Announcing the WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint

The WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) Toolkit for SharePoint provides sample code for producing WSRP conformant data from SharePoint lists and libraries.  External portal platforms (e.g. BEA AquaLogic Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal, SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal etc.) can then render SharePoint data natively through their WSRP consumer portlets.  The Toolkit is available now for download from the MSDN Code Gallery.

The Toolkit demonstrates two possible methods of exposing SharePoint data through the WSRP interface and is intended to provide a starting point for customers who are interested in surfacing SharePoint data in non Microsoft portal environments.  The first method focuses on maintaining high fidelity with the SharePoint user interface and the second method focuses on providing flexibility and control over the rendered output.

Of course WSRP is just one of many options available to support portal interoperability and Microsoft continues to invest in open standards for interoperability including XML based web services, CMIS, Office Open XML, RSS and REST.  Microsoft is also investing heavily in Silverlight, designed to deliver rich user experiences and applications across multiple platforms.  For more details on the SharePoint interoperability story, visit the TechNet Office SharePoint Server Interoperability TechCenter.

A more in depth presentation about this tool will be shown here in my blog in the following few days.

3D Silverlight Charts in SharePoint: SmartTools.Charts

An impressive library for charting was developed by Visifire(http://www.visifire.com/) a while ago. This library is using WPF and Silverlight to create very nice 3D charts (you can test a lot of charts here in this gallery: http://www.visifire.com/silverlight_charts_gallery.php). And, of course we can use them in SharePoint.
Jan Tielens made a new control in his SmartTools library, named SmartTools.Charts (you could find it here: http://www.codeplex.com/smarttools/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Charts&referringTitle=Home) to fulfill our needs to have nice looking charts in SharePoint.

To install and use the feature you should complete the following tasks:
1. First thing you have to do is to download the SmartTools.Charts from codeplex and install it on the site collection you need (it is build with the WSPBuilder so it has an installer for this task). 2. After you install it, you have to enable it at the site collection level. To do that, go in Site Collection features and enable SmartTools.Charts.
3. You are able now to add 2 new web parts:
a) List Charts - this web part connects to one list on your site and brings data from that list in the chart. You can specify here the list to connect to, the view to filter data and the columns to use in chart (as you could see in the picture below).



b) Tasks List Chart - a particular List Chart - it is linked with the Tasks List in the site to show the percentage of work for each task:



4. Enjoy it!

Remember that this tool is on Beta 1, so it might have some bugs out there.
Very good work Visifire for creating those charts and Jan for the SharePoint integration.

P.S. You should have Silverlight enabled in IIS for the site collection you want to put those charts. To do that, go in IIS and add the following MIME Types to the site where the SharePoint site collection is:

.xaml
application/xaml+xml

.xap
application/x-silverlight-app

.xbap
application/x-ms-xbap

European SharePoint Best Practices Conference

In 6-8 April 2009 is the first European SharePoint Best Practices Conference. This is sure to be the best SharePoint related Conference in Europe, this year. It already has an amazing speaker line up. This conference was just announced this week! Check out the killer line up of the SharePoint greats: Steve Smith MVP, Spence MVP, Mike Watson (X MSFT), Todd Bleeker MVP, Andrew Connell MVP, Penny Coventry MVP, Bob Fox MVP, Andrew Woodward MVP, Natalya Voskresenskaya MVP (Blogger think Squirrel). More information you could find at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/.
See you there!

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

In 2-4 february 2009 is the second SharePoint Best Practices Conference (the first SharePoint Best PracticesTM Conference in Washington, DC in September, 2008 was an overwhelming success). This conference will have place in San Diego (USA, CA). More information you could find at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/. The agenda for this event is here: http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/agenda.
The first 250 people who register for the Best Practices SharePoint Conference in February will be given a free copy of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices by Microsoft Press.

Hide search on all application screens in SharePoint

Application screens (a.k.a. "_layouts" screens) usually don't display the search in the header. There does appear to be a few screens out there that do, and depending on your design for application screens, this may throw a wrench in how your page looks. To stop the search from showing in any application screen, add the following CSS style to your theme or alternate CSS file:

.ms-searchform
{
display: none
}