My colleague Mauro Cardarelli wrote a good post yesterday about workflow. We’ve had many philosophical as well as reality-based discussions about workflow over the last few months and I wanted to toss a few more ideas into the mix. Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) provides the tools to build incredibly complex and rich workflows. However, the toolset is a…
Branding can often be an anathema to technical types. We often think that we can’t do anything with it unless we have a designer working with us. I proved to myself recently that it’s not actually that complicated. Here’s how it went. All of the changes I outline below happened in Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007…
I went to an interesting session of the Boston KM Forum last night. The presenter was Marc Solomon from PRTM, and the topic was Enterprise Deployment: Warts and All (A Working Session on Intranet Development). Marc talked about the journey it took to implement PRTM’s SharePoint 2003-based KM system. He had many insights on what…
While there’s no real master page concept in Windows SharePoint Services 2003, I’ve found that editing "C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATE1033MPSdefault.aspx" to replace images, resize objects, etc. works much like a master page in SharePoint 2007 would. Between the default.aspx file and the OWS.CSS file (C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATELAYOUTS1033STYLES), I’m able to…
We had been trying unsuccessfully to do a Sharepoint 2003 backup and restore from production to development for disaster recovery planning for one of our clients, and the restore kept failing with this message: The database schema is too old to perform this operation in this SharePoint cluster. Please upgrade the database and try again. We checked…
Most folks know all about Google’s research labs — they get a lot of press. Equally interesting (and many years more mature) is Microsoft Research. If you want to stay on top of what could or might happen in the future of computing (with a Microsoft bent), subscribe to the RSS feed at the Microsoft Research…
This may seem like a simple one, but it caused a bit of head scratching, so it seems worth a post. I was trying to use some JPG images in Content Editor Web Parts on a SharePoint site, so I put them into the Site Collection Images Library, which worked fine. I could see them…
I found a nice set of products from KWizCom today that help SharePoint developers enhance the SharePoint platform. I haven’t tried any of them myself yet, but they are things that I wish that I had built myself because they seem really useful! I’ll post again with real world experience with them as it happens,…
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…
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…