad) but not really about PCs.

But touch as a way of interacting with business applications would in fact make more sense in some scenarios or provide a more intuitive user experience – something which sometimes referred to as NUI (Natural User Interfaces).

With the introduction of Windows 8 – Microsoft will finally be able to compete with the Android and iOS user experience  (See Windows 8: Touch Keyboard – Handwriting recognition, metro UI (You Tube video)) by providing as a first-class experience.

In 2011 the PC market grew 15% to  414.6 million units of which 15% tablets (majority driven by iOS or Android) (Source: Canalys) – this leaves about 300 million PCs shipped with Windows on it. Even if this number declines in 2012-2013 this still provides for an enormous user base which will be accustomed to using touch in applications. When you look at the current types of applications in the Apple market place or even on the Windows 8 market place you will notice that the majority is aimed at consumers and not at business scenarios.

But consumerization of IT will force developers of business applications to provide the same fluid (and natural) user experience. An interesting statement is made in Consumerization of IT: Getting beyond the Myths:

And while browsing e-mail and social networking sites is still the primary use of personal devices, executives say the consumerization of IT is playing an increasingly important role in mission-critical tasks such as customer relationship management, time and expense tracking, and enterprise resource planning.

For us developers building touch-based touch-based systems will require understanding a new set of guidelines, thinking about user scenarios and target audiences and careful interface design. Off course it all starts with having a touch enabled device.

The thing I’m not really sure about is whether to use a touch enabled portable (I really like the Lenovo X220) or buying a separate tablet such as the Acer Iconia Tab W500 or the more pricier option a Samsung Series 7 XE700T1A. From a developer perspective, this would also provide for a viable alternative since Visual Studio 2011 Beta provides the ability to debug your Metro apps remotely).

Leave your comments and thoughts …

References:

• Exploring human-centric ways for people to interact with future computing paradigms (Microsoft Research)
• Natural user interface
• Dear CEO, why you should really consider moving to Windows 7 from Windows XP

Technorati Tags: windows8,touch,visualstudio2011,metro,NUI,consumerization

Introduction to OData and SharePoint Server 2010

Open Data Protocol (OData) is quickly gaining popularity as a web protocol for querying and updating data. A few Microsoft products already expose their functionality as OData services, including SharePoint 2010, SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services. OData is a set of extensions of the ATOM protocol to makes it easier to share data over the web.

In SharePoint Server 2010 every SharePoint list is exposed through an OData REST API (you might also see some people referring to it as WCF Data Services) – which you can access using the following URL format:

• http://[sharepointserver]/_vti_bin/listdata.svc – returns an ATOM document describing the different lists which are available in that specific site.
• http://[sharepointserver]/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/Projects – returns an entry for every single list item in the “Projects” list
• http://[sharepointserver]/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/Projects(2) – returns a specific list item with ID=2 from the projects list

References:

• Query SharePoint Foundation with ADO.NET Data Services
• Accessing SharePoint 2010 Lists by Using WCF Data Services
• SharePoint 2010 – Using the REST interface

Technorati Tags: odata,sharepoint+2010,sharepoint,sps2010,REST,WCF+Data+Services

Excel versus SharePoint lists–interesting links

Most people think about using document libraries when managing documents within SharePoint but maybe you could use SharePoint lists as an alternative for your Excel documents – check out these excellent articles for more information:

• Should you replace Excel with SharePoint lists? (Part I)
• Should you replace Excel with SharePoint lists? (Part II)

Tags van Technorati: SharePoint,Excel,Office

TechDays 2012 Belgium Content available online

All recorded content and slides for TechDays 2012 Belgium are available online since last week, including related downloads and content. Check it out on techdays.be

Second SharePoint Saturday Belgium on 28th April 2012

On Saturday the 28th of April BIWUG is organizing  SharePoint Saturday Belgium for the second time. SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

Don’t forget to register for the event using this link - http://spsbe2012.eventbrite.com/.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+saturday,community,biwug,sps2010,sps

Belgian Windows Phone 7 User Group–www.wiphug.be is launched

A couple of weeks ago WiPhug was launched - WiPhug is a Belgian user group that focuses on Windows Phone development. The idea is to share knowledge, skills and ideas with the entire community not only about Windows Phone development but also about everything that has something to do with WP7.

WiPhug is currently been run by Dennis Miscoria, Danny Van Neyghem, Nico Vermeir, Glenn Versweyveld, Bart Lannoeye, Michael Bruyninckx and Johan Peeters.

End of April they will organize their first event at RealDolmen Kontich which is fully booked.  Make sure to follow the website for more news about coming events.

Technorati Tags: windows+phone,wp7be,wp7,wiphug

Microsoft Extended Experts Team MSDN

Heb je een complex probleem, maar niet de kennis om het op te lossen? Dan kun je op deze MEET pagina in contact komen met een community van Belgische experts.

Alle leden van MEET zijn geselecteerd voor hun kennis en vaardigheden in hun vakgebied. En ze zijn bovendien uitstekende communicators. Allen delen ze kun kennis via hun persoonlijke blog en regelmatig houden ze ook lezingen voor Microsoft of hun respectievelijke user group.

MEET krijgt de uitdrukkelijke steun van Microsoft België en Luxemburg. Mail naar msdnbewm@microsoft.com voor meer informatie over het programma.

Op zoek naar infrastructuur experts? Ga naar de TechNet MEET members.

 

• Maarten Balliauw
• Gill Cleeren
• Pieter Gheysens
• Ludovic Lefort
• Kevin DeRudder
• Joris Poelmans
• Kris van der Mast
• Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe
• Serge Luca
• Hans Le Roy
• Steve Degosserie
• Brecht Kets
• Isabelle Van Campenhoudt
• Simone Chiaretta
• Marc Gregoire
• Kris Lauwereins

[FUN]: Object is in a zombie state

SharePoint development inspired by the movies – LOL:

Export timephased ( or timescaled) project data to Excel from MS Project 2010 with visual reports

In MS Project 2003 you had a separate button – Analyze Timescaled Data in Excel, for those of you who are looking for this functionality in MS Project 2010 – take a look at the new Visual Reports feature in 2010.

Tags van Technorati: Excel,MSProject,Microsoft