Simultaneous editing for collaboration is one of the most hyped features in Office 2010, however it’s only supported over the web in the Excel 2010 web app.  For Word and PowerPoint simultaneous editing, you’ll need to have the full client versions of the Office 2010 products.  This will likely be a disappointment for people who were hoping to collaborate on documents from kiosks anywhere in the world.

Below are some screen shots of what you’ll see if you try to simultaneously edit a document in SharePoint 2010:

Word

Word will only let multiple people edit a document at the same time if you’re using the full client.  In the Word 2010 web app, the second person will get this error:

PowerPoint

PowerPoint will only let multiple people edit a presentation at the same time if you’re using the full client.  In the PowerPoint 2010 web app, the second person will get this error:

Excel

The Excel 2010 web app is the most advanced web application and allows multiple users to edit a spreadsheet at the same time.  Other users will see changes as they are made by someone.  If two users try to edit a cell at the same time, then the second edit will be the one that saves.

The Excel web app is shown in the screen shot below.

In the bottom-right, the web app tells you how many users are currently editing the spreadsheet.

Surprisingly, the Excel desktop client cannot participate in simultaneous editing.  This collaboration feature is only available from the web app.

OneNote

The OneNote web app does allow simultaneous editing, however edits should be limited to separate pages.  As long as users are working on separate pages, they will see updates that someone else made when clicking on the page.  When we tried to edit the same page between several users however, we were presented with “conflicting changes” errors as shown below, with the only option being to delete the page.

The simultaneous editing features in Office 2010 open up a lot of possibilities for collaboration, however it’s disappointing that only Excel can fully utilize it in the web application.  Our hope is that the next version of Office will fully support multi editing in both the web apps and the client versions.

After installing the Office Web Apps, the first thing you’ll notice is a few new options when accessing the context menu of a document in SharePoint 2010.  The new options include View in Browser, Edit in Browser, and Edit in Microsoft Word.

SharePoint 2010 with Office Web Apps

Clicking on Edit in Microsoft Word will simply launch the version of Word that you have installed locally on your workstation.  But what if you don’t have Word installed?  What if you are on a hotel kiosk computer or a netbook?  In that case, you can click on Edit in Browser to access the Word 2010 Web App.  This will open the document for editing with your browser.  This is designed to work in IE, Firefox, and Safari; but will require the SilverLight plug-in to be installed for the best user experience.

The look and feel of the Word 2010 Web App is quite impressive.  There are navigation links across the top of the browser that can take you back to Client or Matter sites if you have those.  There is also the Office Ribbon Bar built right-in, and a link to launch the document with the locally installed Word client.    Tired of working with the current browser window?  Simply click the Pop-Out icon, highlighted in red in the upper right of the document, to open a new browser window without all the other browser toolbars cluttering the view.

Word 2010 Web App

Until Office 2010 is officially released, you will need to edit the document in the browser using the Word 2010 Web App if you want to take advantage of the simultaneous editing feature.    It will also be interesting to see which other features of the full Word 2010 product Microsoft incorporates into the Web App — Document Comparison?  Track Changes?    We’ll keep our ears to the wall.

Security is always a concern in a law firm, and is especially important in the legal department of a corporation. Lawsuits sometimes include the company’s co-workers, competitors, or other sensitive information, where certain matter information needs to be completely hidden from all but a few matter assignees. Securing documents or DMS folders is often simply not enough protection.

Does the system hide the matter from appearing when doing a table look-up on a search form? Does it hide the matter when accessing the matter table via the DMS web module? For some cases, you want to hide the actual matter itself, so users won’t even know it exists.

Vendors have been known to describe their products as having Ethical Walls, when in reality these products only provide security at the document or folder-level. The matter itself can still exposed on a look-up table.  One possible workaround to this is giving these secured matters a very general description of “Secure” without exposing any matter details.  However, this severely limits the ability of users to perform a matter-name search for the secured matters they are assigned to.

Worldox GX2 has a built-in Ethical Wall that is just what it says it is. Worldox’s Ethical Wall feature is solid and will actually hide the matter itself from even appearing. The only downside with the current version is that it requires a lot of hands-on maintenance to set up the proper rules. Maybe in a future release it can be synced to some external security database? A consultant can dream…

When looking at Ethical Wall solutions, you want to make sure that all doors are closed to the matter information. The last thing you want is to purchase an Ethical Wall and then find out it’s an Ethical Window.

When you click “New Item” in any SharePoint list or “Upload” in any document library, SharePoint sends you to a standard form for creating the new item.  Behind the scenes, SharePoint also passes in two parameters to let the form know where to post the item and where to go after the item is posted.  By leveraging these two parameters in the URL, you can make a link anywhere that posts data to any list and sends you someplace else when finished.  This has come in handy for us when creating intranet home pages, as we can create a list of links to post data to custom lists, which sends the person back to the home page afterwards.  Otherwise, the person would end up in the root of the list or library they submitted the item to.  So we were able to easily meet a requirement that the person be directed back to the home page after submitting the item.

A SharePoint new item link is structured as follows:

https://intranet.doman.com/site/Lists/listname/NewForm.aspx?RootFolder=/site/Lists/listname&Source=https://intranet.domain.com

The two parameters of interest are RootFolder and Source.  RootFolder tells SharePoint where to post the document.  If it is removed from the URL then SharePoint will post data to the root of the list where newform.aspx is located.  You could also specify the path to a subfolder there, and SharePoint would post to that subfolder.  Source tells SharePoint where to go when the posting is complete.  The source needs to be a place in the site collection.  In the example link above it is back to the home page.  If source is left out of the URL then SharePoint will just return you back to the root of the list afterwards.

By using these two parameters, you can create lists of links on a page rather than having to drop in web parts, and you will gain more flexibility in how the user experience and navigation work.

One of our primary concerns here in the Support Practice Group is to maintain our clients’ networks in tip top shape, and this means regularly applying patches and hotfixes. At the moment, we are leveraging WSUS to monitor and deploy patches to servers and workstations at many of our clients, which allows us to select which updates we want to approve and distribute to client machines in the background. We then can manually kick off the install and subsequent reboot once all the necessary updates have been downloaded to each client.

However, as clients upgrade to Server 2008, this method will become problematic for those that leverage the Windows Server Core option. With no GUI, how do we install updates? One of our consultants recently came across a very useful script for just such an occasion, while browsing this blog. After approving and releasing patches to the WSUS clients, he dropped that script into the c:\Tools directory and ran it to install the updates. As we transition to using our network monitoring software (Kaseya) to deploy Microsoft patches and hotfixes, patching Windows Server Core 2008 servers will remain as simple as it is with this script.

I recently performed an upgrade from iManage 8.2 to iManage 8.5 Update 4.    Update 4 was released on January 14th and resolves several issues regarding service stability and wildcard searching.  It adds support for the new WorkSite FileShare, iManage Workflow Manager, and iManage Digital Safe.  I plan on blogging about these modules soon, so keep an eye out for that.

But the real reason for this post is that Update 4 sets the database schema version as 8.51 (all previous releases of 8.5 had set the schema version as 8.50).  This value is listed as the MHVERNUM column in the MHGROUP.VERINFO table of the WorkSite database.   For those of you looking to migrate from an environment with WorkSite Indexer 8.2 SP1 P2 (Verity), there is a compatibility problem with this change.   Although Indexer 8.2 SP1 P2 was released in order to support iManage 8.5 servers for a transitional period, the 8.2 Indexer services fail to start when the database has been upgraded to the 8.5 Update 4 schema.   Autonomy’s workaround for now is to modify the MHVERNUM value and set it to 8.50.  This can be done by executing the following SQL query:

UPDATE MHGROUP.VERINFO SET MHVERNUM = ‘8.50′

This will allow the Index services to start, but will cause problems launching the iManage Database Administration (DBAdmin) program.   In order to get that to launch, I had to change the MHVERNUM back to ‘8.51′.    Autonomy has informed me that they plan on releasing a fix to the 8.2 Indexer executable “very soon”.    Just something to be aware of when setting up a transition environment from 8.2 to 8.5.  You will want to stick with 8.5 Update 3 until the patch for the 8.2 Indexer is released.

In a previous post, I discussed some useful free web parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  In this article I’ll discuss two more very helpful solutions for building extranets in SharePoint and for building more advanced workflows in SharePoint Designer.

• CKS Forms Based Authentication Solution

http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=17901

This is a free open-source solution which handles much of the complexity of building extranets in SharePoint.  It has web parts for creating new SQL user accounts, for extranet users to manage their password, and for access requests and approvals.  You used to have to use third-party software or a Visual Studio project for even just creating users in a SQL database.  With this solution installed, all forms-based user management is done right through the SharePoint settings interface.  The only thing you still have to do by hand is provision the database, and modify the web application web.config files to add a SQL authentication provider.  This solution has been extremely helpful for us in building a few client extranets.

•  Useful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow Activities

http://spdactivities.codeplex.com/

This solution adds a bunch of activities to SharePoint Designer’s Workflow Designer.  The activities are listed below.  This has allowed us to easily create several workflows in SharePoint Designer without writing any code.  In particular, we’ve been able to get around the problem where SharePoint form libraries show all submitted items to contributors by default.  This is an issue when users are submitting forms with sensitive data, which should only be viewable by administrators.  Rather than resorting to a code solution, you can create a workflow that simply “Grants Permission on Item” to the creator, and “Deletes List Item Permission Assignment” for the contributor group.  Presumably the admin group would already have full access.

• Send Email with HTTP File attachment – Allows sending emails with attachments retrieved using a web request
• Send Email with List Item attachments – Allows sending list item attachments as files attached to an email
• Start Another Workflow- Starts another workflow associated with a list item
• Grant Permission on Item- Allows granting of specified permission level on a specified item
• Delete List Item Permission Assigment- Allows deleting of specified permission level assignment for a given user
• Reset List Permissions Inheritance – removes any unique permissions assigned to an item by inheriting list permissions
• Is User a member of a SharePoint group- Checks if a given user is part of given SharePoint group
• Is Role assigned to User – Checks if a user role is already assigned on the current list item
• Lookup user info- allows to lookup properties in site’s user information list for a given login
• Copy List Item Extended Activity – Allows copying/moving list items and files cross site.
• Send Email Extended- Enhaced version of the OOTB activity. Allows you to specify the sender. Also does not break links in body.
• Get InfoPath field inner text
• Get InfoPath field inner xml
• Set InfoPath field inner text
• Set InfoPath field inner xml

A couple weeks ago I blogged about the XML patent infringement that Microsoft had to deal with.  As mentioned in that post, they’ve released new code that removes some of the custom XML functionality that was built into the Office 2007 system, and brings them into patent compliance.

We’ve just heard that there is at least one vendor whose product is now basically non-functional due to the code change.   This sort of problem can result in products needing to be completely re-engineered to work with the new XML limitations.

Organizations who have already implemented or are looking to implement Office 2007 should reach out to any third-party vendor who would be integrating with the Office 2007 XML format to determine compatibility with the new rules.  In addition, any custom code that has already been written would need to be tested and possibly re-written if any issues come up.

Kraft Kennedy has worked with numerous third-party vendors that integrate with Office 2007.  If you find yourself in a tough spot due to this issue, let us know and we can help walk you through the process of finding the right solution.

As consultants to legal professionals, we here at Kraft Kennedy often have to deal with sensitive or private information or data. This often means something as simple as password protecting case privileged files or documents as they are emailed back and forth between opposing counsel or other parties.

I recently came across this issue for a client in the Support Practice who wanted to password protect some documents they had compressed and needed to email to co-counsel in the Far East. My first inclination was to recommend one of the tried and true file compression utilities, like WinZip or WinRAR. After all, Windows is good for compressing files, but doesn’t offer any of the more robust features that these utilities have, right?

Wrong. After a little digging, I found that Windows XP has, as a native file compression feature, the ability to password protect zipped files. And it’s as easy as opening the file menu from within the compressed folder, and selecting the “Add a Password” function. This is a quick, clean, and inexpensive way of adding a little extra security to documents that may need a little extra security.

The bad news is that this feature didn’t carry over to either Windows Vista or Windows 7. You can still open a zip file that is password protected on either of these operating systems, but you can’t add password protection to a zip file one either of these operating systems. Here’s hoping that this feature will get added to Windows 7 soon.

For years organizations have relied on tape drives and changers for backup and recovery of their critical data. Despite many predictions to the contrary, tape is still alive as we begin 2010.

When virtualization became popular it presented a challenge to those looking to continue to use their tape drives in fully virtualized environments. If you were using VMware you could use SCSI pass-through to present a tape drive or changer directly to a virtual machine but that prevented you from using any advanced features like VMotion. It also tied your tape drive and VM to a single host containing a SCSI card, making things complicated if that host were to experience a hardware failure.

While this is still possible in vSphere 4 (and the previous version), this configuration is not ideal.  Instead, consider converting that SCSI tape changer into an iSCSI target that can be used on any virtual machine attached to any host by using an iSCSI-to-SCSI bridge.  These bridges let you attach your tape changer directly to the device and then present the tape changer to virtual machines as an iSCSI target.  There are several different vendors providing this technology, including Atto Technology, Paralan, and others.

Once the tape drive is attached to the iSCSI bridge and configured as a target, you simply use the Microsoft iSCSI initiator inside a virtual machine to connect to the device.  The tape device will appear to the virtual machine as if it were any other iSCSI target (like a SAN LUN).

After connecting to the target in the iSCSI Initator, the tape device will become visible in Device Manager on the VM and within tape backup software.

After the tape device has been successfully discovered, the virtual machine can then be managed with features like VMotion, HA, and DRS because the VM won’t be tied to an individual host.  This configuration also opens up other design possibilities, such as multiple backup servers running different backup products.  Using the iSCSI bridge provides a lot more flexibility than directly attaching the tape device to an ESX host.

Sounds great, right?  As always, there are things to consider before moving forward with this type of solution:

1) Does your backup software vendor and tape changer vendor support this setup?

2) Will this setup meet the performance requirements of your environment?  In practice I’ve seen these devices push 2 GB/min or more, similar to the performance of direct attached tape devices.

Using an iSCSI-to-SCSI bridge opens up a lot of possibilities for keeping a tape device in your fully virtualized environment.  It also simplifies your setup and allows you to take advantage of enterprise features of your virtualization product.  Finally, for around $1,200 for the iSCSI bridge this is also an affordable solution to a common problem.