Presenting at SharePoint Saturday India - 20th November 2010

SharePoint Saturday India is back. This online event is going to happen on November 20th, 2010. Alpesh did a great job at getting several speakers for this event and there are going to be some parallel sessions happening this time.

I will be speaking about "Introducing Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP Applications". This is a level 200 session and would introduce Duet Enterprise. I am excited and a bit nervous too.

You can check the complete list of speakers here @ http://sharepointsaturday.org/india/Pages/speakers.aspx
You can register for this event @ http://spindia.eventbrite.com/

SharePoint Saturday India Registration Open

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals from India that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010 and 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’, on Saturday, April 24th, 2009 for the online event. SharePoint Saturday will be 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!

We are happy to announce that registration is now open.

So don't delay and register today at http://spsindia.eventbrite.com/

Also, follow us on twitter at @spsindia for more information on the event, with respect to sessions and events.

Cheers ....

SharePoint 2010 - SharePoint Designer settings

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is a free WYSIWYG HTML editor and web design program from Microsoft for SharePoint and other websites and is part of the SharePoint family of products. It is part of the Microsoft Office 2007 & 2010 family.

In SharePoint 2010, administrators would be able to control usage of SharePoint Designer in their environment. Now several administration controls and commands help channel SharePoint Designer into the right hands and onto the right pages. There are following settings available for SharePoint Designer administrator :

• De-activate SharePoint Designer entirely (but only if it's absolutely necessary!)
  
• Disable unghosting of web pages
  
• Turn off master page editing
  
• Lock the URL of a web site
  
  

These settings are available at following places -

1. Central Administration : 'General Application Settings' group ( below snapshot )
   

• On clicking of 'Configure SharePoint Designer Settings' link, product displays the SharePoint Designer settings at webapplication level. ( Below Snapshot ). At webapplication level, all the settings are enabled. Farm Administrators can change their settings at the webapplication level. If SharePoint Designer is disabled at the webapplication level, it also disables the usage at all the containing sitecollections.

2. In Site Settings page in Site Collection : Under 'Site Collection Administration' group.

On clicking of 'SharePoint Designer Settings' link, product displays the SharePoint Designer settings at sitecollection level. ( Below Snapshot ).

SharePoint Designer Groups - Furthermore, a new permission group, called Designer, helps target those users who really need SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint 2010 Management Shell - Features CmdLets

The SharePoint Management Shell in SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides an extensive set of Windows PowerShell cmdlets that make development, deployment, and administration of SharePoint 2010 easier and more efficient. Management Shell contains the Powershell cmdlets for SharePoint, by using this we control and manage the SharePoint operations like we done in STSADM command.

Powershell cmdlets for managing SharePoint Features -

PS C:\Users\Administrator> get-command *feature* CommandType Name Defintion ----------- -------- ------------------------------------ Cmdlet Disable-SPFeature Disable-SPFeature [-Identity... Cmdlet Enable-SPFeature Enable-SPFeature [-Identity]... Cmdlet Get-SPFeature Get-SPFeature [[-Identity] <... Cmdlet Install-SPFeature Install-SPFeature [-Path] <S... Cmdlet Uninstall-SPFeature Uninstall-SPFeature [-Identi...

Help is available for these SharePoint 2010-specific cmdlets in Windows PowerShell. Type get-help and then type the name of the cmdlet. For example, to find help about SPServiceApplication, type get-help get-SPServiceApplication.

PS C:\Users\Administrator> get-help get-spfeature NAME Get-SPFeature SYNOPSIS Returns the SharePoint Features based on a given scope. SYNTAX Get-SPFeature [-Identity <SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Limit <String>] [<CommonParameters>] Get-SPFeature [-Identity <SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind>] [-AssignmentCollect ion <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Farm <SwitchParameter>] [-Limit <String>] [ <CommonParameters>] Get-SPFeature [-Identity <SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Limit <String>] [-Sandboxed <SwitchParameter>] [-Site <SPSitePipeBind>] [<CommonParameters>] Get-SPFeature [-Identity <SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Limit <String>] [-Web <SPWebPipeBind>] [<CommonParameters>] Get-SPFeature [-Identity <SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind>] [-AssignmentCollection <SPAssignmentCollection>] [-Limit <String>] [-WebApplication <SPWebApplicationPipeBind>] [<CommonParameters>] DETAILED DESCRIPTION All SPFeature sets take the Identity parameter, which can be either the relative path of the SharePoint Feature (considered the feature name) or the GUID of a Feature definition. If the Identity parameter is provided, the cmdlets attempt to find the given Feature definition or instance for the given scope. If no parameters are specified, all installed features are returned. The Get-SPFeature cmdlet behaves differently at each scope, returning the enabled Features at each level. If no scope is provided, all installed Features are returned. get-spfeature (returns all the installed Feature definitions in the farm ) get-spfeature -farm ( returns all the enabled Feature in the farm) get-spfeature -webapplication (returns all enabled the Features in the Webapplication) get-spfeature -site (returns all the enabled Features on the site <<both full trusted and particially trusted code>>) get-spfeature -site -sandboxed (returns all installed the ptc Feature definitions on the site) get-spfeature -web (returns all the enabled Features in the Web) RELATED LINKS REMARKS For more information, type: "get-help Get-SPFeature -detailed". For technical information, type: "get-help Get-SPFeature -full".

Up and running with the SharePoint 2010 Public Beta

Although, I am late by few weeks, I started with the installation for SharePoint 2010 Public Beta last week. Although, I have been following and reading lot of stuff on SharePoint 2010 in last few months. Installation was pretty neat. Very good experience as compared to SharePoint 2007 beta.

Although, I missed on installing the prerequisites through the setup and started running the prerequisites on my own. After running the required all the prerequisites, setup kept on giving me the error for 'Windows Server Features or Role Services required by the product are not enabled'. ( Attached snapshot). I tried multiple things - enabled the role services on the server.

I ran the SharePoint 2010 prerequisites which added administration roles. After that SharePoint 2010 installation was pretty straight forward. Way to go …

I am planning to share lot of technical details on different areas of SharePoint 2010 in next few weeks.

Connectbeam - SharePoint Connector

Connectbeam, founded in December, 2005, is a leading provider of enterprise social software applications and the first company to integrate concepts of social bookmarking and tagging with those of social networking. Connectbeam's new Spotlight Connect for SharePoint provides SharePoint users with a single destination for discovering and sharing rich enterprise social bookmarking and tagging information. Spotlight Connect for SharePoint also extends and enhances the native collaboration and discovery capabilities of SharePoint Server 2007.

Spotlight Connect for SharePoint -

Spotlight Connect for SharePoint is deployed as a series of customizable SharePoint Web Parts, including:
• Social Search and Related Content
• Social Graphs
• Bookmarks
• Tags
• Groups
• Connections

Suggested Improvements -

SharePoint Document Library - Connectbeam integration

• Incase user would like to share information in the document library at the enterprise level, option to publish the information to Connectbeam

• SharePoint List (Announcements, Custom List etc. ) - Connectbeam integration
  

  In case users would like to share announcement or a part of it with Connectbeam groups or corresponding Enterprise, it would be a good functionality to have.
  

Populating and Creating Business Entities from SharePoint List

Patterns and practices has released a new version of guidance for building collaborative applications.

One of the new functionality provided by the Microsoft group is very useful and generic, w.r.t creating and saving business entities. Concept is based on List based repositories by following below steps -

1. Business entity class E.g. Customer
2. Static class that contains the SharePoint field IDs for the list to be used.
3. Repository class which creates instance of the ListItemFieldMapper class and adds mappings that associate the field IDs to the corresponding property of the business entity
   

   Please refer - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee413898.aspx for more details

4. After business entity and mapping classes are defines, generic functionality could be used to retrieve and save the business entity directly with SharePoint.
   

   Sample Code -

• Creating collection for Customer Business Entity:

  public IList<Customer> GetAllCustomers()
  {
  // ...
  
  
  using (SPSite site = new SPSite(customerWebUrl))
  {
  using (SPWeb customerWeb = site.OpenWeb())
  {
  SPList customerList = customerWeb.Lists[Constants.CustomerListName];
  CAMLQueryBuilder camlQueryBuilder = new CAMLQueryBuilder();
  camlQueryBuilder.FilterByContentType(CustomerContentTypeName);
  SPListItemCollection items = customerList.GetItems(camlQueryBuilder.Build());
  
  IList<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>();
  foreach(SPListItem item in items)
  {
  Customer customer = listItemFieldMapper.CreateEntity(item);
  customers.Add(customer);
  }
  return customers;
  }
  }
  }
  

• Save a Business Entity to a List

  public void AddCustomer(Customer customer)
  {
  using (SPSite site = new SPSite(customerWebUrl))
  {
  using (SPWeb customerWeb = site.OpenWeb())
  {
  SPList customerList = customerWeb.Lists[Constants.CustomerListName];
  SPListItem customerListItem = customerList.Items.Add();
  this.listItemFieldMapper.FillSPListItemFromEntity( customerListItem, customer);
  customerList.Update();
  }
  }
  }