Mark | zevenseas | SharePoint Blog

Screenscraper - create your screenshots within your sharepoint list

Mark van Lunenburg — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:10:00 GMT

Today we are pleased to announce the release of a new free SharePoint Solution called ScreenScraper.

In short, the ScreenScraper application enables you to take screenshots of web pages based on the URL field in a list, any list.

What does it do?

Have you ever lost that article you used to visit so often?

Ever wanted to save the content of an article you found and you had to manually create a screenshot or had to copy-paste the content into a word document?

ScreenScraper for SharePoint helps you to store your valuable webpages by creating a screenshot and then storing it as an attachment to a SharePoint list item.

When you enable ScreenScraper on a list you will be able to fill in a url field, containing the URL or the website you want to save. That screenshot will be saved in the list as an attachment of your newly created item.

You will never lose an article again.

Go ahead and use it?

Download ScreenScraper

Installation steps:

Run the setup on your server

Activate the zevenseas ScreenScraper site feature

Enable the ScreenScraper in the list settings

ScreenScraper requires mandatory fields. If those fields are not present in the list than you will get the option to create them first.

Go back to the list and start creating new items.

Compatible

ScreenScraper is compatible with all SharePoint lists. Unfortunately, the current version of ScreenScraper will not work on SharePoint libraries like document or picture libraries.

ScreenScraper goes hand in hand with the social bookmarking solution Tagged Links, together they are a strong combination.

So, now you are able to easily store your links in the Tagged Links list and directly create a screenshot of your stored link. Now you will never lose your valuable web sites location or its content.

Feedback

Let us know what you think of it. I am happy to receive your feedback / suggestions or any questions.

Hope you will enjoy it.

Download ScreenScraper

Come and follow us on Twitter !!

Mark van Lunenburg — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:03:59 GMT

The zevenseas team is now on Twitter.

If you are new on Twitter you might want to check out Joel his posts:

See you on Twitter !!

Store and Share your bookmarks with Tagged Links, it's free !!!!

Mark van Lunenburg — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:48:00 GMT

Last weekend Daniel launched the zevenseas Tagged Links Social Bookmarking solution for free.

This nifty piece of software will let you store and share your bookmarks within your team / organization. It is a smart and fast way to share information which you came across while riding the waves of the Internet.

Tagged links is still evolving as we speak so stay tuned for more features !!

Try or download Tagged Links yourself and let us know how you feel.

Download Tagged Links here

or

Try Tagged Links here

(Username: DemoUser Password: DemoUser)

Setting up SharePoint development boxes

Mark van Lunenburg — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:17:31 GMT

Last week I was happily given the task to arrange and install six SharePoint development servers for our SharePoint development team.

We requested six virtual w2k3 SP2 dual core servers with 4GB memory. By default SQL server 2005 standard edition SP2 was installed.
Although the boxes where all virtual, unfortunately we are not in the luxury to just configure 1 server and use that one for the other five boxes.

I installed and configured software on the boxes synchronously and keeping track of my actions in the following lists.

Standard software

Software	Description	Server 1	Server 2
Office 2007		x	x
Sharepoint designer 2007		x	x
Office 2007 SP1		x	x
7-zip	freeware zip program that unpacks everything	x	x
bginfo	desktop background that displays system info	x	x
MOSS 2007 + SP1		x	x
Visual Studio team system 2008		x	x
Visual Studio Power tools	A set of enhancements, tools and command line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.	x	x
Visual Studio Team Explorer	used to access Team Foundation Server	x	x
PowerShell 1.0		x	x
Windows Desktop search 4.0		x	x

Additional development tools

Tools	Description	Server 1	Server 2
Fiddler	HTTP Debugging	x	x
IE developer toolbar		x	x
Reflector		x	x
SandCastle	Document your sourcecode by creating CHM files.	x	x
CodeRushExpress 3.2.1	Visual Studio add-on	x	x
AD explorer	advanced Active Directory (AD) viewer and editor	x	x

SharePoint tools

Tools	Description	Server 1	Server 2
SharePoint manager	SharePoint object model explorer	x	x
zevenseas SearchCoder	Query SharePoint	x	x
WSS SDK		x	x
Office Server SDK		x	x
WSP Builder	A SharePoint Solution Package (WSP) creation tool for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007	x	x
SharePoint 2007 features	Bunch of very useful SharePoint features	x	x

Server configuration

Configurations	Description	Server 1	Server 2
SMTP server		x	x
Add STSADM.EXE to your local variables path		x	x
Quicklaunch pins	show desktop, IE, 12-hyve,	x	x
Startmenu pins	Central Admin, VS.NET, SQL server management, Computer management	x	x
Copy the startmenu to the all users profile		x	x

I hope this is useful for you. Let me know if you have additional hints and tips.

Store relational information in Sharepoint ?

Mark van Lunenburg — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:18:02 GMT

Can Sharepoint help me out with relational data? Well, Patrick Tisseghem's blog can give you an answer to that question.

But do I really need to have a custom solution if I want to link one item with multiple items? Let me elaborate on this a bit more.

Case
Each period you might have a performance meeting with your employees and you want to store the conclusion of this meeting in sharepoint and attach that to the employee.

Well a folder / item structure in a document library might help you.

Step 1: Create a New contact content type and base this on the existing folder content type.

Go to Site actions -> Site settings -> site content types -> create and fill in the following.

Step 2: Create new site columns

Create new or add existing fields to your content type. These fields will hold the employee personal information. You might want to place the new fields under a new group rather then an existing one.

Step 3: Create a "performance" document library

This document library will hold your employees (folders) and the performance documents (items) underneath.

Go to site settings -> create -> document library and give it a useful name.
Once the document library is created you need to go to the settings of your new document library (settings - > document library settings) and go to the advanced settings.

Here you need to make the following changes:

allow management of content types = yes
Display "New folder" command on the New menu = No

After these changes you have the ability to attach the New contact content type you created in step 1 by clicking on the Add from existing site content types.

Step 4: create a new view

In order to have a nice overview with employees you can create a standard view that contains the employee fields.
In your list settings click "create a new view" -> standard view and select and order the fields you would like to display.

Make sure this is the default view for this particular list.

Step 5: Create a new employee

In your list you can now press new and New contact

Fill in the employee details

Now each folder is an employee and in each employee folder you can store the e.g. performance documents.

LAYOUTS folder revealed

Mark van Lunenburg — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:09:00 GMT

A social life ....... well draw your own conclusions when reading this post but the excuse is at the end of this post.

Of course nothing goes wrong during your development and deployment. But what if for some unforeseen reason a little mistake is made and because of that only the default.aspx is screwed up, you might still want to access the other useful administration pages of your site.

Or perhaps you might want to have some shortcuts to commonly used administration pages, this post might help you.

Fortunately there are not so many pages so therefor I will update this list bit by bit, bare with me and please feel free to help me out here.

For now I am only listing the pages that are directly accessible from your site collection and don't require a querystring. It's an oldie and kind of retro but back in his handsome younger days my mate Daniel posted an item about querystrngs.

AclInv.aspx = add users
AddNavigationLinkDialog.aspx = Edit the title, URL, and description of the navigation item.
addrole.aspx = Add a Permission Level
AdminRecycleBin.aspx = Site Collection Recycle Bin
AreaCacheSettings.aspx = Publishing Site Output Cache Settings
AreaNavigationSettings.aspx = Site Navigation Settings
Site Navigation Settings = Site Navigation Settings
AreaTemplateSettings.aspx = Page Layout and Site Template Settings
AreaWelcomePage.aspx = Site Welcome Page
AssetPortalBrowser.aspx =
associatedgroups.aspx = Edit Group Quick Launch
AuditSettings.aspx = Configure Audit Settings
avreport.aspx = ow really :))
bpcf.aspx = New Basic Page
ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx = Site Master Page Settings
ContentTypeHierarchy.aspx = Content Types Hierarchy
create.aspx = create overview lists, sites and pages
CreatePage.aspx = Create Page
ctypenew.aspx = New Site Content Type
deleteweb.aspx = Delete This Site
dws.aspx = Document Workspace (instruction page)
editpolicy.aspx = Edit Policy
editprofile.aspx = Edit Details
enhancedsearch.aspx = Search Settings
........ to be continued

While going trough all the pages in the layouts folder I came across some pages that I have never seen before. Have a look yourself and feel free to provide your vision about the purpose of these pages.

ConnGps.aspx

Excuse: I am at the Volkswagen dealer waiting for my car to be ready.

Deploy your own custom webservices on a sharepoint environment

Mark van Lunenburg — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:12:00 GMT

I was a little bit puzzled about deploying a new webservice. This is how I did it.

Copy your dll file into the bin folder of your web application
In the 12\ISAPI folder, which is the virtual IIS directory _vti_bin folder, locate the web.config file and modify the following:

<webServices>
    <protocols>
        <~~remove~~ add name="HttpGet" />
        <~~remove~~ add name="HttpPost" />
        <~~remove~~ add name="HttpPostLocalhost" />
        <add name="Documentation" />
    </protocols>
</webServices>

Depending on your needs you can either make the web service available on farm level by using the ISAPI folder or on web application level by using your web application folder.

Farm level:
Copy your asmx file in the ISAPI folder
Web application level:
Create a new folder under the root of your web application and copy your asmx file to this location.

Now navigate with your browser to the copied asmx file:

http://<web application>/_vti_bin/<service>.asmx
http://<web application>/<new folder>/<service>.asmx

If your webservice listens to SOAP requests then you need to enable that by adding the <add name="httpSoap" /> entry.

Want to blog about SharePoint using SharePoint?

Mark van Lunenburg — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:06:00 GMT

To celebrate the release of the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) zevenseas, in partnership with PixelMill, would like to offer the first 20 people to email us at openzeas@zevenseas.com a free, hosted blog, powered by the CKS:EBE.

The CKS:EBE brings the most critical features required to run a successful internet facing blog, including:

Modular Theme Framework ("MTF") that allows for the development of rich themes
Support for Akismet comment spam detection
Multiple categories/tags can be mapped to each blog entry/post
Friendly URL ("FURL") for the blog's posts
Friendly URL for the blog's RSS feed (and support for FeedBurner)
And more....

This offer came together at the recent SharePoint conference, and was the result of a discussion about the CKS kit and what it means to community building. At zevenseas we have been lucky enough to work with a number of customers on ways to engage with the people who care most about their products and services. We’ve used the CKS to build out a platform that enables them to do this effectively, on SharePoint, with blogging at its core. We hope this offer is the beginning of another small community.

PixelMill, our SharePoint Designer Partners, have worked with us on these projects and wanted to be able to demonstrate just how attractive these blogs can be. To do that they have offered, for free, a selection of their premium design themes built for CKS:EBE. These are just the first of a number of new themes they will be offering to help your blog stand out, so be sure to take a look at their gallery.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the team who put the toolkit together. A big thanks to the CKS Team below, we’re really excited about its future:

Vince Rothwell (MTF)
Nadeem Mitha (Linkbacks)
Ari Bakker (Themes)
Heather Waterman (Themes)
Yvonne Harryman (QA)
Matthew McDermott (Documentation/QA)
Shane Perran (Themes)
Gaetan Bouveret (QA)
Keith Bunge (Various)
Steven Van de Craen (Captcha)
Brent Bolleman (EBE-PM)
Lawrence Liu (CKS-PM)

Visual Studio 2005 class project - where is my workflow template?

Mark van Lunenburg — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:06:00 GMT

When I was working in a normal c# class project I wanted to create a new workflow class item. Unfortunately the template wasn't available.

Luckily I found the post from Eric Schoonover which tells you basically four steps:

open your csproj project file in notepad
copy the following tag in the <AssemblyName> section:
<ProjectTypeGuids>{14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
Copy the following import node as the other existing import nodes:
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.0\Workflow.Targets" />
save the file and reload your solution
Make sure you include the correct reference in your project:
e.g microsoft.office.workflow.tasks

Second day on the job

Mark van Lunenburg — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:32:00 GMT

In new sunny day in Seattle which was packed with sessions, five in total. This day was literally a pain in the ass due to the uncomfortable seats :)

The first session: Migrating a spd workflow to a vs.net workflow by Todd Bleeker
My conclusion of this session is that it is possible but it can be a bit of pain to accomplish this.

The second session: Build an Automated Expense reimbursement process using Infopath and sharepoint by Asif Rehmani
Now this was suppose to be a 400 level session, well my opinion is that it was actually a 300 and maybe even a 200 level session.

The third session: Advanced administrative Architecture Deployment and Operations by Shane Young
Well this session was to much high level and didn't go into dept. Unfortunately they only showed how to deploy wsp solution.

The fourth session: How microsoft IT design and creates enterprise portals on MOSS 2007
In this session we got to see two live situation on how Microsoft solved business challenges concerning news and provisioning the styling. They especially mentioned the publishing features like the content (by) query webpart. This session enlightened allot.

The fifth and last one and with pain in my behind one: automated server farm installation platform for the intranet and beyond by Ben Curry
This session was all about setting up sharepoint without using the GUI installation. Everything can be done with psconfig and stsadm. Basically we went through some batch files which are calling psconfig and stsadm with different statements.
Unfortunately the script didn't run due to the fact that it was being executed under a wrong user which didn't had enough permission through out the farm

I will post more details about all these session later on, so check this post at the end of the week again.

Tonight we have a gala at the museum of flight where also the Airforce one is stationed !! Tomorrow I am having my 70-541 exam which is for free (yes, I am dutch).

Catch you all tomorrow.

It's a first day on the job

Mark van Lunenburg — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:09:00 GMT

To start of with an introduction:

My name is Mark van Lunenburg, I finished my Business IT education in 2000 and started my career at ATS (Accenture Technology Solutions). I worked for about 2 years at ATS where I mostly worked with Actuate reporting which is not that much different from to Microsoft reporting server. After two years of working at ATS I decided that I wanted to work with Microsoft solutions so I joined Wortell, a gold certified partner. At Wortell I joined the sharepoint team, I was soled ........

Beginning of this year mr Mcpherson and mr Blaauw approached me with the question if I wanted to sail with a philosophy. The Zevenseas approach and mentality definitely matches my personal idea's, it was a real match !!!

After being unemployed for two days I started my first day here in Seattle, it couldn't be a better one !! On this day I got to see mr Microsoft himself who gave an overall impression about Sharepoint and it's future. After giving his view he impressively gave detailed answers on specialized questions raised by the audience during the Q&A session, I am taking my hat of (which means: respect in dutch).
We also got to see Microsoft's online WSS hosted service which actually seems like an answer to Google sites variant.

Each Zevenseas sailer joined a different sessions in the afternoon. I got to join the Search server, BI and RMS security sessions which were all interesting sessions.
The RMS security session went in detail like:
- RMS can be used on the document level and document library level but can't be used on the content type level
- Copy and past actions can be restricted
- screenshot's can be prevented, only third party tools can probably still make screenshots
- taking a picture from a screen? .......... hahahahaha ........... the joke of the session

After each session we called each other via the walkytalkies which is kind of nurdie actually but it's also allot of fun.

Although I have just started to blog, I already have my loyal fans which I want to mention :)
Jules Dekker, Raymond Groenendijk, Connie van der Biezen, Paul Keijzers, Bram de Jager, Rogier Kramer.

I hope you all enjoyed my very first blog and I will be keeping you posted. If you have any questions or reMARKs just let me know !!!

Hope to read you soon !