October 2008 - Posts
Or I quote someone today, who says "SharePoint is not a real portal", here are some statistics I emailed internally to change the perception.
The list of SharePoint sites are taken from wssdemo.com. I ran some of them with www.quantcast.com, which tells me monthly traffic and profile of the visitors. I don't know how they get it, but if someone knows of another more reliable statistics, let me know. I don't mind going through the list again.
I went through a demo with another platform. Their portal product, to me, is no different from using asp.net to build a portal, plus 3rd party controls to make it easier to build. While I agree that there are areas where other platform is much better than MS stack, there are also areas where other platform are far worse than where MS was in 2002. (Think VS 2002).
I'm quite sick and tired of hearing people telling me that Microsoft product is not good enough for enterprise. If someone give me the kind of resources and time enterprises spend on a portal of the other platform, I'm sure with that resources, I can make SharePoint perform at least on par!
Wiki Discussion - Factors that leads to this design talks about the factors which I have considered when I came out with this design.
Wiki Discussion - Preparing the storage talks about how to create a new link in the wiki page library settings page, and how do I go about preparing the storage.
Before discussion can take place in a wiki page, we need to allow the designer to decide what kind of discussion to take place in the wiki page, and where to store them. I decided to allow the designer to do this when he activates the feature in the wiki...
I plan to use wiki as a library to capture issues developers faces in the product which they are working on, and share creative solutions that they thought of to solve the problem. Each of these wiki library sits inside a site that focuses on the product...
I'm in the process of building a SharePoint community within the company I'm in, and I'm being aided by Ting Fong, one of the bright chap I had the pleasure of training, and microlau, my friend and colleague whom I'm sure you are no stranger to. He is working on enhancing the forums, to be able to mark a post as answer, as well as rating the thread.
While he is working on the forum, I am working on the wiki, to provide the ability to have a threaded discussion on the wiki page itself. Yes, I am also involved in CKS:EWE, but the features in EWE doesn't meet my needs.
The above shows a screenshot of the customisation I did. It is using a OOTB discussion list to store the threads, and have no problems with using other discussion lists that maybe introduced in your enviornment via CAML. What this little pet project has acheved are the following.
1. Able to limit your customisation to a single wiki page in the entire farm, something Mark Miller is trying to achieve.
2. Able to bring the context menu of the content type into any SharePoint page, not fully tested since I haven't added any new custom menu into the content type, but the context menu is showing and working fine!
Lets hope I can find time to document this soon!
P.S., the controls you see in the screenshot, the RAD tree view and RAD editor is Telerik's new ASP.Net AJAX controls. Very easy to use, considering someone who has never touched AJAX before!
I always thought that a discussion thread is just a special content type that inherits from folder. So I thought creating a discussion thread is just as easy as adding a new item into a discussion board, and set the content type to thread. So I created a lookup field with the name "related" to use the discussion board as a storage for discussions done in a wiki library. Using the UI to create a thread, and link to a wiki page works perfectly, so my definitions are correct. However, creating a thread using object model yields a different result.
1. When clicking on the thread, it brings me to the item display form, instead of the flat view.
2. While the lookup field is established, and links to the wiki page, the rendering of the lookup field is not. Its always [ID]_.000.
Then I stumbled upon SPUtility.CreateNewDiscussion(). Used that, and everything works perfectly...
I had a single server moss setup on a windows 2008 virtualised box, and it was crawling fine. I don't do much search, it was until when I wanted to install iFilter for pdf from FoxIt, I realised the crawler is hitting access denied error. Application log as captured warnings from Office Server Search, while nothing in is captured in the Security logs.
Did a search, and found that it got to do with loopback check, which prevents the crawler from authentication as the fqdn doesn't match the machine name. You can either disable loopback check all together, or specify the fqdn which can be accessed.
More info in this kb.