The Bamboo Team Blog

Control when a document is displayed: Managing Item Scheduling

2008-12-04T16:10:00Z

You may not know this already but SharePoint has this cool feature called Managing Item Scheduling. Have you ever wanted to upload a file to a library but only have it display between certain dates even times to all users? Well SharePoint has the answer for your dilemma.

First, here are prerequisites to use this functionality:

Content Approval needs to be enabled on the library.
Versioning needs to be enabled both for Major and Minor versions.
And the real kicker, must use a library within a Publishing site, which means you need MOSS 2007 to utilize this functionality.

So what exactly does Managing Item Scheduling do? Let say you have this feature enabled. When you upload a file to the document library, when entering the properties in the EditForm.aspx page, you will notice 2 new columns: Scheduling Start Date and Scheduling End Date.

When you define the Scheduling Start Date this says when the Published major version of the document will be displayed to the end user in the List View. The options are fairly self explanatory. The Scheduling End Date options define when the Publish major version of the document should no longer be displayed in the list views, again the options are self explanatory.

Now the next parts is where the Versioning and Content Approval comes into play. When you save the document, initially it is marked as minor version (0.1). Once the user is ready for it to be displayed in the library to all users, they must submit a request for the document to be published. This will send the document through a workflow to a set of users who are a member of the SharePoint Approval group. You will notice that the status of the document is marked as Pending. When a users that is a member of the Approval group marks the document as Approved, commonly 2 steps will occur to the minor version of the document sent for approval:

The minor version will be changed to a major version (1.0), and,
The status will be marked as approved.

The above is what happens in a traditional document library with Versions and Content Approval enabled. Now if Managing Item Scheduling is enabled, couple variants are put in place. If the document's Scheduling Start Date is not Immediately and current date and time has not reached the specified date and time, the following occurs to the item:

The status will be marked as Scheduled, and,
The version number will remain as minor (i.e. 0.1)

As a resulting not displaying to end users in list view Web Parts. SharePoint has a timer job that monitors in the background items that has status of Scheduled and when the Scheduling Start Date matches the current date and time, it automatically switches Status to Approved and sets version to major release, thus making the file viewable.

If there is a specified Scheduling End Date then once the current date and time is greater, the status is marked as Scheduled and the version number is set back to highest minor release version of the previous major release.

Cool stuff eh?

So now I told you HOW this cool feature works, lets talk about how to activate it. As I mentioned, one of the prerequisites is a Publishing Site. Microsoft was kind enough to enable this feature automatically in the Documents library of the Publishing Site with Workflow site template. But if you want to create either a new Document Library in this site or another Publishing site, the following steps will need to occur:

After creating a new Document Library go to List Settings.
In section General Settings select the link Versioning Settings, and enable:
1. Content Approval to Yes.
2. Document Version History to Create major and minor (draft) versions.
In section General Settings select the link Manage Item Scheduling and select the option Enable scheduling of items in this list. yes for some reason when you click OK it sends you to Site Settings for some odd reason, gotta keep you on your toes some how I guess.
So back to List Settings of the document library, in the section Columns select the link Add from existing Site Columns (if you are using Content Types you can perform this step in the Site Content Type also).
Filter the list of Available Site Columns by selecting the group Publishing Columns in the drop down menu. Select Scheduling Start Time and Scheduling End Time to the Columns to Add list box and click OK.

You have now successfully configured your library to handle item scheduling.

SharePoint, Pushups, and Breast Cancer Awareness

2008-12-04T16:08:00Z

As a man, I have noticed that men tend to be less likely than women to get involved in raising funds or participating in Breast Cancer awareness. In an effort to combat this tendency, the men in our office recently decided to see if we could help change the behavior, raising money for the cause in a unique and fun way, and to get the entire company involved as well. Being typical men, however, we were late by one month for the actual Breast Cancer Awareness month.

What does any of this have to do with SharePoint? Read on...

So as to get the entire office involved, a group of 9 men organized and ran a pushup pledge drive. Yes, you read that correctly: Pushups. Recall that "unique and fun" were among our goals at the outset.

Each man solicited donations from his colleagues on a per-pushup basis, pledging in return to participate in an office pushup contest. Our original goal was $300, but when the final pushup was completed, we had raised over $1,700! The excitement for the contest, including online polls and spirited boasting, really brought the office together in a fun way and got all of our men pumped up to be involved in a worthy cause. Needless to say, donations were accepted from both sexes, and many men and women donated to the cause.

We were able to use our own Web Parts to really make the effort shine. Emily Bien used the SharePoint Poll Web Part to create a poll to get votes from the office staff as to who they thought would win, which led to much smack talk as many of the participants kept up with who the office thought would win. As it turned out, the results of the voting were actually pretty much on target with what the actual results were (collaboration usually leads to the right answers!)

When the big day arrived, all nine participants dropped and did as many pushups as they could manage in 6 minutes. Sweat and shortened breath came from the men as they cranked out their pushups. Our colleagues watched and cheered us on (sometimes laughing uproariously) as we did our pushups, generating excitement in our version of the race for the cure. Prizes were awarded for the most money raised, as well as the most pushups completed (pink hats in honor of Breast Cancer Research, and a tiara was also earned by yours truly for having cranked out the least amount of pushups: 33).

As it turned out, we had not one but two ringers gents who each did over 100 pushups apiece in the allotted time. Our triple-digit champions were Douglas Jay with 138 pushups, and Tim Do with 114, but all of our contestants were hailed as champions for their participation.

After the contest, SharePoint once again came into play when Jeff Tubb put together a SharePoint list for us (and really learned to love calculated values in the process), allowing in-office donors to donate through our corporate portal, and enabling us to easily track who earned and owed what amounts. By using Sharepoint, we were able to have real-time results of where the donations stood, and allow people easier access to donate without having to go chase down one of the participants.

In the end, everybody was a winner, and we have SharePoint to thank for helping improve the process.

IT Administrators with Active Directory Experience Wanted for Microsoft User Research Study

2008-12-04T14:39:00Z

Microsoft is conducting a usability study to gain insight into what you would like to see in the next version of Active Directory Users and Computers and how this tool impacts your job function. We want to learn from you, the experts, to determine what needs to be improved in our software. This is a great opportunity for you to provide feedback and help ensure the features you want, make it into ADUC’s next version.

If you have experience working with Active Directory Users and Computers, we want to talk to you.

We highly value your feedback and will be offering you a gratuity option in appreciation of your time and participation.

If you are interested or know someone who might be interested in participating, please email us at itusable@microsoft.com with ADUC in the subject line.

Introducing the ESP Content Editor

2008-12-03T21:14:00Z

Thanks for all the feedback on the Upload Wizard and the Dynamic Quick Launch Master Page. It's great to see folks out there downloading and using those free tools. In the spirit of the holidays, I've put another free tool out in Bamboo Media: The ESP Content Editor is a free Web Part that extends the built-in content editor Web Part to allow on-page editing and a few other nifty features.

Why I built it: I needed a way to quickly prototype CSS changes and see their effects on a live SharePoint page. There are a number of style browsing tools out there, including a few add-ins that let you change the CSS, but none of them included an easy way to save to the page. The ESP Content Editor lets you do that easily:

Add the Web Part to a page.
Write your custom CSS, JScript, or even plain HTML in the edit box.
Click Apply Change to see the effect, edit and correct your code as necessary.
Select Hide editor and click Apply Changes to make the edit box invisible.

Figure 1 shows the Web Part in action.

Figure 1. Using the ESP Content Editor

It's a real Web Part, so once it is installed on your server, you can customize it, export your changes as a .webpart file and reuse on other sites as needed. Just to give you an idea of what you can do, I created a second Web Part based on the ESP Content Editor called the ESP Style Viewer shown in Figure 2. It uses exactly the same server-side code as the ESP Content Editor, only the saved JavaScript and HTML are different.

Figure 2. The ESP Style Editor is based on the ESP Content Editor

There's a lot more to this Web Part which I'll cover in subsequent posts, give it a try and let me know what uses you come up with. I think it's a great building block that gives site owners the ability to create custom Web Parts without writing server-side code (as a site administrator, I like that).

Click Here to Download the ESP Content Editor Now

As always, let me know what you think, and Happy Holidays -- Jeff

Relative URLs and List Rollup Web Part, a perfect harmony

2008-12-02T15:28:00Z

Are you a faithful user of Bamboo List Rollup Web Part? Have you had the frustrating realization of creating the resulting List Rollup Data View internally, just to find out that your external users link to items from the List Rollup Data View still used the internal URL?

Well fear no more! In the latest release of List Rollup Web Part (File Version 3.3.2.0) we now support a trusty HTML trick of Relative URLs, YEAH!!!!!! So let me first introduce you to the Relative URL in general then I'll explain how it folds into List Rollup Web Part.

Let us say I have the following URL - http://www.bamboosolutions.com/Products/ListRollup.jpg

In use case 1, I have 2 URLs accessing the same data - http://www.bamboosolutions.com and http://store.bamboosolutions.com the image ListRollup.jpg exists in Products directory for both URLs just different host URLs (FYI, a host URL is the first part of a URL, in this case http://www.bamboosolutions.com and http://store.bamboosolutions.com).

Relative URL has two methods to achieve the ability to adapt to any host URL provided by using either "/" or "~/", as in our examples, the format could be

/products/listrollup.jpg
~/products/listrollup.jpg

In the second use case, relative URL provides a shorthand method to write URLs. Here we will explain 2 types of shorthand methods: files that exist in the current directory, and files that exist in a different directory. The first type, files that exist in the same directory, means, in our example URL, http://www.bamboosolutions.com/Products/ListRollup.jpg we are currently in the directory of http://www.bamboosolutions.com/Products. I want to get to a file called CalendarPlus.jpg that exists in this same directory. Instead of writing the full URL http://www.bamboosolutions.com/Products/CalendarPlus.jpg, I can use ./CalendarPlus.jpg since I am already sitting in the /Products/ directory.

The other shorthand method provided by relative URL is ability to access files from other directories without entering the entire URL. Again, we are currently at the following URL - http://www.bamboosolutions.com/products/ListRollup.jpg and you need to access a file at the following directory: http://www.bamboosolutions.com/Community/BambooNation.jpg. Instead of writing the full URL, you can use the combination ../ to instruct the browser to go up to the parent directory first then append. In our case the example would be ../community/BambooNation.jpg. Since the parent directory of Products is the host URL, a better example, would probably be the following -

Current URL: http://www.bamboosolutions.com/AllProducts/ListRollup/LearnMore.aspx and I need to get an image file to display on this page from http://www.bamboosolutions.com/AllProducts/CalendarPlus/ListRollupConnection.jpg I would enter the URL ../CalendarPlus/ListRollupConnection.jpg since the parent directory is /AllProducts/

You can use the parent directory shortcut as many times as needed. So for example, if my current URL is http://www.bamboosolutions.com/AllProducts/Listrollup/LearnMore.aspx and I need to go to the following URL to get a file - http://www.bamboosolutions.com/Community/BambooNation/Blogs.jpg, I would enter ../../Community/BambooNation/Blogs.jpg

OK so now that we got the basics of Relative URL down, let us talk about how it impacts our List Rollup Web Part.

Use Case 1 - Alternate Access Mappings

In SharePoint, it is common practice to have multiple URLs hitting the same content: the intranet URL (most likely the server name http://ProductionServer) and an extranet URL (i.e. http://www.production.com). When you build your List Rollup Data View from the List Rollup Web Part, in the Site URL field, make sure that you use one of the host URL substitute methods (i.e. / or ~/). This will build your final List Rollup Data View using the relative URL so no matter if your user is loggin in using the intranet or extranet URL, the item URLs int he resulting List Rollup Data View will be built based on the URL of the browser.

Use Case 2 - Shorter URL for multiple lists

You can also use the shorthand method of building URLs through List Rollup Web Part but take note that when using the Shorthand URL method, it is based on where the resulting List Rollup Data View resides. Here is an example. I am currently on the following Web Part Page http://ProductionServer/Sites/English/ListRollup.aspx where List Rollup Web Part resides. I have a list sitting on the following site - http://ProductionServer/Sites/French that I want to rollup. In the List Rollup Web Part for Site URL I enter ../French and select the list I want to rollup. After building the List Rollup Data View, I see items from my French site with no problem. I export the Data View and place it on the top level site http://ProductionServer/, now I see nothing. This is because the URL defined int he List Rollup Data View is defined to go up a level and since the data view resides on the top level site already it is going to fail. Now if I have placed the List Rollup Data View on http://ProductionServer/Sites/German/ it will work since it is on the same level (also known as Sibling site) as the English site.

I hope this helps! For more information about List Rollup Web Part and building the List Rollup Data Views, see here - http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/07/02/list-rollup-intro-links-to-how-to-guides.aspx

Bamboo Welcomes Systems Garden to the Partner Advantage Program

2008-11-26T21:01:00Z

Welcome our newest partner Systems Garden. Systems Garden is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner located in Finland specializing in business productivity and information management. Systems Garden helps customers to improve their business performance by offering state-of-the-art Enterprise Search, Business Portal, Content Management and Custom software solutions. More than 100 organizations have chosen Systems Garden to improve their productivity. We are looking forward to working with them.

Bamboo Welcomes DataLan to the Partner Advantage Program

2008-11-26T20:54:00Z

Welcome to the Partner Advantage Program DataLan Corporation! DataLan is based in New York and delivers solutions enabling organizations to innovate and compete in a global economy, the technology to support those solutions, and the capabilities to make innovation happen. They deploy Microsoft SharePoint™ and the Office System™ as an enterprise portal – a point of access for enterprise information and services, providing information workers with capabilities including Enterprise Content Management, Workflow Automation and BPM, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Project Management, and Compliance and Audit Management.

How to Install and Configure the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator

2008-11-24T20:57:00Z

Having recently introduced the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator to an appreciative SharePoint nation, we thought that a step-by-step installation and configuration guide might be equally well received. And since we aim to please...

System Requirements:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Windows Server 2003
Usage Analysis Processing in Microsoft Shared Service Provider must be enabled (see section How to Enable Usage Reporting).

How to Enable Usage Reporting:

The SharePoint Analytic Accelerator requires the Usage Reporting to be enabled in the Microsoft Shared Service Provider (SSP). To confirm that it is enabled, follow these steps:

Run SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.
Click the link to go to Shared Services Admin for the existing SSP.
Under the section Office SharePoint Usage Reporting click on the link Usage Reporting.
Enable the two options as listed below

Processing Settings
Search Query Logging

How to Install and Configure the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator

Download the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator from the Bamboo Nation downloads section (http://community.bamboosolutions.com/media/p/6290.aspx). Unzip the installation package to a local hard drive on the SharePoint server.

Login to the SharePoint server with a local Administrator to the SharePoint Server and Farm Administrator.
Click Next to begin the installation.
The setup wizard performs a system check prior to the installation. All of the system checks must be completed successfully in order to proceed with the installation. After the checks have completed, click Next.
Select the Web application(s) where you wish to install the product. Select the Automatically Activate Features check box to automatically activate this feature for all site collections within the selected Web application, then click Next.

WARNING: You must be logged in to the SharePoint server with a Site Collection Administrator account to automatically activate this feature.
Click Next.
Click Close to complete the installation.

How to Configure the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator

The SharePoint Analytic Accelerator is built to display data for all sites across site collections within the Web application in which it is deployed. The following configuration occurs only once per Web application you want the product deployed to.

Upon Activation of Bamboo.SPAnalyticAccelereator, open Site Settings.
Click on the link Shared Services Settings under the section header Bamboo SP Analytic Accelerator.
In the following screen, enter the Database Server name where the SSP DB resides, and the database name of the SSP.

If you are unsure of the database name, open SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. Click on the link Shared Services Administration

In the Manage this Farm’s Shared Services screen, locate the appropriate SSP, and in the edit menu, select Edit Properties.

In the properties window scroll down to the section SSP Database for the Database Server name and Database Name.
Going back to the configuration of the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator, notice that Windows Authentication is greyed out. This is because the logged in user might not necessarily have enough access to the database. As a result, we only allow entry of a SQL Authentication account to guarantee access for all users.
Click OK to save the settings.

What Permissions are Required to Allow User to View the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator

The following permissions are required for the user to view the SharePoint Analytic Accelerator:

List Permissions

View Application Pages

Site Permissions

View Usage Data
View Pages
Open

Bamboo Welcomes Devault BV to the Partner Advantage Program

2008-11-24T17:10:00Z

Our newest partner, Devault BV, joins us from the Netherlands. Devault specializes in offering complete ICT solutions to small and medium sized companies. Devault One is a unique modular concept that runs Microsoft SharePoint as a main portal and is easily customizable upon need of the customer with other market proven ICT services like Mamut Business Solutions, MS Dynamics NAV/CRM, MS Exchange (e-mail), MS Office Communication Server (OCS), MS Office, Hosted PBX (VoIP), Hosted Fax. Welcome to the Partner Advantage Program, Devault BV!

This Week in Bamboo (Nov 16th - Nov 22nd)

2008-11-24T16:07:00Z

Since the release of MashPoint R1.0 on November 7th, we enhanced and released Calendar Plus Web Part and Chart Plus Web Part. These enhancements allow users to bring external data in via MashPoint framework and display using Calendar Plus and Chart Plus. We continued fixing bugs for our other products. See the updates below.

Calendar Plus Web Part (HW20 R2.6.3) -

New Features:
Provide support for BAMBOO MASHPOINT 1.0.

Bugs Fixed:

• Editing items throws off 'time of day' sorting.
• Editing items throws off 'time of day' sorting.
• Items are displayed based on the descending order of time.
• Editing an instance of recurrence item caused the Calendar to display item twice in Quater and Yearly view.
• Calendar Plus does not support multiple choice condition when connect to SharePoint List Filter.
• Mouse over tool tips do not display multiLine Text box
• Filter lookup column in Calendar Plus.
• Gantt shows currency decimal points although Data View does not.
• Time zone issue with cal attached to a list.
• Dates from list rollup aren't converted to local time.
• Calendar Plus with rollup dataview throws error message on anonymous site.

Known Issues:
Does not display Bamboo Rich Text column type.

List Rollup Web Part (HW24 R3.3.2) -

New Features:
Support relative URL.

Bugs Fixed:

• ERRORMSG: Value does not fall within the expected range.
• Invalid path in the dataview for Lookup Site Column.
• Incompatible with Search Core Results Web Part on same page.
• Item points to the wrong URL when the site is accessed externally (Use relative URL will solve this issue).
• Dataview Toolbar button strings not translated.
• Dataview filter control does not presents sorted items in the dropdown box.
• Dataview of List Rollup show Date and Time Wrong, this occur on Calendar list, Issues List.
• Re-directing to List Rollup site when export/import data view.

Known Issues:

• Unable to do Web Part connection if chosen column is calculated type.
• Sort is not correct for Lookup column in List Rollup.
• Not able to search sibling list or sub list that have special characters for names.

Chart Plus Web Part (HW27 2.2.1) -

SPv3:
New Features:
Provide support for BAMBOO MASHPOINT 1.0.

Bugs Fixed:

• Not show X-Axis Value type with the amount in the charts.
• Calculated field type column are not support for X-axis.
• Display the currency with an amount in pie charts.
• Multiple items in a row at boundary of range missing line graphing.
• Creating a Pie chart based on an average count of calculated column.

SharePoint Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator (SA05 R1.1.37) -

Bug Fixed:
Category problem - clicking on the + sign on the tree view creates new child categories.

Cross List Web Part (HW09 R1.2.5) –

Bugs Fixed:
• ShowResult: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
• ShowResult: Cannot complete this action. Please try again.

SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard (HW35 R1.0.38) -

Bugs Fixed:
• Error in creating calculated column for Project Portfolio Dashboard list on 64bit server. Project list was not created after the Web Part was dropped to the page.
• Not everything can be translated in the SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard.

Put Some Teeth in Your SharePoint Task List

2008-11-24T16:06:00Z

As Director of Online Operations here at Bamboo, one of the tools I use to keep my team on track and in sync with the rest of the company, is an ordinary SharePoint task list. We review this list every Monday morning with representatives from other teams across the company. We make updates to this list throughout the week reflecting our progress against key projects and ongoing activities. Anyone looking for the current status of a particular project can check in and see what's going on.

I recently made a minor change to this list, using a new Bamboo product, that completely changed the way I look at this list. I believe this small change will significantly improve the frequency of updates to the list, and maybe even result in some increased productivity. Here's some background on what I did:

My task list is a very standard list of "projects", and includes the following columns: Project Name, Status, Assigned To, Priority, Due Date, Percentage Complete & Notes.

Overall this list has been an effective exhibit. In our weekly meetings, we simply read through the tasks in order, report progress and discuss any issues or challenges. Once tasks are marked as complete, they disappear off the default list view and are effectively "archived".

In terms of editing and updating the list, there isn't a whole lot to do. Project Name, Assigned To, Priority and Due Date rarely change. And honestly, it just hasn't been that useful to update the Notes field very often. If a project is complex enough that notes to fellow team members would be helpful, these are usually sent in email or captured on a related wiki or discussion board.

So in terms of weekly updates, the most useful field is actually Percentage Complete. I thought that my team was doing a reasonable job of keeping this field updated, but I found out I was wrong. I made this discovery by adding a Bamboo Visual Indicator to my task list. Visual Indicator is a hidden gem of the relatively new Bamboo Custom Column Pack. There are two main categories of Visual Indicators, essentially "color coding" and a "thermometer" style progress bar. The latter is what I added to my task list, and here's the result:

Once applied, it was instantly obvious that most of the values in the Percentage Complete field hadn't been updated in a long time, a flaw totally obscured by the previous list of numeric values. The new display also put a bright spotlight on the long list of tasks that genuinely hadn't been started at all. There's nothing like effective data visualization to make a tired data old data set suddenly seem urgent and relevant again.

With the enhanced visibility of this data point, you can bet that this column will now be updated before every weekly status meeting. You can also imagine how much harder it will be to hide the fact that some projects just get stuck or bogged down. Bamboo Visual Indicator will be a component of any project management application I ever build in SharePoint.

So, download a 15-day free trial of Bamboo Custom Column Pack, and add some teeth to your SharePoint Task list. Custom Column Pack has a bunch of other killer features for dressing up any SharePoint list column, including a replacement text editor with spell check and in-line picture uploading, and two "selector" controls that simplify and control data entry. If you create or maintain SharePoint lists as part of your daily life, you will deeply appreciate all the functionality these products have to offer.

How to Show Multiple Exchange Calendars in a Single Calendar in SharePoint

2008-11-24T02:55:00Z

One of the coolest things we have ever created is the ability to view multiple Exchange user calendars overlaid on one another in a single view in the Team Calendar Web Part. This makes it a true, collaborative, team calendar. So often you hear words like “collaboration” and “team” when talking about SharePoint products, but when you look at them closer, you find out that it is not really collaborative at all and requires a lot of work and process improvement to get it to a point where it might be just scratching the surface of collaborative. But with this new functionality, the Team Calendar Web Part really earns its name. Allow me to elaborate. .

For those of you not familiar with Team Calendar, it is basically a Web Part that allows you to view three types of data sources in a significantly enhanced, color coded calendar view:

· A single SharePoint List (SP List Only).

· A single SharePoint List side-by-side with a single Exchange calendar (Exchange and SP List).

· Multiple Exchange User Calendars (Exchange Only).

The Exchange Only mode, requires you to enter in an Exchange account name, password, and the web service URL for Exchange. The Exchange account entered here will also be displayed with the other Exchange calendars in the Team Calendar Web Part. So usually this account is one of the team member’s accounts.

At this point, you can click the Test Connection button to make sure you are able to access the Exchange Web service. Then enter the Active Directory domain and the default global address list container value (an example is provided for you in the tool pane). This value is used to pull user information from the Global Address List, and can vary depending on how your Exchange server has been configured.

Now you are ready to enter in the email addresses of the users you want to include in your calendar. You can type them in directly (separated by a semicolon) or click the Address Book button to pop up a Find window inside the tool pane and search for your users there. Using the Find window inserts the domain specific email address in the mailbox list instead of your commonly used email address. Both will work. But the most important thing here is to make sure that the users you are selecting have set their calendars to be shared. If their calendar is not shared, then it won’t be displayed in the Team Calendar Web Part.

Then click the Update Mailbox List button. Clicking this button causes the color coding section to appear in the tool pane so that you can assign a different color to each user’s set of calendar items. Notice that the account used to access the Exchange Web service (i.e., dpfettscher) is also listed for color coding.

So that was the tough part since you really have to know about Exchange. Now you can set how you want the calendar information displayed and interacted with in the Team Calendar Web Part. Things like:

· Allowing only the appointment creator to cancel their own meetings or appointments.

· Hiding private items from view.

· Switching how the color-coding displays the user account color vs. the status color for each calendar item in the Team Calendar itself (more on this later).

· Allowing users to dynamically select which user calendars to display.

This last bullet allows users to select a check box from the Team Calendar Web Part user interface to display only the selected user calendars. The list of users to choose from comes from the mailbox list created in the tool pane (see above screenshot).

You can also indicate whether to show or hide the owner’s name on each calendar item by default, or to allow users to show or hide the owner’s names dynamically.

Finally, you need to select the field that is displayed in the calendar view. Most commonly, this will be the Subject field. You also need to select the fields that are displayed in a tool tip when users mouse over a calendar item, the field that will be used to color code the item itself, the colors for color coding the status, and whether to show the calendar item based on a single date or a date range. The field used to color code the calendar item will be the Status field as it will indicate whether someone is out of the office, free, busy, or has tentatively accepted a meeting invite or appointment.

And you are done! Based on the configuration examples I’ve showed, your calendar could look like this:

This calendar allows you to select the user calendars you want to show as well as indicate whether you want to show the owner’s name in the calendar item. You can also see the tool tip showing pertinent information about the calendar item. Notice that the color coding indicates the status as the small rectangle at the beginning of the calendar item while the color of the item itself indicates the calendar owner. The Invert color coding style option in the tool pane is selected so the color coding is displayed this way. If this option were not selected, then the small rectangle would indicate the calendar owner and the calendar item color would indicate the status.

You can create a new appointment for yourself or schedule a meeting directly from the Web Part. You can also click on the subject of any of the calendar items that you created to view more details about that item.

Other things you can configure include the default view (i.e., day, week, month or year), the skin (i.e., the look and feel of the calendar itself), the start day for the Week View, the maximum number of items that can be shown in each day within the Month View (before the Show More link is displayed), and whether you show the color legend at the bottom of the calendar or not. This includes both the calendar owner legend as well as the status legend.

So is that cool or what? Setting up multiple exchange calendars in a single SharePoint calendar with color coding is pretty easy with the Team Calendar Web Part. Project Managers, Team Leads, Scheduling Managers, Remote Team Members will love being able to see as well as create meetings and appointments on their team members' calendars from a single SharePoint calendar that sits next to their team documents, contact information, announcements, project dashboard, etc.

Try it out for yourself and tell me whether you think it's as cool as I do.

November 2008 e-news Recap

2008-11-21T18:46:00Z

This month we released two major products, the SharePoint Navigators (available exclusively in the Bamboo Suites), and MashPoint. The SharePoint Navigators allow you to create custom menus, tabs, tree items, and a Site Actions menu for site navigation. As a free data integration platform for SharePoint, MashPoint enables Web Parts to surface external data in both WSS and MOSS.

Over the next month, we plan to release 6 more products, including SharePoint Task Master, SharePoint User Registration Accelerator, Data-Viewer Web Part 2.0, MashPoint Business Data Column, Bamboo Lookup Selector and Bamboo Column Level Security (both of which are available for purchase individually or as part of the SharePoint Custom Column Pack).

A new pre-release product, SharePoint Analyzer was released via Bamboo Labs. This tool allows you to easily access and view important information on your SharePoint environment, from servers and services to Bamboo products.

To keep you up to speed on these and all our latest releases, we're offering a new Webinar, What's New from Bamboo. Packed into just 30-minutes, this high-level overview includes short product demos of our latest product releases.

We have recently signed an OEM agreement with an existing partner, TeamDirection. They are offering the SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard as part of its IntelliGantt Add-in for Microsoft Project.

Bamboo is proud to participate in the Best Practices Conference 2009, February 2-4 in San Diego, California, as a Gold Sponsor. We will also attend SPTechCon, The SharePoint Technology Conference, January 27-29 in San Francisco, California. Make sure to look for us at these events and the 2009 IMAGINE Event, January 21 in New York.

Read the full-version November e-news

Record Site Traffic at Bamboo

2008-11-21T17:00:00Z

Hi, Steve Gaitten here, Director of Online Operations at Bamboo Solutions. I wanted to take a moment and share some positive news about site traffic here at Bamboo.

Here are the headlines:

Yesterday, Thursday, November 20th, Bamboo registered it's highest one day total for site traffic in the history of the company. In a single day, there were more than 4,000 visits.

In October, we saw our eigth consecutive month of growth in site traffic, with over 72K total site visits. We are on pace to blow past that number again in November, although I suspect the looming Thanksgiving holiday may slow us down. Still, our rolling 4 week average is now comfortably above 80K total site visits.

I'm especially proud and happy about the traffic and activity across Bamboo Nation, our SharePoint community site. We launched Bamboo Nation back in April of 2008. Since then traffic has grown almost exponentially. In October, we had more than 26K unique visitors to Bamboo Nation. That's almost three times the number of visitors we saw in June. We're on track to cross 30K in November.

Now, I know that 30K unique visitors puts us somewhat below Facebook, MySpace and YouTube in terms of audience size. In my previous role at AOL, I ran the AOL Money & Finance Channel, a site that regularly saw 10 million unique visitors per month and generated half a billion page views. But when you stop and think about the content niche we serve, the numbers really blow me away. To know that there are 30,000 SharePoint professionals out there who found this site to be a worthwhile informational resource is truly gratifying. I like to visualize the Bamboo Nation audience all together in a venue like FedEx Field here in DC. Together we would take up about 1/3 of the seats. At our current growth rate, we will fill that stadium sometime in late Spring of next year.

Why should you care? Well, there are plenty of good reasons:

The more people who participate in this community, the better the experience. There are that many more individuals willing to take a few minutes and answer a question in the Bamboo Nation forums, contribute a guest post to the Bamboo Team Blog, or make a code snippet or utility available for download. There is strength in numbers and wisdom in the crowd. Together, we can make this SharePoint thing better, easier and more powerful.
We're willing to share this audience, with virtually anyone, including you. Would you like to reach 30,000 SharePoint professionals with a message? We're here to help. Here are three ways you can make Bamboo Nation work for you: 1) Contribute a guest blog post. We strongly encourage guest appearences on the Bamboo Team Blog. Simply contact John Anderson, our Manager of Content & Syndication and he will work with you to schedule and publish your appearance. 2) Add your blog to our blog index. When your blog is mirrored by Bamboo Nation, your headlines are syndicated across the site, and our readers come to you. To have your blog added, please drop a note to Chris Dooley, our Community Manager. This opportunity is available to anyone. 3) If your company is a member of the Bamboo Partner Advantage Program, you're entitled to free advertising on Bamboo Nation. Again, please contact Chris Dooley, and he will work with you to schedule your free run on Bamboo Nation. There's no upsell, no catch, this is purely a benefit of your partnership with Bamboo Solutions. In general, we're willing and eager to help anyone with a message for the SharePoint community. If you're promoting a conference, a user group, a code camp, etc. etc., reach out and let us know how we can help. Please feel free to contact me directly at steve.gaitten@bamboosolutions.com
The site traffic and referrals to the Bamboo Solutions Online Store help fund new site features and continued operations. Over the past few months, we helped you Install SharePoint on Vista, Calculate Your SharePoint Licensing Costs, and Use SharePoint for Project Management. With your continued support, we'll continue to roll out great new features and useful content.

We humbly thank you, the reader, for your support and participation. We tremendously enjoy the opportunity to meet and interact with Bamboo customers, and SharePoint users in general. Please continue to feed us suggestions and let us know how we can serve you better.

Thank you!

-Steve

An Open Invitation to Qualified Guest Bloggers

2008-11-20T18:58:00Z

Regular readers of the Bamboo Team Blog will have noticed that we've hosted a number of excellent guest blogs from distinguished SharePoint professionals* over the past several months. We're currently in discussions to secure guest blogs from additional SharePoint thought leaders, but we felt the time was right to cast an even wider net by extending an open invitation to all qualified prospective guest bloggers.

In October, Bamboo Nation received over 26,000 unique visitors, and we're on track to beat that number in November. We invite you to jump onto the Bamboo Team Blog soapbox and engage our highly qualified audience of SharePoint users and professionals with a guest blog entry. All that we ask is that you speak to any SharePoint-related topic about which you're passionate, share a lesson learned, or write about a timely issue. Naturally, you're also welcome to plug your own company or product offerings in the course of your guest blog.

We want to make sure that the guest blogging process is as streamlined as possible for you, so guest blogging is as easy as choosing a subject, submitting your content (a Word doc with embedded images is perfectly acceptable), and we'll take it from there. We'll handle the editing, proofreading, and formatting, and will send the finished blog to you for your approval prior to publication.

If you're not already a registered Bamboo Nation user, we'll create a profile for you so that the guest blog will be posted under your name. If you've already got a Bamboo Nation account, that's great ... we'll just ask you to create a placeholder blog entry, and we'll take it from there.

If you're interested in guest blogging for Bamboo, please drop me an email at john.anderson@bamboosolutions.com. I look forward to hearing what you'd like to share with Bamboo Nation!

* Write a guest blog for Bamboo and take your place among the following SharePoint gurus:

Ben Curry, MVP: Best Practices for Creating My Sites in SharePoint Server 2007
Bill English, MVP: Two guest blogs, including I Can't Find my Information in SharePoint
Mike Ferrara: SharePoint and Search Server 2008
Robin Meure: Extending SPBoundFields
Bob Mixon, MVP: Findability Webinar Invitation
Joel Oleson: Seven guest blogs, including User Management Challenges and Solutions for SharePoint Extranets
Paul Stork, MVP: Best Practices SharePoint Conference in D.C.
Jeff Webb: Two guest blogs, including Introducing the Upload Wizard