Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

  After a long delay, a new release of SUSHI has been published. This version includes the following: Improvements Improved "Select A Site" functionality. Updated Documentation. Bulk List creation updated. Profile picture import feature improved. Bulk site creation includes both user site templates and system site templates. Stable Release This release has been tested in multiple SharePoint environments and used in many production environments as well. Stability and Security are SUSHI's highest priorities.   Future Releases I already have another release with some nice graphics improvements which improve the look and user experience of SUSHI. I have enlisted a couple programmers to help with testing, and graphics work. The are quite helpful and good to work with so hopefully we can make SUSHI even better. I have lots of ideas but just not enough hours in the day to turn all my ideas into reality. I'd love to improve the backup/restor...

A few thoughts on picking a URL name for the a SharePoint Intranet site: The URL name is one of the most central branding pieces of the site. From my experience, this is a tough decision for organizations because a corporate Intranet is so many things and (will become many things that are not even conceived yet). Nevertheless, it is an very important one and one that needs to be made at the beginning of the Intranet build. - The URL name needs to be easy to remember, be consistent with company branding, represent the content it delivers but also not be so specific that it can’t be flexible and grow and deliver new functionality. - I would not vote for the name “sharepoint.mycompany.com” because users shouldn’t have to care what technology is being used to deliver functionality. We aren’t selling sharepoint to employees. We  are delivering company content and the company brand to employees. - Many companies use their company name along with a gene...

  I just found this great lightweight ISO extraction utility . I don't need anything fancy, just something to read the ISO. I need: reliably extract an ISO image lightweight /fast install free I've found the tool I've been looking for. So cool. Find out more and download here: Extract Now . -Joseph

  I am a big fan of the SharePoint API and I was thrilled to see this MSDN article suggesting many great uses of the SharePoint API that you might not have thought about:   May 2008 MSDN magazine article on MOSS is a must read for SharePoint developers. It summarizes all the options, and also has a really innovative and I think great way to roll out changes to multiple environments and that is to “script” those changes using the SharePoint API in a console app, and run it in both dev, staging and production. SharePoint API requires just a few lines of code for most tasks and is easy to log, debug etc. You can do almost everything with the API: site navigation changes, webpart customizations, Web.config changes, create web app, create site, create list, create a publishing page from a layout. The one thing you can’t do with the API, is create site and list definitions.   Comments on Site Templates vs. Site Definitions: Using Site Templates ha...

Thanks to Peter Brunone for this post. Peter pointed out that you can extend SharePoint stsadm.exe command line tool and that there are lots of free extensions already out there to download, plug and play.   Peter writes: "I just came across this concept and was floored by it (maybe I’m just a pushover).  With a strong-named assembly and an XML file for description, you can add your own operations to the STSADM utility. http://sharepointsolutions.blogspot.com/2006/09/extending-stsadmexe-with-custom.html Gary Lapointe has a few too many (you can download his 100-command extension from the blog): http://stsadm.blogspot.com/ That’s all. "   Good tip! -Joseph Fluckiger

Coveo vs. Ontolica. Search is very important part of a corporate Intranet portal or Internet site. Choosing the right search engine is critical, but can also be a difficult process because the most important questions like "is this search engine scalable, reliable and secure" take the longest to answer. I've worked with two of the more popular search engines for SharePoint over the past 6 months and have gathered enough data on the two to make some valuable, well-tested observations. Below I will compare Coveo and Ontolica. Both Ontolica and Coveo are very good products. I have really been impressed with both. They offer fantastic, have-to-have features over out-of-the-box SharePoint. After you have used either Ontolica or Coveo, you will not want to go back to native SharePoint Search. About Ontolica Ontolica uses the SharePoint native search engine. Note that the native SharePoint search engine is included with the purchase of WSS 3.0 and MOSS...

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SUSHI has become more popular than I had ever imagined. Codeplex has just added a fantastic statistics page which shows exactly how popular it is. The stats include number of downloads, visits and referring sites. SUSHI has been downloaded over 2000 times! Figure 1: Downloads since the project began in November 2007:   It is interesting to see where most of my traffic comes from, and read the reviews on those sites. My favorite review is from a this German site : " Send a Test Email – Um die outbound Mail Funktion zu testen ist dieses Tool super handy." :) It looks like wssdemo.com has brought me a lot of traffic and of course google. Figure 2: Top Referring Sites over last 30 days:   Final Comments SUSHI fills a need for SharePoint in a way that very few other tools do and it is much more user friendly than command lines, or SharePoint features. But it is not yet finished. I still have a lot of additions to make. I would love to have com...

You can download the latest version of SUSHI here . Improvements in this version include:   *Improvements to the "Copy a view" feature. Change copy a view so it doesn't require all fields to be present. This is a nice improvement! so that this feature can be used without having to have all the columns of the view present in the destination list. **More tab for less popular features, click on the More tab to open up these features. BugFix: For Import Documents feature, Upload button was disabled after pressing the validate. button. This is fixed now.   version 2.23 is in the works: I've been working on improvements to the security report in SUSHI so that the report will also take into consideration active directory group membership in determining if a user has access to a site. To accomplish this, I've had to brush up on the System.DirectoryServices namespace used to access Active directory.   -Joseph

I never thought that I would like XSLT and I hoped that I wouldn't have to learn this "wimpy web language" which is how I used to see it. But after this weekend, I am a big XSLT fan.  Which is appropriate because this month marks the 10 year anniversary of XML . So why is XSLT so cool? I think I would have embraced it much sooner had someone made this simple comparison for me: XSTL is like TSQL. I love TSQL: it is so powerful for getting and manipulating data. It is blazing fast and it takes way way fewer lines of code than it would take in .NET. XSLT is similar because both TSQL and XSTL are declarative languages: they focus on saying what do do rather than how to do it. When writing TSQL or XSLT I only have to say what I want done, and the parsing engine is responsible for figuring out how to do it. Another way to look at these two languages is that they do one thing really really well: TSQL manipulates data in a database, and XSLT transforms XML. I strongly reco...

What are my favorite features of Windows Server 2008? Install experience is way faster. You don't even enter a name for the machine until after the install is complete. This is huge since virtualization is so big and installing Windows Server is happening more and more. This will save the IT industry hundreds of thousands of cumulative man hours. Windows Server 2008 is built for performance, not beauty. This is what I don't like about Vista. It is pretty but terribly slow. I hate when Vista's wastes my time. Windows Server 2008 is focused on performance. Perhaps I'll install Windows Server 2008 on my laptop.. Event Viewer is much improved. Interface is written by a non-developer and it is helpful. This is so nice that each tab and button is much more clearly described exactly what the feature does and what will happen when I hit the OK button. This will make me much less nervous about making changes on a production server. The interface is Humane. ...

I've been trying to figure out for a while how to turn on intellisense in visual studio for feature.xml files. Here is the trick, thanks to this post . Inside the TEMPLATE directory there is a directory named XML that contains several XML schemas, including one named wss.xsd. If you associate this schema file with feature files such as feature.xml and elements.xml, Visual Studio will provide IntelliSense, which makes it much easier to author a custom feature. You may also copy these XSD files into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\.

In production environments, my clients often want to put as little as possible on the C: drive. This is a very good idea for performance reasons. Unfortunately, I confirmed today that you can’t install all the MOSS files on a drive other than the C drive. During install, WSS/MOSS asks you where you want to install MOSS. Even when you specify a drive other than C during the install most of the files end up on C:. For example I chose the “I:” drive for the install path, but all my “12 hive” files still showed up on the C drive.   Here is my 12 hive on C: even though I installed MOSS on the I: drive.   The one folder that does obey my wishes is the “Microsoft Office Servers” folder. Which is 381 megs and as you can see is on the I: drive.   So it does save you 381 megs that would have gone on the C drive, but you can’t prevent most of the MOSS install files from ending up on the C: drive.

  We've all used Reflector to open up a .NET assembly and look at the code. But did you ever think of doing this to the core SharePoint assemblies? I had never thought of it until last week at Sleepless in Dallas, Nadeem Mitha of Infusion suggested it. It is quite instructive, and reveals a couple very important nuances that if you don't understand can make your code very slow.  For example, looking at the SPList.Items property you can see that this property simply calls the GetItems() method to retrieve all items for that list. So here is the kicker, any time you call the Items property it is retrieving all the items in the SharePoint list, even if you just call the Items[0] , SharePoint retrieves all the items in a list and then peels off the first one and gives it to you, very inefficient . Other classes to look at are  GetItemByUniqueId ( Guid uniqueId). You can see that behind the scenes, Microsoft is creating a CAML query and retrieving items. Why Microsoft i...

Sleepless in Dallas is over and what a whirlwind weekend! My brain is still swimming from all the SharePoint knowledge jammed in over the past two days. At 11pm Sat night they gave us our overnight assignment. It was to create something to include in the CKS (Community Kit for SharePoint). For my team’s project we worked on adding functionality to SUSHI, which is the SharePoint utility that I’ve been working on for almost a year now and have made available to the SharePoint community for free on CodePlex http://www.codeplex.com/sushi . Unfortunately for me, the rules of the contest say that you can’t use what you’ve already built, so the only item that was entered into the contest was a couple small features that we added to SUSHI that night. However, they wanted to present special recognition for SUSHI and gave me the Community award for having created a utility for the SharePoint community. So far, the CodePlex sushi page has gotten 6,000 page views, and over...

Hey great news, I found that I am a final candidate fro Sleepless in Dallas ! Sweetness! The event is billed as the ultimate SharePoint developer's conference and put on by Infusion Development. Post by Chris Koenig on the event. Andrea from Infusion who interviewed me said that my application caught her attention because I mentioned that I had won the grand prize in a programming contest in the 8th grade, that she thought that the most successful programmers were people who had programmed all their lives and who were passionate about programming.   For the record, the programming contest involved using Apple IIe Basic to create an animated face that could express various emotions: happy, sad, angry, etc. This was part of the Odessy of the Mind contest and the challenge was to incorporate a robot that expressed emotion into a skit. So we perched our monitor on a cart and dressed it up with clothes. Our robot was a brilliant actor, let me tell you what! :) It was the cheesiest ...

The latest version of SharePoint SUSHI has been released! SharePoint SUSHI version 2.18   This version includes the new treeview SharePoint browser. This makes it easier to find a site on your local farm by browsing, rather than having to type it in. Click the "select a site" link button to use this new feature.