Just in from Scott Howlett of iMason are two terrific WebCasts, one tomorrow (Tuesday, January 25) and one in February. Tomorrow's topic appears to cover accessing SharePoint as a service, and promises a healthy bit of usable code to download. February's session covers search and indexing, an important but oft-overlooking topic. In fact in any SharePoint deployment, planning the index should come soon after step one: cataloguing an organization's existing knowledge. And if you glossed over both of those, you should really pick up the Resource Kit between now and Scott's February WebCast.
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I thought you might be interested in two upcoming MSDN Webcasts that imason is delivering. These follow on from earlier Sharepoint Webcasts that were presented in 2004. You can view the previous webcast by clicking on these links: SPS 2.0: Developer Considerations and SPS 2.0: Architecture and Best Practices for SPS Development. I think you’ll find these upcoming Webcasts compelling, and the January 25th webcast might include Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and some bits from Whidbey! The events are about 45 minutes, are delivered online and are free so feel free to forward these to anyone you think might be interested.
January 25, 2005 - SPS 2.0: Developing Sharepoint Solutions Without WebParts
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Description:
Many people are actively developing Sharepoint solutions using the expected WebPartPage/WebPart paradigm. This is indeed a powerful model to be working with. However, it is not the only one that you can use. In fact, the Sharepoint technologies are split between back-end technologies (security, storage, searching...) and front-end technologies (templates, webparts...). As such, it is very possible to leverage the back-end technologies using other front-end technologies such as WinForms, Console Applications and WebForms. In this session, we’ll outline why you might want to do this and we’ll provide a truckload of code samples and demos.
February 24, 2005 - Leveraging the Power of Custom Search and Ranking
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Description:
In this level 400 presentation, we’ll go extremely “deep” on authoring applications that utilize Sharepoint’s powerful search capabilities. We’ll provide lots of information about how to author search queries, how to execute search queries and how to leverage the “ranking” capability of the search index. We’ll also include a bunch of demos and some sample code.
Today I'm figuring out how to migrate information from Exchange Public folders into SharePoint. I found a good WebCast but the tools referenced weren't obvious to find, so here are both links in one place.
TechNet Webcast: Migrating eRooms, Windows File Services and Exchange Public Folders into SharePoint.
Tools on GotDotNet: This workspace is used for development and testing of Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Import tools as well as development of various exporters (SPS2001, Lotus QuickPlace, File Share, eRoom, Public Folders) to the importer neutral XML format.
The Windows Recycle Bin is a popular feature and saves the average help desk a lot of repetitive work. Unfortunately, SharePoint 2003 lacks the feature and SharePoint admins either need to turn to third-party tools or develop convoluted database recovery routines "just in case." Heck, even SharePoint 2001 has a downloadable undelete web part), why not us?
This month's MSDN Magazine comes to the rescue with an article on creating your own Recycle Bin for WSS:
In this article, we'll take advantage of the extensibility of WSS and both its server-side and client-side object models to build a restore feature that works like the Recycle Bin in Windows Explorer. We'll examine WSS document library server-side events and will develop a .NET event handler class for asynchronous server-side processing of those events. In the end, you'll have a working recycle bin for document libraries. Additionally, the lessons learned will help you write your own custom workflow applications based on the WSS document library event model.
[Download the Code]
Stumbled upon a post I wrote on the newsgroups that others might find helpful. The question was roughly:
I'm using FP 2003 to generate the usage statistics every month, but I doubt the accuracy. Files in the same doc lib all receive nearly the same counts, and all have 145 hits every day even during holidays when no one is in the office.
The answer:
I'll prefix this by saying that I haven't used FPs stats features, this is more of a "what I did to measure traffic."
For one, I wrote custom routines to generate statistics against the IIS logs with filters on the column which contains the username to only include live users, not the service accounts. An added advantage was being able to relate this to a user roles table (which, at that org, were kept in a table used to track accounts, configurations, physical assets, etc.), and that let me see which managers, champions and end-users were making use of what resources.
I found that links were being generated in different ways depending on context. Sometimes a path to an .aspx is referenced, sometimes the target will be a .dll with parameters. This prevents many logging apps from recording accurate stats.
There are great lessons to be learned when you understand how people use your site, so start by setting a few goals (how many users read the "Message from the President" each week?), import your IIS logs into a database - MS Access will do - read through to see how it all works and start writing simple queries to get at what you want.
Yeah, "you know you're a geek when," but it cracked me up.
Eli: argh, why my site crawler not working.
PJ: bad grammer in the source code?
Eli: The address could not be found, (0x80040154 - Class not registered )
Eli: Nice and ambiguous.
PJ: Oh, yeah, the guys at 0x80040154 moved across the street to 0x80040163