Michael Lotter's little view of the big world of SharePoint and InfoPath

Last week has been a good week for me because it has been the first full week that I've been exposed to SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) GTM outside of my company.  There has been so many things that I have learned that I can't even start explain.  The one thing that is evident about SharePoint 2007 is that it has grown 2 to 3 times the size and it has a lot more complexity than it predecessor SharePoint 2003.

There are a lot of underlining things that are completely the same but there a lot more items that are brand new and require a lot more planning than before.  A big problem that I recognized over the last 2 years is that most companies under plan there deployment of SharePoint and after a year or so it becomes unmanageable or no longer supplies a benefit because information is too hard to find through navigation and search. 

For the new release Microsoft has tried to help in this situation by supplying additional planning information.  Some of the information that I have found very useful are the supplemental documents for MOSS and WSS which can be found by using the first to links.  These Visio documents give great examples and information that any company planning to do a MOSS or WSS deployment.

MOSS

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/49cf7edd-14ee-445b-8ab0-1d1339f2435f1033.mspx

WSS

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/bcbae7bd-656b-4003-969c-8411b81fcd771033.mspx?pf=true

Another set of great content that I have found is the worksheets that Joel posted links for on his blog.  These worksheets will give you a great start on getting all the planning organized and help everyone see the big picture.  These worksheets will definitely help create the road map that can be used for a successful MOSS or WSS deployment.  The link to the worksheet are posted below.

Worksheets

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/386a641c-3c07-46e8-a25d-bfdcc55bfacb1033.mspx

This week and the next I'm in Seattle working with another company doing MOSS discovery and planning.  I'm very excited about these 2 weeks because it is going to give more real world experience with the new versions.   So far Seattle has been a little windy, wet and cold but I guess that is expected for the middle of December.  I'm off to work for the day and looking forward to another adventures day.

I was just informed that I will be traveling to Seattle on Sunday, December 10th for a 2 week SharePoint 2003 engagement and I decided to stay over the weekend because home sweet home is Raleigh, NC.

Does anybody have any suggestions on things to do in Seattle at night or over the weekend?  If anybody wants to meet up for a couple of pints and shoot the breeze then I would be game for that.

Just got finished with a 12 week SharePoint and InfoPath project and I learned a interesting thing about the “System.Environment.UserName” attribute, IE security zones and InfoPath 2003.  We all know that InfoPath 2003 and IE is joined to the hip and it was definitely reinforced when I discovered the newest scenario.

I have always thought one of the cool interactions with SharePoint and Outlook is the capability to create a Meeting Workspace and to programmatically update the Attendees information when a meeting invitation is accepted or rejected.  Today my current client and I discovered that the OWA client they have currently deployed does not have the same capabilities to updating the Attendees information.  I was sort of surprised that it didn't work but I guess there must be some extra functionality in Outlook that might have this extra capability.

I'm going to do some extra research on this and see if I can't find out why it doesn't work and post back my findings.  If somebody all ready knows the answer I would be more than welcome to understand why it doesn't work and if there is a work around for the lack of functionality.

A while back I moved over to a new Centrino Duo laptop and everything was working great and then about a month ago I started having problems with my SharePoint VPC images blue screening and I first thought it was a problem with my portable hard drive.  So I built a brand new image on my local hard drive and things were ok for about 2 weeks and then the problem started occurring again and then I started to get a little frustrated about it and today I finally had sometime to see what I could find out about the problem and the below link is what I found.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/10/24/484461.aspx

I've made the changes to  one of my machines and I've had no problems so far and hopefully this is the fix.  Each time I have a problem like this I've always been thankful the internet is around because it has helped me solve problems some many times without calling and waiting on support.

I was recently assigned to a new 11 week SharePoint 2003 project and I'm currently in my 3^rd week and today I learned something new about uploading shortcut files into a document library and I thought it was worth sharing.  Everyone might already know about this but this was my first experience with this functionality.

The client has a few third party PDF forms that are located on remote web servers that are currently being linked to in a simple HTML page and we won't be able to add them into a document library for grouping with other internal forms.  So, I thought that we could create shortcut files (“.url” extensions) that link to the third party forms and then upload the shortcut files to the document library.   We created the shortcut files with URL reference and then uploaded them into the document library and to my surprise once the upload was complete the shortcut file was not uploaded but instead the actual third party PDF form was uploaded.  To my discovery once the shortcut file is selected the dialog box reads the link specified in the shortcut file instead of specifying the shortcut file path.

Has anyone else experienced  this and does anyone know if this has always been this way?

My company (OnSphere) has a Life Science product called PharmaReady and this product is built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and ASP.NET.  Whenever I am in the office (which is not often at all) I usually help the PharmaReady technical or development staff with solving WSS related problems and recently they ran into a problem with WSS search with PDF iFilters installed not working with SQL 2005.

After working with them and doing a little research we were able to narrow down that problem had to do with SQL 2005 not accepting the installation changes from the PDF iFilter software.  I did some searching and discovered a article by Hilary Cotter called SQL Server Full Text Search Language that helped me solve the problem.

In this article it advised how to query the SQL 2005 to show me the fulltext document types that were installed and how to load new resources and verify the signature.  After a little testing I was able load the PDF iFilter.  This was accomplished by loading the resource and stopping the SQL Server service to except the changes.  Below are the steps that I took to verify the PDF iFilter resources were not present, load the new resources and make them available.

If you open up the SQL Server 2005 Management studio and open a new query window and type in the SQL statement select document_type, path from sys.fulltext_document_types and execute it you will get a list of all the resources that are currently being used for FTS.  Now comment out the “select” statement that we just created and type in the next two statements and execute them.

exec sp_fulltext_service `load_os_resources', 1;

exec sp_fulltext_service `verify_signature', 0;

Once they have completed restart the SQL Server service through the studio, command prompt or by restarting the server.  Once the service has restarted re-execute only the “select” statement and you will notice that the PDF iFilter now appears and that the WSS search is retrieving PDF documents in the search results when looking for words inside the document.

Please remember that this is what worked for my situation and it may not work in every situation.

I'm currently finishing up a project and the last 2 weeks will be creating a prototype environment for MOSS, InfoPath 2007, .NET 3.0 (Windows Communication Foundation specifically) and SQL 2005.  I will be converting 2 forms that I just built in InfoPath 2003 with a Web Service/manage code middle tier and SQL 2005 backend.

The purpose of this blog is to share the experiences that I encounter during my consulting career while using SharePoint, InfoPath and Workflow.  You'll see information about SharePoint 2003, 2007 and maybe a little about 2001 when migration time comes along.  You'll also see posts about InfoPath 2003 and 2007 and creating workflows in the new Windows Workflow Foundation technology.  The type of posts will focus on both technical and development because I got my experience working on both sides of the fence and most of the clients that I currently work with demand both.

This is my first blog and I'm not a great writer but I hope to improve by sharing my experiences and getting feedback from the community.

I'm currently working full time for a Microsoft Gold Partner company called OnSphere out of Raleigh, NC.  I'm currently one of several lead SharePoint solution experts for the company and travel all over the United States working with corporate clients wanting to implement SharePoint technology within there corporation.  The incorporation of InfoPath has started to increase over the year and I forsee that this will be a big part of SharePoint in the near future.

While working at OnSphere I've tried to contribute to the community by answer news forms at MSD2D and creating short tips at the site.  While helping at MSD2D I met Jason Medero and he got me involved working with B&R Solutions part-time on SharePoint related work.

Before working for OnSphere I worked for a global insurance broker out of Nashville, TN and got a lot of experience working in a enterprise environment and learning how to design global applications.  The experience that I picked up at the company has been a strong asset for me and I don't reget any of the time that I spent there.