SharePoint 2007 provides the ability to view the profile of people within an organization and also to view a very basic organizational chart listing peers and subordinates.   I recently researched the options available for displaying a more advanced organizational chart and found there are several third-party web parts that provide this functionality for a fee, I also found a free option and also some sample code. 

At the SharePoint 2009 conference this year in Las Vegas I also saw a demonstration of a SilverLight web part that will provided as part of the SharePoint 2010 product that provide a really slick and interactive org chart interface (but you’ll have to wait for SharePoint 2010).  If you’re currently using SharePoint 2007, below are some good options for adding a better org chart to your site.

Third party Solutions

1OrgChart by ContentAndCode provides highly customizable org chart that is beautiful, especially if you store photos of your employees.  Some of the key features include:

• Create organizational charts using information from User Profiles populated by Active Directory or another line-of-business applications
• Online presence indicators allowing you to see when staff members are online and/or available.
• Create organizational charts from a custom list
• Create charts by organization, department or people
• Decide which properties will be displayed
• Decide the order in which properties will be displayed
• Print charts as an image or to a printer
• Expand/collapse branches in the chart
• View personal profiles by clicking on a user name
• Hide accounts that you do not want included in the charts
• Search for people in the chart
• Include or exclude photos from the chart
• Limit the number of people to display in the charts
• Automatically picks up the SharePoint site styles or theme
• Turn on caching options to improve performance

SharePoint Org. Chart Web Part by KwizCom is a very nice solution at a very reasonable cost.  This web part isn’t as visually appealing as some of the other web parts but does provide a nice tree-view of the organization that other don’t provide.  It also has a nice pop-up window when you hover over an individual’s name, a nice touch.  Some of the key features include:

• Hierarchical/flat view
• Based on a standard Excel/XML file format, therefore enables easy integration with corporate HR system
• Dynamically configurable view (you decide which columns should be displayed)
• Textual & property-based filtering capabilities
• Web part’s layout is fully customizable (CSS files and images)
• Support filtering by URL parameters and by Web Part Connections

AA OrgChart by AASoftech is another low cost option which consists of three separate web parts.  The web parts work together to display organizational data in a tree view and also a searchable list view.  Some of the key features include:

• Can directly connect to SharePoint User Profile on MOSS (SharePoint Server 2007)
• Supports Multi Manager when connecting to SharePoint User Profile on MOSS (SharePoint Server 2007)
• Can directly connect to SharePoint List
• Supports XML data as input
• Can also get data from SQL server, Access, Oracle, Excel, Text, SharePoint List, User profile or Active directory
• Can lunch other application from the chart
• Can display OrgChart in any Sort Order of the existing fields
• Can display Query result (Employee Locator) in different styles
• Can locate (Search) employee
• Displays the Organization Hierarchy in Tree View as well as Chart View
• Accepts Query string to browse the chart
• Displays up to 11 data fields on "OrgChart" Web Part
• Can browse the chart from specific Node

User Directory Web Part by Bamboo Solutions is an all-encompassing employee directory, employee search, organizational chart, and employee listing all wrapped up into a single web part that can be easily dropped onto any page in your site.  This is an amazing web part but if you’re simply looking for an organizational web part it may have (dare I say it) too much functionality.  The key features include:

• View SharePoint and/or Active Directory users in a tree view structure
• View and edit both Active Directory and SharePoint User Profile databases
• Maintain and delegate security for profile updating to department level
• Search for users by name or other metadata such as skill set, or user customized fields
• Audit trail of changes to Active Directory
• Maintain restriction on private and non-editable attributes
• AJAX web part eliminates annoying post backs and enhances usability
• Email notification when changes are made to profile database

Free Solutions

SimpleChart by ARB Security Solutions is a simplistic organizational chart displayed in a graphical manner.  This web part only accepts data from a SharePoint list, but with some creative thinking you can probably get your organizational data into a SharePoint list. 

Graphical Organizational Chart by Sue Hernandez is a set of fairly complete C# web part code using the Profile Manager and Google’s Org Chart API to display organization data in a nice graphical format.  She does a nice job of explaining the code and providing all the necessary pieces to build your own graphical display of your organizational chart. 

Feel free to comment if you find other solutions that you’d like to recommend.

There is a Master page gallery created for every site in Sharepoint Server 2007, but you can only create new master pages with the page layouts stored in the master page gallery of the top-level site in the site collection

I have been asked this a few times. How can I remove the View All Site Content link for certain users?

The View All Site Content link can be a great navigational link or a problematic link that confuses end users.

The default security setting for this SPLinkButton is set to be displayed to everyone…and when I say everyone I mean everyone…viewers and even anonymous users. This is found in the master page in your site.

1. Open up the master page in SharePoint designer
2. Place the page into split view
3. Click the View All Site Content link and in you code window you should see the following

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat=”server” PermissionsString=”ViewFormPages”>
        <div class=”ms-quicklaunchheader”><SharePoint:SPLinkButton id=”idNavLinkViewAll” runat=”server” NavigateUrl=”~site/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx” Text=”<%$Resources:wss,quiklnch_allcontent%>” AccessKey=”<%$Resources:wss,quiklnch_allcontent_AK%>”/></div>
</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

Thankfully we can easily upgrade the security to different security level. For example, if we change the PermissionsString=”ManageWeb” then only users who have this permission level (site admins) will see the View All Site Content link.

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat=”server” PermissionsString=”ManageWeb”>
        <div class=”ms-quicklaunchheader”><SharePoint:SPLinkButton id=”idNavLinkViewAll” runat=”server” NavigateUrl=”~site/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx” Text=”<%$Resources:wss,quiklnch_allcontent%>” AccessKey=”<%$Resources:wss,quiklnch_allcontent_AK%>”/></div>
</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

There are a number of different permission levels that you can view here.

The SharePoint:SecurityTrimmedControl is a handy control that can be used in many locations. For example, wrap it around the Site Actions control for custom and you remove this control based on security.

A couple of weeks ago a colleague of mine was having trouble installing language packs on one of our clients SharePoint 2007 farm. Today I received an email from a colleague requesting some advice for another client who was having problems adding an additional Web Front End to their SharePoint 2007 Farm.

Since both issues share the same root cause I thought a quick post was in order.

What happened?

In both cases the engineers tried to use RTM installation sources on an updated SharePoint 2007 farm, in this case with SP1 and one of the recent cumulative updates installed.

Logically this doesn’t work as expected.

Whenever you make a change to your SharePoint 2007 farm you should do so with installation sources that are the same version as the farm you are trying to update or reconfigure. The easiest way to do so is by adding the update(s) in question into the updates directory of the installation sources using the /extract switch from the setup program.

A short step by step procedure:

• copy / extract the installation sources into a directory, for this step by step I’ll use C:\Temp. Make sure the Setup program is in the root and you have a directory structure with an updates folder
• download the update(s) from the Microsoft site
• open a command prompt en CD into the directory where you downloaded the update packages
• for each update you want to slipstream type the command:

setup /extract:C:\Temp\Updates

A few notes:

• “setup” in the above command refers to the setup program you downloaded from the internet but sometimes it has a more descriptive name to identify the package e.g. SharePoint.exe
• you can also type setup /? to view all the switches for the command
• for each update you need to download the WSS and SharePoint Server versions so you will need to extract two packages / update to the updates folder
• As of the december cumulative update Microsoft uses “über” update packages that contain the infrastructure update, language packs updates etc… so there’s no need to download these seperately: just extract the latest cumulative update to the updates folder

Once you executed the steps above you can execute the installation as you would normally, the setup program will check the updates folder and apply them at the end of the installation progress.

Additional Resources:

A Marvellous Point: How to ‘Slipstream’ installation for MOSS with SP1

I have been developing inside SharePoint for a while now and while things are getting easier with tools I think this process for developing User Controls inside SharePoint gives me a lot of control.

1. I have a Graphical User Interface
2. I have a separate project to build and test outside of SharePoint
3. I can easily update and view my project html and binary code

Currently this process doesn’t create me any SharePoint Solution files to deploy across environments. I think to achieve this I will need to create a VS 2008 SharePoint Project…but so far these projects seem to add weight and time that I don’t want at the moment…while I am developing.

1. Create a VS2008 web project
2. In IIS create an IIS Application under your SharePoint web site that has a path to your VS2008 web project created above. This helps for updating content
3. In your VS2008 project create some user controls and test that they function
4. In VS2008 project properties under the Build Events tab point the Post Build events text box and add a copy statement to copy your .dlls and .pdbs to your SharePoint web sites bin directory. This will deploy a new .dll every time you build your VS2008 project. I had problems when I put the VS2008 project .dll into the GAC…it only worked when I put it into the SharePoint’s web sites bin directory
5. Update your master page with CSS references if your VS2008 project contains a style sheet.
6. In SPD in your Page Layout add a Register directive to register your user control
   “<%@ Register Src=”~/UI/UserControls/JobGoals.ascx” TagPrefix=”uc1″ TagName=”JobGoals” %>”
   OR
   Update the SharePoint web site web.config file
   <pages>
     <controls>
           <add src=”~/UI/UserControls/MyAttributes.ascx” tagPrefix=”uc1″ tagName=”MyAttributes”/>
           <add src=”~/UI/UserControls/JobGoals.ascx” tagPrefix=”uc1″ tagName=”JobGoals” />
       </controls>
   </pages>
7. Add the User Control to the Page Layout
   <uc1:JobGoals ID=”JobGoals1″ runat=”server” />
8. Update the SharePoinnt web sites web.config file
   <SafeControl Src=”~/UI/*”  IncludeSubFolders=”True” Safe=”True” AllowRemoteDesigner=”True” />
9. Restart IIS, navigate to a page that uses the page layout and you should see your User Control

Because we created a IIS Application under our SharePoint web site and mapped our VS2008 projects .dll output path to our SharePoints web site, updates are extremely simple.

1. .ascx changes:                modify, save in VS2008 and refresh sharepoint browser
2. .ascx.cs changes:          modify, save, build  in VS2008 and refresh sharepoint browser

I was having a great deal of pain on a new SharePoint development server recently. Environment = Windows 2008, IE7.

Situation

1. Create a SharePoint web application with a host header on port 80. Create a site collection
2. Update host file (or DNS) with new host header entry
3. In IE make sure the web application is in the Intranet Zone
4. Open up browser in IE navigate to site using host header and the authentication dialog login is displayed.
5. Enter my credentials 3 times and receive a 401.1 and an entry in the Security Event log
6. If I open FireFox and browse to the web site the authentication dialog is displayed
7. I enter my credentials and I can log in fine
   Note: To get rid of the authentication prompt in FireFox
1. Open FireFox and in the address type about:config
2. Find the entry network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
3. Set the Key’s value to a comma seperated list of trusted URIs i.e your host header
8. So FireFox is fine but IE is having issues

Solution

I finally stumbled across a blog article from Brian Farnhill and Ishai Sagi that lead me to the solution.

You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/896861

In my case I am using IE 7 and while the Solution/Workaround discusses two separate methods and states that method one is preferred, I could only fix my issue upon completing method 2

I am often asked to customize the layout of a page within a SharePoint site as a “one-off” change (one that affects only that page and not the entire SharePoint site).  This is typically a request to hide something on the page or to change the attributes of a font on a page, such as hiding the quick launch bar, hide the breadcrumbs or increasing the font on a header.  These changes are often small and don’t necessarily require a change to the site master page or style sheet (.css file).  One of my favorite tips is to use “inline CSS styles” to apply style changes to a page. 

My solution basically consists of adding a Content Editor web part to a page and including style sheet instructions that override the current page styling (as HTML style tags within the Content Editor web part).  The beauty of this solution is that it does not require changes to the site style sheet and can be isolated to just one page.  The down-side to this approach is that the change only impacts one page at a time, and you must apply this technique for each page you wish to change.

In this article I will provide you the specific instructions needed to inline CSS styles to customize your pages. 

Example Request: Hide the breadcrumb on our news article page.

Let’s pretend we’ve received a request to hide the breadcrumb line so that the page title is at the top of the page.  The user is basically asking us to make remove the words “Home > News > Sample News Article” and make the words “Sample News Article” appear at the top of the page.

Step 1: Add a Content Editor web part to the page and make it hidden.

Open the page in edit mode and add a web part to the page of type “Content Editor web part”.  You do this by using the “Site Actions” menu and selecting “Edit Page”.  Modify the properties of the web part so that the web part is hidden.  You do this by checking the “Hidden” box inside the Layout section of the web part settings panel.  Important note: Even though you’ve hidden the web part the CSS styles still effect the contents of the page.

Step 2: Identify the styles to override in the HTML source of the page.

Open the HTML source of the page and look through the HTML for the area you want to effect.  Both Internet Explorer and Firefox provide a menu option for viewing the HTML source for a page; in Internet Explorer you’ll need to use the View menu and select Source.  After opening the HTML source you can search for the desired HTML area, In our case we can do a find on “Sample News Article” to find the breadcrumb area.  See the following code example; notice the CSS class named “breadcrumb” that is applied to the HTML “div” tag, we will be applying a change to the “breadcrumb” class to override the styling of the breadcrumb text.

<div class="breadcrumb">
    <span id="ctl00_PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb_siteMapPath">
    <span><a class="ms-sitemapdirectional" href="/Pages/Default.aspx">Home</a></span>
    <span> &gt; </span>
    <span><a title="Company News Home" class="ms-sitemapdirectional" href="/News/Pages/Default.aspx">News</a></span>
    <span> &gt; </span><span class="breadcrumbCurrent">Sample News Article</span></span>
</div> 

Step 3: Use the HTML Editor to add style tags to override the page styles.

Open the Content Editor web part and use the “Source Editor” button to add HTML directly into your page.  Enter your CSS commands in the middle of <style></style> tags.  See the example below where we override the breadcrumb div tag by using the CSS display property to hide the breadcrumb div.

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<style type="text/css">
    div.breadcrumb
    {
        display: none;
    }
</style> 

Step 4: Preview the page and make adjustments if necessary.

Save the changes to the Content Editor web part and publish your changes.  Be sure to preview the page to see if the CSS style overrides you applied are what you expected.  If not, you’ll need to back up a few steps and try again.

My hope is that this technique of applying inline CSS styles directly into your SharePoint pages can give you another option for formatting your pages.  Again, this technique can be particularly useful when you have a change that affects only a single page and does not need to affect the entire SharePoint site.  Good luck and let me know if you come up with other creative uses for applying inline CSS styles.

I want to thank everyone who attended my session on SharePoint Workflow with Visual Studio at our TechFest event yesterday.  Please feel free to post any comments (good or bad) about my presentation or the event. 

Demo source code is posted on Nakido until the Techfest site is updated with session content.

SharePoint WorkFlow with Visual Studio – Downloads

• Slide deck
• Demo code

SharePoint WorkFlow with Visual Studio – References

• Robert Shelton’s SharePoint Workflow How-To Video Screencasts
• MOSS 2007 SDK and WSS 3.0 SDK
• Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System by David Mann

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This little feature has caused myself so many problems for different clients. Some of the main issues I have come across include:

• Still runs .Net code under the person who has logged into the computer
• Creates authentication issues for end users when trying to open an Intranet bowser. Have to remove their user profiles to fix

I recommend to anyone now to find the IExplore.exe (right click your shortcut and select Properties, then click the  ”Find Target” button), right click and select the ”run as”. Enter the credentials of the user you wish to log in as.

This still won’t run .Net code under the new credentials you have entered but I have not come across any authentication issues using this approach so far.

How to get non-admins to view your site collection and site usage reports

Site Collection Admins or user will Full Control can view Site Collection and Site Usage Reports.  So if you want other users to access these reports you can do the following:

1. Create a custom site permission level and select the “View Usage Data” check box
   Note: this will also select the “View Pages” permission
2. Create a new Group called something like “Usage Report Viewers” and assign the permission level you created above to the group
3. Add the people you want to view the reports
4. Provide the users with links to the report pages
   1/ http://sitecollection/_layouts/SpUsageSite.aspx - view site collection reports
   2/ http://sitecollection/_layouts/SpUsageWeb.aspx - view site reports

Use a web part to display the links and above and audience targeting so only the users in the SharePoint group “Usage Report Viewers” see the web part.

Problem

SharePoint 2007 Web Front End (WFE) servers crashing repeatedly.  Environment is SharePoint 2007 (MOSS Enterprise) 64-bit running on Windows Server 2008 Standard.  Server was crashing repeatedly with CPU spiking to 100%, blue screen, and server rebooting itself.  System log showing BugCheck event (1000) entry with code 0×0000001d:

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0×000000d1 (0xfffff9802ea0ef50, 0×0000000000000002, 0×0000000000000000, 0xfffffa6004e06ed9). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP.

Resolution

After a lot of troubleshooting, it turns out it was Trend Micro Common Firewall Driver (Trend Micro OfficeScan Client 8.0).  When we disabled the firewall, problem resolved.

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I’m unlikely to unearth better details on this than good ‘ole SharePoint Joel. Check out Joel’s post for all the dirt. If, though, you’re like me and you just say “Gimme the downloads!” here are the key bits:

2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 (x86)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082
2007 Microsoft Office servers Service Pack 2 (x64)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082

2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B444BF18-79EA-46C6-8A81-9DB49B4AB6E5

What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services — a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 — provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, and it serves as a platform for application development.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide additional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.

What is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server?

SharePoint Portal Server is a portal server that connects people, teams, and knowledge across business processes. SharePoint Portal Server integrates information from various systems into one secure solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities. It provides flexible deployment and management tools, and facilitates end-to-end collaboration through data aggregation, organization, and searching. SharePoint Portal Server also enables users to quickly find relevant information through customization and personalization of portal content and layout as well as through audience targeting.

What is Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft Windows Services is the engine that allows administrators to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office System and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a plat form for application development. SharePoint sites provide communities for team collaboration, enabling users to work together on documents, tasks, and projects. The environment for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development.

What is the relationship between Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) deliver highly scalable collaboration solutions with flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services provides sites for team collaboration, while Share Point Portal Server connects these sites, people, and business processes—facilitating knowledge sharing and smart organizations. SharePoint Portal Server also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization.

Who is Office SharePoint Server 2007 designed for?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used by information workers, IT administrators, and application developers. is designed

What are the main benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

• Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management of their electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar, everyday applications.
• Organizations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners across organizational boundaries using InfoPath Forms Services–driven solutions.
• Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through the facilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, access to back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can be personalized.
• Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks.
• Developers have a rich platform to build a new class of applications, called Office Business Applications, that combine powerful developer functionality with the flexibility and ease of deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the use of out-of-the-box application services, developers can build richer applications with less code.

What is the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have identical feature functionality. While the feature functionality is similar, the usage rights are different.

If you are creating an Internet, or Extranet, facing website, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites which does not require the purchase client access licenses. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition can only be used for Internet facing websites and all content, information, and applications must be accessible to non-employees. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition cannot be accessed by employees creating, sharing, or collaborating on content which is solely for internal use only, such as an Intranet Portal scenario. See the previous section on licensing for more information on the usage scenarios.

What suites of the 2007 Microsoft Office system work with Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Office Outlook 2007 provides bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007, included as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, will enable bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.

Features such as the document panel and the ability to publish to Excel Services will only be enabled when using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007or Office Enterprise 2007.

Excel Services will only work with documents saved in the new Office Excel 2007 file format (XLSX).

How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?

SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, who are invited to join via e-mail. In addition, the site administrator can restrict certain members’ roles by assigning different permission levels to view post and edit.

Can I post any kind of document?

You can post documents in many formats, including .pdf, .htm and .doc. In addition, if you are using Microsoft Office XP, you can save documents directly to your Windows SharePoint Services site.

Can I download information directly from a SharePoint site to a personal digital assistant (PDA)?

No you cannot. However, you can exchange contact information lists with Microsoft Outlook.

How long does it take to set up the initial team Web site?

It only takes a few minutes to create a complete Web site. Preformatted forms let you and your team members contribute to the site by filling out lists. Standard forms include announcements, events, contacts, tasks, surveys, discussions and links.

Can I create custom templates?

Yes you can. You can have templates for business plans, doctor’s office, lawyer’s office etc.

How can I make my site public? By default, all sites are created private.

If you want your site to be a public Web site, enable anonymous access for the entire site. Then you can give out your URL to anybody in your business card, e-mail or any other marketing material. The URL for your Web site will be: http:// yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com

Hence, please take special care to name your site. These Web sites are ideal for information and knowledge intensive sites and/or sites where you need to have shared Web workspace. Remember: Under each parent Web site, you can create up to 10 sub-sites each with unique permissions, settings and security rights.

How do the sub sites work?

You can create a sub site for various categories. For example:

• Departments – finance, marketing, IT
• Products – electrical, mechanical, hydraulics
• Projects – Trey Research, Department of Transportation, FDA
• Team – Retention team, BPR team
• Clients – new clients, old clients
• Suppliers – Supplier 1, Supplier 2, Supplier 3
• Customers – Customer A, Customer B, Customer C
• Real estate – property A, property B

The URLs for each will be, for example:

• http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/finance
• http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/marketing

You can keep track of permissions for each team separately so that access is restricted while maintaining global access to the parent site.

How do I make my site non-restricted?

If you want your site to have anonymous access enabled (i.e., you want to treat it like any site on the Internet that does not ask you to provide a user name and password to see the content of the site), follow these simple steps:

1. Login as an administrator
2. Click on site settings
3. Click on Go to Site Administration
4. Click on Manage anonymous access
5. Choose one of the three conditions on what Anonymous users can access:

·          

•  
  • Entire Web site
  • Lists and libraries
  • Nothing

Default condition is nothing; your site has restricted access. The default conditions allow you to create a secure site for your Web site.

Can I get domain name for my Web site?

Unfortunately, no. At this point, we don’t offer domain names for SharePoint sites. But very soon we will be making this available for all our SharePoint site customers. Please keep checking this page for further update on this. Meanwhile, we suggest you go ahead and set up your site and create content for it.

What are picture libraries?

Picture libraries allow you to access a photo album and view it as a slide show or thumbnails or a film strip. You can have separate folder for each event, category, etc

What are the advantages of a hosted SharePoint vs. one that is on an in-house server?

• No hardware investment, i.e. lower costs
• No software to download – ready to start from the word go
• No IT resources – Anyone who has used a Web program like Hotmail can use it
• Faster deployment

Can I ask users outside of my organization to participate in my Windows SharePoint Services site?

Yes. You can manage this process using the Administration Site Settings. Simply add users via their e-mail alias and assign permissions such as Reader or Contributor.

Are there any IT requirements or downloads required to set up my SharePoint site?

No. You do not need to download any code or plan for any IT support. Simply complete the on-line signup process and provide us your current and correct email address. Once you have successfully signed up and your site has been provisioned, we will send a confirmation to the email address you provided.

I am located outside of the United States. Are there any restrictions or requirements for accessing the Windows SharePoint Services?

No. There are no system or bandwidth limitations for international trial users. Additionally language packs have been installed which allow users to set up sub-webs in languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.

Are there any browser recommendations?

Yes. Microsoft recommends using the following browsers for viewing and editing Windows SharePoint Services sites: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later.

What security levels are assigned to users?

Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels by default and additional levels can be composed as necessary.

• Reader – Has read-only access to the Web site.
• Contributor – Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
• Web Designer – Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
• Administrator – Has full control of the Web site.

How secure are Windows SharePoint Services sites hosted by Microsoft?

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Technical security measures provide firewall protection, intrusion detection, and web-publishing rules. The Microsoft operation center team tests and deploys software updates in order to maintain the highest level of security and software reliability. Software hot-fixes and service packs are tested and deployed based on their priority and level of risk. Security related hot-fixes are rapidly deployed into the environment to address current threats. A comprehensive software validation activity ensures software stability through regression testing prior to deployment.

What is the difference between an Internet and an intranet site?

An internet site is a normal site that anyone on the internet can access (e.g., www.msn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.). You can set up a site for your company that can be accessed by anyone without any user name and password. The internet is used for public presence and a primary marketing tool managed typically by web programmers and a system administrator.

An intranet (or internal network), though hosted on a Web site, can only be accessed by people who are members of a specific network. They need to have a login and password that was assigned to them when they were added to the site by the site administrator. The intranet is commonly used as an internal tool for giving employees access to company information. Content is driven by business relevance, business rules and has increasingly become a common tool in larger organizations. An intranet is becoming more and more the preferred method for employees to interact with each other and the central departments in an organization, whether or not the organization has a Web presence.

What is a workspace?

A site or workspace is when you want a new place for collaborating on Web pages, lists and document libraries. For example, you might create a site to manage a new team or project, collaborate on a document or prepare for a meeting.

What are the various kinds of roles the users can have?

A user can be assigned one of the following roles

• Reader – Has read-only access to the Web site.
• Contributor – Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
• Web Designer – Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
• Administrator – Has full control of the Web site.

Can more than one person use the same login?

If the users sharing that login will have the same permissions and there is no fear of them sharing a password, then yes. Otherwise, this is discouraged.

How customizable is the user-to-user access?

User permissions apply to an entire Web, not to documents themselves. However, you can have additional sub webs that can optionally have their own permissions. Each user can be given any of four default roles. Additional roles can be defined by the administrator.

Can each user have access to their own calendar?

Yes there are two ways to do this,

• by creating a calendar for each user, or
• by creating a calendar with a view for each user

How many files can I upload?

There is no restriction in place except that any storage consumed beyond that provided by the base offering may have an additional monthly charge associated with them.

What types of files can I upload / post to the site?

The only files restricted are those ending with the following extensions: .asa, .asp, .ida, .idc, .idq. Microsoft reserves the right to add additional file types to this listing at any time. Also, no content that violates the terms of service may be uploaded or posted to the site.

Can SharePoint be linked to an external data source?

SharePoint data can be opened with Access and Excel as an external data source. Thus, SharePoint can be referenced as an external data source. SharePoint itself cannot reference an external data source.

Can SharePoint be linked to a SQL database?

SharePoint 2007 Portal Server (MOSS2K7) allows connections to SQL based datasources via the Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC also allows connecting to data via Web Services.

Can I customize my Windows SharePoint Services site?

YES! Windows SharePoint Services makes updating sites and their content from the browser easier then ever.

SharePoint includes tools that let you create custom lists, calendars, page views, etc. You can apply a theme; add List, Survey and Document Library Web Parts to a page; create personal views; change logos; connect Web Parts and more.

To fully customize your site, you can use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Specifically, you can use FrontPage themes and shared borders, and also use FrontPage to create photo galleries and top ten lists, utilize standard usage reports, and integrate automatic Web content.

Will Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 run on a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows?

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Forms Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search will support 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

How Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help you?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help us:

Manage content and streamline processes. Comprehensively manage and control unstructured content like Microsoft Office documents, Web pages, Portable Document Format file (PDF) files, and e-mail messages. Streamline business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity.

Improve business insight. Monitor your business, enable better-informed decisions, and respond proactively to business events.

Find and share information more simply. Find information and expertise wherever they are located. Share knowledge and simplify working with others within and across organizational boundaries.

Empower IT to make a strategic impact. Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms that have to be maintained by supporting all the intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities can help improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides these capabilities in an integrated server offering, so your organization doesn’t have to integrate fragmented technology solutions itself.

What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?

The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people within the organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.

What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?

• User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
• Document management enhancements
• The new Workflow engine
• Office 2007 Integration
• New Web Parts
• New Site-type templates
• Enhancements to List technology
• Web Content Management
• Business Data Catalog
• Search enhancements
• Report Center
• Records Management
• Business Intelligence and Excel Server
• Forms Server and InfoPath
• The “Features” feature
• Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication

What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?

The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:

• Document management
• Records management
• Web content management

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.

Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?

Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you find documents and information fast.

Write the features of the search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. New features provide:

• A consistent and familiar search experience.
• Increased relevance of search results.
• New functions to search for people and expertise.
• Ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications and
• Improved manageability and extensibility.

What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

• Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
• Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
• Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
• Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
• Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
• Connect people with information and expertise.
• Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
• Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
• Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
• Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?

The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.

What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?

If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides error handling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled security exceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where the Web Part appears.

How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?

Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option.

Option Pros Cons

Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server. For more information, see “Setting the trust level for a virtual server” Easy to implement.

In a development environment, increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure.

This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server. There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server.

Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see “How do I create a custom policy file?” Recommended approach.

This option is most secure.

An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirements for the assembly.

By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your Web Parts.

Requires the most configuration of all three options. Install your assemblies in the GAC

Easy to implement. This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed in the BIN directory.

This option is less secure.

Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as it potentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope than necessary

In a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies.

Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.

Does SharePoint work with NFS?

Yes and no. It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the sharepoint database or logs cannot be stored there.

How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?

Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them on dashboards (pages). SS doesn’t have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference would be SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.

What would you like to see in the next version of SharePoint?

A few suggestions:

1. SPS and STS on same machine
2. Tree view of Categories and Folders
3. General Discussion Web Part
4. Personalization of Dashboards
5. Role Customization
6. Email to say WHY a document has been rejected for Approval
7. More ways to customize the interface
8. Backup and restore an individual Workspaces
9. Filter for Visio
10. Better way to track activity on SPS
11. Ability to Save as from Adobe to space on My Network Places

Why Sharepoint is not a viable solution for enterprise wide deployments?

Planning an enterprise deployment using SharePoint features is a very difficult task unless you can establish a Service Oriented Architecture, using AD for managing security with well defined roles based information access(EISA). Sounds reasonable, although it seems difficult to deploy with the tools limitations in document storage.

Document management does not scale beyond a single server, but scales great within a single server. For example, a quad Xeon machine with 4GB of RAM works great for a document management server that has about 900,000 – 1,000,000 document, but if you need to store 50,000,000 document and want to have them all in one single workspace then it does not scale at all. If you need a scenario like this, you need to plan your deployment right and it should scale for you, it just does not right out of the box. If you are using your server as a portal and search server most for the most part it scales great. You can have many different servers crawl content sources and have separate servers searching and serving the content.

If you have < 750,000 documents per server and fewer than 4 content sources and fewer than 50,000 users, SPS should scale just fine for your needs with the proper planning.

What are the actual advantages of SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) over SharePoint Team Services (STS)?

SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has MUCH better document management. It has check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, publishing, subscriptions, categories, etc. STS does not have these features, or they are very scaled back. SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has a better search engine, and can crawl multiple content sources. STS cannot. STS is easier to manage and much better for a team environment where there is not much Document Management going on. SPS is better for an organization, or where Document Management is crucial.

How Does SharePoint work?

The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

How do I open an older version of a document?

Normally, all previous versions are located in the shadow, so if you right click a published document from within the web folders, go to properties and then the third tab, versions you can view older versions.

If you want to do this in code:

strURL = “url of the last published version”

Set oVersion = New PKMCDO.KnowledgeVersion

Set prmRs = oVersion.VersionHistory(strURL)

Set oVersion = Nothing

prmRS will contain a recordset, which contains the url to the old versions in the shadow.

Why do the workspace virtual directories show the error “stop sign” symbol in the IIS snap-in?

If World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) starts before Microsoft Exchange Information Store (MSExchangeIS), “stop sign” symbols appear under the Default Web Site folder of the Internet Information Services console in Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

There is a dependency between the local paths of the SharePoint Portal Server virtual directories and the MSExchangeIS. You must start MSExchangeIS first, followed by W3SVC.

Complete the following steps to prevent the stop signs from appearing each time you restart:

1. Change the Startup type for W3SVC to Manual.
2. Restart the server. The MSExchangeIS service starts automatically.
3. Start W3SVC.

What newsgroups are available?

There are two,

• microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver and
• microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development.

What is SharePoint from a Technical Perspective?

Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft’s .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System.

SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web’s medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of!

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

What is SharePoint from an Administration Perspective?

Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like “edit profile”. Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.

What is SharePoint from a Users Perspective?

From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessible over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name “Share-Point”. Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, and version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint’s Search facility. Even documents not “in” SharePoint can be included in the search engine’s index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it’s a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.

What are the various Sharepoint 2003 and Exchange integration points?

Link to Outlook

This is a button on contacts or events lists that lets Outlook 2003 add a pst file named Sharepoint Folders and it links to the data on the site. It’s read-only, but you could make the home page for that PST be the Sharepoint site for easier viewing. The link to outlook feature seems more to be where some can public a calendar, but not want too much collaboration. For example, a holiday schedule, company meeting schedule, etc, can be made available for people to be able to view from Outlook without having to go to a web browser. Another nice thing about OL2K3 is that you can compare these calendars with others side by side.

Searching Public Folders

With SPS you can index Exchange’s public folders with the search engine so that all that precious public folder content is searchable. You’ll want to look at content sources and indexing in Sharepoint administration.

Displaying Public Folders in a web part

Since exchange web-enables public folders, you can create a web part that displays that content. IE, http://exchangeserver/Public/IT/Helpdesk will display the IT/Helpdesk public folder via OWA. So you add the Page Viewer web part to a page and point it at that URL. The key here is to add ?cmd=contents to the end of the url if you don’t want the navigator pane on the left.

Smart web parts

Some of the web parts that come with SPS allow you to add a web part to a page that actually takes the users outlook info (calendar, inbox, contacts, tasks) and put them into the page.

The SmartPart Web Part project template for Visual Studio allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to:

   * write a web user control (ASCX)

   * wrap the user control in a SmartPart instance

   * generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment

   * generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation

Can SharePoint compare two document versions?

“In Word 2003, you can compare documents side by side. Open two documents. Then, from the Window menu of one of them, select the Compare Side By Side command. If you have only two documents open, the command will automatically choose to compare them. If you have three or more documents open, you’ll have to select which document to compare with the current file.

A floating toolbar with two buttons will open. If the button on the left is selected, Word will scroll both documents at the same time. Press the button on the right side of the toolbar to return to where the cursor was located when you started comparing.”

What are the integration differences between SPS 2003 and the various Office versions?

SPS webpage can detect you have installed the Office 2003 and run local dll to implement some SPS function, e.g. multi-file upload only works when you have office 2003 installed.

Integration with Office XP is gone.

You will get guys telling you that you can integrate with SPSv2 if you install a backwards compatible document library – but that’s really just putting a bit of SPS 2001 on the server.

Believe me, check-in, check-out, which are themselves very basic, are not available from inside Office XP, or even from the context menu in Windows Explorer.

The ONLY option you have is to use the web interface to check-in or check-out.

Q What is Sharepoint?
Ans: Portal Collaboration Software.

Q What is the difference between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services?Ans: SharePoint Portal Server is the global portal offering features like global navigation and searching.Windows SharePoint Services is more content management based with document libraries andlists. You apply information to certain areas within your portal from windows sharepoint Services or directly to portal areas.

Q What is a document library?
Ans: A document library is where you upload your core documents. They consist of a row and columnview with links to the documents. When the document is updated so is the link on your site. Youcan also track metadata on your documents. Metadata would consist of document properties.

Q What is a meeting workspace?
Ans: A meeting workspace is a place to store information, attendees, and tasks related to a specificmeeting.

Q What is a document workspace?
Ans: Document workspaces consist of information surrounding a single or multiple documents.

Q What is the difference between a document library and a form library?
Ans:Document libraries consist of your core documents. An example would be a word document,excel, Powerpoint, visio, pdf, etc… Form libraries consist of XML forms.

Q What is a web part zone?
Ans: Web part zones are what your web parts reside in and help categorize your web parts when designing a page.

Q How is security managed in SharePoint?
Ans: Security can be handled at the machine,domain, or sharepoint level.

Q How are web parts developed?
Ans: Web parts are developed in Visual Studio .Net. VS.Net offers many web part and page templates and can also be downloaded from the Microsoft Site.

Q What is a site definition?
Ans: It’s a methods for providing prepackaged site and list content.

Q What is a template?
A template is a pre-defined set of functions or settings that can be used over time. There are manytemplates within SharePoint,Site Templates, Document Templates, Document Library and ListTemplates.

Q How do you install web parts?
Ans: Web Parts should be distributed as a .CAB (cabinet) file using the MSI Installer.

Q What is CAML?
Ans: CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language and is an XML-based languagethat is used in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to define sites and lists, including, for Eg, fields, views, or forms, but CAML is also used to define tables in the Windows SharePoint Servies database during site provisioning.

Q What is a DWP?
Ans: The file extension of a web part.

Q What is the GAC?
Ans: Global Assembly Cache folder on the server hosting SharePoint. You place your assemblies there for web parts and services to share them.

Q What are the differences between web part page gallery, site gallery,Virtual server galleryand online gallery?
Ans: Web Part Page Gallery is the default gallery that comes installed with SharePoint. Site Gallery isspecific to one site. Virtual Server gallery is specific to that virtual server and online gallery aredownloadable web parts from Microsoft.

Q What is the difference between a site and a web?
Ans: The pages in a web site generally cover one or more topics and are interconnected through hyperlinks. Most Web sites have a home page as their starting point. While a Web is simply a blank site with SharePoint functionality built in; meaning you have to create the site from the ground up.

Q What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft OfficeSharePoint Server 2007?
Ans: Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web site for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services — a key piece of theinformation worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 — providesadditional functionality to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, and itserves as a platform for application development.Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provideadditional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search,Enterprise content management,business process and forms, and business intelligence.

Q. Who is Office SharePoint server 2007 designed for?
Ans: Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used by information workers, IT administrators, and application developers.

Q. What are the main benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Ans: Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet,and Internet applications across the enterprise.

* Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management oftheir electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar,everyday applications.

* Organizations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners acrossorganizational boundaries using InfoPath Forms Services–driven solutions.

* Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through thefacilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, accessto back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can bepersonalized.

* Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks.

* Developers have a rich platform to build a new class of applications, called Office BusinessApplications, that combine powerful developer functionality with the flexibility and ease ofdeployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the use of out-of-the-box applicationservices, developers can build richer applications with less code.

Q. What is the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Ans: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server2007 have identical feature functionality. While the feature functionality is similar, the usagerights are different.If you are creating an Internet, or Extranet, facing website, it is recommended that you useMicrosoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites which does not require the purchase client access licenses. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition can only be used forInternet facing websites and all content, information, and applications must be accessible to nonemployees.Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition cannot be accessed by employees creating, sharing, or collaborating on content which is solely for internal use only, such as an Intranet Portal scenario.

Q.What suites of the 2007 Microsoft Office system work with Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Ans: Office Outlook 2007 provides bidirectional offline Synchronization with SharePoint documentlibraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks.vabnix.page.tlMicrosoft Office Groove 2007, included as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, will enablebidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.Features such as the document panel and the ability to publish to Excel Services will only beenabled when using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007or Office Enterprise 2007.Excel Services will only work with documents saved in the new Office Excel 2007 file format(XLSX).

Q. How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?
Ans: SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, whoare invited to join via e-mail. In addition, the site administrator can restrict certain members’ rolesby assigning different permission levels to view post and edit.

Q Can I post any kind of document?
Ans: You can post documents in many formats, including .pdf, .htm and .doc. In addition, if you areusing Microsoft Office XP, you can save documents directly to your Windows SharePointServices site.

Q Can I create custom templates?
Ans: Yes you can. You can have templates for business plans, doctor’s office, lawyer’s office etc.

Q. How can I make My site public?
Ans: By default, all sites are created private.If you want your site to be a public Web site, enable anonymous access for the entire site. Then you can give out your URL to anybody in yourbusiness card, e-mail or any other marketing material. The URL for your Web site will be:http:// yoursitename.wss.bcentral.comHence, please take special care to name your site.These Web sites are ideal for information and knowledge intensive sites and/or sites where youneed to have shared Web workspace.Remember: Under each parent Web site, you can create up to 10 sub-sites each with uniquepermissions, settings and security rights.

Q. How do the sub sites work?
Ans: You can create a sub site for various categories.
For example:* Departments – finance, marketing, IT* Products – electrical, mechanical, hydraulics* Projects – Trey Research, Department of Transportation, FDA* Team – Retention team, BPR team* Clients – new clients, old clients* Suppliers – Supplier 1, Supplier 2, Supplier 3* Customers – Customer A, Customer B, Customer C* Real estate – property A, property BThe URLs for each will be, for example:* http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/finance* http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/marketingYou can keep track of permissions for each team separately so that access is restricted whilevabnix.page.tlmaintaining global access to the parent site.

Q.How do I make my site non-restricted?
Ans: If you want your site to have anonymous access enabled (i.e., you want to treat it like any site onthe Internet that does not ask you to provide a user name and password to see the content of thesite), follow these simple steps:

# Login as an administrator
# Click on site settings
# Click on Go to Site Administration
# Click on Manage anonymous access
# Choose one of the three conditions on what Anonymous users can access:** Entire Web site** Lists and libraries** NothingDefault condition is nothing; your site has restricted access.
The default conditions allow you to create a secure site for your Web site.

Q. Can I ask users outside of my organization to participate in my Windows SharePointServices site?
Ans: Yes. You can manage this process using the Administration Site Settings. Simply add users via their e-mail alias and assign permissions such as Reader or Contributor.

Q. Are there any restrictions or requirements for accessing the Windows SharePoint Services?Ans: No. There are no system or bandwidth limitations for international trial users. Additionallylanguage packs have been installed which allow users to set up sub-webs in languages other thanEnglish. These include: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian,Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.

Q. Are there any browser recommendations?
Ans: Yes. Microsoft recommends using the following browsers for viewing and editing WindowsSharePoint Services sites: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2, MicrosoftInternet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator
6.2 or later.vabnix.page.

Q.What security levels are assigned to users?
Ans: Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels bydefault and additional levels can be composed as necessary.
* Reader – Has read-only access to the Web site.
* Contributor – Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
* Web Designer – Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
* Administrator – Has full control of the Web site.

Q.What is the difference between an Internet and an intranet site?
Ans: An internet site is a normal site that anyone on the internet can access (e.g., www.msn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.). You can set up a site for your company that can be accessed by anyonewithout any user name and password.An intranet (or internal network), though hosted on the Web, can only be accessed by people whoare members of the network. They need to have a login and password that was assigned to them when they were added to the site by the site administrator.

Q. What is a workspace?
Ans: A site or workspace is when you want a new place for collaborating on Web pages, lists anddocument libraries. For example, you might create a site to manage a new team or project,collaborate on a document or prepare for a meeting.

Q.How customizable is the user-to-user access?
Ans: User permissions apply to an entire Web, not to documents themselves. However, you can haveadditional sub webs that can optionally have their own permissions. Each user can be given any offour default roles. Additional roles can be defined by the administrator.

Q.Can each user have access to their own calendar?
Ans: Yes there are two ways to do this,
* by creating a calendar for each user, or
* by creating a calendar with a view for each user.

Q. What types of files can I upload / post to the site?
Ans: The only files restricted are those ending with the following extensions: .asa, .asp, .ida, .idc, .idq.Microsoft reserves the right to add additional file types to this listing at any time. Also, no content that violates the terms of service may be uploaded or posted to the site.

Q.Can SharePoint be linked to an external data source?
Ans: SharePoint data can be opened with Access and Excel as an external data source. Thus, SharePoint can be referenced as an external data source. SharePoint itself cannot reference an external datasource.

Q. Can SharePoint be linked to a SQL database?
Ans: This is possible via a custom application, but it not natively supported by SharePoint or SQLServer.

Q.Can I customize my Windows SharePoint Services site?
Ans: YES! Windows SharePoint Services makes updating sites and their content from the browser easier then ever.SharePoint includes tools that let you create custom lists, calendars, page views, etc. You can apply a theme; add List, Survey and Document Library Web Parts to a page; create personalviews; change logos; connect Web Parts and more.To fully customize your site, you can use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Specifically, you can useFrontPage themes and shared borders, and also use FrontPage to create photo galleries and top tenlists, utilize standard usage reports, and integrate automatic Web content.

Q. Will Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 run on a 64-bit version of MicrosoftWindows?Ans: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Forms Server 2007, andOffice SharePoint Server 2007 for Search will support 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

Q. What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?Ans: The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Websites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people withinthe organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.

Q.What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?
Ans: * User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
* Document management enhancements
* The new Workflow engine
* Office 2007 Integration
* New Web Parts
* New Site-type templates
* Enhancements to List technology
* Web Content Management
* Business Data Catalog
* Search enhancements
* Report Center
* Records Management
* Business Intelligence and Excel Server
* Forms Server and InfoPath
* The “Features” feature
* Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication

Q.What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?
Ans: The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:

* Document management
* Records management.
* Web content managementOffice SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality providedby Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhancedauthoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, recordsmanagement, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.

Q.Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?
Ans: Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you finddocuments and information fast.

Q.What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Ans: * Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.* Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.* Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.* Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.* Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information acrossdisparate systems.* Connect people with information and expertise.* Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.* Share business data without divulging sensitive information.* Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information inone central location.* Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applicationsacross the enterprise.

Q.Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?
Ans: The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.

Q.What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?
Ans: If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides errorhandling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled securityexceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where theWeb Part appears.

Q.How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?
Ans: Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option.

1.Option Pros Cons Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server.
In a development environment,increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure. This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server.There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server.

2.Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see “How do I create acustom policy file?” Recommended approach.This option is most secure.An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirementsfor the assembly.By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your WebParts.

3.Requires the most configuration of all three options.Install your assemblies in the GACEasy to implement.This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed inthe BIN directory.This option is less secure.Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a serverrunning Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as itpotentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope thannecessaryIn a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies.Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.

Q. Does SharePoint work with NFS?Yes and no.
Ans: It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the sharepoint database or logs cannotbe stored there.

Q.How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?
Ans: Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them ondashboards (pages). SS doesn’t have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference wouldbe SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.

• What is the relationship between Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows Services?
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) deliver highly scalable collaboration solutions with flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services provides sites for team collaboration, while Share Point Portal Server connects these sites, people, and business processes-facilitating knowledge sharing and smart organizations. SharePoint Portal Server also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization.

• What is a SharePoint Feature? What files are used to define a feature?
A SharePoint Feature is a functional component that can be activated and deactivate at various scopes throughout a SharePoint instances, scope of which are defined as
1. Farm level 2. Web Application level 3. Site level 4. Web level
Features have their own receiver architecture, which allow you to trap events such as when a feature is
Installing, Uninstalling, Activated, or Deactivated.

The element types that can be defined by a feature include
menu commands, link commands, page templates, page instances, list definitions, list instances,
event handlers, and workflows.

The two files that are used to define a feature are the feature.xml and manifest file(elements.xml). The feature XML file defines the actual feature and will make SharePoint aware of the installed feature. The manifest file contains details about the feature such as functionality.

• Workflow can be applied to what all elements of SharePoint ?
Workflow associations are often created directly on lists and libraries, a workflow association can also be created on a content type that exists within the Content Type Gallery for the current site or content types defined within a list. In short, it can be applied …
At the level of a list/library
At the level of a content type defined at site scope
At the level of a content type defined at list scope

• What are the types of input forms that can be created for a workflow ?
You can create four different types of input forms including
1. An association form
2. An initiation form
3. A modification form
4. A task edit form.

Note that these forms are optional when you create a workflow template.

• What are ways to create input forms for workflow ?
Two
1. You can create your forms by using custom application pages, which are standard .aspx pages deployed to run out of the _layouts directory. ( disadv: lot of code required when compared to Infopath approach)
2. Using Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 (disadv: picks up a dependenct on MOSS, i.e. it cannot run in a standalone WSS environment)

• What is the difference between method activity and event activity in WorkFlow ?
A method activity is one that performs an action, such as creating or updating a task. An event activity is one that runs in response to an action occurring.

• What are content types?
A content type is a flexible and reusable WSS type definition (or we can a template) that defines the columns and behavior for an item in a list or a document in a document library. For example, you can create a content type for a leave approval document with a unique set of columns, an event handler, and its own document template and attach it with a document library/libraries.
• Can a content type have receivers associated with it?
Yes, a content type can have an event receiver associated with it, either inheriting from the SPListEventReciever base class for list level events, or inheriting from the SPItemEventReciever base class. Whenever the content type is instantiated, it will be subject to the event receivers that are associated with it.

• What two files are typically (this is kept generally) included when developing a content type, and what is the purpose of each?
There is generally the main content type file that holds things like the content type ID, name, group, description, and version. There is also the ContentType.Fields file which contains the fields to include in the content type that has the ID, Type, Name, DisplayName, StaticName, Hidden, Required, and Sealed elements. They are related by the FieldRefs element in the main content type file.

• What is an ancestral type and what does it have to do with content types?
An ancestral type is the base type that the content type is deriving from, such as Document (0×0101). The ancestral type will define the metadata fields that are included with the custom content type.

• Can a list definition be derived from a custom content type?
Yes, a list definition can derive from a content type which can be seen in the schema.XML of the list definition in the element.

• When creating a list definition, how can you create an instance of the list?
You can create a new instance of a list by creating an instance.XML file

• What is a Field Control?
Field controls are simple ASP.NET 2.0 server controls that provide the basic field functionality of SharePoint. They provide basic general functionality such as displaying or editing list data as it appears on SharePoint list pages.

• What base class do custom Field Controls inherit from?
This varies. Generally, custom field controls inherit from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.BaseFieldControl namespace, but you can inherit from the default field controls.

• Can multiple SharePoint installs point to the same DB?
Multiple SharePoint installs can use the same database server. Not literally the same database on that server. That server must be SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005. It cannot be Oracle or another vendor.

• How to create links to the mapped network drives?
Creating links to mapped drives in WSS v3 or MOSS 2007 can be done via
the new content type for .lnk files.

• While creating a Web part, which is the ideal location to Initialize my new controls?
Override the CreateChildControls method to include your new controls. You can control the exact rendering of your controls by calling the .Render method in the web parts Render method.

• What are the two base classes a WebPart you are going to use within SharePoint 2007 can inherit from?
There are two base classes that a WebPart which is going to be consumed by SharePoint can inherit from, either the
SharePoint WebPart Base class
or the
ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart base class.
When inheriting from the SharePoint WebPart Base class your derived WebPart class will inherit from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart. When inheriting from the ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart base class your derived WebPart class will inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart. It is considered good practice to use the ASP.NET WebPart base class since the old base class is meant for backwards compatibility with previous version of SharePoint, however there are four exception when it is better to leverage functionality from the SharePoint WebPart base class:
Cross page connections
Connections between Web Parts that are outside of a Web Part zone
Client-side connections (Web Part Page Services Component)
Data caching infrastructure

• What are the differences between the two base classes and what are the inherit benefits of using one over another?
The difference is the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart base class is meant for backward compatibility with previous versions of SharePoint. The benefit of using the SharePoint WebPart base class is it supported:
Cross page connections
Connections between Web Parts that are outside of a Web Part zone
Client-side connections (Web Part Page Services Component)
Data caching infrastructure
ASP.NET 2.0 WebParts are generally considered better to use because SharePoint is built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 web architecture. Inheriting from the ASP.NET 2.0 base class offers you features that inherit to ASP.NET 2.0, such as embedding resources as opposed to use ClassResources for deployment of said types.

• What is the WebPartManager sealed class? What is its purpose?
The WebPartManager sealed class is responsible for managing everything occurring on a WebPart page, such as the WebParts (controls), events, and misc. functionality that will occur in WebPartZones. For example, the WebPartManager is responsible for the functionality that is provided when you are working with moving a WebPart from WebPartZone to WebPartZone. It is known as the “the central class of the Web Part Control Set.”

• What does AllowUnsafeUpdates do ?
If your code modifies Windows SharePoint Services data in some way, you may need to allow unsafe updates on the Web site, without requiring a security validation. You can do by setting the AllowUnsafeUpdates property.

• What does RunWithElevatedPrivileges do?
There are certain object model calls model that require site-administration privileges. To bypass access-denied error, we use RunWithElevatedPrivileges property when request is initiated by a nonprivileged user. We can successfully make calls into the object model by calling the RunWithElevatedPrivileges method provided by the SPSecurity class.
• What does SPWeb.EnsureUser method do?
Checks whether the specified login name belongs to a valid user of the Web site, and if the login name does not already exist, adds it to the Web site.
e.g SPUser usr = myWeb.EnsureUser(“hitenders”);

• What is a SPSite and SPWeb object, and what is the difference between each of the objects?
The SPSite object represents a collection of sites (site collection [a top level site and all its subsites]). The SPWeb object represents an instance SharePoint Web, and SPWeb object contains things like the actual content. A SPSite object contains the various subsites and the information regarding them.

• What does a SPWebApplication object represent?
The SPWebApplication objects represents a SharePoint Web Application, which essentially is an IIS virtual server. Using the class you can instigate high level operations, such as getting all the features of an entire Web Application instance, or doing high level creation operations like creating new Web Applications through code.

• Would you use SPWebApplication to get information like the SMTP address of the SharePoint site?
Yes, since this is a Web Application level setting. You would iterate through each SPWebApplication in the SPWebApplication collection, and then use the appropriate property calls (OutboundMailServiceInstance) in order to return settings regarding the mail service such as the SMTP address.

• How do you return SharePoint List items using SharePoint web services?
In order to retrieve list items from a SharePoint list through Web Services, you should use the lists.asmx web service by establishing a web reference in Visual Studio. The lists.asmx exposes the GetListItems method, which will allow the return of the full content of the list in an XML node. It will take parameters like the GUID of the name of the list you are querying against, the GUID of the view you are going to query, etc.
Side Question: I got asked how I built queries with the lists.asmx web service. In order to build queries with this service, one of the parameters that the GetListItems method exposes is the option to build a CAML query. There are other ways to do this as well, but that was how I answered it.

• When retrieving List items using SharePoint Web Services, how do you specify explicit credentials to be passed to access the list items?
In order to specify explicit credentials with a Web Service, you generally instantiate the web service, and then using the credentials properties of the Web Service object you use the System.Net.NetworkCredential class to specify the username, password, and domain that you wish to pass when making the web service call and operations.

• What is CAML, and why would you use it?
CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language. CAML is an XML based language which provides data constructs that build up the SharePoint fields, view, and is used for table definition during site provisioning. CAML is responsible for rending data and the resulting HTML that is output to the user in SharePoint. CAML can be used for a variety of circumstances, overall is used to query, build and customize SharePoint based sites. A general use would be building a CAML query in a SharePoint WebPart in order to retrieve values from a SharePoint list.

• What is impersonation, and when would you use impersonation?
Impersonation can basically provide the functionality of executing something in the context of a different identity, for example assigning an account to users with anonymous access. You would use impersonation in order to access resources on behalf of the user with a different account, that normally, that wouldn’t be able to access or execute something.

• What are WebPart properties, and what are some of the attributes you see when declaring WebPart properties in code?
WebPart properties are just like ASP.NET control properties, they are used to interact with and specify attributes that should be applied to a WebPart by a user. Some of the attributes you see with ASP.NET 2.0 properties are WebDescription, WebDisplayName, Category, Personalizable, and WebBrowsable. Although most of these properties come from the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts class, ones like Category come out of System.ComponentModel namespace.

• Why are properties important in WebPart development, and how have you exploited them in past development projects? What must each custom property have?
Properties are important because WebParts allow levels of personalization for each user. WebPart properties make it possible for a user to interact, adjust, and increase overall experience value with the programmatic assets that you develop without having the need to use an external editor or right any code. A very simple example of exploiting a property would be something like allowing the user to change the text on the WebPart design interface so that they can display whatever string of text they desire.
Each custom property that you have must have the appropriate get and set accessor methods.

• What are ClassResources? How do you reference and deploy resources with an ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart?
ClassResources are used when inheriting from the SharePoint.WebPart.WebPartPages.WebPart base class, and are defined in the SharePoint solution file as things that should be stored in the wpresources directory on the server. It is a helpful directory to use in order to deploy custom images. In ASP.NET 2.0, typically things such as images are referenced by embedding them as resources within an assembly. The good part about ClassResources is they can help to eliminate recompiles to change small interface adjustments or alterations to external JavaScript files.

• What is a SharePoint Solution File? How does it differ from WebPart .cab files in legacy development? What does it contain?
A SharePoint solution file is essentially a .cabinet file with all a developers ustom componets suffixed with a .wsp extension that aids in deployment. The big difference with SharePoint solution files is is that a solution:
allows deployment to all WFE’s in a farm
is highly manageable from the interface allowing deployment, retraction, and versioning
Can package all types of assets like site definitions, feature definitions (and associated components), Webparts, etc.
Can provide Code Access Security provisioning to avoid GAC deployments
And much more..

• What is a .ddf file and what does it have to do with SharePoint Solution creation?
A .ddf file is a data directive file and is used when building the SharePoint solution bundle specifying the source files and their destination locations. The important thing for someone to understand is that the .ddf file will be passed as a parameter to the MAKECAB utility to orchestrate construction of the SharePoint solution file.

• What file does a SharePoint solution package use to orchestrate (describe) its packaged contents?
The solution Manifest.XML file.

• What deployment mechanism can you use to instigate Code Access Security attributes for your WebParts?
SharePoint solution files can add in order to handle code access security deployment issues. This is done in the element in the SharePoint solution manifest.XML, which makes it easier to get assemblies the appropriate permissions in order to operate in the bin directory of the web application.

• What are event receivers?
Event receivers are classes that inherit from the SpItemEventReciever or SPListEventReciever base class (both of which derive out of the abstract base class SPEventRecieverBase), and provide the option of responding to events as they occur within SharePoint, such as adding an item or deleting an item.

• When would you use an event receiver?
Since event receivers respond to events, you could use a receiver for something as simple as canceling an action, such as deleting a document library by using the Cancel property. This would essentially prevent users from deleting any documents if you wanted to maintain retention of stored data.

• What base class do event receivers inherit from?
Event receivers either inherit from the SPListEventReciever base class or the SPItemEventReciever base class, both which derive from the abstract base class SPEventReceiverBase.

• If I wanted to not allow people to delete documents from a document library, how would I go about it?
You would on the ItemDeleting event set: properties.Cancel= true.

• What is the difference between an asynchronous and synchronous event receivers?
An asynchronous event occurs after an action has taken place, and a synchronous event occurs before an action has take place. For example, an asynchronous event is ItemAdded, and its sister synchronous event is ItemAdding

1) What are the two base classes a WebPart you are going to use within SharePoint 2007 can inherit from?

There are two base classes that a WebPart which is going to be consumed by SharePoint can inherit from, either the SharePoint WebPart Base class or the ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart base class. When inheriting from the SharePoint WebPart Base class your derived WebPart class will inherit from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart. When inheriting from the ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart base class your derived WebPart class will inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart. It is considered good practice to use the ASP.NET WebPart base class since the old base class is meant for backwards compatibility with previous version of SharePoint, however there are four exception when it is better to leverage functionality from the SharePoint WebPart base class:

Cross page connections

Connections between Web Parts that are outside of a Web Part zone

Client-side connections (Web Part Page Services Component)

Data caching infrastructure

2) What are the differences between the two base classes and what are the inherit benefits of using one over another?

The difference is the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart base class is meant for backward compatibility with previous versions of SharePoint. The benefit of using the SharePoint WebPart base class is it supported:

Cross page connections

Connections between Web Parts that are outside of a Web Part zone

Client-side connections (Web Part Page Services Component)

Data caching infrastructure

ASP.NET 2.0 WebParts are generally considered better to use because SharePoint is built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 web architecture. Inheriting from the ASP.NET 2.0 base class offers you features that inherit to ASP.NET 2.0, such as embedding resources as opposed to use ClassResources for deployment of said types.

3) What is the GAC?

The GAC stands for the global assembly cache. It is the machine wide code cache which will give custom binaries place into the full trust code group for SharePoint. Certain SharePoint assets, such as Feature Receivers need full trust to run correctly, and therefore are put into the GAC. You should always try to avoid deployment to the GAC as much as possible since it will possibly allow development code to do more than it was intended to do.

4) What is strong naming (signing) a WebPart assembly file mean?

Signing an assembly with a strong name (a.k.a strong naming) uses a cryptographic key pair that gives a unique identity to a component that is being built. This identity can then be referred throughout the rest of the environment. In order to install assemblies into the GAC, they must be strongly named. After signing, the binary will have a public key token identifier which can be use to register the component in various other places on the server.

5) What are safe controls, and what type of information, is placed in that element in a SharePoint web.config file?

When you deploy a WebPart to SharePoint, you must first make it as a safe control to use within SharePoint in the web.config file. Entries made in the safe controls element of SharePoint are encountered by the SharePointHandler object and will be loaded in the SharePoint environment properly, those not will not be loaded and will throw an error.

In the generic safe control entry (this is general, there could be more), there is generally the Assembly name, the namespace, the public key token numeric, the typename, and the safe declaration (whether it is safe or not). There are other optional elements.

6) What is the CreateChildControls() method? How can you use it to do something simple like displaying a Label control?

The CreateChildControls method in WebParts is used to notify the WebPart that there are children controls that should be output for rendering. Basically, it will add any child ASP.NET controls that are called instantiating each control with its relevant properties set, wire any relevant event handlers to the control, etc. Then the add method of the control class will add the control to the controls collection. In the relevant WebPart render method, the EnsureChildControls method can be called (or set to false if no child controls should be called) to ensure that the CreateChildControls method is run. When using CreateChildControls it implies that your WebPart contains a composition of child controls.

In order to create something like a label control in Create, you would create a new label control using the new keyword, set the various properties of the control like Visible=True and ForeColor = Color.Red, and then use Controls.Add(myLabelControl) to add the control to the controls collection. Then you can declare EnsureChildControls in the Render method of the WebPart.

7) What does the RenderContents method do in an ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart?

The render contents method will render the WebPart content to the writer, usually an HtmlTextWriter since WebParts will output to an HTML stream. RenderContents is used to tell how the controls that are going to be displayed in the WebPart should be rendered on the page.

*** Side Question: I got asked what the difference between CreateChildControls and the RenderContents method. The CreateChildControls method is used to add controls to the WebPart, and the RenderContents method is used to tell the page framework how to render the control into HTML to display on a page.

What is the WebPartManager sealed class? What is its purpose?

The WebPartManager sealed class is responsible for managing everything occurring on a WebPart page, such as the WebParts (controls), events, and misc. functionality that will occur in WebPartZones. For example, the WebPartManager is responsible for the functionality that is provided when you are working with moving a WebPart from WebPartZone to WebPartZone. It is known as the “the central class of the Web Part Control Set.”

*** Side Question: I got asked how many WebPartManager controls should be on a page. In order to have WebParts on a page there has to be just one WebPartManager control to manage all the WebParts on the page.

9) What is a SPSite and SPWeb object, and what is the difference between each of the objects?

The SPSite object represents a collection of sites (site collection [a top level sites and all its subsites]). The SPWeb object represents an instance SharePoint Web, and SPWeb object contains things like the actual content. A SPSite object contains the various subsites and the information regarding them.

10) How would you go about getting a reference to a site?

Select For Unformatted Code

C#:

1. oSPSite = new  SPSite(“http:/server”);
2.  
3. oSPWeb = oSPSite.OpenWeb();

11) What does a SPWebApplication object represent?

The SPWebApplication objects represents a SharePoint Web Application, which essentially is an IIS virtual server. Using the class you can instigate high level operations, such as getting all the features of an entire Web Application instance, or doing high level creation operations like creating new Web Applications through code.

12) Would you use SPWebApplication to get information like the SMTP address of the SharePoint site?

Yes, since this is a Web Application level setting. You would iterate through each SPWebApplication in the SPWebApplication collection, and then use the appropriate property calls (OutboundMailServiceInstance) in order to return settings regarding the mail service such as the SMTP address.

Side Question: I got asked if there are other ways to send emails from SharePoint. The answer is yes, there is. You can use the SendMail method from the SPutility class to send simple emails, however it is not as robust as using the System.Net.Mail functionality since it doesn’t allow things like setting priorities on the email.

13) How do you connect (reference) to a SharePoint list, and how do you insert a new List Item?

Select For Unformatted Code

C#:

1. using(SPSite mySite = new SPSite(“yourserver”))
2. {
3. using(SPWeb myWeb = mySite.OpenWeb())
4. {
5. SPList interviewList = myWeb.Lists["listtoinsert"];
6. SPListItem newItem = interviewList.Items.Add();
7.  
8. newItem["interview"] = “interview”;
9. newItem.Update();
10. }
11. }

14) How would you loop using SPList through all SharePont List items, assuming you know the name (in a string value) of the list you want to iterate through, and already have all the site code written?

Select For Unformatted Code

C#:

1. SPList interviewList = myWeb.Lists["listtoiterate"];
2. foreach (SPListItem interview  in interviewList)
3. {
4. // Do Something
5. }

15) How do you return SharePoint List items using SharePoint web services?

In order to retrieve list items from a SharePoint list through Web Services, you should use the lists.asmx web service by establishing a web reference in Visual Studio. The lists.asmx exposes the GetListItems method, which will allow the return of the full content of the list in an XML node. It will take parameters like the GUID of the name of the list you are querying against, the GUID of the view you are going to query, etc.

Side Question: I got asked how I built queries with the lists.asmx web service. In order to build queries with this service, one of the parameters that the GetListItems method exposes is the option to build a CAML query. There are other ways to do this as well, but that was how I answered it.

16) When retrieving List items using SharePoint Web Services, how do you specify explicit credentials to be passed to access the list items?

In order to specify explicit credentials with a Web Service, you generally instantiate the web service, and then using the credentials properties of the Web Service object you use the System.Net.NetworkCredential class to specify the username, password, and domain that you wish to pass when making the web service call and operations.

*** Side Question: I got asked when you should state the credentials in code. You must state the credentials you are going to pass to the web service before you call any of the methods of the web service, otherwise the call will fail.

17) What is CAML, and why would you use it?

CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language. CAML is an XML based language which provides data constructs that build up the SharePoint fields, view, and is used for table definition during site provisioning. CAML is responsible for rending data and the resulting HTML that is output to the user in SharePoint. CAML can be used for a variety of circumstances, overall is used to query, build and customize SharePoint based sites. A general use would be building a CAML query in a SharePoint WebPart in order to retrieve values from a SharePoint list.
18) What is impersonation, and when would you use impersonation?

Impersonation can basically provide the functionality of executing something in the context of a different identity, for example assigning an account to users with anonymous access. You would use impersonation in order to access resources on behalf of the user with a different account, that normally, that wouldn’t be able to access or execute something.

19) What is the IDesignTimeHtmlProvider interface, and when can you use it in WebParts?

The IDesignTimeHtmlProvider interface uses the function GetDesignTimeHtml() which can contain your relevant render methods. It was helpful to use in 2003 since it allowed your WebPart to have a preview while a page was edited in FrontPage with the Webpart on it, because the GetDesignTimeHtml() method contains the HTML for the designer to render.

20) What are WebPart properties, and what are some of the attributes you see when declaring WebPart properties in code?

WebPart properties are just like ASP.NET control properties, they are used to interact with and specify attributes that should be applied to a WebPart by a user. Some of the attributes you see with ASP.NET 2.0 properties are WebDescription, WebDisplayName, Category, Personalizable, and WebBrowsable. Although most of these properties come from the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts class, ones like Category come out of System.ComponentModel namespace.

21) Why are properties important in WebPart development, and how have you exploited them in past development projects? What must each custom property have?

Properties are important because WebParts allow levels of personalization for each user. WebPart properties make it possible for a user to interact, adjust, and increase overall experience value with the programmatic assets that you develop without having the need to use an external editor or right any code. A very simple example of exploiting a property would be something like allowing the user to change the text on the WebPart design interface so that they can display whatever string of text they desire.

Each custom property that you have must have the appropriate get and set accessor methods.

22) What are ClassResources? How do you reference and deploy resources with an ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart?

ClassResources are used when inheriting from the SharePoint.WebPart.WebPartPages.WebPart base class, and are defined in the SharePoint solution file as things that should be stored in the wpresources directory on the server. It is a helpful directory to use in order to deploy custom images. In ASP.NET 2.0, typically things such as images are referenced by embedding them as resources within an assembly. The good part about ClassResources is they can help to eliminate recompiles to change small interface adjustments or alterations to external JavaScript files.

23) What is a SharePoint Solution File? How does it differ from WebPart .cab files in legacy development? What does it contain?

A SharePoint solution file is essentially a .cabinet file with all a developers ustom componets suffixed with a .wsp extension that aids in deployment. The big difference with SharePoint solution files is is that a solution:

allows deployment to all WFE’s in a farm

is highly manageable from the interface allowing deployment, retraction, and versioning

Can package all types of assets like site definitions, feature definitions (and associated components), Webparts, etc.

Can provide Code Access Security provisioning to avoid GAC deployments

Just to name a few things…

24) What is a .ddf file and what does it have to do with SharePoint Solution creation?

A .ddf file is a data directive file and is used when building the SharePoint solution bundle specifying the source files and their destination locations. The important thing for someone to understand is that the .ddf file will be passed as a parameter to the MAKECAB utility to orchestrate construction of the SharePoint solution fiel.

25) What file does a SharePoint solution package use to orchestrate (describe) its packaged contents?

The solution Manifest.XML file.

26) What deployment mechanism can you use to instigate Code Access Security attributes for your WebParts?

SharePoint solution files can add in order to handle code access security deployment issues. This is done in the element in the SharePoint solution manifest.XML, which makes it easier to get assemblies the appropriate permissions in order to operate in the bin directory of the web application.

27) What is a SharePoint Feature? What files are used to define a feature?

A SharePoint Feature is a functional component that can be activated and deactivate at various scopes throughout a SharePoint instances, such as at the farm, site collection, web, etc. Features have their own receiver architecture, which allow you to trap events such as when a feature is installing, uninstalling, activated, or deactivated. They are helpful because they allow ease of upgrades and versioning.

The two files that are used to define a feature are the feature.xml and manifest file. The feature XML file defines the actual feature and will make SharePoint aware of the installed feature. The manifest file contains details about the feature such as functionality.

Side Question: I got asked how the introduction of features has changed the concept of site definitions. SharePoint features are important when understanding the architecture of site definitions, since the ONET.XML file has been vastly truncated since it has several feature stapled on it.

28) What types of SharePoint assets can be deployed with a SharePoint feature?

Features can do a lot. For example, you could deploy

Simple site customizations

Custom site navigation

WebParts

pages

list types

list instances

event handlers

workflows

custom actions

just to name a few….

29) What are event receivers?

Event receivers are classes that inherit from the SpItemEventReciever or SPListEventReciever base class (both of which derive out of the abstract base class SPEventRecieverBase), and provide the option of responding to events as they occur within SharePoint, such as adding an item or deleting an item.

30) When would you use an event receiver?

Since event receivers respond to events, you could use a receiver for something as simple as canceling an action, such as deleting a document library by using the Cancel property. This would essentially prevent users from deleting any documents if you wanted to maintain retention of stored data.

31) What base class do event receivers inherit from?

Event receivers either inherit from the SPListEventReciever base class or the SPItemEventReciever base class, both which derive from the abstract base class SPEventReceiverBase.

32) If I wanted to not allow people to delete documents from a document library, how would I go about it?

You would on the ItemDeleting event set: properties.Cancel= true.

33) What is the difference between an asynchronous and synchronous event receivers?

An asynchronous event occurs after an action has taken place, and a synchronous event occurs before an action has take place. For example, an asynchronous event is ItemAdded, and its sister synchronous event is ItemAdding.

34) How could you append a string to the title of a site when it is provisioned?

In the OnActivated event:

Select For Unformatted Code

C#:

1. SPWeb site = siteCollection.RootWeb;
2. site.Title += “interview”;
3. site.Update();

35) Can an event receiver be deployed through a SharePoint feature?

Yes.

36) What is a content type?

A content type is an information blueprint basically that can be re-used throughout a SharePoint environment for defining things like metadata and associated behaviors. It is basically an extension of a SharePoint list, however makes it portable for use throughout an instance regardless of where the instantiation occurs, ergo has location independence. Multiple content types can exist in one document library assuming that the appropriate document library settings are enabled. The content type will contain things like the metadata, listform pages, workflows, templates (if a document content type), and associated custom written functionality.

37) Can a content type have receivers associated with it?

Yes, a content type can have an event receiver associated with it, either inheriting from the SPListEventReciever base class for list level events, or inheriting from the SPItemEventReciever base class. Whenever the content type is instantiated, it will be subject to the event receivers that are associated with it.

38) What two files are typically (this is kept generally) included when developing a content type, and what is the purpose of each?

There is generally the main content type file that holds things like the content type ID, name, group, description, and version. There is also the ContentType.Fields file which contains the fields to include in the content type that has the ID, Type, Name, DisplayName, StaticName, Hidden, Required, and Sealed elements. They are related by the FieldRefs element in the main content type file.

39) What is an ancestral type and what does it have to do with content types?

An ancestral type is the base type that the content type is deriving from, such as Document (0×0101). The ancestral type will define the metadata fields that are included with the custom content type.

40) Can a list definition be derived from a custom content type?

Yes, a list definition can derive from a content type which can be seen in the schema.XML of the list definition in the element.

41) When creating a list definition, how can you create an instance of the list?

You can create a new instance of a list by creating an instance.XML file.

42) What is a Field Control?

Field controls are simple ASP.NET 2.0 server controls that provide the basic field functionality of SharePoint. They provide basic general functionality such as displaying or editing list data as it appears on SharePoint list pages.

43) What base class do custom Field Controls inherit from?

This varies. Generally, custom field controls inherit from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.BaseFieldControl namespace, but you can inherit from the default field controls.

44) What is a SharePoint site definition? What is ghosted (uncustomized) and unghosted (customized)?

SharePoint site definitions are the core set of functionality from which SharePoint site are built from, building from the SiteTemplates directory in the SharePoint 12 hive. Site definitions allow several sites to inherit from a core set of files on the file system, although appear to have unique pages, thereby increasing performance and allowing changes that happen to a site propagate to all sites that inherit from a site definition. Ghosted means that when SharePoint creates a new site it will reference the files in the related site definition upon site provisioning. Unghosted means that the site has been edited with an external editor, and therefore the customizations are instead stored in the database, breaking the inheritance of those files from the file system.

45) How does one deploy new SharePoint site definitions so that they are made aware to the SharePoint system?

The best way to deploy site definitions in the SharePoint 2007 framework is to use a SharePoint solution file, so that the new site definition is automatically populated to all WFE’s in the SharePoint farm.

What is a Shared Service Provider? In what circumstances might you create more than one?

The Shared Service Provider in MOSS is where the administrator manages the Search crawling and indexing in the portal. It is also where the information from Active Directory is compiled. The reasons for having more than one would be to ensure information in a secure or sensitive part of your portal is not included in search results for the rest of the portal.

What are Features and Solutions and what is the difference between the two?

Features are a method for developers to package customisations and deploy them to the SharePoint portal. They can then be activated and deactivated at the Site Collection level. Solutions are a way to bundle features together for deployment.

 What is the difference between a Site Definition and a Site Template?

Site Definitions are stored on the hard drive of the SharePoint front end servers. They are used by the SharePoint application to generate the sites users can create. Site Templates are created by users as a copy of a site they have configured and modified so that they do not have to recreate lists, libraries, views and columns every time they need a new instance of a site. 

  what is SharePoint?

Portal Collaboration Software.

  what is the difference between SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services?

SharePoint Portal Server is the global portal offering features like global navigation and searching. Windows SharePoint Services is more content management based with document libraries and lists. You apply information to certain areas within your portal from Windows SharePoint Services or directly to portal areas.

  what is a document library?

A document library is where you upload your core documents. They consist of a row and column view with links to the documents. When the document is updated so is the link on your site. You can also track metadata on your documents. Metadata would consist of document properties.

  what is a meeting workspace?

A meeting workspace is a place to store information, attendees, and tasks related to a specific meeting.

  what is a document workspace?

Document workspaces consist of information surrounding a single or multiple documents.

  what is a web part?

Web parts consist of xml queries to full SharePoint lists or document libraries. You can also develop your own web parts and web part pages.

  what is the difference between a document library and a form library?

Document libraries consist of your core documents. An example would be a word document, excel, powerpoint, visio, pdf, etc… Form libraries consist of XML forms.

  what is a web part zone?

Web part zones are what your web parts reside in and help categorize your web parts when designing a page.

  how is security managed in SharePoint?

Security can be handled at the machine, domain, or sharepoint level.

  how are web parts developed?

Web parts are developed in Visual Studio .Net. VS.Net offers many web part and page templates and can also be downloaded from the Microsoft site.

  what is a site definition?

It’s a methods for providing prepackaged site and list content.

  what is a template?

A template is a pre-defined set of functions or settings that can be used over time. There are many templates within SharePoint, Site Templates, Document Templates, Document Library and List Templates.

  how do you install web parts?

Web Parts should be distributed as a .CAB (cabinet) file using the MSI Installer.

  what is CAML?

tands for Collaborative Application Markup Language and is an XML-based language that is used in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to define sites and lists, including, for example, fields, views, or forms, but CAML is also used to define tables in the Windows SharePoint Services database during site provisioning.

  what is a DWP?

he file extension of a web part.

  what is the GAC?

Global Assembly Cache folder on the server hosting SharePoint. You place your assemblies there for web parts and services.

  what are the differences between web part page gallery, site gallery, virtual server gallery and online gallery?

Web Part Page Gallery is the default gallery that comes installed with SharePoint. Site Gallery is specific to one site. Virtual Server gallery is specific to that virtual server and online gallery are downloadable web parts from Microsoft.

  what is the difference between a site and a web?

The pages in a Web site generally cover one or more topics and are interconnected through hyperlinks. Most Web sites have a home page as their starting point. While a Web is simply a blank site with SharePoint functionality built in; meaning you have to create the site from the ground up.

  What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services — a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 — provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, and it serves as a platform for application development.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide additional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.

  What is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server?

SharePoint Portal Server is a portal server that connects people, teams, and knowledge across business processes. SharePoint Portal Server integrates information from various systems into one secure solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities. It provides flexible deployment and management tools, and facilitates end-to-end collaboration through data aggregation, organization, and searching. SharePoint Portal Server also enables users to quickly find relevant information through customization and personalization of portal content and layout as well as through audience targeting.

  What is Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft Windows Services is the engine that allows administrators to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office System and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a plat form for application development. SharePoint sites provide communities for team collaboration, enabling users to work together on documents, tasks, and projects. The environment for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development.

  What is the relationship between Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) deliver highly scalable collaboration solutions with flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services provides sites for team collaboration, while Share Point Portal Server connects these sites, people, and business processes—facilitating knowledge sharing and smart organizations. SharePoint Portal Server also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization.

  Who is Office SharePoint Server 2007 designed for?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used by information workers, IT administrators, and application developers.
is designed

  What are the main benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
* Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management of their electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar, everyday applications.
* Organizations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners across organizational boundaries using InfoPath Forms Services–driven solutions.
* Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through the facilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, access to back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can be personalized.
* Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks.
* Developers have a rich platform to build a new class of applications, called Office Business Applications, that combine powerful developer functionality with the flexibility and ease of deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the use of out-of-the-box application services, developers can build richer applications with less code.

  What is the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have identical feature functionality. While the feature functionality is similar, the usage rights are different.

If you are creating an Internet, or Extranet, facing website, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites which does not require the purchase client access licenses. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition can only be used for Internet facing websites and all content, information, and applications must be accessible to non-employees. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition cannot be accessed by employees creating, sharing, or collaborating on content which is solely for internal use only, such as an Intranet Portal scenario. See the previous section on licensing for more information on the usage scenarios.

  What suites of the 2007 Microsoft Office system work with Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Office Outlook 2007 provides bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007, included as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, will enable bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.

Features such as the document panel and the ability to publish to Excel Services will only be enabled when using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007or Office Enterprise 2007.

Excel Services will only work with documents saved in the new Office Excel 2007 file format (XLSX).

  How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?

SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, who are invited to join via e-mail. In addition, the site administrator can restrict certain members’ roles by assigning different permission levels to view post and edit.

  Can I post any kind of document?

You can post documents in many formats, including .pdf, .htm and .doc. In addition, if you are using Microsoft Office XP, you can save documents directly to your Windows SharePoint Services site.

  Can I download information directly from a SharePoint site to a personal digital assistant (PDA)?

No you cannot. However, you can exchange contact information lists with Microsoft Outlook.

  How long does it take to set up the initial team Web site?

It only takes a few minutes to create a complete Web site. Preformatted forms let you and your team members contribute to the site by filling out lists. Standard forms include announcements, events, contacts, tasks, surveys, discussions and links.

  Can I create custom templates?

Yes you can. You can have templates for business plans, doctor’s office, lawyer’s office etc.

  How can I make my site public? By default, all sites are created private.

If you want your site to be a public Web site, enable anonymous access for the entire site. Then you can give out your URL to anybody in your business card, e-mail or any other marketing material. The URL for your Web site will be:
http:// yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com

Hence, please take special care to name your site.
These Web sites are ideal for information and knowledge intensive sites and/or sites where you need to have shared Web workspace.
Remember: Under each parent Web site, you can create up to 10 sub-sites each with unique permissions, settings and security rights.

  How do the sub sites work?

You can create a sub site for various categories. For example:
* Departments – finance, marketing, IT
* Products – electrical, mechanical, hydraulics
* Projects – Trey Research, Department of Transportation, FDA
* Team – Retention team, BPR team
* Clients – new clients, old clients
* Suppliers – Supplier 1, Supplier 2, Supplier 3
* Customers – Customer A, Customer B, Customer C
* Real estate – property A, property B

The URLs for each will be, for example:
* http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/finance
* http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/marketing

You can keep track of permissions for each team separately so that access is restricted while maintaining global access to the parent site.

  How do I make my site non-restricted?

If you want your site to have anonymous access enabled (i.e., you want to treat it like any site on the Internet that does not ask you to provide a user name and password to see the content of the site), follow these simple steps:
# Login as an administrator
# Click on site settings
# Click on Go to Site Administration
# Click on Manage anonymous access
# Choose one of the three conditions on what Anonymous users can access:
** Entire Web site
** Lists and libraries
** Nothing

Default condition is nothing; your site has restricted access. The default conditions allow you to create a secure site for your Web site.

  Can I get domain name for my Web site?

Unfortunately, no. At this point, we don’t offer domain names for SharePoint sites. But very soon we will be making this available for all our SharePoint site customers. Please keep checking this page for further update on this. Meanwhile, we suggest you go ahead and set up your site and create content for it.

  What are picture libraries?

Picture libraries allow you to access a photo album and view it as a slide show or thumbnails or a film strip. You can have separate folder for each event, category, etc

  What are the advantages of a hosted SharePoint vs. one that is on an in-house server?

* No hardware investment, i.e. lower costs
* No software to download – ready to start from the word go
* No IT resources – Anyone who has used a Web program like Hotmail can use it
* Faster deployment

  Can I ask users outside of my organization to participate in my Windows SharePoint Services site?

Yes. You can manage this process using the Administration Site Settings. Simply add users via their e-mail alias and assign permissions such as Reader or Contributor.

  Are there any IT requirements or downloads required to set up my SharePoint site?

No. You do not need to download any code or plan for any IT support. Simply complete the on-line signup process and provide us your current and correct email address. Once you have successfully signed up and your site has been provisioned, we will send a confirmation to the email address you provided.

  I am located outside of the United States. Are there any restrictions or requirements for accessing the Windows SharePoint Services?

No. There are no system or bandwidth limitations for international trial users. Additionally language packs have been installed which allow users to set up sub-webs in languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.

  Are there any browser recommendations?

Yes. Microsoft recommends using the following browsers for viewing and editing Windows SharePoint Services sites: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later.

  What security levels are assigned to users?

Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels by default and additional levels can be composed as necessary.
* Reader – Has read-only access to the Web site.
* Contributor – Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
* Web Designer – Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
* Administrator – Has full control of the Web site.

  How secure are Windows SharePoint Services sites hosted by Microsoft?

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Technical security measures provide firewall protection, intrusion detection, and web-publishing rules. The Microsoft operation center team tests and deploys software updates in order to maintain the highest level of security and software reliability. Software hot-fixes and service packs are tested and deployed based on their priority and level of risk. Security related hot-fixes are rapidly deployed into the environment to address current threats. A comprehensive software validation activity ensures software stability through regression testing prior to deployment.

  What is the difference between an Internet and an intranet site?

An internet site is a normal site that anyone on the internet can access (e.g., www.msn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.). You can set up a site for your company that can be accessed by anyone without any user name and password.

An intranet (or internal network), though hosted on the Web, can only be accessed by people who are members of the network. They need to have a login and password that was assigned to them when they were added to the site by the site administrator.

  What is a workspace?

A site or workspace is when you want a new place for collaborating on Web pages, lists and document libraries. For example, you might create a site to manage a new team or project, collaborate on a document or prepare for a meeting.

  What are the various kinds of roles the users can have?

A user can be assigned one of the following roles
* Reader – Has read-only access to the Web site.
* Contributor – Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
* Web Designer – Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
* Administrator – Has full control of the Web site.

  Can more than one person use the same login?

If the users sharing that login will have the same permissions and there is no fear of them sharing a password, then yes. Otherwise, this is discouraged.

  How customizable is the user-to-user access?

User permissions apply to an entire Web, not to documents themselves. However, you can have additional sub webs that can optionally have their own permissions. Each user can be given any of four default roles. Additional roles can be defined by the administrator.

  Can each user have access to their own calendar?

Yes there are two ways to do this,
* by creating a calendar for each user, or
* by creating a calendar with a view for each user

  How many files can I upload?

There is no restriction in place except that any storage consumed beyond that provided by the base offering may have an additional monthly charge associated with them.

  What types of files can I upload / post to the site?

The only files restricted are those ending with the following extensions: .asa, .asp, .ida, .idc, .idq.  Microsoft reserves the right to add additional file types to this listing at any time.  Also, no content that violates the terms of service may be uploaded or posted to the site.

  Can SharePoint be linked to an external data source?

SharePoint data can be opened with Access and Excel as an external data source. Thus, SharePoint can be referenced as an external data source. SharePoint itself cannot reference an external data source.

  Can SharePoint be linked to a SQL database?

This is possible via a custom application, but it not natively supported by SharePoint or SQL Server.

  Can I customize my Windows SharePoint Services site?

YES! Windows SharePoint Services makes updating sites and their content from the browser easier then ever.

SharePoint includes tools that let you create custom lists, calendars, page views, etc. You can apply a theme; add List, Survey and Document Library Web Parts to a page; create personal views; change logos; connect Web Parts and more.

To fully customize your site, you can use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Specifically, you can use FrontPage themes and shared borders, and also use FrontPage to create photo galleries and top ten lists, utilize standard usage reports, and integrate automatic Web content.

  Will Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 run on a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows?

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Forms Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search will support 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

  How  Office SharePoint Server 2007  can help you?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help us:

Manage content and streamline processes. Comprehensively manage and control unstructured content like Microsoft Office documents, Web pages, Portable Document Format file (PDF) files, and e-mail messages. Streamline business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity.

Improve business insight. Monitor your business, enable better-informed decisions, and respond proactively to business events.

Find and share information more simply. Find information and expertise wherever they are located. Share knowledge and simplify working with others within and across organizational boundaries.

Empower IT to make a strategic impact. Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms that have to be maintained by supporting all the intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.
 
Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities can help improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides these capabilities in an integrated server offering, so your organization doesn’t have to integrate fragmented technology solutions itself.

  What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?

The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people within the organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.

  What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?

* User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
* Document management enhancements
* The new Workflow engine
* Office 2007 Integration
* New Web Parts
* New Site-type templates
* Enhancements to List technology
* Web Content Management
* Business Data Catalog
* Search enhancements
* Report Center
* Records Management
* Business Intelligence and Excel Server
* Forms Server and InfoPath
* The “Features” feature
* Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication  
 

What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?

The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:
* Document management
* Records management
* Web content management
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.

Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?

Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you find documents and information fast.

  Write the features of the search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. New features provide:
* A consistent and familiar search experience.
* Increased relevance of search results.
* New functions to search for people and expertise.
* Ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications and
* Improved manageability and extensibility.

  What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

* Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
* Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
* Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
* Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
* Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
* Connect people with information and expertise.
* Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
* Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
* Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
* Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

  Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?

The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.

  What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?

If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides error handling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled security exceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where the Web Part appears.

  How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?

Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option.

Option Pros Cons

Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server. For more information, see “Setting the trust level for a virtual server” Easy to implement.

In a development environment, increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure.

This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server.
There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server.

Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see “How do I create a custom policy file?” Recommended approach.

This option is most secure.

An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirements for the assembly.

By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your Web Parts. 

Requires the most configuration of all three options.
Install your assemblies in the GAC 

Easy to implement.
This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed in the BIN directory. 

This option is less secure.

Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as it potentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope than necessary

In a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies.

Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.

  Does SharePoint work with NFS?

Yes and no. It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the sharepoint database or logs cannot be stored there.

  How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?

Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which
provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them on dashboards (pages). SS doesn’t have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference would be SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.

  What would you like to see in the next version of SharePoint?

A few suggestions:

# SPS and STS on same machine
# Tree view of Categories and Folders
# General Discussion Web Part
# Personalization of Dashboards
# Role Customization
# Email to say WHY a document has been rejected for Approval
# More ways to customize the interface
# Backup and restore an individual Workspaces
# Filter for Visio
# Better way to track activity on SPS

  Why Sharepoint is not a viable solution for enterprise wide deployments?

Document management does not scale beyond a single server, but scales great within a single server. For example, a quad Xeon machine with 4GB of RAM works great for a document management server that has about 900,000 – 1,000,000 document, but if you need to store 50,000,000 document and want to have them all in one single workspace then it does not scale at all. If you need a scenario like this, you need to plan your deployment right and it should scale for you, it just does not right out of the box.
If you are using your server as a portal and search server most for the most part it scales great. You can have many different servers crawl content sources and have separate servers searching and serving the content.

If you have < 750,000 documents per server and fewer than 4 content sources and fewer than 50,000 users, SPS should scale just fine for your needs with the proper planning.

  What are the actual advantages of SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) over SharePoint Team Services (STS)?

SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has MUCH better document management. It has check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, publishing, subscriptions, categories, etc. STS does not have these features, or they are very scaled back. SharePoint team Services (SPS) has a better search engine, and can crawl multiple content sources. STS cannot. STS is easier to manage and much better for a team environment where there is not much Document Management going on. SPS is better for an organization, or where Document Management is crucial.

  How Does SharePoint work?

The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

  How do I open an older version of a document?

Normally, all previous versions are located in the shadow, so if you right click a published document from within the web folders, go to properties and then the third tab, versions you can view older versions.

If you want to do this in code:
<pre>
strURL = “url of the last published version”
Set oVersion = New PKMCDO.KnowledgeVersion
Set prmRs = oVersion.VersionHistory(strURL)
Set oVersion = Nothing
</pre>
prmRS will contain a recordset, which contains the url to the old versions in the shadow.

  Why do the workspace virtual directories show the error “stop sign” symbol in the IIS snap-in?

If World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) starts before Microsoft Exchange Information Store (MSExchangeIS), “stop sign” symbols appear under the Default Web Site folder of the Internet Information Services console in Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

There is a dependency between the local paths of the SharePoint Portal Server virtual directories and the MSExchangeIS. You must start MSExchangeIS first, followed by W3SVC.

Complete the following steps to prevent the stop signs from appearing each time you restart:

# Change the Startup type for W3SVC to Manual.
# Restart the server. The MSExchangeIS service starts automatically.
# Start W3SVC.

  What newsgroups are available?

There are two,
* microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver and
* microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development.

  What is SharePoint from a Technical Perspective?

Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft’s .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System.

SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web’s medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of!

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

  What is SharePoint from an Administration Perspective?

Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like “edit profile”. Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.

  What is SharePoint from a Users Perspective?

From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessible over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name “Share-Point”. Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, and version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint’s Search facility. Even documents not “in” SharePoint can be included in the search engine’s index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it’s a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.

  What are the various Sharepoint 2003 and Exchange integration points?

Link to Outlook

This is a button on contacts or events lists that lets Outlook 2003 add a pst file named Sharepoint Folders and it links to the data on the site. It’s read-only, but you could make the home page for that PST be the Sharepoint site for easier viewing. The link to outlook feature seems more to be where some can public a calendar, but not want too much collaboration. For example, a holiday schedule, company meeting schedule, etc, can be made available for people to be able to view from Outlook without having to go to a web browser. Another nice thing about OL2K3 is that you can compare these calendars with others side by side.

Searching Public Folders

With SPS you can index Exchange’s public folders with the search engine so that all that precious public folder content is searchable. You’ll want to look at content sources and indexing in Sharepoint administration.

Displaying Public Folders in a web part

Since exchange web-enables public folders, you can create a web part that displays that content. IE, http://exchangeserver/Public/IT/Helpdesk will display the IT/Helpdesk public folder via OWA. So you add the Page Viewer web part to a page and point it at that URL. The key here is to add ?cmd=contents to the end of the url if you don’t want the navigator pane on the left.

Smart web parts

Some of the web parts that come with SPS allow you to add a web part to a page that actually takes the users outlook info (calendar, inbox, contacts, tasks) and put them into the page.

  Can SharePoint compare two document versions?

“In Word 2003, you can compare documents side by side. Open two documents. Then, from the Window menu of one of them, select the Compare Side By Side command. If you have only two documents open, the command will automatically choose to compare them. If you have three or more documents open, you’ll have to select which document to compare with the current file.

A floating toolbar with two buttons will open. If the button on the left is selected, Word will scroll both documents at the same time. Press the button on the right side of the toolbar to return to where the cursor was located when you started comparing.”

  What are the integration differences between SPS 2003 and the various Office versions?

SPS webpage can detect you have installed the Office 2003 and run local dll to implement some SPS function, e.g. multi-file upload only works when you have office 2003 installed.

Integration with Office XP is gone.

You will get guys telling you that you can integrate with SPSv2 if you install a backwards compatible document library – but that’s really just putting a bit of SPS 2001 on the server.

Believe me, check-in, check-out, which are themselves very basic, are not available from inside Office XP, or even from the context menu in Windows Explorer.

The ONLY option you have is to use the web interface to check-in or check-out.

Here is a great post from Spencer Harbar entitled SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes.  In it, Spencer has gone to the immense effort of logging exactly what all of the post-SP1 hotfixes are and what version numbers they represent.  If you need to figure out where your SharePoint farm stands in the update timeline, this post will be of real help.

I’m copying Spencer’s list here as of today just for quick reference, but click on through to Spencer’s post for further updates and some good advice about them as well!

We’re using our hosted WSS site for our Internet site, our Intranet, and our Client Extranet.  This is a very cool use of WSS, IMHO.  Not only do we have all of the great content management capabilities for our external site, but we have the team-based capabilities which we can use to interact with our clients and amongst ourselves.

One of the tricky bits to this configuration is of course to get the permissions right.  Because WSS was built fundamentally as a collaboration platform, your users often see things that you don’t really want them to.  One specific thing you probably don’t want to expose is the permission groups.  For instance, if you have a group called Clients – Client A, you probably don’t want the members of that group to know that the group Clients – Client B even exists, not to mention its membership.

The solution for this isn’t totally obvious.  By default, every user who has access to a site can also see the permission groups and users from that site.  Since permission groups are managed at the Site Collection level, that means that they can see all of the groups, not just the ones that have permissions on the current site.  Sure, you might say, just create separate Site Collections.  That’s one answer, but since we want to be able to enable collaboration not only between us and our clients, but potentially also amongst our clients (should they decide they want to be a part of that community), separate Site Collections would be limiting.  We want this all to work within one Site Collection.

Removing the People and Roles link on the Quick Launch hides the visible navigation, but any user who has spent any time with SharePoint is likely to know that the page lives at /_layouts/people.aspx.  (You will want to remove the People and Groups link, though, so that the users won’t get the unsightly

Error: Access Denied

error page.)  Never forget that obscurity isn’t security!

To clean this up, I created new roles called Read – No Browse User Information and Contribute – No Browse User Information.  (See this previous post about managing roles.)  These are copies of the Read and Contribute roles, but with Browse User Information removed:

We have a permission group called Clients, and I assigned the Read – No Browse User Information role to that group on the Extranet site.  Each client sub-site has a permission group like Client – Client A which is assigned the Contribute – No Browse User Information role.  Now the users can read or interact with all of the content, as appropriate, but they can’t “see” each other. 

If you do this, make sure that you make the change for any child sites which don’t inherit permissions as well!

User Information cannot be modified by acessing “My Settings” and then clicking “Edit Item” with a MOSS Installation

although this is perfectly possible with a WSS installation.

Please refer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926202

There are two user profiles stores – one is associated with WSS and other is associated with MOSS. The WSS profile is accessed from Welcome User >> My Settings page(userdisp.aspx). The MOSS profiles are created when users are imported into the system from AD or LDAP. They are accessed by People Search or from a link off of your MySite >> Details (Editprofile.aspx)

The reason for having two profile stores is that a simple WSS installation without MOSS must support a functionality where a basic user profile can be viewed and modified (again, accessed through Welcome User >> My Settings page) . In case of a MOSS installation , the basic WSS profile is retained and an additional functionality of Profile Information Management is enabled through shared service. Once you do a profile import, and go to the WSS profile(accessed through Welcome User >> My Settings page), you’ll see a bunch of properties added by MOSS . If you want to modify property values in your profile, you need to go to your MOSS profile from your MySite (MySite >> Details). You’ll be on the Editprofile.aspx page. Once done with modifications then a sync to your WSS user information list happens by a couple of timer jobs. You will see the modified values show up on the WSS profile once the sync is done. Well, two MOSS Timer jobs per Web Application apparently control the synchronisation. If you take a look at the Timer Job definitions (Central Administration -> Operations -> Timer Job definitions), you’ll find jobs called Profile Synchronization and Quick Profile Synchronization. These jobs should sync the changes to the WSS profiles. A server reboot will make the synchronization happen. It is a bit drastic to reboot the server simply just to force MOSS to update a property. To get proper synchronization of profile information use stsadm -o sync to force the property sync:

• -o -synctiming changes the Profile Sync job
• -o -sweeptiming changes the Quick Profile Sync job

To get better results by changing the schedule for the Profile Sync job to run every couple of minutes use stsadm -o sync -synctiming m:2 This may not be appropriate in a production environment with a large user population, though.

In case of a MOSS installation enabling users to update their profile by acessing Welcome User >> My Settings requires you to redirect each request to userdisp.aspx(Welcome User >> My Settings ) to EditProfile.aspx (MySite > Details) so that default user experience is modified and the user is no longer shown userdisp.aspx. This can be achieved by modifying the code in userdisp.aspx

Add the following line to the start of the first line in userdisp.aspx

<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>


Add the rest of this code just before the final </asp:Content> tag at the bottom of the page
<%
try
{
Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext cntx =   Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext.GetContext(HttpContext.Current);
Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager profileManager = new  Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager(cntx);
bool userExists = profileManager.UserExists(this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());
if (userExists)
{
Response.Redirect(profileManager.MySiteHostUrl + "Person.aspx?accountname=" + this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());
}
}
catch
{
// do nothing, original userdisp.aspx content will be displayed
}
%>

However with this modification be aware of the case when the user has been deleted from AD, removed from the SPS User Profile and deleted from the Site Collection. The userdisp.aspx page just shows an error.Other smarter work around could be to have a copy of EditProfile.aspx renamed to userdisp.aspx

Last Monday the Microsoft SharePoint Team announced the availability of the February Cumulative Update packages.

Quick links

A quick introduction

Because of the way SharePoint Server 2007 is implemented behind the scenes, the upgrade process differs quite a bit from the usual update progress we have come accustomed to with other Windows based technologies.

Usually installing updates comes down to:

• downloading an update package
• launching a setup program
• follow on-screen instructions

In the background the upgrade process updates or replaces some files, makes backups of the existing files and the process is terminated. This works just fine for Windows Applications because in most cases the only dependency is the operating system. As long as the update process doesn’t need to update files that are in use, we can continue working as we did before launching the update.

For SharePoint Server 2007 things are somewhat different:

1. First of all SharePoint Server 2007 builds upon the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 platform which in turn is build on top the .NET framework.
2. Secondly, all members of a SharePoint farm are dependent on a common data store: the SharePoint Server and content databases.
3. Thirdly, as a ASP.NET 2.0 web platform SharePoint Server 2007 requires IIS 6 / IIS 7 .

The diagram below shows how the different components relate:

For the update process this means that, whenever a new update comes available for SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 also needs to be updated. Sometimes it might even occur that an update of the .NET framework is required as well e.g. when an update makes use of .NET framework functionality that was introduced in a new version of the .NET Framework released after the previous update for WSS / MOSS.

The use of a common data store for all SharePoint farm members and the dependency on IIS also means that you cannot update a SharePoint farm without downtime unless a fully synchronized standby farm is available, a luxury rarely seen in the real world.

Now let’s see what steps are involved in updating a SharePoint farm.

Preparing to update a farm

Before you can start installing the SharePoint Server update packages, there is some preparing to do. This section is an overview of the tasks you must execute before starting the update process.

Update your documentation

As a first step in your preparation you should verify if your documentation is up to date and includes documentation on all changes that occurred after the initial installation of your SharePoint farm:

• Search customizations
• Custom solutions
• Third-party add-ons
• Alternate Access Mappings
• …

This list is just an example to help you get started but I assume you get the idea.

Make a backup of following files and folders:

• The Internet Information Services metabase — default location on Windows Server 2003: %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv
• The website root folder — default location on Windows Server 2003: %systemdrive%\inetpub\wwwroot
• Depending on your environment there might be other files and folders to backup as well: check your documentation
• Create a backup of your index files using STSADM or the Central Administration backup page.

Prevent access to the SharePoint farm

During the update process no activity is allowed on the SharePoint Server 2007 websites so you will need to shut them down.

Quiesce farm

SharePoint Server 2007 has an option to gradually take a farm offline so that users can finish their work in a timely fashion. The option is called Quiesce farm and is located in the Global Configuration section of the Central Administration Operations tab.

To use Quiesce farm:

• Set a time frame during which you want the close the connections and click Start Quiescing
  
• Wait until you see the Status Quiesced message
  

Disconnect the content database from the SharePoint web applications

This step is optional.

During the update progress the SharePoint databases schemas are upgraded, a process that takes up quite some time because the update package needs to detect each content database connected to the farm. Disconnecting the content databases reduces the number of databases the update process needs to detect and thus greatly reduces the time needed for installing the packages.

Once the update is installed you can re-connect the content databases which initiates the upgrade process for the database in question. An additional advantage of this way of working is that it gives you the option of prioritizing web applications and connect critical applications first.

Stop the SharePoint Server 2007 web applications

This step is optional but will ensure none of the SharePoint Server 2007 web applications is accessed during the update progress.

To shut down the web applications:

• Open internet information manager
• Expand the Application Pools section
• Stop each of the application pools hosting the SharePoint Server 2007 web applications

Optionally you can stop the web server by typing iisreset /stop in a command prompt or the Windows Start Menu run box. However, this will stop all running websites on the web server as well. The method described above is a little less brutal, especially if you have other web sites running on the web server.

Download the update packages

Download and extract the update packages from the Microsoft download site, remember that you will need at least two packages for the update in question:

• the Windows SharePoint Services update package
• the Office SharePoint Server 2007 update package

Installing updates

Now that all farm activity on the farm is suspended you can start installing the updates.

As with the SharePoint Products and Technologies installation process, we need to take several actions to complete the update process:

• Install the Cumulative Update package binaries
• Run the configuration wizard to update the existing binaries
• Run the configuration wizard

Installing the binaries

The first step in the actual update progress is to install the binaries for the Windows Server Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 update packages.

The steps below need to be repeated on each member of the farm that has the Office SharePoint Server 2007 binaries installed: Web Front Ends, Application Servers, Indexer, Query etc…

Install WSS binaries

The screenshots shown here are made while installing the December Cumulative Update package for Windows Server Services 3.0 but the steps described here can be re-used for other updates or Service Packs up to the February Cumulative Update package for Windows Server Services 3.0.

• Launch the setup program for the Windows Server Services 3.0 update package
• Accept the License Agreement and click Next
• Click Ok for the warning message
• The update progress starts
• Wait until the update finishes installing and click Ok

Install MOSS binaries

The screenshots shown here are made while installing the December Cumulative Update package for Office SharePoint Server 2007 but the steps described here can be reused for other updates or Service Packs up to the February Cumulative Update package for Office SharePoint Server 2007.

• Launch the setup program for the Office SharePoint Server 2007 update package
• Accept the License Agreement and click Next
• Click Ok for the warning message
• The update progress starts
• Wait until the update finishes installing and click Ok
• Reboot the server if needed

Run the configuration wizard

Because of the common data store — all farm members connect to the same databases on a SQL Server — and the fact that the update process updates the database schemas with each package, we have to:

• initialize the configuration wizard on each server to update the installed binaries
• finish the configuration wizard in sequence: one server at a time

Initialize the configuration wizard

1. Log on to the server that has the Central Administration application installed
2. Launch the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard from the Microsoft Office Server menu in the All Programs section of the Windows Start menu  
3. Click Yes to the warning message and click Next when you return to the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard
4. After a few seconds you will receive a warning, do not click Ok
5. Repeat steps 2 – 5 on all member servers of the SharePoint farm
6. When all servers in the farm are showing the message as described in step 4, return to the server that has the Central Administration application installed and click Ok
7. The Configuration Wizard starts the upgrade process
8. Wait until the Configuration Wizard finishes the upgrade process
9. Finish the Configuration Wizard upgrade process on the other member servers of the SharePoint farm, one by one, wait each time until the Configuration Wizard has finished the upgrade process

Troubleshooting

From time to time the Configuration Wizard upgrade process exits with an error:

If you receive such an error run the following command in a command prompt to force the upgrade process:

psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force

This should finish the upgrade process correctly or at least give you a detailed description of what went wrong.

Finish the update process

• Reconnect the content databases to their respective SharePoint server 2007 web applications
  TIP: if you want to rename your content databases to comply with a naming convention, you can do so before re-attaching them to the SharePoint server 2007 web applications
• Assign an indexer server to the content databases you just attached
• Start a full crawl
• Recompile any audiences you have configured

Verify the configuration

When all members of your SharePoint farm have been updated you now need to verify your configuration.

• Open the Central Administration Application and browse to Quiesce farm, located in the Global Configuration section of the Central Administration Operations tab
• Click Stop Quiescing
• Test all the SharePoint server 2007 web applications to see if they can be accessed
  • repeat this for all the zones you might have configured
• Test all the functionality of your SharePoint server 2007 web applications.
  If one or more web application(s) do(es) not work as expected:
  • Verify if all solutions were deployed correctly, re-deploy if needed
  • Verify your documentation to see if you need to do some manual tasks
  • Check for missing entries in the new web.config files by comparing them with the web.config files from your websites backup
  • Check the bin folders from your websites backup for custom components, copy them to their respective bin folders of the updated SharePoint server 2007 web applications
• Test the search engine
• ….

Conclusion

That’s it, my preferred way for installing updates. I’m not going to say that the described method is full-proof because each SharePoint Server 2007 implementation is different, and you might need to do additional steps to complete the update process.

What I can confirm is that I never had any significant problems during the dozen or more farm updates I have done so far — ranging from small farm implementations to fully scaled out farms — using the practices described above.

Last week I (finally) decided to install a Windows Server 2008 R2 labo environment to test SharePoint Server 2007 with the latest member in Microsoft’s Server family.

After installing the OS for the usual suspects — SQL Server 2008, two Web Front Ends and an Indexer — I configured the firewall for accessing the SQL Server Database engine and set out to configure SharePoint Server 2007.

I use scripting to automate the rather boring and tedious task of installing and configuring MOSS so I launched the scripts and went to get some coffee, expecting the installation to be finished by the time I got back. However, on returning — and to my surprise — I noticed the scripts had failed.

Suspecting there still was a configuration issue with the Windows firewall I disabled the firewall on the SQL server machine and this time I could connect, as expected. My curiosity sparked and not wanting to leave the server in a less secure state than necessary, I decided to take some time for in-depth troubleshooting. Read on for the answers…

Identifying the cause

I had used the scripts without problem dozens of times before, so I quickly ruled them out as a possible source for trouble.

The next step was to verify any possible error messages for further indications to the root cause of the issue. I opened the SharePoint configuration log located in %programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS and sure enough, there was an error that confirmed my suspicion:

The server parameter specified with the configdb command is invalid. Failed to connect to the database server or the database name does not exist. Ensure the database server exists, is a Sql server, and that you have the appropriate permissions to access the database server

(excess information truncated for clarity)

As expected, SharePoint was unable to connect to the database server and since my quick and dirty test already proved that I could connect with a disabled firewall on the server with SQL Server 2008 installed, it couldn’t have been related to SQL Server access permissions.

Still suspecting the Windows Firewall I then concentrated my efforts on the SQL Server 2008 configuration and almost immediately realized why I couldn’t connect: instead of installing SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition I elected to go with the lightweight SQL Server 2008 Express Edition, using a named instance for the MOSS databases. The fact that I was using a named instance instead of the default instance pointed me to the actual cause of the connection problem and, eventually, the solution:

When using named instances, TCP ports for communication are dynamically assigned by default but can be configured to use a specific port. To access a named instance you have to:

• assign a static port number to the instance you want to connect using the SQL Server Configuration Manager
• configure the Windows Firewall to allow access to that port for specific users or computers using a similar netsh command as below:

  netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=SQLPort dir=in protocol=tcp action=allow localport=<port_number>remoteip=localsubnetprofile=DOMAIN

  Where <port_number> is the port you want to use for communicating with the SQL Server Database Engine

As already suggested in the introduction I actually did assign a static port to the SQL Server instance and configured the Windows Firewall but I overlooked one important detail: the way SharePoint connects to the database engine to create the databases. A simple fact I only realized after re-tracing the configuration steps.

Connecting to the SQL Server instance

Now that I identified the root cause I was faced with a whole new challenge: how to tell the SharePoint configuration wizard on which port to connect to access the SQL Server instance.

Neither the UI (PSCONFIGUI) and command line (PSCONFIG) versions of the Configuration Wizard offer the possibility to enter a port number for the SQL Database Server connection. A quick G-search didn’t offer any clues either so for a second I was completely lost. Then I remembered when you want connect to an instance of the SQL Server Database with the SQL Server Management Studio you have to use a specific connection string, like so:

<sqlserver_name>\<named_instance>,<port_number>

Figuring there was no harm in trying I adapted my scripts to the above syntax, ran them anew and …. eureka, this time the installation finished without errors! Case closed….

Conclusion

In the end my initial presumption was wrong: although related to the active Windows Firewall on the server with SQL Server 2008 Express installed, the firewall configuration wasn’t the problem but the way the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard connects to the SQL Server Database engine.

Figuring this out was a lot of fun but what surprised me was the fact I never encountered a similar problem before. Yet the answer is alarmingly simple: in my experience most companies, even those with a very strict security policy, disable the Windows Firewall using Windows or Active Directory policies. When asked for the reasons why, the most common answer is administrative overhead due to added complexity.

While it is true that the configuration of certain technologies can take a bit longer with an active Windows Firewall, my personal opinion is that it is no viable excuse for completely disabling the Windows Firewall, on the contrary:

First of all the Windows Firewall can be managed using policies, when implemented correctly the administrative overhead for managing the Windows Firewall should be next to none.

Secondly, as this post proves, the Windows Firewall can be a very valuable tool to figure out how a technology works behind the scenes. Exactly what network administrators want in the end, not?

Last but definitely not least, disabling the Windows Firewall makes an environment more vulnerable to malware that exploits well-known ports on the Windows platform which in turn raises the question: how does the cost of extra effort needed for implementing and managing the Windows Firewall compare to the cost of possible downtime, reduced productivity and fighting the various side effects of a malware attack when — not if — it strikes?

Additional Resources

All the information was found on the Microsoft Technet and MSDN sites:

Windows Firewall Technical Reference How To: Configure Windows Firewall for Database Engine Access Netsh Commands

Recently I was faced with this customer situation: “Replace my existing web site with a SharePoint 2007 site AND handle all the existing links to my site gracefully”.   Basically the customer asked me to build them a new public facing web site and asked that their existing page links (those in search engines, other web sites and links saved by their customers) continue to work and don’t become “dead” links.

I’ve heard this request when building Intranet sites and Extranet sites, but it’s probably most important when SharePoint 2007 replaces an existing Internet site because you have less control and contact with the audience.  With Intranet and Extranet sites you often have the ability to notify site users that the links to their sites and documents may be broken and you may even provide documentation and training on how to deal with the new site taxonomy.  With Internet sites you don’t have the same relationship with your users (customers) so your SharePoint 2007 site often has to handle the old links gracefully. 

With public facing sites you often reply upon search engines (Google, Live Search, Yahoo, etc) to find your site and you want to be sure that the stale links in those search engines do not lead to dead ends.  Most search engines today provide webmaster tools that allow you to remove dead links and provide updates site maps.  See my article on site maps for SharePoint.   Below are links to the three most popular search engine webmaster tools:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Live Search Webmaster Center
• Yahoo Site Explorer

There are two basic approaches for solving the page redirection and bad link issues; 1.  Translate the http requests before they reach the site, or 2. Make the site “smart” so that it can redirect the http requests to the appropriate destination.

Things to consider before you begin building a solution:

1.  Identify all potential inbound links to your site and document those (I recommend creating a SharePoint list or spreadsheet).  Be sure to visit all major search engines to see what pages are indexed by those search engines, those links should be included in your list.

2.  Determine if your inbound links use query string parameters; for example: a link like http://www.kroger.com/privacypolicy.htm does not use query string parameters where a link like http://www.kroger.com/page.asp?tabid=143 does use query string parameters.  This will depend heavily on the technology used to implement the site you are replacing and may impact your choice on solutions.

3.  Identify the tools at your disposal; For example; is there a hardware-based firewall, a software-based firewall, load balancing software, load balancing hardware.  It is often easier to leverage one of these tools for page redirection rather than going down the custom programming path.

Solutions for handling page redirection include the following:

1.  Firewall or Load Balancing – Configure your firewall to “listen” for the set of inbound links and have your firewall redirect the request to the desired destination page.  If you are using Microsoft ISA Server you can enable Link Translation to handle the transition to the new addresses.  Other firewalls and load balancing solutions provide similar functionality to ISA, so be sure to check with your vendor.

2.  Custom Redirection Page – Implement a custom ASP.NET page inside SharePoint to handle all 404 errors.  

3.  Use the Codeplex Smart 404 Feature created by Josh Carlisle.  This is the solution I’ve used the most and I’ve found it very effective. 

In my next post I will guide you through the use of the Smart 404 Feature and provide you some sample code for extending the functionality of that feature.

The error “SecurityException was unhandled by user code” is something that many developers will have encountered during their Infopath development in C# or VB.NET, mostly using Visual Studio 2008 together with .NET Framework 3.5 (Eventualy on Windows Vista). Until now there is no hotfix available for this issue. Though you can get rid of this error by changing some security settings in Infopath (while developing, when you are about to publish the form, please think about what the best setting would be for your or your customer’s environment.

What do we do?

In infopath:

• Point your cursor to “Tools”;
• Select “Form Options”;
• Click on “Security and Trust” (6th option counting from the top of the list);
• Uncheck “Automatically determine security level (recommended)”;
• In the optionlist that became available after the uncheck, choose “Full Trust (the form has access to files and settings on the computer)”.

Finally go back to the Infopath project in Visual Studio, build the project and run the form again.
You will see that there is no Exception being thrown again (At least no SecurityException).

Do keep in mind that the error might return when you publish the form into another location due to other reasons, but that will be covered in another blogpost.

I hope this was helpfull.

A client reported that the search feature is not working on a WSS 3.0 share-point portal. All search queries returned the same following text:

No results matching your search were found.

1. Check your spelling. Are the words in your query spelled correctly?
2. Try using synonyms. Maybe what you’re looking for uses slightly different words.
3. Make your search more general. Try more general terms in place of specific ones.
4. Try your search in a different scope. Different scopes can have different results.

And an error and a warning kept comming on the server every 5 minutes (after every 5 minutes share-point search service tries to index the share-point sites)

We google the error description but the results did not help – then we google the warning text and were able to find the cause of this problem. Here is the warning that kept on coming every 5 minutes

Event Type:   Warning
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3 Search
Event Category:       Gatherer
Event ID:       2436
Date:            12/26/2007
Time:            3:08:16 AM
User:            N/A
Computer:     AZHAR

Description:
The start address <sts3://dws571210/contentdbid={8a1d4489-b9bd-4ee6-8d24-d8305c6b64f4}> cannot be crawled. 

Context: Application ‘Search index file on the search server’, Catalog ‘Search’

 Details:
          The object was not found.   (0×80041201) 

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Following post helped us in finding the cause of this:

WSSv3 Search, Small Business Server & DNS

As per described in the article, when we tried accessing the site from with-in the server, we were not able to access it. As we were not able to access the site using I.E. the crawler was also not able to access the site and hence it was not indexed. The error The object was not found.   (0×80041201) indicates that the site is not found by the crawler.

As a solution to this problem, we mapped a sub-domain http://site1.myserver.com to the existing URL and we verified that the new URL is accessible from with-in the server. Once this is done the site search feature is back up and running

Microsoft Office SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint can provide us with many secure, scalable, manageable, extensible and instant solutions. All of this can be achieved while allowing us to better communicate and collaborate  as well as simplify our business processes.

 

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 are designed to easily integrate with many Microsoft products and technologies.

 

Microsoft has provided us with a comparison table of SharePoint features available across different Microsoft Products and Technologies.

 

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

 

The article covers the following solutions while easily identifying each availble feature.

• Component overview
• Collaboration
• Enteprise portal
• Enterprise search
• Enterprise content management
• Forms-drive business processes
• Business intelligence
• Management
• Platform