Getting started with building apps for SharePoint 2013

In SharePoint 2013 everything is an app now … but in strict sense apps are a new way to build and deliver self-contained pieces of functionality that extend the capabilities of a SharePoint site. Apps will be installable by site owners from either the SharePoint Store or from a private App catalog which is setup within your SharePoint 2013 environment.

The SharePoint Store (or marketplace) will be a public App Store which will allow you to publish your Apps world-wide and sell them through this new channel.

So how do you get started:

• Sign up for an Office 365 Preview developer site – this is fastest way to get started without the hassle of setting up your own development environment. You will only need to install Visual Studio 2012 together with the Microsoft Office Dev Tools which are distributed with the Web Platform Installer 4.0  (Just search for Office within Web PI) and the and you are good to go.
• … but you don’t even have to install Visual Studio 2012 – you can now also build your apps within the browser and the Napa – Office 365 development tools to build your apps without Visual Studio.
• Take a look at the Apps for Office and SharePoint Code Samples
• .. but first look at the Introduction to SharePoint 2013 Training videos 

Other links which might be of interest:

• How to Deploy Apps Remotely to the Office 365 Preview
• Introducing the SharePoint 2013 Application Model
• Apps for Office and SharePoint Developer Contest (only for US, Canada, UK and India)
• What’s new for developers in SharePoint 2013
• How to: build a SharePoint-hosted Client Web Part in SharePoint 2013
• SharePoint 2013 apps – architecture, capability and UX considerations

Tags van Technorati: apps,sharepoint+2013,sharepoint,sps2013,office365,vs2012,Napa,sharepoint2013,development,microsoft

Presenting MSDN Webcast –SharePoint 2013: to app or not to app? on September 4th

I will be presenting a MSDN Belux Webcast on Tuesday , September 04, 2012 around the new App model in SharePoint Server 2013.

SharePoint 2013: to app or not to app?

SharePoint 2013 introduces a new mechanism for custom code solutions with the new App model. In this session, we'll examine why SharePoint Apps have been introduced and how it compares with the standard solution deployment model, the different architecture models and which technologies are used in the App model. We will also look in to the enhancements in the Client Side Object Model and the new REST API which will help you build SharePoint Apps. During this session the different scenarios are outlined using demos and after this session attendees will be ready to build Apps in SharePoint 2013.

Don’t forget to register for the MSDN Webcast – SharePoint 2013: to app or not to app? It is free.

Tags van Technorati: SharePoint+2013,apps,MSDN,webcast,development,visual+studio,vs2012,Napa,sps2013,officepreview

Building a Windows Phone 7 client application for Office 365 and SharePoint Online

If you want to build a client application for SharePoint Online such as a Windows 8 Metro App or a Windows Phone 7 app you will need to understand how active authentication works in Office 365 – a great background article on this is How to do active authentication to Office 365 and SharePoint Online which has a code sample listed below the blog post. This code sample uses the Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll which is part of Windows Identity Foundation and which you can normally find underneath - <drive>:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Windows Identity Foundation\v3.5\Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll

But since there is no version of Windows Identify Foundation available for the Windows Phone platform so you will need to  create the SAML sign-in request programmatically if you want to build a Windows Phone 7 client for SharePoint Online. You can start by taking a look at the code sample Claims-SPOnline from Edin Kapic which does exactly that in a scenario with Windows 8. Unfortunately the code will become quite a lot more complex once you try to port it over to Windows Phone 7 since you can’t use the new async/await keywords which were introduced with .NET 4.5.

So if anyone has written a generic framework for authenticating against SharePoint Online from a Windows Phone 7.x – please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: windowsphone7,sharepoint+online,office365,development,visual+studio

Quick workaround for Excel and PowerPoint 2010 startup problem after installing Visual Studio 2012

I recently installed Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate on my machine and now every time that I open Excel 2010 - I get a message "Please wait while Windows configures Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2012..." and then I have to wait for 20 seconds…

The same thing happens with PowerPoint 2010. One of the workarounds seems to be to disable some of the COM add-ins which are added by Visual Studio 2012.

For Excel 2010:

• Go to File > Options > Add-Ins.  Select COM Add-ins in the drop down on the bottom of the View and manage Microsoft Office Add-ins screen and click Go… Next you can uncheck the COM add-ins which seem to be causing problems
• Team Foundation Add-in
• Visual Studio Tools for Office Design-Time Adaptor for Excel
• Load Test Report Add-in

For PowerPoint 2010:

• Go to File > Options > Add-Ins. Select COM Add-ins in the drop down on the bottom of the View and manage Microsoft Office Add-ins screen and click Go… Next you can uncheck the COM add-ins which seem to be causing problems
• Team Foundation Add-in

This seems to work for the moment – although the definite solution might be something else.

Tags van Technorati: Visual+studio,office2010,troubleshooting,microsoft

Building a Windows Phone 7 application integrated with SharePoint 2010 in authenticated scenarios

One of the hurdles you will be facing when building a Windows Phone 7 application which needs to integrate with SharePoint Server 2010 is the fact that WP7 does not support NTLM windows authentication. There are currently two different options:

• Integrate using Form Based Authentication
• Integrate using Microsoft ForeFront Unified Access Gateway (UAG)

For more information check out Security with SharePoint and Windows Phone Applications which is part of the SharePoint 2010 and Windows Phone 7 Training kit.

These are the two official ways of doing it  but I recently found a third option where you can access your SharePoint site from Windows Phone 7 using basic authentication as outlined on Darrin Bishop’s blog.

Tags van Technorati: wp7,windows+phone,sharepoint,sps2010,development,visual+studio

Login for Visual Studio 2010 Team Explorer on tfs.codeplex.com

If you need to login to tfs.codeplex.com from Visual Studio you will need to use the following user name  - SND\myusername_cp as login. The domain is SND and you need to add extra _cp to the end of the user name that you use to normally login to www.codeplex.com

Tags van Technorati: codeplex,login,tfs

Your chance to win free copies of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints

I have two copies of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprints to give away to two lucky winners.

How you can win:

To win your copy of this book, all you need to do is come up with a comment below highlighting the reason "why you would like to win this book”.

The contest is valid until the end of July, and is open to everyone. Winners will be selected randomly on the basis of their comment posted below.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Application Blueprintsis written by Mike Oryszak, and  highlights details on building SharePoint solutions based on real-life scenarios that you will encounter within your own organization or at your customers. These scenarios range from building an engaging community site to building a site directory with SharePoint search. It is written in an easy-to-understand style and is targeted at SharePoint developers, consultants, and administrators who want to
build a range of SharePoint solutions that extend the SharePoint platform, and see how to apply the many available SharePoint features in different business scenarios.

Chapter outline:

• Chapter 1, Building an Effective Intranet: An Effective Intranet Site for your  organization that maximizes the site's ability to aggregate content and is highly effective at communicating important messages.
• Chapter 2, Building an Out of Office Delegation Solution: A Workflow Out of Office Solution that allows users to manage their out of office dates and automate task assignments to a delegated resource.
• Chapter 3, Building an Enterprise Content Management Solution: An Enterprise Content Management solution designed to support large scale document repositories with
  the ability to route documents automatically between site collections based on metadata attributes along with custom solutions for surfacing the relevant content.
• Chapter 4, Building an Engaging Community Site: An Engaging Community Site including custom features that can be used to enhance collaboration and provide an information sharing system.
• Chapter 5, Building a Site Request and Provisioning System: A Site Request and Provisioning System that supports automated site provisioning for user requested sites in a way that supports complex dynamic feature activation and configuration.
• Chapter 6, Building a Project Site Template: An overview of the template methods available with SharePoint along with a detailed approach for creating web templates in order to create a project site template to support project initiatives and track Issues, Tasks, and Contacts.
• Chapter 7, Building a Project Management Main Site: A Project Management Main Site demonstrating a solution that can aggregate the key metrics and status information
  from the project management sites created in the previous chapter.
• Chapter 8, Building a Task Rollup Solution: Create custom Web Parts that can aggregate tasks from the specified sites.
• Chapter 9, Building a Site Directory with SharePoint Search: Solutions to leverage SharePoint Search to provide an optimized experience making it easier for users
  to search and discover relevant sites.

10 things you should know about BLOB externalization in SharePoint

• Every file which is stored in SharePoint is stored in the SQL Server database as a Binary Large Object (BLOB). SQL database storage needs high IOPS (input/output operations per second) and low latency. This combination means that this is typically expensive storage.
• Around 95% of many SharePoint databases is BLOB data
• It is however possible to take these BLOBS out of the SQL database and store them somewhere else – this is something called blob externalization.
• There are two APIs available in SharePoint for blob externalization – commonly referred to as EBS and RBS
• SharePoint External BLOB Storage ( EBS) – an API which was specifically written for SharePoint Server 2007 and which was shipped with Service Pack 1 of SharePoint Server 2007. EBS is supported by both SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Server 2010. Do note that EBS is being deprecated and is likely to be removed from the next version of SharePoint Server. There can only be one EBS provider per SharePoint farm.
• SQL Remote Blob Storage (RBS) is an API which came available with SQL 2008 R2 Feature pack. It is not unique to SharePoint but is available to any application. You can build your own RBS provider library (and most third party storage optimization tools have done this) and Microsoft also did this by building a provider named the FILESTREAM provider  which can externalize Blobs to local storage.
• The SQL FILESTREAM feature can only use local storages. Therefore RBS FILESTREAM Provider has the same limitation. 3rd party RBS Providers do not have this limitation if they are not leveraging SQL FILESTREAM feature. (See FAQ: SharePoint 2010 Remote BLOB Storage (RBS)
• Externalizing BLOBs from SharePoint will not only save you money by moving into tiered storage but will also increase the performance of SharePoint. In a typical real-world collaborative environment Microsoft reports a 25 percent performance increase with BLOB externalization. Check out this white paper for more details - SQL Server RBS performance with SharePoint Server 2010 and StorSimple Storage Solutions .
• Performance improvements increase as the size of files increases. Microsoft research indicates that if files are smaller then 256 KB – SQL storage will out perform, above 1 MB the file system will provide better performance. Check out Plan for RBS (SharePoint Foundation 2010) for more details
• Also remember that when you externalize BLOBs, you  architecture might become more complex. After you externalize BLOBs, you must consider the BLOB store in plans for backup, restore, high  availability, and disaster recovery. Here, the story can be complex, but doesn’t have to be.

Reference links:

• Overview of RBS (SharePoint Foundation 2010)
• Externalizing Blob storage in SharePoint 2010 (Part 1)
• Externalizing BLOB storage in SharePoint 2010 (Part 2) – Installing and configuring RBS & migrating and moving BLOBs between BLOB stores.
• Intelligently reducing SharePoint Costs through storage optimizations 
• Optimize SharePoint storage with BLOB externalization.

How to connect to Hotmail using Outlook 2013 Preview

In Office 2013 the Microsoft Office Outlook Hotmail connector is not supported anymore instead you should be using Exchange ActiveSync. You should follow these steps to connect Outlook 2013 to Hotmail:

• Select Manual setup or additional server types when adding your Outlook accounts
• Next select “Exchange ActiveSync”
• For server name use m.hotmail.com

It works like a charm

Tags van Technorati: outlook15,outlook2013,officepreview,microsoft,office15,office

Results of first Belgian SharePoint User Adoption Survey

A couple of months ago two university students organized a survey around SharePoint User Adoption in Belgium. The results are now in and with over 130 respondents it gives a interesting view upon how SharePoint deployments are perceived in Belgium. The full report is only available in Dutch but here are some interesting facts and numbers that I want to share:

• The majority of the respondents are satisfied with the deployment of SharePoint within their organization (73 % indicates to be satisfied or very satisfied)
• SharePoint is used in organizations of all sizes within Belgium – 56% of the respondents are however working in organizations of over 1000 employees.
• 44,3% of respondents have been using SharePoint for over 5 years and another 37,1% of the respondents have deployed SharePoint between 3 and 4 years ago.
• 68% of the respondents are using SharePoint Server 2010 which points at a relatively high adoption rate.
• 71,8% of respondents are using SharePoint enterprise wide
• Document management functionality underused – still considered as a collaboration solution.
• The three most challenging issues with SharePoint implementations are the following:
• Limited governance policies, coordination and commitment (17,06%).
• (Lack of) end user adoption and training (17,61%). This is again re-iterated when 55,7% of respondents answer that there is no (formal) SharePoint training program in place.
• Limited or lack of SharePoint strategy in business or IT (16,46%)
• Cloud-based/hosted deployments still seem very limited – only 23,8% of respondents indicate that they have deployed a cloud based solution or that they are thinking about implementing a cloud based deployment of SharePoint. 38% indicates that they will not implement a cloud based solution due to specific limitations and another 28,6% answer that they deployed SharePoint on-premise and that they are not considering moving to a cloud-based/hosted solutions.

The full report is available as well – Onderzoek naar de tevredenheid en implementatie van SharePoint in België (Available in Dutch only)

Tags van Technorati: SharePoint,microsoft,survey,belgium,user+adoption,sharepoint+server+2010,sps2010

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