1. Configure web part data source with XML
2. Specify parameters to filter data with XML
3. Customize the look and feel with XSLT.

Getting Started

The base web part XML to begin with is attached below. As you can see, this is a SharePoint data form web part with many configurable properties.

Next, I just need to customize three sections marked by red boxes above. Here they go again:

• DataSourcesStri

Specify your SharePoint data source XML. You can refer to the XML SharePoint designer generates when a data source is chosen for a data form web part. However, make sure to replace the markup sensitive characters with their respective encodings.

• & → & (ampersand)
  
• &lt; → < (less-than sign)
  
• &gt; → > (greater-than sign)
  

  Look at the xml below to find out what I mean

    

• ParameterBindin

Specify parameters binding here. Here is a sample below with some custom parameters marked in the red box

• DataFields

Specify the fields you would like to include from the chosen data source.

XSLT for Look and feel:
Use custom xslt for look and feel. The xslt can be specified after the web part is deployed to a SharePoint site.

SharePoint designer can also be used to generate your xslt.

Finally, here is one of the web parts I created using the above customizations:

The screen shot shows the list of parameters that can be configured using the web part parameters editor window;

By dropping multiple instances of the web part with different set of parameters, a web part page looks like this:

First find which CSS classes you want to modify, here is a link to CSS reference chart for sharepoint 2007

http://www.heathersolomon.com/content/sp07cssreference.htm

In my example below, i will be overriding the srch-paging and srch-stats classes to modify the back groud color for search paging and search statistics web parts commanly used in Sharepoint Search centers. Here are steps:

• Drop a content editor webpart on the results.aspx page of your Search center.
• On the property pane, open the source editor for the webpart.
• Insert inline styles as given below and save.  

<style>

.srch-stats{

    background-color: red !important;

    white-space:normal !important;

}

 .srch-Page{

    background-color: #000000 !important;

}

</style>

• Set the content editor webpart chrometype to none as you don’t want anything of this webpart to be displayed on the page.

Some of the other kool features of the product are:

• Faceted Navigation (let users refine results based on grouping by document metadatas)
• Popularity tagging
• Key concepts (based on document tagging)
• Documents preview, download, print etc functionality right on the search results page.
• XSLT based customization of Search UI
• Parametric Search
• Hit highlighting
• Wild card Search
• Enhanced People Search etc

With these features, finding the relevant information is 10 times faster than with the default sharepoint search.

For additional info on the product, visit http://www.ba-insight.net

Here are some vidoes demo of the product.

http://www.ba-insight.net/enterprise-search-demo.html

Here is a comparison among Mss 2008, Moss 2007 search and Ba-insight Longitude for search.

http://www.ba-insight.net/longitude-feature-matrix2.html

Thanks to my friend Mahesh for sharing these.

· Migrate an SSP to another farm (Office SharePoint Server 2007) This article describes the unique process of migrating an SSP from one server to another.
· Running SharePoint Virtually (VIDEO) In conversations with customers and partners, most organizations running SharePoint are now considering running it on virtualized servers. Last week, Michael Noel, partner at Convergent Computing – a Microsoft Gold Partner and SharePoint MVP, sat down with me to talk about running SharePoint components virtually.
· Internet presence scenario (Office SharePoint Server 2007) This series of topics and an accompanying poster provides an end-to-end scenario that outlines how to plan, design, build, and maintain an enterprise’s Internet presence Web site based on Office SharePoint Server 2007. This scenario focuses on the design, creation, and deployment of an Internet presence site in a large enterprise.
· Security for Federation (Office SharePoint Server 2007) This article describes security considerations for the Federation feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with the Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers installed.
· Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog
· SharePoint Toolbox
· SharePointPedia is the very first custom developed Internet facing SharePoint based application hosted by the MSCOM Operations team that has support for Windows Live ID authentication and integration with Microsoft’s “RegSys” user profile system that is used across all Microsoft.com properties

so20you20want20to20develop20custom20sharepoint20workflows1

The article below has extensive list of excel functions.

 http://blog.ray1.net/2008/04/sharepoint-calculated-fields-use-excel.html

 Note: The formatted calculated fields then can be used in many places including SPD workflow which runs on a sharepoint list item.

If we take Task List for example, following are the default views that are installed along with a team site or a document workspace.

Enough of good things about the list views, now let s get into some of the limitations and workarounds to them. I will continue with Tasks List for example.

Limitations:

 1.)

 The listed default views or any custom views for a task list can be viewed as a dropdown list on a standard list view web part tool bar and user can switch between them and view different views of data as shown below:

 This is good. But what is not so good is that a view does not appear in the list after you edit it. Thereafter, the only way to access or view the view is by using the view’s web address. A view has its web address assigned to it. For example, for the view My Tasks, the web address is like

http://server/lists/tasks/myitems.aspx

Let’s say if you have edited the view called My Tasks, thereafter, it cannot be viewed anywhere else but using its web address only.

I even copied the list form web parts source code by opening the myitems.aspx page in SharePoint designer and pasted the list form web part in a brand new aspx page. When I opened my new page, I

 Was able to see the My Tasks view but it disappeared from the original page i.e.

http://server/lists/tasks/myitems.aspx.

Findings:

The edited view for example My Tasks actually exist in the system. You can create a custom ListviewWebPart and use the edited view to display data where ever you want. Following is a sample source code:

protected override void CreateChildControls()

{

base.CreateChildControls();

SP.WebPartPages.ListViewWebPart lst = new ListViewWebPart();

lst.ListName =

SPControl.GetContextWeb(System.Web.HttpContext.Current).Lists["Tasks"].ID.ToString(“B”).ToUpper();

lst.ViewGuid = SPControl.GetContextWeb(System.Web.HttpContext.Current).Lists["Tasks"].Views[“My Tasks”].ID.ToString(“B”).ToUpper();

lst.ViewType =ViewType.Html;

lst.ChromeType = System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PartChromeType.None;

lst.GetDesignTimeHtml();this.Controls.Add(lst);

}

Tip if you must have to edit an existing view and you don’t want it to disappear:

Create a custom view from any of the existing views and edit it. SharePoint gives you an option to pick up a standard view or data sheet view etc or existing views to start with to create a new view.

 2)

Next limitation applies to Task list. As this is a typical filtering issue, it can exist in other types of lists as well. Please see the article below:

http://sanjayapdl.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/single-web-part-to-display-tasks-assigned-to-current-user-and-current-users-groups/

How to view item versions:

On click of the context menu item “Version History” in a document, system redirects to Versions.aspx (a layouts page) . Versions.aspx pulls all the versions for the current document and displays.

How to view restore option and who can resotre:

In this page, user who has a add/edit/delete permission on the document, can resotre a particular version. “Restore” is an option provided as a context menu item on each version item.

Removing restore option for all users:

I took this approach, which is good and working. If you have any other way of achieving this please lemme know.

I noticed that the restore option was not shown for a user who has only view permission on the document. Then i saw through the application page Versions.aspx. In this page, the current user’s  effective base permissions on a item is passed to the system. The options in the context menu are filtered based on those permissions. I then found out the effective base permission on a item for a user who had only view permissions. Next, i hardcoded those permissions and checked, the restore option was gone as system interpreted that the logged in user has view permission only. I also ensured that this change would apply  for my document workspace alone, as Versions.aspx is an application page and other sites in the farm can use it too. Following is the piece of code, i modified on the page (versions.aspx)