Faceted Tafuta uzio Sitter No More

I had reason today to play about with the codeplex faceted search project today.

Ni imekuwa karibu kwa wakati, lakini mimi alisita kushusha na matumizi yake kwa sababu za kawaida (hasa ukosefu wa muda), plus outright fear 🙂

Kama wewe ni kuangalia kuboresha tafuta wako na kuchunguza chaguzi mpya, download it and install it when you have an hour or so of free time. I followed the installation manual’s instructions and it took me less than 20 minutes to have it installed and working. It provides value minute zero.

It does look pretty hard to extend. The authors provide a detailed walk-through for a complex BDC scenario. I may be missing it, but I wish they would also provide a simpler scenario involving one of the pre-existing properties or maybe adding one new managed property. I shall try and write that up myself in the next period of time.

Bottom line — in minutes, you can install, configure it, use it and add some pretty cool functionality to your vanilla MOSS search and be a hero 🙂

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Saving Older MS Office Files to SharePoint Using WebDAV — Problems and Fixes

During the past week, my mwenzake and I were doing some work for a client in NYC. We were testing a different aspects of a MOSS implementation using their "standard" workstation build (as opposed to our laptops). While doing that, we ran into a few errors by following these steps:

  • Open up an MS word document via windows explorer (which uses WebDAV).
  • Make a change.
  • Save it.

We came to realize that some times (usually the first time) we saved the document, the save didn’t "stick." Save did not save. We would pull that document back up and our changes simply were not there.

We didn’t understand the root issue at this point, but we figured that we should make sure that the latest MS Office service pack had been installed on that work station. The IT folks went and did that. We went through the test again and we discovered a new problem. When we saved it, we now got this error:

picha

Wakati huu, it seemed like every change was, kwa kweli, saved, whether we answered Yes or No to the scripts question.

We finally had a look at the actual version of Office and it turns out that the workstation was running MS Office 2000 with service pack 3 which shows up under Help -> About as "Office 2002".

The moral of the story: I will always use Office 2003 as my minimum baseline office version when using WebDAV and MOSS.

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(For search engine purposes, this is the error’s text):

Line: 11807

Char: 2

Kosa: Object doesn’t support this property or method

Code; 0

URL: http://sharepoint01/DocumentReview/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?location=Documents/1210/testworddocument.doc&dialogview=SaveForm

Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?

SharePoint Uhamiaji Tip: Kutumia “untagged data” Kwa maoni ya Uhamiaji Unaozidi

In one or my very first blog posts, Mimi ilivyoelezwa mchakato wa jumla sisi ikifuatiwa kuhamia wateja kutoka SPS 2003 to MOSS. A reader left a comment asking for more detail and here it is.

Kwa kuwa mradi uhamiaji, tulikuwa na kutafuta njia nzuri kwa hoja mengi ya SPS 2003 documents over to MOSS. The initial load was easy enough. Create a new target document library in MOSS and use windows explorer to move the documents.

This is the new document library:

picha

Open up two windows explorers. Point the first at SPS 2003 and the second at the new document library in MOSS. The following screen shot shows this. Note that the top browser is actually pointing at my c:\temp drive, but you can imagine it pointing to an SPS 2003 document library:

picha

After that drag and drop operation, my target looks like this:

picha

Now it’s time to deal with the metadata. Assume we have just one column of metadata for these documents named "location." We can see from the above "all documents" view that the location is blank. It’s easy enough to use a data sheet view to enter the location, or even go into each document’s properties one by one to add a location. Let’s assume that there is no practical way to assign the location column a value automatically and that end users must do this by hand. Aidha, let’s assume there are hundreds of documents (maybe thousands) and that it will take many many days to update the metadata. As we all know, no one is going to sit down and work for four of five days straight updating meta data for documents. Badala yake, they will break that out over a period of weeks or possibly longer. To facilitate this process, we can create an "untagged data" view as shown:

picha

Sasa, when someone sits down to spend their allocated daily hour or two to tag migrated documents, they can use the "untagged documents" view to focus their effort:

picha

As users tag documents, they drop off this list.

This notion of an untagged data view can also help with a class of data validation problem people inquire about on the forums. Nje ya boksi, there’s no way to prevent a user from uploading a document to MOSS and then not enter meta data. We can specify that a particular site column is mandatory and the user won’t be allowed to push the save button. Hata hivyo, if the user uploads and then closes the browser (or uses windows explorer to upload the document), we can’t force the user to enter meta data (tena, nje ya boksi).

This approach can be used to help with that situation. We can use a "poorly tagged data" view to easily identify these documents and correct them. Couple this with a KPI and you have good visibility to the data with drill-down to manage these exceptional circumstances.

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SharePoint Wildcard Tafuta: “Pro” Si ni shina la “Programu”

Kwenye jukwaa MSDN tafuta, mara nyingi watu kuuliza swali kama hili:

"I have a document named ‘Programming Guide’ but when I search for ‘Pro’ tafuta asipate."

Inawezekana si kujisikia kama ni, but that amounts to a wildcard search. The MOSS/WSS user interface does not support wildcard search out of the box.

Kama kuchimba katika sehemu ya mtandao tafuta, utapata checkbox, "Enable search term stemming". Stemming is a human-language term. It’s not a computer language substring() aina ya kazi.

Hizi ni baadhi mashina:

  • "fish" is a stem to "fishing"
  • "major" is a stem to "majoring"

Haya si inatokana:

  • "maj" is not a stem to "major"
  • "pro" is not a stem to "programmer"

The WSS/MOSS search engine does support wild card search through the API. Here is one blog article that describes how to do that: http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2008/03/06/how-to-use-the-moss-enterprise-search-fulltextsqlquery-class.aspx

3 chama bidhaa, Ontolica, provides wild card search. I have not used that product.

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Magogo Workflow Shughuli katika Designer SharePoint

Wiki iliyopita, I was working out how to loop and implement a state machine using SharePoint Designer and mentioned, kama kando, kwamba napenda pengine kuandika post blog juu ya magogo bora workflow.

Vizuri, Sanjeev Rajput beat me to it. Have a look.

Saving log data into a custom list seems superior to using the regular workflow history:

  • It’s just a custom list, so you can export it to excel very easily.
  • You can create views, dynamically filter the data, nk.
  • It’s not subject to the auto-purge you get with regular workflow history.

There are some risks / downsides:

  • Many running workflows with a lot of logging could cause too much data to be written to the list.
  • Maybe you *do* want automatic purging. You don’t get that feature with this approach (without coding).
  • Security is tricky. In order to write to the list, the user must have permission to do so. That means that it’s probably not suitable for any kind of "official" audit since the user could discover the list and edit it. This could be overcome with some custom programming.

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Shida Na Tribbles … kupotea .. KPIs

This past week I finished off a proof of concept project for a client in Manhattan. While implementing the solution, Mimi mbio katika mwingine kasoro ya MOSS KPIs (kuona hapa kwa ajili ya suala uliopita KPI na workaround yangu).

Background: We used SharePoint Designer workflow to model a fairly complex multi-month long business process. As it chugged along, it would update some state information in a list. KPIs use this data to do their mojo.

We decided to create a new site each time a new one of these business processes kicks off. Aside from the workflow itself, these sites host several document libraries, use audience targeting and so forth. Just a bunch of stuff to help with collaboration among the internal employees, traveling employees and the client’s participating business partners.

We also wanted to show some KPIs that monitor the overall health of that specific business process as promoted by the workflow state data and viewed using the KPIs.

Hatimaye, we used KPI list items that do a count on a view on a list in the site (as opposed to pulling from another data source, like excel or SQL).

The Problem: As you can imagine, assuming we were to carry the basic idea forward into a production world, we would want a site template. Provision a new site based off a "business process" template.

The problem is that you can’t seem to get a functioning KPI that way. When I create a new site based on a template with a KPI List and KPI web part, the new site’s KPI data are broken. The new site’s KPI list points at whatever source you defined when you first saved it as a template.

By way of example:

  • Create a new site and build it to perfection. This site includes the KPI data.
  • Save that as a template.
  • Create a new site and base if off the template.
  • This new site’s KPI list items’ sources point to the site template, not the current site.

The instantiation process does not correct the URL.

I tried to solve this by specifying a relative URL when defining the KPI list item. Hata hivyo, I couldn’t get any variation of that to work.

I always want to pair up these "problem" blog posts with some kind of solution, but in this case I don’t have a good one. The best I can figure is that you need to go in to the newly provisioned site and fix everything manually. The UI makes this even harder because changing the URL of the source list causes a refresh, so you really have to redefine the whole thing from scratch.

If anyone knows a better way to handle this, tafadhali post comment.

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MOSS Small Farm Ufungaji na Upangiaji Story Vita

Wiki hii, I’ve struggled a bit with my team to get MOSS installed in a simple two-server farm. Having gone through it, Nina shukrani kubwa zaidi kwa kila aina ya matatizo ya watu kuripoti kwenye vikao MSDN na mahali pengine.

mwisho kilimo Configuration:

  • SQL / Index / Intranet WFE ndani ya Firewall.
  • WFE katika DMZ.
  • Some kind of firewall between the DMZ and the internal server.

Before we started the project, we let the client know which ports needed to be open. During the give and take, back and forth over that, we never explicitly said two important things:

  1. SSL means you need a certificate.
  2. The DMZ server must be part of a domain.

Day one, we showed up to install MOSS and learned that the domain accounts for database and MOSS hadn’t been created. To move things along, we went ahead and installed everything with a local account on the intranet server.

Katika hatua hii, we discovered the confusion over the SSL certificate and, cha kusikitisha, decided to have our infrastructure guy come back later that week to continue installing the DMZ server. Katika maana wakati, we solution architects moved ahead with the business stuff.

A weekend goes by and the client obtains the certificate.

Our infrastructure guy shows up and discovers that the DMZ server is not joined to any domain (either a perimeter domain with limited trust or the intranet domain). We wasted nearly a 1/2 day on that. If we hadn’t let the missing SSL certificate bog us down, we would have discovered this earlier. Oh well….

Another day passes and the various security committees, interested parties and (not so) innocent bystanders all agree that it’s OK to join the DMZ server with the intranet domain (this is a POC, after all, not a production solution).

Infrastructure guy comes in to wrap things up. This time we successfully pass through the the modern-day gauntlet affectionately known as the "SharePoint Configuration Wizard." We have a peek in central administration and … yee haw! … DMZ server is listed in the farm. We look a little closer and realize we broke open the Champaign a mite bit early. WSS services is stuck in a "starting" hadhi.

Muda mrefu hadithi fupi, it turns out that we forgot to change the identity of the service account via central administration from the original local account to the new domain account. We did that, re-ran the configuration wizard and voila! We were in business.

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Mea culpa — SharePoint Designer * CAN * Fungua Workflows mashine Hali

I’ve recently learned that it’s possible and even fairly easy to create a state machine workflow using SharePoint Designer. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that good stuff and I had a need this week that looked for an invention. Coincidentally, I came across this MSDN forum post pamoja. My personal experience this week and that "independent confirmation" lends strength to my conviction. I plan to write about this at greater length with a full blown example, but here’s the gist of it:

  • The approach leverages the fact that a workflow can change a list item, thereby triggering a new workflow. I’ve normally considered this to be a nuisance and even blogged about using semaphores to handle it.
  • SharePoint allows multiple independent workflows to be active against a specific list item.

To configure it:

  • Design your state machine (i.e., the states and how states transition from one to the next).
  • Implement each state as separate workflow.
  • Configure each of these state workflows to execute in response to any change in the list item.

Each state workflow follows this rough pattern:

  • Upon initialization, determine whether it should really run by inspecting state information in the "current item". Abort if not.
  • Do the work.
  • Update the "current item" with new state information. This triggers an update to the current item and fires off all the state workflows.

Aside from the obvious benefit that one can create a declarative state machine workflow, all that state information is terrific for building KPIs and interesting views.

It does have a fairly substantial drawback — standard workflow history tracking is even more useless than normal 🙂 That’s easily remedied, hata hivyo. Store all of your audit type information in a custom list. That’s probably a good idea even for vanilla sequential workflow, but that’s for another blog post 🙂

I call this a "mea culpa" because I have, kwa bahati mbaya, said more than once on forums and elsewhere that one must use visual studio to create a state machine workflow. That simply isn’t true.

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Njia ya kujifunza Hard — DMZ WFE Lazima kuwa katika Domain

Ingawa ni kweli si halisi, kama suala la kivitendo, internet-yanayowakabili mtandao mbele ya mwisho katika DMZ lazima kuwa katika miliki ya (i.e. si baadhi server ilio katika workgroup yake mwenyewe kidogo). It doesn’t need to be in the same domain as the internal WFE(s) na mengine ya seva (na pengine lazima si), lakini inahitaji kuwa uwanja.

My colleagues and I spent an inordinate amount of time on a proposal which included SharePoint pre-requisites. This included a comprehensive list of firewall configurations that would enable the DMZ server to join the farm and so forth. Cha kusikitisha, sisi kushindwa kuongeza sentensi mahali fulani kwamba alisema, na athari, "the whole bloody point of this configuration is to allow your DMZ WFE server, katika uwanja, kujiunga na kilimo ndani."

dhoruba kamili ya matukio ya, ambapo sisi kimsingi inaonekana kushoto wakati sisi tupate kuwa inaonekana haki, fitina kuficha tatizo hili kutoka kwetu mpaka haki marehemu katika mchakato, hivyo kuzuia yangu kutoka kwa kuliungama yangu "kuwaambia habari mbaya mapema" kutawala.

Sigh.

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Kama Wewe Je Alijaribu Twitter …

Twitter is a very odd duck. I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a month and in some indefinable way, it’s almost as important to me as email. I find myself vaguely unsettled if I wait too long before looking over what others are twittering about. I get annoyed at Twitter’s occasional performance problems because it means I’m missing out. I get a little puff of excitement when I see a new Woot announcement.

Ni kweli jamii wajenzi katika njia ambayo kweli mchango blogs na vikao na hata binafsi uso kwa uso mikutano.

Katika mwezi wa mwisho, Nimekuwa ikifuatiwa majaribio ya mtu mmoja katika kutetereka baridi wakati akijaribu kusimamia Seder.

I’ve learned personal detail about many folks I mainly "know" kupitia blogs — ambapo wanaishi, aina ya miradi ya kazi juu ya, kwamba wana kazi / familia masuala ya kusimamia tu kama mimi.

Mama ya mtu mmoja alifariki … a sad event for sure. But sharing that fact changes and enhances the character of the whole experience.

Hiyo tu mambo binafsi.

There’s more to it than that. It’s also another medium for sharing ideas, au zaidi mara nyingi nadhani, seeking help. Throw a question up on Twitter and you’re never left hanging and the responses typically arrive within minutes.

Kama si walijaribu, you should really give it a go.

Kuangalia yangu hadi saa http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

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