Hope to see you at Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008

Well, it has kind of snuck-up on me, but we’re only about a week away from Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008!

If you are going to make it over to Seattle for SPC2008, we hope that you’ll stop by our booth and take a moment to say hello. Our SharePoint Solutions’ booth number at SPC2008 is #810, right next to the meal area ;). We’ve gone big for SPC2008, with a voluminous 20x20 space and a brand new booth to boot! We’ll be giving away a few Zunes, so please come by and register to win.

Along with Jeff Cate and Jeremy Luerkens, I will be presenting a session at SPC2008. Our session is titled “Collaborating with Customers on the Extranet with SharePoint 2007: Solutions and Best Practices”, and is a 200 level presentation in the Collaboration and Social Computing track. Here’s the session description:

Come to this session to hear about using Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server on the Extranet, from the foremost experts on the subject. This session presents a case study of an extranet deployment at a company that has a need to create numerous extranet sites per month for customers and manage accounts for over 1500 extranet users and growing. This session covers the details of forms-based authentication and alternate authentication stores—which are the two primary extranet-enabling features included in WSS and MOSS. Then, we dive deep into the best-of-breed add-on, Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint 2007, to see how it rounds out SharePoint's native functionality to provide a truly complete solution that is secure and manageable. Don't miss this session if you are planning to deploy SharePoint on the Extranet!

If you have time after hours, I’ll be grabbing a pint with the bunch over at Kells Irish Pub on Wednesday night.

Hope to see you there!

Has Microsoft Redefined the Order of Operations in Workflow Designer?

We were recently reviewing the content for a new InfoPath workflow course (Mission: Automation) here at SharePoint Solutions when it was brought to my attention that the Workflow Designer in SharePoint Designer appears to have redefined the order of operations for Boolean expressions.

If you take a look at the conditions in the Workflow Designer for a simple case where we're creating a condition on the title field, you'll notice we have the Boolean expression:

title field contains "meeting" OR title field contains "lunch" AND title field contains "manager"

I learned the order of operations as BNAO (brackets, not, and, or). Since there are no brackets or parenthesis in the user interface, I can only assume that the correct way to interpret this condition expression is:

(title field contains "lunch" AND title field contains "manager") OR (title field contains "meeting")

However, when you do the testing within SharePoint, you find the order of operations interpreted within Workflow Designer as:

(title field contains "meeting" OR title field contains "lunch") AND (title field contains "manager")

as indicated by the results in the following screen shot. The "completed" workflows represent the cases where the Boolean expression evaluated as false and the "in progress" workflows represent the cases where the Boolean expression evaluated as true.

Somebody help me here! Has Microsoft redefined how Boolean expressions are evaluated or am I missing something about the way the expression is displayed that should cause me to adjust my perspective?

Integrating Community Server with SharePoint

Since Community Server™ was first released, SharePoint™ administrators and users have looked towards its rich forums and blogging functionality with envy. Even with the latest release of SharePoint, its built-in discussion and blog capabilities have been a disappointment to all but the least demanding users. The scalable, feature-rich forums and flexible blogging functionality of Community Server are what users really want.

Our engineers here at SharePoint Solutions have spent some time and effort coming up with the standard work and best practices to make these two excellent products integrate well together. The end result for our customers is a best-of-both-worlds scenario with a seamless user experience. Both applications recognize the same user account, without any additional login required.

As an example, our SharePoint-based commercial software site uses the out-of-the-box Blue Band master page. By creating a custom master page for Community Server, we've skinned the forums to match the software site's look-and-feel. As you can see, the result is visually consistent and convenient with only a single user login required.

SharePoint Solutions now offers a professional service to integrate Community Server with your SharePoint implementation. If you would like Community Server's excellent forums and blog capabilities integrated with SharePoint, please contact us to have our expert team assist you.

Our Newest Class – Mission: Automation – SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath

For the past year, students have been telling me they wanted more information on how to use Workflow Designer in SharePoint Designer to write workflows to automate their business processes. I hear this after they use the out-of-the-box workflows in our MOSS Core Features class. When I wrote the MOSS Advanced Features class, I included an entire module dedicated to SharePoint Designer Workflows and InfoPath. Students continue to tell me that was great, but they still want more about workflows and InfoPath.
I'm excited to announce our newest class – Mission: Automation – SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath. For three exciting days, students will dig into InfoPath, Forms Services, and SharePoint Designer workflows.
On day one, you'll focus on learning the basics of InfoPath, Forms Services, and Workflow Designer in SharePoint Designer. On day two, you'll continue to build on those skills while you learn how to interact with external data, convert existing Word and Excel forms to InfoPath forms, work with digital signatures, and explore e-mail enabled forms in InfoPath and e-mail enabled lists in SharePoint. On the last day, you will continue to expand your knowledge by learning how to send your InfoPath form data to a database, how to work with forms on a mobile device, and how to work with an InfoPath form that contains code. Whew! I told you it was exciting!
If you want to make SharePoint far more than just a place to store information, this is the class for you. Register today! The class is geared towards Information Workers who want to learn how to use SharePoint to automate common business processes, Power Users, Enterprise Planners and Teams, Webmasters, Application Designers, Systems Analysts, Help-desk and end-user support professionals, Trainers, and IT Pros and Developers who are primarily interested in out-of-the-box functionality and features. Note: this course does not teach workflow development using Visual Studio and .NET.

Checking for a NULL Date Field in SharePoint Designer Workflow

I was recently teaching an Advanced SharePoint class in Richardson, TX and a student was expressing his frustration over Microsoft's apparent oversight within the SharePoint Designer workflow wizard. One of the "IF" conditions is a simple testing of the value of a field…"If this equals that." He wanted to test a date field in SharePoint to see if it was empty or not. Problem is, when you select a field that is typed as DATE in SharePoint Designer, there is no test for the empty or null condition. You can see this in the first figure.






It occurred to me that we might be able to change the type of the field to a string and then be able to perform the comparison. I used the "Build Dynamic String" action.


I selected the End Date custom field on my Expense Statements list and stored it in a new variable that was typed as STRING.


The results of this were not exactly what I expected, however I was able to determine, through trial and error (sending the values in an email), that the conversion created a string that was filled with question marks (????). Therefore, if you simply test to see if the new string begins with a ?, you can successfully test for an empty date value.


Both my student and I were happy with the results. There may be other ways to do this (perhaps by testing if the value of the date is equal to the "beginning of time" date), but this certainly seems like an easy and foolproof method.

VMs Disappearing from Microsoft Virtual Server

I know this isn't specifically a SharePoint issue, but...

Problem:
I use Microsoft Virtual Server to run all the SharePoint VMs that I use. At any given time, I may have 4-6 VMs on my notebook computer. Recently I ran into a problem where I kept losing my VMs that I set up on Virtual Server. Each time I came back into the Virtual Server administration web site (after restarting my notebook) my VMs that I set up from the last time would be missing. This caused me to have to go into the directory C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Virtual Server\Virtual Machines and delete all the VM shortcuts so I could re-add the VMs. Sometimes I had to create the VM again. However, all the Virtual Network shortcuts seemed to be unaffected. In all cases, the VHD and VMC files were fine...it was just the shortcuts that were causing the problem. I had been living with this problem for the last several months.

The Solution:
I felt like there was a problem somewhere in the permissions, so I finally started poking around. Sure enough, I found that there were some permissions that were not being correctly inherited from C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Virtual Server. I'm a little rusty on setting advanced permissions, so it took me a while to figure out how to make the correct permissions inherit to the Virtual Server sub-directories, but I finally figured it out. The Network Service didn’t have the appropriate permissions to the Virtual Machines directory. I finally found this MSDN documentation that details the DACLs for the Virtual Server directory. The NETWORK SERVICE entries in the following table were the permissions that were missing and not correctly being inherited by the sub-folders.

NETWORK SERVICE	Read & execute	This folder, subfolders, and files
NETWORK SERVICE	Create Files/Write Data Create Folders/Append Data	This folder only

Whew! Finally got that fixed!

Presenting at Information Worker Conference 2008 (IWC08)

I'm looking forward to presenting at this year's upcoming Information Worker Conference. Along with SharePoint Solutions' president Jeff Cate and fellow software engineer Jeremy Luerkens, I'll be presenting a session on how we use SharePoint and Extranet Collaboration Manager to facilitate and automate our customer-facing business processes. Here is the title and description of our session:

Real-world case study: Collaborating with Customers on the Extranet with SharePoint
In January, 2007, SharePoint Solutions began using SharePoint 2007 to collaborate on the Extranet with every customer that attends one of its training classes. Each training class that is held receives its own WSS site that students can access during and after class to collaborate with fellow students and their instructors. The class extranet collaboration application has been a huge success with over 100 extranet sites created and being accessed securely over the Internet by over 1,500 customers. Come hear about the features of this solution, the approach that has been taken to ensure security, and the processes that have been established to quickly generate user accounts and uniform class sites. SharePoint Solutions' award-winning Extranet Collaboration Manager add-on, a big part of this solution, will also be highlighted by its designers, Tony Bierman and Jeremy Luerkens.

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Promote and recommend SharePoint content

So where do you currently go to look for pointers on various SharePoint content…? There are so many sites which claim to provide links to "good" SharePoint content that it's hard to keep count. Why not have a central place where users can recommend various content on functionality related to SharePoint Products and Technologies and then other users can recommend that content if they find it useful... Kinda like how digg.com currently does it.

Well, this concept is now a reality! SharePointPedia.com was launched a couple of weeks ago and it contains community driven content recommendations. It doesn't have that much content out there yet, but it's growing steadily. You can be a part of it as well and submit or recommend content. It's as simple as signing up on the site.

SharePoint Information Worker Conference 2008

Early bird registration for the SharePoint Information Worker Conference 2008 is available until December 1.
$1,495 USD will get you full access to the world's only SharePoint Conference dedicated 100% to non-technical content.
This conference is the business and power-user's dream conference. We will have numerous topics on features and functionality and how to apply them to solve business problems. We will also have several in-depth case studies from companies that have been wringing every bit of value possible out of the SharePoint product line.
Our speakers will include experts from SharePoint Solutions, Microsoft, Project Performance Corporation, SharePoint MVPs and others from government and industry.
Finally, the conference venue, Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Hotel, is truly a one-of-a-kind place to visit. Inside the hotel are nine acres of lush, indoor gardens, shopping and restaurants. The multiple indoor atriums and gardens have year-round climate control so that it is enjoyable no matter what the weather is outside!
If you are interested in the business aspects and application of MOSS and WSS, don't miss this conference.