November 2009 Entries
When MOSS 2007 came out I created a blog post very similar to this one. It turned out to be one of my most popular posts and I received many comments and private emails thanking me for putting the post together. Since the post helped out so many folks I decided to create an updated version for SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 ships with many predefined site templates you may use to create site collections and sub sites. Sometimes the out of the box site templates will meet the needs of your project. Other times, the out of the box site templates may...
In part 1of this blog post series I showed you how to create a .NET Assembly Connector to read data from a flat file. This blog post shows you how to register an external content type associated with a .NET Assembly Connector with the SharePoint search search service so you can index and search the data coming from the external content type.
The Business Context
As I mentioned in part 1 of this blog post series, it’s commonplace to find critical business data stored inside flat files in large, mature organizations. In addition to being able to browse the data inside web...
The Business Context
In many large organizations business data is stored inside of flat files from mainframes or other legacy systems. These systems chug along just fine everyday and support many key elements of the business; they aren’t going away anytime soon. Traditionally, accessing flat file data, making it viewable in a web pages, and making it searchable requires an enormous amount of custom code.
The Solution
New functionality inside SharePoint 2010’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS) makes it extremely easy to connect to flat file data sources (or any other data source), display it in web pages, and make it searchable. This...
It was quite a week in Las Vegas at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009! Wow, what a long way the product has come! I can remember several years ago speaking at SharePoint conferences and seeing only a few dozen people attending many of the sessions. That’s certainly not the case anymore. In fact, SharePoint has grown so much that now the conferences come complete with live bands and fireworks!
My wife and I embraced the 80’s spirit during the beach party Tuesday night at the Mandalay Bay. We were surprised to find only few handfuls of folks were taking the same...
Creating SharePoint themes used to require editing CSS style sheets manually or using a tool like SharePoint Designer. Furthermore, packaging and deploying the themes required administrative access to the server. This is no longer the case! Now you can create a SharePoint theme without ever having to see a single CSS style and you can easily deploy it to your server and apply it all within your web browser! Here's how it's done with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.
Create the theme
First, open Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and proceed to create an Office theme just like you would for a PowerPoint presentation. See this...
This article describes how to create a custom site definition in SharePoint 2010. The process to create a custom site definition has not changed much since the last version of SharePoint, the only differences are the directory names and some of the XML in the WEBTEMP files. See this blog post if you would like to see how this is done in WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007.
Site Definition basics
Site definitions are located in the following folder on the SharePoint server:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates
Each site definition has its own sub directory under this folder.
Inside each site...