Ravi Vajaria's Blog

If you’re getting this error, open your BDC Application Definition file immediately and check the format of TypeDescrioptors.

Change following (and similar):

<LocalizedDisplayName LCID=”1033″>

Contact ID

</LocalizedDisplayName>

To:

  <LocalizedDisplayName LCID=”1033″>Contact ID</LocalizedDisplayName>

The web part does not like the space/newline character. The error we get is not quite friendly to tell you what may be wrong.

I hope this saves you time (and adds value to your deliverable). Needless to say, don’t forget to upload the application definition file in SharePoint!

I just took a look at the sneak peek videos http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx. This is probably one of the most busy page today! Instead of listing all sneak peeks here, I will let you watch the videos – Overview, IT Professional and Developer videos.

All enhancements are great, my favorites are ability to multi select the files and perform actions on then such as check-in and check-out; and Business Connectivity Services (BCS), aka enhanced BDC. These will directly add values to our clients, giving ability to surface their Dynamics CRM data through SharePoint, and more importantly search CRM data from SharePoint with FAST integration into SharePoint.

As highlighted in videos, the first step to have a great SharePoint 2010 for those using SharePoint 2007 is to have a great SharePoint 2007 site. We are hoping for a smooth transition since SharePoint implementations we have done both internally as well as for the clients follow the best practices in the industry.

Enjoy the videos while I look forward to hear the hands on feedback from our team at Microsoft World Partner Conference 2009!

CLIENT PORTAL; one or more site for every client – NAVIGATION CHALLENGE

We use our hosted SharePoint site for clients for account management and project tracking perspective. This month, a number of sites were created for the Account Managers (AMs) and the Project Managers (PMs). And with that we faced the navigation challenge! How to provide the best navigation mechanism so that the end users can browse/search to what they’re looking for with least amount of clients

EASY FOR CLIENTS (they don’t have access to all sites)

It’s easy for the clients since they have access to a few sites only. Hence, the TOC (Table of Content) web part works just great! After login page, our clients are presented with the links to the sites they have access to, along with Issues, documents, tasks etc for the projects.

PAINFUL FOR AMs AND PMs (they have access to all sites)

However, it’s not that easy for AMs and PMs. With changing responsibilities, they all need to have access to all sites. Hence, the same TOC web part will show them links to all projects and their resources. Not a bad thing but the home page takes a few seconds to load with all the links they don’t want to use all the time.

SOLUTION

A combination these features worked well:

• Site Directory, and custom columns
  • Column to indicate if a site is Account Management specific or Project specific
  • Column to indicate if a project is Active/Completed/On hold, etc
  • Different pages in the site directory
• Data View Web Parts (DVWP)
  • Links to Account Management sites
  • Links to Projects Sites
• Audience Targeting
  • Separate audiences for Clients and Staff.
  • TOC web part is targeted to client audience (remember they see only those sites they have access to). PMs and AMs do not need to be bothered with all the details
  • Above DVWPs are targeted to Staff audience.

This works well for the clients, since they see the detailed links to all the resources into their sites.
This also works well for the AMs and PMS because they are presented with just the links to the sites (not the details) of the clients.

My apologies for not showing any screenshots; hopefully you’re still reading this post and following along!

Microsoft recently released KB963027 for Windows 2003 IE7. Known issue documented in the article is that the IIS web sites on port 80 cannot be browsed locally from server. Obviously the site can be browsed from workstations. This seems to be NTLM problem and a work around is provided in the article.

Without this work around, the end result for a SharePoint site on port 80 would be is that in a single server scenario, the Shared Services Provider will not be able to access the site (http://intranet for example) and hence reports “access denied” errors in crawl logs. Eventually the users will not be able to perform the search.

Work around just works great! However, applying the patch on MOSS (I should try not to use this acronym since “Office” part of name is going to be removed from next version – SharePoint 2010) with all cumulative updates applied upto February 2009 updates works just fine – no work around required.

Office 2007 SP2 is expected to be released next week!

Famous-internet-search-engines-like search for CRM seems to be in high demand from CRM users. The search accelerator was released in January this year, by taking advantage of the CRM schema information in supplied LOB Business Application Definition file in the Accelerator, we have a search module in our lab environment. The UI part seamlessly integrates with CRM, querying MOSS Index file that has crawled information from CRM through BDC using the application definition file supplied in the search accelerator!

Searching within a file stored in CRM notes is still a challange, protocol handler develpment is involved!

Users of both, Dynamics CRM 4 and and MOSS 2007, are eagerly waiting for CRM’s Enterprise Search Accelerator that is due any minute now. See this informative video to take a high level overview http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/archive/2008/11/19/crm-accelerators-enterprise-search.aspx

Power of SharePoint truely surfaces when it is customized for your needs

Business Data Catalog (BDC) - of SharePoint 2007 allows to present data from non SharePoint system on SharePoint UI. Not only display, BDC can also crawl and index data!

We use BDC to extract data from MS CRM database (using API, direct database access or web service) and display on SharePoint Site using out of the box business data web parts shipped along with BDC. SharePoint Designer is then used to edit XSL of BDC web parts as needed for rich formatting.

Combination of BDC and SharePoint Designer allows us to cater MS CRM Data in customized style and format as required by our customers.

One more reason why upgrade to Office 2007!

It requires following configuration
1) Active Directory for Kerberos and
2) MOSS Excel Services correctly so that Excel Services can impersonate end users account to access cube in order to get and display data.