Combing More than One Document Library in a View

Here is a trick I have learned. Say you have more than one Document Library in a site. Access could be controlled by AD membership. You want to show all three document libraries in a view. Each document library has a view for Open and a view for Closed documents. What you want is to create two views, once showing all Open documents in the three libraries, the other showing all Closed. If all you have is MOSS out of the box and now web parts from a firm like Quest this trick might meet your needs.

First create 2 empty Document Libraries. Nothing will ever go in them, they are just place holders. In this example they are called All Open View and All Closed view.


Open each document library and select Edit Page. Here is the trick. Add all the other document libraries you want to show.


And apply the views to the document libraries. You can even delete the document library All Closed Views. So you have a page called All Open Views with three documents libraries with their views set to Open and a view called All Closed Documents with three documents libraries with their views set to closed.



Remember that you need to have the views created before you insert the document library on the pages. Document libraries inserted on pages don't update changes to views. Also be sure the security on you place holder document libraries (All Closed Views, All Open Views) is set so no one can add anything to them. Remember they are just place holders.

MOSS alone for Record Management? Uhhhhhh

Okay let me say what is on my mind by talking about something else.

Facebook is a great tool for social networking, for keeping in touch with people, for sharing bookmarks and for expanding networks. Facebook is only starting to develop and combined with Twitter organisations and businesses will find the fool a free aid to knowledge collection, knowledge capture, and people management. In time Facebook could provide expanded security services, being able to assure that a person is who they claim to be via secure background checks.

So Facebook is a great KM tool. So if the good young billionaires at Facebook suddenly decided to promote Facebook Records Management would I use it? Would you use it? Would anyone take seriously Facebook EDRMS?

Tools have use and that use produces value for organisations.

SharePoint can reduce time for information search, reduce time to develop intranet sites, provide RAPID and Agyle information management solutions for teams and to a lesser extent to departments.

But MOSS has some key flaws that make the RM tool not really an RM tool, I am sorry to say this but it sadly is the truth:

1. Metadata: SharePoint content types and metadata provides a flat hieracrchy for taggigng information.
2. SharePoint libraries can not include other libraries. Folder seem to give you sub-folders but they are just metadata tags.
3. Therefore it is not possible to implement file plans, or to prevent a "folder" from containing both folders and documents without massive dev. Therefore as much as you would like to say otherwise IT IS NOT RM.
4. RM systems will mean a large part of a companies documents are stored in a single location. In WSS this means a single Web Server, as single Web Application with its own single web application pool and a single database which will likely grow in to TBs. You can set up MOSS to partition content across several databases but I have only meet a few people who know how to do this and its not any easy administration task as compared to creating a new site. And even if you do managed to break it down to 4 databases you have no real control over where files are located, so if you have a failure you will need to restore all 4 to get your data back!!! And you will have to train your entire staff in doing it.

This is one of those features an IT person smiles, shows you, and then gets back to whatever they are doing. You end up sitting there dumbfounded with how you are going to communicate this to IT support in India, how you are going to get DB backup teams to understand this, and how you are possibly going to spread this across different LUNS. I have to say I don't know, but I assume you will be stuck in the worse case with one single DB that contains about 25% of your current information churn IF not more, all stored as BLOBS taking up 2 to 3 times their normal size. And if you do break it between 4 databases you have 4 massive databases that are entirely black boxes to you, you need to rebuild all of them to restore anything. It would reduce backup time but add massive administration complexity.

I could even go on, but why?

If you want to use MOSS as an RM follow this task:

Are you really required to do RM, do you have legal requirements to retain data in such a controlled way as Records?

If the answer is no end here.

If yes, do you have a massive good dev team that understands SharePoint inside and out and a massive good RM team?

If the answer is yes then get great, give it a try. Take a look at this case study.

If the answer is no you need to find a product that works with SharePoint. Meridio is the classic and now that they are own by Autonomy concern that they would not survive is silly.

My own personal experience is Open Text as the solution to look at if you got the money. I state them because I have some experience with the company and have been expressed.

So it comes out to if you are going to use real RM and MOSS you need to spend so much for dev it might be better just to buy Meridio. Again sorry. But a tool is not what it is not. Maybe future release of MOSS will take on RM by itself, but right now Microsoft does not own a solution and buying one would be massive even for MS.

Common Ground For SharePoint and Database Developers?

by Jeffrey Schwartz

When I pointed last week to the potential conflict that Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) can have on database developers and DBAs, I apparently struck a nerve. Some said I hit the nail on the head, while one said I was oversimplifying the matter and creating FUD.

But for some database developers and administrators -- and in many cases even higher up in the IT food chain, the unintended consequences of SharePoint's growth can lead to a lack of control for how data is kept in sync as more data ends up in MOSS.

"You don't have to be a developer to go in there," said Ed Smith, a systems analyst at Tetra Pak, a global supplier of packaging machines. "You can get two secretaries together, they can figure out what they want to do and they can start putting stuff in there."

While SharePoint is popular for storing and sharing documents and other unstructured content, when an individual has complex, structured data based on large numbers of rows columns, where multiple lists have to be joined together, and certainly when referential integrity is critical, it needs to be in a relational database server.

"We discovered that lists are the place to store information but they can't be substitute for tables and relations and of course referential integrity," wrote Prabhash Mishra, CEO of Skysoft IT Services Pvt. Ltd., based in Noida, India in an e-mail.

In an interview last week, Paul Andrew, Microsoft's technical product manager for the SharePoint Developer Platform, said many are already building custom applications on SharePoint that use a mix of SQL Server schema and tables within MOSS. "Of course, each has its own strengths, and each is better suited in different parts of an application," Andrew says.

Not all DBA organizations are wary of SharePoint. "My manager, the head of our DBA organization, loves SharePoint," wrote Kevin Dill, IT innovation analyst at Grange Mutual Casualty Co. in an e-mail. "For example, he regularly stores information on SQL clustering and business-specific SAS functions in the wiki and document library, for easy searching."

Dill added that SharePoint will not completely replace traditional DBAs. "While you can configure many aspects in the Central Admin, you still need DBAs to monitor data growth and backups," he said. "In fact, SharePoint can help DBAs maximize their time on the things that really matter, instead of provisioning little one-off databases for internal projects."

But in many shops, SharePoint is outside the purview of database developers and DBAs. One way to avoid the problem of allowing employees to work around them is for IT organizations to put controls over who is permitted to commit data to SharePoint servers. That's the case for the City of Prince George, BC.

"We've locked it down pretty much so that all they can do is put in content directly," says programmer/analyst Rob Woods. "Nobody else really has the option of doing any of this kind of stuff except for the IT staff."

Jeffrey Schwartz is executive editor, features, for Redmond Developer News.

What don't you like about SharePoint?

I sometimes get asked what I think is SharePoint's weaknesses. No software is perfect and I would rather think about conditions under which you should probably think either about another product or and extension of SharePoint.

The 3 main "problems" I see with the current SharePoint are as follows:

1. Accessibility. This makes me rather sad actually because accessibility is not just about getting disabled people to see your site, but about good structured sites. Sadly the HTML produced by SharePoint is requires massive effort to make accessible to AA or AAA standards.

2. Graphics. Basic modifications are much better in MOSS than under SPS 2003, but still SharePoint is one of the harder tools to make look the way you want. I used to work with Senerna's Collage WCM tool and even now MOSS 2007 publishing features are far inferior.

3. File Plans. SharePoint RM does not support MoReq or TNA FilePlan trees structures. Since almost all existing RM solutions use complex filepans using MOSS as an RM replacement will be very difficult.

Lets Get Serious!!!!! Out of the Box is the true value of SharePoint

Okay lets talk about how IT generally has been run in the past.

IT is often viewed by companies as a kind of immunization. Firms need to put IT in because anyone who does not purchase IT will soon lose their job. Staff people hate new IT systems, IT people hate talking to staff, and year after year the IT and Internet grows without any clear road maps or logical business justifications.

When I got in to IT 20 years ago it was simply taken for granted that most big IT projects would fail. Over the last 10 years there has been a growing demand for ROI, but this has been actualized in my experience via talk rather than reality. SharePoint projects have been finished but generally sit either unused or even used in ways that actually hurt give no benefit over file shares.

There is a joke about why Microsoft offerings can't go after SAP. Any company that uses SAP has someone who purchased SAP, and anyone who purchase SAP can't be very interested in reality, truth or ROI. I know little about SAP but I think the joke admits something wider about the larger marketplace: a failure to see the truth of the sorry state of Enterprise adoption of IT has created a profession that is more of a religion than a science.

As far as I can tell the conditions around serious SharePoint adoption are pretty obvious. You are buying SharePoint not because its cheap or better than any other product. The reason you have SharePoint over another ECM stack is because its Microsoft. Microsoft is more of a government than a company; by using Microsoft you can engage in modern global network economics.

For example I started working in Microsoft in the early 1990s, when the firm made a big successful play for the Information Worker space. Today the reason firms use Office rather than OpenOffice is because they can find staff who know how to use the product and FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH IT.

I think Microsoft has forgotten this basis of their advantage. Office 2007 and Vista both fail to build on the established space of Microsoft as the system everyone knows and DOES NOT HAVE TO THINK ABOUT. Office 2003 and Windows XP establish a standard set of tools like a standard typewriter or accounting ledger. You know you can get staff globally who know how to use it.

In the 1990s there were 2 ways to do an Office roll-out. One was to give your users Office and spend the money training them. The other was to spend tons of money writing VBA appliations to run in the Office tools to carry out all your special "business logic". Today any Enterprise that went down the VBA is stuck with millions or billions of lines of business logic stuck in silos. The better way to go was to use Office out of the box.

Remember that all generalizations are false, including this one. Still radical standards are good starting points for thinking and here is my radical stand on SharePont out of the box!!!!

Its stupid to NOT deploy as an out of the box. Money spent on styling and custom Web Parts is money almost certainly poorly spent. I would go as far to say that SharePoint should only be customized in cases were you have high accessability requirements (AA or AAA) or massive legacy systems that need integration and portal deployment (in which case you should be looking for a SOA broker). In both cases I doubt MOSS is the best PORTAL tool.

Out of the box SharePoint deployments have the following benefits:

1. You can find staff who have SharePoint experience, gain from collective experience. Just as you don't have to train new staff in Windows or Office you won't have to train staff in 4 years to use OTB MOSS. Think about it!!!!
2. You can connect to other firms who use SharePoint without worrying about customizations. We live in the economy of networks, open standards are good but nothing can beat actually standard tools. The ability to connect to other companies IT systems quickly could give great benefits.
3. SharePoint can be very hard to customize.

I think only very mature SharePoint implementations should be at a point where complex WebParts and Workflows are needed. Deploy SharePoint first as an Out of the Box with solid Information Management rules. BPM and SOA should be long term road maps with SharePoint as a part.

Branding a Blog The Easy Way

The easiest way to brand a blog is to select a theme



Go to site settings and then select Site Theme



This gives you a set of colour schemes you can use to quickly style a site

Creating a Blog in MOSS 2007

For now lets assume you know how to create a Web Application in MOSS, which I will cover again and again later. Web Applications create unique Web Sites in IIS. When first created they are empty. The provide a Web Site, and Application Poll and a Database to store the application poll, but as I said they are empty. To create Site Collection link on the document above should be clicked to put a site collection in the Web Application I have created.


In the web application on port 2009 I select a Blog template and give it the name "Home" You can call it anything.




One of my bones with MOSS is there is just room for 2 primary administrators at start. More can be added later but it would be nice to declare one for business, one for IT and a top level Enterprise account. These administrators can not be group accounts but only unique accounts. I find a best practice is to have a shared account like SharePoint Admin of Administrator used to create all of these. Therefore in the future you will always have administration control.

In this case I select no quota and just press okay.



A blog is created with Out of the Box styling. I do prefer the Blogger set up where you select one of many template styles as part of the blog production, but remember MOSS is more for Enterprise and in the wild and generally you will have a stand look and feel in place on your estate.

The above steps also work with WSS 3.

EcontentMag.com: MarkLogic Announces Connector for SharePoint and a Free Toolkit for Word

John Kreisa, director of industry solutions at MarkLogic, says many customers are looking for a way out from under cumbersome, expensive ECM solutions. His company saw one possible solution to customers’ problems when it realized so many were migrating to Microsoft’s SharePoint. By connecting "out of the box SharePoint applications with the MarkLogic server," the company hopes to provide a nimble alternative to heavier applications, says Kreisa.

EcontentMag.com: MarkLogic Announces Connector for SharePoint and a Free Toolkit for Word

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Why SharePoint?

If I had to sum of the core thing using SharePoint will get your staff I would do so in a true story that happened to me.

About 4 years ago I I had a HP laptop that one day fell out of my locker.

Slowly but surely over the next few days the blue screen of death popped up again and again. I took it to support and a few hours later a very worried looking young man came to my office.

He was clearly scared to tell me that my computer's hard drive was damaged and lost.

I grinned and simply asked when I could get a new hard drive.

He seemed surprised by my lack of concern. Certainly I had lost some things that would need to be re-installed but I was using SharePoint 2003 for team sites and my own MySite. Most of my critical content I needed to work was stored.

That is the core utility of this tool.

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Open Text releases Recruiting Management for Microsoft SharePoint

WATERLOO - Open Text(TM) announced yesterday the release of Open Text Recruiting Management for Microsoft SharePoint, a native Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 application for collaborative hiring case management that helps to simplify the recruiting process within organizations. This release is part of a continuing Open Text strategy to build applications that extend Office SharePoint Server 2007, based on the Open Text ECM Suite.

Daily Exchange

Open Text is really pushing its partnership with SharePoint pretty hard.  The fact that the industry leader ECM product is embracing SharePoint is all the proof you need of the future of SharePoint.

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Product Demo: Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, from Mainsoft Corp. - White Papers, Webcasts and Case Studies - ZDNet

Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes integrates your Lotus messaging and SharePoint collaboration environments, without the hassles or risks of a migration. In this demo, watch a Lotus Notes user access, modify, and publish Notes emails and document attachments on SharePoint using Mainsoft's sidebar application. Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator is available as an add-in for Lotus Notes 8 and as a rich, standalone client that docks to Notes 7.x and 6.5.x.

Product Demo: Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, from Mainsoft Corp. - White Papers, Webcasts and Case Studies - ZDNet

Technically speaking SharePoint and Lotus Notes are in competitive positions.  In my experience firms that are drawn to SharePoint have probably already invested Lotus Notes years before.  Full replace of the stack is what Microsoft wants but are not likely.  That is why this integration tool from Mainsoft is worth looking into.

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So you are stuck with SharePont 2003?

Many companies installed Microsoft SharePoint 2003.  With SharePoint 2007 many managers are wondering if it is even worth working with 2003.  Often there are no plans to migrate to 2007 and many office workers have to make due with 2003.  I hope to show that 2003 is a very useful tool to establish collaboration and it is all you have by all means use it.

There is an unwritten law of Microsoft technology that the third release is the one that gets it right.

This is certainly the case with Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007.  Its a shinny star in what has been overall a poor performance of Microsoft to lead users with Vista and Office 2007.

But many very large firms that I have worked with have invested in SharePoint 2003 server farms.  So is it worth even trying to use it?

The answer is yes.  Though 2007 is better than 2003,  SharePoint 2003  provides tools to help get your teams to start collaborating better.  As long as you keep in mind what it can do and what are some of its limits.

It is my opinion that SharePoint 2003 does the following things well:

1.  Broadcast a message: It does require a bit of HTML skill to get it to look good but a department can effectively communicate with it.
   
2. Collect feedback:  You have chat groups. Chat groups can be very productive spaces for collecting feedback. 
   
3. Document Collaboration: You get collaborate on making Office documents.  This is wonderful for producing team documents like bids or manuals.  I have also seen it used for annual reports.

2003 lacks some key features:

Effective Search.  SharePoint 2003 has 2 levels of search, I won't go in to details but it is confusing.   Make sure you test your search and get IT to insure its working.  I don't have space to go in to all the problems with 2003 Search but many firms decided to install other products.

Workflow: when I was first asked about 2003 workflow I could only say "there is nothing there that impresses me"

Web Content Publishing: Got to get 2007 for that.  Again you need to know some HTML to get it to look professional.

But still 2003 offers more features that most people not on a good Lotus Notes system will not have. It is my experience that even though Lotus Notes is a good system it is often implemented poorly and unpopular.  Many firms are using both systems, don't think that just because you have Lotus you can't use SharePoint.

Warning:  Make sure you delete sites when you don't need them any more. Be strict about this, make your users prove they still need their systems.  SharePoint 2003 can become a bloated collection of outdated text, pictures, and endless drafts of unnecessary or dated documents. Remember that everything needs to be stored in a database and that can get very expensive for the company.  Don't let using SharePoint 2003 create a new problem.  Set clear rules on how long people can have team sites for and delete them when no longer needed.  People can still use their own computers to share files.

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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Learn More about Office SharePoint Server

• Collaboration and Social Computing
• Portals
• Enterprise Search
• Enterprise Content Management
• Business Process and Forms
• Business Intelligence
• Hosted Solution
• Developer Platform

RSS | Also see Official Product Blog

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Welcome to my SharePoint blog from London

I hope to make this a major location for SharePoint. I am going to try and follow Jorn Barger in his rule of linking, but I would like to present some text as well.

For those of you who don't know SharePoint 2007 is Microsoft tool to, at the highest level replaced file shares for smaller documents, Office documents and documents that are going to be collaborated and require metadata and workflow.

A lot of people are getting commands from above to use SharePoint. The good news is its a good tool. The band news is that is had dangers I will try to go in to in this blog.