Sometimes opening up SharePoint 2010 makes me come over all Star Trek: I feel like I’m on a mission, to explore strange new worlds: to seek out new life  . . . . . OK someone slap me now!

But seriously, there are some funky new features in 2010 and wikis seem to have come on quite a long way. Last week we looked at working with Sharepoint wikis and explored the functionality that is common to 2007 and 2010.

This week we are going to look at the new 2010 features – most of which look great with a couple of exceptions which are frankly a little confusing.

So – set Phasers to stun – lets boldly go!

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SharePoint wikis get quite a bit of flack from Wiki enthusiasts – who think they are way too basic and rather a lame example of a wiki.  We disagree:  we quite like SharePoint wiki’s – yes they are very simple and easy to use, but isn’t this kind of the point?  That they should allow you to add and share content quickly and easily?

So we have 2 articles for you here.  This first one is Wiki basics – why and how you would use a SharePoint wiki – and these apply to both SharePoint 2007 and 2010.

And the second installment will take a spin through the new wiki features which are available in SharePoint 2010 – and some of these should be exciting enough to shut up even the most hard core sceptic.

So first up SharePoint Wiki basics.

Why use a Wiki?

Basically a wiki is a bit like a big, on-line, shareable notepad or whiteboard. So if you want your very busy and important subject matter experts to share their pearls of wisdom with the rest of the organization a wiki is probably a great way for them to do that – because its quick and its easy and they can get their point across without having faff around with formatting or worry about where there are going to save the thing. . It’s also really easy for the original author, or others to add, amend and cross reference.  So wikis are also great as team project workspaces, for sharing ideas, gathering information and discussing issues.

You wouldn’t want to use a wiki for structured data (Tasks/Issues/Invoices etc) that would be better in a List and likewise the very unstructured and easy to edit nature of a wiki means that they are probably not the best place for dealing with content that needs a lot of authentication or protection – so for example you might not want your company pay scales, or disciplinary procedures stored in a wiki – as these are things that you want to put a bit of structure around, and that you don’t want every Tina, Deidre and Harriet editing.

Set up your SharePoint Wiki

This is a 30 second job. From the top left of your screen choose Site Actions and then More Options:

From the next screen scroll right the way down to the bottom and choose Wiki Page Library, give it a name, and press the Create button – Job done – you have a Wiki.

You can see straight away that the wiki is a friendly and intuitive place to be.  First and best you have the nice big easy to read navigation bread crumbs at the top of the page. Then in the body of the page an introduction to wikis and a link to instructions on how to use them. Finally, a link to your wiki will have appeared on your quick launch menu.

So, lets add some Content.

So as you can see the Wiki page comes with a very Word-like rich text editor, and you can treat adding text to a Wiki page in pretty much the same way as you would add text to a Word document. Just click the Edit link to start and the Save and Close icon when you are finished.

But what are all those square brackets about?

Well, square brackets are how we add a link to a page in a SharePoint wiki library.

Add New Pages

In wikis you are encouraged not to create orphans (pages that are all alone in the world with no links to any other pages) so best practice is first to create a page, then put some content in it.  You created the first page of your wiki library automatically when you created the library.

To create other pages, simply type the name of the page [[surrounded by double square brackets]]

Click “Save and Close” and your pages are created.

Once you’re out of Edit mode – after clicking “Save and Close” you will see that your square brackets have vanished, and you are left with links.  The headings with dotted underlining are for pages with no content yet.  The normal looking links are pages which have content.  So in this example our Planner Demos page has content, but the others have yet to be created.

Just click on one of the dotted links to go to a new page a create content.

This system of page creation is also a great method of getting people started, and keeping them on track with minimal effort.  We all know how getting started is the biggest challenge in any writing project – and keeping on trakc the next.  So say you wanted your subject matter experts to create a wiki on environmental awareness at work you might create pages titled something like:  “recycling”, “power saving”, “car sharing” which might help to steer your environmental experts in the right direction, and stop them wastings hours on things you didn’t want like “windfarms”, “biofuel” and “international environmental policy”.

Add other Links

Using our square brackets we can add different links.

Linking to an existing page is just the same as creating a new page – just enter the page name, surrounded by square brackets:

[[existing page name]]

no need to fiddle around with addresses and / forward slashes.  Wiki pages are not arranged in a “tree” like traditional website pages – it’s all much more laid back and informal (they come from Hawaii remember?).  So just type the name of any page within your wiki and the wiki will find it for you and create the link.  The wiki won’t allow you to create duplicate pages with the same name, try and do that and it will simply link you back to your existing page.

and to link to an external webpage:

[[http://www.yourpage.com]]

To display a link where the link text is different to the destination page name use the pipe character | . So if we wanted to link to the Planner Demos page, but wanted our link to be called “latest demo”:

[[Planner Demos|latest demo]]

Check Revisions and Revert to Previous Version

Need to see who added that really dumb comment? No problem:

Oh . . . looks like that was me!

To get to the revision history choose Page/View All Pages, then click on the arrow next to the page you want to see and choose Version History.  You can see exactly how and when the wiki page changed and who has made the changes.  You can then choose to delete a version, or revert back to an previous version if you wish.

So that’s the basics of working with wikis.

Do you have any other tips and tricks to share?

Next time:  What’s new in SharePoint 2010 wikis.

I’ve been working on moving all our products over to Visual Studio 2010. Whilst Microsoft still has some way to go to make SharePoint totally developer friendly (I mean 47 1/2 steps to install SharePoint 2010 on a Windows 7 desktop for development? And shake a double 6 to start? Really?) they have made huge advances and the SharePoint tools built into Visual Studio 2010 are a big improvement on hand crafting or using VSeWSS or WSPBuilder.

I’ve learnt a few things along the way and thought I would pass them on. Today its :-

How to add ClassResources to a Web Part

ClassResources are intended to be used for browser requested resources used in a web part – e.g. images, css files and javascript. This location is often forgotten about and instead these types of files end up spread all over the place.

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Tooltips  – those little boxes that pop up when you hover over something – can be a blessing or a bit of a nightmare.  It drives me nuts when people enable those snapshot tooltips on every hyperlink on a page.  the resulting pop ups are huge, usually contain info I don’t want to see, and seem to hang around on the screen for ever.

But imagine a tooltip where you choose exactly what information is displayed?  How cool would that be?  Well that’s exactly what you get with tooltips in our PivotPoint web part  for SharePoint – which is why I think they rock.

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Hi everyone.

We wanted to share this new SharePoint case study with you.  It shows how online security specialists Websense are using our PivotPoint webapart to slice and dice their marketing list data, and create some awesome, dynamic dashboards.

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Despite the infamous “fake today column trick” still appearing in new blog posts on a monthly basis you can’t use Today in calculated columns in SharePoint.

I’ve seen people assume (not unreasonably) that the same rule must apply with calculated default values used in columns that are not calculated columns as well – but strangely,  you actually can use Today in calculated default values, so I am going to explain why it works and how you might use this.

What is the difference between Calculated Column and Calculated Default value?

A calculated column, erm… calculates values from other columns in your list.

For example if you have an orders list with a Quantity and Price column you can calculate a Grand Total of Price * Quantity.

With a calculated default value you use a calculation to set the default value for a column that is not a calculated column – this is the value that is entered automatically when a new list item is created and may be over-written by the user.

So why may I want a calculation using Today as the default value?

Suppose we have a list containing customer complaints and we have a target to resolve everything in 3 days. Sometimes though for complex queries or if there are public holidays we may give more time. In that case we can set the default value as

= Today + 3

But the user can override that if necessary (public holiday etc).

So why can I use Today here but not in calculated columns?

With a calculated column the calculation is only reworked every time a record is updated. When it’s just viewed then it picks up the saved result from the last edit. This makes perfect sense for most calculated values, but not for values using Today or Me.

So for example if we tried to calculate the days left until a due date we might want to use

Days left = Due Date - Today

If we added the complaint on Monday then it would show that we have 3 days left to do it (Thursday). If we just look at the record on the Wednesday it would still show 3 days (as this was the calculation saved on Monday) when in fact we only have 1 day left to keep the customer happy.

That’s why SharePoint wont let you use Today in calculated columns.

However with a default calculated value the result is only worked out once when the record is being created – it’s understood that what is saved in this field is not updated automatically so there is no problem with using Today.

For a bonus point – you can’t reference other fields in calculations for default values (e.g. Start Date or Order Date) as before a record is being created the fields don’t yet contain values.

What else could I do with this?

The OP in this thread is using it to set default financial years. Suppose that your company’s financial year starts in April then you could use this formula to default to 2009/10 or 2010/11 on or after April.

=IF(MONTH(Today)>=4,"2010/11","2009/11")

or generating the year 20xx/xx notation automatically :-

=IF(MONTH(Today)>=4,YEAR(Today) & "/" & (YEAR(Today)+1),(Year(Today)-1) & "/" & YEAR(Today))

It’s also worth noting that you can use a similar formula in calculated columns – suppose you have an Order Date field and the financial year depends upon when the order was placed then simply replace Today with Order Date.

NB – This has been tested with SharePoint 2007/2010.

Just a quick note to let you all know that we have just released a new version of SharePoint Planner web part – v2.6.4.

The new version includes a couple of handy new features that might be useful for you.

The new Split Multiple Values option will be useful in resource planning in circumstances where you want to enter multiple category values into one list item, but still view each individual category’s activity as a separate line in your Planner view.  For example you might want to create a list item for a project meeting, with several people in attendance.  In a Gantt view of project tasks it would be appropriate to show this meeting as one item.

But in a category view of staff availability/commitments you would want the meeting to appear as a separate item for each staff member involved. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part 5 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

See the System In Action

So, now let’s reap the rewards for all of our hard work and see the system in action.

I need to book a day off for a hospital appointment on Friday 9th of July.  I can see all the absence bookings for my department and the number of days I have had off this year on the absence dashboards above. I’ve only had 1 day off for Medical Appointments so far this year and I am allowed 3 so that’s fine – but 3 people are off on that day already, it’s going to be tough, but I really need to go to that appointment.

So, as you can see, I can add a new item to the planner straight from the link in the webpart, I don’t need to go to the list.

Ryan receives the absence request email and from looking at his dashboards he can see that although I am well within my Medical Appointments entitlement approving this absence is going to leave him really short staffed on Friday – but he can’t face the thought of listening to me moaning about my in-growing toenail for another 3 months, so he approves the request.

Once the request is approved I get an email notifying me, and the status of the absence changes from “pending” to “approved” on the absence planner.

And for the final step in the process, is the email to Ryan on Thursday, to remind him that I am off the next day, giving him chance to make sure all my work is covered.

So now we should have no excuse for messing up staff absence planning ever again!

So Can’t I do this with SharePoint out of the Box?

Well some of it. Clearly, your basic list and filtered views are all set up in SharePoint out of the box.

When it comes to your dashboard views there are some limitations.

This is how your Vacation Planner Wall Chart looks out of the box:

or as a Gantt view:

We have lost all of our color coding, it’s not possible to show the name of the person who is absent, unless you make this the title of the event, and we have no way of distinguishing between approved and pending items.

For the “Absences to Date” and “My Absences” dashboards we can achieve something similar, if a bit clunky, out of the box.  From the settings tab in your Staff Absence Planner list, choose edit current view.

Head down to Group By and choose Requested By and Reason.  Then expand the Totals section and choose # Days Absence and sum.

This will give you a view like this:

The information is all there, but I have to work to get at it.  For example Ryan can see that I have had 11 days off this year, covering 3 separate occasions, but he is going to have to drill into each individual event and get his calculator out to figure out how many of my days off have been annual leave, training or Medical.

Then on to the workflow emails. It is possible to generate email alerts for the absence request and the request approval, but the solution isn’t perfect.  For absence requests an administrator can set the list up to email all line managers within your company or department, every time a new request is added to the list.  This means that managers will get absence requests from their own staff, but also from all other staff as well.  The only way to avoid this would be to set up a separate absence request list for each line manager.

For the request approved/rejected email the requester will need to set up an alert on each request as they create it, asking to be alerted any time anything changes on that list item.

When the alert emails arrive, this is how they look:

There is no way to edit the email, and give the recipient clues on what they are supposed to do with it.

The final “John Smith is off work tomorrow” email, cannot be generated in SharePoint out of the box, as it doesn’t do date based alerts.

You could do this with Workflow and Event Receivers, but that means having some technical knowledge and breaking out SharePoint Designer and/or Visual Studio.

So – can you build a staff absence planning system with SharePoint out of the box?  I guess the answer is “kind of”. It is possible to build a basic system but it’s going to lack some useful functionality and may now be enormously user friendly.

We hope you’ve found this useful.

If you would like to try the Vacation planning system you can download a 30 day free trial version here.

And as always, if you have any questions or comments, we would love to hear them.

We’re Hiring!

We’re looking for new developers to join our team.

As you will know if you are a regular here, we are a small, specialist ISV, based in Cheltenham, England.

We are purely focused on the development of webparts and tools for use with Microsoft SharePoint.  We have been growing steadily over the past couople of years, and now we some new talent for the team.

So, if you are a really talented developer, who has the ability to think creatively, put yourself in the shoes of the end-user and come up with smart solutions to real business issues we would love to hear from you.

Take a look at the full job ads here and get in touch if you feel we’re right for you.

This is Part 4 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

In parts 1 through 3 of this series we have laid the foundations for our tailor made Staff Vacation and absence planning system.  We have set up the basic SharePoint list, defined a number of list views, and set up dashboards using SharePoint Planner and PivotPoint webparts.

Now we are going to add the “moving parts” to the system and set up a simple approval email workflow using SharePoint Reminder webpart.

We are going to have 3 steps in our system :-

• One email to a staff member’s line manager when a new request for absence has been submitted.
• One email to the staff member and let them know whether their request has been approved or rejected.
• One email to the line manager the day before a staff member is due to be absent from work as a reminder.

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