SP2007 Architecture

Content Roll-up options Part V – Bamboo's List Roll-up Web Part

Andy Burns, , , , 1 Comment

And the final content roll-up web part I examined is Bamboo Solutions List Roll-up Web Part.

This web part is a little strange; indeed, I’m not sure how to describe it. As I understand it, basically it’s a web part to generate a data-view web part, and add it to the page. Sound strange? Well, it is a little bit. Let’s have a look:

Web Part for generating other web parts

As you can see, this is a big web part on page. It’s user interface is much more complicated than the Lightning Conductor. I couldn’t help but notice that to do filtering by metadata column values appears to require writing CAML – which really is a bit much for many users.

This web part then generates an output Dataview Web Part:

Generated Dataview Web Part

(In that example, it’s only aggregating from one list – ‘cos I forgot that gave my lists different names, and then told the view to roll-up by list name).

So, it’s advantages:

  • Can consolidate across Multiple Site Collections (which isn’t possible through the Out-of-box options)
  • Can consolidate a single site collection, a site and it’s subsites or a specific list.
  • Can also consolidate sibling sites – which isn’t something I’ve seen elsewhere.
  • Can filter by list type
  • Can filter by content type or meta data fields
  • Can Group results
  • Has user definable sorting
  • Has Pagination of results
  • Fine control over caching

And it’s disadvantages:

  • More complex to use
  • More complex user interface
  • Probably requires writing CAML
  • Costs money (though I think is still a bargain compared to developer time)
  • Could be a tough sell to customers (“But SharePoint already has the Content Query Web Part“)

In short: Probably the most powerful and feature rich of the web parts, but not as easy to use as some of the others. Really, more of a developer tool than a user tool.

So, on to the conclusions…

Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part V – Bamboo's List Roll-up Web Part” →

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Content Roll-up options Part V – Bamboo's List Roll-up Web Part

Content Roll-up options Part IV – Lightning Tools Conductor

Andy Burns, , , , 1 Comment

From Lightning Tools, the folks who brought us the BDC Metaman (awful name, good product) comes their ‘Lightning Conductor’ web part. Again, a slightly strange name (it isn’t copper and it doesn’t poke out from the top of a church roof). So what does it look like:

Lightning Conductor Web Part

Okay, so it looks similar to the data view web part (apart from the ‘trial version’ message!), but it has the same sorts of roll up options to the Content Query web part. One of the things that impressed me about this web part was actually the configuration screens in SharePoint:

The main settings form is a well laid out, clear (if somewhat long) form. It just looks right.

The other significant administration screen with it is selection what columns you want to show, and their order, and any sorting or grouping.

Selecting columns and ordering for the Lightning conductor Web Part

Now that is much easier than displaying extra columns in the Content Query Web Part (or the Data View Web Part, come to that. Again, quite a long form, but clear, and trust me, easier than writing XSL 🙂

I did have a couple of little problems with it, though. Firstly, for some reason it didn’t seem to want to show me my Project or Project Status columns in the ‘Filters’ section, so I couldn’t restrict my view by these fields. I may have configured something wrongly that this wasn’t possible.

The other thing that struck me was that while the web part does have column headings that the user can click to sort by, there is no icon to tell them what column they’re sorting by already, or whether it is sorting ascending or descending.

So, it’s advantages:

  • Good user interface. I could imagine non-technical people being able to set up their own views.
  • Can consolidate across Multiple Site Collections (which isn’t possible through the Out-of-box options)
  • Can consolidate a single site collection, a site and it’s subsites or a specific list.
  • Can filter by list type
  • Can filter by content type or meta data fields (though I had a problem with them)
  • Can Group results
  • Has user definable sorting (but needs a little arrow to show which column is being sorted, and in what order)
  • Has Pagination of results.
  • Can define view by XSL if you really want to.

It’s disadvantages:

  • Costs money (though I think is still a bargain compared to developer time)
  • Could be a tough sell to customers (“But SharePoint already has the Content Query Web Part“)

In short: It’s what everyone really wished that the Content Query Web Part actually was.

So, I’m quite impressed by the Lightning Conductor Web Part, but what of the other commercial option I’m reviewing – Bamboo’s List Roll-Up Web Part?

Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part IV – Lightning Tools Conductor” →

Content Roll-up options Part IV – Lightning Tools Conductor

Content Roll-up options Part III – Data View Web Part

Andy Burns, , , , 1 Comment

The Data View Web Part is sort of the Swiss-army knife of displaying data in SharePoint. It’s an Out-of-Box web part, and while it is typically focussed on showing items from a single list, it is capable of showing data from merged lists.

Here’s an example of a Data View Web Part showing the same data as our examples from the Content Query Web Part

Data View Web Part showing Merged data

It’s advantages are:

  • Can show a view with user defined filtering, grouping and sorting.
  • Has pagination of results
  • Showing extra columns of data is easy to add
  • Can filter the results by Content Type, or Metadata field values
  • Cheap (Out-of-box)
  • Designing the view is easy

It’s disadvantages are:

  • Requires SharePoint Designer – and therefore a suitably technical user
  • Can only query and merge results from a fixed set of sites – there is no ‘All Site collection’ or ‘This site and subsites option’
  • Limited by site collection boundary

In Short: Flexible in the views it presents, but it’s actual ability to roll up data is limited and could require constant maintenance. Requires someone fairly technical with SharePoint Designer to set view up. Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part III – Data View Web Part” →

Content Roll-up options Part III – Data View Web Part

Content Roll-up options Part II – Content Query Web Part

Andy Burns, , , , 3 Comments

The Content Query Web Part is the Out-of-Box content roll-up web part in MOSS, and consequently it’s one of the most widely used.

Here’s an example of one rollup up the ‘Project Documents’ type:Standard content query web part

It’s advantages are:

  • Can select from an entire Site Collection, a Site and it’s Sub-Sites, or from a List
  • Can select by List type
  • Can filter the results by Content Type, or Metadata field values
  • Can be configured to do Sorting and Grouping
  • Can display custom data – but this is a little complex

It’s disadvantages are:

  • Customising the view is possible, but tricky.The view has to be defined in XSL, and the Content Query Web part configured correctly to get the data you want to display.
  • No pagination of results – it’s just truncated.
  • The user can’t select the results order, or add his own filter.
  • You can’t query across Site collections.

All in all, I’d say that defining the styles for what you want to display puts this into more a ‘development’ task, which isn’t ideal if you’re trying to push administration out to your users a bit more.

Also, a major issue as far as I’m concerned is the lack of pagination. You can limit the number of items shown, but without an link to the next ‘page’ of items.

Here’s an example of a Content Query Web Part showing some custom data (highlighted in yellow):

Content Query Web Part showing custom column data.

In short: Cheap, and available, but has that ‘just a bit awkward’ feel to setting it up, and lacks some of the features you’re likely to want. Often will require someone a bit technical for customisation. Continue reading “Content Roll-up options Part II – Content Query Web Part” →

Content Roll-up options Part II – Content Query Web Part

Content Roll-up options Part I – Introduction

Andy Burns, , , 2 Comments

Well, I’ve been asked to examine some of the options for doing content roll-up in SharePoint. I thought I’d present this as a bit of a mini-series, rather than one huge post.

What is content roll-up? Simply, it’s about pulling data from different locations in SharePoint into a single view, and presenting it to the user in a consolidated form. This is a pretty common task in SharePoint. For example, think of things like roll-up of News items from the sites in your site collection. That’s actually built into the Collaboration site template:

News Items - and example of content roll up

I’ve bracketed both the web parts being used with red and blue – otherwise it’s not clear that there are two web parts doing content roll-up here – one for the most recent headline, and another to show a list of recent News items.

There are lots of other examples of where this is useful – consolidation of tasks for a user is another common requirement, or rolling-up all the documents of one type or another – such as expenses, etc..

Anyway, over the next week or so I’ll examine some of the solutions to content roll-up that I’ve seen. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list – there are quite a lot of solutions to content roll-up around, and you can write your own – but why reinvent the wheel?

| Introduction | Content Query Web Part | Data View Web Part |

| Lightning Conductor Web Part | Bamboo’s List Roll-Up Web Part | Conclusions |

Content Roll-up options Part I – Introduction

Outlook 2003 to SharePoint 2007 Email Integration

Andy Burns, , , , , , 9 Comments

So what has Andy been working on lately? Well, lately I’ve been writing an integration between Outlook 2003 and SharePoint 2007. It was all a bit fraught – some of the web services I was using are a bit dodgy, uploading files and metadata as one transaction doesn’t seem to be possible, and everyone always underestimates the effort involved in coping with the metadata about an email. I’ve written an integration between GroupWise 6.5 and Open Text Livelink before now, and again, dealing with the metadata was a bigger effort than browsing the system or uploading the document.

Now, email saving into SharePoint seems to be an overlooked thing. Microsoft have their Exchange 2007 Managed Folders, which can push emails into a SharePoint Records center. Liam Cleary has written his usual high-quality description of setting it up, and the MS Records management team blogged about it in parts I, II, III and IV.

However, a lot of our customers aren’t impressed with this solution. They want to be able to save emails into particular SharePoint Libraries within their usual collaboration environment, rather than just booting them off into a Record Center.

U2U built an Outlook 2007 addin which is very nice – though a bit of a different take. Their approach requires defining the save location up front and mapping to the data, but that then saving emails is dead easy – just drag them into the folder. Nice.

Anyway, this is what I built – I’ll contrast with the U2U offering lateer…

Continue reading “Outlook 2003 to SharePoint 2007 Email Integration” →

Outlook 2003 to SharePoint 2007 Email Integration

Are SharePoint Breadcrumbs completely wrong?

Andy Burns, , , 5 Comments

I upgraded the version of WordPress I’m running recently and I enabled statistics on the blog. It’s been a bit of an eye-opener. My posts on ‘What the heck is going on with SharePoint Breadcrumbs‘ and ‘More SharePoint Breadcrumbs WTF‘ have together more hits that any of my other articles, and both are visited about evenly.

This is pretty interesting. Breadcrumbs should be pretty simple. I mean, we all use them on the web, probably every day, and often without noticing. So how come people are clearly looking up information about SharePoint breadcrumbs? Clearly something is wrong with them.

So this set me thinking – what’s wrong with them? And here’s what I could think of:

  • There are two breadcrumbs. You’ve got the Global breadcrumb, and then the PlaceholderTitle breadcrumb. Seriously, how many websites do you come across that have two?
    Image showing the Global and Title Breadcrumbs
  • ‘Site’ levels of the hierarchy can appear in one or the other breadcrumb. Depending on whether or not your navigation inherits it’s navigation from it’s parent site, the ‘Site’ links can appear in the global or title breadcrumbs. Thus, there’s no consistency as to where a site appears – if it appears at all! I can see why it’s been built this way – essentially it allows us to ‘skip’ levels in the site hierarchy as shown on the global breadcrumb, and it shortens the title breadcrumb. I wonder if this wouldn’t be better facilitated by a ‘show in Global breadcrumb’ site setting. Or just show all sites in the path to the site?
  • Why is what is shown in the breadcrumbs tied to what is shown in the site’s top navigation? That’s just confusing.
  • Having some breadcrumbs in the Page Layout (i.e. in the main content area) and others coming from the master page is just plain confusing.

I don’t quite know what the answer to this is; after all, we need a way to navigate back up the site hierarchy, though we might not always want to allow that. And breadcrumbs could get very long, so yes, maybe we want to skip levels. But I think I’d be tempted by showing all sites in the Global navigation. This would also divorce the breadcrumb from the top navigation settings, and I think would be easier.

And if the Global navigation gets too long? Well, that seems quite possible. In that case, how about a setting on each site to ‘Display in Menu in the Breadcrumb’ to give something like this:

Concept of single breadcrumb using drop down menus

This way you can still have your ‘Main’ sites in the hierarchy, but all levels are still available. Of course, you might want to make it that all the subsites of last ‘Main’ site are always visible irrespective of that setting. I think that would work, and would require less getting used to.

It’s a bit like the Vista breadcrumb in Windows Explorer – but a bit different, which might count against it…

The breadcrumb in Windows Explorer in Vista

That said, I’m open to thoughts from others! Comment if you’ve got an idea of how breadcrumbs should work!

Are SharePoint Breadcrumbs completely wrong?

Comparison of different ways of putting content into SharePoint 'Pages'

Andy Burns, , , , , , , Leave a comment

Previously I’ve looked at a couple of ways of entering your data into a Publishing Page. Well, it turns out that really there are 3 ways of putting content in:

  1. Writing content directly using the Content Editor control (the RichHTMLField control)
  2. Writing content in Word 2007 and using the Document Conversion service
  3. Writing content in Word 2007 and cutting and pasting(!)

I decided to test and compare these techniques. For options 2. and 3. I used this document:

The Source Word 2007 Document

Let’s look at the results of this and the code that is behind each resulting page… Continue reading “Comparison of different ways of putting content into SharePoint 'Pages'” →

Comparison of different ways of putting content into SharePoint 'Pages'

Accessibility in MOSS…

Andy Burns, , , Leave a comment

Recently I had a meeting with HiSoftware about the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint that they’ve made (and is available on CodePlex), and it was quite interesting. Making a SharePoint system accessible requires knowing how much of the system to make accessible, and to what level of accessibility. As with branding, doing the whole system would probably be prohibitively expensive. However, making certain areas (such as a WCM site) accessible is quite feasible.

Even if a SharePoint system is developed to be accessible, there is a governance issue in make sure that new content is also accessible. HiSoftware provide the Accessibility Kit (for free) to help develop an accessible site – though custom work will always be required. They also provide several commercial products to facilitate governance of new content and ensuring that it is accessible. I think that these will be useful sometimes, so it’s not a bad sales pitch. Continue reading “Accessibility in MOSS…” →

Accessibility in MOSS…