Blog - Robert Bogue [MVP]

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Article: Drawing a Target on Your Users with SharePoint

One of the challenges with most portals, including intranets, is maintaining relevancy of the information that the user sees and interacts with. You'll hear a ton about search relevancy but relatively little is said about what is displayed on the home page. Some organizations approach the home pages as simple landing pages, a place for links to other places. Others try to serve up relevant content, but all too often there are substantial portions of a corporate intranet home page that just aren't relevant. If you're in Indianapolis, how important is the company picnic taking place in New York?

In our information overload culture we've gotten adept at blocking out advertising and other non-content items on a page and still ad blocking software is in widespread use. We can filter information ourselves but the more we can filter information for users the better they like it. The more focused we can make our content the better the user experience. Luckily SharePoint has several ways that we can deliver customized content to users and groups.

More…

http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200806/ij_06_11_08a.html

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Monday, June 09, 2008

Article: Managing the Code when Customizing SharePoint

One of the most common problems that organizations that are customizing SharePoint have is how do they manage the code deployment process. Organizations typically have configuration management guidelines that help them regulate how code makes it into production whether that's internally developed code or are patches that are applied to the operating system and products being leveraged.

The problem is that SharePoint doesn't fit a nice clean model. Because so much of SharePoint is configuration and data driven, code that works in development or a test environment may not work in Prod because things are configured differently or there's different data to operate on.

So how do you manage a situation where you've got configuration information that needs to meet up with code to create a complete solution? In this article I'll tackle this problem, a generic approach, and talk about a few of the sharp edges on the strategy that you'll have to educate everyone on.

More?

http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200806/ij_06_09_08a.html

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Monday, May 19, 2008

Article: Office Space - From VBA Macro to Word Add-In

Document automation isn't a new functionality by any means. It has been going on since the invention of macros, and there has been a full-fledged programming model within Microsoft® Office applications since the early 1990s. For many years, the Office tools have featured macro recorders that weren't limited to simply replaying keystrokes but have been capable of writing code on the fly as well. Macros have even demonstrated that they are functional enough to write viruses. And while writing a virus using a Word macro may be a dubious feat, it is a feat nonetheless.

However, even with all of the capabilities of Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA), there are some things it just doesn't do very well. In the early days of VBA, XML hadn't yet been invented, the Internet was in its infancy, and the first HTML pages were just beginning to appear. As such, it's no wonder that making a Web service call isn't well handled in the context of Visual Basic for Applications.

The Microsoft .NET Framework CLR, on the other hand, understands these technologies quite well. The ability to call Web services is just one among a number of reasons for wanting to write .NET-targeted code rather than VBA—and doing so means using Visual Studio® Tools for Office (VSTO). But switching from VBA to VSTO doesn't have to be a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water; rather, it can be just a natural way to extend how you are already developing solutions in Office.

In this column you'll see how to use Word to capture some VBA code that solves a basic problem. Then I will use the latest version of VSTO included with Visual Studio 2008 to wrap this code into a deployable Word add-in. I'll also write some simple code for some of the tasks that the macro recorder either just can't record or doesn't record in an optimal way.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507643.aspx

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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Become a SharePoint Developer Instantly, If Not Before

With all of the interest in SharePoint I sometimes think that people walk up to me and want to know how to become a SharePoint developer instantly. (Just add water, as they say.) If you read my MSDN Magazine End Bracket article "You Should Learn SharePoint" you probably already realize that it's not quite that simple. However, Paul Andrew has been leading a charge that Andrew Connell and I've been a part of to get a good primer for SharePoint developers out there so anyone who has the desire to learn will have all of the tools they need to get started with SharePoint development. The first part of the campaign is ten (!) hour long web casts where we cover the things you need to know about SharePoint and some of the cool things to learn about SharePoint that can make building your solutions easier.

They are every Tuesday & Wednesday from 12p-1p EDT (GMT -0500) starting next week for the next five weeks. Here's a break down of the schedule:

Date (all times EDT)	Topic & Registration URL	Presenter
Tues, May 20 : 12-1p	Web Parts	Rob Bogue
Wed, May 21 : 12-1p	Data Lists	Rob Bogue
Tues, May 27 : 12-1p	Silverlight	Andrew Connell
Wed, May 28 : 12-1p	Event Handlers	Andrew Connell
Tues, June 3 : 12-1p	Site Branding	Andrew Connell
Wed, June 4 : 12-1p	Workflow	Rob Bogue
Tues, June 10 : 12-1p	Web Services	Andrew Connell
Wed, June 11 : 12-1p	Page Navigation	Andrew Connell
Tues, June 17 : 12-1p	User Management	Rob Bogue
Wed, June 18 : 12-1p	Content Types	Rob Bogue

Special thanks to Paul for getting this ball rolling, and the awesome set of people participating both at Microsoft and external to Microsoft to make this happen. I'm excited to be a part of it.

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Wednesday, April 09, 2008