|
Paul Galvin Profile |
|
|
My Blog Has Moved
Paul Galvin
pMy colleague and friend, a href="http://www.mstechblogs.com/sharepoint/" target="_blank"Uday Ethirajulu/a, made it his mission to move my blog to a more appropriate platform. He migrated it over to here: a title="http://www.mstechblogs.com/paul/" href="http://www.mstechblogs.com/paul/"http://www.mstechblogs.com/paul//a/p pIt’s a wordpress blog and it is simply amazing./p pThe most immediately great thing about it is that comments are handled in a useful way. Being able to moderate comment [read].
Posted: Fri, Jun 4th '10 |
Content Query Web Part: SharePoint’s Swiss Army Knife
Paul Galvin
pMy latest article is up at a href="http://www.sharepointbriefing.com"www.sharepointbriefing.com/a. Here’s a teaser:/p pa href="https://tw1srg.blu.livefilestore.com/y1mPJyoa6A-AUw5X6HMPkzejGiiW2tTRCmRIj1f5wu7sMIYE9owPTUYXadvW_e5ZxwyqRQYvHHeiqz9LNYEVmNW8pQZrHzjiAdpL1tzaF6SR9souPPao0yZCAE6Purw8Fne3Hpgp6D2Z5gSKY6VoSKe6w/image[3] 65631270.png" rel="WLPP"img style="border-right-width:0px;display:inline;border-top-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-left-width:0px" title="image" border="0" al [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 2nd '10 |
Use Calculated Columns to Close Technical Gaps in SPD Workflows
Paul Galvin
pHere’s another article I wrote for a href="http://www.sharepointbriefing.com"www.sharepointbriefing.com/a. This one describes a technique that we can in SharePoint Designer to perform calculations that aren’t possible using any of the built-in calculation-style activities. The basic idea is to use a custom list as a calculation engine – define a list that performs the calculation correctly, create an item via SPD and then read the result./p pHere’s a teaser:/p pa href="https://tw1sr [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 23rd '10 |
Create an Image Rotator in SharePoint Using jQuery
Paul Galvin
pA while ago, I wrote an article for SharePoint Briefing (a href="http://www.sharepointbriefing.com"www.sharepointbriefing.com/a) that describes how to create an image rotator in SharePoint. Here’s a teaser:/p pa href="https://tw1srg.blu.livefilestore.com/y1mNmMbd1Y0vAQBT_Z4wvJ2Ga6tUM8zZuzKwCwyZaoPI19McS3J-Z2n1pIO1Ga9foTLfL02Vl053oOyyhV0Z798_fv1-L96PN_HXmwrDb1Z1IE-k8WxTTWteBs8oBhGLH4ThrQhJw1jfu-o4HjqSgLETA/image[3] 43B0088E.png" rel="WLPP"img style="border-right-width:0px;display:inline;border [read].
Posted: Mon, Mar 22nd '10 |
Use jQuery to Kill Spell Checker in SharePoint Lists
Paul Galvin
p“Use jQuery to Kill Spell Checker in SharePoint Lists” – that’s the title of a recent article of mine that the good folks at a href="http://www.sharepointbriefing.com"www.sharepointbriefing.com/a posted earlier this month./p pHere’s a teaser:/p pa href="https://tw1srg.blu.livefilestore.com/y1mU_U-0E12BZgGoGyoSaPQFPyu_UKb5H7qW4TLAtk4BPkeqghxLGQ8jQ-P2Xeq4B1oLMTbEsDkAv1a4M0eW-mM6VT2zZ0Z-Pru-NrayI82f59NxeTzzX6umkaJyuQki-KVj2pvPOB8foij-XeFH076oQ/image[3] 65CE9A20.png" rel="WLPP"img style=" [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 18th '10 |
Solution: SPD Workflow and “The form cannot be rendered …” Message
Paul Galvin
pI was preparing today to give a demonstration on SharePoint 2010 focusing on SPD 2010 workflows. As I was prepping, I hit this error when I tried to run a workflow manually:/p blockquote pstrongThe form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service. For more information, contact your server administrator./strong/p/blockquote pI had previously set up my farm on an underpowered laptop and in trying to help it out, I tried to turn off [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 17th '10 |
Quick Hit: Reading InfoPath XML Directly From an SPListItem in SharePoint
Paul Galvin
I’m been working on a project where I need to extract attachments from an InfoPath form. There are some good resources for parsing InfoPath forms (which are just XML files, so it’s actually quite easy). While I was building up the project, I started by downloading an InfoPath form and saving it to my local hard drive. My c# code was reading directly from that instance. However, the InfoPath forms are really living inside a SharePoint forms library. I did a little half hearted sear [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 27th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday 10/29 at 12:30 PM EDT
Paul Galvin
The next SharePoint Shop Talk takes place this Thursday at 12:30PM EDT. We’ve taken two weeks off (due to SharePoint Conference last week) and as a result, we have a number of questions in queue, not to mention all kinds of cool stuff to talk about regarding SharePoint 2010. All of the panel members attended SPC, so bring your SP 2010 questions to the call or email them to questions@sharepointshoptalk.com. Aside from a good part of the call set aside to talk about some SP 2010 goodness, we [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 27th '09 |
Quick and Easy: Send Email Using Gmail SMTP Server in .NET C#
Paul Galvin
This isn’t exactly a new topic, but when I needed to do it, I found a lot of “why won’t this work for me” and not too many direct answers. I hope someone finds this useful. The following bit of code will send an email using my own gmail account to do it, including attachments: using System.Net.Mail;
using System.Net;NetworkCredential loginInfo = new NetworkCredential("[My Gmail ID]", "[My Gmail Password]");
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage();
msg.From = new MailAddress("[M Gmail Id [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 27th '09 |
SharePoint Conference 2009 – Get Your Real Time Raw Data From Twitter
Paul Galvin
I expect that nearly everyone knows this anyway, but I thought I’d toss out a quick note that there’s a tremendous amount of very interesting information available via twitter. The hash tag #SPC09 seems to be the most popular. Like always, there’s a lot of silliness and “in” jokes, but if you can get past that, check it out. I do my best to respond to comments or questions directed to me and I know that a lot of others do as well, so it’s not just a one-way flow of information. [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 20th '09 |
Programmatically Extracting Attachments From InfoPath Forms (Including Their Names!)
Paul Galvin
I have an expense entry solution for a client that leverages InfoPath and workflow. At one point during the approval process, I need to generate an email that has all of that good InfoPath data as well as the attachments themselves so that (sigh) someone can take that data and manually re-key it into an Oracle database application. It’s not very difficult to get at or parse the InfoPath form. I didn’t know how to handle the attachments, however. After an hour or two of poking around th [read].
Posted: Fri, Oct 16th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Recap for 10-08-2009
Paul Galvin
Today’s SharePoint Shop Talk covered its usual wide range of topics: We discussed the issues around opening up parts of a SharePoint site collection to your trading partners. It’s not the most complicated thing in the world, but when you start talking about out loud, you realize there are a lot of small individual things that need to be done to do this correctly. You have to consider the firewall, licensing (your intranet SharePoint license may not be, and probably won’t be, sufficien [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 8th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk 10/08/08 at 12:30 PM EDT
Paul Galvin
We’re hosting our next weekly SharePoint Shop Talk session tomorrow at 12:30 PM EDT. This is an open Q&A and general kibitzing session on all topics SharePoint related. You can read various recaps of prior sessions here to get a sense of what we do on these calls here: http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/?_c11_BlogPart_BlogPart=blogview&_c=BlogPart&partqs=cat%3dPublic%2520Speaking Registration is up and ready right here: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 7th '09 |
To Blog or Not to Blog – That is the Question (to Blog About)
Paul Galvin
Note: This was originally posted to www.endusersharepoint.com. A few weeks ago I had the chance to speak at SharePoint Saturday in New York. Once again, a tremendous event. This time, I spoke about “learning SharePoint” – a very broad topic. During the presentation (which you can get here), I talked about a variety of techniques for “learning” SharePoint, including stuff like book learning, class room training, creating your own VM and most importantly (to me), community partic [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 6th '09 |
Don’t Be a Bull in the China Shop
Paul Galvin
A Brief History of SharePoint (From a Relative Newcomer’s Perspective) Note: This article was originally posted to www.endusersharepoint.com. I forgot to post it to my own blog :) SharePoint has evolved a great deal since its early days as sort of an incubation technology at Microsoft --it’s evolved almost like a horror movie, where the mad scientist’s creation takes on a life of its own, breaking free of its creator’s expectations and rules. The technical evolution is obvious – th [read].
Posted: Mon, Oct 5th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Recap for Thursday 10/01/09
Paul Galvin
I’ve noticed that people seem to be waiting until the last minute to register for SharePoint Shop Talk sessions. Last Thursday, at about 11:45AM, we had nine people register, which is a very small number. However, at one point, we had 18 or 20 people signed in, so at least nine people signed up for it 45 minutes or less before the call. I’m not complaining, just observing. We had a full schedule of questions and discussion topics and couldn’t get to all of them. As usual, we’ll p [read].
Posted: Sun, Oct 4th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday 10/01 @ 12:30 PM EDT (tomorrow!)
Paul Galvin
SharePoint Shop Talk registration is up and ready for tomorrow. We have a few questions teed up that address some management issues (dev/test/prod and syncing up service packs), email notifications (how to select people to email based on metadata of a document) and some discussion around using InfoPath forms services in an FBA environment. As always, if you want to talk about a topic: Send an email to questions@sharepointshoptalk.com Twitter me (@pagalvin) Leave a comment here. Just show up on [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 30th '09 |
Windows Live Spaces and Twitter Counter
Paul Galvin
I was DM’d a message from twitter today and thought I’d blog the answer. The question is: “Hey Paul, quick one for you,how did you get the twitter counter into your live space as the script code is blocked when saved Thx” I did this by adding a custom html widget to my live spaces page and using the little code snippet:
This uses a version of the twitter counter widget interface that gets past the windows live censor thing that we all hate so much and wish would get a bad [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 30th '09 |
Managing Approval Groups with InfoPath in an FBA Environment
Paul Galvin
I have an expense approval process that I need to implement using InfoPath in a forms based authentication (FBA) environment using forms services (web based InfoPath). There are two approval groups and the process works like this: User fills out an expense report and submits it for approval. That triggers an email to first level approver group. First level approver reviews and approves or denies the report. If first level person approves it, system notifies second level approver. On the InfoPat [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 29th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Recap (09/24/09 edition)
Paul Galvin
We finished our 8th SharePoint Shop Talk open Q&A session yesterday. During that session, we covered the following topics: How to send out a highly formatted email from a workflow created using SharePoint Designer. Check out this link for a treasure trove of great SPD info and email: http://tinyurl.com/cssworkflow Where to find information on the differences between SharePoint 2010 and especially Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (the free version of SharePoint). We discussed jQuery ma [read].
Posted: Fri, Sep 25th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday 09/24 @ 12:30 PM EDT
Paul Galvin
Registration is up and ready for tomorrow’s SharePoint Shop Talk at 12:30 PM. During these conference calls, a panel of experienced SharePoint pro’s take your questions via email, via live meeting or directly over the phone. We do our best to provide independent expert advice on all topics related to SharePoint. Email your questions to “questions@sharepointshoptalk.com”, twitter them to me, leave a comment here or just show up on the call and ask. We also welcome and seek insight from [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 23rd '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk this Thursday 09/17/09 12:30 PM EDT to 1:30 PM EDT
Paul Galvin
The next SharePoint Shop Talk takes place this Thursday, 09/17 at 12:30PM EDT. What is SharePoint Shop Talk? It’s a one hour conference call where a panel of SharePoint pro’s answer questions. Send your questions to “questions@sharepointshoptalk.com”, leave a comment on my blog here or just ask them out loud on the call. The panel tries to offer several different approaches to solving the underlying problem behind the question and just generally provide unbiased expert advice. This [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 15th '09 |
SharePoint Saturday New York
Paul Galvin
I’ve uploaded my presentation for the New York SharePoint Saturday here: http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/Follow%20the%20Yellow%20Brick%20Road%20to%20SharePoint%20Mastery.pptx It’s not terribly useful if you don’t go to the presentation, but I do hope to add a lot of notes between now and Tampa, when I present it again. That would give it more legs and context and be more generally useful. Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitte [read].
Posted: Sat, Sep 12th '09 |
Wouldn’t it be Cool if …
Paul Galvin
I was going through my huge pile of MSDN magazines to get my wife off my back for 30 seconds to make room for new MSDN magazines and I came across an older article about integrating MS Speech Server with workflow foundation and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to integrate all that with SharePoint? It would be kind of neat to be able to say “Create site named [cool site] in site collection [papa bear]” into my cell phone and have it do that. I can imagine an architecture where speech ser [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 9th '09 |
Consulting Can Be a Little Like Pulling Out Your Own Teeth
Paul Galvin
[Note: This article cross-posted to End User SharePoint here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/09/09/sharepoint-a-case-study-in-ask-the-expert/] Sometimes, when you’re working as a consultant (as a profession, or in a consultative role within your company), you find yourself living in an Onion story. The Onion has a series of articles called “Ask an [expert] about [some problem]”. This follows the famous “Dear Abby” format where a concerned person is asking for personal advice [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 9th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday, 09/10/09 at 12:30PM EDT
Paul Galvin
SharePoint Shop Talk continues this Thursday at 12:30 PM EDT to 1:30PM EDT. This will be our 5th call I believe. SharePoint Shop Talk works like this: A panel of SharePoint Experts answer questions. This week the panel includes Laura Rogers, Natalya Voskresenskaya, Harry Jones and me. Any SharePoint question is fair game. Send or ask questions: By email: info@arcovis.com Twitter directly to @pagalvin Leave a comment on this blog Write the question down on the back of a piece of poster [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 8th '09 |
Internet Explorer 8 Crashing // 64 bit Operating Systems
Paul Galvin
A comment from Bob Fox (via Twitter, @bfox11b) reminded me that I had meant to throw together a quick blog entry describing a problem and my solution to Internet Explorer crashing on me all the time. A few months ago, I got a new laptop (Dell Vostro 1720). This is my first 64 bit machine and I was running 64 bit IE8. Over time, it started to crash unpredictably, but frequently (probably every day). It’s pretty agile at recovering from all that, but it was a real nuisance. The problem [read].
Posted: Sat, Sep 5th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday, 09/03 at 12:30 PM EDT
Paul Galvin
We resume SharePoint Shop Talk tomorrow at 12:30 PM EDT. As usual, if there are any topics or questions you’d like the panel to address, please email them to info@arcovis.com. This week we are drawing a few questions from the www.endusersharepoint.com Stump The Panel forums: “I understand that a parent site and a child site cannot communicate. For instance, I would like to either push data from a list in a child site to a list in a parent site or have the parent site pull data from child [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 2nd '09 |
SharePoint On Line // BPOS – Some Hands On Experience
Paul Galvin
(Note: this article was cross-posted here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1912) I had a chance to really dig into Microsoft Online’s offering earlier this year and specifically the business productivity online suite (BPOS). This came along before I even hard a firm plan to set out on my own at Arcovis. I immediately saw, however, that BPOS could be a key part of my company’s internal infrastructure and over time, it has become exactly that. Arcovis, uses it on a daily basis. I t [read].
Posted: Tue, Sep 1st '09 |
SharePoint – What’s It Good For? A Health Care Mini Case Study
Paul Galvin
[Note: this blog post is cross posted at Mark Miller’s site here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1897] One of my company’s more unusual clients is a New York City doctor who is a leader in his particular field of medicine (eye care). Like many doctors, he has a strong interest in research. He wanted to do some research on a rare eye disorder that affects a relatively small number of people in the U.S. and Canada. I don’t know the number, but it’s really too small for a large p [read].
Posted: Tue, Aug 25th '09 |
Cloud Computing, Emphasizing SharePoint
Paul Galvin
In lieu of a SharePoint Shop Talk session this Thursday, my partners and I at Arcovis are teaming up with Cloud Strategies and Integrated Systems and Services Group to give what I hope will be an interesting presentation on Microsoft’s online services, focusing on the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Arcovis actually uses BPOS for its internal SharePoint portal so we have some hands on experience and the kind of experience borne of daily use. In fact, the demo itself is running i [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 24th '09 |
SharePoint Talk Shop Recap
Paul Galvin
We held our 3rd SharePoint Shop Talk session yesterday. Twenty-five folk braved the overly aggressive registration screen (we’re working on that!) to sign up and dial into the call. The topics varied widely although they were a bit more end user and light admin focused this time. We spent a lot of time discussing the age old question, “how do I secure a view”. There was some SharePoint Designer in there, a bit of content deployment, version of web parts on publishing pages (there [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 21st '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk (Open Q&A) This Thursday, 08/20/09 at 12:30PM EDT
Paul Galvin
We are holding our 3rd SharePoint Shop Talk session tomorrow, 08/20 from 12:30 to 1:30 PM EDT. You can read about last week’s session here: SharePoint Shop Talk Thoughts and Reactions Bring your questions or email them in advance to info@arcovis.com. Register here: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=xnddgb0b7zh5w9xs Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin Technorati Tags: SharePoint Shop Talk,public Speaking [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 19th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Thoughts and Reactions
Paul Galvin
We held our second “SharePoint Shop Talk” session yesterday and it was a lot of fun. We had fewer attendees this time (mainly because our partner, ISSG, didn’t send out a big email invite to their customer base). On the other hand, we had probably more than twice as many questions to answer. We had so many, in fact, that we couldn’t get to all of them, so now we have a little bit of a head start on questions for next week’s Shop Talk session. The questions and our responses tou [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 14th '09 |
InfoPath // One Explanation for “Unhandled exception when rendering form System.Xml.XmlException: Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred. “
Paul Galvin
I was working on an InfPath form today and ran up against an old friend, “Unhandled exception when rendering form System.Xml.XmlException: Unexpected end of file while parsing Name has occurred.” This happened to me a long time ago and I don’t know what exactly I did to resolve it. Honestly, I think that I had been transitioning to a new project and never saw this one resolved (my replacements had to deal with that headache). I do remember it was a devil of a problem. I spent several [read].
Posted: Tue, Aug 11th '09 |
SharePoint Shop Talk Open Q&A Session Thursday 08/13 @ 12:30 PM EDT
Paul Galvin
Arcovis will be hosting our second “SharePoint Shop Talk” session this Thursday at 12:30 PM EDT. Show up with your SharePoint questions and we’ll do our best to entertain you with banjo jokes, smart but harmless put-downs of our fellow panelists and maybe even answer a question or two. This week’s “official” panel includes yours truly, my Arcovis partners (Natalya Voskresenskaya and Harry Jones) and Laura Rodgers (of twitter & EndUserSharePoint fame). Bob fox threatened to [read].
Posted: Tue, Aug 11th '09 |
Pre-existing Conditions: SharePoint Alert Templates to the Rescue (?)
Paul Galvin
One of my clients worked with a previous contractor to build out a small but useful HR application for the enterprise. That contractor used SharePoint Designer to implement the workflow portion of the solution. It’s a bit of a mess. For instance, there are nine SPD workflows in support of a single logical workflow process and up to five of them may fire simultaneously at any given time given the right conditions. It’s not easy to debug :) My customer has a number of still-outstanding [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 28th '09 |
Live SharePoint Q&A Session Thursday 07/30/09 @ 12:30 PM EDT ending 1:30PM EDT
Paul Galvin
Going back to my first ever SharePoint conference, just over a year ago, I’ve been struck by how terrific a live Q&A session can be. The conference organizers had put together a sort of ad hoc group of “experts” (i.e. people who were hanging around and weren’t afraid of looking to silly up on stage) to answer any questions that came from the audience in the room. It was in my head back then, and periodically since then, to host a similar session but do it on line and the phone. [read].
Posted: Sat, Jul 25th '09 |
Embed Developer Notes Inside Your InfoPath Forms
Paul Galvin
I’m still living in InfoPath Forms world and I needed to make one of those “small” changes to a form that, unfortunately, breaks a naming convention I adopted with it two weeks ago. I thought to myself, “someone is going to look at this thing a year from now and say, ‘What was Paul thinking? By Jove, his naming convention makes no sense!” I realized that I could create a view on the form for this and then, once again, realized that I could have been doing something like this all [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 8th '09 |
Managing InfoPath Views
Paul Galvin
I seem to go through InfoPath phases where, out of the blue, I’m crafting a bunch of forms. My fingers learn how to use the tool well and then I go through nine month drought and have to learn it all over again. I’m in the middle of an InfoPath phase and I’m creating InfoPath forms with a lot of views. One thing you probably notice is that the InfoPath 2007 client shows views in alphabetical order. This is a real nuisance some times. My best technique these days is to prepend a nu [read].
Posted: Mon, Jul 6th '09 |
InfoPath Form Sevices, Forms Based Authentication (FBA) and Unique File Names
Paul Galvin
I’ve been working on some InfoPath forms this week in MOSS in an FBA environment and learned, when I went to deploy the forms to a production environment with an FBA zone that the username() function function does not work. I was using it to generate unique file names. Well, that function doesn’t work in an FBA environment (at least, not out of the box). And, upon reflection, using username in the way I had planned wouldn’t have guaranteed a unique file name in any event. My solution w [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 25th '09 |
Securing SharePoint List/Document Library Views Seems (sort of) Possible with jQuery
Paul Galvin
This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint. If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz. One of the first things I thought, once I started to play around with jQuery, was whether we could use it to secure a SharePoint view. The answer is “no” (or at least, I’m not claiming it’s possible). However, it is certainly possible to make it difficult for people to see a particular view. [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 14th '09 |
Quick and Easy: Create Your Own jQuery Sandbox for SharePoint
Paul Galvin
This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint. If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz. Getting started with jQuery in SharePoint is surprisingly easy (to me). (I do have serious questions about a “best practices” approach to deploying these things to production, but that’s for another day). I’ve just started playing with this technology and to that end, I created a sandbox environ [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 14th '09 |
Quick and Easy: Use jQuery to Hide a Text Field on a SharePoint Form
Paul Galvin
This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint. If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz.
UPDATE (already!): I did think of a better way to locate the tag I want to hide and wrote about it here. You may still find this article interesting anyway so I'm leavnig it up.
I want to hide a text field, “Hide Me!” as shown:
‘
The following jQuery does the trick for me:
$(function() {
[read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 14th '09 |
Quick and Easy: A Better Way to Use jQuery to Hide a Text Field on a SharePoint Form
Paul Galvin
This is another post in my on-going series on how to use jQuery with SharePoint. If you want to learn more about jQuery, I highly recommend: jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz. Previously, I wrote about how to use jQuery to locate and hide a text field on a form. I didn’t care for the specific approach (I was chaining parents – that’s simply isn’t done these days, at least in families of quality). When I first started to think about it, I knew I needed to find a to w [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 14th '09 |
Quick and Easy: Use jQuery to Set A Text Field’s Value on a SharePoint Form
Paul Galvin
I started playing around with jQuery yesterday. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, ever since Paul Grenier started writing his series about jQuery for End Users at the venerable www.endusersharepoint.com web site. As I use it, I hope to add a series of “Quick and Easy” posts like this one. This post describes how to set a known text field’s value to anything you want. In this scenario, I have created a custom list whose “new” form looks as shown: This is the new for [read].
Posted: Sat, Jun 13th '09 |
SharePoint Demonstration: Leverage SharePoint to Build a Vertical Business Application
Paul Galvin
[Note: I want to straight away say that I have a financial interest in the desired outcome of this demonstration, which I mention in the interest of full disclosure, etc. This is actually the first time I’ve ever blogged about an event where I stand to benefit personally in this way.] This web demonstration takes place Thursday, 06/04 at 12:30 EDT, ending at 1:30PM EDT. In cooperation with my excellent business partner, Integrated Systems and Services Group (ISSG), I have been working to dev [read].
Posted: Fri, May 29th '09 |
You Can Pry SharePoint Designer From My Cold, Dead Hands
Paul Galvin
My latest article is up at www.EndUserSharePoint.com. I wrote about SharePoint Designer, End Users and the outline of a strategy that End Users might try and follow in order to demonstrate competence and build trust around this tool. The comments are more interesting than the article itself. Check it out. Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin Technorati Tags: SharePoint Designer, End Users [read].
Posted: Thu, May 28th '09 |
Efficiently Follow Microsoft SharePoint (and Other) SharePoint Forums
Paul Galvin
I have been following MSDN forums for well over a year (and possibly almost 2 years at this point) and every now and then I hear from someone how “hard” it is to do that. I find it quite easy and thought I’d share my “technique”. This technique also works for www.endusersharepoint.com (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP). Taking MSDN as an example, I first go to standard forum page such as the General Questions for SharePoint main page here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Fo [read].
Posted: Wed, May 20th '09 |
Use Custom Lists for More Effective Workflow Auditing
Paul Galvin
I’ve reorganized my life a bit and found some time to submit an article to www.endusersharepoint.com. My latest article is up here: Use Custom Lists for More Effective Workflow Auditing (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1658). This is the opening ‘graph: SharePoint Designer workflow doesn’t give us a lot of visibility into what’s happening with our workflow solutions. And, the visibility that we do get is hampered by a relatively poor interface and 60 day time window. This 60 d [read].
Posted: Tue, May 19th '09 |
Bamboo Calendar Interacting with SharePoint Causes “An unexpected error occurred”
Paul Galvin
Today, I’ve been working in an environment that uses a Bamboo calendar web part for some improved collaboration. This a standard medium/small farm with two load balanced WFEs, a “application server” for indexing and InfoPath and a clustered SQL back end. The client installed some disaster recovery software onto one of the WFEs and that resulted in a broken WFE for a specific site in the site collection. Whenever load balancing pointed at the affected WFE and that site, users saw a larg [read].
Posted: Thu, May 14th '09 |
Griping about Windows Live Comment Control
Paul Galvin
I picked windows live spaces back in July of 2007 as my blogging platform. For the most part, I don’t have any regrets and Microsoft certainly extends it over time (though I mainly find out about new features by accident). My biggest complaint right now is blog spam. This person / account (http://cid-82b0534bceed9881.profile.live.com/) (among others) frequently adds a lot of spam comments to my blog in the form of comments. MSFT added a nice feature to show “recent comments” so at le [read].
Posted: Wed, May 6th '09 |
SharePoint Saturday Phenomenon Continues (plus, my slide deck)
Paul Galvin
I returned from Washington DC yesterday after attending the latest SharePoint Saturday. What a remarkable event! Continuing the tradition of other SP Saturday’s, it was very well run. The environment, the overall organization, the flow, vendor area, food … all of it was terrific. Of course, the best part is the content and I don’t think anyone was disappointed. It’s really quite amazing to me how so many people are rousing themselves out of bed early on a Saturday to go and listen [read].
Posted: Mon, May 4th '09 |
Governance is a Marketing Plan Too
Paul Galvin
The reason we spend so much time (or should, anyway) working out governance plans is because we want the SharePoint solution to be as effective as possible. We want good infrastructure and rules to keep it humming and safe in case of disaster. We want good security processes to both properly secure the environment but also make it reasonable to manage. We want a good information architecture that will stand the test of time, ideally managing to survive a major organizational change in the [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 28th '09 |
Solution: Compiling MOSS Audience Adds No New Members
Paul Galvin
Bottom line: if you want to use a profile property in a rule for creating audiences, the property must be visible to “everyone.” I was working with a co-worker yesterday and he was building out a MOSS audience based on a custom user profile property in MOSS. In this case, the audience property is named “SITECD” and by convention, stores a 3 character code. He had defined the audience and a rule that said that if “SITECD equals ‘ABG’”, then include that user profile in the audie [read].
Posted: Wed, Apr 22nd '09 |
Using MSDN (and other) Forums for SharePoint Support
Paul Galvin
I could write on at great length about MSDN forums, etiquette, naming conventions, search, etc. I may do that, in fact. I wanted to point out a small thing which may help people have a better overall experience. I’ve lately been telling people that if you run into some kind of problem with your SharePoint environment, development project or other SharePoint related activity, post a question to the forums earlier in your action chain rather than later. I know for myself that when I have a [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 20th '09 |
Small Note About Microsoft Online Services Passwords and Administration
Paul Galvin
I started to work with Microsoft’s Small Business Productivity Online Suite several months ago, but now I have some better reason to be using it. I’m still working my way around it, so I may be getting some of the terminology wrong, but basically there are two major interfaces: the administration center and the services themselves. The system was telling me that I had to change my password, so I went ahead and did that. That allowed me to proceed and work with the services part (SharePoi [read].
Posted: Sun, Apr 19th '09 |
SharePoint as a Business Operating System
Paul Galvin
Ever since I heard a quote, reportedly during a Q&A session with Steve Ballmer in March 2007, I’ve sort of been holding my breath for something to happen. The quote was basically this: “SharePoint is an operating system for business applications.” Knowing a fair bit about SharePoint and a middling bit about operating systems, I thought it was really apt. I’m holding my breath, waiting for companies to really buy into that concept and start to build applications within the Share [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 14th '09 |
Canadian Minutes
Paul Galvin
This time last week, I was in Montreal, attending the highly recommended SharePoint Summit 2009. I gave a 3.5 hour tutorial on installing and customizing SharePoint. It was a scary subject on many levels. I’m not really a SharePoint admin, but I know enough to give a tutorial on the subject. (Thankfully, Geoff Schaller from Software Objectives in Australia, among a few others, was in the crowd to answer some of the deeper questions [I don’t know what they put in the water down there, b [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 13th '09 |
Fun SharePoint SSO Fact of the Day
Paul Galvin
I’ve been working with SharePoint SSO and learning as I go. One way in which this works is that you tell SharePoint about external applications. Users log into that application via some SharePoint function (e.g. iView web part). The first time the user performs this action, it prompts them for the correct user id and password to use for that system. It’s setting up a mapping between your SharePoint credentials and your credentials for that backend system. Thereafter, the user won [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 18th '09 |
Adventures With iView Web Parts
Paul Galvin
I needed to do some minimal proving today that iView web parts can work in my client’s environment. I’ve never worked with this slice of SharePoint before. Microsoft has created a very high quality white paper on this subject. The first obstacle I had to overcome was – where is the iView web part? For some reason, my first thought was that I’d have to download it from a site somewhere, perhaps SAP’s site. I had 1/2 convinced myself that iView web parts might even cost extra. Of [read].
Posted: Mon, Mar 16th '09 |
MOSS User Profile as the Authority for User Language Preference
Paul Galvin
On my current project, some of the users will travel around the world and when they arrive at different destinations, use whatever machine is handy at the time. Those guest machines will be running Windows and installed and configured for the local locale. (I've just realized that the guest machines may not have the right language packs... probably won't, in fact... I'm parking that one for now). SharePoint needs to provide a mechanism whereby the user can pick their preferred language and [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 11th '09 |
Capturing "mailto:" Metrics
Paul Galvin
I'm on a project where we need to collect metrics around a function named "Share a Story." The idea is very simple -- if you're looking at an interesting article on the intranet and want to share it with someone, click a link labeled "Share this story" email it to your buddy. We played around with a custom form for this purpose, but in the end, common sense won the day and we just use the familiar technique. ( is a surprisingly robust little bit of HTML; as a bonus, that link brings me back [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 11th '09 |
Great Tutorial and Walk-through using InfoPath and Workflow to Solve a Scheduling Problem
Paul Galvin
These days, I'm perpetually playing catch-up with my blog reading and I just came across this post: http://sharepointsolutions.blogspot.com/2009/02/give-blood-to-your-workflow.html It's as solid and detailed a SharePoint Designer workflow tutorial (plus more!) that you'll see anywhere on the interwebs. I'd check it out, even if you're a scarred SPD veteran. It's a great SharePoint tutorial for both InfoPath and workflow. Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com [read].
Posted: Thu, Feb 19th '09 |
NYC SharePoint Developers Group - Deep Tech Talk
Paul Galvin
A few weeks ago, I presented at the New York City SharePoint Developers Group meeting at the Microsoft office in Manhattan. They meet every last Tuesday of the month. I've been spending most of my time lately in my beloved New Jersey so I don't get to go into the city as much as I like. As a result, I think I made it to the first or second of this group's meetings and then again at January's meeting. I missed all of the meetings in between (four or five of them probably). It's a new grou [read].
Posted: Sat, Feb 14th '09 |
Defining "Great" SharePoint Requirements
Paul Galvin
As requested and promised, I've uploaded my presentation on how to obtain "great" requirements from end users for SharePoint projects and implementations. It's here: http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/Paul%20Galvin%20Great%20Requirements.zip I presented this at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in Feb 2009 (www.sharepointbestpractices.com). If you attended the conference, you'll also get this on the conference DVD. The presentation includes a lot of not [read].
Posted: Fri, Feb 6th '09 |
"Wild West" Governance PowerPoint Presentation
Paul Galvin
I just finished up my "Wild West" governance presentation here at the SharePoint Best Practices conference and I was asked to post my slide deck to my blog, so here it is: http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/Paul%20Galvin%20Wild%20West.zip (Sorry for the viola joke!) Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin Technorati Tags: PPT, PowerPoint, Governance [read].
Posted: Wed, Feb 4th '09 |
Control Workflow Behavior with Custom Lists (Again)
Paul Galvin
Earlier this month, I put together an article originally planned for Mark Miller's www.endusersharepont.com. However, I instead used like Dustin Hoffman used a cross at the end of the The Graduate to fend off my (awesome! friendly!) editor at TechTarget. This is another SharePoint Designer workflow article in the same vein as my more recent effort here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1226 ("Use Control Lists to Create Flexible Workflow Solutions"). It starts like this: HAVE YOU EVER wish [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 26th '09 |
Use Control Lists to Create Flexible Workflow Solutions
Paul Galvin
Last week, Mark Miller posted my latest SharePoint Designer workflow article for end users on his site (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1226). It starts like this: We technical types use a lot of jargon and acronyms in our daily routine such as “OOP” (object oriented programming), “CT” (Content Types), “SPD” (SharePoint Designer), “RTFM” (please read the manual), etc. This article concerns itself with a particular bugaboo called “hard coding:” What it is, why it’s ba [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 25th '09 |
Governance and SharePoint Search - It's Never Too Late to Start
Paul Galvin
I wrote an article (http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid1_gci1345231_mem1,00.html#) for SearchWinIT.com on governance as it relates to SharePoint Search. It's not in my usual "voice" but that's editing for you :) Here is how it starts: Although nearly every aspect of SharePoint can benefit from a strong governance plan, MOSS 2007's enterprise search functionality benefits most of all. Like all parts of SharePoint, there is good news and bad news about governance. For many organi [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 25th '09 |
Upcoming FAST Presentation, Wednesday 01/28, Noon EDT
Paul Galvin
I'll be doing my first ever online presentation hosted by the mighty EMC marketing machine at 12:00 noon EDT on Wednesday, 01/28. I have no idea what to expect from this, in terms of attendance. However, since I'm leading it, I can tell you what to expect if you make time for it. I'm going to be describing what we here at EMC mean when we talk about "Enterprise Search." I'm distinguishing between regular old SharePoint Search (which is quite useful by itself) and Enterprise Search, which is [read].
Posted: Fri, Jan 23rd '09 |
Self-Service Site Creation Isn't Exactly About Creating Sites
Paul Galvin
Like many SharePoint consultant types, I've been exposed to a lot of SharePoint functionality. Some times, I dive pretty deep. Other times I just notice it as I'm flying by to another set of menu options. One of those is "self-service site creation." I haven't had a need for it until this week. This week, I need to solve a business problem which I think is going to become more common as companies loosen up and embrace more direct end user control over SharePoint. In this case, I've des [read].
Posted: Thu, Jan 22nd '09 |
Speaking at New York SharePoint Developers Group Meeting
Paul Galvin
I'll be presenting at the New York SharePoint Developers group meeting in New York at the Microsoft Offices on 6th Ave on Tuesday, 01/27 at 6:00 PM (just over a week from now!). Sign up here. It's going to be a technical presentation where I walk through the process of creating a custom workflow action that can be packaged and installed into a SharePoint environment and used by SharePoint Designer to create declarative workflow solutions. Think this: http://www.codeplex.com/spdactivities I'll do [read].
Posted: Mon, Jan 19th '09 |
A Web Proxy Server Tried to Stop Me From Installing Windows Workflow Foundation, But I Defeated It
Paul Galvin
I'm working at a client site and needed to install windows workflow foundation so that I could so some SharePoint Designer work. (I didn't know until today that SPD installs fine but really needs at least .NET 2.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation to be really usable; I always assumed these were installed along with SPD, but I was wrong). The client has a proxy server. No problem, I have credentials to get outside to the public Internets. I go to the usual place to download WWF (SPD helpfull [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 30th '08 |
Using Reflector on Microsoft.SharePoint.dll
Paul Galvin
Michael Blumenthal has put up an article about alerts and views ("Which views can be used when Creating an Alert ?"), which is interesting on its own merits. However, I was even more interested to see how he methodically walks through the process of using Redgate's .NET Reflector. Step by step, he shows how to use that tool track down how SharePoint determines whether a view on a list should be "subscribable" for lack of a better word (he explains this much better than I do :) ). At this poi [read].
Posted: Sun, Dec 28th '08 |
SPD Workflow: Display Full Name Instead of Domainusername
Paul Galvin
In what appears to be his inaugural blog posting, chiqnlips has delved into the madness that is a calculated column and described a solution to a common SharePoint Designer workflow email activity problem: How to display a person's real name in an email instead of "domain\username." I haven't tested it myself, but it looks promising. Check it out. Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin Technorati Tags: workflow, sharepoint workflow [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 24th '08 |
SharePoint Predictions for 2009
Paul Galvin
I’ve read a few retrospectives on 2008 and this has got me to thinking about 2009. Here are my guesses at the future of SharePoint in 2009. Small Disclaimer I’m a SharePoint MVP and as a result, I sometimes get a little advance information before it's public. I am NOT making any such information public. I really haven’t been around long enough to be entrusted with that kind of stuff anyway. With that out of the way, on to the predictions … FAST I believe that FAST will become a ver [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 22nd '08 |
SharePoint Best Practices Conference Feb 2-4, 2009
Paul Galvin
I'll be doing two presentations at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference this February in San Diego. I haven't been doing this thing long enough to get jaded by it, so every conference I attend is a, frankly, awesome. However, I do think this conference is special. There is zero marketing focus and the whole thing is about offering real-world practical advice on how to untangle some of the thorniest issues we face dealing with SharePoint. It's not gigantic, so all of the speakers are ve [read].
Posted: Sat, Dec 20th '08 |
Reading Through 1,000 Blog Entries in 3 Weeks is like Watching Lost Season Four in a Weekend
Paul Galvin
This past summer, while I was working on two chapters for the best SharePoint social computing book ever, I began to get very far behind in my blog reading. I use Google Reader for my RSS stuff and when you have more than 1000 unread items, it just says, "1000+". Over the last few weeks, I've been sitting down and systematically reading them and tagging them as I go for future reference (I use Delicious.com). This past weekend I watched all of Lost, season four in a couple of sittings and catc [read].
Posted: Fri, Dec 19th '08 |
Porting SharePoint Designer Workflow from One List to Another
Paul Galvin
Mark Miller over at www.endusersharepoint.com posted my latest article on SharePoint Designer workflow here (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1037). I describe the basic approach for moving a workflow you create in one list to another list. The other list can be in the same site, same site collection or an entirely different farm (e.g. from development to production). This is a complicated subject so I only covered a very basic scenario. Next week, I'll write up a more useful real world e [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 16th '08 |
Blog list: Blog Roll
Paul Galvin
Blog Rollbelle's sharepoint musingsbelle's sharepoint musings - mostly about sharepoint (sometimes SQL), collection of personal pains, how to's and other resources that will help alleviate sharepoint headaches (mostly my own) .. plus some other random stuffGunnar Peipman's blogA mix of topics, not 100% SharePoint. SharePoint, WCF, ASP.NET.No Geekspeak on SharePoint 2007Mark Miller's blog focuses on MOSS but unlike most, does not drop down to code. He focus [read].
Posted: Fri, Dec 12th '08 |
SharePoint Guy Compares SharePoint to DotNetNuke
Paul Galvin
SharePoint is better. Technorati Tags: Funny [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 10th '08 |
Is This the Best SharePoint Question Ever Asked?
Paul Galvin
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP/topic/doom-web-part#post-2908 I think so... [read].
Posted: Tue, Dec 9th '08 |
Why Can’t I Easily Port SharePoint Designer Workflow Solutions From One List to Another?
Paul Galvin
Mark Miller has posted my latest End User oriented SharePoint Designer Workflow article up on his site here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1008
I attempt to provide a straight-forward answer to the question, "Why can't I easily port a SharePoint designer workflow from development to test?" In the process, I also give some insight into what SPD is actually doing behind the scenes when we use it to create a workflow solution.
Next week, I describe an End User friendly way to port SPD wor [read].
Posted: Mon, Dec 8th '08 |
Defining the Findability Problem
Paul Galvin
I had the good fortune of attending some partner training from FAST last spring. I was really impressed with the product and was looking forward to working with it. Unfortunately, one project fell through and then EMC acquired my company. Predictably, a certain amount of chaos ensued while we learned about EMC and EMC learned about us. FAST technology dropped a few points on the priority scale during that period. However, I never lost my interest in the product and, more interestingly, [read].
Posted: Wed, Dec 3rd '08 |
Personal On-line Backup Mini-Review: Mozy
Paul Galvin
One of the ... side effects ... of working for a giant corporation is that I get a lot press releases in my inbox every month. I'm still new to the EMC world, so a lot of these press releases are, basically, inscrutable. This or that company purchased these or those EMC products, blah blah blah. I'm not complaining. I actually take this as an incentive to learn more about EMC as time goes by so that I better understand the big picture of what EMC is all about (hint: it's about Informatio [read].
Posted: Wed, Nov 19th '08 |
Sorting Calendar Items in the Calendar View
Paul Galvin
I'm using a calendar to track panel discussions on a given day. I have two sessions: morning and afternoon. I want to create a view that shows morning sessions only listed alphabetically via a session ID. This is a little tricky to accomplish (unless I missed something real obvious). I can easily create a filtered view showing just that day's events. The calendar will show all those events and if they all take place on the same hour, it lists them side by side in the hour slot. That's [read].
Posted: Tue, Nov 18th '08 |
NJ SharePoint User Group Meeting With Dave Mann ... Or .. What Bob Said
Paul Galvin
Bob Fox lets us know that Dave Mann, SharePoint workflow genius, is speaking at the NJ SharePoint user group meeting on Wednesday evening, 11/19/08. Don't miss it. (Sadly, my corporate overlord has scheduled a big group meeting Wed night and I will miss it). Click here to register and get more details. Here are some session details: Session Title “Deploying Workflows in a Large Scale SharePoint Environment” Workflow in SharePoint is an exciting new capability. However, it is a capability [read].
Posted: Tue, Nov 18th '08 |
SharePoint Features & Solutions Management -- Don't Forget the U in CRUD (or the D for that matter)
Paul Galvin
We collectively spend a great deal of time thinking about SharePoint solutions -- how to create them, which tool to use, what happens when they fail to deploy, timer jobs, scopes, etc. We spend so much time thinking about the up-front bits that it's easy to forget that we need to retract them as well. Retracting solutions is probably more difficult, from a conceptual design perspective, than deploying them. Deployment is basically a cookbook affair. Typically, install a feature, maybe ha [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 10th '08 |
SharePoint Designer Workflow Cannot Access "Remote" or "Foreign" Lists
Paul Galvin
Here's another common SharePoint Designer workflow question: "Can I access (read/write) SharePoint lists via workflows which do not reside on the same site as the list itself?" The simple answer is: No. As in so many ways, however, we have to qualify that (which is a good thing in this case). The platform lets us create extensions to the produce in many ways, including a custom action (see my little codeplex project here for an example). A custom action lets us do basically anything we want [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 10th '08 |
SharePoint on the Train
Paul Galvin
Today, I was reading through Mike Walsh's Teach Yourself SharePoint 2007 in 24 Hours and, incredibly, the lady on the seat next me said, "We just implemented SharePoint in our company." It's "incredible" because people just don't talk to me on the train :) It's funny how SharePoint was the catalyst. The other interesting aspect was that she didn't realize that there were books on the product. Here comment was along the lines of "It must be pretty important if people are writing books about [read].
Posted: Fri, Nov 7th '08 |
Spinning Up Temporary Virtual WFE's for Fun and Profit
Paul Galvin
I was one of 20 or 30 (or maybe 100?) panelists last night at the New York SharePoint Users Group meeting. Instead of the usual presentation format, this was all about Q&A between the audience and the panel members. Early on, Michael Lotter introduced me to a new idea and I wanted to share. An audience member described how his company had paid a consultant to write an application for his company. The consultant wrote it as a console application using the SharePoint object model. As a [read].
Posted: Thu, Nov 6th '08 |
Services on Server Does Not List Search -- Why?
Paul Galvin
I was chatting today with Agnes Molnar (the only person I know that I know in Hungary) about a strange search configuration problem. Namely, search was missing from the "services on server" display (via Central Admin -> Operations -> Services on Server). I had a look at a functional VM on my own machine and together, we determined that search was not installed on that server. There are probably a few ways to do this, but we did it by confirming that "Office SharePoint Server Search" wa [read].
Posted: Thu, Nov 6th '08 |
Are Recruiters Getting a Little Aggressive?
Paul Galvin
Or is it just me? I've received three or four calls at my house since late September looking for SharePoint work. I'm used to the email solicitations, but these phone calls are a little unnerving. I haven't had an updated resume on a job site I(like Monster pr Dice) since almost two years ago exactly. And back then, my resume was all about BizTalk and MS CRM. That's the only place my phone number appears on line anywhere, so far as I know. Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitte [read].
Posted: Tue, Nov 4th '08 |
Just When I'm About to Disable Comments ...
Paul Galvin
They pull me back in! Windows Live Spaces doesn't do a good job protecting me from comment spam. I assume MSFT has good spam detection, but that the spammers are better. The fact remains, however, that I get far more spam comments than I get real comments and I was just thinking in the last week or so that I was going to disable comments. However, today, I found two excellent comments in response to this post (about Limited Access) and this post (about limiting search to documents, as oppose [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 3rd '08 |
Social Computing Book for SharePoint 2007
Paul Galvin
In mid July, I was offered a chance to author two chapters for Brendon Schwartz's and Matt Ranlett's up-coming book, Social Computing with Microsoft SharePoint 2007: Implementing Applications for SharePoint to Enable Collaboration and Interaction in the Enterprise. (I think they were trying to win a length contest with that title; I think they won). I jumped on the opportunity and now, finally, the entire book is done, arriving at stores in February. As SharePoint matures, publishers have be [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 3rd '08 |
Custom List: Recommended Books
Paul Galvin
Recommended BooksMicrosoft Office SharePoint Server Administrator's CompanionProvides overview of all MOSS functionality. Light on programming, but an excellent resource that covers everything avaialble in MOSS and, as its name implies, focuses on administration. Must-have for those seeking the administrative certifications.Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0Great technical introduction and deep dive into WSS 3.0. Useful for WSS 3.0 and MOSS environments. Must-have for those seeking WSS p [read].
Posted: Mon, Nov 3rd '08 |
What is Limited Access Anyway?
Paul Galvin
I've been working on a secret tech editing project for an up-coming book and it references this blog entry by Tyler Butler on the MSDN ECM blog. This is the first time I personally read a clear definition of the meaning of Limited Access. Here's the meat of the definition: In SharePoint, anonymous users' rights are determined by the Limited Access permission level. Limited Access is a special permission level that cannot be assigned to a user or group directly. The reason it exists is becau [read].
Posted: Sun, Nov 2nd '08 |
I Don't Often Agree with Big George Will, But He's Right About Dreary Outcomes
Paul Galvin
The closing thought on this otherwise dull article speaks well to problems we often face in the technical community: "Such dreary developments, anticipated with certainty, must be borne philosophically." This puts me in mind of one of the presentations I gave at the SharePoint Best Practices conference last month. I was describing how to get "great" business requirements and someone in the audience asked, in effect, what to do if circumstances are such that it's impossible to get great requir [read].
Posted: Sun, Nov 2nd '08 |
SharePoint Designer Workflow and Email Attachments -- A Consummation Devoutly to be Wished
Paul Galvin
Sadly, it is not to be. We cannot send an email with attachments from a SharePoint Designer workflow using out of the box features. This wish comes up with increasing regularity on the MSDN forums. However, the SharePoint platform, as with so many things, does offer us a path forward. We can create custom actions which we then incorporate into our workflows. Once installed, a custom action looks and feels like any other action (e.g. Collect Data, Log a Message, etc). Creating a custom ac [read].
Posted: Sun, Nov 2nd '08 |
Quick Tip: Configure Security to Allow Admins to Access any My Site in SharePoint
Paul Galvin
In a sign that Social Computing is beginning to take off with SharePoint, I see an increased number of My Site type questions. One common question goes something like this: "I am an administrator and I need to be able to access every My Site. How do I do that?" The trick here is that each My Site is its own site collection. SharePoint security is normally administered at the site collection level and this trips up many a SharePoint administrator. Normally, she already has access to conf [read].
Posted: Sat, Nov 1st '08 |
Quick Tip: Use "IsDocument:1" to Trim Search Results
Paul Galvin
Two questions came up in rapid succession this week on the MSDN forums asking a variation of this: "When I search a keyword, folders from my document library with that keyword in their path will come out first in my search results. I don't want that to happen. Files with that keyword are more important to me. I don't want to see folders at all." This is actually quite easy to do out of the box. Simply add a "IsDocument:1" to the search query and SharePoint search (both WSS and MOSS) will re [read].
Posted: Sat, Nov 1st '08 |
Today is Opposite Day and I Love Debugging Code Like This
Paul Galvin
Subscribe to my blog. Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin Technorati Tags: Debugging [read].
Posted: Thu, Oct 16th '08 |
Quick Fix: Web Services that Interact with SharePoint, InvalidOperationException
Paul Galvin
A million years ago, I helped developed a web service that was invoked via a custom action for a SharePoint Designer workflow. This week, the client wanted to move it to production (finally!) so we did. The custom action worked fine, but the web service it invoked did not, giving us this error: System.InvalidOperationException: This operation can be performed only on a computer that is joined to a server farm by users who have permissions in SQL Server to read from the configuration database. [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 15th '08 |
Using Delicious.com to Track SharePoint "v.next" Information
Paul Galvin
As I find resources on the web discussing features available in the next version of SharePoint, I'll be adding them to my delicious bookmarks. It appears that Delicious allows people to subscribe to a particular tag, so if you're interested in what I find, when I find it, subscribe here: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/pagalvin/SharePoint_O14?count=15 Subscribe to my blog. Technorati Tags: v.next [read].
Posted: Tue, Oct 14th '08 |
Congratulations, Natalya!
Paul Galvin
I just received word that my friend and colleague, Natalya Voskresenskaya was awarded MVP for SharePoint today. I've been working with Natalya for almost 18 months now and it's a well-deserved recognition. Like all the MVPs I know, she's strongly motivated by the community and her work with ISPA, among other things, is helping to make the SharePoint community one of the strongest and most helpful of any technically oriented effort on the planet. Congrats! [read].
Posted: Wed, Oct 1st '08 |
VPN Strikes Again, Slowing Me Down and Ruining My Beer
Paul Galvin
Tonight, I'm doing some hobby work with a virtual machine running on my desktop. I'm connecting via IE on my laptop and I'm noticing horrible performance. IE keeps freezing, especially when I access anything in the upper right hand corner that would cause a drop-down to, well, drop down. I would click on Site Actions and things freeze up for a while. They would freeze long enough for me to switch over to another browser window and do something else. If I confine myself to navigating ar [read].
Posted: Sun, Sep 28th '08 |
SharePoint Best Practices Conference, "Best Practices," and the Elephant in the Room
Paul Galvin
I was lucky to attend and present at last week's SharePoint Best Practices conference. I'm still new to the whole speaking "thing" and, frankly, I was a bit nervous for the first half while I sweated out waiting to speak myself. That sort of nervous feeling made it a little hard for me to pay attention to the presenters (not that I ignored them). Instead, I focused a bit more on the attendees. Conferences always set my mind racing and there was a lot take in at this one. This conference [read].
Posted: Thu, Sep 25th '08 |
New Blogger on the Block
Paul Galvin
My EMC colleague, Erik Swenson, has been persuaded to jump in the fray, stand up and be counted :) He blogs about about a wide variety of SharePoint branding topics at http://erikswenson.blogspot.com/. Some of his recent posts include interesting stuff about Photoshop, Microsoft Office Live for small business, SharePoint Governance, creating custom WCM styles and so forth. He does not confine himself to branding. It's quite an interesting mix which is a little bit different from a lot of t [read].
Posted: Wed, Sep 24th '08 |
Best Practices Conference: "Get Great Requirements" PowerPoint Presentation
Paul Galvin
I've uploaded the PowerPoint for one of my sessions, "Get Great Business Requirements," right here (http://cid-1cc1edb3daa9b8aa.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Paul%20Galvin%20Great%20Requirements.pptx). Aside from a series of brilliant points, powerfully made, the deck includes extensive notes which supplement and enhance the afore-mentioned brilliant talking points. For those of you that missed the Best Practices conference, I was lucky enough to present and discuss a process that works [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 22nd '08 |
SharePoint Dashboards Online Seminar
Paul Galvin
My online friend, Mark Miller over and End User SharePoint (www.endusersharepoint.com) is running a free one hour seminar targeted, like he always does, at the SharePoint End User community. It takes place at 1pm EDT. Details are here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=785 I have sat in on one of his online seminar last month and it was done quite well and if you're interested in some very practical info on dashboards in SharePoint, I'm sure it's worth the 1 hour investment. Subscribe to [read].
Posted: Mon, Sep 15th '08 |
SharePoint User Group Webcast Tonight
Paul Galvin
Tonight, 08/20/08, the Connecticut SharePoint user group meeting is broadcasting a webcast in lieu of a physical meeting this month. Tonight's topic: "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Extranet deployment methodologies" Microsoft's own Chris Lavista will lead the discussion. I've worked with Chris before and he really knows his stuff. If you have any interest in this subject, check it out. Here are the details: SharePoint User Group Webcast: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation [read].
Posted: Wed, Aug 20th '08 |
Has Your Search Committee Met This Month?
Paul Galvin
It's the beginning of the month and now is as good a time as any for your company's search committee to get together and analyze Best Bets, successful and not so successful searches, etc. You don't have a search committee? Then form one :) WSS and especially MOSS search benefit from some human oversight. Investing a few hours a month on a consistent monthly basis is not only more fun than a barrel of monkeys, it can: Give insight into the information needs of the enterprise. If people a [read].
Posted: Tue, Aug 5th '08 |
Quick and Easy: Get SPFolder of SPItemList
Paul Galvin
I keep running into this problem and the Google never seems to understand what I want to do, so I figured I would write this down.
I've been doing a lot of event receiver debugging in the last week or two. The ER is defined against a document library. The individual items in the document library are tightly related to their parent folders. So, I am always getting the folder of the item for various manipulations. While debugging, I needed to update the metadata of a folder for a specific it [read].
Posted: Mon, Aug 4th '08 |
Sunday Morning Funny: "Dad, He Doesn't Even Know You"
Paul Galvin
We northern New Jersey Galvin's are big fans of the political satire t.v. program, The Daily Show hosted by Jon Stewart. I don't like to get political in my blogging, so all I'll say on that is that without the Daily Show, I may well have permanently lost all of sense of humor on or about 12/12/2000. We were having a meal on the deck early last week and my ten year old son brings up a recent episode of the Show. I made the comment, "Jon Stewart knows that he better not make fun of me or there [read].
Posted: Sun, Aug 3rd '08 |
Employee Training Schedule and Materials Template -- Seat Count Bug PLUS Security Fix(?)
Paul Galvin
This is a fairly popular "fabulous 40" template. It also has a bug which is widely known (I've even blogged about how to fix it). Sogeti released a codeplex project this week that fixes the bug (which is nice by itself, but not earth-shattering) but they also claim to have solved a much thornier problem: security. The fab 40 template requires a very generous security setting (users needs contributor level access to virtually everything). Not any more! According to the codeplex summary: [read].
Posted: Sat, Aug 2nd '08 |
SharePoint Designer Workflow, Event Receivers and "Update List Item" versus "Set Field in Current Item"
Paul Galvin
We have a set of SharePoint designer workflows that "communicate" with an event receiver on the list via changes to site column values. For example, if a site column "SetDuedate" is set to true by the workflow, the event receiver detects that change, calculates a due date and assigns that date to another site column, "Due Date." We split things up like this because the event receiver can calculate a due date using complex business rules (taking weekends and company holidays into account) whi [read].
Posted: Fri, Aug 1st '08 |
Get Thee to a SharePoint User Group!
Paul Galvin
In the last two weeks, I attended the New Jersey SharePoint user group and the newly formed New York SharePoint Developers user group (as opposed to the more established New York SharePoint user group). In New Jersey, the good people of NewsGator presented their product and covered a lot of very interesting social computing concepts. If you're looking to incorporate social computing into your organization in a system-assisted way and can't get out-of-the-box SharePoint to do it for you, seriou [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 30th '08 |
Emailing Daily Task Reminders // Looping in SharePoint Designer Workflow
Paul Galvin
I wrote up a detailed article a few weeks ago describing how to create a SharePoint Designer workflow that sends a task reminder email on a daily basis. It's been published at the new SharePoint Magazine site. More generally, the article shows how to create a looping structure in SPD. The magazine has a wide variety of articles including, among other things, very technical stuff, interviews and industry news. I recommend you add it to your RSS feed. If you have a product or service to sell [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 25th '08 |
SharePoint Best Practices Conference
Paul Galvin
I'm speaking at the SharePoint Best Practices conference in November. It's sort of a funny story. I was in Virginia presenting at the SUGDC conference and that Friday was the deadline to submit speaking proposals for the BP conference. The organizers described how they would use a "blind selection" process and that every effort would be made to select presentation on the basis of its value, etc. To maximize my chances of getting selected, I submitted two proposals. The selection committe [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 15th '08 |
My Latest "In Defense of SharePoint Designer" Article is Available
Paul Galvin
Mark Miller over at End User SharePoint has posted my latest article about using SharePoint Designer to create great workflow solutions up on his site. Check it out. In this article, I talk about the design process and, in greater detail, how to set up a reliable and repeatable test process using SharePoint features (custom lists, site templates). The article targets End Users, but the approach is good for developers too. Subscribe to my blog. Technorati Tags: SharePoint Workflow, workflow, [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 11th '08 |
How Do You Describe Your SharePoint Job?
Paul Galvin
How often does this happen to you? I'm sitting at my laptop, reading blogs, responding to forum postings, 2 copies of visual studio open and VPN'd out to another server with its own visual studio + 15 browser windows (a typical day) and someone named Samantha (my wife, apparently) tells me, "We have be there in 30 minutes. Get dressed." I get up in a daze, wander around the house confusedly, get in a car and next thing I know, I'm at a party with a beer in my hand and someone asks me, "So, w [read].
Posted: Fri, Jul 11th '08 |
Hiding Custom Actions in SharePoint
Paul Galvin
Several months ago, while working on a project for a client, I created a feature. Among other things, that feature defined a custom action (these appear under site settings). The only purpose for this custom action was to demonstrate to me that the feature activation was working as expected. Basically, I used it as a crude form of debugging. Much to my embarrassment, this debugging artifact made its way from dev to UAT and to production before someone got around to asking, "what is this xy [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 9th '08 |
Configure Thesaurus in MOSS
Paul Galvin
I'm working on an architecture review document this week and it suggests, among other things, that the client consider using the thesaurus to help improve the end user search experience. Having never done this myself, I wanted to do a quick hands-on test so that my suggestion is authentic. It was surprisingly difficult to figure out how to do, although it is, in fact, quite easy. There's a pretty good bit of information on the thesaurus (check here and here, for example). However, those [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 8th '08 |
Large-scale MOSS Document Management Projects: 50k Per Day, 10 Million Total
Paul Galvin
This past week, someone asked a question about creating a SharePoint environment that would handle a pretty high volume of new documents (10,000 +/- in this case). I don't know much about this, but thanks to this white paper, I feel much better informed. For me, this white paper is pretty much just a book mark at the moment, but I did start reading through it and thought I'd highlight my main take-away. SharePoint can be scaled to handle, at a minimum, this load: 50k new documents per day. [read].
Posted: Sun, Jul 6th '08 |
SharePoint Performance -- Quick (But Unusual) Tip
Paul Galvin
We've been working in a user acceptance testing (UAT) environment which, as compared to development, is dead slow. It's a complicated environment using FBA, SQL 2008, SSRS and extended web applications accessible over the internet using https, so it's been hard to track down the issue. For a previous client, we used FBA with an LDAP role provider (and membership provider). One of my colleagues, far more clever than I, determined that the "out of the box" LDAP role provider, when used in that e [read].
Posted: Thu, Jul 3rd '08 |
Fairfield/WestChester SharePoint User Group in Connecticut
Paul Galvin
My colleague (Natalya Voskresenskaya) and I will be speaking at the Fairfield/Westchester SharePoint User Group meeting at 6:00 PM on 07/16 (Wednesday). We are talking about the content query web part. This is the same (but improved version that we gave to New York in May). Pre-register here: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=129626&wa=wsignin1.0 Natalya and I hope to see you there! Here's the email Richard Martzelle just sent out on the subject: Topic: Using Content Q [read].
Posted: Wed, Jul 2nd '08 |
Awarded MVP for SharePoint
Paul Galvin
This morning, Microsoft emailed to tell me I have given the Microsoft MVP award! It's a lot to take in all at once. When I've had a chance to properly reflect, I'll share more of my thoughts on the whole thing. I know it's a subject of great interest to a lot of people. I'm bursting with excitement. The SharePoint MVP crew is a great group of men and women dedicated to building and expanding the community. I've only met a handful and look forward to meeting more and helping to expand a [read].
Posted: Tue, Jul 1st '08 |
June 2008 SUGDC Conference -- That's a Wrap
Paul Galvin
I attended my first ever SharePoint conference this past weekend and it was a blast. Thursday afternoon, I drove down to Virginia, guided by my newly purchased $50 GPS appliance plug-in thing to my phone. The device was flawless. After the five hour drive, I had the energy to do a nice run on the tread mill and then, even more surprisingly, had the energy to head to the lobby for an advertised speaker's cocktail hour. Conference n00b that I am, it turned out that the cocktail hour was re [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 29th '08 |
FBA and SQL Server: A Love Story
Paul Galvin
My colleague has been working on a web part in an FBA environment. Among other things, the web part pulls some data from SQL server. The grand plan for this project dictates that a DBA configures data level security in SQL (as opposed to embedding a user ID in a SQL query or some other approach). The problem is that SQL server doesn't know anything about our FBA environment so it can't trust us. We solved this problem by, for lack of a better word, manually impersonating an AD user so that [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 25th '08 |
Adding to the Lore: SSRS Tells Me "rsAccessDenied", But ... I Really DO Have Access
Paul Galvin
A few weeks back, I was working with my developer colleague on a project involving SQL Server Reporting Services plug-in for MOSS. He was developing a web part that provides a fancy front-end to the report proper (the main feature being a clever lookup on a parameter with several thousand searchable values behind it). This was working great in the development environment but in the user acceptance testing (UAT) environment, it wouldn't work. Firing up the debugger, we would see exception det [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 24th '08 |
Quick Fix: Accessing SharePoint Site Throws [HttpException (0x80004005): Request timed out.]
Paul Galvin
One of my developer colleagues was working on a project this week and ran into a timeout problem while working on building some crazy web part. His web part was fine, but "suddenly" an unrelated site became very slow and frequently timed out with this error: [HttpException (0x80004005): Request timed out.] I logged in and saw that several other sites were just fine. I suspected that there were some hidden web parts on the page and using the trusty ?contents=1 debug technique, I did in fact [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 23rd '08 |
In-class FAST Training is Excellent
Paul Galvin
I'm starting day 4 of FAST's partner training headed up by Larry Kaye here in Needham, MA. This 5-day session is broken down into classes (3 and 2 days respectively) entitled "FAST ESP: Developing Custom Search Applications for Alliance Partners I" and "FAST ESP: Developing Custom Search Applications for Alliance Partners II". This is a real boot camp type class. The material is deep (very, very deep). The instructor (Larry) clearly knows his stuff. I highly recommend this training if you cons [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 19th '08 |
SharePoint and FAST -- the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Enterprise Apps?
Paul Galvin
I've finished up day 2 of FAST training in sunny Needham, MA, and I'm bursting with ideas (which all the good training classes do to me). One particular aspect of FAST has me thinking and I wanted to write it down while it was still fresh and normal day-to-day "stuff" pushed it out of my head. We SharePoint WSS 3.0 / MOSS implementers frequently face a tough problem with any reasonably-sized SharePoint project: How do we get all the untagged data loaded into SharePoint such that it all fits wi [read].
Posted: Wed, Jun 18th '08 |
Learning About End Users At www.EndUserSharePoint.com
Paul Galvin
Mark Miller over at http://www.endusersharepoint.com has built, in my experience, the best end-user focused SharePoint site in the 'sphere. In the last month, he has enlisted some of the premier end-user focused bloggers around to contribute to the "front page" on a regular basis, including but not limited to Paul Culmsee, Chris Quick, and Dessie Lunsford. He has others lined up and ready to contribute as their schedules allow. I jumped on the chance to participate and my inaugural post is h [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 17th '08 |
Invoking SSRS Web Services From WSS / MOSS in FBA Environment
Paul Galvin
We needed to invoke the "CreateSubscription" method on an SSRS web service that is hosted in an FBA managed MOSS environment from a custom web part. We kept getting variations of: 401: Not authorized Object Moved The "object moved" message was most interesting because it was saying that the "object" (our SSRS service) had "moved" to login.aspx. This clearly meant we had some kind of authentication problem. I eventually realized that I had bookmarked a blog entry by Robert Garret that descri [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 9th '08 |
Have You Performed Your Monthly Search Analysis?
Paul Galvin
It's a good practice, probably even a Best Practice, to review your search reports once a month and look for opportunities to add best bets, tune your thesaurus and maybe even uncover some business intelligence that is otherwise hidden to management. It's already the 3rd of the month. Time's awastin' :) Subscribe to my blog. Technorati Tags: SharePoint Administration [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 3rd '08 |
Faceted Search Fence Sitter No More
Paul Galvin
I had reason today to play about with the codeplex faceted search project today. It's been around for a while, but I hesitated to download and use it for the usual reasons (mainly lack of time), plus outright fear :) If you're looking to improve your search and explore new options, download it and install it when you have an hour or so of free time. I followed the installation manual's instructions and it took me less than 20 minutes to have it installed and working. It provides value minu [read].
Posted: Tue, Jun 3rd '08 |
RSS Feed
