Ben There, Done That

I’ve actually done it, a SharePoint Administrator writing a web part.  Granted this web part is in it’s earliest stages, but it performs the task I needed it to.

So, what does it do? It’s a very simple SharePoint 2007 web part (So far I have only tested it on MOSS 2007 Standard Edition) that takes a URL (must be absolute at this point in time) and the name of a SharePoint Calendar list and displays the events on the calendar for the given week.  It can be placed on any page or site within your web application and query a calendar on any other site.

Also, the key issue that got me writing this web part is that is correctly handles recurring appointments on your SharePoint calendar.  If you have recurring appointments, this web part will show the correct start and end time for ONLY the recurring event in the current week rather than the end date for the last recurring appointment.  Here is a screen shot displaying the web part returning a variety of different events scheduled in the same week.

Granted, it’s nothing fancy, but for me it was a big deal coming from a SharePoint Administrator background.  There are also lots of bugs to it and errors that aren’t properly handled.  But, it’s a start.

If you want to play with the web part, you can download the solution file below.  Just remember, it’s free, it’s my first real web part and there are definitely several bugs.  So, if you choose to try it out:

1.  Don’t complain about it not working the way you want or about bugs…remember it’s FREE. 

2.  If you do find a bug or have suggestions to improve it, I welcome the comments and suggests and we’ll see what I can do as time allows.

3.  There is no warranty, guarantee, etc, etc…pretty much, I’m providing it free as is.  If you choose to install it in your farm that is your choice and your responsibility.  By downloading this web part you are agreeing not to hold me responsible for any negative effect or impact it has on your SharePoint environment.  Again, if it does something weird, feel free to let me know and I’ll do my best to help you, but there are no guarantees.

If you still choose to try the web part you can download it here.  To install and use the web part:

1.  Download the .wsp file

2.  Add the solution to your farm

3.  Deploy the solution

4.  Activate the Site Collection Feature “Upcoming Events Web Part”

5.  Add the web part to your page

6.  Open the Web Part Properties and in the respective boxes enter an Absolute URL for the page where your Calendar List is located as well as the Calendar Name.

7.  Click OK.

***Update: Today Microsoft is releasing as out-of-band security update to address this issues.

- SharePoint Team Blog Announcement – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/

I’m sure by now all of you have heard about the ASP.NET security vulnerability and there are plenty of references out there about it and how to fix it so I’m not going to go into much detail here.  The key point is yes, it effects WSS 2.0, SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 and MOSS) and SharePoint 2010 (Foundation and Server).

The best references I have found so far, and I will refer you to rather than writing it all up myself are":

1. The Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, this is where the fixes are documented that you can put in place until a patch is released.

2. Scott Guthrie’s Blog, this contains a very good list of FAQs about the vulnerability.

The other day I had an annoying problem accessing SharePoint sites.  I am running Windows 7, IE8 and Office 2007 and Office 2010 Beta.

Any internal SharePoint site continued to throw the error of element not found for init.js

It only happened on my desktop (my laptop worked just fine).  I tried clearing the temporary internet files, browser cache, even uninstalling and reinstalling IE8.

Nothing worked, I finally found the solution here – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/41e1874f-7825-4bfe-ba4c-37255d198df2

So, I opened up SharePoint Designer 2007, ran the diagnostic tool in the Help menu, restarted IE and everything was back to working as normal.

Thanks to a co-worker for this blog post – http://msfarmer.blogspot.com/2009/07/sharepoint-versions.html

It lists all of the updates for MOSS and WSS 2007 along with what version number the update is.  I’ve had several times when I’ve wanted to know exactly what version number went with which update and was never able to find a comprehensive list (I would always ask this co-worker if he knew

So, if you aren’t sure if an update fully installed (I’ve had it happen before) or you can’t remember the last update you installed into your farm, head over to the Microsoft Farmer blog and check it out!

After a little over a month since my last blog post I’m back.  The lapse in posting had several contributing factors.  The biggest being that within the last month I go married and then went on a week long honeymoon to St. Lucia with my beautiful bride. (I’ll maybe put up a few pics when we get our favorites).  That combined with the increased workload to make up for the time off didn’t give me a lot of time to blog.  I’ve also been eagerly awaiting the Office 2010 suite of products to start working with.

So, rather than posting sever updates, I figured I would post one update that highlights what has been going one.

First, I have the SharePoint 2010 bits that I have started testing.  Due to an NDA with Microsoft, I can’t talk about them other than if you want to get a peak, head over to http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx where MS has posted 3 videos giving you a sneak peak at SharePoint 2010.

Secondly, I have also installed the Office 2010 clients.  I was accepted into the Office 2010 beta program on http://connect.microsoft.com.  There is no NDA in place for the clients, so there may be more posts following on that topic.

Also, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have both RTM’d.  You should expect to see them on MSDN and TechNet the beginning of August.  I’ve seen several dates, so I won’t try to predict, just keep your eyes open. You can see the official Microsoft Post here.

The June Cumulative Update Package for SharePoint 2007 has also been released.  Head over herehttp://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/07/20/june-cumulative-update-packages-ready-for-download.aspx to get the download links and more information about the update.

I read an article on The Seattle Times website that in an attempt to compete with Google Docs, Microsoft will be releasing a free web based version of Microsoft office. Read the Full Article here.

I think that’s all I have for now, stay tuned as more and more information becomes available on the Office 2010 suite of products.

First of all, I realize I’m a little behind on this post.  The truth is I started it over a week ago.  The day after I started it, I lost my access to TechNet.  It was a weird glitch with TechNet and I never found out what it was, but I was able to get to it again about 2 1/2 days later.  As Murphy’s law would have it, shortly after that I had computer problems that let to a format.  But finally, here it is:

Microsoft has add an stsadm reference on TechNet allowing you to “navigate through the stsadm commands with both WSS and SharePoint.  You can filter commands are not in the UI, which commands were new with SP1, SP2.  You can also view al the commands with a key that lets you see the same thing as the filters above.

The commands are also categorized so you can see which commands are available for Import and Export, General, Features and Solutions, etc.  But, enough with my babling, go check it out for yourself!!

WSS -  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/dd418924.aspx

MOSS – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/cc948709.aspx

If you’ve installed SP2 into your SharePoint farm you’ll want to read this article to make sure you SharePoint license doesn’t expire on you:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

I was working with a client over the last few days on building a Project Workspace site template.  We were nearly finished and had to make a couple last edits to a web part when we hit the JavaScript error.  When expanding the details of the error it was similar to:

line: 2135
Char: 4
Error: ‘style.display’ is null or not an object
code: 0

This error was keeping us from adding web parts and modifying current web parts (we could still delete web parts, but only by using http://url/default.aspx?contents=1 to get to our web part maintenance page).

I did some researching and thanks to this thread, I found this solution:

1)  Place page in edit mode
2)  Edit the content of the content editor web part by selecting the
‘modify web part’ drop down menu
3)  Select the Rich Text Editor and copy the text if you do not want
to lose it.
4)  Select Source Editor button, this opens the HTML source code for
the CE Web Part
5)  Remove the source code.  Our source code had a conflicting ID.
6)  Update CE web part and make sure source code does not have auto
generated code, or just add a new content editor web part.

The thread varies on what web parts people had on the page, in our case, we only had one content editor web part and then several list web parts.  Once we removed our single content editor web part, everything worked beautifully.

True to their word, Microsoft release SP2 for their Office suite today.  It includes SP2 for Office 2007, WSSv3 and MOSS 2007.  For a little more detail on the updates, SharePoint Joel has a great blog post.

Of, if you just prefer to go straight to the downloads the links are below:

Office 2007 SP2

Office 2007 Language Pack SP2

WSSv3 SP2

WSSv3 Language Pack SP2

MOSS 2007 SP2

MOSS 2007 Language Pack SP2 (x86)

MOSS 2007 Language Pack SP2 (x64)

I’ve found myself in an interesting spot lately, I think due to a few things.  The primary point this post will revolve around is my blog.  Lately I’ve found myself posting fewer blog entries and I’ve been speculating on the reason for this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it is two point mainly.  Those two being twitter and the state of SharePoint.  I’ll go into a little more detail below.

1. Twitter – I’ve found myself getting wrapped up in the twitterverse.  Tonight I’ve been speculating on the user of twitter.  It definitely has it’s place, and there are lots of good things about it.  I started tweeting as lots of the SharePoint blog writers I follower were jumping on the twitter bandwagon.  This user base continues to grow, however, tweets become more and more frequent, with the SharePoint tweets growing farther apart in some cases.  I’ve been guilty of this as well.  It is easy to start tweeting about SharePoint, but as you use it more and more, other topics jump in, and before you know it you are tweeting about everything.  I find the new tweets I follow growing more and more cluttered and harder and harder to keep up with and sort the quality content out of.

So…with that speculation, I find myself tweeting instead of blogging more and more, but is my content getting lost within twitter and the massive amount of tweets?  Are people missing valuable content due to just not seeing it in twitter?  Am I “slacking off” in my blogging because of twitter and not delivering to my readers the content they want to see?

2. SharePoint – I think in addition to the growth of twitter, the state of SharePoint has caused few blog posts.  Not just by me, but by the SharePoint world in general.  SharePoint has reached that point where 2007 has been out for a while and 2010 is right around the corner.  There is so much information on SharePoint 2007, that there isn’t as much new and exciting content to post on, or new discovers and methodology that needs documenting.

With SharePoint 2010 right around the corner people are just waiting to get there hands on SharePoint 2010, but because it hasn’t been publicly released yet, there isn’t anything to blog about that isn’t shared thousands of times between twitter and blogs, just because of the lack of available content available for SharePoint 2010.

So, those are my thoughts about why I have found myself blogging less, the rise in twitter and the “wait” for SharePoint 2010 and lack of topics for SharePoint 2007 to blog about.  What does every one else thing?  I would love to hear your comments.

With that said, I hope to not abandoned my blog readers and only post content on twitter.  Hopefully I can pick it up a little bit more again with my blogging and continue to share valuable SharePoint information through it.