SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday, 09/10/09 at 12:30PM EDT

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SharePoint Shop Talk continues this Thursday at 12:30 PM EDT to 1:30PM EDT.  This will be our 5th call I believe.  SharePoint Shop Talk works like this:

  • A panel of SharePoint Experts answer questions.  This week the panel includes Laura Rogers, Natalya Voskresenskaya, Harry Jones and me.
  • Any SharePoint question is fair game. 
  • Send or ask questions:
    • By email: info@arcovis.com
    • Twitter directly to @pagalvin
    • Leave a comment on this blog
    • Write the question down on the back of a piece of poster board, one side of which is covered with $20 bills and mailed to my home address (leave a comment and I will be in touch with you directly).
    • Lastly, dial into the call and just ask it out loud.

This week we have a few questions around SharePoint workflow.  Two sample questions:

  • “How do I deploy a SharePoint Designer workflow from development to test?”
  • “Does SharePoint Designer workflow work well with InfoPath?  How I can share information between an InfoPath form and a SharePoint Designer workflow?”

This week’s SharePoint Shop Talk registration is up.  Click here to register.  We hope to hear you there!

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Internet Explorer 8 Crashing // 64 bit Operating Systems

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A comment from Bob Fox (via Twitter, @bfox11b) reminded me that I had meant to throw together a quick blog entry describing a problem and my solution to Internet Explorer crashing on me all the time.

A few months ago, I got a new laptop (Dell Vostro 1720).  This is my first 64 bit machine and I was running 64 bit IE8.  Over time, it started to crash unpredictably, but frequently (probably every day).  It’s pretty agile at recovering from all that, but it was a real nuisance. 

The problem seems to have been an adobe plugin, “Air” or their flash plugin – I don’t really know what it’s called or care all that much.  It turns out that it’s not compatible with a 64 bit environment (which is *totally* reasonable; it’s not like 64 bit is the kind of thing that anyone except ***crazy*** companies want to support or anything).  I tried to uninstall it but that experiment only lasted about 15 minutes.  It turns out that a ridiculous number of sites are using flash tech (I may be the last one to realize this on the planet).  So, I can’t live without it and I can’t use IE8 64 bit. 

My answer is to switch to 32bit IE8.  It’s been smooth sailing since then.

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SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday, 09/03 at 12:30 PM EDT

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We resume SharePoint Shop Talk tomorrow at 12:30 PM EDT.  As usual, if there are any topics or questions you’d like the panel to address, please email them to info@arcovis.com.

This week we are drawing a few questions from the www.endusersharepoint.com Stump The Panel forums:

  • “I understand that a parent site and a child site cannot communicate. For instance, I would like to either push data from a list in a child site to a list in a parent site or have the parent site pull data from child site. Is there a way to design a workflow to accomplish having data sent for pulled from lists in a parent/child site relationship?”
  • “On my newform.aspx for my main list, I have a lookup column that points to the title column in my employee list.

    In the employee list, there is another column that is a checkbox named ‘active’.

    What I would like to happen is on the newform of the main list, when they click on the dropdown it only displays the records from the employee list that are marked active.

    Is there a way to filter the dropdown on the mainlist’s newform.aspx so it only displays the ones marked active?”

  • “I know this is simple but, for the life of me I can’t get it to work! We have a discussion board that we built a date field into call expiration. I would like to automatically have expired items delete after their expiration date. If you could send me a screen shot of the workflow it would be much appreciated. Basically if expired = today then delete current item “
  • “I am trying to set up a sign-up list for a blood drive, wherein once a time slot is chosen, it is no longer available. Is there a way to do this, besides just making an Excel-type spreadsheet be the sign-up? “

And if we have time:

  • How many SharePoint experts does it take to change a light bulb?

In addition, we answer questions directly from email and we’re open to questions any time on the call itself.

Register here: https://www323.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=0dc4shjthnl6d0mm

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SharePoint On Line // BPOS – Some Hands On Experience

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(Note: this article was cross-posted here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1912)

Update 09/01/09: Based on twitter feedback, I need to clarify that InfoPath is supported in the sense that BPOS provides forms libraries.  What I mean when I write "not supported in any way" is that InfoPath forms services functions are not supported.  That means that you can’t publish an InfoPath form to BPOS and and have it render in the web browser.  It also means that some out of the box workflows, which use InfoPath (even in MOSS standard edition) don’t work in BPOS because their initiation and other forms use InfoPath.  Hopefully that clears things up.

I had a chance to really dig into Microsoft Online’s offering earlier this year and specifically the business productivity online suite (BPOS).  This came along before I even hard a firm plan to set out on my own at Arcovis.  I immediately saw, however, that BPOS could be a key part of my company’s internal infrastructure and over time, it has become exactly that.  Arcovis, uses it on a daily basis.  I thought I’d share some of that experience from a practical perspective in case you want to evaluate it for yourself or are just curious about it.

As the word “suite” in BPOS implies, you get a small bundle of applications:

  • Exchange
  • Live Meeting
  • Communicator
  • SharePoint

You can buy each of them separately, I believe.  It’s all spelled out relatively clearly on the Microsoft online site.  You may be able to get better deals through MSFT partners.  Arcovis has been working with Cloud Strategies and they seem to know their stuff, so I’d include them in your list of vendors if you do a multi-vendor search.

I outline my experience and thoughts for each of these respectively.

Exchange

This is a hosted exchange environment and from my perspective, it works like any other Exchange server I have ever used.  It’s fully integrated with all of my fellow Arcovis partners’ environments and gives me access to the calendar (which is huge).  Good stuff.

It also provides the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface.  That means I can get my email on any machine that has a web browser.

My HTC mobile phone, running Windows Mobile 6.1(?) connected to it nicely via Active Sync.  It did this in exactly the way I expected and wanted.

I don’t consider myself much more than a casual outlook and exchange user so there may be really important Exchange features that just aren’t supported and I wouldn’t necessarily know it.

I think the strongest recommendation I make for this is that I am completely unaware that my exchange environment is “somewhere else.”  I don’t know see any difference in Exchange and how I use it on a daily basis versus the half dozen or so other times I used someone’s exchange environment.  In fact, this is better because it simply works.

Bottom line – hosted exchange is what it needs to be and I’m very happy with it.

Live Meeting

This is a truly indispensible tool when you’re in the consulting business.  I fire up instant live meetings several times a week to show intermediate work product to clients, to watch them break my solutions so that I know how to fix them, do sales presentations, etc.  Live meeting is bundled with BPOS and it’s very easy to use. 

I’m even less of a live meeting expert than I am on exchange.  However, for my purposes, it’s great.

Communicator

So far, I use communicator almost only for presence information.  I say “only” but have that presence data available to me whenever I’m connect has become addictive.  With communicator installed and running, my colleagues know when I’m available, what my schedule is like at this moment, and can IM me (though the IM interface is pretty dull, at best).  It’s one of those things that I really miss when I don’t have it.  I actually get a little annoyed when my colleagues aren’t running communicator because the presence information is missing.

The presence indicator feels pervasive.  It shows up in SharePoint whenever their name appears as an author to a document, assigned a task, etc.  It shows in email, embedded right in outlook.  It shows up in the communicator client itself. 

For the most it just sits there running in the background and decorates my outlook and SharePoint screens with real-time presence information.  It’s very cool.

SharePoint

My favorite bit, of course, is SharePoint. 

BPOS provides a modified version of MOSS standard edition.  I’ll explain “modified” below.  We’ve been using our BPOS SharePoint portal for stuff like:

  • Marketing information
  • Sales (proposals, lead tracking) –> we do plan to invest in a CRM solution but for now, SharePoint is working out as our CRM solution.
  • Partner and customer contacts
  • Search
  • Client project information
  • Billing (mainly for storing our invoices)
  • Discussions
  • Prototyping solutions
  • Building out demonstration sites (e.g. new hire management HR process)
  • Time sheets
  • Document collaboration

Basically, all the stuff you’d expect to use SharePoint for.

Along the way, we use technical features like:

  • Alerts
  • SharePoint Designer
    • Workflows
    • Branding
  • Content types
  • CQWP
  • Document libraries with version control
  • Custom lists for all kinds of things (like our time sheets)
  • jQuery (and all the goodness that can come from that, including AJAX calls to SharePoint web services)

What can’t I do with it?  There are a bunch of things that would be nice:

  • I cannot provide anonymous access.  In fact, i don’t think I can do that for any price.  I could be wrong, or hopefully MSFT will change this in future.
  • No InfoPath of any kind.
    • This has the slightly strange side effect of blocking a few standard MOSS workflows that rely on InfoPath.
  • No server side code.  That means, among other things:
    • No event receivers
    • No custom SharePoint designer actions
    • No custom field types
    • No proper SDLC (i.e. features/solutions).
    • No access to stsadm
  • No access to a shared service provider. 

      • The last bit is a little sad because we can’t do as much search configuration I would like. 

      You basically give up a lot of technical capability and are forced to live within the confines of out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality.

      I can live with that.  I have found myself wanting to slap together an event receiver or use a custom action once or twice,, but for the most part, I don’t notice the lack.

      I should add that this is not a comprehensive list of the differences between a hosted “on prem” MOSS environment and SharePoint on line.  Cloud Strategies has a very detailed presentation that goes into all that if you’re interested.  I’m speaking from the perspective of a business owner leveraging the tool.

      Ease of Use

      Microsoft provides a nifty desktop application that enables quick and easy access to all of the BPOS functions:

      image

      You don’t need to use it, but eliminates the need to log into each of the applications separately and for live meeting, It’s quite nice because you can do a “meet now” session with just 2 clicks (one on the “web conferencing” button above and another on the web browser that pops up).  It’s also nice to get OWA with one click, though you can just put that in your browser favorites as well.

      The other major advantage with this desktop application is that it provides a background kind of single sign on service.  As long as this is running in the background, I can open up web browsers and connect to my BPOS environment without ever needing to enter credentials.

      Full Disclosure

      Microsoft made BPOS available to me for free so I am not currently paying the monthly per user fee at this time.  However, I see value there and you can accept on faith (or not) that I would pay for this service.  The fact is that I can’t count on Microsoft providing this for free forever and it’s become so strongly integrated with my business that moving … the mind quails.

      Conclusion

      BPOS is an insanely feature rich platform.  Exchange, SharePoint (MOSS Standard!), presence, instant live meetings – it’s a lot of functionality that I would sorely, sorely miss if I had to live without it.  My business would be severely impacted without it.  Could I find replacement functionality?  Probably, but I think I would have to cobble it together from a variety of other vendors, complicating my life.  BPOS has so far proven itself to be stable and reliable.  For the right kind of customer (like my company), BPOS is worth strong consideration.

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      SharePoint – What’s It Good For? A Health Care Mini Case Study

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      [Note: this blog post is cross posted at Mark Miller’s site here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1897]

      One of my company’s more unusual clients is a New York City doctor who is a leader in his particular field of medicine (eye care).  Like many doctors, he has a strong interest in research.  He wanted to do some research on a rare eye disorder that affects a relatively small number of people in the U.S. and Canada.  I don’t know the number, but it’s really too small for a large pharmaceutical company to invest its own private funds with an eye toward eventual commercial success.  I’m sure large pharma’s do some amount of research into rare diseases, but I believe that the U.S. government is probably the largest source of funding.  Like anything, resources are scarce.  Many doctors across the country want to perform research and trials.  As a result, there’s more than a little competition for that government funding.  This is where my company and SharePoint enter the picture.

      The fundamental idea is that a master organization will recruit other doctors across the country and enlist those doctors’ practices in a particular research study.  These individual practices must sign up with the master organization and then, subsequently, sign up for a particular study.  The relationships look like this:

      • One master organization.
      • Many different doctor’s practices sign up with the master organization.
      • The master organization obtains funding for individual studies.  At the outset, there is just the one study on a specific rare eye disease although we’re already ramping up for another study.
      • Individual doctors’ practices sign up for specific studies.  A specific practice could sign up for one or multiple studies.

      The master organization itself is broken down into groups:

      • Executive committee
      • Steering committee
      • Individual study committees
      • Administration
      • others

      Finally, when a specific doctor’s practice signs up to participate in a study, they need to provide professionals to fulfill a variety of roles:

      • Investigators (including a primary investigator, normally a doctor, along with one or more additional investigators)
      • Coordinators
      • Technicians
      • Grants administrators
      • others

      The above roles have very specific and highly proscribed roles that vary by study.  I won’t get into more detail here, but if you’re interested, leave a comment or email me.

      And now I can answer the question, SharePoint – What’s it good for?  The answer – it’s really good for this scenario.

      This intro is already longer than I expected, so I’ll summarize the vital role that SharePoint plays in the solution and dive into details in a future article (if you can’t wait, email me or leave a comment and I’ll be happy to discuss and maybe even try to do a demo).  We are leveraging a wide array of SharePoint features to support this concept:

      • Sites for committees, individual roles (coordinator sites, investigator sites, etc). 
      • Security to make sure that different practices don’t see other practices’ data.
      • InfoPath forms services for online form entry.  This is a particularly big win.  Normally, these difficult forms are printed, mailed to the practices, filled out and mailed back.  The advantages to the online forms are obvious.  They do introduce some complexities (licensing and human) but that’s another story.
      • Out of the box web parts, like announcements (when does committee [x] meet?) and meeting work spaces.
      • Forms based authentication in combination with a CodePlex tool to provide self-registration and password forget features.
      • Customized lists and list views for visibility into study activities which simply aren’t possible with pure paper and pencil approaches.

      With the exception of the forms based authentication module and a handful of InfoPath forms, this project is using nearly all out of the box SharePoint functionality.

      Before I wrap up this min-case study, I want to point out something very important – no on involved with this project (aside from my company of course) has any idea that a thing called “SharePoint” is playing such a fundamental technical role.  Nearly all of my end users view this as “the web site.”  Our client values us because we’re solving their business problem.  SharePoint is a great technical blob of goodness, but done right, that’s irrelevant to end users.  They need a problem solved, not a wonderful blob of technology.

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      Cloud Computing, Emphasizing SharePoint

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      In lieu of a SharePoint Shop Talk session this Thursday, my partners and I at Arcovis are teaming up with Cloud Strategies and Integrated Systems and Services Group to give what I hope will be an interesting presentation on Microsoft’s online services, focusing on the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).  Arcovis actually uses BPOS for its internal SharePoint portal so we have some hands on experience and the kind of experience borne of daily use.  In fact, the demo itself is running in our very own BPOS environment.

      You can read all the gory sales details here but the main points are:

    • The Cloud Computing Value Proposition: When to Consider Moving to the Cloud
    • Microsoft’s Online Services: Business Productivity Online Suite Overview
    • SharePoint™ Online Spotlight
    • Live Demonstration: Empowering your Business using SharePoint Online
    • How to Get Started with Cloud Computing

      I’ll be giving the live demo and I think it should be interesting in its own right, divorced of the whole cloud / online thing.  I’m going to describe a very common business process, the famous New Hire / On-boarding process.  I’ll demonstrate a solution that uses SharePoint to implement that process.  The demo will include notifications, a dashboard and just generally cool visibility to what’s going on with new hires.

      I’ve personally implemented this solution for three separate companies, so I know it’s a pretty common process that people like to automate using SharePoint.   With luck, Arcovis will be using this ourselves soon enough 🙂

      So, if you’ve had any interest in cloud computing from a very practical SharePoint point of view, this webinar is just what you need to do this Thursday 🙂

      Register here: https://www323.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=1dcgz55vlpm0psn3

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      • SharePoint Talk Shop Recap

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      We held our 3rd SharePoint Shop Talk session yesterday.  Twenty-five folk braved the overly aggressive registration screen (we’re working on that!) to sign up and dial into the call. 

      The topics varied widely although they were a bit more end user and light admin focused this time.  We spent a lot of time discussing the age old question, “how do I secure a view”.  There was some SharePoint Designer in there, a bit of content deployment, version of web parts on publishing pages (there really isn’t any versioning for web parts), best practices for setting up security (answer = “it depends” and keep in mind Joris’ post here: http://jopx.blogspot.com/2009/08/sharepoint-and-2000-principal-limit.html) and analytics (which led to promoting Todd Klindt’s post here about LogParser and SharePoint: http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=85). 

      A pattern seems to be forming with these calls.  A question is emailed in or asked during the Q&A and the bottom line answer is “it depends.”  The panel discusses various angles to the question, we may stray off onto the odd tangent or two, but in the end, we’ve had a pretty thorough discussion of that topic.  My goal with these sessions is that question asker walks away from the call with more options to solve her problem than she had before she joined the call.  I think it’s safe to say that that’s happening (in fact, she may have too many options in some cases).

      Next week, my colleagues and I at Arcovis are jointly presenting a webinar with two of our partners, Integrated Systems and Services Group and Cloud Strategies about Microsoft Online services.  I think it’s going to be very informative.  Our role (Arcovis) is to present a short demo on how to build a real world solution using Microsoft on line.  We’re going to demonstrate a human resources application to manage the on-boarding process for new hires.  If you’ve wondered about MS Online, check this webinar out. 

      This webinar probably means that we won’t be holding a Shop Talk session next week, but keep tuned 🙂  If we do have it, it won’t be on Thursday.

      Once again, my thanks goes to the panel: Harry Jones, Natalya Voskresenskaya and Laura Rogers.  Thanks, guys!

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      SharePoint Shop Talk (Open Q&A) This Thursday, 08/20/09 at 12:30PM EDT

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      We are holding our 3rd SharePoint Shop Talk session tomorrow, 08/20 from 12:30 to 1:30 PM EDT.

      You can read about last week’s session here: SharePoint Shop Talk Thoughts and Reactions

      Bring your questions or email them in advance to info@arcovis.com.

      Register here: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=xnddgb0b7zh5w9xs

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      SharePoint Shop Talk Thoughts and Reactions

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      We held our second “SharePoint Shop Talk” session yesterday and it was a lot of fun.  We had fewer attendees this time (mainly because our partner, ISSG, didn’t send out a big email invite to their customer base).  On the other hand, we had probably more than twice as many questions to answer.  We had so many, in fact, that we couldn’t get to all of them, so now we have a little bit of a head start on questions for next week’s Shop Talk session.  The questions and our responses touched on data view web parts, setting user region specific information programmatically, SharePoint designer workflows, crazy infrastructure question about Kerberos (that was probably a plant by Bob Fox) and jQuery.  Sadly, no banjo jokes, however.  Sigh…

      We’ve registered the site, www.sharepointshoptalk.com and we want start using that to do all the usual things, like announce the schedule of calls, put up the recordings of the sessions and the questions/answers themselves.  (don’t bother clicking the link as there isn’t any content there as yet).

      On yesterday’s call, we had the original expert panel which included my Arcovis partners (Natalya Voskresenskaya and Harry Jones).  We added Laura Rogers of EUSP.com (and elsewhere) fame.  To top it all off, SharePoint MVP Bil Simser joined the call and we roped him into the discussion.  Bil even dusted off an old blog entry and updated it in response to one of the questions. 

      If you’re interesting in participating as an “official” panel member, fire off an email to info@arcovis.com and let us know (I promise that that email address now works!) or DM me, Natalya or Harry via Twitter.

      Thanks Bil and Laura!

      That’s a lot of SharePoint firepower on the line ready to answer your questions as best we can. 

      I’ll be posting details for the next SharePoint Talk Shop session on my blog and twitter. 

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      InfoPath // One Explanation for “Unhandled exception when rendering form System.Xml.XmlException: Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. “

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      I was working on an InfPath form today and ran up against an old friend, “Unhandled exception when rendering form System.Xml.XmlException: Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred.”

      This happened to me a long time ago and I don’t know what exactly I did to resolve it.  Honestly, I think that I had been transitioning to a new project and never saw this one resolved (my replacements had to deal with that headache).  I do remember it was a devil of a problem.  I spent several unsuccessful days dealing with it.  Since then, I’ve seen this come up on MSDN forums at least once over the last year and never really saw an answer for it.

      I hit it today and fortunately this time , I had just made a change to the form.  I backed out that change and the problem went away.  It turns out that it’s possible to create a from template using InfoPath Designer in such a way that it generates a parse error on the forms server side of the fence.

      In my case, the problem was caused by these steps:

      1. Add a new element to a data source as a text field.
      2. Drop it onto the form.
      3. Change it’s display into a drop down list.
      4. Tell the drop down list to pull its values from a SharePoint custom list.

      I don’t know if those steps cause a problem or maybe, somehow the data in the list itself is a problem. I’m going to experiment a bit and see if I can nail downt he parameters of this with any more detail. 

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