When:Friday, February 10, 2012

Time:12:00 – 1:00 Eastern

Register: Click Here to Register

ANSOR Legal Marketing and Experience Suite helps law firms of all sizes maximize their Microsoft investment while accelerating the proposal development process. ANSOR Proposal Generation Center built on the power of Microsoft Office and SharePoint delivers a robust set of Legal Marketing Components that allow your firm to develop, manage, and deploy approved marketing content. The webinar will focus on how firms can quickly generate unique, high quality proposals and marketing content as well as delivering new capabilities in collaboration, workflow, and access to experience content.

Presenter:
Rich Westle. a management consultant with Kraft Kennedy, leads solution development and product strategy for ANSOR Software, and has been involved in leading teams to deliver SharePoint based solutions to the legal market since 2004. Rich has been a featured speaker in the area of developing law firm experience management systems, most recently at the LexisNexis Redwood Analytics conference and Gensler Legal Market Summit.

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/

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.

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);

To make this change, just log onto the Citrix server and open the following file:

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\XenApp\site\default.aspx

That file is the home page of the Citrix web interface.  Add a script such as the following to the bottom of the page:

In Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010, reminder windows pop up in Outlook, but they do not steal the focus if you are working in another program.  For example, if you currently working in Word or Internet Explorer, you won’t see a reminder window if one pops up, since you’re not in Outlook.

In previous versions of Windows, this wasn’t as big of a deal because you would still see the reminder window in the task bar.  So even though you didn’t see the actual window, you would see the tab for it flashing on the taskbar.

In Windows 7 however, the default grouping of same-application windows, makes is much harder to see when a reminder window pops up. For example, the image below shows a second Outlook window, which is actually a reminder window.

As a result, Windows 7 users may find that they’re more likely to miss reminders and meetings.

The Solution – An Outlook Addin to Bring Reminders to Focus

Kraft Kennedy has created an Outlook addin which responds to the “reminder” event in Outlook, and uses Windows API functions to locate the reminder window and force it into the foreground.

With this addin installed, users would see the reminder window pop up in front of whatever application they are working in, and it will stay in the foreground until the reminder is dismissed or snoozed.

People who may have missed reminders before should now find that it is no longer an issue.

The image below shows a reminder in the foreground, over an Internet Explorer session.

We’re giving this addin away for free to anyone that is interested, but with no support.  If you’re interested in using it, please contact Michael Worth at  (212) 692-5610 or worth@kraftkennedy.com.

Here’s an example of how the menus open by default, behind the Flash content.

After much digging around, I was able to find a way to correctly display the menus in front of Flash content.  You have to add the following parameters to your actual object html code for the Flash object, to make it transparent.

Add the following parameter to the OBJECT tag:

   <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>

Add the following parameter to the EMBED tag:

   wmode=”transparent”

After that the page menus should load correctly, as shown below.

This architecture is common to all versions of Outlook and Exchange, through 2010, and is not really a bug, so much as an architectural decision by Microsoft to keep item-level permissions in the client-tier.  The end result is that people should realize that just because they mark an appointment or other item private in Outlook, it doesn’t mean that no one else will be able to see it.  Items that are extrememly sensitive should probably not be stored in Exchange in the first place, or you should take off all delegate / view rights to your mailbox.  People who you give delegate rights to should also be people who you trust.

Developers should note that when writing custom applications with WebDAV, Exchange Web Services, or any other method, all items will be returned including private items.  The custom application should look at the sensitivity setting of each message before displaying it.  If the sensitivity is private, then the mesage should not be displayed.  We, at Kraft Kennedy, have run into this issue several times when creating custom applications with WebDAV that pull back appointments from the Exchange calendar.

Microsoft has details about allowing other users to manage your mail and calendar here: 

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA100750811033.aspx?pid=CH100788801033

Note, the last paragraph of the article:

The code below is VB.Net code to interact with the SharePoint profile database by using the userprofilemanager class.  This will update one profile, so it would need to be put in a loop to update all of the employee profiles.

'Objects for profile database

dim strUrl as string = <site collection url>

dim site as Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite = new SPSite(strUrl)

dim sc as Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext = Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext.GetContext(site)

dim upm as UserProfileManager = new UserProfileManager(sc)
dim sAccount as string = "domain\username"
Dim u As UserProfile = upm.GetUserProfile(sAccount)        
if u.ProfileManager.Properties.GetPropertyByName("PictureURL") is nothing then
 'error code
else
 u("PictureURL").Value = '<put the url plus username.jpg here>
 u.Commit
end if
Remember to also include the following assembly and namespace...
<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles" %>
If you import additional fields into the profile store, it may be necessary to also run a complete profile import and an incremental search index process to make sure that everything is up to date.  Future profile imports won't overwrite the PictureURL property, so all employee photos should be permanent.  The only drawback is that you will have to run the script for new users or manually enter their picture URL.
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