Introduction

The out-of-the-box Image Web Part can be used to display an image on a site. The web part has a property that specifies the web address of the image. For most site members, this is problematic – how do they get an image on the web site? And how do they determine the web address? For power users, these steps are understood, but are time consuming to complete.

The Image Upload Web Part will allow the site member to browse their local computer for the image. Once the image is selected, the web part will automatically upload the image to a location specified by an administrator and set the web address.

The result is a solution that works for both groups. Site members can display pictures from their computer and administrators can provide storage for those pictures with changing the permissions of their site and with minimal training.

More information available in the download or at the project's page on CodePlex.

My recommended reading list on the right is woefully out of date. It is on my to-do list, but in the interim I want to call out Ben Curry and Bill English's book on SharePoint Best Practices. It is not yet available, but you can pre-order on Amazon.

Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices (Pro - Other)

I will be speaking at the MOSS Camp in St. Louis on April 5th. I will giving an overview of the Porting Workflows project and community site.

Hope to see you there!

Barracuda, LLC, Announces DeliverPoint: PERMISSIONS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Minneapolis, MN — February, 18^th 2007 — Barracuda, LLC announces the release of DeliverPoint: PERMISSIONS - a security trimmed enterprise permissions management application for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  DeliverPoint: PERMISSIONS empowers SharePoint Products and Technologies administrators - both Central administrators and non-IT Local administrators, to be able to discover, copy, transfer and delete account and object permissions in one efficient administrative action.

Read the full press release

I am working on getting a community site up to host these articles as well as the code. My hope is that all interested developers will contribute their solution to the various Actions that can be selected in SharePoint designer.

This post is the first in a series. The series will discuss the porting steps as we presented in Seattle, but with the details filled in. (We had only 75 minutes to present, which is way too little.) Part 1 will discuss the virtual machine setup and the creation of the SharePoint Designer workflow that will be ported.

Virtual Machine Setup

When a workflow is created in SharePoint Designer, the site is updated with a few pieces that enable it to work. We want to ensure that we port all of these pieces, so we will be using two different web applications. The first at http://spdflow will be used for the SharePoint Designer workflow. The second at http://vsflow will host the Visual Studio workflow. Rather than use different port numbers for the web application, the hosts file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) is updated with each of these host names.

The virtual machine will also have the necessary applications installed: SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 with the Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK.

SharePoint Designer

We will use SharePoint Designer to create a workflow. The workflow will perform the most popular actions -- collecting data, creating a task and writing to the history list. This is accomplished via the following steps:

• In SharePoint Designer, open the site http://spdflow.
• Click File | New | Workflow. The Workflow Designer wizard is displayed.
• Name the workflow SPDFlow and attach it to the Announcements list. Leave the start options at the default, which is manually. (We'll be starting it often.)

  

• Click on the Initiation button on the bottom
• Add a Workflow Initiation Parameter named InitiationField with a default value of Barracuda. Then click OK

  

• Back in the Workflow Designer wizard, Click Next.
• In Step 1, click on the Conditions button and choose Compare Announcements field.

  

• Choose the Modified By field and the account name of the current user.

  

  

• Click on the Actions button and choose Collect Data from User.

  

• Click on the "data" link to invoke the Custom Task Wizard.

  

• Enter "Collect Data Task" for the task name and click Next

  

• Click Add to create a field.

  

• Name the field "TaskField" and enter a default value of "DeliverPoint"

  

• Click Finish on the Custom Task Wizard. You will receive a warning about running instances, which can be ignored.
• Click on the "this user" link in Step 1 Actions. Select the account name for the current user.

  

• Click on the "Variable: collect" link in Step 1 Actions. Rather than put the data in a generically named variable called "collect," choose "Create a new variable" and name it "ListItemID"

  

• Click on the Variables button at the bottom of the Workflow Designer form. Even though we did not choose the variable named "collect," it was created for us. Remove it, and any other unused variables, from the list.
• Click Finish.

SharePoint Designer will save the workflow and associate it with the Announcements list. Test the workflow by returning to the browser and navigating to the Announcements list.

• On the context menu of a list item, select Workflows

  

• On the Workflows page in the Start a New Workflow section, click on the name of the workflow (SPDFlow)

  

• The initiation form is displayed. Click Start

  

• The Announcements list is displayed, with a new column on the far right. The column name matches the name of the workflow and the value is "In Progress"

  

• Click on "In Progress" to display the Workflow Status page

  

• In the middle of the page is the name of the task: CollectDataTask. Click on this link to display the task.

  

• Click on Edit Item in the tool bar. This will display the custom task edit form for this workflow

  

• Click on Complete Task

  At this point we have a workflow that was created in SharePoint Designer. The next post is this series will move us further along our path. Stay tuned!

Many have asked. Many have said it is not possible. At the SharePoint Conference in Seattle today (March 4^th, 2008), Todd Bleeker is presenting the steps necessary to take a workflow created in SharePoint Designer and port/convert it to a workflow template in Visual Studio!

The process started with an innocent question back in the fall of 2007 at Mindsharp's TechWeek. All of the Mindsharp Authorized Trainers, and one lucky developer (me) we assembled to share what we know and learn from others. One session address this workflow topic. The session ended when the steps we attempted crashed the site collection. (Thank goodness for virtual machines!) The topic list of that week was submitted to Microsoft as potential sessions at the SharePoint Conference. They selected the workflow porting session to be presented.

The task fell to SharePoint MVP and superstar presenter Todd Bleeker. As usual, Todd threw his considerable enthusiasm at the topic. I had the privilege of being a second set of eyes and a sounding board to Todd during the days leading up the presentation. Not only did I learn a ton about workflows, but I also interacted with many smart people who contributed ideas, encouragement and humor to us in the last 48 hours. I am honored to be the one to make this post, but I am not solely responsible for its content. I want to specifically mention Todd Bleeker (of course), Kimmo Forss of Microsoft, Marilyn White of White Consulting, Rob Bogue of Thor Projects, David Mann of Mann Software and Woody Windischman.

[Details to follow]

I added a new operation to the Barracuda Application Extension Download:

stsadm -o enumsitegallerytemplates -site <site collection url>

   Displays the names and identifiers of Site Definitions in the Site Template Gallery.

Barracuda StsAdm Extensions.wsp (8.01 KB)

If you live in the Midwest and are not going to Las Vegas on November 9th, make plans to attend the MOSS Camp - Chicago.