This works great with lists, as the new form is populated with all of the fields from the content type, and you can easily modify the XSL to choose which fields are displayed, as well as the layout.  However, the form will be a lot more empty if you try this with a document library.  For some reason, the new document library forms include the data view web part for the library, but do not start off with any of the fields included.  But the fix for this is pretty easy.  Just follow the steps below to get the data view web part to include all of the available fields:

1) In Designer, create a new edit form and pick your content type

2) Click the form to open it

3) Click to the right of the “created at” field.  This should show “Data View Tools” in the ribbon.

4) Open the Design ribbon, and check “Sample Data.”  That should be it–that puts all the fields into the form.

After that, you should be able to modify the layout, as well as the fields in the XSL.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/838028

There are several options and workarounds for dealing with this issue.  One workaround is simply to disable the “options” call, which will disable the initial authentication prompt that users would have to cancel.  Before attempting this, you should read the KB article to learn more about this call, and thoroughly test your environment.

To disable the call, just add the following code to the <system.webServer> section in the web.config file for each web application on each SharePoint web server.

<security>
<requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping=”true”>
<verbs allowUnlisted=”true”>
<add verb=”OPTIONS” allowed=”false” />
<add verb=”PROPFIND” allowed=”false” />
</verbs>
</requestFiltering>
</security>

“Some or all identity references could not be translated”

The systems were up to date on updates and hotfixes, and the applications appeared to be configured correctly.  The problem in the end turned out to be that the servers all had the same SID and were joined to the domain with different computer names, but the same SID.  This led to the unpredictable domain authentication issues that we were seeing.

For anyone in this situation on Windows 2008 Server R2 machines, don’t run the “NewSID” tool.  That will blue screen the server, and you’ll have to restore from a backup or rebuild the box.  Instead, you can use sysprep to change the SID of the machines, even after the machines are fully configured (though it’s best to use it before configuring machines).

You should backup the machines before makiong any changes.  We were able to do the following sequence on the servers to fix the authentication issues:

1) Use the PSTools (psgetsid) to view the current machine’s SID, available here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx

2) Disconnect the machine from the domain and place in a workgroup.

3) Delete the computer account from Active Directory.

4) Run sysprep on the Windows 2008 R2 server from this path:
/System Drive/Windows/system32/sysprep/sysprep.exe

Click the “Generalize” box, which creates the new SID, leave the other options as is, and press OK.

5) Once the machine reboots and runs through some Windows dialogs, use psgetsid again to verify that the SID has changed.  Rejoin the server to the domain, and then verify that the apps are all working as they should, and that the authentication issues are gone.

There’s lots of information online about setting up extranets in SharePoint 2010, but there’s not so much information on how to actually manage your forms based user accounts once the extranet is provisioned.  Most documentation tells you to manage user accounts in IIS or with a membership seeder tool, both of which require admins to manage everything and have bare-bones interfaces.  Luckily, the SharePoint FBA open-source pack, which was fabulous for SharePoint 2007 extranets, has finally been ported to 2010.  This tool gives you a web page in central admin where admins can manage all of their user accounts and reset passwords, as well as web parts for users to manage their account themselves–such as password changes and password requests.

Password Change Web Part

My initial impression of these tools are that they are fabulous, and make extranet administration much more friendly, just as they did in 2007.  This also saves us from having to buy an expensive third-party tool or develop something custom, in order to let users change their own passwords.

You can download the SharePoint 2010 FBA pack here:

http://sharepoint2010fba.codeplex.com/releases/view/65194

Installation is as simple as installing a WSP package, as long as your extranet site is already provisioned.  I discussed setting up an extranet site for Microsoft Project Server in a separate blog post here:

http://blogs.kraftkennedy.com/index.php/2011/03/04/building-a-project-server-2010-extranet-in-sharepoint-2010/#more-1830

I also referenced the 2007 version of this product in a blog post a few years ago:

http://blogs.kraftkennedy.com/index.php/2010/01/24/useful-free-web-parts-for-sharepoint-part-2/

The first step in building a Project Server 2010 extranet is to build a SharePoint 2010 farm and configure it to use claims-based authentication, most likely with accounts you create in a SQL database.  There’s many blog posts on configuring claims-based authentication.  Here’s one that I found helpful:

http://donalconlon.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/configuring-forms-base-authentication-for-sharepoint-2010-using-iis7/

The next step is to install Project Server 2010 into the farm.  You should also make sure some other services are properly configured, such as the secure store and Excel services.  Here’s a good place to start, for steps on installing Project Server:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662109.aspx

Once project server is installed, and you configure a project server site collection such as https://extranet.company.com/pwa, the tricky part is delegating access inside PWA (Project Web Access) to the external users.  You’ll need to create all of the external accounts in the SQL database first, and ensure that these accounts have rights to log into SharePoint.  Then, as an administrator, go into PWA and into Server Settings –> Manage Users.  You’ll need to create a new PWA user for each account that will log into PWA and assign permissions to it.  Just make sure that the “user logon account” matches the external accounts (or internal accounts) that you are giving access to.  For a regular active directory account, it’s easy.  You would just list the account as domain\user.  However, with your external user SQL accounts, you need to list them with the membership provider, like the following: i:0#.f|fbamembershipprovider|user

After users are given permission to PWA, you’ll also have to give them individual permissions to projects that you’ve uploaded to Project Server.  As an administrator, just view each project in PWA and click on the “Project Permissions” button.  You can create groups for each project and assign rights to that group or to individual users in “Project Permissions.”

After that’s done, external users should be able to go to your extranet, log in, and click on “Project Center” to see all of the projects that they have rights to.  Depending on their rights, external users could just view the project, or they could even manage the project and assign resources, tasks, and help build the corresponding SharePoint site.

If you create a Project Server 2010 extranet, just make sure your licensing is kept up to date.  You’ll need a CAL for each internal and external user.

Out of the box, Outlook 2010 has a setting which allows it to mine your sent items for common terms, and to upload those terms to SharePoint.  These terms are listed in your SharePoint MySite profile as suggested skills you can associate yourself with, or you can type in new ones.  Other employees in the firm can search based on those skills, and can view your profile information and your spot in the organization via the organizational browser.

But what if you don’t have users that would ever update their MySite or keep their skills up to date?

SharePoint has a great programatic interface to automate keeping this information up to date, and to broadcast changes out to colleagues.  We’ve successfully mined our time and billing system, ConnectWise, to pull out skills and project information related to people.  We set up an automated script that runs nightly to pull the information out and upload to SharePoint MySites.  It also broadcasts the updates out to your colleagues in a feed, similar to the status feed you would see on FaceBook.  This way, the firm can leverage information that is already going into the time and billing system, and allow people to view real time updates of the info in SharePoint, without requiring any additional manual data entry.

The script adds activities to everyone’s profile, which they will follow by default, but can also choose not to.  The screen shot below shows two options, to follow new projects added to the time and billing system, and to follow when people are added as team members to these projects.

Your colleagues would see notes similar to the one shown below, to indicate that you’ve been assigned to work on a project.

The colleague news feed is shown on the default page of your My Site, but we’ve also elected to put it on the home page of the corporate intranet, to make it more available.  Your colleagues in SharePoint start off as people in your group, determined by your manager, but we also elected to write a script to make everyone in the firm be a colleague of one another.  For a small firm, we felt it was advantageous to keep everyone in the loop about what others were doing.  In addition, we didn’t want to force people to have to “friend” other people, so we took the approach of automating everyone as a colleague.

Here’s some links to help developers get started in programming these social features.  The Microsoft SDK examples are particularly helpful.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/activityfeedsconsole
http://sp2010social.codeplex.com/

There’s more social features in SharePoint 2010 to take note of as well, such as note boards, tagging, tag clouds, and document ratings.  If you haven’t played with any of these features, it’s worth setting up a test site and taking a look at.  Even if SharePoint is not your DMS, there’s so many new interesting features that can help people stay in touch, collaborate, and find the right information better.

SharePoint Designer 2010 gives you the ability to create impersonation steps, which run in the security context of the workflow author.  So it’s simple to create an entire process that will run in the context of the item submitter, but have one step which runs with elevated permissions.  In that way we could setup an HR workflow that checks how many vacation days you have left and updates the number, without having to give the actual user anything more than read rights to the HR list.  You only need to make sure the workflow author has the elevated permissions required on the list.

Another interesting feature is the ability to use Visio 2010 Premium to design the layout for workflows and then import them into SharePoint Designer.  While this sounds good, I found it less useful in practice.  First, it’s limited to Visio Premium, which many companies might not have.  Second, you can only create a layout, but cannot set any of the actual parameters or configuration settings.  Thirdly, I found that when I imported the Visio project into SharePoint Designer, it didn’t look anything like what I expected.  So I decided to just stick with using SharePoint Designer for the entire process for our workflows.

Another great feature is the ability to create globally reusable workflows that are tied to content types.  This lets you reuse workflows between many lists and libraries, rather than having to be tied into a single library.

The new task processes also make the workflow process more powerful and give you full control over how tasks should look and function.  As with any workflow activity, you can insert it by simply typing a few words in the text box in the workflow designer.  The approval task process is a prebuilt process that can be inserted into workflows for gathering approval on an item.

You would start off by selecting participants for your approval process, the duration for each task, the due date, and instructions that should be sent in the email.

You then have full control over the approval workflow and individual tasks, and can customize all of the emails that get sent for task assignments.  You can also easily customize InfoPath forms that users see when approving items.  The following screen shots show samples of the steps that can be customized in the approval and task workflows:

My overall impression is that the workflow engine in SharePoint Designer 2010 has been considerably improved and should be the starting point when considering what tools to use for building workflows.  Much more complex workflows can be build now versus what was possible in 2007.  In the case that you need custom actions that are not available out of the box, those can be built in Visual Studio and imported into SharePoint, for use in SharePoint Designer.  But there’s a lot of functionality that can be leveraged in SharePoint Designer before considering custom development in Visual Studio or third party tools.

To add this functionality to your apps, just use the following code.  For business continuity purposes, you could first try to send messages with an internal server, and then use the Gmail code only if a connection could not be established to an internal server.

[VB.Net]

        Dim fromAddress As String = "YourAccount@gmail.com"

        Dim toAddress As String = "EmailTo"

        Dim message As New Net.Mail.MailMessage(fromAddress, toAddress)

        message.Subject = "Subject"

        message.Body = "Body"

        Dim client As New Net.Mail.SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com", 587)

        client.EnableSsl = True

        client.Credentials = New Net.NetworkCredential("YourAccount@gmail.com", "YourPassword")

        client.Send(message)

[ASP]

Dim iMsg, iConf, Flds

Set iMsg = CreateObject("CDO.Message")

Set iConf = CreateObject("CDO.Configuration")

Set Flds = iConf.Fields

schema = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/"

Flds.Item(schema & "sendusing") = 2

Flds.Item(schema & "smtpserver") = "smtp.gmail.com"

Flds.Item(schema & "smtpserverport") = 465

Flds.Item(schema & "smtpauthenticate") = 1

Flds.Item(schema & "sendusername") = "YourAccount@gmail.com"

Flds.Item(schema & "sendpassword") = "YourPassword"

Flds.Item(schema & "smtpusessl") = 1

Flds.Update

With iMsg

.To = "EmailTo"

.From = YourAccount@gmail.com

.Subject = "Subject"

.TextBody = "body"

.Sender = "YourAccount@gmail.com"

.Organization = "Kraft Kennedy"

.ReplyTo = "YourAccount@gmail.com"

Set .Configuration = iConf

.Send

End With

set iMsg = nothing

set iConf = nothing

set Flds = nothing

(Note: SharePoint 2010 adds the option to use InfoPath forms for lists, but this still might apply in certain cases.)

Here’s a good primer on using SharePoint Designer 2007 to edit or create a new list item form:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/create-a-custom-list-form-HA010119111.aspx

Adding client-side javascript events is where it gets a bit tricky.  You could look at the source code for the page in a browser in order to find the ID of the control you wish to add an event to.

Then you could add a function in javascript to assign another function to run after an event.  Note, you can’t just simply add the event into the control in the source code, since the control is a server-side SharePoint control.  So you’d have to have a separate function where you assign the event, as shown below.

function addEvents(){
//Add event functions here

document.all.<ID-OF-CONTROL>.onclick = function(){EventCode()};

document.all.<ID-OF-CONTROL>.onchange = function(){EventCode()};

}

function EventCode(){
//Actual code to respons to event

alert('test');
 }

The next tricky thing I found is that if you simply call the “addEvents” function in script or in the page load, it doesn’t actually do anything.  This seems to be because the page needs to be fully built and loaded before the events are added.  So adding the following timeout to the script, in order to wait a second after the page loads before assigning the events, seems to do the trick.

setTimeout('addEvents()', 1000);

1)  Windows Explorer Folders

Any SharePoint library or folder can be opened in Windows Explorer.  You can also write a script to deploy shortcuts to people, or ask users to create their own shortcuts.  Users can create shortcuts to folders by opening the library in Windows Explorer, and right clicking any folder to create a shortcut.  If you want to deploy shortcuts or create shortcuts by hand, they can be structured as follows:

\\SharePointSiteName.Domain.com\DavWWWRoot\Library\Folder

Note, that you would have to open the Explorer window in a separate window, and then drag out of Outlook and into that Explorer window.

2)  SharePoint Workspace 2010

If you’re using Office Professional Plus 2010, then you probably already have this program.  SharePoint Workspace is the successor to Groove, and is a full client for SharePoint.  You can sync any SharePoint site, list, or library to Workspace, and you get the advantage of being able to take files offline, add files offline, and sync any changes to and from the server.  You can initiate the connection to Workspace either from within Workspace or from a button in the ribbon in the SharePoint web interface.  As is the case with Windows Explorer, Workspace has to be open in another window outside of Outlook, but you can drag emails and attachments out from Outlook and into your folders in SharePoint Workspace.  This also gives you the advantage of being able to do drag and drops while you’re offline.

Using either of these approaches, you won’t be able to “live” inside Outlook, as you could with a traditional DMS.  But you do end up with a way to do drag and drops to a separate window, and not have to go through the SharePoint web interface.  So this could provide some help for anyone who wants to do email management “light” and doesn’t want to invest in an addin for Outlook.  But for the full blown email management experience, that you might be used to from FileSite or another DMS, then you should consider looking at one of the third-party addins.