Microsoft has just released information about the next version of Sharepoint, Sharepoint 2013 or Sharepoint 15 or whatever it will be named.

Microsoft released a preliminary SDK called SharePoint 15 Technical Preview Managed Object Model Software Development Kit, follow the link to download.

Microsoft recently announced that Business Connectivity Services is now available for all Office 365 midsize and enterprise customers.

This will enable Office 365 customers to develop solutions that connect to line-of-business (LOB) applications that sits behind the customers firewall. Business Connectivity Services enables customers to connect to external data sources via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services endpoints in both read and write modes.

Office 365 and Sharepoint Online now also supports external lists and data columns, the Business Data Catalogue (BDC) service for WCF connectors, and the Secure Store Service partitioned at the tenant level within customers’ SharePoint Online Administration Center.

You can get more information about this and other new functionality for Office 365 from the Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1002

The 2011 Sharepoint Conference in Anaheim California is over and those of us that did not attend can watch the KeyNote on the following link http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/keynote.aspx

The SubSites webpart we have available as a free download will not run on Office 365, this is because it is not developed as a sandboxed solution. Sandboxed solutions is a requirement if you want to deploy webparts to Office 365.

To make the SubSites webpart available as a sandboxed solution we needed to make some small changes in the code. This is because we had used some classes and methods that are not available in a sandboxed solution. One of these where SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context) to get the current site the webpart is running in. The SPControl class is not allowed in a sandboxed solution. You can see what classes and methods are available in a sandboxed solution in the Sharepoint SDK. The are marked with Available in Sandboxed Solutions: yes or no

Creating the sandboxed solution

Start Visual Studio 2010 and create a new project. I created a Empty Sharepoint Project

The next step is the important one in creating a sandboxed solution. In the Sharepoint Customization Wizard make sure the Deploy as a sandboxed solution is selected and click finish.

We then get an empty Sharepoint 201 project. I then right clicked the project and selected Add and New Item. Select to add a webpart.

I then copied and pasted the code from the original SubSites webpart and made some small changes.
I changed “Dim myWeb As SPWeb = SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context)” to
“Dim myWeb As SPWeb = SPContext.Current.Web”

You will find that SPControl is used 2 places so make sure to change both.
The last thing I changed was the redirection taking place in the SubWebList_SelectedIndexChanged methode. I used “Me.Page.Response.Redirect(SubWebList.SelectedValue)” there. Response.Redirect is also not available in a sandboxed solution so I chnaged that to use a javascript instead.
”scriptlit.Text = "<script type=’text/javascript’ language=’javascript’>window.location=’" + SubWebList.SelectedValue + "’;</script>"”
The scriptlit is a Literal control declared at class level.

That’s it, compile and packed the solution and you have the webpart packed as a sandboxed solution wsp file that can be installed on Microsoft Office 365.

Installing on Office 365

To install the wsp fil on your Office 365 sharepoint site navigate to your site and select Site Settings on the Site Actions menu.
Click “Go to top level site settings” under the Site Collection Administration category if you are not already at the top level of the site collection.

Then click “Solutions” under the Galleries category.

Once in the Solutions gallery click the Solution tab and then Upload Solution, point to your wsp file and click OK. Remember to Activate the solution.

Navigate back to your Sharepoint site and edit the page to add a webpart. The SubSites webpart should now be available in the Custom category.

Click add and the webpart will be available on the Sharepoint site.

Downloads

SubSites Webpart for Office 365 (sandboxed solution)

Source code for the SubSites WebPart for Office 365

Microsoft announced on the 28 of June 2011 the general availability of Office 365 in 40 countries worldwide. The announcement was made by Steve Ballmer at a live event in New York yesterday.

You will find all the information you need about the event and Office 365 on Eric Ligman’s blog Microsoft SMS&P Partner Community.

You will find a video from the event and also a comprehensive list of links to Office 365 information and resources.

Microsoft has released the Sharepoint 2010 products Service Pack 1 on June 28.

The Service pack can be downloaded from the Update Center for Microsoft Office.

Microsoft recommends installing the June 2011 Cumulative Update immediately after the installation of Service Pack 1. The update includes fixes that did not make it into Service Pack 1.

For more information about the installation of Sharepoint 2010 Service Pack 1 you should check out the Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog.

Additional Resources

Description of new functionality in Sharepoint 2010 Service Pack 1 from the Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog
Sharepoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Release Notes

Microsoft has launched a new website named IUseSharePoint.com. The site contains a lot of tips&trick on how to use SharePoint and has a lot of videos and testimonials from customers on how they are using SharePoint.

There’s also a SharePoint Adoption Kit available for download. The kit contains instructions, templates, videos, quick reference cards etc.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/iusesharepoint/Pages/get-the-kit.aspx

Microsoft announced on the 17 April the publicly available beta of Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud offering of Office, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

You can sign up for the beta at www.office365.com

More info:
www.office365.org
Office 365 Hits Public Beta, Small Businesses Get the Next Generation Cloud Productivity Service

Microsoft announced on the ECM Team Blog that they have teamed up with WAND, a leading provider of Enterprise Taxonomies and have made there General Business Taxonomy available as a free download.

this should provide a great starting point for those looking at implementing the Managed Metadata Service

Read more and find the download at the ECM Team Blog.

Taxonomy–The Challenge of Starting from Scratch – Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

I recently did a small project where we wanted an easy way for users to create subsites without them having to think about Sharepoint templates and make to many choices.

We decided to make a Sharepoint list and have the users create a new entry in this list with only two fields, Site name and Site Description. We then developed a Sharepoint Event Handler that took care of creating the subsite with a predefined Sharepoint Template. The template was built from a standard team template and saved as a solution to the Solution Gallery in Sharepoint.

So for step 1 we created a new Team Site in Sharepoint and configured it the way we wanted, with a Task List webpart on the Home page, the lists and views we needed.
then we went to Site Setting on the Site Actions menu and clicked save site as template in the Site Actions section.

Give your Site Template a name and click OK. For this demo we will call our template “Test Project”

This will save the template to the Sharepoint Solution Gallery and you can now create new sites based on this template.
In the Operation Completed Successfully dialog window you can click the solution gallery link to navigate to the solution gallery and see your template saved or click OK to return to the Site Settings page.

The code in our Event Handler will use this template to automatically create subsites for the user when the add an item to our Subsite list. So lets create the subsite list.

Click the Site Actions menu, click More Options and create a new Custom List. Name this list SubSites.

Go to List Settings for the SubSites list and we will add a couple of columns. Click add column and type Description for the name and select Multiple lines of text for the type.

Click Ok and add a new column. Name this column SiteUrl and select HyperLink or Picture for the type and then click OK.

You should now have the following columns for you SubSites list:

Click the Title column and change it’s name to “Site Name” and click Ok. Your columns should now look like this:

That’s it for the Site Template and the SubSite list. Now let’s look at the code for the Event Handler.

Sharepoint Event Handler code

Start Visual Studio 2010 and create a New Sharepoint 2010 Project, select Event receiver for the Project Type.
In the Sharepoint Customization Wizard select List Item Event and Custom List, then select An Item is being added and click Finished.
This will create an event handler which triggers only when an item is added in a list based on the Sharepoint custom list template.

This is the code for the Event Handler and as you can see this goes in the ItemAdding function. There are comments in the code explaining what it does.

 public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)
       {
           base.ItemAdding(properties);

           // Get the web where the event was raised
           SPWeb spCurrentSite = properties.OpenWeb();

           //Get the name of the list where the event was raised          
           String curListName = properties.ListTitle;

           //If the list is our list named SubSites the create a new subsite directly below the current site
           if (curListName == "SubSites")
           {
               //Get the SPListItem object that raised the event
               SPListItem curItem = properties.ListItem;
               //Get the Title field from this item. This will be the name of our new subsite
               String curItemSiteName = properties.AfterProperties["Title"].ToString();
               //Get the Description field from this item. This will be the description for our new subsite
               string curItemDescription = properties.AfterProperties["Description"].ToString();
               //Update the SiteUrl field of the item, this is the URL of our new subsite
               properties.AfterProperties["SiteUrl"] = spCurrentSite.Url + "/" + curItemSiteName;
                   
               //Create the subsite based on the template from the Solution Gallery
               SPWeb newSite = spCurrentSite.Webs.Add(curItemSiteName, curItemSiteName, curItemDescription, Convert.ToUInt16(1033), "{8FCAD92C-EF01-4127-A0B6-23008C67BA26}#1TestProject", false, false);
                  //Set the new subsite to inherit it's top navigation from the parent site, Usefalse if you do not want this.
                  newSite.Navigation.UseShared = true;
                  newSite.Close();
                
                
            }
       }

There is one bit of information you need to get from your Sharepoint installation to be able to create a subsite from a Sharepoint template saved in your Solution Gallery. You need the GUID for the template and the name of the template. The easiest way to get this that I found was to use the old style create subsite page in Sharepoint. (Not the Silverlight one you get when you click “New Site” from the Site Action menu.)
To get the old style dialog append /_Layouts/newsbweb.aspx to the url of your Sharepoint site. For my test environment it looks like this:

On this page select the Custom tab in the “Select a template section. There you should find the “Test Project” template we saved to the Sharepoint Solution Gallery earlier.

Now hit F12 to bring up the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer. Click the arrow in the toolbar to Select element by click and click on the Test Project box.
We are looking for the line in the following picture to get the exact GUID and name for your Template.

Copy the GUID including the braces and past it into the code for your Event Handler. This is the solution I found for creating a subsite based on a Sharepoint Template in the solution gallery. If anyone knows a better method I would appreciate some pointers.

Deploy the solution to the Sharepoint server and try to create a new item in the SubSites list we created earlier. A new subsite based on the template we saved earlier should now be automatically created.

With the solution now deployed a new subsite will be created when the users adds an item to the Subsites list. The user never has to worry about selecting the correct template as the event handler will create the subsite based on the template we decided earlier.

In the project where we used this we where running on Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise version and could therefore use Infopath forms to replace the built-in form and make it even easier for the user with a nicer Create Site form with pictures/icons and more descriptive text. See the article Use InfoPath to replace Sharepoint List forms for an example of how to do this.