Development Matters Blog

The Gov 2.0 Summit defined innovations from the government and the private sectors to highlight technology and ideas that can be applied. The next generation of government (also known as Open Government/Government 2.0) is focused not only on bringing government information, data, and transactions to citizens, but also on connecting the relationships between government and the communities it serves. Social media, cloud computing, web, and mobile technologies all provide new capabilities that government agencies are beginning to utilize in order to achieve much better results at lower costs.

One of the most important improvements Microsoft made with SharePoint 2010 is their dedication to establish SharePoint as a secure, strong and reliable government platform. By using Web 2.0 interoperability – information sharing and integrated collaboration in form of wiki pages, discussion boards, and interactive dashboards - Microsoft is putting SharePoint in front of traditional competitors like Google, IBM, Cisco, Drupal etc.

The tool that will support Microsoft on that road is the new Gov 2.0 Kit. The Gov 2.0 Kit allows users to fast-track their Gov 2.0 deployments. By utilizing Gov 2.0 Kit accelerators, government agencies are able to integrate their sites in the eGovernment’s trends.

The enhancements include Microsoft SharePoint accelerator templates, which streamline site development and design. By focusing on both internal and external collaboration and integration with social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, the Gov 2.0 Kit helps make government more transparent and collaborative. Using the kit, you can provide an enhanced user experience to citizens who search or browse federal or state and local government sites that will help them quickly find information and complete services with increased ease and satisfaction.

Features

‘MyPeeps’ – Gov 2.0 Kit ‘My Peeps’ templates enable social sharing of information within government entities and allow optional promotion of this information to public facing social networking sites. The major advantage of ‘MyPeeps’ is that it is hosted on-premise for “government-only” social networking and all information is kept internal unless otherwise tagged to be posted to Internet sites like Twitter or Facebook.

Improved User Experience – Gov 2.0 public facing portal templates maximize portal experience by featuring the most relevant information and allowing site users to find information quickly. We have incorporated Twitter Feeds, RSS, Social Networking, and Video News parts right into the page.

Connect With Your Constituents – Allow communication channels through idea, complaint, question formats as well as blog participation – all of which give the community a voice and allows you to serve the community even better. This integrates directly with Constituent Relationship Management software for your office staff to track correspondence and critical constituent issues.

Intranet – Use Gov 2.0 intranet templates to enhance your back office experience by quickly bringing technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, BI, Live Meeting (and more) together in one place!

Merit Solutions has been selected by Microsoft as 1 of 6 Worldwide Partners to participate in their Partner Business Systems (PBS) Pilot Program, effective July, 2010. The Partner Business Systems is part of the Microsoft Dynamics Partner Readiness Strategy, which represents Microsoft’s commitment to deliver subsidized advanced training, guidance and systems to set a trajectory for profitable growth.  Partner Business Systems helps partners monitor, manage and scale their businesses.

Merit Solutions has been chosen as the pilot partner for Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Microsoft SharePoint integrations.

What is Partner Business Systems?

• CRM and  ERP applications that help Partners automate, manage and track key business processes
• Systems that incorporate Microsoft’s best practice sales, implementation and financial processes
• BI tools that provide insight into business results and critical KPIs, both leading and lagging
• Web services that ease integration and collaboration with Microsoft

Why Partner Business Systems Matters:

• Partners need complete insight into business critical KPIs
• Partners’ systems need to capture key performance data
• Partners need proper infrastructure to enable scalability and growth
• Collaboration capabilities are needed across the Dynamics eco-system
• Partner Business Systems improves business insight/oversight and enables scalability
• Partner Business Systems automates and supports best practice business processes

In an effort to keep our web content relevant, up-to-date, and informative, we have recently gone through and updated our Microsoft Dynamics Development Services landing pages.

Below is a brief snapshot of the new content, along with the links to individual pages:

Microsoft Dynamics AX Custom Application Development: With a team of highly-qualified Microsoft Dynamics AX developers, Merit Solutions provides custom application development to both ISVs and Microsoft Dynamics AX clients, extending your team in regards to requirements analysis, technical design and development, and quality assurance testing of all software products. In the end, we measure success by our ability to deliver custom applications that will help organizations optimize performance and reduce costs.

Read more about our Microsoft Dynamics AX Development services.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Migrations: Users migrating to Microsoft Dynamics GP often want to improve the structure of existing processes and line-of-business applications. Typically these businesses have grown and become more complex in their business process needs. Using the migration tools available from Microsoft, Merit Solutions can help organizations plan and implement an efficient migration from systems like QuickBooks, Peachtree, and legacy systems. Our methodology preserves data, enhances security, improves reporting, and minimizes business disruption by designing and following an efficient migration plan.

Read more about our Microsoft Dynamics GP Development services.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integrations: For companies interested in integrating front- and back-end business operations, Merit Solutions provides seamless Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration that brings together sales, marketing, accounting, supply chain, and more. We have extensive experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrations to Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, and other 3rd party ERP Systems. Merit Solutions also provides cost-effective integrations with external sites, hosted either in-house or at the hosting partner.

Read more about our Microsoft Dynamics CRM Development services.

Microsoft SharePoint Development: Merit Solutions provides Microsoft SharePoint development and deployment services to companies in need of extended portal functionality. Our integration, training, and consulting services help companies through new intranets, workflows, collaboration, document management, and custom portal solutions. We also have extensive experience developing SharePoint-based features and solutions, including 21 CFR Part 11 SharePoint Document Management.

Read more about our Microsoft SharePoint Development services.

We hope you enjoy the new content. Feel free to make suggestions by commenting on this blog article!

SharePoint offers a very good object model which allows a developer to achieve just about anything. But what happens in situations when the developer must achieve certain functionality, but his or her code is not running on a server hosting SharePoint? That’s where the SharePoint Services step in.

Anyone who has tried to manage content in SharePoint using SharePoint Services knows that it can be a very challenging task. A lot of functionalities are limited, or don’t exist at all. Some of them are very basic and it can be a real mind cracker when it comes to the development of more complex functionalities. For example, there is no service that provides the method to delete a web site – a quite extraordinary fact, if I may add. Of course, the developer may develop a custom web service and use it for his or her purpose. However, sometimes a client requires the development of an application which is not allowed to add anything to the server machines. When that happens, the only tool left for the developer to use is the existing coding arsenal and his or her wit.

One of the very common and basic functionalities that may arise in the never ending list of client requirements is to develop a code which creates SharePoint sites. This should be rather easy, right? Well, not quite so. On this MSDN page you may see the list of all available web services. A web service websvcSites may appear tempting judging by its name, but it deals with the site content migration and site templates information. The websvcAdministration web service “provides methods for managing a deployment of Windows SharePoint Services, such as for creating or deleting sites”, as stated on the page. Unfortunately, by the term sites the documentation actually refers to site collections, thus our problem still remains unsolved.

The solution, believe it or not, lies in the web service called websvcMeetings. This service contains a class Meetings with a method CreateWorkspace. The purpose of this method is to create SharePoint meeting workspaces. It may seem odd to use such a method, because we are not actually trying to create a meeting workspace, but a site instead. The key lies in one of the method arguments – site template. By providing a site template other than the meeting workspace template, the method will create a corresponding site. This small trick extends the purpose of the method and solves the challenge of creating SharePoint sites using SharePoint web services.

The complete list of SharePoint’s default site templates can be found on this page. For custom templates, the developer should provide the name of the site template file which has been previously uploaded to the site collection’s site template gallery.

There are a few disadvantages with this method. For example, there is no option to set the permissions inheritance or whether the new site will contain the top navigation bar from its parent site. Actually, there are no SharePoint web services for the top navigation what so ever. This and many other disadvantages are eagerly expected to be implemented and enriched in the future releases of SharePoint platform.

InfoPath form templates in MOSS are widely used because there are many reasons that empower both servers.

The most common situation is that you need to pick-up some user information from MOSS and show / manipulate it on an InfoPath form. There are a few possible ways to make it work, with or without coding. The most powerful thing is by using web services provided by MOSS.

To be able to use web services in InfoPath, you should create a new Data Connection (Tools-> Data Connection). When the wizard starts, define what you would like to do with the data: submit or receive. Select Web services as a source of data and define the web service’s location. For getting user profile information (email, phone number, preferred name, etc) use MOSS services located at http://MOSSServerName/_vti_bin/UserProfileService.asmx.

• This service is not available if you are using Windows Share Point Services but only Microsoft Offices SharePoint Server.
• Some of available public methods are listed below:
  • AddColleague
  • AddLink
  • AddMembership
  • AddPinnedLink
  • CreateMemberGroup
  • CreateUserProfileByAccountName
  • GetCommonColleagues
  • GetCommonManager
  • GetUserLinks
  • GetUserProfileByGuid
  • GetUserProfileByIndex
  • GetUserProfileByName
  • ModifyUserPropertyByAccountName
  • RemoveMembership
  • UpdatePinnedLink, etc.

Moving forward, you can take the profile data for any current or other MOSS user. For users currently logged on, you should be able to pick-up some profile info when the form is loading. For non-current users, you have a lot different cases and you can pick data on the field value changed or drop down list value selected or something else.

If you need to handle some of the available events, you should have VSTA installed (Visual Studio Tools for Applications). If you do not have it, you will not be able to create event handlers at all. To enable it, find Microsoft Office in list of Add/Remove programs. Select Change option and add find those tools for InfoPath. Select the option to install it.

Now you can create event handlers by selecting a control, right click on it, then Programming and selecting the desired event. The most interesting case is if you have a drop down list with a few names and you would like to send an email to the selected one. Before we continue, just to note that the drop down list item has a Value and a Display Name. This can give us the possibility to hide non user-friendly data. So, if you decide to get email defined in MOSS for selected user, assign the Account Name as Value for each item in the drop down. Display value can be as you wish…

When VSTA is running, add reference to UserProfileService and name it. Code in the event handler should look like:

XPathNavigator XPathNav = MainDataSource.CreateNavigator();

ServiceReferenceName.UserProfileService profile = new ServiceReferenceName.UserProfileService();

   profile.UseDefaultCredentials = true; 

   profile.PropertyData[] userProperties = null;

    try {

              userProperties = profile.GetUserProfileByName(SelectedDDLValue);

    }

    catch { }

    if (userProperties == null || userProperties.Length == 0) {

        return;

    }

    for (int i = 0; i < userProperties.Length; i++) {

        XPathNavigator node = null;       

            case “workemail”:

                node = XPathNav.SelectSingleNode(“/my:emailField/my:userEmail”, NamespaceManager);

                break;

            default:

                continue;

        }

       ServiceReferenceName.ValueData[] values = userProps[i].Values;

        if (values.Length > 0) {

            if (node != null && string.IsNullOrEmpty(node.Value)) {

                node.SetValue(values[0].Value.ToString());

            }…

The email field can be hidden or visible, it depends on what information you would like to share with the user.

• In some cases, you can experience that drop down list events do not react as you expect. Try to avoid this by setting “Always Postback” option on drop down list property.

View a sneak peek of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Developers. SharePoint 2010 provides a robust development platform to rapidly build solutions using familiar tools like Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010. Developers gain access to a rich set of out-of-the-box features such as Business Connectivity Services for read/write integration between external application data, the web, and Office 2010 client.

Feature Highlights:

• Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools
• Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for SharePoint
• Developer Dashboard
• Business Connectivity Services
• Client Object Model (OM)
• Silverlight Web Part

View the Sneak Peek Video:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek for Developers

We have posted a new MeritCare Training Session, this one covering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Practices: Usage of Content Types

Site content types in the Microsoft Office SharePoint platform are defined as a reusable group of settings for a category of content. In this training session, we will present their usage to manage the metadata, templates, and behaviors of items and documents consistently. We will show you how to organize the content of your collaboration portal in a meaningful way and associate the same capabilities to your content across your document management solution.

Date: 7/08/2009
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 CST

Register now for the free Microsoft Office SharePoint Practices training session.

Coming from the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog, starting today (April 2, 2009), SharePoint Designer 2007 will be available as a free download.

The team is hoping this free download will lead to more SharePoint Customizations.

Learn more about the free download on the MSDN SharePoint Team Blog site.