Lágmark Öryggi þarf til Eyðublöð Infopath

I needed to meet a security requirement for an InfoPath form today. In this business situation, a relatively small number of individuals are allowed to create a new InfoPath form and a much wider audience are allowed to edit it. (Þetta er ný-ráða á borð mynd notuð af Human Resources sem kynnir workflow).

Til að mæta þessu markmiði, Ég bjó búið tvær nýjar aðgangsstig ("create and update" and "update only"), broke inheritance for the form library and assigned permissions to a "create, uppfæra" user and a separate "update only" notandi. The mechanics all worked, but it turned out to be a little more involving than I expected. (Ef þú feel a lítill skjálfta á SharePoint leyfi, skrá sig út this blogg). The required security configuration for the permission level was not the obvious set of granular permissions. To create an update-only permission level for an InfoPath form, Ég gerði eftirfarandi:

  1. Búa til nýjan leyfi stig.
  2. Hreinsa burt alla möguleika.
  3. Selected only the following from "List permissions":
    • Breyta Atriði
    • Skoða hluti
    • Skoða Umsókn Greinar

Velja þessa valkosti leyfa notanda að uppfæra mynd, en ekki skapa það.

The trick was to enable the "View Application Pages". There isn’t any verbage on the permission level that indicates that’s required for update-only InfoPath forms, en reynist það er.

Create-and-Update was even stranger. I followed the same steps, 1 gegnum 3 ofan. I had to specifically add a "Site Permission" valkostur: "Use client integration features". Aftur, lýsing þar er ekki að gera það virðast eins og það ætti að vera þörf fyrir Infopath formi, en þar er.

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Að “In-Milli” Feeling; Athuganir á SharePoint ráðgjöf

Því miður, phase one of my last project has come to a close and the client has opted to move ahead by themselves on phase two. We did our job too well, as usual 🙂 I’m now between projects, sérstakur tími fyrir ráðgjafa starfsmanna eins og mig (as opposed to independents who must normally live in perpetual fear of in-between time 🙂 ). We staff consultants fill this time in various ways: Working with sales folk to write proposals; filling in for someone or backing up a person on this or that odd job; studying; Blogging :). It’s hard to plan more than a few days in advance. At times like this, while I have a bit of time on my hands, I like to reflect.

I’m almost always sad to leave a client’s campus for the last time. We consultants form a peculiar kind of relationship with our clients, unlike your typical co-worker relationship. There’s the money angle — everyone knows the consultant’s rate is double/triple or even more than the client staff. You’re a known temporary person. As a consultant, you’re a permanent outsider with a more or less known departure date. En, you eat lunch with the client, take them out to dinner and/or for drinks, buy cookies for the team, go on coffee runs, give/receive holiday cards — all the kinds of things that co-workers do. On one hand, you’re the adult in the room. You’re an expert in the technology which puts you in a superior position. Á hinn bóginn, you’re a baby. On day zero, consultants don’t know the names, the places or the client’s lingo. Most times, consultants never learn it all.

When things go well, you become very well integrated with the client’s project team. They treat you like a co-worker in one sense, and confidant in another. Since we don’t have a manager-style reporting relationship with the client, the project team often feels a little free to air their dirty laundry. They let their barriers down and can put the consultant into an awkward position, never realizing they are doing it.

Consultants often don’t get to implement phase two and that never gets easy for me. I think this is especially hard with SharePoint. Phase one of of your typical SharePoint project covers setup/configuration, governance, taxonomy, basic content types, o.fl.. and in many respects, amounts to a lengthy, extremely detailed discovery. That’s how I view my last project. We did all the basic stuff as well as execute some nice mini-POC’s by extending CQWP, implementing BDC connections to PeopleSoft, introduced a fairly complex workflow with SharePoint Designer, touched on basic KPI’s and more. A proper phase two would extend all of that with extensive, almost pervasive BDC, really nice workflow, fine tuned and better search, records center, excel services and probably most important, reaching out to other business units. En, it’s not to be for me, and that’s sad.

Based on this recent experience, I think it’s fair to say that a proper enterprise SharePoint implementation is a one year process. It could probably legitimately run two years before reaching a point of diminishing returns. Details matter, auðvitað.

That’s the consultant’s life and all of these little complaints are even worse in a SharePoint engagement. As I’ve written before, SharePoint’s horizontal nature brings you into contact with a wide array of people and business units. When you’re working with so many people, you can see so many ways that SharePoint can help the company become more efficient, save time, do things better… but you don’t always get to do them.

I often look back to my first job out of college, before starting a consulting career 1995. We did get to do a phase two and even a phase three. Those were nice times. On the downside, þó, that means that that would mean a lot of routine stuff too. Managing site security. Tweaking content types. Creating views and changing views. Dealing with IE security settings. Restoring lost documents. Blech! 🙂

Despite my melancholy mood, I can’t imagine a place I’d rather be (except at a warm beach with a goodly supply of spirits).

I can’t wait to get started implemented the next enterprise SharePoint project.

(Apropos of nothing, I wrote most of this blog entry on an NJ Transit bus. I don’t think I made any friends, but one CAN blog on the bus 🙂 )

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Sunnudagur Fyndið: “Þeir eru ekki svo slæmt”

Aftur nálægt 1999, Ég var að eyða fullt af vikum í Santa Barbara, CA, að vinna fyrir viðskiptavin, leaving my poor wife back here in New Jersey alone. I dearly love my wife. I love her just as much today as I did when she foolishly married me 1,000 years or so ago. Einhvers staðar meðfram línu, I coined a phrase, "special fear", as in "Samantha has special fears." She as a special fear of "bugs", which to her are not flies or ladybugs, but rather microbes. She’s afraid of this or that virus or unusual bacteria afflicting our son, or me, but never really herself. (She is also specially afraid of vampires, miniature evil dolls (especially clowns) and submarine accidents; she has out-grown her special fear of people dressed in Santa Claus outfits).

Einn daginn, my co-worker and I decided to drive up into the nearby mountains near Ohai. At one point, we got out of the car to take in the scene. When we got back into the car, I noticed that a tick was on my shoulder. I flicked out the window and that was it.

That night, I told her about our drive and mentioned the tick. The conversation went something like this:

S: "Oooo! Those are bad. They carry diseases."

P: "Well, I flicked it out the window."

S: "They are really bad though. They can get under your skin and suck blood and transfer bugs. You better check your hair and make sure there aren’t any in your head!"

P: In a loud voice: "My God! CAN THEY TAKE OVER YOUR MIND???"

S: Literally reassuring me: "No, they’re not THAT bad."

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Fljótur og Þægilegur: Sjálfkrafa Open InfoPath Form frá SharePoint Designer Email

UPDATE: Madjur Ahuja bendir á þennan tengil frá a ráðstefnu umræða: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms772417.aspx. It’s pretty definitive.

===

We often want to embed hyperlinks to InfoPath forms in emails sent from SharePoint Designer workflows. When users receive these emails, þeir geta smellt á tengilinn frá tölvupósti og fara beint í Infopath formi.

Þessi slóð skrímsli byggingu virkar fyrir mig:

HTTP://server/sites/departments/Technical Services/InformationTechnology/HelpDesk/_layouts/FormServer.aspx?XmlLocation=/sites/departments/Technical Services/InformationTechnology/HelpDesk/REC REM RED Forms/REC2007-12-18T11_33_48.XML&Source=http://server.corp.domain.com/sites/departments/Technical%20Services/InformationTechnology/HelpDesk/REC%20REM%20RED%20Forms/Forms/AllItems.aspx&DefaultItemOpen=1

Replace the bolded red text with the name of the form, as shown in the following screenshot:

mynd

Note that there is a lot of hard-coded path in that URL, as well as a URL-encoded component. If this is too hard to translate to your specific situation, try turning on alerts for the form library. Post a form and when you get the email, skoða uppruna bréfsins og þú munt sjá allt sem þú þarft til að fela.

Astute readers may notice that the above email body also shows a link that directly accesses the task via a filtered view. I plan to explain that in greater detail in a future post.

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Hugsun Um auglýsing vara

I put up a SharePoint Designer extensions project up at CodePlex earlier this year and even though it’s really quite limited in scope, I estimate that it’s been downloaded by 40 að 60 (possibly even 100) companies in just about two months. That indicates to me that there’s a market for that solution and if I were to successfully commercialize it, that could translate into a goodly amount of beer 🙂

My background is actually much more in product development and I know what is required to bring a top-notch product, as opposed to a CodePlex hobby project, to market. In my past life, I was responsible for product R&D for all software products. The difference between then and now is that I’m a consultant now working for an (excellent) consulting firm (Conchango). Áður, I had an entire company behind me and in front of me, selling and supporting the products we brought to market. Í dag, I’d be alone.

I have several product ideas in mind, but I think the easiest would be to create a commercial version of the above-mentioned CodePlex project that uses that as a starting point and extends it further. My fuzzy off-the-cuff thinking is to charge something like $100 for an unlimited developer license and $500 per production web front end. I think I would also give away the source code.

If you have thoughts or experiences that you’re willing to share, vinsamlegast eftir umsögn eða email me directly. I’d like to hear opinions like:

  • Is it all worthwhile?
  • Practical suggestions for marketing, collecting money, distributing.
  • Pricing.
  • Stuðningur.
  • Any other comment you’d like to leave.

It’s "easy" to come up with product ideas and to implement them, though many dozens of hours of work are required. The other stuff is not as easy for me.

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Sunnudagsmorgun Funny: “Jesús Must Die”

We bought our first (and only) "luxury" car back when hurricane Floyd nailed the east coast of the U.S. We got a LOT of rain here in New Jersey and several days passed before life returned to normal. Just before Floyd struck, we made an offer for a used Volvo 850 GL and after Floyd struck, drove it home.

It was our first car with a CD player. Like most new car owners, we went a little CD crazy, revived our dormant CD collection and went on long drives just to listen to CD’s in the car. Like all fads, this passed for us and we ended listening to the same CD over and over again. Í okkar tilviki, it was Jesus Christ Superstar.

Eitt af því sem (margir) brilliant pieces in that rock opera is sung by the establishment religious types, led by Caiaphas, the "High Priest". They sing their way into deciding how to handle the "Jesus problem" and Caiaphas directs them to the conclusion that "Jesus must die". The refrain on the song is "Just must die, must die, must die, this Jesus must die". You hear that refrain a lot in that piece.

At the time, my son was about three years old. You can probably see where this is going.

I came home from work one day and my son is in the living room playing with toys and humming to himself. I’m taking off my jacket, looking through the mail and all my usual walk-in-the-door stuff and I suddenly realize that he’s just saying, not really singing: "Jesus must die, must die, must die." I was mortified. I could just see him doing that while on one of his baby play dates at a friend’s house — probably the last play date with that baby friend.

We pulled that CD out of the Volvo after that 🙂

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Google gerði Samþykkja Live Spaces Blog mína í AdSense

UPDATE: Frá 03/09, I have found no way to integrate my live spaces account with Google Adsense. Microsoft’s system here seems to prevent all of the technical mechanisms that Google provides would-be adsense hosters. I tend to believe this is mainly a side effect of the security they’ve built into live spaces, not a direct effort to disable Adsense.

Þetta er ekki SharePoint staða, en gæti verið áhugaverð fyrir bloggara gen heimsókn.

Someone commented on their Windows Live Spaces blog that Google affirmatively denied their application to participate in AdSense. She theorized that Google denied her because Windows Live Spaces hosts her blog. Hins, Ég var nýlega samþykkt inn í forritið fyrir lifandi rými mínir blogg, svo stefnan hefur annaðhvort breytt eða Google hafnað henni af öðrum ástæðum.

Auðvitað, Ég sé ekki neina augljósa leiðin til að fella Google AdSense í lifandi rými mitt, but it’s a start 🙂

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Framkvæmd Master / Detail Sambönd nota sérsniðna Lists

Forum notendur oft og spurningum eins og þetta:

> Halló,
>
> Vinsamlegast segðu mér ef það eru einhverjar möguleikar til að byggja upp sérsniðna lista með
> skipstjóri og gerð upplýsinganna (eins reikningum) án þess að nota Infopath.
>

SharePoint afla sumir út af the kassi lögun sem styðja konar kröfur fyrirtækis eins og þessi.

Almennt, one links two lists together using a lookup column. List A contains the invoice header information and list B contains invoice details.

Nota fleiri listum til að halda viðskiptavinar Reikningur, vörunúmerum, o.fl..

Notaðu fyrirspurn efni vefur hluti (í mosa aðeins) and/or a data view web part to create merged views of the lists. SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) er einnig í boði fyrir skýrslugerð hlið hennar.

Hins, there are some important limitations that will make it difficult to use pure out-of-the-box features for anything that is even moderately complex. These include:

  • Stærð tengdum útlit listum vs. "smartness" of the lookup column type. A lookup column type presents itself on the UI differently depending on whether you’ve enabled multi-select or not. In either case, the out-of-the-box control shows all available items from the source list. If the source list has 1,000 atriði, that’s going to be a problem. The lookup control does not page through those items. Staðinn, it pulls all of them into the control. That makes for a very awkward user interface both in terms of data entry and performance.
  • Lookups "pull back" one column of information. You can never pull back more than one column of information from the source list. Til dæmis, you cannot select a customer "12345" and display the number as well as the customer’s name and address at the same time. The lookup only shows the customer number and nothing else. This makes for an awkward and difficult user interface.
  • No intra-form communication. Ég hef skrifað um þetta hér. You can’t implement cascading drop-downs, skilyrðum virkja / slökkva reiti, o.fl..
  • No cascading deletes or built-in referential integrity. SharePoint treats custom lists as independent entities and does not allow you to link them to each other in a traditional ERD sense. Til dæmis, SharePoint leyfa þér að búa til tvær sérsniðnar lista, "customer" and "invoice header". You can create an invoice header that links back to a customer in the customer list. Þá, you can delete the customer from the list. Út af the kassi, there is no way to prevent this. To solve this kind of problem, þú myndir venjulega nota atburði dýraþjálfari.

Það kann að virðast hráslagalegur, but I would still use SharePoint as a starting point for building this kind of functionality. Though there are gaps between what you need in a solution, SharePoint gerir okkur að fylla þær eyður nota tæki svo sem eins og:

  • Event handlers. Use them to enforce referential integrity.
  • Custom dálka: Create custom column types and use them in lieu of the default lookup column. Add paging, höggdeyfir og AJAX lögun til gera þá móttækilegur.
  • BDC. This MOSS-only feature enables us to query other SharePoint lists with a superior user interface to the usual lookup column. BDC can also reach out to a back end server application. Use BDC to avoid replication. Rather than replicating customer information from a back end ERP system, use BDC instead. BDC features provide a nice user interface to pull that information directly from the ERP system where it belongs and avoids the hassle of maintaining a replication solution.

    BDC er MOSS lögun (ekki í boði í WSS) and is challenging to configure.

  • ASP.NET vefform: Búa til fullur-lögun AJAX-virkt form sem notar SharePoint mótmæla líkan og / eða vefur þjónusta til að nýta SharePoint listi en að veita mjög móttækilegur notendaviðmót.

Síðasti valkostur getur finnst eins og þú ert að byrja frá grunni, en íhuga þá staðreynd að SharePoint vettvang byrjar þú burt með the hópur stuðningsmanna lykill lögun:

  • Öryggi líkan með viðhald.
  • Matseðill kerfi með viðhald.
  • "Master table" (i.e. Raða listum) með öryggi, innbyggður-í viðhald og endurskoðun.
  • Leita.
  • Back End Integration verkfæri (BDC).

Ef þú byrjar með nýja auða verkefni í Visual Studio, þú hafa a einhver fjöldi af grunngerð og pípulagnir að byggja áður en þú nálgast það SharePoint býður.

I do believe that Microsoft intends to extend SharePoint in this direction of application development. It seems like a natural extension to the existing SharePoint base. Microsoft’s CRM application provides a great deal of extensibility of the types needed to support header/detail application development. Although those features are in CRM, the technology is obviously available to the SharePoint development team and I expect that it will make its way into the SharePoint product by end of 2008. If anyone has an knowledge or insight into this, vinsamlegast eftir athugasemd.

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Quick Ábending: Efni Fyrirspurn Web Part, Leit column value og XSL

I have a column name in a content type named "Real Estate Location".

That column is of type "lookup".

Ég hef breytt <CommonViewFields> og ItemStyle.xsl að sýna dálk.

Einföld <XSL:gildi-af velja =…> skilar til baka innri gildi sem felur Ordinal gögn stöðu, svo sem eins og:

1;#Miami

Til að fá manna-vingjarnlegur gildi, nota XSL hlutstreng-eftir, eins og sýnt:

<XSL:value-of select="substring-after(@ Real_x005F_x0020_Estate_x005F_x0020_Location,'#')"></XSL:gildi-af>

Use this technique whenever you are working with lookup values in XSL transforms and need to get the human-friendly value.

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SharePoint Beagle desember Útgáfudagur Up & Lifandi

Margir af þú veist þetta nú þegar, en í desember útgáfu SharePoint Beagle er lifandi.

Sérhver hlutur er þess virði að lesa að mínu mati.

Ég vil gefa smá auka högg til Samstarfsmaður minn er grein (Natalya Voskrensenskya). She provides a screen-shot extravaganza while describing how she used custom lists, workflow, SharePoint Designer, data views and other elements to implement a self-service training feature in MOSS. She describes techniques that can be applied in many different business scenarios. Check out bloggið hennar meðan þú ert á það.

Ekki gleyma að kíkja minn hlutur as well 🙂 I wrote about using MOSS to help an HR department manage open positions.

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