Products, News, Updates – Anything SharePoint
Do not miss our latest release: Cascaded Lookup 3.0
SharePointBoost Cascaded Lookup, one of our favorite, is upgraded to version 3.0. And many new features are coming: multiple parent-child relationship, multiple filtered lookup, displaying additional column, etc. But the best comes with this version 3.0 is the improved lookup performance (click here to check the details). Cascaded Lookup is such useful that you can not imagine how you could do without it today.
In many situations users have successive choices to make with dropdown menus, typically “Country” and “Province”. Well thanks to Cascaded Lookup you will not have to display all Provinces in the world but only the ones relevant for the chosen country. That’s easy. Of course there are many refinements like combining filters, removing duplicates etc.
Let’ s take a look at an agile project management scenario. Let us assume we have the following lists:
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Performance Comparison: Cascaded Lookup 3.0 Vs Cascaded Lookup 2.x
Hardware Environment
This performance test is tested in the following hardware environment:
Server:
| Component | Configuration |
| Processor | 64bit, four cores, 2.66GHz |
| RAM | 8GM |
Client:
| Component | Configuration |
| Processor | 64bit, four cores, 2.33GHz |
| RAM | 8GM |
Lookup Performance:
Lookup performance refers to the load time of the New/Edit item page of the list which contains Cascaded Lookup column or Cross-Site Lookup column.
New/Edit item Page Load time: the time interval from the request to all content of the list item displayed.
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How to Configure and Manage a mobile account (SharePoint Server 2010)?
This article discusses how to configure and manage a mobile account for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to enable users to subscribe to alerts that are sent by using Short Message Service (SMS). The alerts are sent to users’ mobile phones when changes are made to a SharePoint list or item.
The mobile alert feature resembles a feature that already exists in SharePoint Server 2010 that enables outgoing e-mail alerts. However, instead of receiving alerts via e-mail when changes are made in a SharePoint list or item, users receive the alerts on their mobile phones.
A SharePoint site is usually located on an intranet. As a result, access to the SharePoint site can be difficult when users are away from the office—for example, when they are traveling or attending a business dinner. The mobile alert feature enables users to react quickly when they receive an SMS alert that an item in a SharePoint list has changed.
You can configure one mobile account for all Web applications in a server farm, or you can configure the mobile account for a specific Web application; however, you can only configure one mobile account in the farm. The scale of your implementation might determine whether you configure the mobile account for the farm or for a specific Web application. If you configure the mobile account for a server farm, everyone in the organization can subscribe to alerts. This is useful, for example, in a small organization in which management wants all users to receive certain alerts. If you have several Web applications that divide your organization into groups, you might want to configure a mobile account for only one of those groups; for example, you want to configure a mobile account to enable everyone in the sales group to subscribe to alerts.
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How to Remove Missing WebPart during SharePoint Upgrade
If you are upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 and getting “MissingWebPart” error when using the Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet in PowerShell, this tip will help you diagnose the issue.
Following is the original error:
Category: MissingWebPart
Error: True
UpgradeBlocking : False
Message: WebPart class [8c8bca43-cbc1-da50-d518-54614c79b3f5] is referenced [1] times in the database [WSS_Content], but is not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature/solution which contains this web part.
Remedy: One or more web parts are referenced in the database [WSS_Content], but are not installed on the current farm. Please install any feature or solution which contains these web parts.
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How to monitor SharePoint performance issue?
SharePoint is a fast-growing platform, more and more lists and documents need be managed may cause SharePoint performance issue. How to avoid SharePoint performance issue? You can use tools to monitor it during develop SharePoint AddIn.
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SharePoint Dispose tracker tool
SPDisposeCheck is a tool that helps developers and administrators check custom SharePoint solutions that use the SharePoint Object Model helping measure against known Microsoft dispose best practices. This tool may not show all memory leaks in your code and may produce false positives which need further review by subject matter experts.[1]
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Install SharePoint Dispose tracker tool.
Make sure you have installed Microsoft visual Studio 2010. Then run installer file SPDisposeCheck.exe.
After install successfully, you will able to find SPDisposeCheck Addin in Visual Studio 2010 Tools menu.
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SharePoint Interview Questions from Stack Overflow
In this blog, I am going to present some very awesome SharePoint interview questions collected from Stack Overflow—-one of my favorite technology forums. Moreover, I also collected some questions from other site, let say from internet. So thank you Stack Overflow, and the whole internet, especially SharePoint communities.
Enjoy!
Q: What is the difference between System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart and Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart?
A: Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart is provided in MOSS 2007 to provide backwards compatability with MOSS 2003 webparts. In MOSS 2007, it is recommended to use System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart instead.
Q. When running with SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges (web context) what credentials are being used?
A. The App Pool Identity for the web application running SharePoint.
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A SharePoint Alternative in the Cloud
Chances are you have come across quite a lot of SharePoint alternatives. Some of them claim it while others are so defined by users. It is as rewarding to learn about these so called SharePoint alternatives as to learn about SharePoint itself. In a previous post, I introduced two prominent SharePoint alternatives – Box.com and Jive Software. In this post, I am going to introduce another SharePoint alternative – the #1 alternative of SharePoint in the cloud.
Notwithstanding that SharePoint is arguably the dominating ECM and collaboration platform, as a person who cares a lot about UI and UE design, I must say I am not particularly fascinated by SharePoint. To put it in a clear and frank way, I may be biased on this. After this little disclaimer, let’s take a look at the SharePoint challenger – Huddle.
Huddle was established in 2006, and now it is a leader in cloud collaboration and content management for the enterprise. It boasts 90000 organizations worldwide using their product and Disney, Kia Motors and HTC are among them.
One feature that makes Huddle stand out from other SharePoint alternatives is that Huddle can be accessed online, on desktops via Microsoft Office applications, and on the move with BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad apps. It only supports 12 languages though, far behind what SharePoint does.
In the Company presentation page, one sentence states their ambition and confidence abundantly clear: if SharePoint was built today, they would have built Huddle.
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How To Create Your SharePoint VisualStudio Multiple Project Template (The Whole Solution)
Are you wasting your time to create a SharePoint foundation solution architecture?
Let’s assume you are a software architect, and you have to create the template for a new product. It is a repetitive task and will cost you a lot of time for the following:
You shall define the layers for your solution, such as Presentation Layer, Domain Layer, Data Access Layer, Service Layer, Infrastructure Layer and so on. In other words, you should create different projects in VisualStudio and build the projects relationships.
You should keep the same technology, otherwise when an employee is transferred from one product team to another, he will have to study a new technology (eg: one product team using Spring.NET IOC container and the other product team using Castle IOC container. What a bad message! The employee should master two different IOC framework).
Regarding to coding, you should reference the infrastructure assembly (Eg: IOC, AOP, Unit Test framework and so on), attach the xsd schema for xml configuration file input intellisense, and keep the same technology and code structure for all products.
What happens today?
You can create your SharePoint VisualStudio multiple project (the whole solution) template now.
Using it, when you want to start a new product, you can create your foundation code structure with the template. The whole creation process only takes a few seconds, finally you can put away the repetitive work and do something productive.
Preview of the Solution Template solution
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Aggregate or Sync Lists from Different SharePoint Sites
A big chunk of information is presented in the form of lists in SharePoint. Moreover, we do various calculations and analysis with lists. As such, to ratchet up SharePoint Lists will bring more fruits. In this blog, I am going to introduce two cool ways to make your SharePoint lists more suitable to your requirements such as BI (Business Inteligence), ECM (Enterprise Content Management).
A few things about SharePoint Lists
First off, let’s take a look at SharePoint lists. In order to avoid repeating the obvious, I will briefly introduce what is a SharePoint list, its roles, and, of course, its shortages.
SharePoint list is a collection of similar items based on list templates. A list contains columns (fields) that define the item data or metadata schema. Each item stored in a list shares the same schema. Technically lists also include libraries, but libraries are treated separately from lists because of their different template.
SharePoint list is similar to database tables and their behavior. Yet, data in SharePoint lists is based on XML, meaning we can query data like we do with XML. Because of this, we can do quite a lot of operations with SharePoint lists. Common operations in database such as filtering, sorting, and looking up can be performed in SharePoint lists as well. Furthermore, SharePoint lists also can be used for data visualization in addition to store it in various templates. Common SharePoint list template includes libraries, calendars and so forth. Having introduced what are SharePoint lists and their purpose, let’s move on to take a look at some common shortages. Depending on different industries and circumstances, these shortages maybe differently perceived. Plus, due to the scope of the blog, I will bring up two of the shortages in the form of scenarios.
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Document ID in SharePoint Server 2010
Here’s a great post from Microsoft Enterprise Content Management(ECM) Team Bolg that talks about document ID in SharePoint Server 2010.
Document ID Overview
A common content management problem is documents getting moved to different locations and links no longer working. Another problem is submitting content to a repository and being able to find it at a later time. These are the types of problems the Document ID feature handles. Document ID is a site collection level feature that when activated adds columns to all document content types. Whenever an item is created or uploaded and is set to a content type that inherits from document it will get a Document ID. The document sets content type is a special case non document content type that also gets Document IDs.
Quick Tip: You may want to activate the Document ID feature on site collections that already contain a large amount of documents. Because this event triggers a content type pushdown on the Document content type the process can take a while. As a result, Document ID activation is done through a timer job that by default is run nightly. If you would like to activate the Document ID feature right away please run the Document ID enable/disable job in Central Administration. There is a separate time job that assigns Document IDs to existing documents.
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Prevent user from attaching an attachment when creating a new item in SharePoint 2010
Imagine one requirement from customer: prevent user from attaching an attachment when creating a new item in a list. User can attach an attachment anytime from anywhere but just cannot do the same when creating a new item.
It’s simple if we can tell the difference between adding attachment when creating a new item and adding attachment from Ribbon after created, but it costs a few time to find. Of course we’ll handle attachment in event receiver “ItemAttachmentAdding”, I created event receivers and wrote test code like this:
public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
base.ItemAdding(properties);
}
public override void ItemAttachmentAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
base.ItemAttachmentAdding(properties);
if(IsAttachingInNewForm(properties.ListItem))
{
Properties.Cancel = true;
}
}
We’ll check if user is trying to attach an attachment in new form in function “IsAttachingInNewForm”. Actually it’s very simple:
bool result = false;
try
{
result = string.Equals(item["owshiddenversion"].ToString(), "1", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
}
catch{}
return result;
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Add Humanity to Your SharePoint with SharePoint Text Size Zoom Web Part
With SharePoint adoption among different organizations raging on, SharePoint is widely used as a comprehensive Enterprise Content Management System (a.k.a. ECM). Some SharePoint users are using SharePoint as their intranet portal while others are using it as public internet portal.
Since information published on SharePoint is consumed by a large number of people, accessibility is becoming one of the challenges we cannot ignore anymore. SharePoint is especially widely adopted by non-profit organizations because of its rich features.
First, let’s take a look at what is web accessibility before we dive into this issue. Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. More specifically, web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the web, as well as they can contribute to the web. Web accessibility also benefits a more general public, like senior citizen with declining abilities due to aging.
Web accessibility also involves quite a lot of topics. And here I am focusing on fonts, more specifically on font size.
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Software Paradise (UK) is now our Partner
We are happy to announce that Software Paradise has just signed up with us.
They may be close to you
Software Paradise was founded in 1986 and is the UK’s leading independent reseller of computer software.
Software Paradise recognised the need for fast, high-quality distribution of an extensive range of competitively priced software to businesses, end users, software developers and other resellers. Software Paradise quickly grew from its humble beginnings as a supplier of dBASE (the first mass market DBMS from Ashton-Tate Inc), to one of the world’s premier mail order suppliers of PC, Mac & Linux software.
Software Paradise improved upon the typical mail order organisation with its low prices and the widest range of software from a single source. This has been combined with quality service, accurate product information and secure online ordering. They have been trading securely online since 1997 and were one of the very first mail order resellers to begin trading on the Internet.
Software Paradise’s biggest asset is its staff. They’re dedicated to making your buying experience a productive one. From the moment you call, you’ll find they take an active interest in satisfying your IT needs. All of them are working to make sure you get more than just a product. Software Paradise wants every customer to be a satisfied customer!
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