SharePoint Conference Seattle, Day 2

Update is a little slow, lots of things to do here, the rest of the days will probably be when i’m back at home :S

AG300 – Your data is in SharePoint, Now What?

This session was presented by Adam Buenz, he works at the US Navy and had a talk about compliance, records management and audit trails. The session was future extended by another speaker who explained something about IRM in sharepoint.

Adam Beunz was really happy with the Record Center from SharePoint. At first I didn’t understand this. The OOTB functionality isn’t all that great. An overlooked possibility is to extend the Routing facility which basicly opens up lots of options. Another thing that passed was that you could (via code) get the ‘hold’ documents and move them to physical storage. Like the Custom Route, this is non OOTB functionality but it does provide extensions to use the Record Center which helps user experience.

For the custom route you need to inherit from the IRouter interface, this gives you one method (OnSubmitFile). This can all be deployed as a feature.

The talk then went on the SharePoint auditing and the conclusion only is that it’s reporting/statistic facilities aren’t enough. Custom tooling can be created for that which allows the right reports and statistics. This also showed some nice VSTO integration, showing the audit trail of the document on a side pane of the document itself.

BAS400 – Building an automated expense reimbursement rocess using InfoPath and SharePoint

This session showed a no-code solution in InfoPath and SharePoint designer which is nice to see, it did show some less nice stuff about InfoPath (click ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, annnndd.. ok). That development experience isn’t very nice, but its nice functionality and it showed that SharePoint Designer is quite powerful for workflow. One site picked up on this session was sharepoint-elearning.com.

BAS301 – Leveraging the Power of Excel Services to Build Rich SharePoint Applications

This session was presented by Dan Parish and showed a demo of Excel services. In general in showed the overall things you can do with Excel Services. I didn’t know much about this so it was a good starting point for me. It showed a nice case with a User Defined Function (UDF) that can be used inside the Excel sheet. UDF’s are created using a normal Class Library which has some extra properties to enable it for use as UDF. After that it needs to be deployed via the Shared Services Administration Center.

After this session my colleagues and I had some discussion how, when and if you can use Excel services. I’m quite positive but some colleagues where negative about this. Guess we just have to try.

ECMS311 – How Microsoft IT Designs and Creates Enterprice Portals on MOSS2007

This showed how to create enterprice portals withing MOSS2007. There where loads of tips and tricks and a shorter version of the CQWP presentation I had the day before.

Here are the tips I wrote down:

• Use as less master pages as possible, use more page layouts
• Start with the BlueBand masterpage of use the empty master page that’s out on the net
• Content Types are very powerful, use them if you can
• Never edit core.css, override the CSS in a separate file
• Use the CSS Link Server Control to include your own CSS files
• Cache is powerful, learn how to work with it and be aware of what its doing (for debugging)
• If you enable debug in web.conf, the view source will show how the cache settings are set
• Only go to production with Solution files, this is extra work, but pays of in the end (for testing etc etc)
• If you use Solution files, also make batch files to install them, this makes installation as easy as possible
• Master pages and Page Layouts CAN be deployed via features
• If you use code and have errors, use PortalLog and/or SPException
• SharePoint lists can be big, just remind that you only want to show 2000 items at once. So, more items in a list are fine (150k is OK) but make sure the user only sees <2000 items per view (for performance)
• If you use the BDC, always do a full crawl

The tips itself aren’t that great, you probably want some reasons for it. Then you should have been here in Seattle :)

Gala Evening – Museum of Flight

In the evening there was a nice Gala diner at the Museum of Flight. Nearly every Dutch attendy had a nice orange shirt they got from Microsoft The Netherlands. We got loads of reactions to the shirts and had a very nice time at the diner.

WebPart LifeCycle – Cosumer/Provider trouble

Hi,

Ever made a webpart with a consumer/provider model in it? The system is very nice to work with and to create webparts with, but i did have some trouble handling a button click and using the provider… the WebParts’ lifecycle helps understand! I couln’t find it in msdn and i did some searching, found this blog but that didn’t help mutch since i’ve got a different response when stepping trough all the events…

Without Provider/Consumer

1. Constructor
2. OnInit
3. CreateChildControls
4. OnLoad
5. OnPreRender
6. Render
7. RenderContents

With consumer/provider:

1. Constructor
2. OnInit
3. CreateChildControl
4. OnLoad
5. Provider/Consumer methods
6. OnPreRender
7. Render
8. RenderContents

This means you can’t use the provider inside the CreateChildControl… you can fix that by using the OnPreRender to add stuff… slightly bad there, but do-able… not let’s see how it looks with a button click event on there…

1. Contructor
2. OnInit
3. Create child Controls
4. Onload
5. Event handling (click!)
6. Provider/Consumer methods
7. OnPreRender
8. Render
9. RenderContents

This also means that you can’t use the Provider/Consumer inside the click event! That’s a thing i def. do not like… i fixed this by setting a variable on what to do with the provider, and running that code in the Provider/Consumer methods…

If you ask me, the provider/consumer method should be called after the OnInit and before the CreateChildControl…

Day 1 of the Berlin SharePoint 2007 Conference

Yesterday was the first day in berlin. The flight (the day before yesterday) was short and dark. The landing was rather weird because it was cloudy and the pilot sad there was a freezing drizzle. So people looked at each other like ‘how are we going to brake?’. The wheels touched the ground and the pilot slammed the brakes, everything went as normal :)

The airport was small but nice, then in a taxi to the hotel, checked in and had a drink with my collegues.

Sessions – really day 1
So, yesterday was the real day of the conference. I’m not going to describe every session, but some where good and some wheren’t. I gues that was to be expected :)

The K2 blackperl session was good, the presenter wasn’t that good and he went very quick, also he’s demo crashed or had bugs. In general i think K2 Black perl will add a lot of stuff to the ECM project that i’m working on. I can’t wait to get the beta and start working on it.

Another presentation that i liked was the one from Patrick Tiggesem from U2U. The info was good, low level but also a little in depth. I went to two sessions from him and i sure hope he stops mentioning that SmartPart, that shameless plugg drops by every time you hear a session from the U2U guys. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice product, but come on, stop promoting it like it’s a requirement!

Evening program
In the evening we had a diner, what impressed me was the enormous room where with all the tables set up in under 2 hours. It reminds me of the AXA Cathering that Gasterij De Vendel had when i still worked there part time. I do see a lot of people walking around doing lot’s of stuff, compliments to Hotel Estrel.