SharePoint Tuning is not a crime

Don't reinvent the wheel and check out some great features, webparts, tools,... available @ CodePlex.




Advanced webparts
Tam Tam
SharePoint 2007 WCM WebParts
TabControl WebPart
Winsmarts SharePoint WCF Support
Search Community Toolkit
SharePoint Custom Field - Regular Expression Validator (!)
SPWakeUp - Wake up your Sharepoint and WSS Sites
Enhanced picture custom type sharepoint 2007
SPNewsletter
SPTwitter

Most Recent 50 SharePoint Projects Focused on SharePoint on CodePlex
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Silverlight charts with Visifire

I recently started playing around with Silverlight in SharePoint. I took a look at the Silverlight BluePrints to start with... Oh man, what a hell to get a sample working! A lot of people were complaining about a blank webpart... and of course I had the same problem. Recompiling the Silverlight project in VS 2008 helped for me.

After trying a few examples from the BluePrints I took a look at Visifire...

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft^® Silverlight^™. With Visifire you can create and embed visually stunning animated Silverlight Charts within minutes.

I examined the Asp.net example and gave it a try to build a chart based on some list data.


A sample SharePoint list with some data (Year and Profit)



Based on the data from the SharePoint list I created a Silverlight Column Chart. Looking good isn't?







You can also choose other visually stunning animated charts.
eg. line charts, donuts, columns, ...






To bring this to a next level... I'm trying to embed this in a SharePoint webpart. I was thinking about the SilverLightPart "wrapper" webpart from the BluePrints to do this job. Normally, this webpart is able to wrap a .XAP file to embed your silverlight applications. But first, I'll have to create a new Silverlight application to create a .XAP file (The above example is just an aspx page) . I am working on this...

It all looks well, but still in its infancy! :)

Concentra.be in the air!

Recently, a new public facing SharePoint website went online.

Concentra is a multimedia media company with a decentralised structure, which gives each medium or market the full chances that they need in order to grow.

There are seven activity clusters within Concentra: Newspapers, Free Press, Industry and Services, Audio-Visual, Books and Magazines, Classifieds and Digital Media.

Part of the advertising sales activities for the various activities fall under Concentra Media Regie, the group’s internal sales division.

I'm quite happy with the result... especially for my first WCM project.
Just take a look at concentra.be...

PS. I recommend watching the site in Dutch (not all pages are included in other languages)

Bulk editable workflow tasks

Have you ever heard about bulk workflow tasks? Hmm... neither had I! In one of our analyses I read there was no out of the box solution to edit workflow tasks at the same time. I did some research and found that in some cases you have the opportunity to mark for instance 5 workflow tasks of a certain type as "complete" for a given workflow association.

It is a pity that there only one predifined workflow (disposition workflow) in Office SharePoint 2007 that supports that option. However, there is a way to accomplish this behavior. First, you have to build a "custom" workflow template definition that define task types as bulk editable. Then, you also have to build an infoPath edit form with different views (one for individual task editing and also one for bulk editing).

For more info, take a look at:
Bulk editing workflow tasks in Office SharePoint Services 2007
How to: define a worklow task as bulk editable

A pile of workflow resources

It gives me the shudders when I hear about the word "workflow". As everybody will admit, workflow development is a heavy matter. Tom Nys, on the other hand, isn't scared of them... Next week I'll attend his presentation about workflow foundation at BIWUG.

Some useful workflow resources:
Recource 1
Recource 2