Free MOSS equivalent… from Microsoft!

Once upon a time I had to create a web solution for a SMB-client within Microsoft environment. I was stuck when I understood that the best thing is to buy a MOSS (Mictosoft Office SharePoint 2007) to create it – but that would extremely rise TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Everybody knows – licensing MOSS isn’t cheap.

So I had to think of free (or at least cheaper) analogs, and it’d be good if they’d live within MS environment, too.  I thought of  a simple and free (!) solution: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) + Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express.

Main benefits of such a pair are:

• they both are free;
• using it together gives almost the same functionality as MOSS.

That’s all for now; I’ll continue posting about this development because now we’re at architecture planning stage.

World time and weather webparts

Just’ve found a nice world time and weather webpart from CodePlex.

The CKS World Clock and Weather web part allows users to display local time and weather for selected major cities from around the globe. 

Tried it, looks quite nice.

Also found another one from Pentalogic. Looks more shiny, more configurable. Thinking of electing it as my candidate.

Nested IFs limitation

Like in Excel, in Sharepoint using nested IFs in calculated value formula is limited to 7 levels.

Problem using “IF” in calculated formulas

Problem

I create a calculated field with a formula containing “IF”:

=IF(Month=”January”,1,2)

You enter the formula, try to save but get error message like this:

The formula contains a syntax error or is not supported.

Solution

As simple as annoying, as often Sharepoint is. Check if you have a “English (United States)” or smth like this: you have to use semicolon instead of commas as divider.

“Tag Cloud” solution problem

When using “Tag Cloud” Sharepoint solution from CodePlex you have two most often used web parts: “Tag Cloud” and “Tag Browser”.

The problem is: you can use “Tag Cloud” WP with a column which exists in a list only, but you can’t use this column in “Tag Browser”. It must be a site-level column.

As for me, I use special naming to solve that: for example, use “tagCasesLib” column name and use it in “Cases Libary” list.

Impossiblity: day/month/year extraction

You can’t use [Start Time] or any field with a space in the name to extract the day / month / year – i.e. DAY[Start Time].

SP books

“Essential SharePoint” by J. Webb

World time web part

Pentalogic World time web part allows to show time in different time zones. Useful for companies owning distibuted businesses or clients.

NB: not tried by myself yet, just FYI.

Customizing Task alert email problem

Way 1: Command line

stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -url http://server -filename "C:\Program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\template\XML\alerttemplates.xml"

via © Bytelab

 

Way 2: Create workflow & send custom emails

That’s the way I tried to go but got stuck in a problem. Although it’s a often-got problem, hope you won’t meet it; otherwise, watch this post’s updates.

We’ve created a custom workflow which:

• assigns task to a person from my “content” list (field of “Person\Group” field);
• send a cutomized email where Receiver is a field mentioned above from current list record.

Here we encounter the error: no email is sent. Yet haven’t understood WTF is because the task is assigned and alert about task assignment is sent. Please comment if you know that solution…

Some more ways…

• At MSDN:
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdeveloperdocs/archive/2007/12/07/customizing-alert-notifications-and-alert-templates-in-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0.aspx
  • http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/2a0d8f1e-a481-42da-8d93-ec2c33af7c30/
  • http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/ebcb81ec-ba36-4a4c-bd01-26dc2c4d0913/
• http://www.sharepointblogs.com/jeff102410/archive/2008/02/21/workflow-not-sending-emails.aspx
• http://geekswithblogs.net/DanielC/archive/2008/02/10/email-notifications-and-alerts—sharepoint-tasks-list.aspx
• http://rapidapplicationdevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/04/multi-value-columns-in-sharepoint.html

 

Upd1: In comments at last link blog I’ve found a kind of solution:

• create workflow variable of “string” type”;
• insert a workflow step of assigning  ”Person\Group”-type field as this variable value;
• send email to this variable value as Recipients.

It also didn’t work.

 

Upd2:

Found an official hotfix update which fixes the error: “Workflow generated e-mail messages will not use HTTPS. Therefore, you cannot use workflow from a server that is using HTTPS.”

The link is: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;956057.

Hello world!

Hi, %username%

This blog is devoted to SharePoint.

It’s well know for hard-to-solve, google-research-needed customizing solutions and tons of tips-n-tricks, so I’ll be posting them here.

Poooehali! (c)