See you there!

This topic is pretty neat though, because it’s really so simple and yet has high wow-to-effort ratio. Live Earth from Microsoft works slightly differently, but Google Maps API is really quite easy to plug into, even from a SharePoint page. They call this a “mashup” because you’re mixing media here in some delightful new way. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Read through the Static Maps API Developer’s Guide from Google. Google has two map APIs, one for dynamic maps (the kind you can drag within the window) and static maps (which appear frozen but are also generated on-the-fly). I’ll go with static for the time being.
2. You have to register for a Google Map API key (it’s free).
3. Then all you need to do is pass some parameters to the API via your page! Here’s a full URL: http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=40.714728,-73.998672&zoom=14
&size=512x512&maptype=mobile&markers=40.702147,-74.015794,blues|
40.711614,-74.012318,greeng|40.718217,-73.998284,redc&key=XXXXX

So here’s what you’re passing above:

• Longitude for the center of the map
• Latitude for the center of the map
• the level of the zoom (in/out) you want for the map
• the size of the image you want (512 x 512)
• the maptype (for mobile, normal, etc.)
• then you describe what points you would like laid out on the map, what Google calls “markers.” Each of these has:

a color for the marker, as well as a size (normal, tiny, mid-sized)

a letter or character to appear in the marker pin

longitude and latitude for the marker itself

the parameters for each marker are comma-separated, and each set of marker parameters are separated by a “|” character

• finally, your API key (the XXXXX at the end is where this would go)

So the image above would end up looking like this:

It’s not too difficult to do this in InfoPath, but we currently have a pretty extensive SharePoint document library project where this would be handy. So putting this feature in place there is on my current task list. As I was trying to gather resources for it, I ran across this helpful post on Datacogs.

Anyhow, it’s not something I am yet familiar with, and writing good CAML is obviously important. So there’s this code from U2U that plugs right into your MOSS lists or libraries. From Karine Bosch – ready to install as a solution, then grab the code it generates.

http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=3

Here’s a great posting from MSDN on just how to do it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2007/01/29/submitting-to-a-database-via-web-services-in-infopath-forms-services.aspx

Neal: Well, it seemed like between posts of SharePoint tips and stuff from work, alongside posts of our daughter swimming in the pool at age 2 and political cartoons, it just seemed smart to separate them a bit.

Interviewer: Okay, I can understand that. But WHY on earth would you choose WordPress for this and not just host one on one of your SharePoint servers??

Neal: Yeah, I knew you were going to ask this. The blog feature in MOSS 2007 is okay, but not nearly as nice or full-featured as WordPress is. And, it just so happens that another division within the Union is rolling out some WordPress stuff and I had to get the server configured over the last few days. Maybe I’ll move it over there eventually, but this seemed as good a place as any to have an open, fully-accessible, rich repository of things I’ve come across and learned. It’s probably more for my own good than it is for everyone else’s!

Interviewer: Well, thanks for answering our very tough questions, Neal. It’s a stunning and remarkable job you’re doing, and we’re all in awe. Okay maybe not.

Here’s a shot from MS for a KPI “dahsboard”:

Finally, there’s a great post from Rehm Angul on this — just a good overview: http://rehmangul.wordpress.com/2007/05/04/key-performance-indicators-kpis-in-moss-2007/

So I found this post on MSDNER which links back to MSDN “Custom Action Definitions” and the “Custom Action Element“. I knew this would all be in XML, so let’s see how helpful SPD2007 can be.

So what can you do?

Thanks to this post I happened to find, I neeed to tell the search crawler to ignore certificate warnings — this is because as it searched on itself, it wasn’t using the FQDN that was written on the certificate, only the servername itself … which would understandably cause a certificate warning message. Mark Andrew’s post reads:

Try Application management/manage search service and under farm level search settings there is a checkbox to ignore SSL certificate name warnings

Once again … a key feature, sort of buried away down in the bowels of MOSS. But at least the option is there:

Anyway, all that’s really involved is setting up your own custom scope, grabbing the right ID that references that scope, and putting the right inputs in your content editor web part. Works really well, and doesn’t have too many options.

I wanted a stripped-down search utility since I think one of the main complaints about MOSS/WSS is the “overwhelming” user experience: getting lost, confused, unsure what to click on, etc.

And I then discover the wonderful Foxit iFilter for PDF documents: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/

Cheap and solved the problem perfectly. Thanks to this post from Filter Central most of all.

The best image is one I had to tweak a bit, 16×20 pixels: