ChadClarkesMOSSBlog

I met with the SharePoint Users Group of Kansas City today. And they brought up an interesting topic.  And all in all it makes sense.  Should IT release SharePoint in the hands of the end users…  I would say yes, but your managers and execs would probably say no.  Like the mindsharp people were saying SharePoint is a tool for their employees to communicate with other employees… and everytime you attempt to increase the communication in the workplace there is hesitation by management.  The oldest MCT in the biz, a mindsharp trainer, was recalling the days when companies were first thinking about placing phones at employees desks…  and then when email was to hit the desktop with Outlook…  Each time a tool becomes available to enhance communication among employees, management wants to have their hands in it, with an attempt to control and police it.  However, like with email and the phone, SharePoint will produce more results when it is placed in the hands of the employees.  Each individual employee having their own mysite, and each dept having its own site with subsites.  There will be a learning curve, but someday it will be an everyday utility.

 There is also another side to SharePoint, a development environment for web based applications.  Also SharePoint can be used as a WUI, web user interface, (Intranet) for various web applications you already have in place, or develop new Web Part centric applications.  Your applications, now housed in SharePoint, will inherit SharePoint's Security model and features.  Bringing together various diverse applications into a concise homogenious format as well as their look, feel, and navigation.

I am unsure as to what the purpose here is.  From what I've seen this is how you associate various site collections(SPSite) back to a central "portal" (another site collection).  I'm guessing that if these properties are set then a link appears somewhere in the child site collection leading them back to the parent portal.  Also this occurs within the SPWeb, again I'm assuming that this basically relays a link within sharepoint back to a parent portal.  Does anyone know of any other uses for this?  Can anyone confirm what I have stated?  Has anyone have any use cases where this became neccessity?  Does anyone know where this link turns up when implemented?

Has anyone else had problems with the discussion boards?  My end user will simply modify the view and end up causing problems with the entire list.  The the default view will become the home page…  And the links won't go to the threaded discussions, they will begin acting like folders…  Anyone else had these types of problems?

I have written ADF's myself for Oracle and SQL and configured security on them. But I haven't used the new microsoft tool from the last SDK.  Has anyone had any successful or unsuccessful experiences with this tool?  I have a colleague that attempted to use this tool, and she said she just couldn't figure it out, so she went a different route…  I'm interested to hear different points of view.

 Thanks!

I would like to open this discussion up because I'm having trouble differentiating the terms.  Especially when dealing with the object model.  SPSite vs. SPWeb.  Are there any known differences?  My latest thoughts have been that SPSite is the top level site for a site collection and SPWeb can be a site within that site collection…  But very unsure here.  Please comment!

I am currently attempting to use a site creator tool.  What I would like to do is expose a web service to an external application that will create a sharepoint site for every client in the external app, delete the site if the client is deleted and create a site based on a custom template if a new client is created. 

Problems I am having with this process.

 First, couldn't get sp1 for VS2005 installed, which a tutorial said was needed for my sharepoint web service to work correctly…  Error Code: 2755 occurs on the attempt to install….

Second, site creation from site templates seem to have some bugs in them.  Got a hotfix to keep webpart configuration information, however still getting a web part connection id already exists when I try to create a site from the template.  I use a query filter web part to connect to 3 custom web parts…  The client id is passed to a couple of web parts to bring back oracl information from a web service.  So the template site creation isn't working.  Currently testing in a vpc to see what the issue is…  Any input here would be appreciated.

My scenario is I have a dropdown for a list field that I would like populated with clients from an Oracle Stored Procedure.  I can't get the connection set up for the oracle table.  Has anyone else come across this issue?

I can set up a web service as a datasource in Share Point Designer.  However, when I attempt to pull that information into a drop down list list form control it does not populate with information.  I've tried it several different ways, and paralleled it with a working model using a direct sql connection.  I believe this to be an error with SharePoint Designer.  Please comment with any related experiences.

Use web parts that either actions(BDC Data), custom columns(List), or spgridview control(Database), to establish links that provide a query variable to your dynamic page.  On your dynamic page, create a web part or embed server side code that creates a folder in each of your lists, document libraries, or wikki libraries.  Make sure that these folder are also assigned an id value to an id field(only can be do programmatically, no default UI for this).  Use the query variable given to arrange for a rootfolder query variable that navigates list web parts to their respective folders.  Modify any extraneous links through javascript, utilize cookies and redirects with a custom web part to hold id values despite application page navigation.  Well, I hope this helps, and good luck in the world of sharepoint!

When you attempt to create a site using a site template, everything migrates fine, except if you have any configured web parts on the main default.aspx, they lose their settings.  Currently, summary toolbars change to full toolbars, and configured views reset back to defaults.  This causes a very large headache for me.  Also, this same situation occurs when you attempt to migrate content from say a development environment to a production environment.  Wish me luck trying to automate the process of configuring these web part after I create the site off the template, should be fun!

 Chad