SharePoint 2010

De twitter import ( en blog import ) code die ik eerder hier had gepubliceerd, staat nu als volledig project op codeplex.com

Project: http://sp2010social.codeplex.com

Orginele blogpost:http://stefvanhooijdonk.com/2009/12/02/getting-the-web-inside-sp2010-code-sample

I’ve just published the first release for a CodePlex project I started to provide sample projects / solutions for using the Word Automation Services in SharePoint 2010.

Word Automation Services allow you to convert document to and from different formats.

File formats the service can read:

Office Open XML (DOCX, DOCM, DOTX, DOTM)

• Word 97-2003 Document (DOC) and Word 97-2003 Template (DOT)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Single File Web Page (MHTML)
• HTML
• Word 2003 XML
• Word 2007/2010 XML

File formats the service can write:

• PDF
• XPS
• Office Open XML (DOCX, DOCM)
• Word 97-2003 Document (DOC)
• Rich Text Format (RTF)
• Single File Web Page (MHTML)
• Word 2007/2010 XML

(source: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2009/12/16/Word-Automation-Services_3A00_-What-It-Does.aspx)

As far as I’ve found out, there are no UI features available out-of-the-box to use these services, so I’ve decided to create some. The first one is a custom workflow action you can use in SharePoint Designer to convert a document to many of the supported formats.

In the workflow designer you can add the “Convert Document” action:

The action is inserted into the workflow step where you can specify the url of the output file, select the output format and save options and select a variable for storing the conversion job id (which you can use later to retrieve the status, as the job runs asynchronous):

The job id is also logged into the Workflow History Log (the second entry is from a second workflow action that logs the returned conversion job id variable):

After the job has run, which can take up to a few minutes (depending on the word automation services settings), the converted document appears in the library:

The custom workflow action is one of the first features for Word Automation in SharePoint 2010 I’ve planned to release. Other features will be a Ribbon and Item context menu extension and more Workflow actions.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement or other functionality you would like to see.

When you create a project in Visual Studio 2010 on one of the SharePoint project templates it will take care of all the packaging for you.

But when I was working on a project with custom workflow actions, the SafeControl entry that is needed for making it work was not added to the generated manifest.xml file.

Fortunately the package designer allows you to modify the template file it uses for generating this file. So open up the package designer, switch to the “Manifest” tab and add the assembly reference in the template yourself, but this time, include the SafeControl entry:

You can safely use the SharePoint project tokens in there as well, but only for the SafeControl entry. When you put it into the Assembly entry, the package generator won’t understand it and will add another assembly reference for the project output:

Developing a custom workflow activity for SharePoint 2010 doesn’t differ that much from developing one for the MOSS 2007 platform. So by following the different articles on that you will be able to create one with ease.

SharePoint 2010 still uses the same mechanism with an .ACTIONS file and adding an “authorizedType” element to your web.config. I was unsuccessful however in getting the activity to show up in SharePoint Designer 2010.

After adding a “SafeControl” entry to the web.config the activity did show up. As far as I can see this is the only thing different to the steps you have to take in MOSS 2007.

In SharePoint 2010 there are quite a few interesting changes to the User Profile System. In this post I will outline some of them.

Profile types

You can specify sub-types for profiles. For each profile property you can configure for which types the property is used. A user will be able to see or edit only those properties that are linked to their Profile type:

In the Profile list or Profile property list you can filter the list by profile sub-type:

Organization profiles

You can now import organizations from your profile store. This includes options for importing organizations in a hierarchy. The organization profile system also supports specification of Profile Types, so different types of organizations can have different properties.

The hierarchy is specified by selecting a parent organization in an organization profile. You can also specify the leaders of an organization and the members of that organization. This will link the specified user profiles to this organization:

Property Synchronization

Profile properties can now be exported as well. This allows for users to edit a property value which is then updated in your identity store such as Active Directory:

This sync is one way only, so a property can be imported or exported, but there’s no option to keep the two values in sync in a bi-directional way. Export to BCS sources is also not supported.

Term store used for choices

Properties that are defined with choices are linked to the Term store. So there’s a single management system for choice fields across the SharePoint farm:

The property will use the configuration of the Term set to define if users are allowed to use fill-in choices.

Multiple import connections

In SharePoint 2007 you were only able to import from one primary store. So importing from 2 or more Active Directories or a custom user database was not supported. In 2010 this is supported. You can now specify more then 1 import connection to import accounts from AD as well as a LDAP or BCS store.

Import filters

You can specify exclusion filters for your import connections. This will allow you to filter out user or organization profiles when importing from you identity store:

Conclusion

The SharePoint team has done quite a big overhaul on the user profile system. A lot of pain points from MOSS 2007 have been solved, the system allows for more granualarity in configuration of the profiles and has been integrated nicely with new functionality such as the Term store (a.k.a. Managed Metadata Service)

I just had a tough time deploy FAST Search Server 2010 Beta on a new SharePoint 2010 farm. Upon searching the internet it looked like I had the same issue as loads of other people, a not complete/wrong installation guide. But even after reviewing the posts in this thread and reading the post from Manfred Berry, I was unsuccessful in getting FAST to work.

Until I dove into the logs on the FAST server, which is something I always postpone due to the overload of information in there. I found an error mentioning “Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'”, caused by the dreaded WCF issue that needs the same hotfix as metioned here. So not only install the hotfix on your SharePoint servers but also on your FAST servers, which seems kind of logical now I think of that.