Jamie McAllister - Cloud with a Sunny Outlook (Page 6)

Techniques to use when Variations Attack!

You know those moments where it goes horribly wrong? I've just fought my way through one of those, and it might be useful for you to know how. We are talking again about MOSS Variations. I'm going to describe how they got trashed, and how we

Sharepoint

Variations Editor has Shipped!

Tim Dobrinski has been putting in a lot of work on a utility to edit and repair the Relationships List. An invaluable tool for when Variations go bad. He is giving it away free on his site. I strongly suggest you check it out. You can get it here http:

Bug

Do MOSS Variations really SUCK?

I've been using the MOSS Variations feature for quite some time now. In that time there has been a lot of comment on the web detailing it's shortcomings. The first major comment I remember was Jeremy Jamesons 'Dumping MOSS Variations'. Your favourite search engine

Variations

Variations Documentation from MS

Documentation on Variations has always been a bit light. But today I found this new documentation about Variation Settings. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc824903.aspx#section3 Being an optimist I'm taking this find as a sign that the tide is turning, and Microsoft are getting to

Patches

Content Deployment and the Infrastructure Update

Those recent roll-up fixes for content deployment have been further rolled up! ;) http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2008/07/15/content-deployment-and-the-infrastructure-update.aspx WSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698 MOSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704/

CMS

Create Expandable Regions in MOSS Publishing Pages

When you have a large amount of text on any given MOSS Publishing page it can obscure information that the reader wants. You're always free to split that content across several publishing pages of course, but that might not agree with your sites structure or how users want

CMS

Andrew Connells new MOSS WCM book is really good!

I've been doing MOSS Web Content Management work since MOSS 2007 was released. There have been the highs and lows, and frankly it's been a bit of a voyage of discovery. Let's face it the documentation was somewhat lacking, and some areas were in

Variations

Applying Content Deployment rollup fixes 952698 and 952704 - slight issues to address

Just a quick post to make up for a quiet month. I've been on holiday, hence the lack of new posts. Just installed the Content Deployment rollup fixes to one of my environments. They contain some 60+ fixes, and seem like a good supplement to the lovely stability

.NET

Release of "Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, June 2008 Community Technology Preview"

Notice that Microsoft have released some new goodies today; "Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5, June 2008 Community Technology Preview". As most of my web projects these days seem to sport a quad core server or some such, I always evaluate my parallel processing options with

Propagating Document Library Items In SharePoint Variations (in the same way as Pages)

The Problem When my users see Sharepoint Variations in action, they’re usually pretty impressed. Alas, when they then realise that only their publishing pages are being propagated out, and not their Documents they tend to deflate pretty quickly. “Why aren’t the contents of Document Libraries published out in

Bug

Broken Variation Links on URL Rename

There's a Variations bug blighting the MOSS install I'm currently working with, which we may have figured out. In the portal, you open Site Content and Structure and navigate to a Site Variation. In the settings for the variation, change the url of that site. The

Create Variations Programmatically

There have been a few queries from people recently about whether Variations could be created programmatically. I started investigating the methods used in the Sharepoint API, but then I happened across some excellent detective work on Michiel Lankamp's Sharepoint Blog. The method he outlines is unsupported by Microsoft,

Sharepoint

Variations Sting in the Tail with MOSS Service Pack 1

Our early experience with Site Variations involved some nasty errors that were fixed by http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936867 . Recently we decided the time was right to install WSS SP1 and MOSS SP1. So, the test environment got service packed first. Imagine my surprise when the error from several

Exposing your MOSS WCM to Mobile Devices

Overview An ever present possible requirement is for Web Content pages to be accessible via mobile device. This posting provides some basic guidance on that. This post was written with MOSS 2007 in mind. If you need guidance on SharePoint 2013 mobile offerings, go here [http://blogs.office.com/b/

Embed CAML Queries into the Content Query Webpart - Finding Draft Publishing Content

In a recent article I demonstrated how to use recursion to show the publishing status of my publishing pages. This is a great technique, because a natural progression from there is being able to manipulate those same publishing pages’ properties you accessed through recursion. This can manage a number of

Mutli-lingual Page Layout Text for Site Variations Part 2 - Using Resource Files

OK, so in part 1 we used javascript to update headings in a page layout, depending on what variation we were in. That might be fine for some situations, but it has major shortcomings, not least of which guaranteeing that your clients have javascript turned on. A slightly more fiddly

Report Publishing Page Checkout Status by using Recursion

My client recently asked for a simple user control that would show which publishing pages were checked out. The idea being a one stop shop to find unpublished pages, and publish them! This gives me a good excuse to demonstrate a very powerful technique that can be applied to Sharepoint

CMS

Mutli-lingual Page Layout Text for Site Variations Part 1 - Using Javascript

This article was interesting, but is not the way to go for multi-lingual pages, so I've removed the content. The best solution for multi-lingual page layouts and can be found here; https://jamiemcallister.com/post/Mutli-lingual-Page-Layout-Text-for-Site-Variations-Part-2---Using-Resource-Files.aspx [https://jamiemcallister.com/post/Mutli-lingual-Page-Layout-Text-for-Site-Variations-Part-2---Using-Resource-Files.aspx]

CMS

Reflections on the use of Language Pack Resources

Well as you probably gathered from my last post, it was fun using those language pack resources to provide my custom footer labels with multiple language text. It does beg the question what other resources are available in those language packs. It isn't documented anywhere I can find.

.NET

Building a multi-lingual 'Last Modified' Footer for MOSS

Anyone familiar with my work will know that most of my efforts just recently have been directed towards a MOSS 2007 Publishing Site for a major multi-national company. The site is used in several countries, and uses Site Variations to provide multi-lingual content. Just to make life interesting, I was

Sharepoint

Accessing Sharepoint Documents from Winforms via HTTPS

I was recently asked how someone could access a document in a Sharepoint list from a Winforms client. His only caveat was that it was secured via SSL. This is the code I gave him, and it seems to work! System.Net.WebClient Client = new System.Net.WebClient(); Client.UseDefaultCredentials

Sharepoint

Minor SPD Bug to watch out for

If you fancy re-creating a Sharepoint Designer (SP1) bug, read on. Removing a column from your site and then re-adding one of the same name seems to cause problems with field controls. But there is a simple workaround; (MOSS Publishing Site Version 12.0.0.6020) Site Settings > Site