One of the main selling points of Office 2007 (to me, anyway) is it’s integration with SharePoint 2007. However, customers usually seem to still be using Office 2003, and this degrades the user experience. One of the main things that irritates is Check-out/check-in policy, and users just opening things in Read-only mode.
Well, again, Ton Stegeman has a solution. As one of my colleague’s comments ‘Smart man, that’.
We’ve a customer who wants Excel Workbooks in one of their libraries to always open on a specific worksheet. Normally, Excel opens from SharePoint showing whatever the last selected tab was, but they’d like theirs to always open on the first worksheet.
I was curious, so I set up a document library with a template XSLX file. In it, the 4th worksheet was the active one when I saved the workbook as the template.
I created a new document in the library with that template. When Excel opened, it showed me the 4th tab, as expected. I saved the document, and downloaded a copy. I reopened the document from SharePoint, selected the first tab, saved the document and downloaded a second copy.
So, now I have 2 XLSX file for the same workbook, but with different tabs selected. I changed their extensions to .zip, and unzipped them. Next, I ran WinMerge on the folders they unzipped to to see what the differences were.
There weren’t many really – most were related to ‘last saved time’ and things like that. There were three XML files in the archive that seemed relevant – 2 for the worksheets (the one that was selected and the one that is now), and the Workbook xml.
Here are the differences for one of the WorkSheets:
Yup, the difference is the tabSelected=1 attribute. If it there, that’s the selected tab.
Or is it? The WorkBook xml also contains a difference:
This is a little more complicated – activeTab seems to be the index number into the Sheets node, if you treat it as a zero-based array. And if the first tab is selected, there doesn’t seem to be an activeTab element at all. Still, not too bad, I’m sure I could work with that.
So, how would this help? Well, if the customer is really keen that the first tab is always selected, then we could write an event receiver that captures a document uploaded to their library and then:
Pretty straight forward, really.
I received a good link in one of the comments on the blog, and I thought I’d bump this up – Sensible Document and Template Management.
I’m with Mads on this – to me the killer feature of SharePoint is how it works with Offices, and template functionality is key in that. Demos of document properties, quick parts and then the list columns in Sharepoint have a very high wow-factor (rightly so – I think it’s pretty neat too!)
However, templates are something rarely used in my experience, or not use properly anyway. Often it’s seen as an unnecessary effort, and usually everyone just starts creating their own documents from blank, or deleteing the contents from an existing document and using that one, or copying and pasting across – none of which are pretty scenarios.
Then again, often the guys actually making these templates need a good course of ‘How to use Word’. No so much with Excel – I think that people accept you need a bit of training to use it – but Word seems to be an issue.
Anyway, the point is, do try and plan building templates into your project. And that there is probably a consultancy opportunity in trying to generate these…
So what has Andy been working on lately? Well, lately I’ve been writing an integration between Outlook 2003 and SharePoint 2007. It was all a bit fraught – some of the web services I was using are a bit dodgy, uploading files and metadata as one transaction doesn’t seem to be possible, and everyone always underestimates the effort involved in coping with the metadata about an email. I’ve written an integration between GroupWise 6.5 and Open Text Livelink before now, and again, dealing with the metadata was a bigger effort than browsing the system or uploading the document.
Now, email saving into SharePoint seems to be an overlooked thing. Microsoft have their Exchange 2007 Managed Folders, which can push emails into a SharePoint Records center. Liam Cleary has written his usual high-quality description of setting it up, and the MS Records management team blogged about it in parts I, II, III and IV.
However, a lot of our customers aren’t impressed with this solution. They want to be able to save emails into particular SharePoint Libraries within their usual collaboration environment, rather than just booting them off into a Record Center.
U2U built an Outlook 2007 addin which is very nice – though a bit of a different take. Their approach requires defining the save location up front and mapping to the data, but that then saving emails is dead easy – just drag them into the folder. Nice.
Anyway, this is what I built – I’ll contrast with the U2U offering lateer…
Twospeakers at the user group meeting last night. The first session was an eye opener for me, one of those ‘thoughts crystalising’ moments. Continue reading
Dear Microsoft – The word Ultimate means ‘Final’. Somehow, I suspect there will be future versions of Office and Windows – what do y’reckon?
Okay, so I’m a simple man really…
I’d been asked to demo a custom workflow to a customer. They’d some fairly clear requirements, and we just wanted to knock up a prototype. It was all about filling in ‘fields’ in a word document. “Great”, I thought, “we can allow them to do this entirely within Word”. And, looking at the marketing bumpf, the demos and the docs, yeah, we could. The workflow task could be displayed in MOSS, and the document properties pane would expose any other fields they needed.
Except… …I couldn’t get the ‘Edit this Task’ button to appear in Word. I know it should be able to – but it wasn’t. I tried everything; nope, nothing. In the end, I ran out of time – but one of my colleagues, of a slightly curious nature, kept plugging away at it.
It turns out, it was the wrong version of office. It used to be that versions of things were simple – there only was one for each ‘iteration’ of the software. Then we started getting ‘Home’ and ‘Professional’ – which was okay, and seemed sensible, to be honest. I liked that – it was simple, just like me. Continue reading