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SPC 08: Migrating SPD Workflows to Visual Studio

The best session so far at SPC 08 was Todd Bleeker 's inspirational talk on the daunting task of migrating SharePoint Designer workflows to Visual Studio. Often customers want to take a specific SPD workflow and use it on different lists - but as most of you know, this is not possible because an SPD workflow is tied to one list, and one list only. If you need to attach a workflow to several lists in a site collection, you are forced to build the workflow from scratch in Visual Studio. Until now. Todd Bleeker went through the process of migrating a simple SPD workflow to Visual Studio. And it's difficult! And time-consuming. Basically, you need to go through a long process of importing files, renaming variables, attaching new dll's, changing XML and loads more. It's not for the faint of heart and at the moment you're not likely to be using this method for other than proof-of-concept projects. However, Todd is working with Paul Schaeflein and Mindsharp to automate the tedious migration process and he indicated that their efforts may result in a turn-key product sometime in the future. The one great use of the migration method is prototyping, i.e. you can let your users develop a workflow in SharePoint Designer with most of the functionality added. All the kinks can be ironed out in this phase and once the user is happy with the workflow, the developer can take over and migrate the workflow to Visual Studio. The advantage of this approach is that you free up developer...

SharePoint Designer Trainings

Videos und Traingsmaterial zum SharePoint Designer 2007 als Stand-Alone-version bzw. Portal Edition Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training Portal Edition The Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training (Portal Edition) leads the learner step Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Sharing Links: SharePoint Designer Governance

I just wanted to take a quick second to direct you to a post published today by Robert Bogue, a SharePoint MVP: http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/02/12/737.aspx The article covers Rob's views on the proper usage of SharePoint Designer (SPD) and how that usage should be governed by SharePoint administrators. SPD is a great tool for the customization and modification of SharePoint, but when not used properly it can really generate some heartburn for you. I highly recommend checking out Rob's article and taking his advice to heart; it may not be directly applicable to your situation but hopefully at least it will get you thinking about what kind of limits your organization needs around tools such as SPD. Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

SharePointLive.TV

Kennt ihr qik.com ? Mit Qik.com kann man Videos live von seinem Handy ins Netz via UMTS oder WLAN streamen (mit einer Verzögerung von ein paar Sekunden). Die Qualität ist super - Robert Scoble hat vom WEF in Davos viele Beiträge veröffentlicht. Der Dienst Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Create a Zero Code Web-Based Training Site

One of the best tips I've come across recently has been the use of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License javascript library called LyteBox . This library allows you to incorporate some pretty cool effects into SharePoint using a simple content Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Dashboards for WSS 3.0 Part II Apply the XSLT to the Data View (DVWP) using Sharepoint Designer

If you read part 1 before January 29, 2008, it has been updated and you will need to view the updated content before continuing. (Sorry, found a small error but it's fixed now.) Ok, in the first article Dashboards for WSS 3.0 Part I The Stylesheet We modified the xslt from the "Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects" template dashboard. Now we want to apply that xslt to our list using SharePoint Designer. Let's open our project in SPD and the site (This is the site where the list we are applying the xslt to)and create a folder called "xslt". Where you store you xslt is really up to you. I create a folder like this on a site and store them all there. I am not saying this is the best way or even the right way. Just how I do it. In that folder place a copy of the xslt you want to use. Open an existing page or create a new one ( "File > New > ASPX" ). I place all my data views in a web part zone so I can move them around easily if I need to. So let's add a web part zone to an existing page ( "Insert > SharePoint Controls > Web Part Zone" )or create a new page a place a web part zone on it. SPD should look like this: Select the web part zone (it will highlight blue), then select "Data View > Manage Data Sources". A list of data sources for this site will appear in the right task pane. In the Data Source Library hover your mouse over the list you want to use and select "Show Data" from it's...

Dashboards for WSS 3.0 Part I The Stylesheet

Most people who use WSS 3.0 most likely want to use some type of dashboard component on their sites. If you haven't seen it, there is a great document called "Application Templates Under the Hood" published by Microsoft in June 2007. (Get it here.) Page 24 of that document "Using Dashboards" deals with the Bar Graph used in many of the Fantastic 40 Application Templates. Our example references one of the bar graphs used in the "Budgeting and Tracking multiple Projects" templates dashboard. If you have seen this but still find yourself scratching your head, I'm going to attempt to detail how to use this type of graph in a SharePoint list. I don't claim to be able to teach you about xslt but I'll show you how to do this . After you do it once or twice you begin to understand how it all works. Good Luck So what we want to do is create a bar graph. We have a list of issues or action items that has a field called "Status". The various "Status" categories are: "Contractor Action", "Customer Action" or "Completed". We want to show a bar graph that tells us: How many total items are in the list How many items in each category The percentage in each category based on total items I'll do this in two parts: 1. Modifying the XSLT used to display the list data. 2. Use SharePoint Designer to create a data view and apply the style sheet. The XSLT used to transform the data to the bar graph is...

ExpGroupBy(obj) Javascript Function

There are times that I am glad to be a SharePoint developer. Today is one of those days! I have been working on a web part that needs to roll-up a lot of data from multiple sub-sites for a dashboard style view. The view needs to group the data by two Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

"Cannot find c:\...\exportsettings.xml" error when restoring with SharePoint Designer

When making a SharePoint Designer backup of a certain Windows SharePoint Services site it's creating it normally. But when you try to restore the same backup you receive the cannot find ... exportsettings.xml error. After digging a lot around I've Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Custom SharePoint Designer Subject Lines with Calculated Fields

A way long time ago (back in October) I was working on building workflows with SharePoint Designer 2007 but for the life of me couldn’t figure out how to make custom Subject lines. Out of the box SharePoint Designer will only let you select one workflow variable or one field from the current item to [...] Mirrored on SharePoint Blogs Posted on SharePoint Blogs...( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Possible glitch in SharePoint Designer Service Pack 1

By now, almost everyone has heard about the release of Service Pack 1 for the following Office Products: Office 2007 SharePoint Designer 2007 Visio 2007 Project 2007 Before opening a SharePoint Site did notice that the "HTML Editor" option in Internet Explorer was set to "Microsoft Office Word". Fixed this problem with the following steps: Click inside Internet Explorer the "Tools " Toolbar dropdown Click "Internet Options" Click "Programs" Tab Set...( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Tasks in a (SharePoint Designer) workflow

For a customer I have created a SharePoint Designer workflow that is linked to a Forms Library. The workflow needs to start whenever an item added AND when an item is changed. One of the steps in the workflow includes assigning a task to someone. This person needs to change a field in the form, after which the workflow needs to start again. However, if you assign a task (or To-do Item as it is called in SharePoint Designer) the workflow waits until the task is marked complete before it consideres the step finished. This means that if the person changes the value in the form and then marks the task complete (the most logical order) the workflow doesn't start again. A kind of dirty trick to get around this is to add an action to the workflow that assigns a field in the form with it's own value after the To-do item action. Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Naughty SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer keeps adding spaces ( ) to my HTML in page layouts. This is particularly annoying as I am working to a web design that has been produced at great expense and the customer quite rightly expects that the developed website will Read More......( read more ) Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

Codeplex Project that Adds Custom Actions to SPD

I found this link today on Codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/SPDActivities. If you notice there is a workflow condition that allows for the checking of a Sharepoint Group...I guess I am not going to write a custom action or custom workflow, since someone already wrote something and it was sitting right in front of my face. I also noticed another nice function that will start another workflow, rather than auto starting two workflows together. I'm considering e-mailing the author and offering my services to help him update these features in the future. I would love to get my hands dirty after reading half of Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System . Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

MOSS 2007: Customize the Search Result (using XSLT) - Part 3 - Customize using SharePoint Designer 2007

Author: Tobias Zimmergren Url: http://www.sharepointblogs.com/zimmer After being rather busy the last couple of weeks due to taking the SharePoint Certifications as well as tutoring some MOSS 2007 Development around the country it has finally begun to lighten up again. Being the geeky nerd that I am (Yeah, like you aint?), of course the first thing that comes to my mind is to complete the two articles about customizing the Search Results Page with a third post on the subject which will show you a trick to use SharePoint Designer to generate your custom XSLT. These posts are by no means any in-depth articles on the subject, but rather a pointer to get you started on the journey. If there's interest to create a more in-depth article series about the subject, don't hesitate to contact me using the contactlink from my blog or leave a comment to this post. Please refer to the previous articles if you have any questions about editing the xslt for your Search Result. They can be found here: MOSS 2007: Customize the Search Result using XSLT MOSS 2007: Customizing the Search Results Page (XSLT) - Part 2 - Add highlighting Step by step First of all, take a look at this picture to understand how it looks before the changes are done (this picture illustrates a standard-layout of the Search Core Results WebPart that is shown when you perform a search in the Search Center) Modify the XSLT of the Search Core Results Web Part to get the raw XML The search results are actually based on...