.NET From India

MOSS - Great Links

Here are a couple of great links to MOSS resources I came across when searching for some information related to MOSS.

Best Practices Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007
Clinic 5046: Inside Look at Building and Developing Solutions with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 - Free Elearning course
SharePoint 2007 Developer Resources - A super big list of SharePoint Links
Things to Consider for SharePoint Performance
Sharepoint Developer VPC and Hands On Lab - One of the toughest things with starting off with Sharepoint is to have to setup so many other softwares . This VPC is a great way to start off your learning spree without too much of a hassle. Note this contains only Sharepoint Services WSS, not MOSS

What should you be learning this year?

I do get asked a lot of questions on what is the best technology to learn. Obviously, depending on what a person currently knows, this question also has options added. So it is usually, .NET or Java, VB or C#, SQL Server or Oracle etc..

And in most cases my answer depends on what I know of the person asking the question. Obviously, a generic answer is mostly useless. But then I do have some advice for you this year if you are a web application developer working on ASP.NET or related technologies.

Learn MOSS 2007.

Categorized Search Results in MOSS

As you may have noticed I have been doing a lot of Sharepoint related work recently. Search is one of the main feature of MOSS, that is one of the most important feature considered by a enterprise. If people have to use a document management system, they have to be able to find their documents easily and a good search is very important.

One of the features I wanted to give to my users was the ability to filter based on some peices of Metadata like the document type or maybe categories. This is very similar to the option that most ecommerce sites have where you can drill down into a product category based on some properties of the product you select. But Sharepoint search does not have something like this by default.

I found a component in Codeplex called Faceted Search which adds this feature to MOSS. This is a set of webparts that allows you to do this with ease. You can actually use any coulmn in the document library to on which facets can be created.

Document Link Content Type

I have a need where I have a single document, but it should appear in multiple folders (Wanted something like Vista's Virtual Folders) in SharePoint. One of the new features in MOSS is that of content type and there is a content type called Document Link, that allows you to link to a document in another document library. Todd Klindt has a very detailed post about this.

This works fine, expect for one problem. Sharepoint does not consider the link to be pointing to another Sharepoint document library. So if you click on the link to open the document in MS Office (2003), Office does not recognize it as from MOSS and show you the edit and check in options that it would show if you had directly clicked on that document. The link always opens the document as read only.

Does anyone know how to get around this??