Monthly Archives: February 2011

SharePoint Saturday New Orleans 2011 Notes

I attended the SharePoint Saturday New Orleans event this past Saturday. We had a decent turnout, some really good speakers. I hope next year they decide to 1: not have the event during Mardi Gras 2: next to a parade route 3: during three parades! I got turned around and wound up on the GNO to the west bank-once you are over there you are stuck so i had to take 90 all the way to the Huey P to get home-I freakin hate mardi gras. Anywho, here are my notes 😉

Session: How to Plan SharePoint Projects

Speaker: Dux Raymond Sy

Notes:

  • How do you define success criteria for your project?
  • Most SP environments in the US are glorified network shares
  • Governed Empowerment: goal of a SP site; through the use of a comprehensive governance plan, allows end-users enough room to be contributors.
  • Make all decisions in regards to your SP environment intentional-there needs to be reasons why you want to create or have xyz.
  • Key Steps:
    • Establish success criteria: what needs to happen for the project to be considered successful?
    • Establish key stakeholders
    • Establish priorities: if stakeholders want goals x, y and z, which ones have the highest priority; time and resources may mean scaling down and implementing only the features with the highest priority
    • Establish rules of engagement:
      • Initiation
      • Planning
      • Execution
      • Control
      • Closing
    • Establish roles and responsibilities: who is in charge of what?
    • Establish project communication
    • Project tracking: create a means to track progress of the project
    • Collaboratively Engineer a Solution: this involves educating the stakeholders
    • Educate and engage the business: explain how SP is a platform; SP isn’t the solution, the solution is the solution (intranet, CMS system, etc.-focus on the solution rather than the technology that enables the solution)
    • Keep priorities in order: project scope must be limited
    • Define project goal: project goal statement
      • We’ll do this
      • Because of this
      • In this timeframe
      • For these people
      • With these constraints
    • Identify Relevant Deliverables
      • Governance plan
      • Training
      • Content migration
    • Define the work needed to be done
    • Properly establish how long things take to be done: percentages are meaningless; think in terms of number of resources and resource hours. It might take a resource 40 hours to complete a task, but those 40 hours might be in increments of two hours per day which would create a timeline of 20 work days.
    • Dux uses MS Project to track progress, he highly recommends its use, has a tracking file that he will send
    • Some links Dux provided:

Session: Extending the Data View Web Part

Speaker: Jim Bob Howard

Notes:

  • Session was only 20 minutes as it was a fill-in for a missing speaker
  • You can connect a DVWP to a web service
  • Talked about using jquery to extend the ui of a dvwp
  • Speaker wrote an extensive ebook now available called Extending the DVWP, has detailed instructions on how to connect to various data sources, how to extend the ui, etc.

Session: Content Deployment

Speaker: Javier Barrera

Notes:

  • Session was about how to move sites and content from one environment to another using the OTB functionality in central admin.
  • Make all edits on dev, push to qc to test, deploy from dev
  • Don’t change anything live or the deployment will fail
  • Best used for pushing whole sites and new features from one tier to the next.

Session: Implementing SharePoint Training

Speaker: Scott Lavoie

Notes:

  • Make sure you train Help Desk first; HD historically gets the weakest training and then they have to support a platform they know nothing about
  • Beyond classroom training provide quick reference guides, job aides, and e-learning
  • E-learning by itself will go mostly unused, works best as a reference
  • Tie learning to performance, pay, incentives
  • Have a sustainment plan: you have a had classroom training, now what? Users start forgetting what they learned almost immediately, you need to have  ongoing resources, refresher courses, etc. to help people remember what they have learned.
  • Slides for session

Session: Content Aggregation

Speaker: Christina Wheeler

Notes:

  • Content roll-ups
  • Infopath can’t see managed metadata
  • Managed metadata can be used as sources for lookups
  • CQWP:
    • aggregates content from within a single site collection
    • filter by content types
    • dynamic filtering easier to do in 2010
    • common view fields now exposed in 2010 cqwp
  • Relevant documents webparts
  • RSS viewer: none to be buggy
  • Calendar overlays: new in 2010; you can overlay up to 10 calendars on top of another

Session: Form Approval

Speaker: Laura Rogers

Notes:

  • Speaker wrote part of book: SharePoint 2010 Building Business Solutions
  • You can set a workflow to write to a custom list like a custom change log
  • You can create an approvals view in InfoPath
  • You can turn on content approval for any list or library
  • 2010 has new task processes
  • Laura’s Blog

Fun with the UserProfileService web service in InfoPath, part two

Part Two: Using the UserProfileService to Auto-Fill Fields

Today we will be using the UserProfileService to automatically populate the following fields based off the current logged user:

  • My Name
  • My Email
  • My Title
  • My Department
  • My Manager
  • My Manager’s Email
  • My Manager’s Title

If you haven’t already connected to the webservice, follow the instructions in Part One: Connecting to the UserProfileService web service in InfoPath

Once you are connected to the service, create a new InfoPath form and add the fields listed above. Your Form should look something like this:

Double-click the My Name field. Select Control Properties from the Properties tab in the ribbon. Under Default Value, click the fx button:

Click Insert Field or Group:

The Select a Field or Group dialog will display. Select GetUserProfileByName from the Fields dropdown:

Expand out the dataFields node until you get to Value. Select Value and then click Filter Data:

Click Add on the Filter Data dialog:

Under the Value dropdown, select Select a Field or group. Select Name from the Select a Field or Group dialog. Click OK:

In the third dropdown in the Specify Filter Conditions dialog, select type text and then type in PreferredName:

Click OK and then click OK on all the open dialogs. You will then follow these same steps on each of the following fields; substitute the listed text for the PreferredName text:

  • My Email: enter text Email
  • My Title: enter text Title
  • My Department: enter text Department

You should now have all of the My Info fields created and have default values added for each. For the manager’s section, we will add a new data connection using the UserProfileService, except when you get to the Operations screen, instead of selecting GetUserProfileByName you will select GetCommonManager:

Once the new data connection for GetCommonManager is made, select the control properties for the My Manager field, click the fx button, click Insert Field or Group. In the Fields dropdown that displays on the Select a Field or Group dialog, instead of selecting GetUserProfileByName, select GetCommonManager. Expand out the GetCommonManagersResult node and then select Name. Click OK on all open dialogs:

Follow these steps on each of the remaining Manager fields with the following substitutions in the Select a Field or Group > GetCommonManagerResult node:

  • My Manager’s Email: select Email
  • My Manager’s Title: select Title

Save your file and preview. your result should look like this:

Stay tuned for Part Three: Using the GetCommonManager function to display a user’s supervisor hierarchy.

I’m attending SharePoint Saturday New Orleans

I’m really looking forward to SharePoint Saturday New Orleans, mostly to see Laura Rogers’ (from SharePoint 911) session. My company has used SharePoint 911 a few times and I highly recommended them if you have immediate SharePoint needs. Randy Drisgill personally helped on one of my projects-really nice folks. I will be sure to post what I learned after the event.

Fun with the UserProfileService web service in InfoPath!

This will be a multi-part post about using the UserProfileService web service with InfoPath. I am using InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2007.

Part One: Connecting to the UserProfileService web service in InfoPath

  • In InfoPath 2010, click on Manage Data Connections at the bottom of the Fields panel:

  • The Data Connections dialog will display. Click ADD:

  • Under Create a new connection to:, select Receive data and then click NEXT:

  • Under From where do you want to receive your data?, select SOAP Web service and then click NEXT:

  • Enter in the address for the UserProfileService, which will be: yourSite/_vti_bin/UserProfileService.asmx. Click Next:

  • Under Select an operation, choose GetUserProfileByName and then click NEXT:

  • On the next screen that displays, keep the defaults and click NEXT:

  • Click NEXT on the screen that displays.

  • On the final screen, keep the default name for the data connection, GetUserProfileByName, check the box next to Automatically retrieve data when the form is opened, and then click FINISH:

  • The new data connection will now display in the data connections list:

    Stay tuned for Part Two: Using the GetUserProfile web service to auto-fill fields