April 24th 2008 meeting

1. Arizona SharePoint Professionals Group April 24th 2008meeting

2. Agenda Community News 5 for 5 Tips and Tricks SharePoint Taxonomy Planning and Governance (Presented by Mark Schneider Vice President, Barricuda Tools) Speed Demoing – MOSS and Silverlight (Presented by Doug Perkes of Microsoft) Raffle

3. Tonight’s Sponsor • Mindsharp will be drawing off a $2995 voucher good for any public Mindsharp training event (including the June training events) – Complete your surveys to be entered!!! • Mindsharp will be providing free Demo DVD’s containing our End User Computer Based Training solution for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. 

4. Community News • Joel’s 10 Steps to Governance Deck • External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint • Hotfix for Lotus Notes Protocol Handler (KB950280) • Mindsharp is holding a public SharePoint training event in Phoenix on June 16th – 20th offering the following classes: • 5-day 2007 SharePoint Designer • 5-day WSS 3.0 Developer • 3-day 2007 SharePoint Power User • TechEd (6-10-08) • Next AZSPG - 5-29-08

5. May Meeting – 5/29/08 Search, Search, Search • Federating search with other engines • What is a search connector and what do I do with it! • Using Facets and Why • Addressing Governance and the Manageability of Search

6. 5 for 5 Tips and Tricks

7. Tip 1: Dealing with Potential Memory Leaks • Symptom • You write custom code that eventually causes your environment to become unstable or unresponsive. • Potential Fix: Validate Your Object Dispose Usage • Review Roger Lamb’s Developer Blog and Jeremy Jameson’s Musings • Long term: Look for new code analysis tools coming in the future to identify these issues.

8. TIP 2: Advanced crawler debugging stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherBackup -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherDestruction -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherDirMon -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherDirMonQ -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GathererLink -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GathererSql -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherHistoryHash -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherPI -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category GatherPITrx -tracelevel verbose -windowslogginglevel information • Situation: The search crawl has failed for some reason and the ULS logs do not contain much information regarding the crawl. All the search categories in diagnostic logging are turned up to verbose yet crawl information is limited. What can you do? • Fix: Turn up the hidden diagnostics categories related to the gatherer. This can be done using STSADM

9. Tip 3: Alert Templates Following OOB alert templates are provided: SPAlertTemplateType.GenericList : Template for alerts on Generic lists  SPAlertTemplateType.DocumentLibrary : for Document libraries SPAlertTemplateType.Survey SPAlertTemplateType.Links SPAlertTemplateType.Announcements SPAlertTemplateType.Contacts SPAlertTemplateType.Events SPAlertTemplateType.Tasks SPAlertTemplateType.DiscussionBoard SPAlertTemplateType.PictureLibrary SPAlertTemplateType.XMLForm SPAlertTemplateType.DataConnectionLibrary SPAlertTemplateType.AssignedtoNotification : Assigned to Task/Issuelist notifications • Alert templates are defined in 12\Template\xml\alerttemplates.xml. They are stored in the config DB and are available at the web application level. Any changes to AlertTemplates.xml must be followed by the following stsadm command for the changes to take effect - • stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -filename <templates file name> -url <site> • With the alert template you can - • Customize the alert email w/ CAML • Customize the New Alert page • Specify custom Alert handler • An alert template is what connects a subscription to the formatting of the email, notification/update handlers if any, filters, etc. Each alert has an alert template specified in the AlertTemplateName property (AlertTemplate property for full xml) of the SPAlert object. The OOB alert templates are in \Template\XML\AlertTemplates.xml • NOTE: Do not modify the OOB alert templates file. You can copy the contents to another file and use the update alert templates command.

10. Tip 4: Customize Alert Email Xml tags - <Digest> - look of the digest email <Header> <HeaderFieldsHeader> <HeaderFields> <HeaderFieldsFooter> <RowHeader> <RowFields> <RowFooter> <Footer> <Immediate> - look of immediate subscription <Subject> <Header> <Fields> <Footer> • The <Formal> </Format> section of an <AlertTemplate> in Alert Templates can be used to modify the look of the email - • In addition to these, CAML is supported. For. e.g you can specify <GetVar Name="NewValue#{Field}"> inside the <Fields> section. More examples can be seen in AlertTemplates.xml. • To exclude some fields from being rendered in the email, you should include them in the <DigestNotificationExcludedFields> and <ImmediateNotificationExcludedFields> section.

11. TIP 5: Looking Under the Covers If you ever want to find out “How did they do that?” when looking at an out-of-the-box SharePoint control or field use these tips to find out how the Microsoft team did it • Explore the TEMPLATE folder in the SharePoint 12 Hive. Pay particular attention to the files in CONTROLTEMPLATES, LAYOUTS, and XML directories. • Use Lutz Roeder’s reflector (http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/). You can get a wealth of information be examining the source code of the SharePoint assemblies. Example:

12. Guest Speaker – Mark Schneider • Learn why your organization’s taxonomy will make or break your SharePoint deployment, how to tell a good taxonomy from a bad one, and why SharePoint requires collaborative governance in order to be successful. • Mark is a contributing author an upcoming Microsoft Press book on SharePoint Governance and Best Practices.  Mark provided technology leadership and planning for over 25  years to organizations big and small.  He focuses on bridging the strategic planning gap between business and technology stakeholders.  His passion is in developing the skills and capabilities of others, and toward that end he teaches workshops on strategic technology planning, taxonomy planning, technology governance, and project management.  He is currently serving as Vice President of Barracuda Tools, a developer and publisher of enterprise software tools.  Mark can be reached at mark@vitalskill.com, and his blog site www.sharepointplan.com.