Where is the rest of my site?

Over two months ago ( you can tell how far behind I am in my blog posts) I built out a French variation of our clients site on our development server, just to get an idea of what the variation mechanism would rebuild. It took nearly 8 hours to build it (it is a very large site) and I selected the option to build both the sites and the pages.

When it was done creating the hierarchies, I started poking into the French site with SharePoint Designer. The first thing I noticed was that all of the pages were in draft mode, which makes sense. With the page in draft mode, you can send the text out to be translated and insert the translated text into the site and approve the page.

The next thing I noticed was that all of the custom lists and document libraries that I created in the English site were not created in the French site. I found this a little odd in that the columns would be the same in the lists and libraries. I did some poking around and found that the variations will only create the pages and any document libraries and lists that the system needs.

The last thing I noticed was that the documents that we placed in the documents document library in some of the subsites were not created. So I had to recreate those documents myself.

Other things to notice include if you add any custom code to the page layouts, some of the pages may not work in your new variation especially if the logic is looking for a specific column or custom list. Once you recreate the column or list, though the page will work fine and will still contain all of the data that the original page did.

In my next post I will be discussing a sample plan for the location of files in a multi-lingual SharePoint site.

Variations Make the World Go Round

The next few posts concern some recent finds when working with the variation mechanism in SharePoint. Variations allow for the quick creation of language sites and allow you to add workflow items for translators to translate the text and then submit the page for approval. An approver can then approve the page, where it will be available on the site. Variations work by creating a landing page in the top site which has some logic to determine the default language of the user's browser. If there is a variation with that culture set, then the user is redirected to that version of the site. If there is not a site with that culture, the user is sent to the default culture site. Each language is a subsite in the SharePoint hierarchy.

While the built-in landing page provides some very cool functionality, (to determine the users preferred browser language and direct them to the appropriate variation), what happens if you want to store the user's language preferences in a user profile or in a separate data store. Well you can modify the landing page and add your own logic to create the preferred action that you want.

This site demonstrates how to customize the landing page to pull data from a user profile to determine which variation the user should be sent to.

Integrating Line Of Business Data

In SharePoint you can easily integrate line of business (LOB) data into SharePoint for easy collaboration and searching. To integrate this data you will be using the Business Data Catalog. The official Microsoft documentation says that BDC allows for the integration of line of business without using code. Although this is mostly true, you will need a good understanding of XML to create the BDC definition. Note that BDC is only available in MOSS, not WSS. Once you have the BDC set up you can use the data in web parts, lists, search, and user profiles. The following site has some good examples of using the BDC, creating the definition, and tools to aid in the creation of the definition files. Believe me, you don't want to build the BDC definition from hand.

SharePoint 2007: BDC - The Business Data Catalog

Opening Office Documents from An Anonymous SharePoint Site

When building a public-facing MOSS site we had found that clicking on a link to an Office document such as Word or Excel caused a dialog box to display asking for the user to sign in. If the user was already authenticated with the SharePoint site this would not occur, only those users accessing the site as an anonymous user. It also only seemed to be a problem if you were accessing the file using Office 2007 or 2000. Office 2003 worked fine.

If the user clicked Cancel on the dialog box then the document would open in a read-only version. After much research and few leads we found a post that said to avoid the login prompt you need to turn off Client Integration. This can be found in the Central Administation Panel under two locations under Application Management, User Permissions for Web Application and Authentication Providers. You should set this setting in the Authentication Providers section. This way you can set it for each type of authentication zone, both anonymous and authenticated.

In order to use SharePoint Designer with the site you will need the Client Integration turned on for the authenticated user. Disable client integration for anonymous users. This will remove the prompt in some Office/browser combinations.

To remove it for the rest, you will need to remove the "Options" verb from the httpHandlers section of the web.config for the anonymous site collections.

This link is the original site where we found this information.

http://www.teuntostring.net/

Request to Run ActiveX control on MOSS Sites

Today I was passed an email about public-facing MOSS and WSS sites prompting users to run an ActiveX control on the page. The control wants to run name.dll which is used by the presence feature in WSS. There is a workaround until Microsoft can fix the issue. This article explains the issue in more depth and provides the workaround:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mossman/archive/2007/09/13/fixing-the-name-dll-activex-problem-the-mossman-way.aspx

This seems to be a sporadic issue. We have a couple of public-facing sites and one has been prompting users to run the ActiveX control and the other, which is a much more heavily trafficked site, has not prompted a single user to run the control. The only other difference is that one site has anonymous access turned on and this could be the key to this issue not appearing on that site.

Setting default expire dates in an announcement list

Today (as I prepare for the launching of the new corporate Intranet), my boss asked if it would be possible to set the default expires date on announcements to 4 in the afternoon of the following day. (This more closely aligns with current newsletter policies.) I said sure we could do that (thinking that there was an option to set the default time as well as date.

I poked into the announcement list settings for the expires column and found that my default options were: (None), Today's Date, or I could type in a hard coded date and time. None of these options would give me tomorrow's date and I time I wanted. So I figured I might be able to use the [Today] keyword in the box next to the time and add one to it to get tomorrow. I tried that and got back a message saying that I could not use [Today] in there.

Then I saw the calculated field and got to thinking that maybe I could create the date using a calculation. I went to my trusty Office site that explains many of the formulas you can use in the calculated fields. I did not see any way to add hours in the day or to get to a certain time in a day.

Then I got to thinking again (scary isn't it). What if I add a fraction of a day to the keyword [Today]. Maybe that would get me the result I was looking for. So I figured out that if I wanted items to expire at 4PM on the following day I would need to add 1 and 2/3 days to today to get that time. So I plugged into the formula (=Today+(1+(2/3))) and clicked the OK button. I went to create a new announcement and looked down at the expires date and time and sure enough it was set for tomorrow at 4PM.

I love working with SharePoint and always finding nice surprises like this that make developing in SharePoint that much easier.

Passed 70-556

Today I passed the 70-556 cert exam, PerformancePoint, Applications. The test was pretty similar to the beta one I took back in November. A good portion of the test was on business rules and how to configure them. Now that I passed both of these tests, I will be back to posting about SharePoint and some of the most recent things I have been finding in the projects I am working on.

PerformancePoint 70-556 Exam

Tomorrow morning I am going to take the PerformancePoint Applications exam, 70-556. I took the exam back in November when it was in beta and since then have attended a week long class on the product, worked hands on with it, and read and studied books and online documentation. For those of you who are interested in PPS and the 70-556 exam I have provided a list of the materials that I have studied.

Microsoft 70-556 Preparation Guide

Books:

Rational Guide to Planning with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
Rational Guide to Monitoring and Analytics with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

Online Documentation:

PerformancePoint Training

PerformancePoint Operations Guide

PerformancePoint Deployment Guide

PerformancePoint Architecture Guide