Wictor Wilen

A Web Part, in SharePoint or not, has a Verb that allows the Web Part to be Closed. Closed means that the Web Part is just closed (not rendered) and not deleted, which is a separate Web Part Verb. Closing Web Parts can cause headache for your users and even a really bad performance. Note: To delete a Web Part you have to go in to Edit mode for the page. Close can be done directly from the Web Part menu.

After passing the developer exams of WSS (70-541) and MOSS (70-542) I thought that I should make the deck complete by taking the configuration exams. Today I passed the first one, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Configuration (70-631). I’m mainly a developer so I had some worries about questions on DNS, network configs and load balancing. But this exam was too easy and kept at a very basic level. I missed one question though. All of these exams follow the same pattern - I whish the creators of them had some more imagination and creativity.

Canvas for OneNote is another new and interesting innovation from the Office Labs team. Canvas for OneNote creates a new way for you to manage your OneNote section and pages in a more “inspirational” and “irregular” way. OneNote is traditionally organized into Note books, sections, groups, pages and subpages - just like a classical book shelf filled with note books. It works really nice if you know in which note book you placed your notes (of course you can search to find it…faster than you search your shelf). This feels a little bit old-school to me and I still have a lot of hand notes and documents spread out over my desktop (not the Windows desktop, a real physical one) organized in a very strict chaotic order.

At CeBIT 2009 it today was announced that SharePoint Online is now available worldwide*. SharePoint online is a part of the Business Productivity Online Suite which also contains Exchange Online and Live Meeting. More services will be available at a later date. There is a free 30 days trial option if you would like to try it out, which I really recommend, before you subscribe/buy the solution. You can find more information about the Microsoft Online Services at http://www.microsoft.com/online.

Not that unexpected, but Microsoft chief executive office Steve Ballmer has confirmed that the new Office 14 clients and servers (read SharePoint) will not be released during 2009. The products will be “generally available” during 2010. Generally available may indicate (I’m always positive) that we have a release for volume licensees and partners in late 2009 and in the shelves during 2010 (just like the previous version). Read SharePoint Daily Special Edition for more information.

To end my series of Web Part properties I would like to show how to store more complex values than just strings or integers. What happens if you would like to store a more complex object; an array or a coordinate etc? Editing these properties with the standard generated interface using the WebBrowsable and Personalizable attributes will not work, since it only accepts basic types, shown in part 1. To make these properties editable you have to (almost…continue reading) create an EditorPart, shown in part 2, and control the properties in the SyncChanges and ApplyChanges methods.

Computer Sweden has an article in today’s issue, also published online yesterday, called “Impossible to get rid of the cash cow of Microsoft”. To sum it up briefly it discusses how hard it is to get rid of Microsoft SharePoint once you have it installed in your environment and that the licensing costs flies away. An interviewed CTO states that companies he met don’t have control of their SharePoint installations and that they had to step back and look at the ownership and licenses.

The Sweden SharePoint User Group had the first meeting of this year this evening and it was a great and interesting meeting. I really enjoyed the session by Rickard Löfberg from Credit Suisse when he talked about their globally rolled out collaboration platform, how they handled the massive amounts of data and customized the platform to have a smooth transition to upcoming versions of SharePoint. I did two short sessions; one about Web Part development with 10 tips and a very short introduction to the Geneva Framework. You can find the presentations for download below, currently in Swedish - but if you beg I can finish up the translation to English.

The latest version of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit has been released and it contains a new feature called SPDiag (SharePoint Diagnostics Tool). It’s a new tool for IT-Pros (or admins and developers for that matter) that helps you have a look at all of your SharePoint server (including hardware) configurations in a nice application. You can check everything from log file locations to web.config content to database configurations to… You have two views, one tree view in which you can drill down in your server/farm configuration and read all of the data and one Trends view in which you analyze and examine the usage of your farm and sites using the different logs in SharePoint and Windows. Unfortunately I did not get the graphs to show on my test machine (yes it’s a Windows 7 with WSS :-), see error message on the right.