MOSS 2007 Formulas and Functions

While working with calculated fields, I’ve found the Formulas and Functions page from Microsoft Office official site which contains listings of formulas and functions that can be used. Some of the functions provided are Date and time, Financial , Information, Logical, Lookup and reference, Math and trigonometry, Statistical, and Text and data. For quick reference, refer to Common Formulas page of often used formulas.

Exporting MOSS Content Type as a Feature

While going through on the best approach on developing content type for the portal I’m currently working on, I’ve stumble across this very cool tool call CTExplorer. It a content type browser, with the ability to export a selected content type into a feature. Therefore, instead of creating feature up front (ouch!), I can build the content type in MOSS 2007, and export it out later. Now that’s sort of like reverse-engineering.

CTExplorer can be found at this page, or download it directly at here. The page is in German, but you can translate it easily if required. I haven’t try out whether it works or not, so I’ll update this post once I’ve tried it out.

Update 2011-01-17: Apparently there is a more complete tool for exploring your SharePoint instance now, call the SharePoint Manager. It's available in Codeplex at http://spm.codeplex.com/.

Enable VS 2008 integration with VSS 2005

To enable source control in Visual Studio .NET 2008 , you’ll need to install a CTP update for Visual SourceSafe 2005. Download it here. For reason why there’s such problem, refer to here.

Updated 20081223: Windows Vista workstation may need to include this service pack. Also, depending on the sequence of installation, you may need to turn on the VSS integration manually in VS.NET, under Tools -> Options -> Source Control.

MOSS 2007 Performance Limitations

While determining the taxonomy for the portal I’m working on, I was thinking whether it should be one with a flat structure or lots of deep subsites. The software boundaries for MOSS 2007 article on MSDN provides a good guideline on my taxonomy design. The following guideline table comes from the article:

Site object	Guidelines for acceptable performance	Notes	Scope of impact when performance degrades
Site collection	50,000 per content database	Total farm throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.	Farm
Site collection	150,000 per Web application	This limit is theoretical, and is dependent largely upon: · Performance of the database server on which the configuration database resides. · Performance of the Web servers in the farm. · Network bandwidth between the Web servers and the database server. This is not a hard limit, and assumes a single database server. Your environment may not be able to host this many site collections per Web application. Distributing content databases across additional database servers can increase the effective limit of the number of site collections per Web application. You should perform testing to determine the actual effective limit in your environment.	Farm
Web site	250,000 per site collection	You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100 sites, each with 1000 subsites, is 100,000 Web sites. The maximum recommended number of sites and subsites is 125 sites with 2,000 subsites each, for a total of 250,000 sites.	Site collection
Subsite	2,000 per Web site	The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000.	Site view
Document	5 million per library	You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders, using standard views and site hierarchy. This value may vary depending on how documents and folders are organized, and by the type and size of documents stored.	Library
Item	2,000 per view	Testing indicates a reduction in performance beyond two thousand items. Using indexing on a flat folder view can improve performance.	List view
Document file size	50MB (2GB max*)	File save performance is proportional to the size of the file. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB.	Library, file save performance
List	2,000 per Web site	Testing indicates a reduction in list view performance beyond two thousand entries. For more information about large lists, see White paper: Working with large lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007.	List view
Field type	256 per list	This is not a hard limit, but you might experience list view performance degradation as the number of field types in a list increases.	List view
Column	2,000 per document library 4,096 per list	This is not a hard limit, but you might experience library and list view performance degradation as the number of columns in a document library or list increases.	Library and list view
Web Part	50 per page	This figure is an estimate based on simple Web Parts. The complexity of the Web Parts dictates how many Web Parts can be used on a page before performance is affected.	Page

Go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx for more details.

Audience Targeting won't work with AD Group in MOSS User Group

I’ve already know about this issue and got “bitten” again today. I’m making sure that I’ll remember this time by blogging it.

Audience Targeting now works with MOSS Group as well without a need to create audience rule and compiling them. However, the users must be added to the MOSS user group directly for it to work. Adding AD user group into the MOSS user group will not work. Instead, add the AD group directly when specifying the audience targeting for the web part.

Another side effect of that also means you wouldn’t be able to find out the user’s MOSS group if he is added to the MOSS group via an AD group. The following code gives me no MOSS group at all, even though the person is already added into the MOSS group via AD group:

SPUser user = web.CurrentUser;

Foreach (SPGroup group in user.Groups)

{

                Str += group.Name + “<br/>”;

}

Therefore, do take note of this when you plan to roll out some custom functionality which is base on MOSS user groups.

Tool for registering SharePoint 2007 event handler programmatically

Found this great tool by Patrick Tisseghem's Blog [MVP SharePoint] for registering SharePoint 2007 event handlers to specific list or document libraries. Works like a charm on my MOSS 2007 SP1 VM. Great for quick deployment for development/testing purposes. Download it from his blog page here: http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/Patrick/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1547

MOSS Event Handler

Brian Wilson’s blog has a  few posting regarding MOSS Event Handlers for quick reference.

Post 1: Everything you need to know about MOSS Event Handlers

Post 2: Developer Solution Starter Kit (Building and deploying event handlers to MOSS)

Post 3: Registering Event Handlers plus Site Settings - Manage Event Handlers

 

Some more at MSDN: Event Fundamentals