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An article in EnterpriseAppsPipeline cites a recent Forrester study that indicates that the success of an enterprise portal deployment hinges on, amongst other things:
- a clear linkage between business processes and the technology
- Well defined budgetary requirements
- Identifying which areas will not receive significant benefit from the launch of the portal and tabling them to a future phase.
The first point seems very clear to those working in the IT industry, and has almost become meaningless. However, developing a process early on in a portal project to systematically link portal development efforts to business processes will improve the efficiencies gained by the portal dramatically. I would also add that by doing this early and often in the portal project allows the teams who are recipients of the portal solutions to have a better understanding of how the portal can impact their business. This clear example, tied to their business, will serve to spark their imagination and empower them to design and suggest future ways that the portal can help them.
The second point is one that I have noticed companies struggling with six months or so after deploying a portal. Often there is a staffing strain after a portal launch because of the frenzy of ideas that come out from the various business units and IT's willingness to help. This is good, but it strains the IT staff when they have to continue to respond to their “normal” tasks. Often a company is still skeptical of the benefits of a portal project right up until they are overwhelmed with the success and do not have time to react with staffing adjustments. A clear roadmap for staffing adjustments early on in the project I could see as being beneficial.
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Ok. I did a search on the internet to make sure this wasn't already painfully obvious to everyone already. So, with the risk of stating the obvious, here is how you can integrate your SharePoint Portal Server 2003 search engine directly into your Office 2003 research task pane.
Load an office application and open the task pane (ctrl-F1). Open the research task pane, and click on Research Options
Click on "Add Services"
In the address type http://<SERVERNAME>/_vti_bin/search.asmx where <SERVERNAME> is the name of your SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
Now when you right-click on a word in an Office 2003 application and click Look Up, one of the search result groups will be pulling directly from your portal.
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Occassionally folks will ask to have a list of links in one web part and have another web part display that content. There is a stupid HTML trick you can do to pull this off. This is one of those situations where it is nice to have required Internet Explorer.
Add two Content Editor Web Parts to the web part page.
In Web Part A add the following code:
<iframe name=”myframe” src=”http://www.msn.com”></iframe>
In Web Part B add the following code:
<li><a href=”http://www.microsoft.com” target=”myframe”>Microsoft</a>
<li><a href=”http://www.msn.com” target=”myframe”>MSN</a>
<li><a href=”http://msdn.microsoft.com” target=”myframe”>MSDN</a>
The net effect is that clicking a link in Web Part B causes it to display inside web part A.
If you want to get fancy, you can use a data view web part to render Web Part A from a list based on the Links list template, and modify the XSL to target the frame in Web Part B.
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James writes:
“I happen to come across your blog site and found it very interesting. I've been researching on how to customize the Form Web Part on a team site in Sharepoint 2003.
For example, I'm wanting to customize the form web part to have two inputs. One would be for 'First Name' and the other for 'Last Name'. The form web part will be connected to a custom list and will filter the list based on both first AND last name. I have been able to accomplish filtering a list with one input value but not multiple.
When I use Front Page 2003 I create the connection but it only gives me the option to select one column name from the form web part and match it with one column in the custom list. I've done research on the form web part and found that you can filter a custom list with multiple input fields but I cannot find out how. ...”
One way to accomplish filtering SharePoint lists using multi-value filters is to take advantage of the URL Protocol for SharePoint lists.
In this case, you would specify FilterField1=FirstName and FilterField2=LastName if those where the respective names of the columns you wish to filter. For example:
http://[server]/[site]/Lists/Contacts/AllItems.aspx?FilterField1=LinkTitleNoMenu&FilterValue1=Doe&FilterField2=FirstName&FilterValue2=John
The preceding example would filter a list based on the built in Contacts list template. Using this you can use a simple HTML form to perform a post using hidden form fields for the FilterField1 and FilterField2 values, and use text boxes for FilterValue1 and FilterValue2 fields. This does not use the Form Web Part, but it accomplishes multi-value filtering. The only way I've seen the Form Web Part provide multiple values is if the web part supports consuming them, which the Data View and List Web Parts do not. This Terraserver web part is an example of one that does.
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In the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 830342, entitled "Soap:Server Exception of Type Microsoft.SharePoint.SoapServer.SoapServerException" Message Appears When You Try to Edit a Portal by Using FrontPage there are a variety of solutions which probably do work. However, one of the solutions mentions opening up the web part page maintenance page.
In order to do this, simply append "?contents=1" to the URL of the page. For example:
http://myportal/myarea/default.aspx?contents=1
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You may have noticed that in a SharePoint event list, you can export an event list item as an iCalendar file. Although the link is generated script, you can create this link manually if you want to post it on another page or in an email for convenience. The format of the URL is as follows:
http://[site name]/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109?Cmd=Display&CacheControl=1&List=[ListGUID]&ID=[EventID]&Using=Lists%2fEvents/event.ics
[site name] : This is the address of your Windows SharePoint Services site
[EventID] : This is the ID of the event, which you can get by looking in the URL when you are on the details page for that event.
[ListGUID] : This is the GUID of the list escaped. Yes, I know, this is tricky. The quickest way to get the GUID is to click on the "Modify Columns and Settings" link on the list's page, and the GUID is in the URL. Escaping it simply requires replacing the front bracket with %7b the closing bracket with %7d and the dashes with %2d.
example: %7bBC04E0B5%2dB290%2d4D5E%2dB95C%2d3F16087246EE%7d
event.ics : You can change the name of the resultant file, but I wouldn't recommend it. The operating system will know that it is an iCalendar file by the extension .ics, so don't change it.