Jenny Everett

In lists there is an "Open with Access" option, I never thought much about this and continued using Excel. However we have a requirement to build an application with drag and drop functionality on a desktop application but to publish this to our Extranet. So I tried Access 2007, I simply created an Access database and connected a number of lists in a site on our Extranet to it and voila! You can use this in online or offline mode, it understands the links between the lists and will even give you a relationship diagram! Mine was a spiders web!

 Access 2007 looks much better also when editing an item in the table you get calendar functionality if it is a date/time field, if it is a lookup on another SharePoint list you get a drop down of the options!

I was really impressed it meant uploading and downloading data (using 2-way sync) for our desktop application was simple!

As many of you will already know a Blog template is just a series of linked lists (+ some fancy bits). There are a couple of interesting observations about the Posts list though:

 a) You don't have the option to save this list as a template (presumably because the content is related to other lists)

b) You can enabled attachments on the list but there is no interface to attach anything

We have a site with a couple of document libraries, one is very large (~16 Gb |  25000 Files | 2500 Folders). 

We have encountered a couple of problems, one of them is when you run Audit reports it returns "unknown error". It seems the bigger the site/document libraries the more likely you are to receive this. So we had to work out a way of getting Audit reports preferably without moving documents into new small document libraries.

So presumably this information is stored in the SharePoint databases? I like many others work on the premise that it is fine to read information out of these databases but DEFINATELY not to update these expect through the SharePoint interfaces.

So we went hunting and some time later…..

We found a table called AuditData (in the relevant Content DB), which contains most of the information required. We also used the UserInfo table to understand who performed the action.

AuditData contained most of the data – we were interested in the ItemType Column, UserID, DocLocation, Occurred, Event, EventData.

Some complicated data analysis later…. We established that everything we were interested in was ItemType 1 and the the Event could be used to determine what type of event. 

Therefore you can construct a query that brings back this information for individual sites, this is very basic and then needs some formatting applied.

SELECT     a.Event, u.tp_Login, a.Occurred, 'http://sharepoint/' + a.DocLocation AS [Document]
FROM         WSS_Content1.dbo.AuditData AS a INNER JOIN
                      WSS_Content1.dbo.UserInfo AS u ON a.UserId = u.tp_ID
WHERE     (a.DocLocation LIKE 'site/%') AND (a.ItemType = 1) AND (a.UserId <> '1073741823')

• WSS_Content1 = relevant content db
• http://sharepoint/ = your portal url
• site/ = the site you are interested in this portal url

• Site definitions have to be updated by a developer or administrator with some XSLT or CAML knowledge
• Site templates can be created easily
• If you update a site template (e.g. change the column type) none of the lists based on it will update – whereas for site definitions they will. Only certain aspects based on site definition – will update – e.g. add/changing/removing views will not

There seems to be very little on the SharePoint blogs about this – everyone has moved on so quickly but in practice we haven't all completely done with SPS 2003 yet!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=AB086D48-1148-48DE-B4EC-A6298367E5F0&displaylang=en

Otherwise you get an error usually, "The network path http://portal/site/doclib/ cannot be found"

I came across this when trying to save as site as a template the other day – the option didn't exist. Beware – one of those nice quirks!

 http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2007/09/19/save-site-as-template-option-and-the-publishing-feature.aspx

 This is also relevant: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925189/en-us

I have been a bit slow getting started with my blog but here it is my first post!

 This post covers what features and other items are configurable at each level – I do not believe this list is complete. Therefore if you have more to add to this please comment on my blog and I will add it on.

Which SharePoint Product?

1. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 – Included as part of Windows Server 2003 licence 
2. Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007 for Search
3. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Standard - Offers a more functionality than WSS 3
4. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Enterprise - Offers all the features of Standard plus more
5. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 for Internet sites – Used for anonymous access websites or extranets with a large number of external users

The below link offers a feature comparison from Microsoft of the differences between these products.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX101758691033.aspx

SharePoint Pricing

I would always recommend you check with your MS vendor (LAR or Partner) rather than budgeting on these figures but they are indicative.

 http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/sharepointserver/FX102176831033.aspx

How has this changed from 2003?

 Previously in 2003 version there were 2 versions of SharePoint – SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2. WSS was included with Windows Server 2003 and SPS was a separately licensable product. There was also an external connector licence for creating SPS 2003 Extranets. There was no separately licensable search version.