Broken Web Parts

Have you ever had a web-part that started creating errors that wouldn't allow you to get to your page for editing it? Here's a cool little tip that might get you up and going with much less frustration. Append ?contents=1 to the end of your URL for the page that contains your problematic web part. This will take you to the web-parts management page that will allow you to remove the troublesome web-part from the page. https://<server>/<site>/?contents=1

DevConnections, Orlando, Florida

Just a heads up for any that are interested, I'm headed to DevConnections next week. I'm exicited about the possibilities and things that I'll be exploring while there. Here are a few of the sessions that I'm planning to attend: Design Powerful Workflows with SharePoint Designer Workflows are essential to business processes. The ability to route a document through multiple stages, gathering feedback, and getting approval from multiple people is a routine procedure in many companies. Now you can take advantage of SharePoint’s built-in support for workflows to design powerful multi-step workflows. You will learn how to make use of the built-in workflows directly through SharePoint’s interface. Then you will see how to develop powerful workflows—without any code—using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. Intelligent Dashboards Made Simple Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) incorporates significant enhancements in presenting Business Intelligence data to the end user allowing them to share, control, and reuse business information to make better decisions. MOSS is utilized to enable information workers to build business intelligence (BI) dashboards in any SharePoint site. The dashboard can provide a bird’s eye view to easily and quickly analyze data or to measure progress of any organizational metrics or goals. This session will show how easy it is to build a powerful BI dashboard using information from various data sources. Even data from Excel spreadsheets, hosted in SharePoint document libraries, will be used along with other data sources. The end result will show a visualization of Key Performance Indicators, graphs, and charts of the data that’s easy to understand and analyze. Quick Integration from SharePoint to Your Application Do you need a quick way to add search to your application? Do you want to add document management including version control and check in/out? In this session, you’ll learn how you can use SharePoint to add more robust features to your application—and how you can use SharePoint to provide a central framework around your existing individual applications. The Hidden Architect—Building Solutions for Smaller Organizations Large enterprises and governments with large projects can justify and afford formal system architecture and design and can afford the loss when a project self-destructs (as they so often do). But what about smaller businesses and their Web applications? These organizations fall victim daily to poorly designed solutions that aren't what they needed in the first place. They need help figuring out what they really need—help they often don't realize they need and are reluctant to pay for. It's not enough to be a Web or application developer when it comes to this kind of client or project—you have to be a system architect as well, even though you don't wear the title and may not be able to charge for the service. So how do you become a system architect? This session might be a good start. You’ll cover requirements, economics, client management, creative and flexible design strategies, and how to look beyond "best practices" design patterns to find solutions that fit the client, instead of trying to fit the client to the solution. P.S. Bring your favorite horror stories for show and tell! If you're planning on attending this event, I'd love to meet you. I'm always interested in meeting those entrenched in the SharePoint world! It amazes me the number of tricks and tips I learn from each individual I've had the opportunity to meet!

Training Site Template Available for Download

As promised, here is the training site template available for download. Please be advised that this file is for demonstration purposes only. I am making it available to the community as an educational resource only, and therefore offer no support for the actual installation and use of the template. TrainingSiteTemplate on SkyDrive. Known Issues

1. Opening in SharePoint Designer shows as unable to render. I have no idea why this happens, but hopefully it will be addressed by Microsoft at some time. The error message is non-descriptive at best and makes it difficult to troubleshoot.
2. Web Part Connections have been removed In the original template, all of the items made use of web part connections to filter the main list of training resources. I continuously received error messages when provisioning a new site with established web part connections. I believe this may be another short-fall of SharePoint designer, as this has been my experience no matter how many different SharePoint deployments I've used.

Please feel free to comment on your experiences with this site definition. I hope it helps you envision a plan for your own templates and zero-code solutions.

Heroes Happen {here}

I just got back in from a day at the Heroes Happen {here} launch event hosted here in the DFW area. It's interesting to see the roadmap that Microsoft has put before us as we move forward in our industry. One of the points from the keynote that most intrigued me is the idea of changing the 80/20 rule. This is the rule that states in most IT departments, 80% of your time is maintenance and only 20% is innovation. The new goal for the 2008 line of server products is to try to move IT from a cost center to a strategic asset in the company. This means that the 80/20 rule would still apply, but now 80% of your time is innovation. Personally, I don't see this is an attainable or realistic goal. It is a good one, but the reality is that most IT departments spend a large chunk of their time recovering from poor communication between the user and the IT professional. Until users and IT professionals can begin speaking the same language, there will always be a level of communication missing. One thing that didn't seem to be a factor in this new 80/20 idea is cost. While it would be great to spend 80% of your time in innovation, that also means you are potentially spending more to attain that innovation. With that stated, I think the new line of server products will be a great boost in the right direction. There is a feature that has excited me with SQL 2008. In SQL 2008, the SQL Report Designer has been transformed into a stand-alone application. This means that the report designer can be placed on a desktop as a stand alone application, enabling business users to create reports from data housed in SQL 2008 databases. As a developer, one of the things that bothers me most is the continual request for new reports. By giving the end user a tool like this, I can now forcus my time on building the complex reports while allowing the business user to tweak the reports. Also, SQL 2008 Reporting Services also includes gauges for use in your reports. I believe this is a new addition to the platform, and one that has been needed for quite some time. Don't go looking for fancy new color schemes or exciting graphically diverse charts though. They still look very similar to the charts found in 2005. Unfortunately, the only break-out I was able to attend was the first session of the developer track. While informative, since we have migrated our team to Visual Studio 2008 it was rehashing all of the things we'd already discovered or heard from other Microsoft events. There were some other tracks that looked interesting, but I had personal obligations that I required me to leave (and since it is an hour trip from Dallas to Fort Worth by train, I had to leave). Overall, I'm excited about the possibilities of this new product line, but I'm going to have to spend some time diving deeper into the new features and resources for these products. Having just recovered from being on the front edge with Office 2007, SharePoint 2007 and Windows Vista, I think we're going to give these products a year or so to mature.

Two Articles with Developer Implications

Hello again! I apologize for the long period of silence, but I hope to be back over the next month with a few posts. In the mean time, here are a couple of blog posts that I have recently found that I think would be good for consideration by developers.

• EndUserSharePoint.com: Five Ways to Manage a SharePoint Site Collection with SharePoint
  This is an excellent tip on governance structures. Where this might be applicable to a developer is the use of a workflow to assist in the provisioning of sites.
• EndUserSharePoint.com: Weekly Newsletter
  Another good article with a tip on when you might want to use a blog vs. a wiki. We have begun using this tip internally to help us support various software platforms. It's worth a look as a developer to take back to your development teams to discuss ideas on collaborating with your code!

Also, I am planning to post the zero code training site this month, so be on the lookout!