SharePoint USer Group Meeting Tuesday 20th February 2007

Missed out on the pizza as there was too much going on in town, what with Army helicopters flying around and the crowds visiting the QEII. And this brought traffic to a stop at 8pm when I was trying to get the bus home...

Breaking News! Apparently there will be a SharePoint Conference in Sydney from 14th to 16th May!

This was an interesting session showing a free (community) tool for doing some of the basics in SharePoint plus going over the search web parts.

This tool actually competes with some other products out there as it allows one to change field names and properties, and even push out lists across a SharePoint installation or delete lists and even sites.
One feature he loved was being able to hide a field on editing, which one can see on new.
The case he uses this for was for tasks assigned to someone so that the assignee couldn't be changed.

Only works in SharePoint V3/ Moss and it hasn't been that thoroughly tested.

Isai from Unique World in Canberra designed this and updates this tool based on feedback from users.

Go to http://www.codeplex.com/spstipsUtilityPack

Isai also stepped through the search in MOSS and how to change the look and feel without coding.
Well that is not all true. One needs to be able to do XSLT which he recommended doing by copying the code out of the web part into Visual Studio and editing it before pasting it back in.

There was also some comments about the limitation of searching where it doesn't search for the beginning of a word, unless it was the plural a natural extension. e.g. Word will find Words and wording. But wor will not find results with the word “word”.....

But...Ontolica is apparently releasing a free but user limited version of their wildcard search next week...

Also for cross site searches Isai recommend his mates at http://www.kwizcom.com/ along with some of their other SharePoint products....

Tom Bizannes
MacroView Business Technology
Solutions in SharePoint and Office
http://www.macroview.com.au