MOSS Emagazine

Dutch Information Worker User Group
SharePoint ®
eMagazine
2010 Special
January 2010
A Software
TM Development
Network
Publication
SharePoint® eMagazine
2010 Special
Contents
Ready for 2010! 3
The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise 5
Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon 14
Visual Studio extensions or a manually build solution? 20
Working With Data in SharePoint Designer 2010 26
Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010 35
New ECM features in SharePoint 2010 45
Creating new Visual Experiences with Visio Services 52
How to guides - Visio Services 55
About DIWUG 56
A SharePoint User eXperience 63
Introduction to the Business Connectivity Services 67
SharePoint 2010 Client Object Models 73
Understanding Identity in SharePoint 2010 82
Happy Together in 2010 86
About SDN 87
SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part 89
Enrich your SharePoint 2010 portal by integrating SAP applications 96
SharePointComic 102
Colofon
DIWUG SharePoint2010 eMagazine
January 2010
Publisher:
Dutch Information Worker UserGroup
Powered by SDN
First Edition, January 2010
Editors:
Marianne van Wanrooij (lead)
marianne.vanwanrooij@sdn.nl
Mirjam van Olst
mirjam.vanolst@sdn.nl
Special thanks to:

Marcel Meijer (review), Remi Caron (review), Joop Pecht (secretary)
and all the authors and sponsors!
Design and layout:

Barth Sluyters
http://home.12move.nl/barthsluyters/
©2010. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any
way without prior written permission of Diwug/SDN or the author. All trademarks
mentioned in this magazine are the property of their respective owners.

2010 Special
Ready for 2010!

Editor’s note
Last year SharePoint conference in Las Vegas has been one of the best conferences
I’ve ever been. Not only was it great to meet the SharePoint Community whom for a
majority I only knew from Twitter, Blogs, FaceBook or other virtual social networks
but also the sessions and information shared were from a high quality. That’s where
the idea was born to create the very first SharePoint eMagazine. A free magazine for
IT-Pro’s, Developers and End (power) Users and optimized to read in eReaders.
Mirjam van Olst (SharePoint MCM and MVP) and myself took the challenge to find
authors who are well known in the SharePoint Community, Sponsors who are willing
to advertise in this magazine so we could cover the costs and the time to read, review
and edit articles next to our busy jobs. Well... the results is this magazine! Over 100
pages with information for SharePoint professionals.
Playing with SharePoint 2010 you can’t help but to get excited about all the new
possibilities. Have you looked at Visio Services or the Business Intelligence possibil-
ities? It looks very promising! Or have you played with data using the SharePoint
Designer. Talking about data, what about the enhancements of the Business Connec-
tivity Services (previously known as the BDC). Very awesome! Personally I like the
integration of Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint. It’s so easy now to develop, debug
and deploy your solutions. But there are so many new things for a developer to look
at; the Client Object Model, SandBoxed Solutions, UI Customizations.
“Out of the Box” is a column on how you can create business solutions in Share-
Point by configuring functionality (No Code Solutions). Further in this issue we look
at Project Management with SharePoint.
All of this and much more you will find in this first issue of the SharePoint eMagazine.
SharePoint 2010 has so much to offer, this magazine size could easily be double.
Enough for a second edition.. so who knows!
I hope you enjoy this eMagazine as much as we did putting it together and that this
will help you getting ready for SharePoint 2010!
Marianne van Wanrooij

Lead Editor
marianne.vanwanrooij@sdn.nl
This special issue is sponsored by

See page
Getronics 4
WinVision 13
KbWorks 19
Bergler 34
Connected Services 44
Avanade 62
WinVision 72
Sogeti 88

Laat informatie voor je
werken
Informatie wordt steeds crucialer voor een goede bedrijfsvoering. De eisen van mede
werkers, klanten en partners veranderen voortdurend. Effectief en efficiënt (samen)
werken vraagt om bedrijfsinformatie die altijd en overal toegankelijk en uitwisselbaar is.
Getronics Consulting levert advies en technische oplossingen, van visie en strategie
vorming tot implementatie en beheer, voor het optimaliseren van uw informatievoorziening
Getronicsconsulting.com
2010 Special
The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise

by Sjoerd van Lochem
Microsoft has made a lot of changes and major improvements on SharePoint. This makes SharePoint
2010 better suited for a broader variety of applications within small, medium and large enterprises.
Because of the many improvements, it is quite difficult to create a holistic view.
In this article we will discuss the different applications and improvements, based on a random
company which we will call “The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise”. Within this company we will discuss
eight personas who use SharePoint in their daily activities. The personas range from Jack the
developer to Huge the end user. These personas will help you to distinguish the different SharePoint
functional and technical areas and can assist you in choosing which areas to explore in more depth.
At the October convention, Microsoft presented the beta releases of Office 2010 and
SharePoint 2010 (pronounced SharePoint twenty ten). IT professionals and customers
alike described the 2010 release as “super awesome”. They commented: “Microsoft
really listened to us”. Microsoft not only increased the breadth of SharePoint, they
added many configuration possibilities and improved it’s customizability. This poses a
practical dilemma. There are so many things SharePoint has improved on: which areas
are relevant for you and where to start your discovery of SharePoint 2010?
Ribbon UI
SharePoint Workspace
SharePoint Mobile
Office Client and Office Web App Integration
Standards Support
Business Connectivity Services

Tagging, Tag Cloud, Ratings
InfoPath Form Services
Social Bookmarking
External Lists
Blogs and Wikis
Workflow
My Sites
SharePoint Designer
Activity Feeds
Visual Studio
Profiles and Expertise
API Enhancements
Org Browser
REST/ATOM/RSS
Performance Point Services

Excel Services Enterprise Content Types
Chart Web Part Metadata and Navigation
Visio Services Document Sets
Web Analytics Multi-stage Disposition
SQL Server Integration Audio and Video Content
Power Pivot Remote Blob Storage
List Enhancements
Social Relevance
Phonetic Search
Navigation
Fast Integration
Enhanced Pipeline
To give you a good idea of all those improvements, we will discuss SharePoint 2010
applications within a fictive company, “The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise”. Within our
company we distinguish eight personas who we can all relate to. You can use these
personas to guide you through relevant improvements and functionality.
Mark, the developer

Mark is programming SharePoint applications and web parts, extending SharePoint
with cool customizations and building deployment packages in the form of SharePoint
Features and Solutions. Mark has some experience with SharePoint development, but
he finds it time consuming to deliver bug free software for SharePoint.

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Jack, the consultant

As a consultant, Jack is advising his customer how to use SharePoint. He is building an
example by configuring a SharePoint environment, based on out-of-the-box function-
ality. Jack has a background in document management. He advices the Management
Team on how to use SharePoint and web applications really add value. He sees great
possibilities for Enterprise Content Management and reporting applications which
are integrated within the companies back end systems, such as MS Dynamics Ax,
MS Dynamics CRM and a custom built application which stores information in a SQL
database.
Tech Eddy, the application and system owner

The SharePoint environment of our company is managed by Tech Eddy. He is maintaining
a MOSS 2007 environment and his end users are asking for new functionality, better
performance, more uptime and more storage. Tech Eddy is using an MS Access
database to manage issues and change requests on the SharePoint environment.
Remco, the interaction designer

Remco is a capable interaction designer who first had great difficulty in designing
and branding SharePoint sites, but he got the hang of it. He is experimenting with
web content management functionality, knowledge management, social networking
and branding and is attempting to improve on MOSS 2007 possibilities.
Maria, the power user

Maria is Bob’s secretary, Bob is the CEO. She has a lot of confidential information, is a
heavy user of MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access), and she is responsible
for dispersing management information. She has a lot of local MS Access databases
which she uses to register meeting attendance and to create large mail merges, based
on SharePoint templates.
Huge, the end user

Huge is a sales manager who often communicates with customers and colleagues. He
shares a lot of information and spends the majority of his time on the road, travelling
to and from customers. Huge is not always online, nor always connected, so he tends
to print and copy most information on his local laptop. He is mostly struggling to
collect all relevant information from the different applications and getting the latest
versions without having to invest a lot of time in “techno hassles” and the “applica-
tions jungle”. He is a frequent user of Microsoft Excel and Word and just loves the
Office Ribbon that Microsoft introduced (just for him?).
His home is closer to his customers, but because he has to collaborate with his
colleagues, Huge drives to the office. Wouldn’t it be great if they could both work on
a sales document for a customer at the same time?
Bob, the company’s founder

The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise is founded by Bob. His work is his passion and he feels
a great commitment to the company and to its people. Bob’s company is doing well,
but the economical downfall of last year makes him aware that an increasing amount
of employees divert their effort away from the core business. Although these tasks
are important, Bob means to steer things up and he wants the employees to keep
focused on the customers. Over the past few years, the budget of the IT department
grew steadily year after year. The results are good, but could the IT Department be a
little more efficient?
Arthur, the IT architect

Bob has regular meetings with Arthur. Bob is supervising the IT Department, but
the heart and soul of the team lies with Arthur. Arthur is a Microsoft architect with
integral knowledge of the Microsoft software stack. They talk a lot about where to
put their money in future investments. Arthur is convinced that they can save money
if the development process will be streamlined more efficiently, the deployment is
made easier and when the software would be more scalable and fault tolerant. He

2010 Special
attended last month’s Gartner conference, which proved to him that SharePoint 2010
was becoming a dominant Microsoft web platform. He listened and agreed that social
media and search will become very important for future enterprise. He will coach Jack
and Remco to do some research on both topics.
Mark, the developer.

By opening Visual Studio 2010, Mark discovers a lot of cool improvements. First
noticeable are the new SharePoint templates which he can use to build SharePoint
Solutions (included site definitions, content types and lists) and web parts. Mark is
curious and starts a new SharePoint project. He gazes at the SharePoint Explorer.
That’s neat, he can browse through the SharePoint environment and just drag, drop
and reference all kind of SharePoint resources and artifacts. This will save him a lot of
time. Next, Mark is adding a visual web part to the project which allows him to visually
design the web part in the same way he is used to develop user controls. InteliSense
helps him to speed up his coding and assists him during code writing. As soon as
he is finished, he wants to deploy his web part to the central testing environment
of SharePoint. By clicking the build and deploy option, Mark notices that VS 2010 is
doing its job by retracting and deleting the old solution, copying and deploying the
new solution, registering the different components and resetting IIS. Wow, all those
cumbersome steps are done automatically by VS 2010!
But oops, Mark has made a mistake in his code and the web part causes a circular
reference. Normally, this could crash the SharePoint application. Luckily Mark had
configured the SharePoint throttles in order to restrict the resources of the sandbox
solution Mark used to limit the processing time and memory usage of his faulty
solution.
Tags: Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio SharePoint templates, Visual Studio
2010 Tools for SharePoint Development, developer dashboard, logging,
SharePoint solutions, sand box solutions, LINQ
Jack, the consultant.
Jack is advising management in implementing a document management solution. All
that valuable non-structured information is just stored on file servers, local hard drives
and personal e-mail boxes. Finding, retrieving and re-using information is severely
limited by the current situation. Jack tried to implement a document management
solution last year, but a study made clear that the company was not ready and
the available functionality was falling short. Routing documents to archives, meta
dating documents and defining policies was all possible, but the application felt not
yet mature. But with SharePoint 2010 it will be a whole new ball game. Advanced
document routing for supporting much more complex file plans and routing scenarios;
document sets in order to form an entity which consists of multiple documents (for
example: a loan application, which consists of a loan form, income statement and
general terms); expiration policies; centralized management of hierarchical taxnomies
and folksonomies and retrieval of records, even if the file name or file location has
been altered. By using the Business Connectivity Services, documents can be linked
to clients and backorders. This year, Jack has a good chance to make a real start with
document management. Maybe he can even use the new search, social networking
and meta dating facilities to start on a brand new knowledge management project
to organize user groups for each market the company operates in?!
Last year, IT focused on getting the back end systems’ processes right. This year, Jack
prefers to shift the focus and reap the benefits of those smooth business processes.
The company has a lot of different systems and the users spend a lot of time combining
information from those different systems. Jack wants to make a portal which will give
the users insight by presenting the business with financial information and reports. By
using composites, Jack wants to present the Sales department with a map of the sales
area where all the resellers are drawn onto this map. Each reseller could be presented
with a bar of indicators visualizing the sales volume of each reseller. By selecting the
product family filter, Sales can analyze which type of product is sold by whom. By

2010 Special
selecting an area or by drilling down, the Sales representative can analyze past and
present sales of every reseller. But wait, wouldn’t it be great to see what marketing
effort is undertaken locally? By displaying an Internet search query, looking for
planned expos and conventions in the local region, together with our financial data,
Sales can decide to step in the local marketing effort. A business connectivity service
connection to our order entry application enables us to search through the latest
orders of a specific reseller and even enter and write back new customer orders.
Tags: record center, document routing, ECM for the masses, BI for the
masses, business connectivity services, SharePoint & Fast Search, composites
& mashups, InfoPath services, managed metadata service.
Tech Eddy, the system owner
Tech Eddy is maintaining the current MOSS 2007 environments. He values the intro-
duction of separation of SharePoint development, test, acceptance and production
environments. But such a hassle to maintain all those different servers! Microsoft has
good news for Tech Eddy. They understood his problems and offer him far better
tooling and support with SharePoint 2010. From within System Center Operation
Manager (SCOM) he can monitor all these environments and analyze server health
problems. When Tech Eddy starts with SharePoint 2010, he immediately looks for the
central administration. All seems pretty familiar, but he notices the new structuring
of the services. The Shared Services Provider no longer exists. Instead, Eddy is looking
at a bunch of services with names like “Managed Metadata Service” and “User Profile
Service”. The improved service architecture of SharePoint makes SharePoint better
suited for large and secure deployments.
Tech Eddy is thinking of the accident which took place last month. The database of
his MOSS 2007 farm failed. Good backup and restore procedures ensured that he
was quickly back in business. However, he was not able to restore the latest content
because he could not reconnect to the content database with the last content
changes. At last, SharePoint 2010 will support these scenarios. He can connect any
content database without restoring it to the SharePoint environment. By connecting
to the content database he can browse it and restore single sites, lists and documents
which are stored in the content database.
At the top of the screen, the system is stating some problems. Tech Eddy is curious and
clicks on the message. He ends up in the health monitor, a proactive analyzing tool
which detects and prevents current and future problems/issues within the SharePoint
environment. The tool can make suggestions how to solve the issues and can even be
configured to solve the issues automatically. Could it have prevented a system failure
like the database problems of last month?
The content database of his current farm had become very large. It probably
contributed to the system’s failure. With those large CAD/CAM files, the database
was growing rapidly. By making using of the SQL 2008 file stream option to store
large files on disk and reference them from SQL, SharePoint 2010 should be able to
decrease the size of the content database substantially.
Tech Eddy is a heavy user of Powershell for maintaining his Windows and Exchange
servers (for example: maintaining active directory and exchange mailboxes). It would
be very convenient if he could do the same with SharePoint 2010. Curiously, he inves-
tigates and discovers that he can do all the same configurations for SharePoint 2010 in
the central admin or in administration pages of different site collections! It will take
him a couple of days, but Tech Eddy thinks that this investment is worth taking.
All these improvements are great, but how should Tech Eddy prepare to upgrade his
current MOSS environments and servers? Tech Eddy is searching TechNet and soon
discovers valuable information. A new cool feature is the ability to keep each Share-
Point Server in a farm on a different patch level. This will make maintaining, patching
and upgrading much easier to begin with. TechNet describes a couple of upgrade
paths. First he has to upgrade his current MOSS 2007 and WSS 3 environments to
SP2. The second step is running the upgrade checker and investigating the warnings
and suggestions. Tech Eddy can choose from doing an in place upgrade, database

2010 Special
attach upgrade or single click install upgrade. After the technical upgrade process,
Tech Eddy can let each user choose between the old interface and the new interface
(offering new functionality like the ribbon). Each user can choose for the improved
GUI by starting the option “visual upgrade”. Tech Eddy is convinced that SharePoint
2010 will be implemented this year and concludes that he has to write an upgrade
plan.
Tags: service applications, SharePoint Services, central administration,

health monitor, central logs, SCOM, Powershell, MOSS 2007 and WSS 3
upgrade, visual upgrade, backup and restore, attach content database, SQL
2008 file stream.
Remco, the interaction designer
The current enterprise is using MOSS for their public website and has some great
internal knowledge management applications. Although Remco thinks MOSS is doing
a great job, he is encountering the limitations on several areas. He hopes SharePoint
2010 will improve the visual experience of the end user and that it will offer him a lot of
GUI improvements. His first experience with SharePoint 2010 quickly learns him some
cool improvements which will upgrade SharePoint branding to current requirements.
Overlays, tableless menus and controls, separation of design and ribbon functionality,
theming improvements (much easier), tagging, scoring and rating content by end
users, SharePoint 2010 Designer, managed metadata service (hierarchical thesaurus),
improved content editor, 100% browser compatible, improved content query web
part, list view web part, support of mobile devices, localization (ability to dynamically
display any site in any language), greatly improved Silverlight integration, Enterprise
Wiki, Office document previewing within the browser with Fast Search technologies
and the list goes on.
Remco has to investigate all these changes which will enable him to do more with
SharePoint. He navigates through a brand new SharePoint 2010 environment, adds
some comments, creates some Wiki pages and rates some documents. After a while,
he decides to look at the new “My Site” functionality. He creates a “My Site” and
instantly sees, on his public pages, references to documents, items and conversa-
tions he viewed, scored or replied on. SharePoint 2010 has brilliantly improved social
networking functionality. Remco cannot wait to start using these great features.
Tags: branding, theming, social networking, tagging/scoring/rating content,

managed metadata service, Enterprise Wiki, localization and languages,
content query web part, list view web part, mobile devices, Silverlight,
SharePoint Designer 2010, search.
Maria, the power user
Maria is an employee who has worked at the company for 10 years. She is the secretary
of Bob (CEO). Maria forms the center of the enterprise and she manages Bob’s day
to day agenda. Important changes are best to be discussed with her before involving
Bob. Maria has a lot of confidential information she has to store. Minutes of the
board of directors, presence lists and address lists of large mailings. At the latest
endeavor, Maria is organizing workshops for the top 100 customers of our company.
The workshops are a paid service by our company and there is high interest. Maria
is registering which customers have been invited, registered and paid for. She has
developed a small Access database for the registration process.
Tech Eddy hears of all this information which Maria is storing on her local hard drive
and in local Outlook archives (pst-files). The enterprise would be severely crippled
if all this information is lost. Last year, he tried to convince Maria to store this infor-
mation in SharePoint, but for Maria the MOSS environment did not offer enough
‘temptation’ to make her use SharePoint. But could do SharePoint 2010 do the job?
Tech Eddy phones Jack and discusses his latest ideas. Jack agrees and will visit Maria.

2010 Special
One month later, Maria is using SharePoint 2010. Why didn’t she have this tool much
earlier? The ribbon reveals all these wonderful abilities and actions. She can easily
create meeting workspaces and authorize individual users to access these workspaces
by using the ribbon. Maria sees how simple it is to add new documents to the sites.
First she had some difficulty with the approval process. But with Jack she designed
a workflow within Microsoft Visio 2010. Afterwards, Jack exported and opened this
workflow in SharePoint Designer where he configured each workflow step. One small
element could not be configured within SharePoint Designer, but Jack asked Mark to
open the workflow in VS 2010 and program a custom step within this workflow. Now
the workflow for the approval is made available in all the minute sites Maria creates.
She can use the workflow whenever she wants.
Most of the mail merge lists that Maria stored, were Excel files. Jack showed her how
easy it is to export these Excel files to SharePoint lists. Now Maria, and the rest of
the secretariat, can use those list all at the same time and they are even available on
Fridays when Maria works from home. Because of better office integration, those
SharePoint lists can easily be used for mail merge activities.
The Access application which Maria made, was upgraded to Access 2010. Maria
published the Access application to a SharePoint site and now all of the function-
ality is supplied by standard SharePoint functionality. When she deletes an attendee,
all linked information is discarded as well (cascade delete). All the forms she made
are functioning and Jack even corrected a form with SharePoint Designer after the
application had been published to SharePoint. For future congresses and workshops,
Maria can reuse the Access application by publishing the same application to new
SharePoint sites.
Tags: user interface improvements, ribbon, Office integration, workflow,

Access services.
Huge, the end user
As a sales manager, Huge is mainly on the road. Because he often lacks an Internet
connection while he is travelling, Huge tends to print and carry a pile of paper dossiers
within his car. He uses SharePoint to store documents, but he always has trouble in
finding the right site and the digital document he so desperately needs.
Jack setup a SharePoint 2010 pilot environment to let the company users asses this
newest version. Huge is an innovator; he loves new technology and is appointed
as a test user. Huge is using the ‘classic’ SharePoint 2010 sites together with Share-
Point Workspace 2010 and Outlook 2010. In the pilot environment, Jack and Mark did
some work. They created a business connectivity service connection to the ERP system
(Dynamics Ax) in order to access and use customer information and order details.
They published the customers, orders and order details as external content types/lists
and created an InfoPath form which contains order and order details information.
The InfoPath form was published to SharePoint. They configured the customers to
be available in Outlook as contacts and they used a special tool (not yet released by
Microsoft) to make the InfoPath form available in Outlook.
Huge is on the road again. He was just phoned by his most important customer about
the shipment of an important order. The customer wants to add some products to
this order and it should not be delivered to the main plant, but to the distribution
center which is located nearby. Huge could phone to the office, but he knows that
sales support is short on staff and is working overtime in this time of year. Huge
starts his laptop, but guess what? No Internet connection. But remember, Huge is
participating in the pilot and his computer has got some “magic” tricks. Huge opens
Outlook and searches through his contacts. He finds the customer and looks at the
contact details. On the contact card he notices the button “orders” and immediately
selects the button. A neat selection box appears and he selects the latest order. The
order opens up and he inspects the order details. He adds the products required to
the order and changes the delivery address using his address book. Next time Huge
is online, Outlook will synchronize these changes to the ERP (dynamics Ax) system,
using SharePoint as a connection hub.
10
2010 Special
Huge phones the client and checks whether the order is in accordance with the wishes
of his most important customer. Talking with the client, he is reminded of last week’s
contract meeting. They agreed to adjust some of the terms regarding the contractual
guarantee period and replacement procedures. He opens the SharePoint Workspace
of this client and quickly finds the most recent contract. He alters the document and
renews the end date of the contract. Next time his computer is connected to the
Internet, the document changes are synchronized to the SharePoint customer site
and the expiration period of the contract is updated.
Huge comes home and connects his laptop to his wireless home network. The
changes he made earlier this day are synchronized to SharePoint and the ERP system.
He has made some phone calls and needs a service contract for a new customer.
He has to look for clients with existing requirements, but from past search experi-
ences he knows that this can be difficult. However, with SharePoint 2010, the out-
of-the-box search functionality will make his life much easier: full text search queries
will support wildcards, asterisks and Boolean expressions. In order to support less
query search, users can use tag clouds and drill down features (facetted search) which
are all supported out-of-the-box! But Huge notices an odd phenomenon. When he
searches the system, the documents he or his direct colleagues are working on, are
listed higher in the search ranking. Is SharePoint using information about his social
network to make a meaningful and user specific ranking of the search results? Huge
navigates to his My Site and discovers listings of documents he reacted on, documents
he created and sites he required access to. It is almost a grouping of his favorites for
the entire SharePoint environment and he did not have to do anything!
He starts working on a new sales document and decides he has to write a proposal,
but needs Maria to work with him. It is Friday and Maria is working from home. He
puts in a search query for Maria and finds her contact details. The present indicator
states that she is available and he starts an Office Communicator call (OCS) with
Maria. Huge uploads a first draft document and asks Maria to review the document.
Meanwhile, he will add a last chapter. They both open the document simultaneously
and are making alterations. SharePoint will take care of the versioning, merging and
displaying of the changes to them both in realtime! Huge is satisfied with the end
results and sends the draft document to his new client in order to discuss it by phone
tomorrow morning.
Tags: ribbon, my Site, search, Office integration, offline support, SharePoint

Workspace, external list, business connectivity services, co-authoring, Office
Communicator
Bob, the company’s founder
As founder of the company, Bob is the driving force behind the company. The company
has grown substantially so Bob has had to delegate more and more. He knows that
his employees are committed and motivated, but Bob is of the opinion that a lot of
effort and money is piled on trivial activities. He manages the IT department, but lets
the day to day activities to Arthur. But Arthur has got little management experience
and Bob thinks that the increased IT spendings could burn a hole in the company’s
pocket if business was to slow down. The latest investment request was for upgrading
the current SharePoint platform to SharePoint 2010. He does not know whether this
would be wise. Wouldn’t IT investments rise yet again?
Arthur convinces him that IT productivity could increase because of better tooling,
richer SharePoint applications and increased stability and scalability. They investigate
some preliminary studies which indicate that the TCO of SharePoint 2010 would be
even lower than MOSS 2007. They agree to do some pilots before they will pop the
big question: should they migrate to SharePoint 2010 this year? Arthur will calculate
a business case, based on the results of these pilots.
Bob is also curious about how critical SharePoint has become. An increasing amount
of digital documents is stored in SharePoint, but he has no reports showing how many
document and sites there actually are and how frequent employees and customers
are using data. Bob visited an executive meeting with some CEO’s in his industry
11
2010 Special
and they talked about upcoming compliancy legislation. Are contracts stored and
secured properly? Bob would like to get some monitors in place to give him more
insight regarding these questions. Arthur shows him some examples of usage and
audit reports. Bob decides to ask Arthur to include these reports in the pilots and
make a monthly report about the size of the environment, the usage and the audit
information about “disappeared” legal contracts and safeguards, preventing the
accidental change or destruction of vital information.
Tags: audit trail, usage reports, TCO, case studies, SharePoint licenses, legal
hold, records.
Arthur, the IT Architect
Anxiously, Arthur heard of all the marvels of SharePoint 2010. He supports the choice
for the Microsoft platform and SharePoint, but he has some questions based on his
elaborate experience. He knows that customizing standard software can be quite
difficult. A portal should be flexible and expandable though. Support of software
development and deployment strategy are key. Better support to roll out customiza-
tions through a development, test, acceptance and production environment is just as
important as the development tools themselves. Arthur is aware that Bob wants to
focus on the core business. Heavy investments in IT dedicated systems are possible,
but are there possibilities to outsource parts? Arthur discussed the need with Bob to
make a start with customer portals. Last year’s pilot proved that the authentication
and security requirements in these scenarios can become complex. Will SharePoint
2010 and Office 2010 provide better support for these scenarios?
Eddy explains to Arthur how the new SharePoint service applications can be used to
tighten security and to size SharePoint with greater ease and how it will support far
more complex and larger deployments. Arthur likes the concept of sharing services
among farms. Could the sharing of services, combined with for example claims based
authentication, be used for cloud computing scenarios? Arthur decides he wants to
take a firm interest in this subject!
Arthur makes a listing of all the different development tooling for SharePoint:
n Visio for developing graphics and visual designing workflows schemes.
n Excel for creating web based Excel sheets/graphs and interactive calculations
where end users can enter parameters (for example a maximum loan calculator).
n Access for creating database like applications for SharePoint (including macros,
dashboards, user role specific entry screens and cascade/delete linkages
between lists).
n SharePoint Designer for creating and customizing sites and lists, branding,
configuring workflows, creating Business Connectivity Services connections,
CAML queries and XSLT editing, site definitions (!) and even WSP’s.
n Visual Studio for creating custom web parts and other artifacts, Solutions,
features and custom workflow (activities).
Arthur thinks that Visio, Excel and Access can be used by power users. SharePoint
Designer can be used by consultants, interaction designers and developers and Visual
Studio can be used by developers.
Tags: development strategy, cloud Computing, service applications, forms

based authentication, workflow tools (Visio, SharePoint Designer and Visual
Studio), SharePoint solutions (SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio), sizing
and securing SharePoint.
Conclusion
With SharePoint 2010 Microsoft did an amazing job. Microsoft added extra configu-
ration parameters, introduced new functionality and improved Office integration.
Most noticeable are the improvements mode for developers (Visual Studio and Share-
Point Designer), the improved service structure of SharePoint and the modernized
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GUI/WCM functionality. Users who attended the Las Vegas conference where enthu-
siastic and concluded that SharePoint 2010 has matured and has got far too many
functionality and different application to be mastered in depth by one individual.
Probably we will see a lot of area experts who will focus on different aspects and areas
within the SharePoint technology stack. In this article we used different personas to
give a broad overview of the new functionality and changes that are made to Share-
Point 2010. You can use this information to decide which SharePoint 2010 areas you
want to explore first.
In short we can conclude that SharePoint 2010 is a formidable web platform. The IT
research industry predicts a bright future and dominant role for SharePoint 2010.
... by the way ...

The SharePoint 2010 beta Developers Trainings Kit is downloadable from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=bfd1603b-
7550-4b8e-be85-4215a5069b90;
This kit is full of videos, hands-on labs and other practical content for the SharePoint
developer.
Tip from Marcel Meijer (VX Company) http://www.marcelmeijer.net
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2010 Special
Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon

by Marianne van Wanrooij
The Ribbon was introduced to us with Office 2007. And to be very honest. I’ve had problems
finding my way at first. oh well.. sometimes I still get lost! Next to Office clients, even Paint and
WordPad (if you’re running Windows 7) has adopted the Ribbon and now SharePoint is the next
product to use the Ribbon in its user interface. In this article I will discuss the Ribbon basics and
look into some terminology, how you can add or remove a button and how to add events.
Ribbon basics
Before we start let’s look at some terminology of the Ribbon. What is the Ribbon?
The Ribbon User Interface is a task oriented Graphical User Interface. It’s the central
control center which stays on top of the page and doesn’t scroll out of the view.
Fig. 1: Ribbon basics.

The mayor parts of a Ribbon exists of 4 elements: (figure 1).
1 Contextual tabs: based on your position within the site the needed functionality
will appear.
2 Tabs: On a tab you will find all tasks organized by function and organizes a set
of groups.
3 Groups: groups contains a set of controls. Each group can contain multiple
controls and has a label to identify each group.
4 Controls: this is where the action is performed. Each control has a unique
command.
You can use different kind of controls in the Ribbon. These controls are the same as you
can use for the client Ribbon. Like the Button, CheckBox, ComboBox, DropDownList,
Label or TextBox. These are the well known basic Web Controls which won’t be
discussed here.
Other Controls you can use are:
n FlyoutAnchor; is a button with a down arrow which opens another menu or
collection of buttons when you click on it
n GalleryButton; is just like a regular button only it is designed to host an image
of any size (this one is not used in a out-of-the-box installation of SharePoint.
n Spinner; A control used to insert a value by typing or using the arrow keys to
cycle through the values.
n SplitButton; is used as both a button and a menu (e.g. the workflow button)
n ToggleButton; A button used to toggle between an on and off state.
The only client Ribbon control that is not out of the box for the SharePoint Ribbon
is the in-Ribbon Gallery Contol. But you can create/fake this control by using a drop
down grid or with buttons. Maybe in the next release it will make the feature list.
The Ribbon is fully extensible. You can add, modify or remove controls from the
Ribbon. Even the out of the box buttons can be removed. (If you like you can even
remove the complete Ribbon.) If you have created Custom Actions in WSS 3.0, after
an update they will automatically appear on the “Custom Commands” tab of the
Ribbon.
The Out of the Box (OOB) Ribbon is heavily cached and the controls added through
non-filtered the CustomActions are cached with the OOB controls. Non Filtered
Custom Actions are always on the Ribbon and need to be registered.
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Controls added through filtered CustomActions are not cached. Filtered Custom-
Actions are controls that are pointed to specific registrationType and has a registra-
tionId assigned (e.g. 101 for a Document Library or a content type). Especially when
you have added your own security trimming you don’t want to cache the controls.
The Ribbon UI is defined in a XML file - the CMDUI.xml and contains the OOB site
wide Ribbon implementation and can be found at the location
<SharePointRoot>\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML.
The structure of the XML is shown in the listing 1.
<CommandUI>
<Ribbon ...
<Tabs ...
<Tab ...
<Groups ...
<Controls ...
<Button ...
<ContextualTabs ...
<Templates ...
<RibbonTemplates ...
<GroupTemplate ...
Listing 1: XML structure of the Global CommandUI.

The HTML that is rendered contains mainly DIVs. No TABLE-tags are used. This makes
the use of jQuery an easy task.
Add a control to the Ribbon

The Ribbon in SharePoint can be customized by using XML and ECMAScript (a
standardised script language of which JavaScript and JScript are dialects from).
Customizations to the Ribbon are configured and installed like a feature using a
Feature.xml and a Manifest.xml file.
The Manifest.xml could look like this (Listing 2):
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

<Elements xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/”>
<CustomAction Id=”Ribbon.Documents.New.NewRibbonButton”
Location=”CommandUI.Ribbon”
RegistrationId=”101”
RegistrationType=”List”
Title=”Add a Ribbon Button”>
<CommandUIExtension>
<CommandUIDefinitions>
<CommandUIDefinition
Location=”Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls. _ children”>
<Button Id=”Ribbon.Library.Actions.NewRibbonButton”
Command=”NewRibbonButtonCommand”
Image16by16=”/ _ layouts/images/demo/button16.gif”
LabelText=”My First Button”
Sequence=”25”
TemplateAlias=”o2” />
</CommandUIDefinition>
</CommandUIDefinitions>
<CommandUIHandlers>
<CommandUIHandler
Command=”NewRibbonButtonCommand”
CommandAction=”javascript:alert(‘Hello world!’);” />
</CommandUIHandlers>
</CommandUIExtension>
</CustomAction>
</Elements>
Listing 2: The manifest for Ribbon Customization.

Let’s look at some important parts of this XML.
n CustomAction attribute Id: The Id looks like this “Ribbon.Documents.New.
MyButton” it is best practice to have a naming convention like this: Ribbon.
TabName.GroupName.ControlName. This helps you to identify the location of
the control.
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n CustomAction attributes RegistrationId and RegistrationType: This tells us it’s

a filtered Control, shown when you’re in the Document Library List view (101).
Important to know here is that when you have a web part with a custom view
of the Document Library the button will not appear.
n CommandUIDefinition attribute Location: This is standard for adding controls
to the Ribbon. In this example we want to add a button. This is done by using
the same naming convention “Ribbon.Documents.New.Controls._children “.
When you want to add a group this would have been “Ribbon.Documents.
Groups._children” or when you want to add a Tab this would have been
“Ribbon.Tabs._children”.
n Button attribute Command: This must be a unique string and tells what
CommandUIHandler should be used. This handler is found in the CommandUI-
Handlers element or on the page as a Page Control.
n Button attribute Image16by16 and Image32by32: For scaling purposes you
can add a smaller version of the image. This prevents blurry pictures when the
browser scales.
n Button attribute Sequence: The sequence is the order of the controls in the
Ribbon. The sequence numbers from OOB controls is always a multiple of 10.
n Button attribute TemplateAlias: The TemlateAlias is used for styling. In the
CMDUI.xml you’ll find different Templates. These templates are referenced in
the Group definition.
<Group
Id=”Ribbon.Library.Actions”
Sequence=”50”
Command=”ActionsGroup”
Title=”$Resources:core,cui _ GrpConnect;”
....
Template=”Ribbon.Templates.Flexible2”
>
Listing 3: Group definition in CMDUI.xml.

In the template definition of Ribbon.Templates.Flexible2 you will find the behavior of
the TemplateAlias. o1 or o2 is a definition for a OverFlow. Meaning the group will be
expand when more controls are added.
Something to keep in mind is that when you have a typo for the TemplateAlias, the
control, or in our case, the button will not show on the Ribbon.
Remove a control
Removing a control from the Ribbon is easy do. Just add the CommandUIdefinition to
the location. Because the Control is not defined nothing will be shown in the Ribbon
for that particular Id. As an example: you want to remove the button “Connect to
Outlook” from the Library tab in the Actions group.

<CustomAction Id=”RemoveButton”
RegistrationType=”List”>
Location=”Ribbon.Library.Actions.ConnectToClient” />
</CustomAction>
</Elements>
Listing 4: Remove a control.
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Replace a control
Replacing a button for another button seems simular to adding a button. If you
compare listing 1 and 5 you notice that the location of the CommandUIDefinition is
different.
Instead of adding the button to the Controls._children collection, it overwrites the
“Connect to Outlook” button. (Note: Make sure the button is there! In the previous
example the button is hidden. You may need to deactivate the RemoveRibbonButton
feature first.)

<CustomAction Id=”Ribbon.Library.Actions.RelacementButton”
RegistrationType=”List”
Title=”Replace a Ribbon Button”>
Location=”Ribbon.Library.Actions.ConnectToClient”>
<Button Id=”Ribbon.Library.Actions.ReplaceRibbonButton”
Command=”ReplacedRibbonButtonCommand”
LabelText=”My Replaced Button”
TemplateAlias=”o2” />
</CommandUIDefinition>
<CommandUIHandlers>
<CommandUIHandler
Command=” ReplacedRibbonButtonCommand”
CommandAction=”javascript:alert(‘I have replaced it!’);” />
</CustomAction>
</Elements>
Listing 5: Replace a button.
Adding events to the control

The previous examples are very basic with just “hello world” alerts. Of course in
the real world you need more than that. The examples work perfectly for simple
functions. But if you would like to add more advanced functionality you will need a
different approach.
There are three ways to add ECMAScript on the page.
1. Target a delegate control on the page such as AdditionalPageHead. This could
be used when targeting a specific list for customization. When working with a
specific document library or list, the control can determine the current list and
output the ECMAScript as necessary. If you are not targeting a specific list, use
the ScriptLink method instead.
2. Put a Web Part on the page register script by using the ClientScriptManagerReg-
isterClientScriptBlock() method of the System.Web.UI.Page object or inserting it
directly into the page. This method of adding ECMAScript should be used when
the Ribbon button is related to the Web Part that emits the ECMAScript.
3. Use ScriptLink for the Location attribute on a CustomAction (declarative method)
Using ScriptLink as the Location attribute on a custom action places script on
the page at the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite level. All pages in the site will have
the script on the page. This type of customization should be used when the
ECMAScript is used on most pages within a site.
You can use the SharePoint JavaScript API to add functionality. For example show an
AJAX dialog box. In the example below we use the ScriptLink as a the Location to
enable or disable the button depending on if there is a list item selected.
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.....
<CommandUIHandlers>
<CommandUIHandler Command=” NewRibbonButtonCommand”
CommandAction=”javascript:alert(‘Helloworld!’);
EnabledScript=”javascript:enableButton();” />
</CustomAction>
<CustomAction
Id=” Ribbon.Library.Actions.MyButton.CheckEnable”
Location=”ScriptLink”
ScriptBlock=”function enableButton()
{
var IsEnabled = false;
var context = SP.ClientContext.get _ current();
var items = SP.ListOperation.Selection.getSelectedItems(context);
if (items.length > 0)
{
IsEnabled = true;
}
return IsEnabled;
}”/>
...
Listing 6: Adding ScriptBlock.
Deployment
You can deploy the customization, together with feature xml, using Windows Power-
Shell using the following commands (listing 3). Where the parameter ‘FeatureId’ is
the FeatureId in the Feature xml. You can scope the customizations to a site or to a
particular web by using the Scope attribute in the feature.xml file.
Install-SPFeature FeatureId
Enable-SPFeature FeatureId -Url http://hostheader/sitename
Listing 7: Deploying customization.

Once you’ve had added and enabled the feature the CMDUI.XML with the OOB
Ribbon definition will merge with the Custom Action(s) from the Feature(s).
First it will look for the CommandUIHandlers in the CustomAction. If it’s not there
it will look in the page for the right Script. You can add this script adding a Page
Component (PC) with the JavaScript or JScript that handles the control.
This principle is shown in figure 2.
Fig. 2: Rendering the Ribbon.

Source: SPC358.pptx - Developing with the new UI features in SP2010 - E. Olson
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Conclusion
It’s very easy to add functionality to the Ribbon. Using the Ribbon for the user inter-
action on your Custom Lists or Web Parts the GUI will stay the same for the end user.
Your customizations will be better integrated and this helps the user adopting your
functionality.
Customization of the Ribbon is difficult. The Style sheet is not pretty and it is difficult
to add your own styling.
Security should be considered as well by developing custom buttons. When you are
a visitor you can see all of the controls. If you do not have rights to functionality the
controls are grayed out. You have to add this for custom buttons as well.
Sources
MSDN - Customizing the Ribbon (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/
ee539395(office.14).aspx)
SPC09 - Developing with the new UI features in SP2010 - Elisabeth Olson
... by the way ...

If you use Metadata on your Documents or Listitems it is also possible to use Metadata as a
navigation tool. In the library- or list settings click on Metadata navigation settings and
add one or more Columns or Contenttypes to be used for navigation. After enabling you
will see in the Quick Launch that a navigation option was added.
Tip from Jan Ligtenberg APS IT-diensten; www.apsitprojecten.nl
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Visual Studio extensions or a manually build solution?

by Niels Loup
“Designing SharePoint solutions is not for me!” This is something you hear a lot from software
developers. Many software developers also believe that SharePoint requires too much mouse
clicking and that the level of software development you can do for SharePoint is insufficient. But
is this true? In this article I will guide you through the possibilities to get started quickly building
SharePoint solutions using Visual Studio. Together we will build a SharePoint solution. Further
along this article I will show you that this is very easy when using the SharePoint extensions in
Visual Studio. Of course, you can also create solutions manually. This offers you complete freedom
and flexibility, and you can decide how your SharePoint solution is structured.
First things first

I see many SharePoint developers that need to offer certain functionality to their
client open their browser early in the process and then continue to click all kinds of
options in SharePoint. Indeed, in order to supply a good solution you need to perform
quite a few mouse clicks sometimes. Basically, this is not really a bad approach if, for
instance, you want to demonstrate something to your client quickly. Or if you are
performing functional management in an existing environment. However, if you are
starting a new project you should start by considering a number of basic questions,
such as: is it a Development-Test-Acceptance-Production (DTAP) -environment and
how scalable should the solution be?
Two examples.
A client requests a SharePoint environment with a number of webparts that can read
data from various SharePoint lists. One approach might be to produce these lists in
the development or test environment by using the browser.
Example 1: How do you then transfer the work that you have done in the development
or test environment easily to the user acceptance and ultimately to the production
environment?
Basically, SharePoint is very scalable. For instance, if you need to improve performance
in an existing environment, you can easily add a web-front-end server without needing
to (re-)do difficult configurations. Suppose the developer of the client’s request in the
previous example, if you have made a webpart that reads certain application settings
from the web.config. Each web.config in each web-front-end server will now have to
include this setting.
Example 2: How can you make sure that the web.config is automatically adjusted to
the application settings required for your webpart when a new web-front-end server
is added to the farm?
The correct answer to both questions is: by setting up a project structure in Visual
Studio for your SharePoint solution. The SharePoint solution can then be deployed
simply across the SharePoint DTAP environment by using packages.
And now for real

Now you need to get started with the Visual Studio extensions. I will start by describing
the steps you need to take in order to be able to develop SharePoint solutions. Subse-
quently, I will show you how a SharePoint solution is built up and how you can easily
create a package that you can deploy across environments. Finally, I will explain why
you do not need the Visual Studio SharePoint Extensions in a production environment.
This article will conclude with the future and the new Visual Studio 2010 version in
combination with SharePoint development.
Microsoft has released the Visual Studio extensions to allow you to quickly set up Share-
Point solutions. These extensions add item templates to Visual Studio for list defini-
tions, list definitions based on content types, field controls, webparts, Modules, Root
Files, Templates, Event Receivers and List Instances. These extensions also add project
templates for team site definitions, blank site definitions, list definitions and webparts.
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The Visual Studio extensions for WSS 3.0 (VSeWSS version 1.3) can be downloaded
using the url below:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FB9D4B85-DA2A-432E-
91FB-D505199C49F6&displaylang=en
When installing VSeWSS you must be aware that a web service will be installed which
is used by Visual Studio to communicate with SharePoint. This communication is
restricted to local connections. Therefore you must add the application pool account
(where the web service is hosted) to the group administrators IIS_IUSRS, Users, WSS_
ADMIN_WPG, WSS_RESTRICTED_WPG, WSS_WPG and SQLServer2005MSSQLUser$.
During installation an installation wizard screen will remind you of it (see fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Wizard to add the appPool account to the group ‘local administrators’.
Once this is done, you must allow the user to access to the IIS metabase and other
directories used by ASP.NET. You do this by opening an administrator prompt and
entering the command:
ASPNET _ REGIIS -ga domain\user
Fig. 2: After installing the VSe a new website is created to host the web service. This
manages the communication between Visual Studio and SharePoint.
At the end you need to perform an iisreset and you will be ready to continue.
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The first steps

Now that VSeWSS has been installed, you are ready to create your first SharePoint
project in Visual Studio.
Open Visual Studio and create a new project.
By installing VSeWSS the category SharePoint will be added to the Visual Studio
project templates. As shown in figure 3, you can choose new project templates. For
now you will create a new Team Site Definition.
Fig. 3: Visual Studio New Project screen.

A site definition is a template for a site that can be used in a SharePoint environment
as the basis for a new site. In these templates you can determine for yourself how
a site should look visually. You can also define which lists, pages and other parts
should be created automatically after you make a new site in SharePoint based on
this template.
After you have created a project, the solution explorer will look like figure 4.
Fig. 4: Display of the solution explorer after creating a new

“Team Site Definition” project.
What have you just created

In fact the project is a class-library. That is why you will also see the well-known file
assemblyinfo.cs. This assembly has to be signed with a strong name key in order to
get Code Access Security policy (see note on CAS at the end of this article).
In this example it is done using TeamSiteDefinition1.snk.
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In the next step we will see the folder Site Definition. It contains two files Default.
aspx and onet.xml. Default.aspx is the standard aspx page that is loaded when a
visitor visits the site after it has been created. Onet.xml is the blueprint for the site
definition. Among others in this file tells the navigation bars to be displayed, the lists
and the aspx files to be created and the features to be activated on the site after it
has been created.
Packages and deployment

At the beginning of this article I explained that the correct way to add new function-
ality to SharePoint is by using SharePoint solutions in the form of packages. By
installing VSeWSS we have access to a number of project and item templates but
also to a number of handy tools to turn the project simply into a package that can be
deployed in the SharePoint environment.
If you right click on the project TeamSiteDefinition1 you will see the drop down menu
with a number of SharePoint commands as shown in Figure 5.
Fig. 5: Commands that can be performed in the SharePoint project.

Step 1: Package; If you perform this command, a SharePoint solution and a package
will be created for the project.
In the project folder a new sub folder “pkg” will be created. This folder is used as
an intermediate folder for packaging all artifacts from the Visual Studio project into
a SharePoint solution. When you open this folder you will see a number of files:
solution.xml and manifest.xml. These two files contain references to the various
SharePoint artifacts that will end up in the package and that need to be deployed to
the SharePoint environment. For now, I won’t discuss the structure of this folder in
detail. It would be good to browse to this folder yourself and explore the contents of
the various files and sub directories that are created here.
As mentioned, the “pkg” folder contains the content of the SharePoint solution.
The content of this folder cannot be deployed to a SharePoint environment. First
you need to create a package. You can find the package in the project’s “debug” or
“release” folder. In this case you will find a file called TeamSiteDefinition1.wsp in the
debug directory. This wsp-file is the package that can be deployed to a SharePoint
environment.
The content of the package are exactly the same as the contents of the “pkg” folder,
but now compressed using the cabinet algorithm. Is it possible to see the content of
a wsp-file for yourself? Sure, change the file extension to .cab and double click on
the file. You will now see a structure that matches the structure of the “pkg” folder
in the project folder.
Step 2: The next command, Deploy, (figure 5) deploys the package to the local
SharePoint environment. Deployment in this case means that the functionality
included in the package is made available to users.
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After the package has been deployed, you can simply create a new site in SharePoint
based on the TeamSiteDefinition1 template.
Step 3: Open the SharePoint site in a browser. Then click on Site actions -> Create
Site. Figure 6 shows the screen that will be opened. Give your your new site a name
and choose the template TeamSiteDefinition1 from the field template selection with
the tab Development. Now, when you click on “create”, your new site will be created
with all the functionality as defined in the Visual Studio project.
Fig. 6: Creating a new site.

SharePoint will create a new site based on the template you created in Visual Studio.
At this point, we still have not changed the standard Visual Studio project very
much. Now that you have seen how easy it is to start with VSeWSS to create your
own SharePoint project, you can take it to the next level by expanding the Team-
SiteDefinition1 project with lists, also created automatically with the creation of a
new site based on the template in SharePoint. Try adding some new items to the
project yourself as shown in figure 7.
Fig. 7: Adding items to a SharePoint project
Are there other ways?

Tools, such as the VSeWSS automate a lot of manual steps. You can also choose to do
all the work that VSeWSS does yourself. That way you can set up your own project
structure and add the manifest, site definitions, list definitions, content types, site
columns and all other SharePoint artifacts that you may need in your project. This
article will not explain these steps in details. However, this is an alternative with many
advantages and disadvantages.
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The big advantage of VSeWSS is that you can start building the solution you envision
quickly. You do not need a lot of knowledge of all the options of the SharePoint
solutions and how you can set them up manually. The disadvantage of the extensions
is that you are bound by the structure that is generated for you when you create a
new project or item that is based on one of the SharePoint Visual Studio templates.
The main advantage of setting up your SharePoint solution manually is that it offers
you maximum freedom on the solution structure. Often you will use a standard
approach, but you can easily add changes for a specific client or project. The disad-
vantage of manually managing your SharePoint solution is that it requires you to
have in-depth knowledge of the WSS solution framework.
SharePoint templates in the year 2010

In this article I described how the Visual Studio extensions can help software devel-
opers with little or no SharePoint experience to easily create their own SharePoint
solutions. My research is based on Visual Studio 2008 and VSeWSS 1.3.
But what will this be like after Visual Studio 2010 is released? Will a new version of the
Visual Studio extension be released as well?
No new version of VSeWSS will be released after version 1.3. Instead Visual Studio
2010 will be expanded with a large number of SharePoint project and item templates.
On the Somasegar blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/02/19/
sharepoint-tools-support-in-visual-studio.aspx) the following statement has been
published:
Visual Studio 2010 will come with a broad set of project and items templates.
You’ll be able to use these to quickly create or update SharePoint elements such
as list definitions, list instances, site definitions, workflows, event receivers,
Business Data Catalog models, and content types.
Right now the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2010 has already been released. The
Beta 2 does not include the above mentioned SharePoint templates. Writing this, we
unfortunately do not have a preview available for you.
1
Code Access Security (CAS) is part of the .NET framework. CAS prevents code from executing un-authorized opera-
tions and allows administrators to configure policies. When the CLR loads an assembly it will be interrogated to
identify the code group which the assembly belongs to. A code group has a permission set (one or more authoriza-
tions). When an assembly executes a certain action, it will also execute a code-access-demand which will cause the
CLR to traverse through the call stack and check which permissions have been granted to the assembly. Code groups
are collections of permissions sets and are set/managed by the administrator.
... by the way ...

TIP1: The SharePoint 2010 developer dashboard gives a breakdown of the request and
response cycle with timings for each operation. This means the dashboard can be used
to track down why a certain page in your environment is slow. Even if the page doesn’t
contains any custom code.
TIP 2: In SharePoint 2010 profile pictures will no longer be stored in the user’s My Site. They will
now be stored in a central library on the My Site Host site collection (http://<mysitehost>/
UserPhotos/).
Tips from Mirjam van Olst (Macaw) http://sharepointchick.com
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Working With Data in SharePoint Designer 2010

by Laura Rogers
The data view web part has been referred to by some, as the Swiss Army Knife of SharePoint. This
flexible web part can be used to display and aggregate data from various sources. Organizations
often have data dispersed on multiple platforms other than SharePoint. With the functionality
leveraged by data view web parts, there is the potential for a singular repository accessible by the
end users. Now the information and data of interest can all be displayed in one place – SharePoint.
Data View Web Parts

SharePoint Designer is the tool used to create data view web parts. In this article,
the data view web part and its evolution will be introduced. The new interface and
functionalities will also be covered.
Why create a data view web part in the first place? There are several reasons:
1. The data lives in another location besides a SharePoint list or library, such as a
database, an XML file, or a web service.
2. The data exists within a SharePoint list or library, but the view needs to be
customized further. Once the limitations of regular list views in the browser
have been reached, customizations such as formatting can be taken to the next
level.
3. The data exists in SharePoint, but not within the default list or library fields.
Some data is only accessible through SharePoint’s built in web service layer,
which can interact with servers, sites, and lists.
History
The data view web part has been around since SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and WSS
2.0. Back in 2003, Microsoft Office FrontPage was used to create data view web parts.
With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0, FrontPage has evolved
into SharePoint Designer. In regards to SharePoint 2010, which is currently in its Beta
release, SharePoint Designer 2010 will be used for the creation of data view web
parts. SharePoint Designer 2010 is not compatible with older versions of SharePoint.
Figure 1 displays the new user interface.
Fig. 1: SharePoint Designer 2010 User Interface.
Step-By-Step
Data view web parts can easily be created by non-developers, and the three steps are:
select a data source, pick the fields to display, and then customize the way the data
is viewed. These steps will be covered below and the new SharePoint Designer 2010
capabilities will be highlighted.
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Security Note: At the web application and site collection levels, there are
SharePoint Designer Settings, in which to lock down the use of this software.
Administrators have the option to disable the use of SharePoint Designer, or
just certain aspects of it such as customizing master pages.
First, a data source is selected. The Data Source Library is the main interface for
accessing and managing data sources within SharePoint sites. By default, all of the
lists and libraries on the current site are listed as data sources. Once the SharePoint site
has been opened in SharePoint Designer 2010, follow these steps to add additional
data sources:
Click Data Sources in the left pane. This screen will display the Data Sources tab in the
ribbon at the top of the screen, shown in Figure 2.
Fig. 2: List of Data Source Types.
On this screen, new data sources can be added, using the buttons in the ribbon. New
data source types include Linked Data Sources, Database Connections, SOAP Service
Connections, REST Service Connections, and XML File Connections. Note that a Linked
Data Source is unique in that it merges or joins two or more data sources to create a
new one.
Once the target data source exists in the list of the site’s data sources, the data view
web part can be inserted on a page. Open an .ASPX web part page in SharePoint
Designer, and put the cursor in the desired web part zone. In this example, the web
part page is called “ExampleDVWP.aspx”. The Policies document library will be used,
which contains all of the corporate policies. Click the Insert tab on the ribbon, and
click Data View to choose a data source. See Figure 3.
Best Practice: Create a blank web part page on which to develop the data
view web part. When complete, save the web part (see Figure 9), which
can then be inserted in any location in the site collection. Using this practice
helps avoid having a work in progress on production pages.
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Fig. 3: Insert a Data View.

The Policies document library is selected, which automatically inserts the library on
the page, with some default columns displayed. When the data view web part is
clicked on (selected), the contextual ribbon shows a List View Tools section. The Data
Source Details pane can be displayed by clicking Data Source Details on the Options
tab. This pane displays fields that exist within the current data source.
The Ribbon
The new ribbon interface is everywhere in Microsoft products now, and SharePoint
Designer 2010 is no exception. “Ribbon” is the terminology that describes the panel
at the top of the screen, which contains a set of contextual toolbars.
Fig. 4: The Options Tab.

In Figure 4, the List View Tools are displayed in the ribbon, which includes four tabs.
These tabs are Options, Design, Web Part, and Table. All of the functionality of Share-
Point 2007 is still here. One of the main differences between older versions, and
SharePoint Designer 2010, is that settings are easier to find. When tasks need to be
accomplished in this product, there are now less menus and dialogue boxes to click
through.
The Options Tab

The Options tab contains some of the familiar data view concepts, such as filtering,
sorting, grouping, paging, parameters, web part connections, and the ability
to add and remove columns. There are also a few new items here that are worth
mentioning.
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Filtering
Narrow down the list of items returned, by specifying a subset of data.
Sorting
Determine the order in which the data is to be displayed
Grouping
Set groupings on data, according to data in one or more fields. These groupings
can be collapsed or expanded.
Paging
Set the number of list items to be returned per page of data.
Parameters
Specify parameters coming from different sources such as cookies, form values
and query string variables.
Formula Insert a formula into the data view web part, such the calculation of
the sum of the data in two fields.
Web Part Connections
Connect web parts to each other to pass filter data or parameters.
Add/Remove Columns
Add or remove data fields to the view.
Conditional Formatting
When a selection has been made in the data view web part, the conditional
formatting drop-down box will display options as to which content needs to be
formatted. Once the content is chosen such as row, column, or selection, then the
user is prompted to create the condition (rule). Conditional formatting is not a
new feature, but the new interface makes this feature more readily accessible.
Inline Editing
When the Inline Editing toggle button is pressed, a new (seemingly empty)
column will appear as the leftmost column in the data view web part. It won’t
be apparent within this design view, but when the page is saved and previewed,
the inline editing button will be displayed. When this new button is clicked, the
fields in the row become editable directly in the list view. Note that the inline
editing capability is also available when creating regular list views in SharePoint
2010, and is not limited to the data view web part.
Show List Item Menu
In the browser view of a document library, the list item menu associated with
each record has typically been available on the Title field of each SharePoint list.
In SharePoint Designer 2010, we now have the ability to choose the field(s) on
which to display this menu. The options for this configuration are shown in
Figure 5.
Fig. 5: Field-Leve Common Tasks.

Asynchronous Update
There is a new check box called asynchronous update. With this option enabled,
the data becomes dynamic, and the Refresh Button and Refresh Interval options
also become available. If the Refresh button is checked, an icon will be placed at
the top right of the web part, for end users who choose to refresh the displayed
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data. Refresh Interval allows automatic data refresh at the interval you specify,
as shown in Figure 6.
Fig. 6: Asynchronous Update Options.
Folder Scope
If there are folders in the data source, choose whether to display them, or
display all list items without consideration for the folder structure.
The Design Tab

This tab contains options related to the design and formatting of the data view web
part as a whole. This tab is displayed in Figure 7. Again, most of the options on this
screen are not new, they are just easier to get to, with less clicks.
Fig. 7: The Design Tab.
Show/Hide
The ability to choose whether sample data is displayed is useful when working
with a list that has no data displayed. The totals row check box will insert a row
at the top of the data table, displaying a field that totals each column.
View Style
Choose the visual style of the data that is displayed. Examples are displayed on
each button. Note that when changing the view style, the currently displayed
list columns will be reset. It is a best practice to select a view style toward the
beginning of the data view design, so that customizations will not be lost.
Toolbar
This is a web part setting. Choose to display the full web part toolbar, a summary
toolbar, or none. An example of the summary toolbar is displayed in Figure 10.
Actions
Insert data view controls on the form, or customize the form’s XSLT code.
Preview
The preview section contains options to preview how the data will be displayed
under various circumstances, such as determining how many sample items are
displayed in the list during web part creation in SharePoint Designer. Some new
items to note are the last three in Figure 8.
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Fig. 8: Data View Preview Options.

‘No Matching Items’ Template
By default, when there are no items in the list or filtered view, the following
text is displayed: “There are no items to show in this view of the “ListName” list.
To create a new item, click “New” above.” In a document library, the default
text is: There are no items to show in this view of the “LibraryName” document
library. To create a new item, click “New” or “Upload” above.
This ‘No Matching Items’ template allows for customization of the page that is
displayed when there are no items in the view. Not only edit the displayed text,
but the page itself, which could include images, links, or any free-form customi-
zations.
Edit Template
Only available when inline editing has been enabled on the Options Tab. The
Edit Template is the page that end users see when inline-editing a list item.
Insert Template
Only available when inline editing has been enabled on the Options Tab. This is
the form interface when end users are using inline editing to insert a new row
of data in the list.
The Web Part Tab

The web part tab consists of web part properties from the familiar web part toolpane
in the browser, and is displayed in Figure 9.
Fig. 9: The Web Part Tab.

Web part options are illustrated using the following screenshot of a web part in the
browser. See Figure 10.
Fig. 10: Anatomy of a Web Part.
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Web Part Title

The web part title can be configured. By default, this displayed title is the name
of the data source, but can be changed. For example, the title of a filtered library
view of items modified by me, can be changed to My Modified Documents. This
makes the title more descriptive of the items contained in the current view. Use
the Properties button to elicit the web part properties screen, which contains
more settings.
Appearance
The chrome is the frame of the web part. The chrome type is an option to display
the web part title, a border around the web part, neither, or both. The chrome
state options are normal or minimized. Liken this setting to minimizing and
maximizing windows in the operating system. If a web part is set as minimized
by default, end users must click a button to maximize it in order to view the
contents.
Size
By default, a web part is automatically sized to the part of the page in which it
is added. Alternately, specific dimensions may be hard-coded.
Connections
Add new web part connections, and if web part connections already exist, click
to “Manage Connections”.
Allow
This section contains options for actions that will be available for end users to
take, when it comes to modifying the web part.
Save Web Part

The ability to save a web part from within SharePoint Designer is new. When
saving a web part “To File”, there is simply a prompt to pick a location on the
hard drive in which to save this .WEBPART file. When saving a web part directly
to the site’s web part gallery, there is a prompt to configure the web part’s
name and description for the gallery listing. See Figure 11, which displays the
prompt that is shown when saving a data view web part of a document library
called “Policies” to the site gallery.
Fig. 11: Save Web Part to Site Gallery.
After clicking OK to save the web part to the gallery, there is yet another prompt:
Do you want this web part to always show List data from the current Web site http://
site.yourcompany.com? If you select No, the Web Part will show data from the list at
the path Policies, relative to the site in which it is used.
What does this mean? Here are the two options available when saving the web part
to the gallery:
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1. Show list data from the current web site. This means that this exact list of
the same “Policy” documents will be displayed when the web part is inserted
anywhere in the site collection. In this case, there is only one “Policy” document
library, and changes will be propagated to all instances of this web part.
2. Show data at the list relative to the site in which it is used. In this situation, there
could be various departmental sites, each with their own “Policies” document
library. Inserting this “Policies” web part would apply the current web part
view to the “Policies” document library for that department.
The Table Tab

This tab consists of options for formatting the data table. See Figure 12.
Fig. 12: The Table Tab.
These table options are the same familiar options that exist within other Microsoft
Office products, like Excel and Word.
Other New Functionalities

Besides the new data view web part tabs in SharePoint Designer 2010, there are some
other new functionalities to take advantage of, which will be highlighted in the next
sections.
Field Level
When right clicking on any field in the data view web part, there are several options.
Tasks such as creating hyperlinks can be accomplished quicker in SharePoint Designer
2010, meaning fewer clicks. As shown in Figure 13, when Format item as is selected,
and Hyperlink to, there are options to create links to the form’s New Item, Edit Form,
or Display Form pages.
Fig. 13: Field-Level Formatting.
Quick Tag Editor

The Quick Tag Editor is a new option for quickly editing the code for just one element
on the web part page. Select an item on the page, and on SharePoint Designer’s
Home tab, click Quick Tag Editor, which is shown in Figure 14. The snippet of code
related to the current selection is shown, with drop-down options to Edit Tag, Wrap
Tag, or Insert HTML.
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Fig. 14: Quick Tag Editor.
Skewer Click
Use the new Skewer Click button to select an element on the page, or its parents or
children. For example, click the Skewer click button on the Home tab, and then click
on a cell in a table on the web page. This will elicit a drop-down type menu that
contains a selectable list of the elements on the page.
Conclusion
This has been a brief, high level overview of some new functionalities with regards
to creating data view web parts in SharePoint 2010, using SharePoint Designer 2010.
Several new functionalities have been highlighted, along with basic instructions to
get started with these web parts. The data view web part allows for advanced user
interfaces to back end data to be built quickly and easily, with the ability to avoid
custom programming.
When building custom solutions in SharePoint, data view web parts are very useful
when appropriate. When the limitations of a regular list view have been reached, the
data view web part is the next step. Once the limitations of a data view web part have
been reached, custom programming may be required.
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Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010

by Mirjam van Olst
SharePoint 2010 introduces several new concepts, one of which is Sandboxed Solutions.
This article will explain about the what, the why, the when and the how.
What?
Sandboxed solutions (.wsp files) are packages of custom SharePoint artifacts that can
be uploaded to and deployed from a Solutions Gallery at the site collection level by
site collection administrators. The sandboxed solution is completely isolated to the
site collection it is deployed to. This also means that the functionality in the solution
can only be used within that single site collection.
Sandboxed solutions are completely isolated to the site collection they are
deployed to.
To enable completely isolating the sandboxed solution to the site collection a couple
of special measures have to be taken.
n Sandboxed solutions are deployed to the database. This means that no files
within the sandboxed solution will ever touch the file system of the server. Even
dlls, xml files and aspx pages will be deployed to the database.
n Sandboxed solutions run within a special process, the Sandbox Worker Process
(SPUCWorkerProcess.exe). The sandbox worker process makes sure the artifacts
from the solution can be used as though they were deployed to the server
itself and it will enforce the limits of a Code Access Security (CAS) policy on
the contents of the solution. The following permissions will be granted to the
solution by the CAS policy:
w SharePointPermission.ObjectModel
w SecurityPermission.Execution
w AspNetHostingPermission.Level = Minimal
n When using sandboxed solutions a farm administrator can assign “resource
points” to a site collection. The default quota is 300 points per day and points
are calculated based on 14 different metrics. These metrics were chosen because
they impact the health and stability of the server. The use of resources that have
a higher impact on the server will cost you more points. The metrics are called
ResourceMeasures and since they can’t really be normalized each of them has a
ResourcesPerPoint property.
Resource Measure Resources Per Point
AbnormalProcessTerminationCount 1 termination
CPUExecutionTime 3600 seconds
CriticalExceptionCount 10 exceptions
InvocationCount 100 invocations
PercentProcessorTime 85
ProcessCPUCycles 100000000000 cycles
ProcessHandleCount 10000 handles
ProcessIOBytes 0
ProcessThreadCount 10000
ProcessVirtualBytes 0
SharePointDatabaseQueryCount 20 queries
SharePointDatabaseQueryTime 120 seconds
UnhandledExceptionCount 50 exceptions
UnresponsiveprocessCount 2 processes
Table 1: Resource measures and resources per point.
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When the sandboxed solutions in a site collection use more than the assigned amount
of points in a single day the sandboxed solutions in that particular site collection
are shut down by SharePoint. This means that end users won’t be able to use the
functionality of any sandboxed solution in that specific site collection until the
resource points are reset. The quota is per day, so after 24 hours the site collection
will be unlocked and sandboxed solutions in that site collection can be used again.
One badly designed sandboxed solution will cause the other sandboxed solutions in
that same site collection to become unavailable to the end user. After 24 hours the
number of used resource points are reset, so sandboxed solutions in the site collection
will start working again, but it will be important to filter out the bad solution and
change or remove that, to prevent it from shutting down all sandboxed solutions in
the site collection again.
Because a sandboxed solution is completely isolated to its site collection only a subset
of the Microsoft.SharePoint object model can be used. Only objects that operate
within the current site collection are available to you, when you are building a
sandboxed solution. The list below is an overview of objects from the SharePoint
object model that can and can’t be used in a sandboxed solution.
n Microsoft.SharePoint Except
w SPSite constructor
w SPSecurity object
w SPWorkItem and SPWorkItemCollection objects
w SPAlertCollection.Add method
w SPAlertTemplateCollection.Add method
w SPUserSolution and SPUserSolutionCollection objects
w SPTransformUtilities
n Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation
n Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities Except
w SPUtility.SendEmail method
w SPUtility.GetNTFullNameandEmailFromLogin method
n Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow
n Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages Except
w SPWebPartManager object
w SPWebPartConnection object
w WebPartZone object
w WebPartPage object
w ToolPane object
w ToolPart object
Why?
As a developer you can deploy your own solution, you don’t have to wait till the
farm administrator can deploy your solution, which makes you more agile.
-
As a farm administrator you can be certain that whatever a developer creates
and deploys, it can never run under full trust and it can never bring you entire
farm down.
In SharePoint 2007 the SharePoint Solution framework was introduced. This framework
makes it possible to package and deploy solutions for SharePoint in a consistent and
managed way.
Solutions are deployed by farm and server administrators and artifacts from that
solution can be deployed to the file system of the SharePoint server and are available
within the entire farm.
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These solutions, that are called Farm solutions in SharePoint 2010, often run under
full trust, because either they are deployed to the GAC, or the trustLevel of the web
application is set to Full. With sandboxed solutions the solution can be deployed by a
site collection administrator and it can never run under full trust.
This has two major advantages:
n From the developer’s perspective, you can deploy your own solution, assuming
you are a site collection administrator. You don’t have to wait till the farm
administrator takes the time to review and deploy your solution. This makes
you more agile.
n From a farm administrator’s perspective you can be certain that whatever the
developer creates and deploys, it can never run under full trust and it can never
bring your entire farm down.
An obvious disadvantage for developers is that you can’t use the full object model and
that there are certain types of solutions that can’t be built as a sandboxed solution.
The development of sandboxed solutions has been triggered by SharePoint Online,
by far the largest SharePoint implementation at the moment. SharePoint Online is
a hosted SharePoint environment that is being used by many companies, both large
and small ones. Depending on the type of service they chose, SharePoint sites for
several companies might be hosted on a single farm. This means that there are serious
consequences to deploying custom solutions to that farm. Some functionality that
can be deployed using solutions might be available to all customers on that farm and
that might not be desirable at all. Also, if a solution was developed in a poor fashion
it might bring the entire farm down, which will affect all customers on that server.
Because of this, if you are using shared hosting on SharePoint Online 2007, you are
not allowed to deploy custom solutions.
With SharePoint 2010 you can deploy your sandboxed solutions to your own site
collection, which will give you the flexibility you need and the farm administrator the
stable environment he wants.
When?
If you are developing a solution for SharePoint 2010, your first choice should
be to create a sandboxed solution.
So when would you choose to use sandboxed solutions and when would you use
could old farm solutions?
If you are developing a solution for SharePoint 2010, by default you should create a
sandboxed solution. It’s like when you are creating a new solution using Visual Studio
2010. The default choice, when selecting the type of solution, is sandboxed solution.
Some of the capabilities and elements that you can create using sandboxed
solutions are:
n List definitions
n List instances
n Onet.xml
n WebTemplate Feature (you can’t use Webtemp.xml in sandboxed solutions)
n Content Types/Fields
n Navigation
n Module/files
n Feature callouts
n Web Parts derived from System.Web.UI.WebControls.Webparts.WebPart
n Event receivers (on items, lists and webs)
n Custom Actions
n Workflows
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Things that are definitely not available in sandboxed solutions are:

n Custom Action groups
n HideCustomAction element
n Content Type Binding
n Web Application and Farm scoped Features
n Timer Jobs
n Visual Web Parts
So if you want to use one of these capabilities you need to build a farm solution.
Also, if you are developing a solution that should be available in all (or a lot of) site
collections you are probably better of using a farm solution. After all if you want to
make a sandboxed solution available in more than one site collection you will have to
deploy it to every site collection you want to make it available in. When you build a
farm solution you only have to deploy it once and it will be available throughout the
web application or farm.
How?
After all this talk it’s time for some action. We are going to create a site template
using an onet.xml file and a WebTemplate feature.
But before we can start the actual development we need to make sure that our
environment is ready for running sandboxed solutions.
First of all the sandboxed solution service needs to be activated. To do this you browse
to the Central Administration web site and you click “System Settings” and select
“Manage services on server”. Now find the “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation User
Code Service” and start it.
Fig. 1: Activate the user code service.

If you are running SharePoint 2010 on a Domain Controller you need to run the
PowerShell script displayed in figure 2 to add an ACL Access Rule to enable Sandboxed
Solutions. If you don’t add this Access Rule starting the User Code Service won’t start
all the necessary processes.
Fig. 2: PowerShell script to add an ACL Access Rule.

Second, go to “Application Management” and select “Configure quotas and locks”.
Select the site collection you want to deploy the sandboxed solution to and check
whether the “User Solutions Resource Quota” to the value you want it to have. Unfor-
tunately there are no best practices available at the moment, so it’s probably best to
leave it at the default and lower it when you notice your environment resources get
drained by your sandboxed solutions, or make it higher when you have got plenty of
environment resources and your sandboxed solutions are starving.
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Fig. 3: Set the user solutions resource quota.
Now that we’ve set up our environment correctly we are ready to start building a
sandboxed solution.
n Start by opening up Visual Studio 2010

n Create a new “Empty SharePoint Project” and give it an appropriate name, for
instance “SandBoxedSiteTemplate”.
Fig. 4: Create an empty SharePoint project.
n Fill in the URL of a SharePoint site on the machine you’re working on and leave
the trust level at “Deploy as a sandboxed solution”.
n You’ve now got an empty Visual Studio SharePoint project. This project by
default contains a Features and a Package section and a key.snk key.
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Fig.5: Empty SharePoint project.
n Add a new Module to the solution and name it “AlternateTeamSite”.
Fig. 6: Add a new module to the SharePoint project.
n You should now be able to see your module in Visual Studio’s solution explorer.
Visual Studio also created a feature for you, that by default is called Feature1.
w Rename this feature to “SiteTemplateFeature”.
w Double-clicking on SiteTemplateFeature opens the feature designer up.
w Change the title of your feature to “Fancy Site Template Feature” and add a
description for the feature, for instance, “This is a fancy site template feature
that is deployed as a sandboxed solution and therefore only available in this
site collection.”
w Also change the scope of the feature to “Site”. If you forget to change the
scope before you deploy the feature for the first time you will have to create
a new feature, as changing the scope of an existing feature is not allowed
and won’t work.
You can see in the feature designer that Visual Studio already added the Alternate-
TeamSite module to the feature for you.
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2010 Special
Fig.7: The new feature designer in Visual Studio 2010.
n Open the Elements.xml file from our AlternateTeamSite module. As you can
see Visual Studio helped you out here again. It added a Module element that
references the Sample.txt file that is added to a new module by default. If you
delete the sample file, or add new files they will be added to the Elements.xml
file automatically.
w We are now going to add a new WebTemplate element to the Elements file
and we will place this above the Module element.
w The “Name” needs to be the same as the name of your module, or your
deployment will fail.
w The “Title” and the “Description” are shown in the user interface when a user
wants to use your site template to create a new site, so choose something a
user will understand.
w Because we will base our site template on the default Team Site template,
we fill in a BaseTemplateID of 1 and BaseConfigurationID of 0. The BaseTem-
plateName is STS.
w If you want to you can fill in a DisplayCategory, I’ve given it the very appro-
priate name “Fancy Sites”.
Fig. 8: Elements.xml file with WebTemplate element.
n Next step is to add a new XML file to the AlternateTeamSite module. Name the
XML file “onet.xml”.
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Fig. 9: Add new onet.xml file to the project.

n Find the standard Team Site onet.xml in the folder “C:\Program Files\Common
Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\Site Templates\sts\
xml” and copy the contents of the file to your own onet.xml file. Of course
creating a site template that is an exact copy of the standard team site site
definition isn’t really useful, but that doesn’t matter
n Delete the Sample.txt file from the module.
n In Visual Studio, go to View and select Output. This will show the Output
window
n Right-click on the solution name and select “Deploy Solution”.
n In the Output window you can see the steps that are performed while the
solution is being deployed and this shows us some interesting things:
w You can see that no IIS application pool recycle is done, because we are
deploying a sandboxed solution.
When you deploy a farm solution SharePoint will always do an IIS application
pool reset, which will cause your site to be unavailable to the end users for
at least a couple of seconds. In most production environments this is not
acceptable, which means that you can’t just deploy your solution when it’s
ready, but you need to wait for a dedicated maintenance window.
w Visual Studio not only adds and deploys the solution on your SharePoint site,
it also activates the features. If you don’t like this behavior you can change it
in the deployment configurations of the SharePoint section of the solution
properties.
w The last line of the output window should state “Deploy: 1 succeeded, 0
failed, 0 skipped”.
Fig. 10: Output window with output from sandboxed solution deployment.
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2010 Special
Your sandboxed solution is now deployed and ready for use!

We can check whether it all went according to plan by opening up a couple of pages
in the SharePoint site.
n Go to the SharePoint site that you deployed your solution to.

n Click “Site Actions” and selected “Site Settings”.
n Choose “Solutions” under “Galleries”. You should be able to see your solution
here and the solution’s status should be activated.
Fig. 11: Solution Gallery containing an activated sandboxed solution.
n Next go back to site settings and select “Site Collection Features” under “Site
Collection Administration”. You can see the Active feature “Fancy Site Template
Feature” here.
Fig. 12: Overview of Site Collection Features with Fancy Site Template Feature.
n To create a new site using the template click on “Site Actions” and select “New
Site”. If you used your own display category that should be visible on the left
side and selecting it will show you the “Fancy site template” with our fancy
description on the right. Also on the right you can fill in a name and a URL to
create a new site based on this template. Click “Create” to actually create the
site.
Fig. 13: Create a new site based on the fancy site template.
Since we didn’t change anything in the onet.xml of the standard team site definition
your site should look just like a standard team site. If you succeeded in performing all
these steps you have now officially created your first sandboxed solution AND your
first WebTemplate feature.
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2010 Special
Fig. 14: Site created using the new fancy site template.
So...
So you now know that a sandboxed solution is a SharePoint solution that operates
within the boundaries of a site collection. You know that sandboxed solutions were
created to make it possible to develop SharePoint solution in a more agile way,
without making compromises to the stability of your environment. You know that
you choose to use a sandboxed solution over a farm solution whenever possible and
as long as your solution is targeted at the use in a single site collection, or in very few
site collections.
The Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010 have improved vastly compared to
the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for WSS. The tools will help you to setup your
solution, to create SharePoint artifacts and to package and deploy your solution.
0 110 0 0 10 0 110 0 0 110 110 0 10 0 0 110 0 10 10 110 0 110 0 110 0 1110 110 1 0 0 0 0 110 10 0 10 110 1 0 110 10 110 110 110 0 0 110 110 10 110 111 0 0 110 11110 1110 0 0 0 0 1110 0 0 10 1110 0 10 0 1110 0 110 1110 10 0 1110 10 10 1110 110 0 1
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0 10 0 1110 10 10 1110 110 0 1110 111 0 11110 0 0 0 11110 0 0 11110 10 0 110 0 0 0 10 110 0 0 10 0 110 0 0 110 110 0 10 0 0 1
"We have declared war on the Document File Server"

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0 0 110 1 0 110 110 110 0 0 110 110 10 110 1110 0 110 11110 1 110 0 0 0 0 111 0 0 0 10 1110 0 10 0 1110 0 110 1110 10 0 1110 10 10 1110 110 0 1110 1110 1111
0 0 11110 10 0 110 0 0 0 10 110 0 0 10 0 110 0 0 110 110 0 10 0 0 110 0 10 10 110 0 110 0 110 0 1110 110 10 0 0 0 110 1
www.CiiGrid.com
10 0 110 10 110 110 110 0 0 110 1 10 10 110 1110 0 110 11110 1110 0 0 0 0 111 0 0 0 10 1110 0 1 0 0 1110 0 110 1110 10 0 1110 10 10 1110 110 0 1110 1110 11110 0 0 0 11110 0 0 1 1110 10 0 110 0 0 0 10 110 0 0 10 0 110 0 0 110 11
0 110 0 110 0 110 0 1110 110 10 0 0 0 110 10 0 10 110 10 10 0 110 10 110 110 110 0 0 110 110 10 110 11 10 0 110 11110 1110 0 0 0 0 1110 0 0 10 1110 0 10 0 1110 0 110 1110 10 0 1110 10 10 1110 110 0 1110 1110 11110 0 0 0 11110 0 0 11110 10 0 110 0 0 0 10 110 0 0 10 0 110 0 0 110 110 0 10 0 0 110 0 10 10 110 0 110 0 110 0 1110 110 10 0 0 0 110 10 0 10 110 10 10 0 110 10 110 110 110 0 0 110 110 10 110 1110 0 110 11110 1110 0 0 0 0 1110 0 0 10 1110 0 10 0 1110 0 110 1110 10 0 1110 10 10 1110
a new and easy way to

classify and restructure
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1 01 0 011 0 0 0 01 011 0 0 01 0 011 0 0 011 011 0 01 0 0 011 0 01 01 011 0 0 11 0 011 0 0111 0111 0 0 0 011 01 0 01 011 01 01 0 0 11 01 011 01 1 0
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Visit CiiGrid.Com/SDN to receive a 25% discount

011 011 1 0 011 01111 0111 0 0 0 0 0111 0 0 01 0111 0 01 0 0111 0 011 0111 01 0 0111 01 01 0111 011 0 0111 0111 01111 0 0 0 01111 0 0 01111 01 0
1 01 01 0 011 01 011 011 011 0 0 011 011 01 011 0111 0
0 0 01111 0 0 01111 01 0 011 0 0 0 01 011 0 0 01 0 011 0 0 011 011 0 01 0 0 011 0 01 01 011 0 011 0 011 0 0111 011 01 0 0 0 011 01 0 01 011 01 01 0 011 01 011 0
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( valid until February 28th, 2010 )
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2010 Special
New ECM features in SharePoint 2010

Robert van Son
From the first release of SharePoint, it has always been its philosophy to provide a platform for
unstructured content. A lot of organisations had (and some still have) their content stored all over
the enterprise. Documents are stored on file shares, in very inflexible folder structures. Customer
information is stored in a CRM system and employee data in a HR system and their knowledge
profiles are usually stored in their own brains. SharePoint is the platform that brings all of this
information together in one place. Content can be combined and found through simple but very
powerful search features. All of this can be accessed by just using a browser, making the content
available anytime, anywhere.
Since the launch of SharePoint in late 2000, the feature to manage all of the content
has evolved into an extremely powerful platform. SharePoint 2010 will add its bit
to those features presenting the user with a great new set of Enterprise Content
Management (ECM) functionality. Obviously, Microsoft has put a lot of effort in
making SharePoint better for large enterprises. Additionally smaller deployments of
SharePoint 2010 benefit from these new features. This article provides an overview of
some key developments for end users who will need to work on ECM with SharePoint
2010.
Managed Content Types

When you take a look at all of the information in your own organisation, you will
recognize different types of content. On a portal, you might want to publish news
articles; in a document library, there can be user manuals and documents describing
a company policy. Besides the actual content like text and dates, the same types of
content will contain the same elements. A news article, for instance, will have a title,
a body text, a publishing date and an expiration date. To make sure all news articles
are created in the same way in SharePoint, you can create a content type called Ńews
Article´. This content type will define which fields are necessary to create a news article
and set the rules for these elements (for instance, it should always have a title and the
publishing date must be a valid date). All news articles created based on this content
type will inherit these rules. One can define the metadata that must be entered when
storing the document to a SharePoint library for different sorts of documents, such as
a policy document. You can enforce the end user to describe what type of policy it is
and who its owner is. Therefore setting up a good design for these content types is
crucial when implementing SharePoint. However content types will change over time
and therefore it becomes necessary to have good management support. SharePoint
2010 offers a new feature called ‘Managed Content Types’.
In MOSS 2007, content types are restricted to the site collection in which they are
created. SharePoint 2010 offers the ability to manage the content types outside
of the borders of a site collection making them available to other site collections
and even other web applications. Content types can be created within a master site
collection (defined as a hub) and from there published around the enterprise. For
instance, when a new policy is defined that instructs that documents need to have
an expiration date, the appropriate content type at the hub must be changed first;
only then can it be republished. All consumers of the hub that have subscribed to
this content type will be notified. By accepting the changes, its own content type is
updated with the adjustments.
When a consuming site uses a published content type from the hub, it is available
read-only. Consequently, no changes can be made to the content type at the
consuming site. It can, of course, create its own content types based on the published
one, extending it with its own metadata. When a content type is unpublished at the
hub, it becomes editable at the consuming site.
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2010 Special
Managed Metadata
Metadata is “data-about-data”. It provides extra information about the content that
is stored on your SharePoint portal. Metadata can be divided into two categories
Ćontextual Metadata´ and ´Descriptive Metadata´. Contextual Metadata are fields
that are automatically assigned to the content. Examples are Ćreated By´ and Ćreated
on´. Descriptive Metadata are fields that add additional information to the content.
A contract can have an expiry date and a policy document can have a department to
which it applies. Metadata is used to structure, identify or sort the content. In Share-
Point, you can also assign actions based on metadata such as workflows to handle
content.
In MOSS 2007 metadata was handled locally in either content types or at a list or library
level. Many organisations require the use of centrally administered and approved
metadata. Site columns can be used for this, but if metadata is needed for more than
one site column, the metadata needs to be re-entered in a new site column. One of
the most revolutionary ECM features in SharePoint 2010 is managed metadata. This
provides the site administrator with the ability to centrally define a taxonomy. This
taxonomy becomes available throughout the entire SharePoint environment. You can
create and manage the taxonomy with the ´Term store management´ tool in the site
setting of SharePoint 2010. Here you can create a central taxonomy. The terms can
be grouped in a tree-like structure. The top level contains the metadata service.
Followed by, at the first level, term groups. Below a group, a tree structure can be
created containing term sets and terms. Terms will be used to tag the content items.
This can be seen in the following figure (figure 1):
Fig. 1: Overview of a Taxonomy tree structure.
Using managed metadata with content

Now content types can contain a column based on the managed metadata. When
creating a column of this type, you can specify which metadata is valid for this content
type. You can specify which of the available metadata you want to use for this site,
or if you want to use just a group or terms set within the taxonomy. When a content
item based on this content type is used, all terms are available from the selected
level down. When using managed metadata with a column of a content type, you
can allow the user to add terms -when an item is created or edited by allowing ‘Fill-
in’ choices. The ‘Submission Policy’ of the linked parent term set need to be set
to ‘Open’ to enable this feature. In information management terms, the store used
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2010 Special
for the managed metadata turns from a taxonomy to a folksonomy. End-users are
allowed to add terms themselves, enabling a more organic growth of the taxonomy.
This is a very flexible taxonomy, and not all organisations will think their end users
will be able to use this correctly. Of course, you can use both options in the same
content type by adding two metadata columns. With some search customisations,
the centrally managed metadata field can be weighed as more important to manage
search results.
When adding a content item which requires the use of managed metadata, the user
can start typing a term in the input box. The SharePoint Fluent UI provides a type-
ahead feature which suggests certain terms.
Fig. 2: Type-ahead suggestions of managed keywords.

The user can also use the item picker to browse through the metadata structure.
When fill-in choices are allowed, the user can add an item from the term picker.
Fig. 3: Using the term picker to add keywords.

The managed metadata terms are also available in the Office client applications. This
can be done in the document information panel in the Office Backstage view.
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2010 Special
Fig. 4: Adding keywords directly from Word 2010.
Other managed metadata features

n Synonyms can be added to terms. When a synonym is used by the end user in
the managed metadata input box, SharePoint will automatically suggest the
right term.
n Terms can be copied, moved, reused (copied to another location, but as a link
to the original term), depreciated (making it unavailable for new assignments)
and merged. In case of merged terms, the type-ahead function will automati-
cally suggest the term with which the entered term was merged.
n Multi language. Every term can be translated to different languages. Share-
Point 2010 will use the translation corresponding with the language that is
used for the site.
Document management
As said before, document management has come a long way since the launch of the
first SharePoint platform. Previously, documents were stored on files servers, making
them very hard to find and hardly accessible from outside the office premises. Giving
access to some of the documents to an outsider was nearly impossible. An alternative
was implementing a Document Management System (DMS). They were (and some
still are) really good at one thing: managing the documents. But documents are just
a part of all the enterprise content and a DMS usually works pretty much on its own.
SharePoint provides a platform where you can manage your documents and bring
them in context with the rest of your content, inside or outside SharePoint. Already
MOSS 2007 was good at managing documents; SharePoint 2010 takes document
management to an entirely different level by adding numerous new features to the
platform. Now file shares will be obsolete and your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will
be reduced by migrating your DMS to SharePoint.
Large libraries
In SharePoint 2010, document libraries are much more scalable. They can now hold up
to as much as 10 million + items without reducing performance. As a result, both the
number of stored documents and the size of the individual documents are not bound
to restrictions. This is particularly convenient in libraries that store media items.
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2010 Special
Office Web Apps

With Office Web Apps, documents can be edited within the browser. No client instal-
lation of Microsoft Office is needed. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are
available online. The versions are not full featured, but provide all the functionalities
that are needed to do most of the editing work.
Collaborative editing in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint en OneNote 2010
With Microsoft Office 2010, it is now possible to edit a document with more than
one author simultaneously. When a paragraph is changed by one author, it will be
locked for editing for the other authors. The user can see which paragraph in the
document is being changed and who is making the changes. The user can update his
or her opened version with the changes that are being made by the other author(s).
Imagine a quotation that needs input from an account manager, a project manager
and a consultant. All three can work on the same document at the same time without
needing to create their own local copy and manually merging all the versions later.
Content Organizer
In most of the cases, more document libraries need to be created. Retention settings
for HR documents will differ from project documents and access rights for project
documents will differ from department documents. This would mean that an author
will need to know in which library his or her work needs to be stored. This is not
always the case. Fortunately, SharePoint 2010 provides a great feature eliminating
this problem. The ‘Content Organizer’ can deliver the content to the right library. A
‘Drop Off Library’ can be created in which all users can save their documents. Rules
can be defined on this ‘Drop Off Library’ which will manage the distribution of the
documents (figure 5). For instance, when a metadata name contains the name of a
project, the document will be automatically move to the project document library.
Fig. 5: Adding rules to organize your documents.

Manage documents with Information Management Policy Settings
Per content type that is assigned to a document library, the following management
settings can be applied:
Policy settings:
This is a statement which will be shown to the users when an item of the appli-
cable content type is being created. When a quotation is being added to the
library, the user can be pointed at the new general conditions that need to be
handed to the customer;
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2010 Special
Retention:
When enabling retention on a content type, rules can be defined to automati-
cally deal with documents in time. For instance, one can remove all minor
versions of a document one year after it has been created. After two years, all
major versions can be deleted and finally the document itself can be deleted
or moved to another location after three years. This feature will be useful
especially with records management which will be described further on;
Auditing:
When auditing is enabled, all actions on the item will be logged. Reports on
audit trails will become available showing who viewed, edited, moved, copied,
etc. the document;
Barcodes and Labels:
These features are also available in MOSS2007 and remains unchanged in
SharePoint 2010.
Fig. 6: Information Management Policy Settings.
Document sets
Document sets enhance the use of document libraries. For example, a company might
have a library containing all company policies. Within this library, you might want
to separate the financial reporting policies from the IT policies. Of course, you can
store documents in different folders within a document library to keep those policy
documents together. However, the problem with folders is that they are not very
flexible. If you create a new policy group, governance, it must contain documents
from both IT policies and financial reporting policies. This means moving documents
around from one folder to the next. In this case, it would have been better when
all documents were given the right metadata and with the appropriate views in the
library. However, what if you need to download an entire set of documents or what
if you need to change a retention policy on that set? The solution is ´Document Sets´.
This is actually a content type based on the folder content type. It is easy to create
a new content type called´Governance´ with policies based on a document set and
extend the content type with the right metadata. When the content type is created,
the metadata of the document set will apply on all documents in the set. The set can
then be downloaded as a ZIP file, or specific retention rules can be defined on the
particular set. It is also possible to start a workflow on an entire document set.
Validation of metadata
Validation based on a combination of metadata fields is also a new feature in Share-
Point 2010. For instance, a contract ending date can never be earlier than its starting
date. SharePoint can compare those metadata fields and reject changes when they
are made. This ensures the metadata given to an item is - valid and you can rely on
the quality of the data.
Document ID’s
Documents normally have a name when they are saved to a document library. Those
are not necessarily unique and it is hard to enforce the end user to enter a unique
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2010 Special
name. SharePoint 2010 offers a feature to assign unique IDs to each document that is
saved to a document library. When the feature ´Document ID Service´ is enabled on a
site level, unique IDs can be created through combining metadata fields with a pre-
or postfix, e.g. an autonumber.
Document library overview with the document center

A document center comes with a overview page of the documents and libraries within
it. Basically, it is a welcome page displaying information with the newest documents
and documents edited by the user. This overview is a regular SharePoint page and can
be changed. For example, webparts can be added and so on.
Connect to Office
When you are working on a project, you probably will need to work on documents
stored on the project team site on a frequent basis. Each document library offers the
ability to connect to Office. When you use this feature, the library becomes available
from the Office client applications making the library easily accessible.
Records management
When you start with document management, legal or other governance require-
ments might pop up. Tax law tells you to retain invoices for several years and there
are other requirements for documents regarding research data of a pharmaceutical
company. In those cases, you will need to implement records management. This means
that rules need to be defined that apply to certain types of documents describing
retention, user rights and audit trails.
In MOSS 2007, records management is made possible through the record center.
A document becomes a record when it is stored in a record center. In SharePoint
2010, records management features are available in every document library. This is
beneficial, because in spite of the fact that rules apply that a document may not be
edited anymore, it might still be needed in collaborative processes. You can save the
document in the document library in which it was created, or leave it in place and
still use it, despite the fact that it is a record. A record center can be created and you
are able to move records to that center at any time. Retention policies can be used
to automate that process. You can also declare items that are added to a document
library as a record either automatically or manually.
Retention rules can also go the other way. Certain laws may tell you to destroy a
prospective employee’s resumé after six months after he or she applied for a job at
your company. This is easy to define as described before. The user can set up a rule
that automatically destroys items in a resume library after six months.
Discover and hold

Assume you find yourself in a situation (in which you do not want to be:) where a
client has filed a law suit against your company. You will need to build a case in your
defence, but you know a lot of people worked on the customer’s projects, therefore
several team sites might retain important information. The last thing you want is for
users to edit or delete the information from these SharePoint sites. SharePoint 2010
offers the ability search for information regarding this customer ( SharePoint search)
and block this information from the search results. In fact, all information is declared
as a record at once and becomes read-only to all users. The content regarding the
block can either stay at its original place or be moved to a specific library.
... by the way ...

Installing SharePoint with a local account: http://bit.ly/5jGtci
SharePoint 2010 default logging is set to 1TB, make sure to ‘shrink’ it down a bit on your
development machines.
Tip from Albert Jan Schot (TamTam) http://blogs.tamtam.nl/appie
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2010 Special
Creating new Visual Experiences with

Visio Services
by Toni Frankola
SharePoint 2010 introduces a new set of very exciting services, and one of the most exciting ones
are brand new Visio Services. Visio Services is a server component that works with Visio 2010
client and allows you to easily publish, share and collaborate on Visio diagrams. The approach
is exactly the same as for Excel services - you simply save or upload your Visio diagram to your
Document Library and SharePoint takes care of the rest. When a user clicks on a diagram file, it
will be rendered as a web page using Silverlight. If you do not have Silverlight installed, it would
render as a PNG image allowing you to see diagrams from any web browser.
Fig. 1: Sample Visio Computer Network Diagram displayed in Visio Web Accces Web
Part. Silverlight component allows you to zoom-in and focus to individual elements.
Picture would render as PNG for users without Silverlight installed.
Key scenarios for Visio Services

There are a number of scenarios in which you could use Visio Services. As previously
mentioned, you could use them to distribute your Visio diagrams to other members
of your network, or to your public facing web site. Visitors do not need Visio client or
plugins to preview or explore your drawing.
Fig. 2: Defining custom item display with data bar, relevant to free hard disk capacity.
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2010 Special
Benefits of Visio services do not stop at just drawing sharing. You can also integrate
each drawing with backend data sources. For each element in your drawing you
can define a backend system and retrieve relevant data from it. For example, in our
network diagram shown above we could connect to a backend database or custom
data source (e.g. SCOM 2007 monitoring database) and visualize the health of your
SharePoint farm.
Fig. 3: Visio Web Access displays custom visualization for each server based on capacity
retrieved from a custom data source.
There are number of benefits of this approach: Visio diagrams are very easy to create,
end users can easily create drawings with Visio. Integration with backend data
services is also easy to understand and one can create visually appealing Drawings
with colorful indicators without too much work. On top of everything you can easily
publish these to your colleagues or to your web site.
Backend integration supports SQL, Excel, Access, SharePoint lists, other ODBC or
OLEDB sources. You can also use existing Office connections. If your backend system
requires authentication, you can leverage built in authentication mechanisms like
Kerberos.
Once you have a data connection embedded in your Visio drawing you can configure
the drawing to refresh allowing you to have a live dashboard of e.g. traffic infor-
mation or server health monitoring.
Interaction
Visio Web Services allow you to do much more than just rendering Visio files as Silver-
light or PNG images. With Visio Web Access Web part you can easily display Visio
images on any SharePoint page and connect it to other web parts. Let’s say you have
an office floor plan created as Visio drawing. You want to publish everything on the
web, and allow users to select an office they want to rent and highlight it in the main
drawing.
You can see sample integration on a picture below. Visio Web Access is located in the
main zone, and SharePoint list in the right zone. When User selects an office on right
it is highlighted on the main web part.
Fig. 4: This figure shows two integrated web parts. In the main zone, Visio Web Access
shows a Visio diagram. Visio drawing shapes (rooms) are highlighted as user clicks on
elements on the list on the right.
These connections are easy to define. In Visio drawing you need to define a name
for each element you want to highlight, then create a list of Visio elements in Share-
Point (in my case this is a list of offices) and type drawing elements names in one of
columns of your list. Use standard Web Part Connections menu to connect the two
web parts.
On top of built-in web part connections you can also use JavaScript Mash-up APIs to
integrate with your existing solutions.
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2010 Special
Visio Services and Workflow visualization

You can use Visio services for an additional, very exacting visualization - Workflow.
Back in SharePoint 2007, business users had a lot of problems with tracking any Share-
Point Workflows. Now they can easily navigate through Visio Web Access, zoom in to
Workflow activities and track Workflows progress as Visio Flowchart. End users will love
this feature as it is much easier to follow a diagram than read Workflow history lists.
Fig. 5: This figure shows simple 2 level workflow visualization. Users can easily zoom
on more complex workflows and easily review workflow flow and history.
Visio integration with SharePoint workflows does not stop there, there is more! Now
business users can use Visio client to design workflow flowcharts of their processes
using special SharePoint Workflow Visio stencil. This stencil contains default SharePoint
workflows actions and allows you to easily drag and drop them on Workflow area.
Fig. 6: SharePoint Diagram in Visio.

Diagrams created in Visio can be easily exported and imported to SharePoint
Designer 2010 for further configuration and adjustments. The other way around is
also supported: you can export an existing SharePoint Designer Workflow to Visio, so
that a business user can review it and update it to match company’s policies.
When drawing Workflows in Visio, business users can only design the flow, all other
configuration is still being performed in SharePoint Designer 2010.
Fig. 7: Configuring Workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010.
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2010 Special
Editions
Diagram designers must have Visio 2010 client to create diagrams that can be published
as web pages. You also need Enterprise CAL for SharePoint to enable Visio Services.
Conclusion
Visio Services introduces some very interesting and powerful features. It is hard to
select one feature of Visio Services as the coolest one. Visio Services empower your
end users to easily publish nice looking and power diagrams, connect them to backend
LOB systems and easily share them with other users. Business users and analysts will
enjoy the ability to design business process as Visio diagrams and publish them as
SharePoint workflows.
How to guides - Visio Services

by Toni Frankola
Enabling Visio Services

Visio Services are part of SharePoint Enterprise feature set. Before you can use it,
you need to enable Enterprise features on Site Collection level. To enable Enterprise
features go to Site Settings > Site Collection Features and activate “SharePoint Server
Enterprise Site Collection features”.
Fig. 8: Make sure you have enabled Enterprise features before deploying your Visio
Drawings.
By enabling enterprise features SharePoint will now render Visio Drawings in your
browser. You will also be able to use Visio Web Access Web Part. This web part is
available in the Office Clients Applications category.
Fig. 9: Visio Web Access Web Part is available in the Office Client Applications category.
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2010 Special
Publishing Visio files to your SharePoint Sites

The easiest way to publish your Visio drawing to SharePoint is to use Visio client or
simply upload a drawing to the desired document library.(Please note: in case you
cannot save from Visio to SharePoint in Beta2, save your drawing as Web Drawing,
and the upload it to the desired Document Library).
Fig. 10: Save to SharePoint is available from Visio Client.
About DIWUG
DIWUG is a platform for people that are interested in information worker solutions.
Several times a year, DIWUG organizes events where members can meet, share
knowledge and see interesting presentations in an informal setting.
DIWUG is a non-profit organization, which is supported from the information worker

community. Its goal is to activate the Dutch information worker community to:
n Encourage knowledge sharing between members and organizations regarding

Information Worker Solutions;
n Enlarge knowledge of participants by attending presentations;
n Provide a networking environment.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Marianne van Wanrooij; marianne.vanwanrooij@sdn.nl
Mirjam van Olst; mirjam.vanolst@sdn.nl
http://www.diwug.nl
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2010 Special
... by the way ...

Out of the box SharePoint 2010 support Ratings for libraries and list. But by default they are
disabled. Go to your library- or list settings and choose Rating settings. Click on yes and
you can make use of Ratings. The column Rating can even be used in the Content Query
Webpart, nice feature!
A tip from Jan Ligtenberg, (APS IT-diensten), www.apsitdiensten.nl
Working with Visio Drawings

In a document library Visio drawing is displayed as all other documents. Document
context menu allows you to open file as a web page or in Visio client. By default, if a
user clicks on filename it will open in browser.
Fig. 11: Item context menu allows you to open file in Web Browsers or Edit in Visio.
Fig. 12: Visio Drawing rendered in Firefox via Silverlight.
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Link your Visio Shapes with External data

Integration of your shapes with backend systems is defined from Visio client.
Integration features are available under Data ribbon. To define a connection, click
on “Link Data to Shapes” button. A new dialog will open, allowing you to select a
number of connection types you can use.
Fig. 13: Configuring Data Connection in Visio.
With a data connection in place you can configure Graphic for each shape. Configu-
ration is very similar to conditional formatting options of Excel 2007. The following
figure displays a rule that changes icon in the icon set according to CPU value. Each
shape in Visio has a set of predefined data fields, but you can add your custom to
match your business need.
Fig. 14: Configuring Data Graphics for selected shape.
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Fig. 15: Defining Shape graphics.
Building interactive Visio Drawings

If you plan to build interactive drawings one of the most important shape attributes
is "Shape name". The easiest way to view the name and change it is via Developer
ribbon. (To enable Developer ribbon go to Visio Options > Customize Ribbon). Select
a shape whose name you want to change and then click "Shape name" button in the
Developer toolbar. Change the name or remember the existing one to build inter-
active diagrams.
Fig. 16: Shape Name option is available on the Developer ribbon.

Use to change the name of your shapes.
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Connect web parts to create interactivity

You can create interactive Visio Services applications by using two web parts: Visio
Web Access and regular List View web part. Simple application is built on top of a
custom list (with all the shape names) and Visio Web Access Web Part. Add both as
web parts on a web part page and then configure a connection between the two.
When a user clicks on a small arrows icon, next to the list item, corresponding shape
in connected Visio drawing will be highlighted.
Fig. 17: To configure connection between the two web parts go to

Connection > Send Row of Data to > [Your Visio Web Access Web Part Name].
Fig. 18: This dialog allows you to configure mapping between Provider (your list) and
Consumer (Visio drawing).
Creating Workflows with Visio

Visio 2010 comes with a new template for designing Workflows. To create a Share-
Point workflow go to New > Flowcharts and then select "Microsoft SharePoint
Workflow".
Fig. 19: Visio 2010 introduces a new template “Microsoft SharePoint Workflow”
Activities on this template are same as activities in SharePoint Designer.
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Fig. 20: Visio 2010 SharePoint Workflow Actions.

When designing workflows in Visio you need to make sure your workflow has Start
and End Terminator as show on figure below.
Fig. 21: Each SharePoint workflow designed in Visio

must have Start and End Terminator.
Your workflow drawing must also fulfill certain rules (e.g. all shapes must be connected
etc.). Before exporting workflow from Visio you can use Check diagram button to
verify your model is correct.
Fig. 22: Process Ribbon contains commands to verify and

import/export your workflows.
When you are designing workflows in Visio, the model is not SharePoint aware. You
can design the flow but you will still have to use SharePoint Designer 2010 to configure
lists, users etc. you want to use. Use Export button to Export the workflow model.
... by the way ...

The biographies of all authors are grouped together in order of appearance on the pages 103,
104 and 105.
61
9.000
professionals work together
on innovative Microsoft projects
Join
Working for Avanade means being part of a global network of IT
professionals and working on interesting projects for large clients.
These projects are very diverse and in addition to having SharePoint at
their core, consist of many other technologies and products. Avanade
consultants specialize in the Microsoft technology platform and receive
diverse training opportunities to develop themselves further.
Do you want to work on a

professional IT career?
Please find more information at
www.avanade.nl.
Or contact us
at +31 36 547 51 07.
2010 Special
A SharePoint User eXperience

by Sandra de Ridder
The great variety of features, possibilities and information within SharePoint portals make it hard
to provide customers with the right user experience. Slight changes and, for example, the use of
Silverlight can give the user’s experience a big boost. This article gives you some tips and tricks on
how you can improve the user experience of a SharePoint collaboration portal.
What is User eXperience?

In short, UX is understanding what people do and how we can make it better. Or,
according to the Nielsen Norman Group:
User experience is more than just user interface design: it encompasses all
aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its
products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet
the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity
and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True
user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or
providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience
in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of
multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial
design, and interface design.
Know your users
You are not the user, neither is your boss or client. It is tempting to design for the
person making the buying decision but they are usually not the person that will be
ultimately using the application. Managers don’t always understand the details of
how work really gets done. Make sure to talk to the people that will be using the
product, not just their manager.
Fig. 1: You are not the user, neither is your boss or client.
A great way to get to know your users is making personas. User Personas help us
define who is using the site and who we want to use the site. You create a person-
ality based on ages, culture, usage patterns and communities. That helps you to do
research to help support who these users are and what they will do in the portal.
The goal is to develop a precise description of your user(s) and what he wishes to
accomplish. A good person will enable you to build a product that solves a real
problem and that people love.
Needs
Be careful to capture the end goals rather than goals that are a means to an end.
A good test to decide if you have identified an end goal is to continually ask the
question “why is this important?”. If there is an answer, you have not identified the
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root goal yet. Some examples of “fake” goals are: save memory, save keystrokes,
speed up data entry, be easy to learn, use cool technology or features. They may want
to speed up data entry because they want to get out of the office on time and get
home to their family. Or they may want to use cool technology because they want to
be seen as the cool gadget guy on the cutting edge.
ShareWhat?
A website should be intuitive, easy to use and help you reach your goal quickly. If you
have to explain how to use it, your design failed. No different for SharePoint, but
SharePoint as a collaboration portal can scare people. They find it difficult, it changes
the way they do their job. The job they have been doing for fifteen years in a certain
(paper)way. And SharePoint has all these new features they aren’t familiar with.
Keep It Simple and Stupid

The KISS principle states that design simplicity should be a key goal and that un-
necessary complexity should be avoided. Help users get started quickly. Instead of
overwhelming the user with detail and features, offer an overview that is easy to
grasp and, most importantly, easy to start with. News, HRM information, simple forms,
people search /contact information and team sites with announcements, a calendar,
tasks and sharing documents are a great way for a user to learn more about Share-
Point. Organize a workshop or training for the different user groups and give them
some time to play and get used to this (basic) features. Provide good help documen-
tation, the wiki feature is a great way to set up a help an FAQ library.
Why should I use it?

Intranet or collaboration platforms are experienced as portals with information that
are nice to read besides your work. Users see them when they start up their computer
or browser and immediately close it or surf to another website. Make it personal.
Start with a core business feature like digital mailroom or working schedules. Make
sure it becomes the portal where they can find all the information and applications
they need in order to get their work done.
Fig. 2: Start with a core business feature like digital mailroom or working schedules.
Usability Testing and Evaluation

What application or tool is the company using now? Evaluate the client’s current
application and evaluate opportunities for improvements. Not only by interviewing
users, but also by letting them use the current application. Let them get involved
in the process from the beginning of the project and let them test the application
during the implementation.
Keep on evaluating your application by using statistics. Why are users leaving this
page or closing the application when they are on this page. Is there something wrong
with the content or is the button on the wrong spot, were the users expecting other
information on this page or did they expect to navigate to another page?
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An effective website is providing the user the correct information and answers, has a
logic structure, doesn’t waste resources and asks less time management. A satisfied
user finds what he needs, achieves his goal, enjoys the experience, promotes your
application to his colleagues and comes back again.
Avoid solutioneering
Design by very definition, is the act of solving problems. In order for anything to
be designed well, you must first identify the problem we are trying to solve and
the goals we are trying to reach. Promote questions before answers. What is the
problem at hand and what solutions can resolve that problem? Keep asking before
giving an answer or solution. Don’t forget that the client often speaks a different
(not so technical) language. Offer a variety of solutions.
Fig. 3: Avoid Solutioneering.
Form Follows function

The basic rule for any design is “Form follows function.” If an object has to perform a
certain function, its design must support that function to the fullest extent possible.
This goes for industrial design and even more for Web design. Silverlight and Flash
are tools that can add experience to your application and allow people to embrace
the tool or service in a closer interaction. But always keep the user and his goals in
mind. If the use of Silverlight or flash becomes a goal in itself, instead of a means to
an end, the website will not work.
Content design
79% of users scan the page instead of reading word-for-word. On any page with text,
make sure most of your best design efforts account for making that text scanable,
clickable, readable and understandable. Stay close to the standards. Use underscore
for links, heading to highlight important sections, avoid long text blocks and long
sentences.
Less words, less web parts. On the average SharePoint team site all the lists and
libraries are cramped up on the start page “to get a good overview of the content”.
This is an overkill of information. An alternative is to put only the most important
information on the start page and provide links to the other content.
Ask yourself: How easy is it for users to accomplish their tasks on first visit? Once users
are familiar with the application, how quickly can they perform these tasks? When
users return after a period of not using the interface, how easily can they reestablish
proficiency? How many errors do users make, how severe are the errors, and how
easily can they recover?
On the average SharePoint TeamSite all the lists and libraries are cramped up
on the start page.
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Accessibility
Clients keep the business goals in mind, but often put their own needs over their
users. Stay close to the web standards and look in what context the application will
be used. With the possibilities of mobile internet a new User eXperience for the web
is introduced.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is 80% of the usability. Get to know your audience. Design
an efficient navigational structure with clear navigation, in a logical structure, with
easy-to-follow site hierarchy. Most of the intranet environments have an information
architecture that follows the structure of the organization they are implemented in.
This is quite strange.
For example: When you build a website for a clothing company you don’t even think
about providing the user a navigational structure with sales department, financial
department, the warehouse, etc. A more effective and likely structure would be
women, men and children’s collection. It’s the same with a collaboration platform,
keep the process in mind. Keep focused on what the user is trying to achieve and
what for the user is the most reasonable and effective way to achieve it.
Another challenge is preventing the user getting lost in the different site collections.
For a developer it is clear what the difference is between them and how to navigate
from one site collection to another. Going to his MySite can leave the user completely
confused and lost in your application. All of a sudden the navigation has changed and
it’s hard to go back to the main site. Using different colors for different site collec-
tions and putting a “home” button on every page in every site collection can help
the user to navigate through the application and provides him the ability always to
go back to the main page.
Looking for something?

A user can search for people, documents, or other items on the portal site by typing
words in the search box located under the navigation bar. With scopes you can give
the user more control over search results. They can easily choose if they want to search
through all the content, or for example documents only. Custom search scopes feature
is only available with SharePoint Standard or better. A Silverlight People finder can
make searching for a colleague a better user experience. By filtering immediately you
can easily search for people on only the first character of their name. This is standard
in SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010
One of the biggest changes of SharePoint 2010 is in the User eXperience area. The
editor is improved and features the famous “ribbon” from Office 2007 and 2010.
Modifying text on a page is as easy as in Word. This includes adding and modifying
images. SharePoint automatically ensures that everything is in the right place.
The use of Silverlight in SharePoint has also been improved. There are even standard
features in SharePoint using Silverlight. Streaming video is so good, it’s almost unreal.
The video plays without additional drivers and codecs installed and runs smoothly. Even
when choosing a new starting point. Is the SharePoint User eXperience changing???
Conclusion
User eXperience is often underestimated in the implementation of an application.
That is a shame because the success of your application depends on a good user
experience. Certainly a SharePoint application. With relatively simple modifications
and getting the user involved from the beginning of the implementation process and
testing of the application, the changes on succes are a lot bigger. 2010 is a special
(SharePoint) year. The expectations are high, especially for User eXperience. I hope
that with the introduction of SP2010the love hate relationship between SharePoint
and UX can be converted into a good marriage. But even in a good marriage, there
often is tension and a (small) fight:)
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Introduction to the Business Connectivity Services

by Nick Swan
Business Connectivity Services will make your users and management happy, and will allow you
to leave work on time and spend more time at home with your family. A bold claim – let’s see
how SharePoint 2010 and the BCS can do this.
Once upon a time

A long time ago all information within a business was stored on paper! All personal
information, financial data, product and ordering records – myth has it that some of
these organizations still exist! 
Many other places however have moved into the digital age and have this type of
information stored in databases. The problem is different databases have been imple-
mented over time to store this data in meaning in your organization you may have a
HR application, Finance package, and product data all living in different systems. This
could mean a separate User Interface and login account for each system, with it being
very difficult to share data across these systems. Training users on all these different
systems can also be a headache.
SharePoint 2003 introduced many organizations to the idea of moving away from file
shares for storing documents and better practices for collaboration. Users are happy
working away in Word and Excel and saving documents to their sites – but why do
they have to keep moving away to these separate systems to get access to product
information from the product database? And how can they re-use customer details
that are stored in Oracle when they want to tag an invoice with the customer it refers
to as meta data?
SharePoint 2007 enters the ring

Thankfully Microsoft saw this problem and realized that SharePoint could be the
central integration piece that brings all of these separate data systems together.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Enterprise Edition came with a
component called the Business Data Catalog. This allowed you to define your backend
data sources to SharePoint and then re-use that business data with many out of the
box features:
Fig. 1: Architecture of the BDC.
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Web Parts
Five BDC web parts came with MOSS 2007 that allowed your users to create dashboards
with the business data they were interested in. The data could be filtered, related
together to create associations and action’d upon by linking to actionable urls.
Business Data Column

The Business Data Column allowed you to re-use your business data as meta data
against documents and SharePoint list items. Rather than having to re-type all your
customers in by hand against invoices you were saving into SharePoint you could pick
them from a list presented through the Business Data Catalog.
Search
The Business Data Catalog opened up all of your systems to being crawled and indexed
by SharePoint Search, meaning if your users searched for a Product they could get
information not just from within SharePoint being returned, but also directly from
your Product catalog database. SharePoint all of a sudden became the single place to
search all of your systems within your organization.
User Profiles
If you had a separate HR system containing information you’d like to publish to
peoples SharePoint profiles (think phone numbers, job descriptions) you could join
Active Directory properties and your HR system through the Business Data Catalog to
complete the user profiles.
BDC Object Model

All of the data sources you defined within the Business Data Catalog were available
through a single API. This meant your developers only had to learn one programming
method for accessing many different types of data sources – a huge boost in developer
productivity.
So life was good – SharePoint was a place that people could now go to for collab-
oration, and also for viewing and interacting with the data from other business
systems. But you may have noticed from the five uses of the BDC that the Business
Data Catalog was a read only solution. You could get your data to display in Share-
Point quite easily, but if you wanted to write back – well things were a little trickier.
You did have some options:
InfoPath Forms
Utilize InfoPath Forms Server, build some browseable forms, and a web service layer
to write back to your system
BDC Actions
It was possible to link back to your original system user interface through URL actions
and parameter passing
Custom Web Parts

With the tool we created called BDC Meta Man, it was possible to generate Share-
Point web parts to write back to your LOB system through SharePoint.
So there were some solutions, but each took some work to get things up and running
– it wasn’t a write-back story ‘out of the box’.
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Also to let SharePoint know about the system you wished to integrate with you had
to create an application definition file that contain information such as connection
settings and how to execute methods on the backend to return data. These files
could easily become thousands of lines of XML. Initially it required people to open
up Notepad and craft this XML themselves until third party vendors came along with
solutions to automatically generate them. While these tools were good, many people
expected Microsoft to offer more assistance to do this.
Enter Business Connectivity Services

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the new name for Business Data Catalog in
SharePoint 2010. Not only does it have a new name, it also has a many new features,
wider availability and also better tooling to help you configure it.
Fig. 2: Business Connectivity Services.
External Content Types

An External Content Type (ECT) is representation of your business objects within the
BCS. Some examples of ECTs could be Customers, Orders or Products. In SharePoint
2007 we referred to these as Entities, but for 2010 they are now known as External
Content Types. If you are using the beta version of SharePoint 2010 you’ll find the
odd occurrence where the terms Entity and External Content Type are both used
interchangeably.
Features available for your data

The Business Connectivity Service has a number of new features for you to use once
you have declared the backend data you wish to use within SharePoint.
Write-back
The BCS is now a full write back solution. As long as you define the correct methods
within your External Content Type you can use the out of the box user interface to
write back through to your LOB system.
External Lists
An external list allows you to display data from your BCS data source in what looks to
the user as a normal SharePoint list. They can filter, view, edit and even add new list
items if the External Content Type supports it and these changes will be written back
to the backend data source. To the user they think they are working with a SharePoint
list, but they are actually talking straight to the back end system.
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Fig. 3: View of an external list.
Developers can also access the external lists through the standard SPList object model
meaning you can now write solutions that can use both standard SharePoint lists and
external lists.
Dot Net Assembly Data Source

With the BCS we can now connect directly to a .NET assembly as a data source. This
can help create incredibly powerful scenarios where you can use C# code to access
data from multiple data sources, mash it up and present it through the BCS. Imagine
you had Customer information spread across SQL Server and Oracle. Using C# code
you can get the data and push it through to the BCS as a single Customer External
Content Type.
Taking BCS data offline

You are now able to take your BCS data offline to use in Office Clients such as Outlook,
Word and SharePoint Workspaces. When the ‘Take Offline’ button is pressed the
BCS data is copied down to a local SQL Server CE cache to be able to be used in a
disconnected manner. Data can even be added to or edited, with the changes being
written back to the SQL Server CE cache, and then sync’d up when reconnected to
the network.
Office Business Types

Taking your data offline in Outlook is pretty cool, but if it displayed contact infor-
mation in a datagrid that’d be pretty rubbish! Well thankfully you can map your
External Content Type to common Office Data Types such as Calendars, Tasks and
Contacts. This means if you connect Outlook through to the External Content Type
the data will appear to display in the relevant format ie dates on an Outlook calendar
or contacts as Outlook business cards. Again this data can be edited or added to from
within Outlook.
Server and Client APIs

As we’ve already seen the business data catalog had an API that could be used on the
SharePoint server to develop custom solutions. This API exists and has been improved
on the server for BCS, but as data can be taken offline on client machines, there
is now also a client side BCS object model. This is really powerful if you want to
create Office Business Applications that can work with your data when the user is in
a disconnected situation.
Still Around
So those are a few highlights of the new functionality available in the Business
Connectivity Services, but don’t forget we still have the Business Data column, BCS
Search and the ability to add BCS data to user profiles.
Another big announcement however is the availability of the BCS to SharePoint
Foundation.
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Wider availability
As we’ve mentioned the BDC was only part of MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition. Business
Connectivity Services is now part of SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server
2010! In SharePoint Foundation you get access to External Lists, Business Data Column
and the BCS API.
With SharePoint Server you get the added ability of BCS Web Parts, Search, and User
Profile assistance.
Opening up BCS to SharePoint Foundation is huge in my opinion – Microsoft has
opened up SharePoint as an integration platform for companies who are both big
and small.
Tooling available
With the Business Data Catalog you had to rely on third party tools such as BDC Meta
Man to help you integrate your backend data system with SharePoint 2007. BCS comes
with tooling support from SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio 2010 Professional.
SharePoint Designer
SharePoint Designer will allow you to connect to MS SQL Server, WCF and an already
pre-deployed Dot Net Assembly Connector. This tool is great if you want to hook
something up with the BCS quickly such as an External Content Type based directly
from a SQL Server table. SharePoint Designer allows you to get working with the BCS
very quickly and easily without having to understand too much of the BCS model
behind the scenes.
Fig. 4: Manage settings of external content types.
But if you want to do anything complex with your data such as connect to an ODBC
data source, or mash data together to present as a single ECT then Visual Studio 2010
is the route you will want to take.
Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint

As you are writing code in Visual Studio you can get your data from where ever you
want, and perform many different manipulations on it before presenting it to the
BCS. If you are using VS 2010 you will need to have a deeper understanding of the
underlying BCS model as you need to manually create methods, type descriptors and
parts that help explain to the BCS how your Dot Net Assembly Connector will present
data to it. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 BCS projects is the F5 deployment.
Your BCS model and code will get packaged up and deployed directly from Share-
Point, with Visual Studio also attaching to the correct process so you can debug and
step your code as the BCS is executing it.
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Third Party Solutions for taking the BCS further

Microsoft often presents SharePoint as being the platform for you to build applica-
tions on top of. You can expect many vendors to see the BCS functionality that is
available both in terms of SharePoint and the tooling and extend it to make it even
more powerful.
Summary
So going back to our original statement about BCS.
Making your users and management happy – with BCS able to write back and take
data offline your users and management will be able to make much better use of
their Business Data. Your users really can stay in SharePoint and Office now to work
with data that is stored in an external system.
Give you more free time? – the tooling for BCS will make it much easier for you to
integrate and setup. This could take weeks with the Business Data Catalog, but with
the BCS it is much improved – allowing you to leave work on time and do the activities
you love!
The SharePoint team has made a big investment in Business Connectivity Services
for SharePoint 2010 after seeing great adoption of the Business Data Catalog in
SharePoint 2007. The features and functionality have been greatly improved, as has
the tooling and general availability of BCS as an integration platform with the core
technology now available in SharePoint Foundation. We are really excited about the
integration opportunities that the BCS will bring for companies and can’t wait to see
that solutions that are developed and deployed.
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SharePoint 2010 Client Object Models

by Ton Stegeman
SharePoint 2010 offers a lot of new features that are interesting for developers. One of the areas of
improvement is the introduction of new SharePoint object models. The next version of the platform
will offer three new object models, client object models. These APIs can be used to create client
applications for SharePoint in a different way. In SharePoint 2007, these applications were created
using the web services, WebDAV or the RPC protocols. Although it could be done, this was not an
easy task, and it certainly is completely different from programming using the server object model.
Three New API’s

SharePoint Foundation 2010 (previously called WSS) will ship with three new object
models:
.NET Managed
Use this API to create managed .NET client applications (.NET framework 3.5
and higher).
Silverlight
This managed object model can be used to create Silverlight applications that
use SharePoint data and objects. (Silverlight 2 and newer versions).
ECMAScript
API to call SharePoint directly from javascript.
These three APIs are a subset of the SharePoint 2010 Foundation server API. The
majority of the properties and methods of the site collection and all lower objects in
the SharePoint hierarchy are available. This is very powerful, because it makes building
client applications for SharePoint easier and more in sync with building server appli-
cations. All object models are now pretty similar and provide a consistent system to
interact with SharePoint. It also enhances the options to build client applications for
hosted SharePoint environments (like SharePoint Online). These SharePoint sites were
difficult to interact with, because the hosting company did not allow you to run your
server side code in SharePoint 2007.
Programming by using these object models is very similar to server side programming,
but there are some significant differences. This article shows samples of each of the
new APIs. Please note: these samples were created using an early beta of the software.
It is possible that these samples will not work in the final version of SharePoint. These
samples do not include exception handling, to make them as compact as possible.
.NET Managed Object Model

To use the .NET Managed API, the Visual Studio Project needs a reference to two
assemblies; Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.
dll. These can be found in ´<SharePoint Root>\ISAPI´ on the SharePoint server.
<SharePoint Root> is the new name for the folder ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\
Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14’. The application installer needs to deploy
these two assemblies to the client machines. The following samples show code
snippets of a Windows Forms application that provisions a number of artifacts in a
plain SharePoint team site:
n List Companies.
n Lookup site column to the list Companies.
n Content type Contact that uses this site column.
n Association of the new content type to the Contacts list.
First thing to do is to check whether or not the list Companies already exists. Code
sample 1 shows the code how to do this. Just like in the server object model, the
SharePoint context is used. Instantiate a new ClientContext object using the site
URL as parameter for the constructor. The property Web of this context object is the
client equivalent of the server SPWeb object. This Web object has a property called
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Lists, which is a reference to a ListCollection containing all lists in the site. Until now,
writing code using the client object model seems very similar to writing server side
code. There is however one big difference.
Until now, a connection to the SharePoint content database has not been established.
The client application did not yet interact with the SharePoint server, and therefore,
this ListCollection is still empty. The Load method takes care of loading the collection,
but it is not loaded until the ExecuteQuery method of the ClientContext is called. This
might look like a number of extra, unnecessary steps. They actually are necessary and
by design. It allows the programmer to call a number of load statements and compile
these into one batch of commands that is sent to SharePoint as one package. It is
designed this way to minimize the number of round trips from client to server. By
maintaining the Object Identity Path, the client APIs know which objects belong to
each Load statement. After the collections is loaded from SharePoint, the application
iterates through the collection and looks for the list with ‘Companies’ as title.
List companiesList = null;
using (ClientContext context = new ClientContext(“http://tstmss/teamsite”))
{
Web teamWeb = context.Web;
ListCollection lists = teamWeb.Lists;
context.Load(lists);
context.ExecuteQuery();
foreach (List list in lists)

{
if (list.Title.Equals(“Companies”))
{
companiesList = list;
break;
}
}
}
Code sample 1: Check whether or not a list exists.

The pattern in the above code sample is a common pattern in all client object models.
There are always three steps:
n Instantiate objects and request the required properties.

n Load the object(s), update existing objects or create new objects.
n Send a batch of commands to SharePoint by calling
ClientContext.ExecuteQuery.
The next sample makes the previous sample a little more robust. Instead of checking
the title of a list, the application checks the name of the RootFolder of the list. If a user
changes the title of the list, the application will not break. In the foreach loop, the if
statement is changed. The list.Title part is replaced by list.RootFolder.Name. Running
the application, an exception of type PropertyOrFieldNotInitializedException is now
thrown. This is caused by the biggest difference between server and client object
models. In the client models, just the basic properties (like Id, Title) of all objects are
loaded. If the program needs access to other properties, these properties need to be
loaded explicitly. The server API always has all properties loaded and programmers
need not to worry about this. This is a major difference that you need to be aware of.
Loading the ListCollection is changed to the snippet shown in Code sample 2.
ListCollection lists = teamWeb.Lists;

context.Load(lists, listCollection =>
listCollection.IncludeWithDefaultProperties(list => list.RootFolder));
Code sample 2: Specify all properties to be loaded.

This sample used the IncludeWithDefaultProperties method, that is available in most
collection objects. In the method parameters, the List properties that need to be
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loaded are specified. IncludeWithDefaultProperties is not available in the ECMA-

Script javascript library.
An alternative for using IncludeWithDefaultProperties, is replacing the Load method
by LoadQuery. This method accepts a LINQ query as parameter. Code sample 3 shows
the LINQ query. This query specifies that the RootFolder property needs to be loaded
and ensures that just lists with RootFolder name Ćompanies´ are returned to the
client. This enhances the efficiency of the routine that checks the existence of a list.
Instead of returning all lists to the client and evaluating this list at the client, the code
now only returns the list objects that were specified before calling SharePoint.
ListCollection lists= teamWeb.Lists;
IEnumerable<List> resultLists = context.LoadQuery(lists.Include(
list => list.Title,
list => list.Description,
list => list.RootFolder,
list => list.Id).Where(
list => list.RootFolder.Name == “Companies”
));
if (resultLists.Count() == 1)
{
companiesList = resultLists.First();
}
Code sample 3: Just load the specified list object.
If the Companies list does not yet exists, the next step is to create it. If it already
exists, the program updates Title and Description. Creating a new list is done by using
a ListCreationInformation object. A lot of SharePoint objects have a specific Creation-
Information object. The pattern is equal to the previous examples. After setting up
the ClientContext, the object is created and Title and Description are set. After setting
up the list, the Update method is called. As in previous examples, this does not call
SharePoint and create the list yet. This is done when ExecuteQuery is called. Instead
of provisioning one list, the code could have provisioned a number of lists and other
objects in one batch. Code sample 4 shows how to create the list object.
bool update = false;

if (companiesList == null)
{
ListCreationInformation creationInfo = new ListCreationInformation();
creationInfo.Title = “Companies”;
creationInfo.TemplateType = (int)ListTemplateType.GenericList;
companiesList = teamWeb.Lists.Add(creationInfo);
update = true;
}
String companiesTitle = “Our companies”;
if (!companiesList.Title.Equals(companiesTitle))
{
companiesList.Title = companiesTitle;
update = true;
}
String companiesDescription =
“Use this list to manage contact details of all our companies”;
if (companiesList.Description==null ||
!companiesList.Description.Equals(companiesDescription))
{
companiesList.Description = companiesDescription;
update = true;
}
if (update)
{
companiesList.Update();
}
Code sample 4: Creating and updating a SharePoint list.
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Screenshot 1 shows the contents of the site after running the Windows Forms appli-
cation.
Screenshot 1: New list, created using the.NET Managed Client API.

Next step creates the site column. This will be a lookup field that points to the
Companies list. Previous examples showed code that first checks whether or not an
object exists. If this is not the case, it is created, otherwise it is updated. By using
exception handling in the .NET Managed API, this can be done in one step. This makes
the code more compact and it requires one less call to the SharePoint server. Code
sample 5 shows the code.
String fieldName = “OurCompany”;

Field companyField = null;
ExceptionHandlingScope scope = new ExceptionHandlingScope(context);

using (scope.StartScope())
{
using (scope.StartTry())
{
companyField = teamWeb.Fields.GetByInternalNameOrTitle(fieldName);
}
using (scope.StartCatch())
{
String lookupXML = “<Field” +
“SourceID=\”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3\”” +
“Type=\”Lookup\”” +
“Name=\”{1}\”” +
“DisplayName=\”Our company\”” +
“Required=\”TRUE\”” +
“List=\”{0}\”” +
“ShowField=\”Title\” />”;
lookupXML = String.Format(lookupXML, companiesList.Id.ToString(“B”),
fieldName);
companyField = teamWeb.Fields.AddFieldAsXml(lookupXML, true,
AddFieldOptions.AddFieldCheckDisplayName);
}
using (scope.StartFinally())
{
companyField = teamWeb.Fields.GetByInternalNameOrTitle(fieldName);
}
}
Code sample 5: Create a site column by using exception handling.

In this sample, the assumption is that SharePoint throws an exception if the new field
object does not exist when we first try to access this object in StartTry(). The previous
sample introduced the CreationInformation object. For Field objects (for lists and
sites) however, these objects do not exist. A new site column can be created by using
the XML string field definition.
New Content Type

Next step in the provisioning process is creating a new content type. This code is shown
in Code sample 6. To find the content types, our application queries the Available-
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Contenttypes collection of the Web. In one query we search for the new content
type, to check if it exists, and the parent content type that is required to create the
custom content type. Again, a different approach from using the server object model.
Structure your client object model code in a way that groups the requests to the
server in batches as much as possible. This minimizes the number of round trips to the
server and makes the application more efficient.
ContentTypeCollection contentTypeCollection = teamWeb.AvailableContentTypes;
IEnumerable<ContentType> ourContactContentTypes = context.LoadQuery(
contentTypeCollection.Include(
ct => ct.FieldLinks).Where(
ct => ct.Name == “OurContact”));
IEnumerable<ContentType> contactContentTypes = context.LoadQuery(
contentTypeCollection.Include().Where(
ct => ct.Name == “Contact”));
context.Load(contentTypeCollection);
ContentType ourContactContentType = ourContactContentTypes.FirstOrDefault();

ContentType parentContentType = contactContentTypes.FirstOrDefault();
if (ourContactContentType == null && parentContentType!=null)

{
ContentTypeCreationInformation creationInfo =
new ContentTypeCreationInformation();
creationInfo.Name = “OurContact”;
creationInfo.ParentContentType = parentContentType;
parentContentType = teamWeb.ContentTypes.Add(creationInfo);
parentContentType.Update(true);
}
Code sample 6: Create a new content type.

The application is using a ContenttypeCreationInformation object to create the new
content type. To add the new site column to this content type, the application needs
access to the FieldLinks collection. To access this collection, an extra call to SharePoint
using ExecuteQuery is necessary. This example shows that you need to think about
your code very well. When do you need access to what properties and at which point
are they loaded? The previous call to group as many actions as possible to one Execute-
Query statement is still valid, but you cannot simply group all calls.
In the method in Code sample 7, the new content type, including the FieldLinks
collection, is loaded. This collection is queried by using a LINQ query to find the site
column in the associated site columns. If the site column is not yet available in the
content type, it is added to the collection. Please note that the Update method of the
ContentType is called to save the changes.
IEnumerable<FieldLink> contactLinks = ourContactContentType.FieldLinks;
FieldLink companyLink = contactLinks.Where(
ct => ct.Name.Equals(“OurCompany”)).FirstOrDefault();
if (companyLink==null)
{
FieldLinkCreationInformation companyLinkInfo =
new FieldLinkCreationInformation();
companyLinkInfo.Field =
teamWeb.Fields.GetByInternalNameOrTitle(“OurCompany”);
ourContactContentType.FieldLinks.Add(companyLinkInfo);
ourContactContentType.Update(true);
}
Code sample 7: Find a FieldLink using a LINQ query.

Please note this is LINQ to Objects. This is not to be confused with the new LINQ to
SharePoint. That is a new server side only technology to query SharePoint content.
The LINQ samples in this article are using LINQ to Objects.
Final step in the provisioning process is the association of the content type with the
list. The same techniques as described in previous samples are applied. The Add-
ExistingContentType method of the ContentTypeCollection associates the content
type with the list. The DeleteObject object of the ContentType object deletes the
default Contact content type from the list. It is not required to call the Update method
of the List object before calling ExecuteQuery to save the changes.
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The last .NET Managed client object model sample (Code sample 8) shows how to add
an item to the new Companies list. Just as in the server object model, a CAML query
is created to check whether or not the item exists in the list.
String defaultCompany = “Adventure Works”;
CamlQuery query = new CamlQuery();

query.ViewXml =
String.Format(“<View><Query><Where>” +
“<Eq><FieldRef Name=’Title’/><Value Type=’Text’>{0}</Value>” +
“</Eq></Where></Query></View>”, defaultCompany);
ListItemCollection selectCompanies = companiesList.GetItems(query);
context.Load(selectCompanies);
if (selectCompanies.Count == 0)
{
ListItemCreationInformation itemCreateInfo =
new ListItemCreationInformation();
ListItem companyItem = companiesList.AddItem(itemCreateInfo);
companyItem[“Title”] = defaultCompany;
companyItem.Update();
}
Code sample 8: Add an item to the Companies list.

This sample shows that CAML is still alive and kicking in SharePoint 2010. LINQ to
SharePoint is also available, but this is a server side only technology. In the client
object models querying SharePoint data needs to be done using CAML queries.
Silverlight Object Model

The Silverlight API can be used in Visual Studio by adding a reference to the assemblies
Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.
Runtime.dll. These are located in folder ‘<SharePoint Root>\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\
ClientBin’. The Silverlight client object model is very similar to the .NET OM. Biggest
difference is that the Silverlight Client Object Model is asynchronous. The next sample
will show this. This sample is part of a Silverlight web part that renders contacts from
the contacts list of the previous samples in a Silverlight interface. Screenshot 2 shows
the web part in action. In this sample the interface is not important. The important
thing to learn is how easy it is to get data from SharePoint and use that in a Silverlight
application.
Screenshot 2: Silverlight web part shows contacts.

To show the company logo the lookup column uses a new SharePoint 2010 feature.
For each lookup column you can specify which other fields from the lookup list you
want to add besides the Title field. The BDC field type in SharePoint 2007 already
offered this option. Now it is also available for lookup fields. Code sample 9 shows
the query how to read items from a list. Until the ExecuteQuery query statement it is
very similar to the patterns used in previous samples. After getting the ClientContext,
the application specifies which properties it expects SharePoint to return. Field values
of list items are not returned by default, and therefore need to be specified in the
Include statement.
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using (ClientContext context = new ClientContext(“http://tstmss/team”))

{
Web teamWeb = context.Web;
_ contactsList = teamWeb.Lists.GetByTitle(“Contacts”);
CamlQuery camlQuery = new CamlQuery();

camlQuery.ViewXml = “<View><RowLimit>100</RowLimit></View>”;
_ contacts = _ contactsList.GetItems(camlQuery);
context.Load( _ contacts,
items => items.Include(
item => item.Id,
item => item[“FullName”],
item => item[“Email”],
item => item[“Picture”],
item => item[“WorkCity”],
item => item[“CellPhone”],
item => item[“ContactCompany _ x003a _ LogoUrl”],
item => item.Id,
item => item.DisplayName));
ClientRequestSucceededEventHandler success =
new ClientRequestSucceededEventHandler(SuccesHandler);
ClientRequestFailedEventHandler failure =
new ClientRequestFailedEventHandler(FailureHandler);
context.ExecuteQueryAsync(success, failure);
}
Code sample 9: Get items from a list using the Silverlight client object model.
Instead of getting the ClientContext by using the URL, we could have used Client-
Context.Current to get the current SharePoint context. Just before the query is
executed, two event handlers are created. These are passed as parameters to the
ExecuteQueryAsync method, the ExecuteQuery equivalent in the Silverlight API. If the
query is successful, the ClientRequestSucceededEventHandler is called. If the query
generates an error, the application ends up in the ClientRequestFailedEventHandler
event handler. Code sample 10 shows the succes event handler.
private void SuccesHandler(object Sender, ClientRequestSucceededEventArgs e)

{
List<Contact> contacts = new List<Contact>();
foreach (ListItem contact in _ contacts)
{
Contact newContact = new Contact(contact[“FullName”].ToString());
newContact.EMail = contact[“Email”].ToString();
FieldUrlValue pictureUrl = contact[“Picture”] as FieldUrlValue;
newContact.PictureUrl = pictureUrl.Url;
newContact.City = contact[“WorkCity”].ToString();
newContact.Phone = contact[“CellPhone”].ToString();
FieldLookupValue companyLogo =
contact[“ContactCompany _ x003a _ LogoUrl”] as FieldLookupValue;
newContact.CompanyLogo = companyLogo.LookupValue;
contacts.Add(newContact);
}
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
{
ContactList.ItemsSource = contacts;
});
}
Code sample 10: Success event handler after loading contacts.

This handler iterates through all contacts found in the ListItemCollection. For every
item, a Contact object is instantiated and added to a collection. This collection is
bound as Datasource to the XAML code. Because query execution is asynchronous,
the application needs to assure that the code to bind the data is run on the UI
thread. To do this, Dispatcher.BeginInvoke is called just before the ItemsSource
property is set.
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ECMAScript Object Model

The third new client object model is a Javascript API. Just like the Silverlight API, this
object model is asynchronous. Following code samples are part of a LAYOUTS page.
This page shows all users that have access to the site because they have been granted
access directly. They did not get access by being a member of a SharePoint group. By
clicking the name of a user, the page shows extra information about that user. The
page also shows a list of available SharePoint groups. By clicking a group name, the
selected users are added to the group as members and their direct permissions on the
site are removed. Screenshot 3 shows this page in action.
Screenshot 3: Page to move users with direct permissions to SharePoint groups.

Loading and rendering users and groups in this page is server side code. Showing
more information, adding users to groups and removing their permissions, is Java-
script code using the ECMAScript client object model. By using the library, the page
does not need to reload when a link is clicked. The page does not use postbacks to
work, which improves the user experience. To use the SharePoint objects in the SP
namespace, a reference to the ‘SP.js’ file needs to be added to the page:
<SharePoint:ScriptLink Name=”sp.js” LoadAfterUI=”true”
Localizable=”false” runat=”server”/>
The Javascipt API is not just in SP.js. It is divided to a number of JS files that are available
as minified files in the <SharePoint Root>\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS folder. This folder also
contains the debug versions of the javascript files; e.g. SP.Debug.js. The SharePoint
Foundation SDK shows all available JS files. By using the ScriptLink control, SharePoint
automatically loads all necessary javascript files. If the debug attribute of the <Compi-
lation /> element in web.config is set to true, the ScriptLink control automatically
loads the debug files. Instead of SP.js, SP.debug.js is loaded. If you enabled javascript
debugging in the browser, you can debug your ECMAScript SharePoint code in Visual
Studio easily by adding a “debugger;” statement to the code. This makes development
using this new API a lot easier. Screenshot 4 shows the debugger in action.
Screenshot 4: Debugging ECMA Script

In our ASPX page, a second JS file is loaded. This file contains the scripts for the custom
page. Code sample 11 shows the code for getting information about the selected
user. In JavaScript function getUserInfo the first action is to get the ClientContext.
The script is called from an ASPX page in the LAYOUTS folder, and therefore already
knows the SharePoint context. That context can be referenced easily by using the
Current property. Next statement gets a reference to the User Information List. This
is the out of the box SharePoint list that contains the data about the user. A CAML
query is constructed to find the selected user based on the ID. Final step is to call the
ExecuteQueryAsync method that loads the listitem object.
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function getUserInfo(userID) {
var clientContext = new SP.ClientContext.get _ current();
var web = clientContext.get _ web();
var userInfoList = web.get _ siteUserInfoList();
var camlQuery = new SP.CamlQuery();
camlQuery.set _ viewXml(‘<View><RowLimit>10</RowLimit></View>’);
camlQuery.set _ viewXml(‘<View><Query><Where>’ +
‘<Eq><FieldRef Name=\’ID\’/><Value Type=\’Number\’>’ + userID +
‘</Value></Eq></Where></Query><RowLimit>1</RowLimit></View>’);
this.collListItem = userInfoList.getItems(camlQuery);
clientContext.load(collListItem);
clientContext.executeQuery(
Function.createDelegate(this, this.onQuerySucceeded),
Function.createDelegate(this, this.onQueryFailed));
}
Code sample 11: Getting data from the selected user.
In this method you will see the calls to properties and methods are slightly different
in the ECMAScript API. All of them are documented on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.
com/en-us/library/ee538253(office.14).aspx). You can also open sp.debug.js to look at
the implementation and find what properties/methods are available. The Execute-
QueryAsync method is called using two parameters, which are the event handlers to
be used when the call completes. Code sample 12 shows the function that is called if
the query was successful.
function onQuerySucceeded(sender, args) {

var item = collListItem.itemAt(0);
var profile = item.get _ item(‘Notes’);
var pictureUrl = item.get _ item(‘Picture’).get _ url();
var userImage = document.getElementById(‘userImage’);

userImage.src = pictureUrl;
var profileDiv = document.getElementById(‘userProfile’);
profileDiv.innerHTML = profile;
}
Code sample 12: Handle the query results for the selected user.
In this function, the first item from the collection is loaded. The UI is updated by
linking the content of the fields of this list item to the HTML controls in the page.
Conclusion
The three new object models are an important new feature for SharePoint devel-
opers. Building client applications is now a lot easier and intuitive because it is more
similar to the server side programming model that you already know. In this article the
three new models are introduced in a number of samples. These samples show a few
important differences between SharePoint server side and client side programming.
Look into these differences and get a feel for how they will influence the way you
structure your code. This article is meant to be a starting point for your first project
using the new Client Object models. Full source code of these samples is available on
my CodePlex site (see my biography).
... by the way ...

Downloadable .chm files are available that contain help for Windows PowerShell cmdlets for
SharePoint Server 2010.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=045f7af5-
b226-4a05-8ace-4e17cfdef856
Tip from Mirjam van Olst (Macaw) http://sharepointchick.com
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Understanding Identity in SharePoint 2010

by Michiel van Otegem
SharePoint 2007 and earlier versions have some serious drawbacks when it comes to dealing
with the identity and authorization of the user. In SharePoint 2010 the security model has been
completely revamped and based on the new Windows Identity Foundation. The implications of
this change are minor at first glance, but profound if you look at the bigger picture.
Claims Based Authorization

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a set of .NET Framework classes that enable
application to work with a concept known as Claims Based Authorization (CBA).
Before getting into how this works in SharePoint 2010, I’ll first go over the basics of
CBA. In CBA a user’s identity basically consists of a set of claims. A claim is basically
a piece of information about the user. This information can be used in an appli-
cation or service to determine what the user may or may not do. Claims can contain
arbitrary pieces of information, not just the username and roles a user belongs to, as
is common in security. It could for instance contain the user’s age and/or transaction
limit. The former could be useful for a web shop selling liquor online, the latter for
a banking application. These pieces of information can be used to authorize users
based on business logic. This is much more intuitive than using role based authori-
zation, because creating different security groups based on age or transaction limit
isn’t very handy.
CBA allows for much granular and flexible authorization, and allows multi-dimen-
sional security as opposed to one dimensional security offered by role based security.
With CBA you can easily make a security rule that checks whether a user is in a certain
department and is a manager. In role based authorization this combination would
need to be a single role, increasing the number of roles that are needed.
Claims or facts
The reason claims are called claims and not facts is because a claim may not be factually
true. This is quite common on the internet, where I can identify myself on a forum
as for instance President Obama. On the forum this may be acceptable, but when I
have to identify myself on a government site, I probably need to use something like
my social security number, which will clearly show I am not President Obama. This
is where it becomes important who is making the claim. An identity is issued by a
so called Identity Provider (IP). An application or service accepting the identity of
an (external) IP is known as a Relying Party (RP), because it relies on or trusts the IP.
The forum trusts an IP that allows users to use fake names, as the only important
thing for the forum is to distinguish between different forum users consistently. A
government site will definitely not trust the same IP. In the Netherlands for instance,
the government has an IP known as DigID, which most government sites accept as
a valid IP. CBA works with tokens, and these tokens are issued by a Security Token
Service (STS), which is part of an IP.
An RP tells which claims it needs through a policy, and an STS issues token based on
this policy when a user requests a token for the RP. This means that the STS must
have the information needed to create the needed claims, and also that the STS can
decide whether or not to accept a policy. In other words, a STS has the power to
deny a RP access to certain information about a user. On the internet this is quite
important, because this means that privacy sensitive information is only disclosed if
really necessary. In fact, a token doesn’t even have to contain the (user)name if this is
not required for the RP the user wants to access. Similarly, neither the liquor web shop
nor the forum has any reason to know my social security number, so they won’t get it.
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In intranet scenario’s common to SharePoint this is obviously less of a problem, but it

is worth mentioning nonetheless, because it is a key feature of CBA in general.
Windows Communication Foundation

So much for the theory behind CBA, let’s move on to how this works in WIF. WIF
implements CBA using several standards specifications, such as WS-Trust, WS-Feder-
ation, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). As you may have gathered
from the mentioned standard, WIF is web service based and integrates with Windows
Communication Foundation (WCF). This means WIF can in fact work with any non-
WIF STS, RP, or client, as long as they support these standards. This includes WIF-less
WCF using the WsFederationHttpBinding or non-Microsoft implementations.
The SharePoint 2010 web services are all implemented using WCF and integrate WIF,
but the question remains on how this works when you have a browser client accessing
a website, which is also important for SharePoint. To accommodate this, WIF provides
a “wrapper” around the WS-* interactions that enable a website to become so called
Claims Aware. In this context you may come across so called Active and Passive STSs.
An Active STS is one that works with WCF based clients and services, whereas a
Passive STS provides the wrapper functionality needed for websites. You could create
a standalone Passive STS, but it in mixed scenario’s where both websites and web
services are used, it makes sense to have an IP provide both an Active and a Passive
STS, or have the Passive STS wrap the Active STS. In any case, because SharePoint
requires browser based access, it requires a Passive STS. The interaction between the
browser, SharePoint, and an STS is depicted in Figure 1.
Fig. 1: Interaction between a browser, SharePoint, and an STS.
The interaction in figure 1 shows the browser trying to access a SharePoint website
(1). Because the user is not authenticated yet, the browser gets a redirect response
(2), redirecting to the STS. The querystring of the redirect URL contains a URL back
to the SharePoint website for later use. The user then has to authenticate against
the STS (3), which will yield the claims token (4). Finally, the browser sends the
claims token to the SharePoint website (5) to get access. In figure 1 you also see a
step 0, which is not part of the runtime interaction with the browser. It represents
the SharePoint site registering with the STS to setup the required trust relationship
between them. The STS at that point can be configured to determine which claims
are sent in a token to the SharePoint website.
Security Token Service Application

At this point you may be thinking that all this isn’t very useful and just adds additional
interactions and complexity, and I can’t say I’d blame you. However, there are some
important advantages to this setup. For starters, because SharePoint 2010 supports
WIF, it no longer needs to support different authentication mechanisms. Authenti-
cation happens outside SharePoint, and regardless of the authentication mechanism
used by the STS, the user comes into SharePoint in the same way. This reduces the
complexity of SharePoint, rather than increasing it, and makes for a more consistent
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programming model. That said, SharePoint 2010 actually supports to different modes:
“classic mode” for standard Windows Authentication (which is the default), and
“claims mode” supporting WIF scenario’s. Because “claims mode” is something that is
available out-of-the-box, a STS also comes with SharePoint 2010.
Figure 2 shows what IIS looks like after a default installation. Notice the SecurityTo-
kenServiceApplication under SharePoint Web Services, which shows you that Share-
Point provides an STS to work with.
Fig. 2. SharePoint applications in IIS after default installation.
Another advantage of using WIF is the fact that its standards based and actually
enables SharePoint to deal with users that are not in the (same) Windows domain as
the portal itself. One scenario where this is useful is business-to-business communica-
tions where one organization (org A) wants to grant access to its portal to users of
another organization (org B).
In SharePoint 2007 and earlier, this requires users from Org B to get an account in the
Active Directory of Org A, or in the SharePoint user store if Forms Authentication is
used. In SharePoint 2010 this is not needed, because SharePoint can be setup to trust
the STS of Org B, or the STS of Org B can be “chanied” to the STS of Org A, which is
trusted by SharePoint. Claims can then be used to grant or deny individual users. This
is much more elegant and doesn’t clutter the user store of Org A, and it also means
that when Org B disables the account of some user, that user can automatically no
longer access the SharePoint portal of Org A. In the SharePoint 2007 scenario Org B
would have to notify Org A of this event and Org A would have to disable the account
too.
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Single-Sign-On
The last advantage I’d like to cover here is the fact that WIF enables Single-Sign-On
across multiple farms and services that trust the same STS. Without some serious
tweaking this is only possible in SharePoint 2007 when you use Windows Authenti-
cation. One of the implications of this is that SharePoint services no longer have to
be accessed through delegation, in the process losing the user’s true identity, but
can be accessed as the original user itself, making it much easier to ensure that the
user is authorized for whatever the user wants to do/see. To cover scenario’s where
the user’s Windows account is actually required at some point, for instance to access
a non-claims aware resource that SharePoint makes available, SharePoint uses WIF
functionality to convert a so called User Principal Name (UPN) claim into an actual
Windows account that it can use for impersonation. This functionality known as
c2WTS (Claims To Windows Token Service) is a Windows service. For security reasons it
is not running by default, and applications that want to use it need to be configured
explicitly as accepted callers, to ensure that a claim is never inadvertently converted
to a Windows account. Also, the UPN must correspond to an existing account, but in
most cases this is ensured if you’re using SharePoint within a domain.
Conclusion
There is much more to learn about Windows Identity Foundation in itself and how
it interacts with SharePoint 2010. For more information on WIF, see http://msdn.
microsoft.com/en-us/security. There is also a good session about WIF and SharePoint
2010 from PDC available at http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC26. Be sure to check
it out, because Windows Identity Foundation is becoming a core piece of the security
infrastructure on the Microsoft platform.
... by the way ...

Did you know ...
n With the new claims mechanism in SharePoint 2010 it’s possible to use multiple
authentication mechanism in a single web application in a single zone.
n User profile synchronization in SharePoint 2010 enables writing data back to for instance
Active Directory out of the box.
n SharePoint Server 2010 can only run on a 64-bit machine.
n It’s now possible to use Visio to design your SharePoint workflows and to import these
workflows in to SharePoint Designer.
n Visual Studio 2010 can package your SharePoint solution in a .wsp file with a single button
click.
n Visual Studio 2010 supports F5 SharePoint debugging and deployment. No more “attach
to process”!
n Turn the developer dashboard on using PowerShell: Get-SPFarm.PerformanceMonitor.

DeveloperDashboardLevel = “OnDemand”
Tips from Mirjam van Olst (Macaw) http://sharepointchick.com
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2010 Special
Microsoft Project & SharePoint:
Happy Together in 2010

by Dux
For a lot of project managers, Microsoft Project is the de facto project management tool that they
rely on. It effectively supports project planning (schedule development, resource definition and
task assignments, budget, etc) AND project tracking (schedule, resource, cost, etc).
To reap the benefits of Microsoft Project, it is pertinent that you:

n Are familiar with basic project management concepts AND
n Have a project management process that you follow
Without these two, it is less likely that you will appreciate Microsoft Project and more
likely blame it for causing frustration and heartache. Keep in mind that Microsoft
Project is a tool; it won’t make your projects on time, on budget and on scope.
SharePoint as a Project Management

Information System (PMIS)
Another great tool that aids project managers today is SharePoint. If implemented
accordingly, project managers can be empowered to develop a project web site that
centralizes project artifacts and can streamline project communications. This is much
better than solely relying on email to collaborate. With out of the box SharePoint, a
project manager can:
n Centralize project information and communication in a SharePoint site
n Automate project processes like change control process by utilizing built in
SharePoint workflows
n Efficiently interact with project information on a SharePoint site by integrating
it with common Microsoft Office tools such as Word, Excel, and Outlook
n Enable alerts to send automated reminders to project stakeholders
n Define and monitor project tasks in the enhanced project task list which now
shows task dependencies and a “Microsoft Project-like” Gantt view interface.
Fig. 1: Microsoft Project-like Gantt view interface.Project Manager’s Dilemma
A current limitation of Microsoft Project 2007 is the lack of integration with Share-
Point. It would have been a great way to allow project resources to update their task
status directly into a SharePoint task list and have it synchronize with the Microsoft
Project file that is maintained by a project manager. The only way to achieve this
today is through Microsoft Project Server.
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Fortunately, those days are long over. This need has been addressed in Microsoft
Project 2010. The ability to synchronize a Microsoft Project 2010 project plan to a
SharePoint 2010 project tasks list is available out of the box. In addition, this capability
can also be used with existing WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007. The Microsoft Project team has
published a great blog post on how to make the synchronization work.
Interactive Project Reporting That You Can Provide

Another great benefit of leveraging Microsoft Project 2010 with SharePoint 2010 is
the out of the box charting capabilities that SharePoint provides. Imagine being able
to take relevant project information, make it available in SharePoint and display it as
a management dashboard.
Let’s See It In Action

Want to see how Microsoft Project 2010 and SharePoint 2010 work happily together?
Check out this presentation I led during the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009.
More information:
n Basic steps of Project Management http://sp.meetdux.com/archive/2009/01/28/
manage-your-projects-not-just-your-schedule-part-1.aspx
n Project 2010: Sync to SharePoint http://blogs.msdn.com/project/archive/2009/
10/19/project-2010-introducing-sync-to-sharepoint.aspx
n SharePoint 2010 for Project Management Success video http://vimeo.
com/7300710
About SDN
The Software Development Network, is a community for IT-professionals. SDN is
divided into sections. Each section is specifically aimed at a certain group developers.
The main sections are: .NET, User eXperience, Information Worker, DotNetNuke,
Delphi, Core Systems, Database technologies and Architecture.
SDN events
Besides our annual SDN Conference, SDN organizes many other things. Regular
meetings are held four times a year in a seminar-like approach. On several occasions
we have invited foreign speakers for these meetings.
SDN Magazine
Our quarterly magazine contains high quality articles mostly written in Dutch,
however, we often publish English articles as well.
The SDN Conference

This conference is a two-day event with international speakers. Like the Software
Development Network itself, is organized on a non-profit basis. The fee that the
attendants have to pay is used entirely for organizing this event.
SDN Conference 2010 will be held in October 2010.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Remi Caron (president), Joop Pecht (secretary)
Phone: +31-543-518058; Email: info@sdn.nl; Web: www.sdn.nl
87
Als het een ICT-er is,
zit hij bij Sogeti.
Wat kun je? Die vraag stelt ieder bedrijf met een vacature. Wie ben je? Die vraag stelt Sogeti De projecten die je voor klanten uitvoert, variëren
meteen daarna. We vinden het belangrijk dat je bij ons past. Want een ICT-er van Sogeti is enorm. Van portal realisaties tot het neerzetten
geen gemiddelde ICT-er. Het is er een met uitgesproken eigenschappen. van een collaboration omgeving voor 140.000
gebruikers. Ander voorbeeld: momenteel werken we
Gedreven. Resultaatgericht. En niet snel tevreden. Natuurlijk: plezier hoort erbij. Maar we
aan de omvangrijkste integratie ooit van SharePoint
gaan op de eerste plaats voor de inhoud. Zo kennen klanten ons. Zo kennen we elkaar.
in Dynamics CRM.
SharePoint-specialisten over SharePoint. We streven naar innovatie en Interesse? Bel Lijnske Boogaarts of stuur haar je
doen mee met het SharePoint 2010 Evidence- cv: (088) 660 66 00 (nakiesnummer 0954), lijnske.
Stel, je hebt je gespecialiseerd in SharePoint. programma van Microsoft. boogaarts@sogeti.nl. Meer informatie vind je op
En je weet dat er met jouw kennis en ervaring werkenbijsogeti.nl.
veel meer mogelijk is. Dan ben je bij Sogeti aan Kortom, als je ergens kunt doorgroeien, dan is
het juiste adres. Van de 700 collega’s die zich het wel bij ons. We bieden je masterclasses.
bezighouden met Microsoft-infrastructuur en De keuze uit heel veel SharePoint-opleidingen.
–applicatieontwikkeling, weten er zeventig alles En daar horen uiteraard ook certificeringen bij.
2010 Special
SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part

by Agnes Molnar
Whatever you do in your everyday work, I’m sure you prefer to visualize data in a better way than
viewing plain tables or text files with thousands of rows. A good chart is worth more than millions
of data fields. SharePoint 2010 has a great new web part that is able to display your data in various
data sources as graphical charts and diagrams. Let’s see what capabilities this Chart Web Part has.
Chart Web Part - The Basics

The Chart Web Part is new in SharePoint 2010, so first of all let me show you how to
insert it into your pages:
1. Open your SharePoint 2010 page. In order to edit your page, click on the ‘Page’
ribbon, and choose ‘Edit Page’ option.
2. Click on ‘Add a Web Part’ on the zone you’d like to add the Chart to. The Web
Parts list will appear on the top of your page.
3. Select the category ‘Miscellaneous’, and ‘Chart Web Part’ from the Web Parts
list.
Fig. 1: Insert Chart Web Part into your SharePoint 2010 page.
That’s it, you can enjoy your Chart Web Part immediately. It’s on your page and you
can start to use it. Only two steps are missing: to define where your chart data comes
from, and what chart type would you like to use.
Fig. 2: Chart Web Part.
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Chart Web Part - Data Sources

After inserting a Chart Web Part into your page, you need to connect the chart to
some data source, and customize it. The Chart Web Part in SharePoint 2010 can be
connected to the following types of data sources:
Another Web Part;
n ��
SharePoint list;
n ��
Business data;
n ��
Excel Services.
n ��
SharePoint list
As the simplest and most obvious data sources, connecting to SharePoint lists is very
easy. In my very plain example list I’ve stored items of bugs: the requirement is to
store the number of bugs (critical and minor errors, change requests) for every day of
the testing period:
Fig. 3: Simple SharePoint 2010 list.

Let’s go back to the page where you inserted the Chart Web Part into, and select
SharePoint list as data source. The configuration is very simple: you need to select the
site and list, configure the series (in my example I have three series: Critical Errors,
Minor Errors and Change Requests), and your new chart is ready to use immediately.
Fig. 4: Adding more series to the chart.

When you’ve added the series you will see the results immediately. The series will
show up in a line chart as you can see in figure 5.
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Fig. 5: Our new chart with three series.
Another Web Part

I have to admit, I was surprised when I read of this capability of connect the Chart
Web Part to another Web Part on the page. The source Web Part has to be an XsltList-
ViewWebPart, for example a list or library view. These views can be a data source if
the data stored in the Web Part can be organized into a table-like structure.
Excel Services
Above others, Excel Services can be the data source of the Chart Web Part. In this
case, we need to prepare our environment, but it definitely worth: in my experience,
end users like the Excel sheets, export to and manipulate data in Excel files, etc. In
this way, we can separate the data (in the Excel file) and the visualization (on your
SharePoint 2010 page).
These are the steps of defining Excel Services as the data source of Chart Web Part:
1. Enable Excel Services on your farm.

2. Define trusted file locations and trusted connections if needed.
3. Publish your Excel workbook to one of the trusted libraries.
4. Insert a Chart Web Part into your SharePoint 2010 page.
5. Select ‘Excel Services’ as the data source of your chart.
6. On the next screen, you have to set the basic connection info to your Excel
data:
n Excel Web Service URL: The default value of this field is the URL of Excel
Service (http://sp2010/_vti_bin/excelservice.asmx), so if you’d like to use the
default Excel Service instance, don’t touch it.
n Excel Workbook Path: The exact path to your Excel workbook
(eg. http://sp2010/dms/BusinessDocs/Documents/Books1.xslx)
n Range Name: The name of the range in the workbook that you want to use
as data source (eg. Sheet1!$A$1:$B$51).
7. After a successful connection, the source data is immediately assigned to the
chart. You only need to set the required Series, X and Y values, and your Chart
is ready to use.
In my really simple example, I have an Excel sheet with two columns: Year and Value.
The workbook and the connection info are the followings:
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Fig. 6: The example data sheet.
Instead of using the series as in the previous example we will show the data as a
column diagram. With the Value on the vertical ax and the Year in the horizontal ax.
Figure 7 shows how to implement this.
Fig. 7: Binding series to the chart.
The result is a very simple chart, based on the default chart type (in my case, column
type), similar to the other examples above:
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Fig. 8: Basic column chart based on Excel Services data.
My favorite capability of this conjunction is the “live data”: whenever the permitted
users edit the data in the Excel file (either in Excel or in their browser with Excel
Services), the chart can be refreshed immediately with the new data behind.
Business data
Finally, let’s have a look at my favorite data source that expands the whole data
visualization. In SharePoint 2010, we can connect to the Line-of Business systems
(LOB) via Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in a two-way mode. Of course, the
Chart Web Part can use the BCS data as a data source.
So now our SharePoint can be a real data visualization interface! Just imagine:
you have some data in SAP, some in your custom HR system, some in SQL or in
Oracle databases, in SharePoint lists, in Excel workbooks… and all of them can be
visualized with SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part!
Well, in this article I can’t cover the topic of LOB systems and BCS connections, so
let me show you how to use BCS data after the connection is established to the LOB
system. As the Chart Web Part only visualize (read) data, it’s not required to build
two-way connection to the LOB system, it’s enough to read the data.
After selecting the option ‘Business Data Catalog’ as data source, the next step is
setting the required Business Data Catalog existing in your system and accessible
from the current site.
Tip: The other way to display business data in a Chart Web Part is to create an
External List based on the Business Data Definition, and connect your chart
to this External List.
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Customization capabilities of Chart Web Part

Chart Web Part has so much customization settings that it’s almost impossible to
count all of them. Anyway, I’m trying to show as much as possible in this article.
Chart Type
Let’s start from a basic chart, for example our former Bugs Chart. The first thing we’d
like to change very often is the chart type. You can do it right after the configuration
of the data source by selecting ‘Customize Your Chart’ option from the Chart Web
Part’s menu. There are a lot of types you can choose:
Bar
n ��
Area
n ��
Line
n ��
Point/Bubble
n ��
Financial
n ��
Pie
n ��
n Radar
n Polar
n Gantt/Range Column
n Range
n Error Bar
n Box Plot
n Funnel
n Pyramid
Awesome list, right? Moreover, you can select from 2D and 3D types, and after
customizing your chart, there’s an option to save it as a Custom Chart Type.
Chart Appearance Properties

In this step, you can select a theme for your chart, with custom drawing styles and
transparency values as well. You can give the Chart the look & feel that fits best
on your intranet page. Also, this is the interface for defining the size of the chart,
and the image format (BMP, JPG or PNG). Yes, image format: the Chart Web Part
generates an image from your data by your settings, and puts it to your SharePoint
2010 page. (Fig. 9).
Fig. 9: Appearance Themes.
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The second Tab on this page is for the 3D settings of the chart. First of all you can check
in or out if you’d like to see your chart in 3D, and some other properties (Rotation,
Perspective, Light, Wall Thickness, etc.) if you choose yes.. It’s very useful to see the
difference between the 2D and 3D versions of the same chart immediately:
Fig. 10: Preview of the same chart in 2D and 3D.
Chart Element Properties

On the last page of the Chart Customization Wizard, we can set a lot of general chart
properties, mostly familiar from Excel, for example.
These settings are:
n Chart Title: The displaying of the chart title can be turned on or off by your
choice, and the position and font type can be customized too.
n Legend: The displaying of the chart legend can be turned on or off by your
choice, and the legend title, position, style and font type can be customized
too. Also the legend can be docked to the chart area, inside or outside of it.
n Axes and Grid Lines: X and Y axes and gridlines can be customized here.
n Data Labels: Data labels can highlight or explain data shown in the chart, and
can be formatted in different types (e.g. Numeric and DateTime types).
n Markers: Markers can highlight specific data points of the chart, and they can
be styled as square, circle, diamond, triangle, etc. Also the markers’ size can be
set here.
n Hyperlinks and Tooltips: Also very useful option that can help you display other
information about your series, or redirect the users interested in the series to a
custom URL or page.
Conclusion
As you can see, the SharePoint 2010 charts can be customized in various different
ways, and because of that can be a really powerful way to visualize data for your
business. Whatever you would like to visualize, SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part can
help you - moreover, its configuration and customization is very easy.
No development/code is necessary. The only pre-requirement: the data sources have
to be prepared for visualization, but that is a story that fits a new topic for a next
magazine!
... by the way ...

The biographies of all authors are grouped together in order of appearance on the pages 103,
104 and 105.
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2010 Special
Enrich your SharePoint 2010 portal by

integrating SAP applications
by Cyrill Visser a.o.
SharePoint is becoming the number one frontend application for many organizations rapidly.
Many of these organizations are using SAP to support their core and subsidiary business
processes. The upcoming release of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 expands the possibilities
of integrating your SAP applications and data. By using the SharePoint Business Connectivity
Services and SAP Enterprise Services, data can be extracted from SAP, enriched and presented in
your SharePoint portal. In practice however, not all data relevant to these processes is stored in
SAP; a lot of organizations have included Microsoft Excel in their “informal” business processes.
In time these informal processes become part of the primary decision making processes.
This leads us to the following scenario: An organization uses Excel worksheets to

calculate annual project budgets, uses SAP CATS for storing the actual project infor-
mation (hours, team members and so on). The Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS)
can be used by employees or personal administrators to track employee working
times. Project managers would like to have a management dashboard in their portal
to monitor how the actual projects are doing compared to the estimated annual
budget.
We will give you a quick overview of a number of integration scenarios and explain
how to configure the BCS and SAP Enterprise Services to bring the case scenario
mentioned above alive.
Connecting SharePoint to SAP

There are multiple ways of integrating SAP applications with a SharePoint portal and
these can be categorized into three groups:
1. User Interface integration

2. Process integration
3. Data integration
User Interface Integration

Integration with SAP can be realized by exposing SAP UI in a SharePoint site. You
can host complete SAP pages in SharePoint using IFrames that contain SAP Business
Server Pages (BSP). Due to the way BSP’s work this is somewhat of a challenge1. SAP
also offers iViews which are based on the SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal product.
IViews allows you to expose and combine pieces of SAP functionality using IView
WebParts.
In our scenario UI integration is too limited because we want to combine and aggregate
data from different sources. We want complete freedom in the look and feel of the
user interface where both BSP’s and iViews will always have a SAP look and feel.
Process Integration
Process integration occurs when a business process has been started in SharePoint and
uses SAP data or executes a SAP process before completing. Exposing SAP function-
ality to the outside world can be accomplished in a number of ways. The old-school
way is by using SAP Remote Function Calls (RFC) – or standardized Business Appli-
cation Programming Interface (BAPI) program interface. Since the SAP API is used to
extract data or execute a process this way of integration means tightly coupling. An
upgrade of SAP could break your solution.
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Fig. 1: The anatomy of a SAP Enterprise Service.

A better way would be by using SAP Enterprise Services. These services are stand-
ardized web services which expose certain business data. All the Enterprise Services
are stored in the Enterprise Services Repository (ESR). At this moment there are more
than 3000 services available. Fortunately they are well-documented by SAP. Enter-
prise Services offers the best solution for data integration, extracting data from SAP
and using this data in SharePoint for scenarios like BI and full-text search.
The third way would be by using SAP NetWeaver Process Integration. This middleware
layer maps, routes and transports data elements in messages. Adapters are available
to map the data from SAP structures in Microsoft (.Net) structures in Microsoft appli-
cations. The middleware layer centralizes the monitoring and lifecycle management
of the process integration. This is also used in registry and management of Enterprise
Services (The SAP Enterprise Service Registry and the SAP Enterprise Service Repository.
Examples for using process integration in the area of processing EDI messages are csv
files, SAP Intermediate Documents (IDoc’s) and exchange of XML files. An example
for the use of web services is the Enterprise Services for chain process integration.
Data Integration
Data integration is much more interesting and we see a lot of business needs for this
form of integration. Data integration is needed when not all the data needed for
decision making is complete in the ERP system but is scattered over multiple back
office systems. This is often the case in most companies. Imagine that you want to
present a picture of an employee to the SAP CATS system but these pictures are in
a separate system or file store. But also combining data and data enrichment from
excel sheets must be quick and easy. Key is that the data from the original source keep
their integrity. Determining the most robust way of data integration that respects all
the existing business rules of the used data stores is described in this article.
One way to integrate with SAP on the data level is to export SAP transactional infor-
mation into a SQL Server Analysis Services warehouse and then expose the data in
SharePoint using the KPI capabilities2. Our scenario required real-time information
however and therefore required a different solution.
Where to present the data

When sketching and architecture for the above described scenarios the question must
be answered where to present the data to the end-user. As lots of companies now
a days have SharePoint as an intranet portal SharePoint would be the most obvious
place to implement the data and process enrichment. One of the key features of
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is the presentation of information and data. The Business
Connectivity Service is one of the features that would be the most efficient place to
integrate the data presented. It’s a standard service and it’s quick to realize because
in this scenario it needs a minimum or no application development. Only the queries
to the back office systems needs to be configured and enriched if they do not meet
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the requirements. As SharePoint 2010 has an enormous library of KPI-Web Parts and
KPI lists the presentation possibilities are enormous.
SAP user authentication

When a user wants to access SAP data from within SharePoint you want to ensure
that the user is authorized to access that data. Although there are multiple possi-
bilities, depending on your SAP implementation, the two most commonly used are
1. SPNego - Active Directory for user authentication
2. SAP Logon Tickets - SAP usernames and passwords for user authentication
When SAP uses AD you have to ensure that you can delegate the user’s credentials
from SharePoint to SAP which requires the use of Kerberos. This is by far the best
and most secure way to pass credentials to SAP. When SAP uses SAP usernames and
passwords you have no option but to do a form of credential mapping. Assuming
your SharePoint solution uses AD accounts you will have to map each AD account to a
SAP account or map an AD group of users to a specific SAP account. Mapping an AD
group will ease access but at the cost of control. SharePoint offers the Secure Store
Service (formerly known as SharePoint single sign on (SSO)) to enable you to do the
credential mapping.
There are other ways to authenticate users in SAP. One of them being SAML; Security
Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an XML-based standard for exchanging authen-
tication and authorization data between security domains. The usage of SAML might
be interesting since SharePoint 2010 fully supports claim based authorization but that
is beyond the scope of our case.
Using SAP Enterprise Services

The SAP Enterprise Services are atomic. So there is only one service operation in the
enterprise service. Often they must be composed into composite enterprise services
in order to use them in a business process. The next figure gives an overview how the
business process is supported by the enterprise services.
Fig. 2: Overview which describes how a Business process

is supported by an Enterprise Service.
Figure 2 shows that various service operations are used in the enterprise service. There
are two options to compose enterprise services into consumable services: the SAP
Composition Environment (using SAP CAF) and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration
(using SAP Enterprise Services Builder). SAP Composite Application Framework (SAP
CAF) is a composition tool in NWDS (SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio - an Eclipse-
based IDE) and runtime on SAP Web Application Server Java for developing, testing,
deploying, running and configuring composite applications.
We will focus on composition using the SAP Enterprise Services Builder. The process
details are given in the next figure.
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Fig. 3: Composing an Enterprise Service.
The SAP Enterprise Service Builder is a component of SAP NetWeaver Process

Integration. In our case scenario we need three Enterprise Services:
1. Get a list of employee numbers with data entries in the time sheet database
(SAP CATS)
2. Get the employee name for a given employee number form SAP HR
3. Get the time sheets for an employee number in a given time frame (SAP CATS)
The services are selected in the SAP Enterprise Service Repository. This contains the
XML structures and binding to the SAP back-end in ABAP classes that actually access
the data. In order to populate the Enterprise Service it must be published using the
SAP SOA Manager in a UDDI standardized registry. After this step the enterprise
service is available.
There are two options to bind the implementation to the composed enterprise service.
Using internal binding and external binding. The internal binding uses the SAP API
(ABAP Provider Class) and the external binding uses the published atomic enterprise
services as individual service operations. It is obvious that external binding is better
because it is more future proof.
Now we have our SAP Enterprise Service composed and available we should set up
the BCS and connect it to our Enterprise Services.
Using SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services

The primary way to integrate external data in SharePoint 2010 is a service application
called Business Connectivity Services (BCS). This service uses connectors to connect to
external data sources and maps the external data to a SharePoint data model. The data
model is based on the way data is structured in SharePoint using Lists and Columns
and is called External Content Types. This functionality enables you to integrate SAP
data or other external data sources in your SharePoint site and use that to provide
portal functionality like exposing and searching SAP data in your portal or offering BI
functionality in your portal (aggregate SAP data and create Charts and KPI’s).
BCS is able to connect to the following data sources:

n Databases using ADO.NET
n Web services or WCF services
n Microsoft .NET Connector Assemblies
n Custom data sources
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Fig. 4: BCS architecture.

These data sources are listed in order of ease of use. Connecting to a database is easy
because they usually map very well to External Content Types since Lists have a lot in
common with database tables. An External Content Type in SharePoint is an external
data source that is exposed (using BCS) as a special SharePoint List called an External
List. One of the advantages of that approach is that the User Interface is identical
to that of a normal List in SharePoint and is therefore intuitive to the experienced
SharePoint user. A user viewing and editing customer data for instance might not
even notice that the data is actually coming from and being updated in SAP. Also
external data can be joined with SharePoint data and can be filtered just like Share-
Point Lists.
Connecting to Web and WCF services very much depends on the complexity of the
service and the types used and how well they support the model BCS requires. If a
data source is not directly supported or you need to do some translation you will
have to write a .NET Connector or a Custom Data source using Visual Studio 2010, the
differences between these two go beyond the scope of this article. There is better
tooling and support to create .NET connectors but a Custom data source might be
necessary if your back-end service is very dynamic or uses complex types.
For our business scenario we need to configure the BCS to connect to our composed
SAP Enterprise Service. The first step we have to take is to configure the SharePoint
Secure Store Service to map AD / SAP credentials. The next step is to discover our SAP
Enterprise Service and create the external content type:
Fig. 5: Configuring a Read Item operation for the SAP Enterprise Service.
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We will select the WCF type and enter some parameters for the data connection like
URL for WSDL, URL for Web service endpoint and Target application ID as defined in
Secure Store Service. After that we use the created External Content Types in Share-
Point to create the External Lists. Finally we create a SharePoint Composite appli-
cation that combines data from SAP, SharePoint and Excel Services. Now we have all
the data to create whatever dashboard we want.
Conclusion
The SharePoint Business Connectivity Services is a great way of consuming data from
SAP. Unfortunately we were not able to connect the current beta (v. 14.0.4536.1000)
of SharePoint 2010 directly to the SAP Web services. We encountered two problems.
The first was that BCS requires that both the Finder and SpecificFinder3 method of an
external content type has to come from a single data source (Web service) where that
functionality could only be found in separate SAP Web services. The creation of our
SAP Composed Web service fixed that.
The second problem we encountered is when saving the external content type, due
to what we suspect is still a bug in the beta version. We ended up creating our own
WCF service that operates as a wrapper around the set of SAP Web services. In the
end you will probably always need some form of wrapper or middleware because the
SAP Web services do not conform to the requirements of BCS.
Once we had BCS configured we were able to expose SAP data in the form of external
lists and start building our SharePoint Composite Application.
Another nice feature of the BCS, which we haven’t mentioned so far is that it can be
used by an Office Client. It is a relatively small step to expose data from SAP services,
through the BCS to the Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook client. This is a very strong
feature to offer SAP data to the standard and intuitive clients to a broader audience
without distributing the standard SAP Client.
More info
n Integration of SAP Business Server Pages (SAP BSP) in SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft)
http://bit.ly/6CZ18e
n Integrating Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SAP (Microsoft)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91026
n Stereotyped Operations Supported By BDC
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557363%28office.14%29.aspx
... by the way ...

SharePoint can be installed on Windows 7! Perfect for development. Make sure you meet the
requirements, you do need a 64bit machine.
More information on the installation can be found on the following site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx
Tip from Marcel Meijer (VX Company) http://www.marcelmeijer.net
101
2010 Special
SharePointComic
by Dan Lewis
102
2010 Special
The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise

Sjoerd van Lochem is Competence Manager for SharePoint
technologies at Qurius. He has been involved at numerous
SharePoint projects. You can contact Sjoerd by e-mail at
Sjoerd.van.Lochem@qurius.com.
Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon

Marianne van Wanrooij is a solution architect and developer
for Connected Solutions. She works on Information Worker
solutions in the Education industry, integrating line of business
(LOB) applications with Office clients and SharePoint. Next to her
daily work, she runs two user groups, DIWUG (www.diwug.nl)
and the SDN Information Worker track (www.sdn.nl/iw).
Visual Studio Extensions or a Manually Build Solution?

Niels Loup is co-founder of Mavention and realizes as a principle
consultant the most complex SharePoint solutions. Mavention
translates concepts like “new way of work”, “web 2.0” and
“information management” into applications with added value
for organizations. Niels and Mavention are operative within the
healthcare, government and business services industry. You can
reach him by email at niels.loup@mavention.nl.
Working With Data in SharePoint Designer 2010

Laura Rogers is a Senior SharePoint Consultant at SharePoint911.
She has more than five years’ experience in SharePoint archi-
tecture, administration, training and customization. Laura
focuses on maximizing SharePoint’s out-of-box capabilities, and
can be found doing screencasts on endusersharepoint.com, for
her data view web part series. She is an enthusiastic blogger and
tweeter, and an active member of the SharePoint community.
Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010

Mirjam van Olst is a SharePoint Architect in the Information
Worker Solutions department of Macaw in the Netherlands.
In this role she has been helping companies to implement
SharePoint solutions since 2004. Mirjam is a Microsoft Certified
Master for SharePoint 2007. Mirjam is co-organizer of DIWUG
and a track owner of the Information Worker track of the SDN.
Blog: www.sharepointchick.com.
New ECM features in SharePoint 2010

Robert van Son is Team Manager SharePoint at Wortell.
Blog: http://blog.wortell.nl/robert
Website: http://www.wortell.nl
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/rvanson
Creating new Visual Experiences with Visio Services

Toni Frankola’s primary focus is on Microsoft Office SharePoint
and Dynamics CRM. He runs his own company that specializes
in SharePoint consulting, education and software product
development. Toni is author of SharePoint Use Cases (www.
sharepointusecases.com) and co-author at End User SharePoint
(www.endusersharepoint.com)
103
2010 Special
A SharePoint User eXperience

Sandra de Ridder (Sandra.de.ridder@Sparked.nl) is a SharePoint
and UX consultant at Sparked (www.Sparked.nl). She is also
involved in the UX track from SDN.
Introduction to the Business Connectivity Services

Nick Swan, a MVP for Office SharePoint Server, has been devel-
oping on top of the Microsoft technology stack since 2000. After
creating one too many ASP.NET web sites and Winform applica-
tions Nick decides to look into another area and since 2005 has
been concentrating on SharePoint. Nick spends the majority
of his time developing SharePoint tools under the umbrella of
Lightning Tools. They specialize in BDC development tools and
web parts. Nick also co-organizes the SharePoint User Group
(www.suguk.org). Blog: www.sharepointnick.com.
SharePoint 2010 Client Object Models

Ton Stegeman (ton@tonstegeman.com) works as SharePoint
architect for PGGM in the Netherlands.
His weblog (www.tonstegeman.com/blog) contains a lot of
SharePoint development related content.
The CodePlex project (http://sharepointobjects.codeplex.com)
contains a number of open source SharePoint projects that are
created and maintained by Ton.
Understanding Identity in SharePoint 2010

Michiel van Otegem is Chief Software Architect at BataviaLabs
in the Netherlands. He is also an author and speaker, and has
been a Microsoft MVP for the last 7 years. You can reach Michiel
at michiel@aspnl.com and check out his blog at http://michiel.
vanotegem.nl.
Happy Together in 2010

With over 15 years of experience in IT and Project Management,
Dux (you’re right, it’s pronounced as “ducks”) has earned
a reputation as leading expert in leveraging technology to
enhance project management. A Project Management Profes-
sional (PMP), he is currently a managing partner and the chief
evangelist of Innovative-e, Inc. He is the author of “SharePoint
for Project Management”. Blog: http://www.meetdux.com
SharePoint 2010 Chart Web Part

Agnes Molnar (MVP) has been working with Microsoft techno-
logies and SharePoint since 2001. After releasing MOSS 2007,
she founded L&M Solutions, her own SharePoint consultant
company in Hungary, Central Europe. She’s been working
as principal consultant and solutions architect, has leaded
numerous Central European companies’ SharePoint implemen-
tation. She’s an active writer and regular speaker of various
SharePoint conferences around the world.
104
2010 Special
Enrich your SharePoint 2010 portal

by integrating SAP applications
Cyrille Visser is a Senior Architect within Atos Origin with a
strong background in Microsoft technology. He is specialized
in Service Oriented Architectures and gets very enthusiastic in
dealing with complex architectural problems.
Johan Kroese is a Microsoft solution specialist working at Atos

Origin who has been architecting and developing Microsoft
based solutions for customers for over a decade. Although he
still enjoys pure (ASP).NET he now spends most of his time on
SharePoint Solutions and is a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM)
on SharePoint 2007.
Huub Montanus is a SAP Solution architect at Atos Origin with a

focus on enterprise architecture and process integration.
SharePoint Comic
Dan Lewis a SharePoint Consultant & Speaker. He is specialized
in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Share-
Point Services 3.0. He’s a MCAD as well as a MCTS in the config-
uration of SharePoint. He’s a Senior SharePoint Consultant for
ettain group and active in the SharePoint community and on the
committee for the Charlotte SharePoint User Group.
website: http://www.sharepointcomic.com/default.aspx
105

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Dutch Information Worker User Group

Special thanks to:

Design and layout:

Ready for 2010!

Marianne van Wanrooij

This special issue is sponsored by

The SharePoint 2010 Enterprise

Business Connectivity Services

Performance Point Services

Mark, the developer

Jack, the consultant

Tech Eddy, the application and system owner

Remco, the interaction designer

Maria, the power user

Huge, the end user

Bob, the company’s founder

Arthur, the IT architect

Mark, the developer.

Tags: service applications, SharePoint Services, central administration,

Tags: branding, theming, social networking, tagging/scoring/rating content,

Tags: user interface improvements, ribbon, Office integration, workflow,

Tags: ribbon, my Site, search, Office integration, offline support, SharePoint

Tags: development strategy, cloud Computing, service applications, forms

... by the way ...

Tip from Marcel Meijer (VX Company) http://www.marcelmeijer.net

Customizing the SharePoint Ribbon

Fig. 1: Ribbon basics.

Listing 1: XML structure of the Global CommandUI.

Add a control to the Ribbon

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

Listing 2: The manifest for Ribbon Customization.

n CustomAction attributes RegistrationId and RegistrationType: This tells us it’s

Listing 3: Group definition in CMDUI.xml.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

Listing 4: Remove a control.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

Listing 5: Replace a button.

Adding events to the control

Listing 6: Adding ScriptBlock.

Listing 7: Deploying customization.

Fig. 2: Rendering the Ribbon.

... by the way ...

Tip from Jan Ligtenberg APS IT-diensten; www.apsitprojecten.nl

Visual Studio extensions or a manually build solution?

First things first

And now for real

ASPNET _ REGIIS -ga domain\user

The first steps

Fig. 3: Visual Studio New Project screen.

Fig. 4: Display of the solution explorer after creating a new

What have you just created

Packages and deployment

Fig. 5: Commands that can be performed in the SharePoint project.

Fig. 6: Creating a new site.

Fig. 7: Adding items to a SharePoint project

Are there other ways?

SharePoint templates in the year 2010

... by the way ...

Tips from Mirjam van Olst (Macaw) http://sharepointchick.com

Working With Data in SharePoint Designer 2010

Data View Web Parts

Fig. 1: SharePoint Designer 2010 User Interface.