Sitecore Guild

I would like to take this opportunity to invite the Sitecore Guild to the family.

You can access the Sitecore Guild at:

http://sitecoreguild.blogspot.com

You may also follow them on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/SitecoreGuild

Sitecore is an amazing CMS built on ASP.NET. It is flexible as it includes full source code but is also easy for an end user to edit and publish content. For those who have not checked it out yet you need to. You will be amazed.

The next user group meeting for Sitecore in Toronto is in February. Check out the Sitecore Guild often for information on the next user group and for tips on using Sitecore.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share please email Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com

Toronto Sharepoint Users Group

It was a packed house last night as Shia Patel spoke on the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon.

His presentation was extremely deep and covered every possible way you could customize the ribbon both in code and by xml.

If you missed the presentation, be sure to check out the article and presentation on his blog at:

http://kwizcom.blogspot.com/2010/07/all-about-sharepoint-ribbon-for.html

Thanks Shia for a very informative presentation. I look forward to hearing you present again.

For those who don't know, the Toronto SharePoint Users Group meets right at the corner of Yonge and Bloor in the CIBC building on the 12th Floor every third Wednesday of the month. Please join the meetup group to get reminders. http://www.meetup.com/TorontoSPUG/

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you think would be helpful, please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com

SharePoint Nation Web Cast – Creating Custom Actions within SharePoint

I am not sure if this is 2007 or 2010 but I am hoping this is 2010. I thought I would pass it on to anyone who may be interested in the online training session.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=139739606038026&index=1

Finding all Ghosted (custom) Pages For a Site using SharePoint Designer

Have you ever needed to find all the pages that were customized? If so, I came across a pretty cool article on using SharePoint Designer to generate a report on all Ghosted pages.

Here is the link to the article:

http://blog-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/05/sharepoint-designer-2007-run-reports.html

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the guild please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com or Chris Williams at chrisw_88@hotmail.com and we will post them here.

Connecting SharePoint 2010 and SAP with BCS

I came across a few articles on connecting SharePoint 2010 and SAP using BCS.
Here are a couple links:

• http://spninjablog.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/sharepoint-2010-bcs-wcf-sap/
• http://kalsing.blogspot.com/2009/07/accessing-business-data-with-sharepoint.html
• http://www.slideshare.net/kalsing/sharepoint-saturday-india-sapsharepoint-interoperability
• http://blogs.technet.com/duetenterprise/archive/2010/04/16/technical-overview-of-duet-enterprise-for-microsoft-sharepoint-and-sap.aspx

I also came across a blog article outlining how SAP is seeking participants for the beta shipment of SAP Connector for .NET 3.0. Here is the link to the blog article that explains how to sign up for the beta for those interested.

http://kalsing.blogspot.com/2010/06/sap-is-seeking-participants-for-beta.html

If you have any tips, tricks, resources or articles you would like shared with the guild, please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com or Chris Williams at chrisw_88@hotmail.com and we will post them here.

Studying for your SharePoint 2010 (70-573) exam.

I have decided to start studying for my first SharePoint 2010 exam. If you are doing the same then these resources may help.

• SharePoint 70-573 Study Guide
  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-573#tab2
  
  
• SharePoint Server 2010: Advanced Developer Training Presentations
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22882429-EE80-40BB-BA8D-FF55D6E33959&displaylang=en


• SharePoint 2010: Getting Started with Development on SharePoint 2010 Hands-on Labs in C# and Visual Basic
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c010fc68-b47f-4db6-b8a8-ad4ba33a35c5&displaylang=en
  
• SharePoint 2010 Virtual Labs will help you get some hands on without having to set up a 2010 environment
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc707678.aspx

If you know of any resources not listed here that you think would be helpful to the group either comment on this entry or email Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com and we will post them here.

Beth Massi has a lot of SharePoint 2010 Videos For You

Thanks to Rob Windsor for posting this to Twitter and Beth Massi for including all this amazing video content regarding SharePoint 2010 and how to do tonnes of things with it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/archive/2010/06/16/visual-studio-bizapps-launch-content-rollup.aspx

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share with the guild please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com and we will post them here.

Moss 2007 not supported by Visual Studio 2010?

I ran into an odd error with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint and when I did some searching I kept finding the same comments.

"To the best of my knowledge, Visual Studio 2010 targets SharePoint 2010 exclusively in every respect, except for SharePoint 2007 workflow solutions. I doubt that you can connect to a SharePoint 2007 server using Visual Studio 2010."

Is this true? If so I am quite shocked. There are a lot of people still on Moss 2007 or older Sharepoint. I guess this means we run multiple versions of Visual Studio or hold our customers off upgrading to Sharepoint 2010 for yet another reason.

I look forward to hearing comments on this and hopefully a way I can use the robust Visual Studio 2010 to develop for older Sharepoint.

Free tool from Metalogix to import blogs into SharePoint 2010

I thought I would pass this on to the guild. This tool would allow you to import content from blogs like this one into SharePoint 2010. Thus allowing you to continue to have all your content in one location.

http://www.metalogix.net/Company/News/ByYear/2010/Metalogix-Announces-New-Solution-to-Migrate-Blogs-to-SharePoint-2010---Free-to-Microsoft-MVPs/

If you have any tips, tricks, tools, and resources you would like to share please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com and we will post them here.

WebPart Parameter Binding to a static value

It took me a while to find this out myself so I thought I would post it here. Sometimes you want to use a webpart and bind the parameters to a static value rather than to the querystring.

I had to use this for the sites in category web part since I had to place two on the same page with different filtervalues for the same field. The way to do this is to find the filtervalue parameter binding entry and add an extra property called "DefaultValue" set this to the proper value and voila.


I hope this saves you some time when you are trying to perform the same task.

If you have any tips, tricks, resources you would like to share with the group please post them as comments or email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com and we will post them in an article.