SharePoint

Office 2010 Videos: Part 4

David Gerhardt — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:56:20 GMT

Microsoft posted four more of our Office 2010 feature videos on YouTube yesterday, with each one showcasing a different application. I published the videos to GetSharp earlier today...

You might notice that the SharePoint Workspace video is a little longer than most of the other videos we have posted thus far. With SharePoint Workspace being new (well, a newer version of Groove), it was felt that more context was needed for the user to understand what was happening in the video.

There are still more of these feature videos to come...

InfoPath 2010 Filtering

David Gerhardt — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:12:46 GMT

Control filtering is one of the out-of-the-box features not supported in InfoPath 2007 browser scenarios. The InfoPath team posted a Web service workaround for this, and I described a managed-code fix as well.

With InfoPath 2010, it appears that these workarounds are no longer necessary. In the video I posted earlier this month about richer browser forms, see the filtering functionality at work in an InfoPath 2010 browser scenario. At least that's one big improvement to the browser form experience...

Office 2010 Videos: Part 1

David Gerhardt — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:38:39 GMT

Microsoft demonstrated many of the new Office 2010 features this week at the Worldwide Partner Conference. Some of these feature demos were converted to 30-to-60-second vignettes and posted to YouTube. 3Sharp produced many of these vignettes, and I published a few of them to GetSharp as well...

For a sneak preview of Office 2010 functionality, check out these videos. We will be posting more to GetSharp in the coming weeks...

Content Type Book Corrections

David Gerhardt — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:22:56 GMT

I would like to thank everyone who has purchased our book Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007 (all three of you ☺). In a previous lifetime, I was a copy editor at a daily newspaper. That experience helped me to notice a few things that were slightly "off" when re-reading my own work. So, in an effort to bring you the highest quality of reading material, I want to point out the following corrections in the first printing:

Page 48, first paragraph, ninth line - It should read "The New Site Column page allows you to define a site column...". The "to" is missing. I know that is a picky catch, but I am a picky person.
Page 55, second line of the note - The name of the Office Word 2007 document template that is available at http://www.courseptr.com/downloads is Performance_Appraisal.docx. Note the "_" character between "Performance" and "Appraisal".
Page 89, first paragraph, fourth line - It should read "...which will be displayed in the date picker content control...". The AppraisalDate column is mapped to a date picker content control, not a plain text content control.
Page 122, first paragraph, third line - It should read "...can contain a hard-coded link to the appraiser document library...". In the email message body, we provide a link to the library, not the appraisal document.

Hopefully, these and other minor errors will be cleaned up in subsequent book printings.

Modifying Date Formats in SharePoint Designer Workflows

David Gerhardt — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:58:13 GMT

You may have noticed that you cannot modify date formats with out-of-the-box SharePoint Designer workflow functionality. As a result, when you look up a date field in the message body of a Send an Email action, the date will get displayed as "1/28/2009 12:00:00 AM" in the message that is sent to the user.

If the workflow is attached to a form library, there is a codeless workaround that you could implement from within the InfoPath form designer. Just add a rule for your dateTime node (or date node) that re-formats the value to a string node. Use one of the declarative substring functions to modify the format accordingly. In the case of a dateTime node, you may want to use the substring-before function to capture everything that precedes the "T", as shown in the following figure.

When publishing the form template back to the library, be sure to promote the string node that contains the modified date format. Then, in the SharePoint Designer workflow, you can perform a lookup for the string node.

GetSharp Goes Live

David Gerhardt — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:47:45 GMT

Over the holidays 3Sharp unveiled its Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS) site, GetSharp. This site is an excellent opportunity for me and my colleagues to give you a glimpse into some of our SharePoint, Office, Exchange, and Office Communications Server projects. During the next few months, I am hoping to "convert" many of my blog posts into videos...

SharePoint Connections Session Decks

David Gerhardt — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:02:40 GMT

A few people who did not attend SharePoint Connections last month have asked how to get the decks I used in my presentations. The quickest and easiest way: download them here.

In the Can

David Gerhardt — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:54:51 GMT

No, I am not in the bathroom (or potty, as my kids like to say). The book that Kevin Martin and I have been working on, Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007, is in the can (i.e., it shipped yesterday). So, if you have ever created or thought about creating document-centric SharePoint solutions, you might want to add this book to your holiday shopping list. If anything, it should be a great bedtime read for young ones. :-)

I am grateful to everyone who helped or offered to help with this project. I especially want to thank Jen Blaney (our editorial assistant at Charles River Media), Marta Justak (our project editor), and Stacia Misner (our technical editor). Without them, none of this would have been possible.

SharePoint Connections Session Code

David Gerhardt — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:03:45 GMT

Thanks to all who attended my sessions last week at SharePoint Connections. I was especially pleased with the attendance of my last session (Developing InfoPath Browser Forms for SharePoint). Asking people to get up for a session at 8am on the last day of a conference in Las Vegas can be a challenge, but the turnout was still high, and there was no shortage of good questions.

As I promised, the code from my two InfoPath sessions is available for download here. I could not include the form templates used for the demos, as they are owned by a third party, but the code snippets are there and can be included in your Visual Studio solutions. You will just need to modify the code to fit your form data source.

Update on the Content Types Book

David Gerhardt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:29:24 GMT

Last month I provided a teaser about the book I am writing with Kevin Martin (a 3Sharp colleague) titled Building Content Type Solutions in SharePoint 2007. We are in the final editing stages now and should be completely done in the next few weeks. If all goes well, I will have a flier to pass out at SharePoint Connections for those interested. The chapter titles (which may be subject to change) are as follows:

What Is a Content Type?
Included Content Types
Site Columns
Document Template
Document Information Panel
Workflows
Information Management Policies and Document Conversions
Out-of-the-Box Solution Walkthrough
Automating the Performance Appraisal Solution
Completing and Deploying the Appraisal Process

The last mile is always the most difficult...