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brettlonsdale.com > SharePoint Blog
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4/20/2009On the 20th May 2009, I will be presenting at the South Florida SharePoint Users group in Ft Lauderdale (Or thereabouts according to Stacy Draper). I will be presenting The Business Data Catalog and will include how to configure the 5 services: BDC Web Parts, BDC Search, Business Data Columns, BDC User Profiles, and the BDC API. Visit http://www.sharepointgroups.org/sfsug/default.aspx for details. This month I presented at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in London. The conference was EXCELLENT! Combined Knowledge did a great job of organizing the venue, the evening entertainment and the topics the speakers were presenting on. I gave talks on integrating The Business Data Catalog with Office Business Applications (OBA) and Getting the Most out of the Out-of-the-Box Web Parts. I would like to thank everyone who attended and invite you to email me on brett@lightningtools.com if you would like to receive a copy of my slides.
It was great meeting up with the guys in the SharePoint community again.
Thanks to Steve & Zoe for organizing such a GREAT event!!! 2/21/2009Nick Swan and I have created a book on the Business Data Catalog. This is the only BDC Book available. The book was written to help people understand the Business Data Catalog and to be able to use the features of the BDC such as BDC Search, Business Data Column, Business Data Web Parts, and the BDC Object Model. The book also covers subjects like OBA.
You can buy the book now on the Manning Early Access Program from www.manning.com/lonsdale. Please use the following code to obtain a 25% discount. aupromo25
This code will give you a 40% discount until 2nd March 09. sbdc40 2/10/2009I've just finished listening to my own interview with Todd Bleeker for the SharePoint Pod Show. Todd provided a wealth of information on Custom Field Types and Dispose within the interview. Anybody considering creating Custom Field Types should definately take a listen: www.sharepointpodshow.com 11/25/2008
With the Business Data Catalog, you can create a Business Data Field Type that allows you to look up back end data from a datasource. This Field displays in the Document Information Panel when you create a Document such as a Proposal. To look up a Customer in this example, you would need to enter the Customer ID for the Customer, in order for the DIP to populate the other columns such as Company Name, Contact Name, Address etc. However. You can create your own DIP by following these steps:
1. Open Microsoft InfoPath 2007
2. Select 'Design a Form Template'
3. Choose XML or Schema, and click Ok
4. Type the URL for your Proposal List e.g. http://win2k3/bdc/Proposals/
5. Click Next, and then choose Document (Document is the Content type used in your document library)
6. Right click the Customer Text Box control in InfoPath, and choose Change To, Drop Down List.
7. Configure the connection for the Drop Down list to query the database column and display your two columns.
8. Save you changes.
9. Publish your form back to the Document Library.
The result should be as shown:
9/17/2008This summer has been very hectic mainly with travelling back and forth across the pond delivering training and consultancy on SharePoint, so please accept my apologies for not posting for a long long time!
I am currently sat at Washington Dulles airport about to head home after a busy two weeks travelling. Last week I was teaching SharePoint Designer for Mindsharp in Vancouver! What a fantastic place. I had a great week and met some very interesting people. I have promised my wife I will take her there, maybe for the Winter Olympics in 2010.
This week I was a speaker at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference. I did a talk on the Best Practices when using the Business Data Catalog. Most of the talk was about the best way to Authenticate with your databases when using BDC. We talked about Passthrough vs RevertToSelf vs SSO etc. Usually the answer I give when people ask what should be used is it Depends. So I wanted to explain exactly why it depends so that people could decide which route to take.
Whilst there I was also able to spend some time with Bill English & David Mann who kindly gave up the time for me to interview them for the SharePoint POD Show. So keep an eye out for the episodes to be available soon.
Bill English hosted a fantastic conference this week where I didn't hear a single negative comment. I spent most of my time on our Lightning Tools booth, but had the opportunity to see Bill English, Spence Harbar, Bob Fox and Natalya Voskresenskaya present. All were excellent presentations.
I have also been busy with my book. There is a book to be release soon on the BDC. Nick Swan and I have been writing a book 'Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog'. We are currently 50% through it, but it should be launched towards the end of the year.
So, it is about time to board. Tomorrow is more book writing/telephone calls and BDC Meta Man support. Friday, I hope to continue with some Web Part testing as we have made some great improvements to our Lightning Conductor Web Part and Data Viewer Web Parts.
6/4/2008I have been asked at TechEd this week why anyone would still want to create Site Definitions. We should be doing everything with Features was the comment. Well, after hearing that argument, I thought about it, and I still beleive that Custom Site Definitions have their place in SharePoint Development. They simply use the Features that we create.
A lot of goals can be acheived with Features, and Custom Site Templates (STP's). However, if you need to get more granular, Site Templates do not provide you with enough granularity without modifying Sites within Microsoft SharePoint Designer. for instance. What if we want to create additional Web Part Zones on the Default.aspx, specify an Alternate CSS file, imbed additional code? The only way to do this with a Site Template is to create a Customized Site as the basis for our Template. It then has to remain customized otherwise we would lose the changes that we made upon resetting to the Site Definition.
Site Definitions can also be easily changed in the future, and they can be deployed using WSP's.
Another reason for using them is when using WCM. The Publishing Site Template provides you with way too much stuff that you don't need, and the Blank Site provides you with too little. So creating a Custom Site Definition based upon the Publishing Site Template, and removing all the non-required features etc is a good way to go.
Brett 6/3/2008I am around at TechEd Orlando 2008 if anybody wants to meet up. Drop me an email so we can arrange to meet.
4/17/2008Steve Smith (MVP) has authored the following whitepaper, which we found extremely useful recently when testing our Custom Web Parts. Thank you Steve!
The scenario that this whitepaper addresses is where an organization is planning to use SharePoint Server 2007 as well as those who currently use SharePoint Server 2007. Organizations can use this whitepaper to test whether their planned or current hardware will support the envisaged user scenarios. *Note* It is not the intention of this whitepaper to show you real world benchmark results the intention is to show you how to get started with configuring and managing your stress tests.
Read On....
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads/HowToConfigStressTestProjectForMOSS07usingVS2008TS.pdf 3/26/2008Its name has already been criticised! However, the Lightning Conductor Web Part Conducts list items from within, or across multiple site collections in a SharePoint Web Application.
The Microsoft Content by Query Web Part can only work within the boundaries of the site collections.
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