Today at the Fast forward conference Microsoft announced their product roadmap for enterprise search. It includes two new products to be released with the Office 14 wave. The first is FAST search for SharePoint which is basically FAST ESP 5.3x tuned and integrated with SharePoint and targeted for use inside the enterprise. It will be included as part of the enterprise CAL for Office 14. In the meantime there will be an ESP for SharePoint product with similar pricing available for those that want to get started with ESP and SharePoint now.
The second product is FAST Search for internet business. Designed for external sites it will include interactions management for managing campaigns and promotions as well as a content integration studio to help manage diverse types of content.
More details to come.
I recently created a sharepoint designer workflow and only site collection administrators could start it. Other users, even those that had full control on a site could not start it and would get an "access denied" message if they tried. To fix it I opened the site in SharePoint designer right clicked on the workflow in the folder list and checked the whole thing out. I then checked the workflow back in and it worked.
SharePoint designer provides some often overlooked reports on SharePoint sites, they are accessible through the reports button on the bottom toolbar. Summary information is provided on:
- Usage Data - advanced usage reports that are site and item specific, including hits and visits
- Pictures
- Unlinked files
- Linked files
- Slow Pages - based on page load time
- Older Files
- Recently Added Files
- Checked out files
- Hyperlinks - Internal/External links and the ability to verify that both types of links are functioning properly
- Pages with Component errors
- Style sheet links
- Master Pages
- Customized Pages
In addition to this summary information it's possible to drill into specific reports and produce graphs/charts on the data. Keep in mind that usage logging must be enabled to view these reports.
Metadata can be incredibly useful for organizing files within a document library. However the process for filling out the metadata on individual documents can often be time-consuming even using things such as the data-view to apply the metadata to a large number of files. Not to mention the process of checking in and approving those files if those features are enabled. I've actually been asked a number of times if there was a way to apply metadata tags to a file based on the folder it is uploaded into. This is not possible out of the box, however with a simple event handler this can be enabled. Mark Gerow from law.com recently published an article that describes enabling this functionality for a law firm here:
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202424667503 . The nice thing about this solution is that although the event handler is custom it allows the site administrators to configure it through the out of the box interface for SharePoint by adding additional folder content types.
A new version of the MOSS and WSS SDK was released on August 29th. Amongst other things it includes updated documentation for the records management APIs as well as several completely new articles on utilizing remote BLOB storage with SharePoint. The APIs for remote BLOB storage were added with SP1 but in my opinion have not been very well documented until now.