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Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog

Creating RESTful Mashups using SPD 2007 (Part 1)December 5 2008

Hi! J.R. and Kolby here to share an exciting example of the mashup capabilities of SharePoint. This is the first of two blog entries discussing how to use SharePoint Designer 2007 to create mashups.

The word "mashup" has become one of the most repeated buzzwords in the industry over the past few years. Promising ease of data integration and rapid development, mashups have become an integral part of the Web 2.0 lexicon. Many people are now familiar with the stereotypical mashup example of some data rendered on a geographical map.

Most initial applications of mashup technologies happened in the consumer space. For example, in 2007 Microsoft set out to create a tool integrated with a social network targeting the typical MySpace user. Popfly™ was the result of those efforts and has a very large user base already. It was even voted as one of PC World’s Top 25 Most Innovative Products for 2007.

Information Technology (IT) organizations have now begun to consider the applicability of mashup technologies to business use, attracted not only by the potential benefits derived from giving end users the ability to get things done on their own, but also to maximize the return on investment on SOA and data integration initiatives.

This article focuses on building mashups using SharePoint. Specifically, we will show you how to connect to external REST services using SharePoint Designer to bring data into a pag

Locking Down SharePoint DesignerNovember 25 2008

Hello all, Stephen here again – I’m a writer for SharePoint Designer. As you know, SharePoint Designer 2007 is a powerful tool for editing SharePoint sites — so powerful, in fact, that you likely have scenarios in your organization where you want to control where and how people can use SharePoint Designer 2007.

With this post, I’ll try to answer a very common question: “How can I lock down SharePoint Designer in my organization?” And I’ll try to answer the flip side of this question, which arises in an environment where SharePoint Designer has been locked down and the user asks: “Why do I see this message when I attempt to edit a site in SharePoint Designer?”

Options for locking down SharePoint Designer

The following table outlines the various ways in which you can lock down SharePoint Designer in your organization. Some of this information has been previously published in various venues (Office Online, TechNet, MSDN, Knowledge Base, etc.), but I thought it would be helpful to pull it all together for you.

SCOPE OPTION PERMISSIONS REQUIRED TO ENABLE OR DISABLEAt the server level per site definition ONET.XML — Prevent all users from opening all sites created from a specific site definition (such as all team sites or all publishing sites) by modifying ONET.XML for that site definition. Server administrator — You must have an administrator account on the server to modify this file.At the Web

SPD Licensing 101November 14 2008

We often get questions from you about pricing, licensing, purchasing, etc., so we decided to compile a list of issues we hear most frequently from you in these areas and provide you all with a high level guide for these questions. Most of this information is available across other Microsoft and Office sites such as the SharePoint site, Microsoft Support, and TechNet, but this summary can serve as a good reference. The content below is organized in the following areas: Trials, Pricing, Purchasing, Activation, Licensing and Support.

TRIALS

Everybody likes to try a product before buying it, so we give you two choices: test drive the product or download a trial.

One of the easiest ways to learn about SharePoint Designer is to test drive SharePoint Designer. We use Citrix technologies to allow you to test our products directly on some of our own servers, so all you need is a browser. It will take just about 60 seconds on a broadband connection to get you up and running, after which you will see the following screen.

Just click on th

Page Versioning v2November 7 2008

Hello again, Eray Chou here. We’re hitting the tail end of this year’s conference season, and a question I’ve been asked a few times on the road is whether there are solutions or best practices for rolling back changes to page edits in WSS.

One best practice is to put pages into document libraries and turn on versioning. There are limitations to this solution, which I’ll get into shortly, but it is a quick and easy way to handle changes to page content.

To create a document library in SharePoint Designer:

1.) File > New > SharePoint Content

2.) Click on Document Libraries in the left pane and then select Document Library

3.) Name your Document Library, for example “Pages”, and then click “OK”

Next, turn on Versioning for that document library:

1.) Select the Document Library you just created in the Folder List.
Type Alt+F1 if the folder list is not showing, or click Task Panes > Folder List

2.) Right click on the Document Library and select Properties

3.) Go to the Settings tab

4.) Set the Use Version History option to either “Major and minor (draft) versions” or “Major Versions”. If you opt for the former, set the Make drafts visible to option based on your own preference

Now that your document library with versioning is set up, you can create and save new pages into this document library. Each subsequent save you make will

Calling a WCF Service from a SharePoint Workflow (using Visual Studio)November 2 2008

Greetings all, Alex Malek here - I'm a member of the SharePoint workflow team. This week at PDC, I did a breakout session on how to call an external system from a SharePoint Workflow. Let's walk through what that process looks like!

My Setup:

1. Office SharePoint Server (Express Setup)
2. Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
   • Pro or better is required for the SP Workflow Tools

Note: I've already gone and created a WCF Service called "EmployeeUpdate” that has a single Operation called "UpdateEmployeeDB"

Step 0: Create a new SharePoint Workflow

1. Click “New Project” in the VS File Menu
2. Under the "Office/2007" group, choose "SharePoint 2007 Sequential Workflow". I've called my workflow "SharePoint Workflow 1”

1. Make your way through the wizard, and pick a site to test the workflow against. Then click Finish.