SharePoint Use Cases

An anonymous reader asked:

Do i need cals for read-only users sharepoint server 2007?

SharePoint does not recognize a read-only license. You will need to buy a CAL for each user that is accessing your data. Each client computer accessing Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Office Forms Server 2007 requires a valid CAL. There are two types of CAL - Standard and Professional. Click here to learn which SharePoint edition is right for you. Read more about SharePoint licensing.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Licensing for WSS is a little bit different than for SharePoint 2007. WSS is free, and you only need to have a properly licensed Windows Server.

• If you would like to allow external users to access WSS you should check External license (around $2000).
• If you own Windows 2003/2008 Web Edition please note additional limitations might apply.

In previous articles I wrote about configuring scopes in SharePoint and Search Server 2008 (Part 1 | Part 2). One additional question that I would like to explain is scopes dropwodn configuration.

Configuring Scopes

Scopes are controlled by Site Settings > Search Settings, here is the list of available options:

Option	Result
Default Scope > If you choose not to use custom scopes, only current site will be selected:	Scopes dropdown will show this site. Advances search link is not available.
Custom Scopes > Before selecting custom scopes option you will need to create a search site to display the results.	With this option selected, scopes dropdown now shows a list of scopes defined for this site.

hich option would you recommend?

I would definitely go for custom scopes because custom search center (with tabs) gives much better end-user experience. (Custom scopes feature is only available with SharePoint Standard or better)

Search dropdown does not display any scopes

The list of scopes that will be displayed in Scopes drop-down can be configured at Search Settings > Search scopes page. Scopes defined in Search Dropdown group will be displayed in the dropdown show above. In case you are missing that group you will need to recreate it.

A reader Ajay asked:

I have a requirement where I need to send automatic emails to the submitter of the out of the box approval workflow once its finished. I tried to create SharePoint workflow for sending email in the item changed event, but no hit. Would be grateful if you can provide a solution for this.

Dear Ajay and other readers, to my amazement, SharePoint designer does not allow you to send an email to workflow initator (you can only send it to document creator which may or may not be the same person). I tried to think of some custom solution but after a couple of ideas I gave up.

Here are the limitations:

• You cannot modify built-in approval workflow with SharePoint designer
• You cannot create a nice looking approval workflow with SharePoint designer
• SharePoint designer cannot access information about Workflow initiator

There is workaround solution you might want to consider, but I am not 100% sure it would work in your scenario.

The solution (unsolicited)

As I wrote before we work closely with Nintex, and I would recommend switching to Nintex Workflow 2007 in your scenario. It is a great SharePoint Workflow tool, and an experienced user can create a workflow based on your specification in a few minutes (see example below).

Believe it or not, it is time for Microsoft CRM 5.0. It will probably be released as part of Office14 wave (target year 2010) but there is already some information about the new features.

Simon Hutson a very nice post with information about new features, and from SharePoint perspective the most important feature is the ability to integrate CRM entities and SharePoint as back-end for collaboration and storing documents. CRM 4.0 does not support that and this will be a very cool feature once delivered.

Currently we are using c360 add-on product that gives you the same ability.

Some other features include advanced filtering (something similar to SharePoint lists)?

Toni, which features you would like to add?

Here is my current wish-list:

• edit in datasheet view (this is already available in SharePoint 2003/2007)
• once you provision a site (document library) hopeful you will be able to propagate some meta-data. For example the ability to tag the document with related info about parent entity in CRM. This would ease document filtering and search
• the ability to map SharePoint site structure to relations defined in CRM. (E.g. Site structure “An account site” > “An opportunity sub-site” > Invoices (Doc.Lib))
• Some SharePoint web-parts to list data from CRM (non BDC web-parts)
• …

I am sometimes really amazed with cool features of Google Applications. They have just released a new feature for GMail, that allows you to make voice and video calls from your GMail interface. Very cool :))))

In every major project we are running, there is always a request to store some additional metadata to SharePoint. Usually this data describes :

• processes running on SharePoint platform
• document attributes
• users

…or customer just wants to have the same, familiar web interface or a single web application for the end user.

Few days ago I stumbled upon a discussion on this topic at StackOverflow (learn more about StackOverflow). My response is currently marked as the correct one :).

In this post I will try to give some additional details:

Using SharePoint lists to store meta-data

Here are the key benefits why you should use SharePoint custom lists to store data. These features are hard to build from scratch but are available within all SharePoint editions:

• Edit in datasheet / Excel / Access
  This is probably the most important benefit of using SharePoint as data store for the metadata. Users just love to edit their data from web-based datasheets. It is easy to use and updates can be done in seconds instead of minutes.
• Check-in & Check-out
• Versioning
• Permissions
• Ease of use for end users
• Workflows
• Search

Using SQL database to store metadata

In some scenarios SharePoint custom lists will not be adequate and you will need to use SQL Database to store data. In a scenario like this you will need to create a custom database to store data. Here are some cases when you should do it:

• You have a many-to-many relationship in your database model
  These kind of relationships are problematic because you will need to customize UI in order to allow user to easily join two entities. The built-in interface works OK if there are only a few values on each side, but for couple of hundreds of items it won’t be too useful.
• Two or more entities are linked together (Customer > Invoices > Invoice Products)
• SharePoint lists are great when an entity is linked to another entity (One-to-Many relationship). But if you want to link two or more together (in series) this might be tricky and is not supported out-of-box.

For both scenarios mentioned above you will probably want to display data in master > detail format and that is not easy to achieve.

• Reporting
  If you plan to create reports or charts about metadata, stick to plain SQL database. It is much easier to create Views over your own plain data then the SharePoint data (this is also not supported, you should always access SharePoint data via API).

You should definitely consider Business Data Catalog as a solution to integrate your custom data with SharePoint. It is easy to use and no programming required. Bear in mind that it is only availabile with SharePoint Enterprise CAL. If you are using SharePoint Standard CAL or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, then BDC is not availabile.

For such scenarios you can either develop your own solution or use a 3rd party solution like Bamboo MashPoint or some other solution by Bamboo, LightningTools and other vendors. All these solutions have pros & cons, so before embarking a project do some prototyping to avoid problems.

A reader MCT asked:

Does anyone know how to translate SharePoint’s site usage reports? For example, when you generate the report called monthly summary - page, it lists “total hits.” Does this mean the total number of visits to the page? Also, if you have headers or graphics on a page, they show up in the report as well. For instance, my home page has 3,758 total hits but the graphics show up as a hit as well. Should I disregard the hits for the images or add them to the total? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I did a little research and found a great document by Mark Arend about SharePoint Usage Reports. It explains everything about built-in reports.

My company is also partner with Nintex. They have great products for SharePoint including Nintex Reporting 2008 - a great tool that provides you with additional information about content stored in your databases and user activities.

Nintex Reporting 2008.

In order to improve this blog I am constantly monitoring activity reports provided by Google Analytics. Few days ago I noticed that someone came to my blog by using the following keywords:

• add wikipedia searchbox webpart to sharepoint
  
• add google search bar to sharepoint

The query seemed interesting and here are some possible solutions:

Solution 1. - Federated Search

With Infrastructure Update Microsoft introduced a new feature for Search. Federated Search allows you to display results from any search engine that supports Open Search standard. Results are being displayed in the right column.

Microsoft offers a number of connectors for various search engines including Live.com, Wikipedia, MSDN and other. Unfortunately Google does not support Open Search.

Federated Search is also available for Microsoft Search Server 2008.

Solution 2. - Custom Search Web Parts

I created three simple web parts (nothing fancy, a bit of JavaScript and HTML) that allow you to easily initiate Search from a SharePoint page.

The following search engines are supported:

• Google
• Live.com
• Wikipedia

You can download these from my SkyDrive.

In Part 1 of this post I described how you can configure multiple site collections and different scopes, and in this article I will provide step-by-step guide on how to configure scopes for a site collection. As you might recall the part 1, if a user does not select a scop,e MSS will return results from ALL scopes/content sources.

To configure the search properly there are two solutions:

• Display scopes drop-down and let users select a desired scope
• Configure results page to show only results from a desired scope

Solution 1: Display scopes drop-down and let users select a desired scope
Use this solution when you have more than one search scope defined.

• Open you Search Center
• Select Site Actions > Edit Page
• Select Modify Shared Web part for Search Box Web Part
  

 
 

• Select the desired option in for Dropdown mode (see figure below)
  
  
  Here are the options you can select:

  Option	Description
  Do not show scopes dropdown
  Show scopes dropdown	It shows all the scopes defined for this site collection. To define scopes go to Site Collection home page > Site Settings > Site Collection Administration > Search Scope
  Show, and default to ’s’ URL parameter	Default scope will be selected in scopes dropdown. (e.g. if URL looks like this Default.aspx?s=Scope1 Scope1 will be selected)
  Show and default to contextual scope	Contextual scope is the scope of current site. Site MSS site collections usually do not have any content do not use this option.
  Show, do not include contextual scope	This option will not show contextual scope.
  Show, do not include contextual scope, and default to ’s’ URL parameter	See above.



• Repeat the above steps for other search pages (Results, Advanced Search…)

Solution 2: Configure results pages to show only results from a particular scope

Use this solution when only one scope is defined.

• Navigate to your site collection results page (/results.aspx is the default)
• Site Settings > Edit Page
• Select Modify Shared Web Part for Search Core Results web part.
• Enter desired Scope in Miscellaneous section (see figure below)
  

When results page is configured as described above ,all the results will be from the scope Customer1 and other results will not be shown.

We are currently demonstrating Microsoft Search Server 2008 to a number of customers. In order the speed-up the this process, we deployed an evaluation version of MSS on our evaluation server.

I wanted to configure MSS as testing environment for some customers but allowing each customer to have an independent site for testing. The sample configuration is outlined at the following picture.

Each customer has his own web site to access search and different scopes and content sources.

The greatest challenge of all was to configure the search scopes. Here are the things you have to know:

• To manage shared scopes go to: http://<CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION>/_layouts/viewscopesssp.aspx?mode=ssp (It seems that someone forgot to add this link to the central administration interface :))
• To manage other scopes open Site Collection home page > Site Settings > Site Collection Administration > Search Scope. This page allows you to define the scopes which will be available for this search center. Click on selected areas below to add/remove scopes. (The figure shows configuration of Search Scopes for Customer 1)
  
• IMPORTANT: If a user does not select a scope, MSS will return results from ALL content sources. That means that site collection of customer 2 will return results from both content sources (customer 1 and customer 2). To configure search properly consider these two solutions:
  • Display scopes drop-down and let users select a desired scope
  • Configure results page to show only results from a desired scope

In Part 2 I will describe how to configure the settings mentioned above in more detail.