Marc D Anderson's Blog

Data View Web Parts in SharePoint 2003 provide great control over the retrieval and display of items in disparate libraries and lists.  I won’t try to convince you of that in this post, but if you do decide to use Data View Web Parts, there’s a "feature" that you may run into that there is an obscure fix for.

Say you want to create a centralized Document Library or List to hold items that will be displayed across various sites based upon some criteria.  (This allows for centralized content management, with appropriate views across the sites.)

Ok, let’s take a real world example. Let’s say that a document is relevant to (and categorized as) "Arts & Culture" and "Education". This categorization is contained in a column named "Categories" that is of type "Checkboxes (allow multiple selections)" and therefore both boxes are checked. I’d like to be able to show the document in the two sites "Arts & Culture" and "Education".

On the "Arts & Culture" site, when I try to apply a filter to the Categories column, because it is a multi-select column I can only see the "Is null" and "Not null" comparators, so I can’t get the results I want.  See the screen snippet below.

Here’s the trick: choose a different column, one that does is not multi-select, choose the "Equals" comparator, enter the value you want, and click OK.  Open the filter again and change to the multi-select field name that you actually want to compare to the value and click OK again.  Voila!  The filter is doing what you wanted in the first place.

Chris Webb had an interesting post the yesterday that reminded me of the book Flatland, which I read and really enjoyed many moons ago.

I read Flatland when I was a teenager in the 1970s studying geometry and many other things without understanding much of any of it.  The book fascinated me, and I went on (probably not because of it, but certainly in appreciation of it) to study Mathematics in college.  I even sometimes bring it up in my consulting engagements as a way to explain how different types think of their world and learn.  While there are different dimensions represented in the book, there are different learning styles, different socioeconomic exposures, different interests, different *people* we all have to deal with.  I’d recommend Flatland to anyone who wants to take a different slant on why we are all different.

Wait, this sounds more like an Amazon post, but I thank Chris for bringing this back to me.  I will post to Amazon, but think about checking out this truly great read!

Microsoft’s licensing and pricing can sometimes seem byzantine.  However, there is a nice page at Microsoft’s Web site that lets you answer a set of questions to arrive at pricing.  Check out: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mpla

From The OLAP Report via Chris Webb’s BI Blog, an interesting list of Twelve ‘Next Big Things’ that didn’t happen in the Business Intelligence arena.  An interesting and thought provoking read.

There is a new set of application templates for WSS 3.0 available from Microsoft with more on the way.

Application templates are out-of-the-box custom scenarios tailored to address the needs and requirements of specific business processes or sets of tasks in organizations of any size. They can be applied to a task, such as managing a help desk or tracking a marketing campaign, to easily create a dedicated web-based application for a more efficient and effective way of working.

While application templates can be used to solve particular business needs, they also provide a starting point for partners and developers looking to build deeper SharePoint-based solutions. The templates make use of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 capabilities and are compatible with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to help make customization easier.