Recently, I worked on a Sharepoint project solution for our attorneys to be able to create projects and assign them to summer associates.  When the project is completed, a workflow kicks in and sends an email to the responsible attorneys to let them know it is completed.  In building the email, I ran into a problem with converting the user name of the assigned associate into their real name.

In the workflow built with Sharepoint Designer, I added a lookup field to the Subject line of the email.  It came from the Current Item and the AssignedTo column.  The email was sent and in the subject line the name was formatted “domain\username”.  So, how do I convert the name?

After looking and looking for help, I found a wonderful open source solution for custom workflow activities on CodePlex.  It has a nifty activity called “Lookup user info”.  The lookup allows you to query a user profile property by their user name.  (There is a screenshot of this on CodePlex)  I am still amazed at how Microsoft doesn’t have this OOTB.  Anyway, this wasn’t the end of the story.

I was interested in finding the real name of the user.  In the query field, I put in “Name” which seemed logical coming from AD, but got nothing back.  I realized it was looking for the Sharepoint version of the user properties.  I then went to the next CodePlex tool, Stramit CAML Viewer.   What an amazingly handy tool!  I then looked up the User Information List under my root URL and found the real name was actually called “LinkTitle”.  In the end with the help of a couple of tools, the email subject had the exact format I needed.  It was “Evaluation form for actual name(LinkTitle)”.

IMHO, Sharepoint and SPD are great together.  However, there are some vital integration pieces Microsoft left out.  I shouldn’t have to go to Visual Studio or open source to convert an AD user name to their “friendly name”.  AD is their product and they should build their products to FULLY integrate with each other in the easiest ways.  That’s my 2 cents and maybe there is another way, but I haven’t found it yet.

Recently, I was building a training class solution explained here.  After building the solution, I noticed the behaviour of the Edit columns was acting strange.

The Attendees list showed the Edit column.

However, when you click the Edit button, the columns became rearranged.  Notice the save/cancel under the Name heading.

Opening Sharepoint Designer, I found the code where the columns were detailed. Notice the @Author and Sharepoint:FormField are below the dvt_1.automode template call.

To correct the arrangement, copy from the xsl:if to the /xsl:if and move to below the Sharepoint:FormField /td tag.

Now you get the final result (The Title was added later as an extra requirement from our Training Department.)

Click Edit

Now the columns are in the proper order

Hope this helps and thanks to Natalya Voskresenskaya Blog for an excellent solution!

Thanks to Annoyances.org for the solution to this:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1196364537

You have to download the service pack from Microsoft and install manually.  After install/reboot, run Windows Update again.  The SP should not show up anymore.

Recently, I had to change the AD import connection for my Sharepoint user profiles.  I noticed after this change the audience memberships were not compiling.  I searched the web and found nothing exactly solving this issue.  Many of my audiences are based on groups in AD.  I checked the rules again and found when I brought up the browser to select users/groups, the groups were all listed twice or even three times.

Temporary fix: I had to select the bottom most listing to get the audience to have members again.  I am not sure why it is doing this.  There must be some purge tool which can clear out the list of groups and then rebuild, but I haven't found it yet.

Thought I would pass this along in case anyone else is encountering this same issue.

Here in sunny Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay!!  What a large hotel this is.  I have to walk 2 miles just to get to the ballrooms.  (Just kidding, but it is a good walk to get there).  So many restaurants.  Have to listen to helicopters landing and taking off, but it's just part of it.

I really like this conference.  They have a wide variety of classes to choose from.  The attendance this time is the largest yet at 5000.  The keynote speech was good with a quick overview of where Microsoft is going next year.  They are due to release Visual Studio 2008 by the end of this quarter.  SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 are due in the first half of next year.  SQL 2008 has a ton of great features.  They incorporated the Dundas charts into Reporting Services.  I hope the virtualization claims they have made about Win 2008 come true.  VS 2008 has some really good features for integration with Sharepoint and click-once deployment.  I only wish our firm was using Office 2007, so we could use all of the integrated features between all of these products.

Working with a trial version of Adobe Captivate 2, I created a series of training video projects related to Sharepoint training.  I had purchased the full version, but didn't realize I had not upgraded to it when I worked on these training videos.  I completed the training videos and sent them to my customer.  Of course, after a few weeks, the videos started displaying an expiration message.  My customer had not informed me it was doing this and a few months went by.  When they finally called me about this issue, I had already upgraded to Adobe Captivate 3.  So I proceeded to open the trial-version projects in v3 and publish them.  It asked me if I wanted to overwrite my existing project to upgrade to v3 and I accepted.  I assumed this would take care of the expiration problem.  It did not.  The newly published project was still showing "Project has expired".

After hunting online, I found a solution.  In the Preferences, there is a section called Start and End.  In this section, there is a checkbox for the expiration of a project.  The original project had been in a trial version and the expiration time had been set.  When it was imported/upgraded to v3, Captivate automatically set the expiration to the trial expiration date.  All I had to do was un-check the box to set the project to not expire.

You have to try out Microsoft's new tool called PopFly.  They just released the beta version today and it is a blast to use.  I created an aggregated feed of Woot.com and Wine.Woot.com.  I was able to filter and sort the feeds.  There is so much more to this tool.  Check it out.  http://www.popfly.ms

The spell check issue has been posted elsewhere, but I thought I would give my own experience.  I had one user who could not use spell check when entering an Announcement on their site.  The site had broken permissions (uninherited) and new groups created specifically for the site.  I eventually had to re-inherit parent permissions to get it to work.  I think this is a bug.  It should not matter if they have inherited permissions or custom.  As long as they have contribute rights, they should be given all necessary functionality.