Jan Tielens' Bloggings

[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] In SharePoint 2003 you can enable versioning for a Document Library, so SharePoint will store for each document in that library previous versions when the document gets edited. That’s nice, but that’s about it what you get out-of-the-box. Since each version of the document is in fact a complete document (it’s not the delta that’s stored for a version) big documents can take up more space than desired. Just imagine that you have a 1MB Word document for which you have 15 versions, the total size that the document item will use, is 15 MB (15 times 1 MB). So a very common request is to limit the number of versions that is stored in a document library. In SharePoint 2003 there is no out-of-the-box functionality to do that, although it’s quite easy to write a Document Library Event Handler to accomplish this, but you do need to write some code and deploy the solution.

[Yet Another SharePoint Relief Series] If you know a little bit about SharePoint 2003 you probably are aware of the fact that you can add custom columns to a SharePoint List or a Document Library. For example you can add an Importance column to a Document Library so each document in that library can have an Importance value. Probably if you want to do this nicely, you create Choice column so users can select the value for the Importance field from a couple of predefined values (e.g. Important, Very Important …). So far so good, this works fine in SharePoint 2003. But suppose you would like to have this Importance column also in another Document Library or in another List. The only option that you have in SharePoint 2003 is to repeat the creation of the field for the other Lists or Libraries (including defining all the different Importance values). In SharePoint 2007 you can avoid this repetitive work by using a new feature called Site columns. When you navigate to the Site Settings of a site, you’ll see a link called Site columns.

If you have been working with SharePoint 2003 you probably know the abbreviation YASQ which stands for yet another SharePoint quirk. Those quirks seem to be insignificant at first sight, but they are so important to be aware of if you don’t want to run into serious problems. Just imagine that you (or your sales person) have sold document level security in a content management system built on top of SharePoint 2003. :-)

Now it’s getting really funny: head hunters are looking for SharePoint Consultants who know how to use the SmartPart. So if you know the SmartPart, and if you’re looking for a new job the following ad.

When talking to customers about the new version of SharePoint, a lot of questions I get are related to moving the existing infrastructure and data to the new version of SharePoint once it gets released. For now there wasn't a lot of (public) information available, but now Joel Oleson has written a nice post about the topic. There are actually three scenarios:

Since the last couple of weeks I’m spending again some time with BizTalk. Although there is no official training material for BizTalk Server 2006 available yet, U2U is already offering BizTalk 2006 training. So it was about time to upgrade my BizTalk Server 2004 skills!

A feature very high on a lot of request lists: Mobile Views in SharePoint 2007. Read more about them on Martin's blog.

Woehoe, finally there are some SharePoint 2007 courses available at U2U! If you are intrested in this exciting new technology: see you @ U2U... Btw, this is also an excellent opportunity to get yourself one of those SharePoint 2007 t-shirts. :-) So, see you at a SharePoint 2007 training at U2U!