Last weekend I stumbled across a page called TopSharepoint. The page is a gallery of the best internet facing sites done with SharePoint. As we recently announced our new homepage at Solvion I gave it a try and hit the submit button. Neither me nor my colleagues were expecting something to happen, as there are only 707 homepages listed at the moment.

Today my manager came to my desk and said something about several users hitting our page referred by a site called topofsharepoint.com … yeah we actually made it! We see it as a real honor to be listed there as the page says “… Be advised that TopSharepoint website gallery is reserved for only the highest quality Sharepoint websites from around the world …”

So come along http://www.topsharepoint.com/solvion and start voting!

Last week I headed down south to Slovenia to attend the second SharePoint Conference Slovenia in Murska Sobota. As Murska Sobota is just a hour away by car, it wasn’t that far to travel :)

I went there with two goals in my mind. I was looking to get some fresh pics of the new 2010 Version of SharePoint and by far the important point, I aimed to get in touch with other SharePoint guys.

The conference was held at two locations. The first day was a workshop about the 2010 product and on the second day the main conference took place.

 

Day one started with an impressive talk on Taxonomies and Metadata by Zlatan Džinić. He showed us the new Navigation by Metadata feature of 2010 and how all that is integrated in the new version. As he presented on the July build of the product he occasionally ran into some strange behavior. But hey, that’s the point! He showed the product even in an early stage instead of using a prepared video where everything works as expected. That’s fair and straightforward and that’s how even an exception or an “unkown error” can make you likeable.

The second talk was by Agnes Molnar and covered the whole administration field. As all of you know, SharePoint administration is something we could talk about for ages. As Agnes only got two hours of the program she tried to give an good overview about the features and a short deeper dive into taxonomy and business connectivity services administration. Especially BCS will turn out huge in my humble opinion.

The final presentation of the first day was done by Claudio Brotto. He introduced himself as a pure dev head, and he really is one! Great to see that even the best guys in the business fight with the same problem as we ordinary guys do: tooling in SharePoint development. How can anybody even survive without WSP Builder? He showed some new templates in the new version of Visual Studio and how important SharePoint Designer will get in the next version. He also showed some features of the client side object model and how it can be used. It seems that developing for SharePoint will get a little bit easier as it is with the current version. But as always, wait until the RTM …

After that I was heading for some time in the swimming area of the hotel to get prepared for the SharePint event in Murska Sobota. What a fine event :) Drinking one or two pints and talking about SharePoint, very nice. Stayed there till the end, as I always do when it comes down to drinking beer and talking with the geeks. Renato managed to take a pic of Woody, himself and me with his phone’s cam. Here we go :)

As I was the only Austrian out there, that’s probably the time I started to get called “the Austrian guy”. Thanks to Zlatan, Toni, Woody, Renato and all the others for that great time.

The next day started somehow later as I thought it would. I missed the key note in the morning, but the nice guy from the organizing team lead me straight to the conference area, instead of getting lost round about 80 kilometers away from home.

So I stumbled into Zltan’s talk about BI solutions in SharePoint 2010. Awesome presentation! Visio definitely rocks! Also the new DAX features in Excel will help the new version to take off! Zlatan showed us how you can connect external Data from, let’s say a SQL database with Visio Shapes. So you can integrate BI data into your process documentation within minutes. Seems like a real step forward.

After that Renato and I really enjoyed the session titled “Assembly-Free SharePoint Solutions” by Daniel McPherson. He showed us what you can do without putting a assembly into the bin or GAC by just using JavaScript and the built in web services. Check out his blog, as he shows you a appstore like solution to deploy a webpart or theme remotely to your system just by the use of SharePoint web services. This approach will even get bigger if you think about the new buzz word, the cloud. Or do you really believe Microsoft will put your DLL into their servers? What was really amazing to us was the fact that Daniel showed us what is possible with the ootb features with just a little bit of JavaScript. He really got me with that idea and I’m looking forward to play around with this approach soon. Check out his blog, where he talks about solutions like Tunnelpoint or ProduShare.

The next session was about Test Driven Development by Andrew Woodward. Andrew blew me away with his deep and honest motivation for unit testing in SharePoint. I really enjoyed to be his pair buddy during his TDD session. He reminded us all that although SharePoint dev is somehow horrible in the beginning, we still should aim to use all the industry’s best practices used anywhere else in developing. “You can’t unit test SharePoint” A simple statement. A simple lie. He also warned us about the fact that we SharePoint guys will probably be the first guys being confronted with true 64 bit development in the Microsoft stack. Expect some problems there, as Visual Studio is still 32 bit! I also fully admit to Andrew’s tshirt: “Legalize unit testing”. And thanks to the man for the Typemock license.

The last session I attended was by Toni Frankola. He presented us some ideas to boost our SharePoint deployments. Nice to see what ideas are around in the field. Making some tiny features just with the help of JavaScript and Images. Reduce the hyperlinks on your page as users tend to get lost with an overloaded page. We already follow that path at Solvion, as we also made the experience that putting everything on the start page is a sure way to get people mad about SharePoint. Always keep KISS in your mind: keep it small and simple.

Finally I would like to thank Jose Antonio Morales and Matjaž Korenjak for putting together a real great conference. Everyone of your team was polite and friendly. I didn’t remember a single thing to moan about. I really enjoyed my time there and I’m definitely looking forward to meet with you guys again.

Puh .. quite a long time since the last, which was even my first posting … I’ll try to update now on a regular basis what is actually quite hard with all the new things flying around :)

So where to start? First of all I want to show you the end version of the idea from the first posting. A colleague of mine built a new version of our company’s homepage. I’ll show you how he integrated controls from Telerik and used JQuery in combination with the Content Query Web Part.

As written in my last posting, we were working on a news content slider solution for SharePoint. Basically all we used were the CQWP and custom XSL. Now let’s have a look what our solution looks like.

 

As you can see all 8 seconds the image in the center fades out and another shows up. The actual image, the hyperlink and the little text are all meta data from the underlying content page. We put all the meta data in our content pages, like the normal stuff title, text bla bla … additionally we add the image, hyperlink and text we use in the slider on the front page. So the author of the news page provides all the information to the content page and SharePoint renders that information to more than one place on the site.

As you can see on the video I had my cursor pointing on the actual image for the first 20 seconds. The solution is hooked to the onmouseover event and stops rotating the content as long as you put the cursor there.  After leaving the area the rotating starts again.

The next thing I want to show you is how we used the Telerik Rad Controls in our solution. What we were looking for was a feature that allows us to add a fly out/fly in behavior to the left Navigation. There are JavaScript solutions out in the web doing this, but some of them require to put a content editor web part with a special java script on every page of the site. As our authors aren’t devs or admins we needed to built a solution that provides the feature without editing every single page. So what we did was integrating the PanelBar from telerik into our master page. And here is what it looks like.

 

So enough for today. Come back soon, as I already prepare postings from the Slovenian SharePoint Conference which was held last week. Awesome information about the new 2010 release of SharePoint and Office. Also some really great talks about Test Driven Development by Andrew Woodward and assembly free solutions by Daniel McPherson. Needles to say there also was a SharePint :)

Hello on my new created SharePoint focused Blog!
My name is Thomy Goelles, I’m currently working at a Microsoft Gold Partner in Graz, Austria. I’ve been working with the 2007 release of the product since January 2007. Our projects mainly target a SharePoint enablement at small to midsize customers. We didn’t had to update a single 2003 implementation till today. So the real SharePoint hype in our area came with the last version of the product.
Our main focus is building intranet solutions. We’ve done only one internet facing site in the last 2,5 years. I think the license for the internet facing ECM solution is a way to big for our typical customer. We tend to guide our customers to the MOSS Standard version. We did a few projects on WSS, but it turns out that sooner or later you are going to develop a custom solution targeting a built in feature form the Standard product.
All our custom solutions are 100% WSP packages. We are using the WSP Builder VS project as root of any project. We are faced with farm scenarios with multiple front end servers, so WSP solution packaging really pays out. All our solutions are developed locally, checked in to our team foundation server and are built there. It’s not a 100% CI process, but we are getting there.
Currently my personal focus is set on the Content Query Web Part. I really start loving this web part. If your are working with the CQWP you probably came across the more flexible solution built by Imtech public available at codeplex.  This is a real fantastic web part and there is a great blog by a guy called Waldek Mastykarz. If you are interested in the CQWP this blog is a must read!
Inspired by the work done with the CQWP I’m currently working on a “NewsContentSlider” web part. I’m trying to built something like this with the content query web part. I’ve done the xslt part in Visual Studio 2008 with the help of a little reg hack to enable intellisense in VS. The solution is already running on my development machine but I still have to fix some minor bugs in the css. Last week a colleague and I discussed about the used jQuery library in the solution. At the moment I’ve included a reference to the Google based jQuery library but as we deploy this tool to a intranet site we tend to host the libraries somewhere in the style library of SharePoint as a internet connection is not a must on a intranet site.
This week I came across a tweet saying something about SharePint and Slovenia. So I opened Google searching around for a conference in Slovenia and luckily I found the page. So SharePoint Conference Slovenia is held on 26th of November 2009 in Moravske Toplice. As this is probably a hour away from us we definitely looking forward to do this event and also the SharePint that is planed there.