Chaks' Corner

Workflows and Content Type Hubs–Whats the story?

Sat, 05 May 2012 20:43:00 +1200

Recently I have received a lot of misinformation on associating workflows to content types managed via Content Type (CT) Hub.

It is true that workflows do not get published along with the content type from the hub. That means, if you have associated a workflow to a content type and publish the content type, only the content type is published and not the workflow.

So how do I approach this problem if I want to associate my workflow with the published content type?

The key thing here is installing your workflow in the hub and in all the subscriber site collections.

Create a reusable workflow and associate it with your content type in the hub.
Before publishing this content type, export the reusable workflow and import it in all the subscriber site collections or deploy your workflow to the farm if it is a farm solution.
Activate your workflow feature.
Now, your workflow is available in the hub as well as all the subscriber site collections.
Publish the content type. The workflow association will be published.

To test this:

In the subscriber site collection:

Add the published content type to a document library (or list)
Go to the library’s Workflow Settings Page
Select the published content type and click on Add Workflow
It should navigate you to the Workflow Settings page of that content type
Notice your workflow associated with the published content type available to choose in the Workflow Template choices.
The association still exists even if you republish the content type.

Some good links to bookmark re. workflows:

SharePoint 2010 Workflow Resource Center

Building Effective Workflows using SharePoint Server 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 Workflow Administration

It will be great if you can leave any comments if you are using workflows with the content types published from the hub. Love to hear your experiences.

Getting Started With TFS 11 Express Beta

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:39:19 +1200

Microsoft released Visual Studio 11 Beta last week – This also includes Team Foundation Server (TFS) 11. What you might have noticed is the addition of new product TFS Express 11 available for FREE.

TFS Express 11 is a new product line-up in the Visual Studio Express Editions giving you the capability to utilise a subset of TFS features such as:

Source code control
Work Item Tracking
Build Automation

I would recommend reading Brian’s blog post to understand what is included in TFS Express.

In short, if you are a small team, want to explore what TFS offers, then this is a great way to start as it is FREE!

Some key things to note are:

TFS Express only supports SQL Express Edition
Visual Studio Express Editions support connecting to TFS Express

Installing TFS Express 11

Installing TFS Express is very easy. Consider this as the TFS Basic Install.

You can install it in almost any system you have. It does not require you to have a domain. Workgroup will be used if no domain. That means, you can just turn that small little server lying in the corner to be as your TFS Express

The installer also installs SQL Server Express Edition. TFS Express only supports SQL Express as its data tier.

Once installed, you get the familiar TFS Configuration Wizard to configure TFS

Once configured, you can then open the Administration Console to configure your Application Tier

TFS Express also installs web access at - :8080/tfs">:8080/tfs">:8080/tfs">http://<tfs-server>:8080/tfs

Connecting from Visual Studio Express

Microsoft has added the TFS integration with the Express 11 Editions, meaning that you can connect to a TFS instance.

I have installed Visual Studio 11 Express Beta for Web.

You can connect to TFS Express instance from the Team menu:

Once connected, you can do the usual things you will normally do with any TFS connection.

TFS Process Templates

The process template now includes the Scrum template by default and it is the default when you create a new team project - Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 – Preview3

On the whole, TFS Express is a great way to start your TFS journey if you are new to TFS.

You can download the TFS Express 11 Beta here

Put People First – Building a Staff Directory

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:19:23 +1200

This is a follow up of my previous post – Understanding SharePoint Sites

When customers ask me what they should be doing with their newly deployed SharePoint environment, I say Put People First! – Let users find their peers, colleagues. Let them share information with their peers/colleagues. Redirecting your users to search page doesn’t count. It is just a blank white page! You should see how you can show the available options to users so they get interested with the content and come back often to search for people. Sometimes, small change can drive user adoption!

Building a simple Staff Directory

Customising the Refinement Panel

Customising the Search Options Popup

Building a simple Staff Directory

Building a Staff Directory, listing all users and allowing to filter according to metadata properties such as department, office would be a good start.

To do so, create your search center (as a separate site collection or sub site).

Once created, click on Site Actions | View All Site Content

Click on Pages library under Document Library

Create a new Page

Enter Staff Directory for Title and select People search results as the page layout and click Create to create the page

Click on Staff Directory page to open the page and click on Site Actions | Edit Page to edit the page

Edit the People Search Core Results web part

In the web part properties, expand Results Query Options

Enter the following in the Append Text To Query:

contentclass:spspeople

In the web part properties, Click Ok

Edit the People Search Box web part

In the web part properties, expand Miscellaneous

Change the Target search results page url to your staff directory page. In my case it was: Staff-Directory.aspx

Click Ok

Save the page

You should now see the page displaying people results automatically and also the refinement panel filled with metadata values

You can use the refinement panel to filter your results

Search Site Clean-up

Now that we have our Staff Directory page working, we can clean up few things like:

Removing the search tabs
- Go to Site Actions | View All Site Content
- Delete all the items in the the following lists:
  - Tabs in Search Pages
  - Tabs in Search Results
Make Staff Directory page home page
- Navigate to the staff directory page
- In the Ribbon, click on Page tab and then click on Make Homepage

Customising the Refinement Panel

We would now like to customise the refinement panel where we would like to show and allow users to filter by, say, Department.

In order to add the department metadata in the refinement panel, we need to create a new Managed Property under Search Administration

NOTE: The out of the box Department managed property does not work well with refinement panel. This is a known issue.

Open Central Administration and navigate to your Search Service Application

In the Search Administration, click on Managed Properties in the left hand navigation

Click on New Managed Property

Enter the following:

Choose Text for the type of information

Click on Add Mapping

Search for department and then choose People: Department(Text) from the results and click Ok

Optionally you can select this property to be used in scopes

Perform a full crawl on the people content source

Navigate to the staff directory page and click on Site Actions | Edit Page

Edit the People Refinement Panel web part

In the web part properties, expand Refinement

The Filter Category Definition is responsible for showing the filters in the refinement panel. We need to edit this and add our department metadata. Below is the XML text for the department metadata:

Notice the highlighted property which defines our managed property we created earlier. Make sure the value matches the managed property name.

Below is the full XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><FilterCategories>
<Category Title="View" Description="View matches by" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.RankingModelFilterGenerator"    MetadataThreshold="3"    NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3" ShowMoreLink="False" MappedProperty=""/>
<Category Title="spshjobtitle" Description="Use this filter to restrict results to a specific job title" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.TaxonomyFilterGenerator" MetadataThreshold="3" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3" MaxNumberOfFilters="50" ShowMoreLink="True" MappedProperty="ows_MetadataFacetInfo" MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer"/>
<Category Title="Organization" Description="Use this filter to restrict results to a specific organization" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator" MetadataThreshold="5" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4" MaxNumberOfFilters="50" SortBy="Frequency" SortDirection="Descending" SortByForMoreFilters="Name" SortDirectionForMoreFilters="Ascending" ShowMoreLink="True" MappedProperty="OrgNames" MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer"/>
<Category Title="Department" Description="Use this filter to restrict results to a specific department" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.ManagedPropertyFilterGenerator" MetadataThreshold="5" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="4" MaxNumberOfFilters="50" SortBy="Frequency" SortDirection="Descending" SortByForMoreFilters="Name" SortDirectionForMoreFilters="Ascending" ShowMoreLink="True" MappedProperty="DepartmentNames" MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer"/>
<Category Title="Managed Metadata Columns" Description="Managed metadata of the documents" Type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebControls.TaxonomyFilterGenerator" MetadataThreshold="3" NumberOfFiltersToDisplay="3" MaxNumberOfFilters="50"        ShowMoreLink="True"    MappedProperty="ows_MetadataFacetInfo" MoreLinkText="show more" LessLinkText="show fewer"/>
</FilterCategories>

Uncheck the Use Default Configuration

In the web part properties, click Ok and Save the page

We should now see Department in the refinement panel

If you want to add any other property to the refinement pane, make sure you have a managed property associated with it.

Customising the Search Options Popup

Search options is a popup that comes up with when you click the 'Search Options’ link

You can customise this popup to include your option, say Department so we could search by department

Navigate to staff directory page and click Site Actions | Edit

Edit the People Search Box web part

In the web part properties, expand Miscellaneous

The Properties XML defines what appears in the popup. Below is the XML to add Department property:

Make sure the highlighted values are same as the managed property in the search administration. The text in bold should match the user profile property.

Below is the full XML which you can replace for the Properties XML

In the web part properties, click Ok

Save the page

Click on Search Options and you should see the Department option in the popup

Get ready for ‘Office 15’

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:39:11 +1200

Are you eagerly waiting for “Office 15”? Then here is some news!

We just announced the beginning of the “Office 15” Technical Preview and a public beta later this summer! (Summer in the USA, Winter here in NZ)

While the Technical Preview program is already full, everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer, and we'll have more to share about the release then. In the meantime, I do want to thank everyone who is participating in the Technical Preview for their contributions and all our customers for their continued support.

Configuring Phonetic/Nickname Search in SharePoint 2010

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:55:52 +1200

One of the new enterprise search feature added to SharePoint 2010 is the ability to search people by their ‘nicknames’. For example: You could search ‘aron’ for ‘aaron’ or ‘jon’ for ‘john’. We geeks call this Phonetic search

Below is a screen shot of the nickname search:

How does this work?

This is an enterprise search feature, meaning you should have SharePoint Standard (or SharePoint Enterprise) installed. It works in conjunction with the Microsoft Speech Server platform. This is one of the pre-requisite for SharePoint 2010. The pre-requisites installer installs the speech server for English US by default.

It basically has a list of ‘names’ and their associated ‘nicknames’ which is fed to the SharePoint 2010 Search to index. Once indexed, the search can then yield results for a nickname.

Configuring Phonetic Search

SharePoint 2010 already has this configured for you, but only for English US (en-US) locale. This means that if you are not using English US as your locale, you will not get any results for ‘nickname’ search.

To check your current phrases (names and nicknames) you can use the following PowerShell cmdlet – Get-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase – This will display everything including QuerySuggestionBlockList, SpellingSuggestionBlockList etc.,

Below is how you can use the cmdlet to display all language resources:

$searchApp = Get-SPServiceApplication | where{$_.DisplayName -eq "Search Service Application"}
Get-SPEnterpriseSearchLanagueResourcePhrase -SearchApplication $searchApp

Below is the output:

To get all phrases of ‘names’ and ‘nicknames’ for English US (en-US)":

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -Type NickName -Language en-US -SearchApplication $searchApp | Format-Table -Property Phrase,Mapping

Default Phrases

The list of default phrases are stored in a large text file which you can find here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Bin\languageresources.txt

The catch here is that if your locale is not en-US or if your browser locale is not set to en-US, the phonetic search will not work. This is because search does not have any nicknames registered for your locale (and/or language).

You can find your browser locale (in IE) by navigating to Tools –> Options and clicking on Languages button under Appearance:

Configuring Phonetic Search for your different English Locale (like, en-NZ/en-AU)

To make phonetic search work for your locale, you need to register your phrases for your locale.

One good place to start would be to extract the phrases from languageresources.txt file, corresponding to English language and register for your locale.

Open the languageresources.txt in Excel
Accept as Tab delimited file
Select the Column D
Navigate to Data tab in the Ribbon and click on Filter button

In the Column D, click on the dropdown and select only ‘1033’

This will show only the English phrases
In the filter dropdown, select everything except ‘1033’
Right click in the workbook and select Delete to delete all rows
You should now see only the English phrases
Delete Column C, D, E, F
Insert a column in the first row and type name in Column A and nickname in Column B
Save the file as .CSV and call it languageresources-<your-locale>.csv. I called it languageresources-en-NZ.csv

You can add your own phrases if you cannot find one in the list.

I wrote a simple PowerShell script Set-SPPhoneticSearch.ps1 to register the phrases:

param(
    [string]$SearchServiceApplication = $(throw "please specify the Search Service Application display name!"),
    [string]$LanguageResources = $(throw "please specify the full path of the language resources csv path!"),
    [string]$Language = $(throw "please specify the language")
)

# Get the search service application id
"Getting the search service application ..."
$searchApp = Get-SPServiceApplication | where{$_.DisplayName -eq $SearchServiceApplication}

# Impmort the CSV
"Importing the names and nicknames from $LanguageResources ..."
$phrases = Import-CSV $LanguageResources

# Register every name and nickname
"Registering the available names and nicknames ..."
"This will take some time. Please be patient!"
foreach($phrase in $phrases)
{
New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase -Name $($phrase.name) -Language $Language -Type "Nickname" -Mapping $($phrase.nickname) -SearchApplication $searchApp
}

# Start the timer job
Start-SPTimerJob -Identity "Prepare query suggestions"

Now I can call this script by:

.\Set-SPPhoneticSearch.ps1 -SearchServiceApplication "Search Service Application"
-LanguageResources (Resolve-Path .\languageresources_en-NZ.csv)
-Language en-NZ

The SearchServiceApplication parameter is the display name of your search service application.

This will take at least an hour to complete, so just sit back and relax. I would suggest to go out for a coffee

The PowerShell cmdlet New-SPEnterpriseSearchLanaguageResourcePhrase adds a language resource phrase to the search application. Our script reads the phrases from the CSV file. The script also starts the timer job Prepare query suggestions – This timer job is responsible for preparing query suggestions.

Similarly you can use Remove-SPEnterpriseSearchLanguageResourcePhrase to remove language resource phrase from the search application.

Once the script completes registering the phrases, you should do a full crawl on the people content source. The phonetic search should now work for your locale!

What about other Languages?

You need to download the appropriate Speech Server runtime for your language. You can download them here. Once installed you can follow the steps above.

You can download the PowerShell script used in this post here: http://bit.ly/wqEW4w

User Profile Synchronization Service and FQDN

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:13:00 +1200

Spencer has written by far THE BEST blog post on configuring User Profile Service (UPS) Application in SharePoint 2010. Below are the steps I always check/validate when I provision the UPS:

1) Add SPFarm admin account to local administrators group

2) Allow log on locally to SPFarm admin account

3) Start the UPS synchronization service

4) Once UPS is provisioned successfully, remove the SPFarm admin account from the local administrators group

Today while configuring UPS for my demo environment I had this issue where User Profile Synchronization service was not starting at all. I checked, validated with the steps above, still no luck. The UPS would start to configure the FIM services (which I monitored via the services.msc snap-in) and then fail to do so after some time. Unfortunately, ULS logs did not have any errors logged.

Digging deeper into Spencer’s article, I found this:

After clicking Start in Services on Server, nothing happens for 20 minutes and UPS is not provisioned. No ILM Configuration steps are logged to the ULS

This condition occurs when a Fully Qualified Name (FQDN), for example, SQLSERVER1.domain.com, or IP Address has been used as the address for the SQL Server in the SharePoint Configuration Wizard (PSConfig) when creating the Farm. UPS (amongst other things) has major issues with FQDNs and IP addresses. Don’t use them! Use a NetBIOS name (e.g. SQLSERVER1) or a SQL Server Alias when creating the farm.

Yes, I had used the FQDN as my SQL Server in the SharePoint configuration wizard! I totally forgot UPS does not like FQDN! As a best practice always use a SQL alias for your testing/production environments and SQL server short name for your development environment!

Lesson learnt!

Understanding SharePoint Sites

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:50:53 +1200

SharePoint is a platform. When you deploy SharePoint, it is going to help you build and automate many business solutions, not just the project for which you are deploying.

Yes, I hear you – Every project starts with building an Intranet! But is your organisation ready for the Intranet? And what about your business units/teams sites? What about collaboration? What about sharing/caring? – The immediate answer you would get is “everything is Intranet!”.

Is INTRANET Everything?

No. Intranet isn’t everything. If you ask me – It is a portal where employees come often to find info and updates applicable organisation wide. Intranet is not going to cater for teams to have their own collaboration sites to share, upload documents. Of course, intranet being the portal can lead users to their respective team sites. If you think otherwise, feel free to comment your thoughts!.

Below is a breakdown of different types of sites, which will make things clear:

Intranet Sites

Keep employees up to date with the latest company news and information
Simplify routine business processes using online forms and workflow
Find important documents (like policies) and people easily
Share ideas and seek input from the company using community discussion forums and surveys
Alert employees to news and business developments using blogs
Aggregate latest updates of teams from team sites (see below)

Team Sites

Share and manage important documents to help teams work together efficiently
Track key project milestones and schedules with shared-calendars
Create, edit and review documents and proposals in real-time
Manage important meeting notes and project delivery schedules
Share documents and information easily with trusted business partners
Enable real-time communication with colleagues right from within SharePoint
Apply your own unique look and feel to team sites with (minimal) custom theming and branding

My Sites

Create your own personal My Site to share personal information and professional expertise
Access and manage important documents from your PC, phone or browser
Follow your colleagues latest activities and updates using notes and activity feeds
Protect sensitive personal content and control who can read, edit and access files

Simple Roadmap

The diagram below is an example showing the different components in a SharePoint deployment (clockwise):

As you can see:

The core services are identified and will be required for rest of the components.
Once the core services are available, the team sites or the intranet components can be deployed.

Out of the box (vs.) Custom development

SharePoint provides a lot of features out of the box. There are heaps of solutions that you can build out of the box without writing a single line of code. For example, I would see how developers can make use of Content Query Web Parts (CQWP) effectively to query content. However, there may be some code required to automate the sites across different environments (testing, staging and production) like building site templates.

At any time, your aim should be to use the out of the box features than building a custom (development) web part or custom user control to do the same.

Site Branding

Another thing to consider is branding. Sometimes we invest a lot in trying to make the site look good but not useful to users. It is very essential to evaluate the necessity to brand. For instance, branding Intranet (to an extent) makes sense, but branding Team Sites may be an overkill!

Below is a table summarising the efforts required for different branding types:

Branding Type	Time (approx.)	Skills
Out of the box	0	None
Built in theme	5 min	None
Custom theme/Alternate master page	30 min	Basic design skills (CSS, JS, jQuery)
Fully Custom (e.g., publishing sites)	Days	Professional design skills

Comments

Feel free to leave your comments/thoughts if you have followed similar roadmap in your organisation. Would love to hear your SharePoint experience!

Below is a great presentation from Joel on “Social Intranets” which covers most of the things I discussed

Building Social Intranets

View more presentations from Joel Oleson

Visualising Provisioning SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Fields

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:10:00 +1200

Ari Bakker and Wictor Wilen both have done great jobs on documenting what it takes to provision SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata fields.

- Ari Bakker’s Provisioning SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata fields

- Wictor Wilen’s How to provision SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata columns

Yes, I agree it is a tedious job and there are lot of things to keep in mind when provisioning managed metadata fields in SharePoint 2010. So, I decided to visualise what is involved.

I strongly recommend to read Ari Bakker’s blog post before proceeding any further as I reference his methods in the visualisations.

Hope these visualisations help in making the provisioning job much easier.

Do leave your comment if you have any suggestion.

Basic Steps

As a best practice, every thing is wrapped into features:

1) Create your managed metadata columns Feature which deploys the custom managed metadata fields.

2) Create your custom content type Feature which deploys your custom content types that consume your custom managed metadata fields.

3) If you are creating custom list definition from your custom content type (that is consuming the managed metadata fields), then Create a custom list definition Feature.

4) Activate the features above in the same order.

Managed Metadata Columns Feature

This feature:

Deploys your MyMMS field
- This is the actual managed metadata field
Deploys your MyMMS_0 field
- This is the actual field that stores the selected term id and term value
- the MyMMS field references this field
- This field is always hidden
The feature activated code updates the MyMMS field properties like SSpId, TermSetId etc.,
- Refer to Ari Bakker’s blog post for the ConnectTaxonomyField method
It is always good to have a feature dependency on the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature as this (hidden) feature is responsible for all the taxonomy magic in your site. If you are using web templates, make sure you read my blog post on Web Templates and Content Type Publishing which shows how to activate this feature from web templates.

Export (.ical) Individual Events from SharePoint Calendar

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:46:00 +1200

SharePoint Calendar is a great tool to manage events related to your site and also provides many other capabilities like creating multiple calendars and overlaying calendars.

The Problem

What about exporting individual events as .ical so you can add them to Outlook?

It is available out of the box, but it is well hidden in the Event item dialog!

Not a good place to put such an useful feature!

The Solution

You may find many solutions and working samples out there already, but I wanted something that worked On Premise and SharePoint Online and also something SharePoint2010ish

I went ahead and built this simple customisation to Calendar list where an event can be exported from the Calendar view itself:

Web Templates and InfoPath Forms

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:11:00 +1200

The Problem

If you are using custom web templates to create your site, you may face an issue where InfoPath forms don’t work in your site.

Here is the screen shot of the error message: