Have small chat application but i need current online users - sharepoint

In sharepoint I do have chatter web part.
That web part does not show the online user.
In sharepoint are there any ways to get online users into the WEB PART.
Please guide it is the requirement.
THanks a lot in advance

This is not possible out of the box with SharePoint. It's a big limitation, I know because I've been looking for ways to do this as well. But there may be a ways around it:
The following was proposed here: go4answers.webhost4life.com/Example/code-get-many-users-logged-sharepoint-79841.aspx
What comes to mind is that you could write something that would hook into the session_start and session_end. Here's an ASP.NET blog that covers it. http://imar.spaanjaars.com/QuickDocID.aspx?QUICKDOC=223.
I then realized that this may not work since sharepoint uses SqlServer, by default, not InProc for its session mgmt. This would prevent session_end from firing.
Ok, so if you change your web.config to use InProc, it should work. There are implications in doing this, of course. Here is an article that lets you assess where this is a safe thing to do based on your environment. http://sharepoint-one-stop.blogspot.com/2008/06/moss-2007-interview-questions.html

Related

Best free or paid video training series for learning Sharepoint 2016 from a Beginner/Intermediate level

I am a web developer who will be starting Sharepoint development and hasn't used Sharepoint much at all from an end user or developer side of things. I am looking for a training class to ramp up on it so I can be a better developer and make more informed architecture decisions. I found this course https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/sharepoint-2016-foundations. Any other ideas?
Im gonna be straight forward with you and tell you that a training class will not take you far for SharePoint Development and are boring as heck.
They will help you understand the basic structure and piece together basic ideas of lists/libraries and what not. This will not help you as developer.
Best bet is to tune to peoples blogs and Microsoft Office Dev community.
SharePoint Maven is great for you giving you a run down on what best practices are and he is pretty current. A lot of good content that deals with on-prem and sharepoint online/office365
https://sharepointmaven.com/blog-sharepoint-best-practices/
Marcs blog has recently gear itself more toward O365 bet there is a lot of good content if youre willing to dig.
https://sympmarc.com/
If youre stuck on SP16 on-prem I would stear clear of SPFx for now. They dont update it as reguarly as the SPFx for online, still using Node 8. That being said still check it out. But another alternative is using react/angular/vue apps inside content editors leveraging the SharePoint API. I do this whenever I can. SPjeff introduced me to this and I can't thank him enough. Check out more info
https://www.spjeff.com/?s=Angular
Lots of good stuff here.
https://veenstra.me.uk/
I dont know any good resources for navigating SharePoint designer. I just learned as I went along. Google will be your best friend in this situation.
If youre going to be doing online work. Check out the Microsoft Dev center.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs/
Main points are to tune yourself in to SharePoint happenings and updates. The community for on-prem is shrinking so reach out to the blogs as much as possible. Like anything else you just have to dive in.

What is the accepted portlet framework for .Net?

What is the accepted "portlet" framework for .Net these days? By this, I mean the whole "add little widgets to a page and move them around" type of thing.
I know that Web Parts were big at one time, but is this architecture still the "accepted" method in the .Net world? Is this still what Sharepoint uses? (And should that matter?)
I need to use portlet-type things for a client project, and I don't want to re-invent the wheel. I'd like to use the tool that have the most momentum and community support behind it?
Yes, SharePoint still uses web parts. That being said, there are many ways of creating SharePoint web parts.
You can't really go wrong with ASP.NET User Controls. User Controls give you a lot of freedom, are still very "accepted" and supported (and that won't stop anytime soon). What's more, you will be able to re-use the control everywhere (SharePoint or not) with little refactoring which is a big plus in my book.
You can read this article by Scott Gu for more details : http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/02/Writing-Custom-Web-Parts-for-SharePoint-2007.aspx

No-code or little-code website

What is a (free) technology which requires the least amount of code for creating a website with the following requirements:
Sign-up/login
Form for adding your personal info. which gets databased
Each person can view and edit their own info
Admin can view and edit any
The form needs to be easily customizable and extensible (by the website's owner, not during run-time)
Is there a beginner tutorial for such a thing?
(For me, this question is about a friend who wants me to do this, but I want him to do it himself so I don't have to get roped into maintenance. I also want to keep it more general for the sake of Stack Overflow and future readers.)
Edit: I thought I remembered some ASP.NET tutorials that were mostly drag/drop or things where it was all but made for you from the database schema (which can be made with SSMS's GUI) but I can't seem to find them now.
Responding to posts below requesting specifics: this site will be for potential clients to sign-up and enter their company's info and fill out a form about their advertising needs.
I thought about putting this on SU instead, but since there was likely going to be some coding involved (I assumed no-code was an unreachable goal) SO seemed more appropriate.
Your friend can consider a framework like drupal. It has a bit of a learning code but, you can create a website with everything you ask for without code. You may want to modify it to change the look but there are themes for that.
Also, some hosts like godaddy.com have this installed and you do not have to worry about the complex installation procedures. Just start modifying the content of the site, select a built in template and go...
PhpBB? I think you need to specify what the website is going to be used for before you can get better/more specific answers.
... have a look at Drupal or Joomla, expect a learning curve nevertheless.
Is this friend a programmer as well? If so, I'd suggest building such a site using a PHP framework. Deploying an existing forum/wiki is also an option of course, but will probably have much more features than you describe. But if s/he's not a programmer, I don't see how s/he will be able to develop a site like that in a reasonable amount of time.
Why not using a CMS like wordpress, drupal and co. ?

What is the profile of a SharePoint developer

I have a development team specialized in ASP.NET. So the solutions we provide are web based, running on IIS and using MS SQL server. Everything within the intranet of the company. The team has this expertise, and they are excellent in C#, and .Net in general.
The company is deploying SharePoint MOSS 2007. This deployment is part of a project that I am not involved in, and for which I have very little information. However I know that they have established the "thinkers" layer (those who will say what to do), the integrations layer (the who will configure, deploy and manage the production), and that they need to establish the so called development layer (those who will do things the other two can't).
I am asked to evaluate the possibility to increase my team's expertise by adding SharePoint development. This is the easy part, I just have to find the required training and send my people.
However these days the word development could mean a lot of things and sometimes I discover that configuration is used in place of development.
I don't have any objections to evolve the team by developing new expertise, but I want to be sure to keep things stimulating for my developers.
Secondly I don't want to say that we have SharePoint development expertise, and actually what we do is just modifying css or xml files. Also, I don't think that using wizards to produce a solution is the best path to push a C# developer to follow.
The questions I am asking myself first is : what is the background of a SharePoint developer? how could .Net developers feel if asked to become SharePoint developers?
Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
I started in Sharepoint development over a year ago when I inherited a WSS 3.0 solution at my company.
Personally I think it was a great step for me getting to know Sharepoint development a little, there are a lot of problems (e.g. security, load – balance, ghosting) that was good to see how was solved by the WSS team and helps me solve problems in other solutions I‘m working on. But I don‘t work on WSS solutions full time, so others have to anwer how it is working with WSS every day.
WSS and Sharepoint are an extension on the ASP.NET platform, so any experience in ASP.NET and .NET in general should be a good foundation for a developer that is starting creating Sharepoint solutions. I read the Inside Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 book in order to get the basic concepts and wss solution architecuture before I started working on WSS projects.
I quickly found out that you have to have a Virtual Machine environment for Sharepoint development, this is because it‘s a pain working on a client and attaching to a remote process on the server to get in debug mode. Therefore I recommend creating a MOSS virtual machine that has Visual Studio installed that has access to your source control system. Develop solutions on that machine and when finished then check into source control.
I also recommend looking at development tools, such as stsdev and wspbuilder to help you building your solution, these will ease you development process quite a bit. There are also quite a lot of tools available on the web, e.g. codeplex to help you out.
Sometimes it can be a pain developing these solutions, changes can require recycling the IIS pool or a brute-force IISReset, error messages can sometimes by a little cryptic and so on. But you quickly catch on and know where to look. Sharepoint also helps you out a lot, I‘ve had millions of questions from clients that can be solved with standard out-of the box web parts, so that I don‘t have to code anhything to keep my clients happy :)
Sharepoint also expects solutions to be coded in certain way, e.g. 12 hive filestructure so it helps you standardizing your solutions.
There is a serious lack of documentation, so that you have to rely on Reflector and such tools a lot, just to know what is happening within the framework, hopefully this gets better with 2010.
The initial learning curve is high, and a lot of new concepts an technologies to learn ,e.g. Workflows within sharepoint, featuers, ghosting and code access security
There is a lot of Xml configuration that sharepoint uses that developers have to learn, this includes the site definition, list templates and more. There are sometimes days when I‘m stuck in Xml edit mode and can‘t figure out why things don‘t work as they should do
These are just few of my thought, I‘ve been working mainly in WSS development and it would be great if someone could comment regarding web part configuration in Sharepoint, e.g. configuring the search. Which is something I haven‘t been doing a lot of.
From what I have heard around, the SharePoint is a popular technology from the customer point of view, but an object of hatred among developers.
Nice to see you noted Dev and Admin being used "incorrectly".
Although Developing for SharePoint could be purely that, development, like creating webparts etc., I strongly encourage you and your team to get to grips with SharePoint deployment, installation and configuration as well. I am fully SharePoint Certified (WSS Config/Dev and MOSS Config/Dev) and having knowledge of both ends has been invaluable for me.
Knowing what is configured where will help in debugging and troubleshooting along the way. I suggest taking an MCTS WSS 3.0 COnfiguration training / and or a MOSS Config training for at least 1 or 2 of your team. The rest of the team will pick up the essentials as they go along, having those 2 certified colleagues as go to guys concerning config and admin.
IMHO, being a sharepoint consultant entails knowing how to create a piece of functionality as a dev and then being able to deploy, configure and maintain that piece of functionality as an admin (or at least an informed end/power user).
Albert, take a look at this other thread titled Is a sharepoint developer technically “equipped” to do custom app dev and vise-versa. There's quite a bit of info in there about what's involved in making the leap from pure .NET to SharePoint.
My co-worker is studying SharePoint at the moment. Making fun of him all the time. Frequently he gabbles something like "wtf is that??!!". And then i feel a bit sad, because i know - there's a probability that i'll have to learn that stuff too (i guess it's not so easy to get projects nowadays).
I see it more as configuration and customization than software development (something like hunting down fing checkbox for 3 days in a row). You pick up some clay through those crazy sharepoint designers and then endlessly customize it.
For everything i know already - there's a new name (i.e. - spGridView) and unexpected behavior underneath.
Html that gets rendered is bizzare (tables and bunch of serialized viewstate everywhere).
But those configuration xml`s... o_0
Now that's a hurdle i can't get over. Even hardcore SQL stuff starts to seem like a childish game.
Maybe i'm wrong, but as i have heard - Microsoft developed 'spatial columns' (let's you expand count of columns for tables over thousandsomething) for sql mainly because of Sharepoint. That terrifies me.
Of course - my opinion is HIGHLY subjective and a bit offensive. But i hope that helps to better reveal what i think & feel about Sharepoint.
Hopefully developers you are working with sees this different.
In short:
No. I wouldn't like to become a sharepoint developer.
Edit:
I could handle that initial complexity. But the main reason i don't want to - i don't think that development in Sharepoint is the right way to go. I mean - lately people discuss that webforms provides too much abstraction. Then what to say about Sharepoint?
To be a successful SharePoint developer you must have a high threshold for pain and the patience of a Buddha.
thank you all for the answers, they are all really helpful.
from what I read here, I see two things to consider.
First is the context of utilization which I think is an important factor. In some places SharePoint "development" could go very far, and could involve developing really exciting things, in order to satisfy new customers' needs. it could involve writing code and so on. And in some other places it could be just administration and configuration, in order to maintain already established solutions.
Secondly is the personal motivation. It really depends on the person. Some .Net developers with good experience, will prefer not to go in a direction, where they will not code the "SharePoint way", and will like to write code in C# or some other languages. However there will be others that will choose this path and will be happy to have such careers. They will be motivated and thus propose really nice solutions.
For example, from my personal perspective and if I had stayed in development and programming, I would not choose SharePoint development using high level wizards and menus,as a progress path for my career. Even though I am not doing it these days, I still enjoy coding, compiling, debugging etc, but this is just me.

SharePoint - Posting and Retrieving files Automatically via VBScript

I'm going to need to push and pull files from a SharePoint site that is not hosted by my company (it is external). I'm only going to get a few days (if that) to get this working so I don't have much time to experiment.
To add to my requirements/headaches, I'm going to have to implement this with VBScript. .Net would be preferred for me but for reasons beyond my control I have to use VBScript. I don't have direct access to my VBScript web server, so I won't be able to implement this in .NET and use that object from VBScript.
I'm looking for anything that would help me accomplish this goal quickly and effectively. I found this post and am wondering if the PUT/GET method used here would work for me?
http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2004/06/06/149673.aspx (I got this link from: Sharepoint API - How to Upload files to Sharepoint Doc Library from ASP.NET Web Application)
To top all of this off, I've never done any programming or administration of a SharePoint site. My knowledge of SharePoint is that of a user. I'm aware that there is an API from the few Google searches I did. However, my readings make me believe that my code would need to run on or in proximity to the SharePoint server. I don't believe I have the proximity I need to use the API.
Sincere thank yous!
Regards,
Frank
Progress Update: I'm still researching this. Tom pointed out that the example I had posted is probably from an old SharePoint version. His recommendation to use .Net to develop a prototype on Web Services is good but I'm hoping for more detailed answers.
I'm now wondering if I can accomplish what I need to accomplish using HTTP PUT and GETs. At my company, for a specific project we do use HTTP PUT and GETs to do something like this. We have files that are stored on an HTTP server and this is how we post and retrieve them.
Would this work over SharePoint or would SharePoint require special handling? Basically, do I have to use Web Services?
Progress Update 2: This link is helpful... Upload a file to SharePoint through the built-in web services
But I am still looking for more information on this topic... Thanks all...
You'll need to use the sharepoint lists web service for metadata and get/put for uploads. That link looks to be for SharePoint 2001, so hopefully you can use the newer/simpler version.
I recommend building something in .net first to get the web service calls worked out - some of the parameters can be quite tricky to debug, and I wouldn't want to be doing that on a remote vbscript page.
Assuming there is no metadata required and the SharePoint library is being used like a file server you can do most of what you want with PUT/GET, but you will probably need a call to GetListItems to find the urls to download.
There's an example on my blog of a lower level call to that web service - it's javascript, but probably close enough.
http://tqcblog.com/2007/09/24/sharepoint-blog-content-rating-with-javascript-and-web-services
What setting up the .net version gets you is very quick set up of a connection to the server (just add a web service reference in visual studio) so you can get the query and queryoptions strings working to retrieve the items you want. Once that works you just have to put it all together as a string including the soap stuff for use without all the nice tools.
I'm a little unclear on the context of the implementation and the prerequisite of having to use VBScript. Are the files being moved from one server to another server or from a user's desktop to this SP server? or are they being accessed via software like Excel?
The first thing that sprang to my mind (this may sound crazy) was using the Office application to make the connection. Your script would call up Excel (just as an example) and pass it the vba needed to initiate the Open File, and then provide the full path to the file that needs to be retrieved. Then have it do a Save As to the location that needs the file. Do the same thing but in reverse for putting files on the SharePoint server.
The tricky part, obviously, is getting the script to interface with the Office app. I know this can be done with the Windows version of PHP, but I don't want to get into anything specific without knowing your situation.
I seriously wonder if you are going to be able to use VBScript to call the SharePoint web services. I haven't looked at the SharePoint web services for a while so I don't remember exactly how they are defined. I thought the web services were SOAP calls though which makes it trickier than
I'm not sure I tried to use Excel to call some web services with the MSSOAP.SoapClient and it seemed this component was unable to handle any WSDL types beyond the very simple strings. Anything with nested data would not work. Instead, you would need to create a COM object to process the conversion which is a major hassle. If you are able to use XMLHTTP component then it might be possible with VBScript, but I'm not sure if it will work with SharePoint web services.
I'm not sure what you mean, "I don't have direct access to my VBScript web server." Is your web server in VBScript (ASP)? Or did you mean SharePoint server?
You might consider C# Script (cs-script) as a scripted solution that uses .NET. I have had good success with it, although it does need to be installed on the computer that runs the script.
I'm integrating between two companies. According to this book, we should use AD FS to accomplish what I'm looking for.
I still don't actually have this working though so if someone has more information I will change the answer to this question.
http://books.google.com/books?id=-6Dw74If4N0C&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=sharing+sharepoint+sites+external+adfs&source=bl&ots=ojOlMP13tE&sig=FjsMmOHymCOMGo7il7vjWF_lagQ&hl=en&ei=ytqfStClO5mMtgejsfH0Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#v=onepage&q=&f=false
I never really received a answer to this that worked out but this is no longer an issue for me.
What we ended up doing is scraping the html. In effect, we put together our own ad-hoc web service processor where instead of SOAP, html is used to communicate. Then we execute GETs, POSTs, and etc to work with the web service.
We had done something similar in VBScript in for WebDAV -- we had a class and created a new one to work with SharePoint.

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