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Duplicate categories when creating new blog post from Word 2007 in SharePoint blog

Jan Van Belle — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:30:43 +0000

Our marketing department is using Word 2007 to post articles on a SharePoint 2007 blog. Today, a weird issue came up: when you select a category from the drop-down list, that category was created on the SharePoint blog every time, no matter if it existed already or not. This results in duplicate categories in the SharePoint blog.

The solution to this problem is very simple: on the SharePoint site, check the Categories list for items that have a space at the end. If an item in the category list has a space, it gets recreated again when you select the category in Word.

Microsoft LCDS version 2.5

Jan Van Belle — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:51:35 +0000

Microsoft released a new version of its Learning Content Development System, the free content authoring tool. The release notes show the following changes:

E-learning created is compatible with Firefox 3.5.9 and Firefox 3.6.3.
Microsoft Silverlight 4 Media Player for animations that include closed captioning.
Enhanced keyboard accessibility for the sort and tile games, adventure interactivity, and Voice of the Expert element.
LCDS authoring and e-learning created are completely compatible with Microsoft Silverlight 4.0.

An interesting new feature is the possibility to create content on the “lesson” level. Previous versions did not allow this, which sometimes resulted in blank pages in the course structure when you imported the SCORM package in an LMS.

When you open a course in the new version, you will notice an option to enable the content at the lesson level:

Tip: if you don’t know which version of LCDS you are running, open LCDS and press Shift+F1.

Dux about SharePoint 2010 on the iPad

Jan Van Belle — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:19:51 +0000

Dux Raymond Sy made a nice overview video about how SharePoint 2010 displays on an Apple iPad.

SharePoint 2010 on an iPad from Dux Raymond Sy on Vimeo.

Co-authoring with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

Jan Van Belle — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:49:02 +0000

I have been playing with the co-authoring function in Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and the Office Web Apps. Co-authoring allows simultaneous editing of the same document by multiple users. It took me some time to figure out which apps actually support this functionality, because not all of them do.

The following site gives a good overview: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/document-collaboration-and-co-authoring-HA101812148.aspx

The table below (taken from the article) is a good summary:

Application	Server Requirements	Common Scenarios
Word 2010	SharePoint Foundation 2010	Any document including proposals, plans, vision statements, minutes, newsletters, and reports
PowerPoint 2010	SharePoint Foundation 2010	Any presentation including training, conferences, post-mortems, product overviews, handbooks, and project status reports
Excel Web App	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Office Web Apps	Any spreadsheet, including team financial modeling, business-to business product line update on a web page, and real-time trading spreadsheet trackers
OneNote 2010	SharePoint Foundation 2010	Any notebook, including recurring meeting minutes, project brainstorming (“group-think”), shared research and reference material, and shared training courses
OneNote Web App	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Office Web Apps

New theme, same blog

Jan Van Belle — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:19:15 +0000

Since the upgrade to version 3 of WordPress, I was having performance issues with the Sleepy Blue theme I used for this blog. Time for something new: I am now using the SimplePress-2 theme. I think everything is up and running again, but don’t hesitate to comment if you would see something that is not displaying correctly.

Issues with Adobe Captivate 4 and Windows 7 64-bit

Jan Van Belle — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:39:07 +0000

I am running Captivate 4 on a Windows 7 64-bit operating system, and this does not seem to be a good idea; although most of the functionality works fine, I am having problems editing items in the library. E.g. when I try to edit a background with Paint or another graphics application, it opens the background, but when I save my changes, Captivate hangs. It does this consistently, and it has been confirmed as an issue by other users (see http://forums.adobe.com/message/2887534). Other users are even reporting issues with capturing 64 bit applications.

So for now, if you want to use full functionality of Captivate and you have a choice between Windows 7 32 or 64 bit, I would go for 32 bit. Lets hope that everything will be fixed in Captivate 5 or with the next update.

Office 2010 – where did the “Share” menu go?

Jan Van Belle — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:56:29 +0000

In Office 2010 Beta, the File menu contained a Share option, that allowed you to save a file directly to a SharePoint site, or even to SkyDrive.

I was looking for that option in the final release, but could not find it. Well, the Share option is no longer there, but all the functionality is under Save & Send.

It took me a while to figure that out, so I thought I might share it with you.

SharePoint Evolution Conference London

Jan Van Belle — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:14:48 +0000

The next three days, I’m attending the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London. After a very unpleasant check in at the Eurostar terminal in Brussels, I managed to get to the conference center safely. Some speakers and probably also some attendees did not make it here due to the volcano eruption in Iceland.

I’m looking forward to the various Information Worker sessions. If you want to know more, check http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com/ or check Twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23spevo.

Moodle: Flash animations suddenly don’t appear

Jan Van Belle — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:05:28 +0000

We experienced a serious issue in one of our Moodle platforms. Flash animations that worked before, suddenly did not appear anymore. Instead, a warning message appears stating that the Flash player used is too old.
This issue was caused by a recent upgrade to the platform. For security reasons, a new parameter was added, that forces the Moodle users to upgrade to a specific version of the Flash player.
The default in my Moodle version (1.9.7) was set to version 10.0.12, which is pretty recent. In corporate networks, users often do not have the rights to upgrade the player, so this might cause some problems.
You can set the value to an earlier version, or leave the option blank to disable the checking. The option is called Required Flash Player Version and can be found in Site Administration – Security – HTTP Security.

Create a SCORM package from a Microsoft LCDS course

Jan Van Belle — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:57:19 +0000

I was looking at the stats of my blog, and some of the most visited articles are the ones about Microsoft LCDS. A lot of people are contacting me because they have trouble publishing the LCDS content to a learning management system (e.g. to the SharePoint Learning Kit). Tom Molskov already posted a very useful comment with a procedure on how to do this, but I thought it was time for a little screencast.

This is how I do it:

Open your course in LCDS
Click the Media button in the toolbar to open the Media folder
In the Media window, go one level UP. This brings you in the Courses folder
Select all files (Ctrl+A) and add them to a compressed folder (.zip)
Upload that zip file to your Learning Management System