Mirjam's blog

I love Twitter. I started using it a couple of weeks ago and I am starting to get hooked on it.
Of course I also love SharePoint, so what would be better then to combine the two by having a Twitter web part that displays the tweets in your public timeline in your SharePoint environment.
Aidan Garnish has build the web part and blogged about it. The blog and the download of the web part can be found here.

I installed the web part and it works like a charm.

Very cool!

The Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 has been announced!
http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/spc2009.aspx

A whole conference about SharePoint "14" for IT Professionals, IT Decision Makers, Architects and Developers.
And this time we get to go to Las Vegas instead of Bellevue. Let's have some fun!

http://www.helloitsliam.com/archive/2009/02/03/microsoft-sharepoint-conference-2009-announced.aspx

I'm starting to become more and more active on Twitter.
I find that it's easy to Twitter what I'm working on. I only write a blog post if I've actually got some serious information to share.
Right now I'm working on a presentation about integrating SharePoint and Silverlight, with a little bit of LINQ, so that's probably what my next real blog post will be about.

Until then: http://twitter.com/MirjamvanOlst

See you around!

At the DIWUG meeting of november 20th Maarten van den Dungen presented about Data Form Web Parts. We promised to put the presentation online at my blog, so here it is. Unfortunately it's in Dutch, but if you have any questions, post a comment.

All in all it was an interesting evening with two very different and both very interesting presentations. I think a lot of people were inspired by the presentations and the ideas that came up during discussions. At least I know that I was. Discussions afterwards were also very interesting and lively and of course the SharePoint Master came up a couple of times..

The next DIWUG meeting will be next year, but on December 12th there will be another SDN Event in Nieuwegein. For the Information Worker track the following presentations are scheduled:

• Best practices developing & configuring SharePoint Solutions – Meijers / Bethlehem
• First look at Podcasting Kit for SharePoint – Donald Hessing
• Anatomy of a SharePoint Employee Blogging Solution – Daniel McPherson
• SharePoint Data Governance – Sander de Koning
• InfoPath, SharePoint – OTAP met InfoPath Forms Services – Wouter van Vugt

For more information please check the SDN website.

Op 20 november organiseert de DIWUG weer een avond sessie. Ook deze keer zullen er weer twee presentaties gegeven worden.

Data Form Web Parts
Het Data Form Web Part (voorheen het Data View Web Part) is misschien wel het meest gebruikte onderdeel van SharePoint Designer. Met behulp van het data form web part is het op eenvoudige wijze mogelijk functionaliteit toe te voegen aan sites zonder te programmeren. De mogelijkheden die aanbod komen in deze sessie zijn: het gebruik van het data form web part, conditioneel formateren van content in weergaves, web part connecties, bewerken van data rechtstreeks op de pagina en tenslotte het maken van web parts.
Spreker: Maarten van den Dungen (Macaw)

First look at silverlight with SharePoint
Met de komst van Silverlight kunnen we ook aan SharePoint websites een nieuwe visuele dimensie geven. Waar Adobe Flash andere technologiekennis vereist, kunnen we met Silverlight gewoon in onze vertrouwde .NET omgeving en tools werken. Doordat Silverlight in de browser leeft, zal er gecommuniceerd moeten worden met SharePoint. In deze sessie zal eerst een Silverlight Webpart gebouwd worden die gebruik maakt van de RSS-Feed van SharePoint. Vervolgens zal stilgestaan worden bij de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van SharePoint webservices. Daarna is het tijd voor demo-mania: Silverlight smoelenboek op basis van SharePoint gebruikers profielen, Office Word previewer, image carrousel, chat, en tot slot de Podcasting Kit voor SharePoint.
Spreker: Donald Hessing (VX Company)

De avond wordt georganiseerd bij Sogeti in Vianen.

Het belooft een interessante avond te worden, en het kost je niks, dus schrijf je nu in via http://www.diwug.nl!

On Monday,after the SharePoint Online session here at PDC we asked some questions afterwards about the SharePoint Services that were announced at the Keynote as the SharePoint version in the cloud. We were curious whether it would be anything like the current SharePoint version, whether it would be build from scratch, or whether it would be build on top of the current SharePoint versions.
The answer was that they have no idea yet. Microsoft didn't even start serious preparations for moving SharePoint to the cloud, so it will be some time before we can visit SharePoint in the cloud.

On the PDC site there is an announcement today about the PDC 2009. It will be November 17–20  2009 in LA. I'm pretty sure that this will be the PDC to announce Office and SharePoint 14. I'm already looking forward to coming back here next year!

http://www.microsoftpdc.com/View.aspx?post=http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/PDCNews/Save-the-Date-PDC09/&tag=

I just attended the "SharePoint 2007: Creating SharePoint Applications with Visual Studio 2008" session by Chris Johnson, who's a Program Manager on the SharePoint team. The session itself was ok, but not really shocking if you've worked with the Visual Studio Extensions for Visual Studio 2005. The more revealing bit was the Q&A at the end of the session.

When asked questions about updating list en content types features Chris answered that the best practice for updating the lists and the content types is actually to build a new feature with a featurereceiver, where the featurereceiver will contain code to update the list or the content type. This means that the feature itself will have no functionality, we just need it to get the featurereceiver to run the code to perform the updates.

A lot of people already decided that this would probably be the best and most solid way to update lists, libraries and content types, but this was actually the first time that I heard someone from the SharePoint team actually saying that this is indeed the best way to update.

It has been a while since I last posted a blog here, but I hope to make up for some of that this week, as I'm in Los Angeles at the PDC 2008. This morning in the first keynote Ray Ozzie announced that Microsoft will be putting it's money on "Services in the Cloud". The "Cloud" is an environment hosted by Microsoft itself that exposes services to the Internet.

The cloud version of SharePoint will be "SharePoint Online". This is a SharePoint environment hosted by Microsoft in the Cloud, so no SharePoint Server deployment and configuration is needed on your side.
Microsoft offers two scenario's:

• Standard
• More than one company sharing one architecture
• Minimum of 5 seats
• 1TB maximum data storage
• No My Sites
• No custom code deployment!
• $ 7.25 per month per seat
• Enterprise
• More than 5000 seats
• My Sites
• Custom code deployment

SharePoint Online offers Office 2007 client integration, so you can take your documents from SharePoint Online offline with Outlook 2007. Also you can use single sign-on, so your employees don't need to log in separately to the SharePoint Online environment.

The thing that stands out here for us developers is definitely that you can not deploy custom code to SharePoint Online. If you want to make customizations to your SharePoint Online environment you can use SharePoint Designer. So you can alter master pages, create page layouts, use data view web parts or content types for instance, but you can't create your own web parts or features.

If you want to use the data in your SharePoint Online environment in your own custom tools you can create applications that run on your own servers or clients and use the SharePoint Web Services that are exposed by the SharePoint Online environment. Of course you can then also use Silverlight Controls to display the data from the online environment. 

I think SharePoint Online offers changes to small business that cannot or will not pay the licensing costs that come with the MOSS platform. If you want a simple no-code SharePoint solution, SharePoint Online might be your friend. However, if you want to use any custom functionality like custom web parts or features you might be better off either paying the licence costs for MOSS, or use WSS and deal with the limited functionality of the free platform.

Building custom applications for the SharePoint 2007 platform can be done using the WSS and MOSS object model. However, if you can't or won't deploy your code to the WSS server you can also use the WSS Web Services. I must admit that I hardly ever use them, and that I always thought they were not very well documented, but I found some great information here.

The WSS Web Services are part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer namespace. The web services include methods to accessing and customizing SharePoint site content such as lists, site data, forms, meetings, document workspaces, and permissions. The table below shows the WSS web services, including a description of what they can be used for and the reference.

MOSS 2007 also exposes a series of web services. The MOSS web services allow you to use the Business Data Catalog, document management, Enterprise Search, Excel Services, InfoPath Forms Services, and Web content management (WCM). The table below shows most of the web services, there use and the reference you need to use them.

If you want to use one of the SharePoint web serrvices in your visual studio project you can simply add a Web Reference using the path of the SharePoint site for which you want to use the Web Service and add the web service reference to it. Your reference will then look something like this http://[servername]/[sites]/[sitecollectionname]/[sitename]/[subsitename]/_vti_bin/[webservicereference].asmx.

For more information on WSS Web Service look here.

More information on MOSS Web Services can be found here.