Point & Share is nominated and made it to the Finalists – Technology Category at the 2011 Philippine Blog Awards.
2011 Philippine Blog Awards
Thanks for your support!
October 31st, 2011
Hongkong SharePoint Conference
Gain insightful knowledge from SharePoint experts, including SharePoint MVPs, well known and respected local and international SharePoint community representatives, Microsoft attendees and many others. Have your SharePoint questions answered by the best to help maximise your own SharePoint experience.
Conference Tracks
October 22nd, 2011
SharePoint Saturday Manila – The First
The first SharePoint Saturday Manila kicked-off on a fine Saturday morning. Held at the Microsoft Philippines office, the event was attended by around 20+ SharePoint users/developers from different companies in Manila. Two speakers presented interesting topics on how to leverage SharePoint without writing a single line of code.
Chester Coronel on Building No-Code Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint.
First one on the floor was Chester Coronel, a SharePoint Technology Professional from Microsoft, who presented the topic “Building No-Code Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint. The topic covered how to enable solutions through SharePoint’s core capabilities and approaches:
- Data capture
- Document processing
- Data integration
- Business process
- Reporting & analysis
- Search solution
To cap-off the presentation, Chester showed everyone a sample Expense Report system that he created using the approaches mentioned.
The second presenter, was Elczar Adame, Microsoft Valuable Professional for SharePoint and Knowledge Management Solutions Lead from ApSmith Solutions, who happily shared us his knowledge about SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence. He walked us through a demo on how to leverage SharePoint as a Business Intelligence tool. A very interesting subject, and made more lively because of his funny punchlines and side comments. His topic covered:
- Business Challenges
- Business Intelligence
- Business Connectivity Services
- Visio Graphics Services
Elczar Adame presenting Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint.
There are actually a lot more to cover in this area however it will not fit on a limited time.
We missed Windows PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 since the speaker, Jen Trinanes cannot make it. But credit still goes out to Jen for organizing the event. I’m sure we can still hear about it on the next session.
Food was served of course and prizes given away to lucky participants.
Overall the sessions are very informative, some hitches on the demos (we’ll it usually happens when you do a live one) but like as I wrote on my feedback form, “Very good start, hope to attend more sessions soon!”
Good job everyone!
October 18th, 2011
My First SharePoint Site
Since I jumped right away to writing code as my first exercise in SharePoint, I took a break on Web Part development for now and decided to go back to basics.
The Innovation Knowledgebase
SharePoint is very new to our company and only a few have really took the time to learn and use it. So I took the opportunity to be the “evangelist” and proposed to build a site where everyone can contribute and interact. Since I work with Product Development teams, the first thing that came to my mind is to setup an Innovation Knowledgebase.
The purpose of the site is to have a common area where different teams can publish and share information regarding software, projects, products, experiences, etc. I have added the basic Web Parts like Announcements, Team Discussions, Shared Documents and Calendar, as well as 3rd party Web Parts like Dilbert Comic Strip (to make it a bit fun and not too serious) and Twitter. I also create a Team Blog for members to start posting blog posts.
Now the hard part is to get everyone to use the site, my goal is to turn the site into a social networking tool. Who has done something similar already? Any tips?
October 14th, 2011
SharePoint Saturday Manila – Oct 22, 2011
Looking forward to the first Manila session. Who’s going?
October 7th, 2011
A Rookie Mistake?
I’m working on a new Web Part sample and for a couple of days was trying to figure out what I did wrong. I was just trying to rewrite my previous Web Part into a new SharePoint project but when its time to deploy I got this error message:
Error Dialog
The natural reaction was of course to “Google” the error and I found several sites explaining the problem. The most comprehensive was the SharePoint Thoughts blog at bluedogunlimited.com aptly titled, A developers point-of-view on understanding the “not registered on this site as safe” error message.
The blog discussed two failure areas that could be causing the problem: deserialization errors and administrative actions. The first area to check is the Safe Control Entries:
- Did you specify the correct assembly name? – YES
- How about version, culture, and public key token? – YES
- Did you specify the correct namespace? – NO
- Did you specify the correct type name? – YES
- Is it marked as Safe=”true”? – YES
In turns out that when I renamed several properties in my SharePoint project, somehow the Namespace property in my project’s Safe Control Entries was not renamed:
Safe Control Entries
After I corrected the Namespace property, I was finally able to deploy the Web Part. Is this a common SharePoint rookie mistake? What should be the proper way of renaming properties?
October 6th, 2011
SharePoint Do’s & Don’ts
I’ve been following the SharePoint Conference on Twitter (#SPC11) and looking at what the speakers and participants have shared for those who cannot attend the event. Its nice to see a ton of information being shared online.
Here’s one that I have bookmarked on my browser Favorites from Tom of GetThePoint Blog.
Do:
- Make SharePoint easier with views.
- Improve your site with better navigation.
- Take it offline with Outlook and Workspace.
- Put stuff up there with Windows Explorer.
- Stay in the know with Alerts.
- Coauthor documents, notes, & presentations.
- Tell your story on your MySite.
Don’ts:
- Check out documents if you plan to co-author with others.
- Create unnecessary SharePoint sites when you have plenty of others to use.
- Add individual users to site when you can use groups.
- Upload confidential information without first locking down permissions.
- Send attachments in email when you could have used a SharePoint library and linked to it.
Visit the original blog post for more details and screen samples of the above.
October 3rd, 2011
How to fix a SharePoint page that a web part is causing to crash
Repost from Concentra Blog
This is a pretty common problem with an easy and pretty well-known solution. It came up today so I thought I should share it in case anyone doesn’t know it.
Problem
You have a SharePoint page that won’t open due to a particular web part. It’s likely that you won’t know that for sure, you will just have a SharePoint page that won’t load and you may suspect it’s a dodgy web part causing the problem. Particularly if you’ve just inserted a web part!
Solution
The problem is that you can’t open the page to edit it and remove the web part. But you can append the page URL with:
?contents=1
e.g. https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/sites/SitePages/Home.aspx?contents=1
This will bring up a screen where you can remove any offending web parts. Simply check the box next to the one you think could be causing the error then click Close in the toolbar.
October 1st, 2011
Tickets Sold Out at the SharePoint Conference 2011
October 2, 2011 kicks-off the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, USA and all tickets are sold out! Even the hotel bookings for the conference are sold out. This promises to have a good turnout of SharePoint customers and experts in one roof. The event which runs for 4 days is a feature-packed conference and breakout sessions, see the event agenda here.
And wow to cap off the event, the conference will host a private party exclusive for the conference attendees to celebrate SharePoint’s 10th year anniversary at Disneyland Park with a musical extravaganza, unlimited refreshments and access to the theme park’s attractions. I wish I can attend!
September 29th, 2011
Custom Editor Part
So far in Making Web Parts Customizable, I have learned to use the declarative programming approach to make my RSSWebPart’s properties editable by using simple property types and specific attributes. However, this approach does not allow validation of the input fields. Of course, we know that if an invalid data is entered, the Web Part may crash, for example a wrong URL feed. In order to handle input validation, a custom Editor Part needs to be written.
To create a custom Editor Part, a class that inherits the base EditorPart class needs to be defined. The same input fields (URL Feed and Items to Show) are created and synched to the corresponding Web Part properties. The Web Part is then made to implement the IWebEditable interface so that it will use the Editor Part instead of the default properties settings.
To validate data input, a regular expression validation control and a range validator is added as well to check for URL and integer entry.
So far so good, but not yet visually appealing. I will try to make the Editor Part look better next time.