Today’s SharePoint Shop Talk covered its usual wide range of topics:
- We discussed the issues around opening up parts of a SharePoint site collection to your trading partners. It’s not the most complicated thing in the world, but when you start talking about out loud, you realize there are a lot of small individual things that need to be done to do this correctly. You have to consider the firewall, licensing (your intranet SharePoint license may not be, and probably won’t be, sufficient), SharePoint configuration (AAM, extending web applications to zones that probably have HTTPS enabled), etc. If anyone has a checklist of what to do and the sequence, I’d love to see it in comments. This question wins the “Most Discussed Question” aware of the year (so far).
- I got to ask a question about the image library functionality that generates those thumb nail images. I speculated that an event receiver on the image library is generating the thumb nail. I’m probably way off base, but it does seem like there’s an entirely separate image on the web server for the thumb nail itself. Vamshi, a SharePoint Shop Talk regular, points out this blog entry: http://pathtosharepoint.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/picture-libraries-take-advantage-of-web-friendly-formats/. That’s a pretty interesting post about images in SharePoint if you’re interested in it.
- We discussed custom edit forms (that you create via SPD) and the fact that you lose the attachment functionality when you do that. Laura Rogers has blogged on that subject here: http://sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/archive/2009/09/10/fix-for-the-custom-form-attachments-issue.aspx
This week, we introduced a new feature where we spent about 10 minutes demonstrating an interesting tip/trick in a SharePoint environment. This week, we showed how to added a content editor web part (and actually any web part) to a newitem.aspx page. In this case, the objective was to show some extensive online help for that newitem.aspx page. This is also one of the usual starting points for integrating jQuery into your environment. Next week, we do plan to show a jQuery tip/trick. We hope to see you there.
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Kim-Larry,
The answer would depend on whether you’re using Infopath client (running locally on the desktop/laptop) or infopath forms services (where the form is published to sharepoint and then rendered via the web browser).
It would also matter whether you’re in a forms based authentication zone (FBA) or a windows auth zone. Normally, windows auth would be used in an intranet scenario and FBA in an extranet scenario.
In the FBA environment, you don’t have access to the user ID. You can assign it after the fact using workflow (SPD works fine for this).
In a windows auth zone, you can use the "username()" function in conjunction with a rule that fires when the form opens. Roughly:
1: Go to the Tools menu option in infopath client and select "Form options"
2: Select "open and save" from the set of choices on the left hand side.
3: Click on the rules button.
4: Add a rule and name it.
5: Add an action, set a field’s value.
6: Select the field you want to auto-populate.
7: Click on the fx button
8: Click on insert function.
9: Click on all and then select username()
Press OK buttons a few times, publish the form and it should work.
HTH,
–Paul Galvin
Need help: I created a form in Microsoft Infopath and would like to populate the userid automatically in the form when it is opened. I did make the userid as a required field but many people using the form requested it be automatic. Any suggestions?
Paul,
I know you thought we were all underwhelmed by your demo but I actually used your tip today!
Thanks,
Paul Olenick
i’m embarrassed to say that I was registered for the call but got pulled away at the last minute.
DirSync is a very key piece of the MSO puzzle, it makes it very attractive for a lot of reasons.
John
John, awesome point. If you were on the phone, you should have chimed in 🙂
I actually meant at several points to suggest it and I"m going to try and contact the person that asked the question.
Your point, "Integrate w/ your AD via Directory Synchronization" is very interesting to me. I wouldn’t have made that connection and it’s spot on.
Thanks,
–Paul
My recommendation on the extranet? Get SharePoint Online and use it as your extranet.
Benefits:
– Completely separate from your on-premise infrastructure
– Full SharePoint (WSS) functionality
– Integrate w/ your AD via Directory Synchronization
– Use Single Sign In App to streamline account management for your users
– Don’t create external users in your AD.
– No additional infrastructure or architecture to manage
Drawbacks?
– Cost of hosted SharePoint Online solution, which is probably offset by reduced infra overhead
– Long, unreadable URLs
– Data is separate from your internal environment
– ?
Other hosted SharePoint providers could also be used, but I really like all the integration points SharePoint Online offers. I actually do a talk for user groups about this topic, I think its a great extranet solution if you’re not willing or ready to take on the additional complexity and cost that comes with a full-on extranet solution. The biggest positive for me is that external users are stored in a completely separate account repository, so if you have other internal systems that just allow access for all authenticated users in your internal AD, you don’t have to modify them to prevent external users from access them.
John