Office Information Bridge Framework (IBF) is a new solution that provides a standardised way for developers to integrate data from enterprise applications (CRM,HR, ERP,...) into Office. IBF is an example of a service oriented architecture in which your LOB applications are connected to Office through a webservices layer. At the clientside IBF leverages the smart tag and smart document functionality of Office 2003 Professional.
The last couple of months I have been doing a lot of Microsoft Content Management Server (MSCMS) development and I think it definitely allows you to do some cool stuff. For those of you who don't know, MSCMS allows users without any html knowledge or special tools to publish content to a corporate website while maintaining a common look and feel and supporting an approval process for all of your published content.
The product has however some shortcomings and last week the functional analyst of our project stumbled on one of them. For every posting you can define an approval process with authors, editors and moderators, so after an author creates a posting, the editor first approves the layout and then the moderator approves the content (This is a very quick overview). So for about every change, you need to go through this approval process EXCEPT for deletion of postings
The obvious thing todo to disable the delete for authors was to add an ASP.Net panel control around the delete section in the defaultconsole.ascx and put it to visible false when a user had no editor or approve rights. Well this doesn't seem to be very simple:
One of the hottest topics lately seems to be Service Oriented Architecture and how to implement it. But it is also a major source of confusion and I think that for most developers, SOA is still a big mystery. The main problem seems to be that we have to translate these high level concepts to low-level code, because in the end we just like to write code. However I still think that SOA is an important concept that every developers needs a basic understanding about, so the next couple of weeks I'm going to try to write some posting about SOA, providing some summaries of presentations that I saw and links to interesting sites and blogs.
Lets start with the basics, what is SOA? At PDC 2003 Pat Helland gave a presentation about SOA. The key message was the following:
A couple of months later I saw a presentation from Clemens Vasters, he mainly talked about the same concepts but things got a little clearer. There are only 2 types of services, message producers and message consumers. The messages flow through "pipelines", a pipeline is a sequence of services and each service transforms the message. He also gave some concrete tips :
The last couple of days I worked at a customer who was using Citrix Metaframe Presentation Server 3.0, it was the first time that I saw this product and I have to admit that I'm impressed. It enables user to start their everyday applications from within a browser environment. It was great to see that the web interface used ASP.Net and the nice thing is that you can completely customize it. If you run into problems, definitely check out the Citrix support site .
After developing the UI we deployed it to a production server on which a previous version of Metraframe was running as well so we didn't do an install but copied the directory with the files and created the necessary virtual directories. Everything worked except the ICA files were not correctly handled. It seemed that we still associate the ICA extension with the aspnet dll in IIS.
After installing ASP.Net, we however noticed that some of the users which were still using the Citrix 1.5, had problems logging into the web applications. They got a very strange error "error while encoding a gif file". It seems that while installing ASP.Net some userrights were removed. If you encounter this error, just give the anonymous user access to the nfuseicons directory
One of the most posed questions lately seems to be how do we integrate SharePoint and Content Management Server. People often start working together on documents in SharePoint and later want to publish this document in an easy way to CMS (That authors can't work together on a CMS posting - because of the locking principle - is definitely a missing feature in CMS). With the release of SharePoint Connector for Content Management Server (Previously codenamed Spark) in february 2004- some things were solved.
When you are living in a country which has 3 official languages like me - yes we have Dutch, French and German in Belgium - multilanguage definitely becomes an issue when doing a portal implementation. Unfortunately multilanguage is not a very strong feature in SharePoint. Windows SharePoint Services allows you to choose a different language at the moment of site creation when you install language packs, once the site is created it is not possible to switch the language anymore. For SharePoint Portal Server it is even worse, it only support the language of the SharePoint installation, so if you want to have a French Portal you have to install the French version of SharePoint Portal Server. There are however some articles which can guide you, but better multilanguage functionality is definitely something I want to see in the next version of SharePoint. One of the things I noticed which were very hard to find where the way of working of thesaurus files in SharePoint.The best documentation is found in the SPS 2001 Resource Kit and still seems to be correct. Another interesting document is the one on Technet which describes the international features of SharePoint 2003.
I tried out the feature of expansion sets in SharePoint 2003 and how it works with files which have different languages and different formats. SharePoint uses thesaurus files to enhance its search functionality. The thesaurus allows you not only to search for the search term, but also for synonyms and other matching words, like words with the same stem. You can expand the thesaurus by adding tags to the thesaurus file(s). For example, when a user searches for ‘apple*’, you want to automatically search for ‘pomme*’ and ‘appel*’ as well so that documents containing the French and Dutch translations of the word ‘sugar’ will be added to the search results. This is an example of stemming. An expansion set for the word "author" is for example that it searches for documents containing "writer"
There are different thesaurus files for every language, these are xml files - e.g. tsneu.xml is the neutral thesaurus file,tseng.xml is for English, tsnld.xml is for Dutch. The easiest way to test it, is to modify the xml files at local_drive\Program Files\SharePoint Portal Server\Data\Applications\Application UID\Config and then restart the service Microsoft SharePointPS Search.
I added the following lines to the xml files
<expansion>
<sub weight="0.5">author</sub>
<sub weight="0.5">writer</sub>
</expansion>
Well it seems that depending of the file type a different thesaurus file will be used, this happens because of the way how iFilters are implemented.
Then I tried the search for different file types :
I presented some workshops around SharePoint technologies the last couple of months and one of the things that I always include is a quick overview and some demos of InfoPath . It seems that this is still one of Microsofts best kept secrets - both developers and IT decision makers seem to have little or no knowledge about this tool. For those of you who haven't heard about it, InfoPath is a tool for designing electronic forms and the coolest thing is that underlying it uses nothing but XML.
I demo it in SharePoint workshops because of the excellent way it integrates with SharePoint through form libraries but you can also use it without SharePoint. Mostly I start off with the Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 HL7 CDA Demo. It is easy and understandable, just as a demo should be.
One of the major downsides of this product is however that every user needs a complete installed version. I think it would be much more popular if there would be a developer edition (to actually create the forms) and a freely distributable runtime for users who only use InfoPath to fill out forms. The InfoPath Viewer application that Mark Bower created is a good start but it is not enough especially because InfoPath is not standard available in all Office 2003 versions, only in the Professional Enterprise version.
Yesterday I saw another Technet presentation - this time about InfoPath and SharePoint, the presentation was done by Jelle Druyts and Yves Kerwyn. Microsoft positions InfoPath as "The smart client for webservices". Well it seems that it is still lacking some features to be a really smart client. The first missing feature is support for different devices - there's for example no InfoPath for Pocket PC. The other feature is missing Offline support. Microsoft says that InfoPath supports offline scenarios through the use of Outlook outbox but this is not really an ideal scenario. Jelle Druyts presented a solution for supporting offline usage by showing us some code. I can't wait until we can download this code, must be very interesting.
I saw a MSDN evening session in june 2004 on SharePoint customization from Patrick Tisseghem but only found the time to
start playing around with Frontpage and SharePoint today,... well better late than never. It seems that there are a lot of things you have to think about when doing SharePoint customization, luckily I found a lot of information on the Internet.
