We have extremely tough queries and quite complicated data model, so we decided to get another solution:

• The whole thing is divided into 5 parts each describing different business viewpoint of the data; all these viewpoints have been deployed as custom web-parts with initial constructor implemented with 1st webpart.
• SQL code takes about 14 500 (!) lines in 6 different UDFs, which all were written by one person; another guy created webparts.

Finally, we’ve done it. Hurray!

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.

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.

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.

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.

NB: not tried by myself yet, just FYI.

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.