The Mossman

I have moved my blog off of SharePointBlogs.com, the new URL is http://blog.drisgill.com and the RSS feed should stay the same (if you are using my FeedBurner) http://feeds.feedburner.com/themossman. SharePointBlogs is a great place to start blogging but for someone that is focused on branding like myself, I really needed something with more control over the look and feel. I'm hoping The Dean can aggregate my new blog here as I know a lot of people come here for their daily news.

 p.s. As you can tell the cat is officially out of the bag on my true identity. Sorry to disappoint everyone that thought I was Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.

July 4th 2008 was Mossman independence day, in that I have left my cubicle job at a large consulting firm and have begun working with a few small dedicated SharePoint consulting companies. I will be focused on helping them with their MOSS branding efforts.

Also, in the coming days/weeks I will be removing the veil of secrecy surrounding my true identity. Truth is, the only reason I started this pseudonym was because I was never sure what my employers policy on work blogging was. In related news I have a book coming out in September with Wrox entitled "Professional SharePoint 2007 Design". This book will be focused on just the design and branding process with SharePoint. The Amazon page for the book lists my true identity (and a photo of my face!). Can anyone guess which author I am?

Wrox: Professional SharePoint 2007 Design

My good buddy Ted Pattison just published an article with the MSDN Magazine entitled "Automated SharePoint Site Branding". He discusses many different ways to programmatically activate SharePoint branding such as master pages, images, alternate CSS and more. He even discusses switching out the application master pages as well.

Automated SharePoint Site Branding

When placing custom SharePoint themes into the 12 folder, sometimes you may run into this error when you try to select your new theme:

Ok, if you've read my previous post where I talk about IE8 rendering out of the box MOSS Master Pages poorly, you may have been confused by some of my results. Turns out I was using the Developer Tools to switch the Render Mode manually to IE8 which is not accurate. Turns out if a webpage does NOT include a doctype (like default.master and application.master do not) IE8 will default its rendering behavior to the old way of browsing (quirks mode in this case). Thus default.master and application.master, while still not great, do render exactly the same in IE8 as they would in IE7. Now BlueBand on the other hand (and the other "bands") DOES have a doctype so it renders in IE8 mode by default and thusly has problems.

So, it would seem that the best case scenario for now with custom Master Pages, is to declare a doctype of your choice, but to include the new meta tag that forces IE7 rendering (since otherwise OOTB moss will have many problems). I for one, hope that the next service pack or version includes the appropriate back-end code to support full compliant mode.

P.s. Turns out you can always check your rendering mode quickly with this bookmarklet: http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/ie8.asp

I went and grabbed the IE8 early beta and tried it out in a Vista VM. So far, the out of the box MOSS experience isn't looking so hot. Of course you could always switch it to IE7 browsing mode and everything looks great. My own MOSS designs look pretty funky as well. Here are some screenshots of IE8 and the out of the box SharePoint UI's:

UPDATE #4 – Ok, after asking some questions on the IEBlog, I now understand what I was seeing in MOSS. Default.master does indeed render in IE7 mode by default, while Blueband renders in IE8 mode. You can check the render mode easily with this bookmarklet: http://www.enhanceie.com/ie/ie8.asp

UPDATE #3 – This is what I get for posting so early in the beta. Just read the latest post on the IE8 Blog. Based on their description, I think the MOSS ootb default.master would render in IE7 mode by default as it does not have a doctype. This is why it looks normal in IE8 UNLESS you manually force the browser to render in IE8 mode with the Developer Tools… at least this is my latest theory.

UPDATE #2 – Looks like I might have gotten fooled by the IE8 Developer Tools. I was using the Change Compatibility Mode to switch back and forth between IE7 and IE8 rendering. I'm not sure why, but this really messes up my MOSS UI. After closing and opening IE8 the MOSS UI's look better. Very strange… thanks to Wictor for pointing out the flaws in my screenshots. Maybe I can chalk this up to this being an early beta.

UPDATE - on the Acid Test screenshot. Looks like its a known issue with some of the mirrored Acid Test links, from the IEBlog: "IE8 fails the copies of ACID2 due to the cross domain security checks IE performs for ActiveX controls.  Since IE does not natively handle HTML content in the OBJECT tag, but rather uses IE's rendering engine as an ActiveX to display this HTML content, the same cross domain security checks also apply."

Default.master:

BlueBand.master:

Manage Web Part Menu:

Admin Menu:

As the title implies, the IE8 team has reversed their decision to have IE8 render in IE7 mode by default and instead have it render in full Acid2 confirmed standards goodness by default.

Read the post here

My question is, will the SharePoint team release a standards based default.master (hint: a doctype would help) or will they just tag it to render in IE7 Mode?

Just previewed the new Google Sites functionality that was released (http://sites.google.com) recently. It is supposedly their attempt to capture some of the collaboration market that MOSS plays in. To be fair, it's early in the lifecycle of Google Sites, but at this point I think it would only be a viable alternative for shops that need a minimal collaborative environment. The UI is very slick however, Microsoft could take a few cues from them in that department (especially the nice cross browser Ajax interfaces, and deadly simple usage patterns).

To try it out, at least for now, you need to have your own domain name to push up some files to verify that you are your own "company". Once you do that, you will be able to create sites, invite contributors, pick from some style templates, share files and documents, create web pages, create announcements, create very rudimentary lists, and create dashboards (which consist of small widgets for other Google apps).

I think given enough time, Google could have a pretty solid product for small business collaboration, but as it stands now, I don't think Enterprise customers will use it. If they come out with a version that companies could install on their own servers behind firewalls, only then could it come close to competing with MOSS.

I recently created a simple weather web part to enter into Iain Munro's content editor web part contest. Actually, I created two, one using the US National Weather service feeds which don't seem to have restrictions on usage, and one that worked with Yahoo weather which has some restrictions on for-profit usage. Iain wanted the Yahoo one because it supports other countries other than the US, but there seems to be some stability issues with the Yahoo Weather RSS feed, where sometimes it doesn't send the full data (has anyone else experienced this?). So for now, I will just post the National Weather service one. To use it, add the web part to your page and to change the city listed, just modify the shared web part and edit the XML Link to reflect one of the XML URLs listed at this url: http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/seek.php?state=fl&Find=Find

Download the Web Part here: CurrentWeather_WebPart.zip