Creating and Customizing Document Information Panels Using MOSS 2007

Part 1:

Part 2:

This video does a good job of showing how Document Information Panels integrates with Office 2007 applications. Ted demonstrates creating custom content types and using Document Information Panels with InfoPath 2007 to add custom metadata to Office files.
The video is courtesy of Ted Pattison of www.tedpattison.net

ASP .NET 3.5 and ADO .NET 3.5 Beta Exams Canceled

I just got off the phone with the manager of the Prometric testing center I usually go to to cancel both of my beta exams scheduled for today. He said he had an emergency and has to close the center by 10am to go pick up some people from LAX airport. The people he's receiving were supposed to come on Monday but for some reason came a day early.

I don't really care but I am curious if I can actually reschedule them. He gave me a ticket number to use to reschedule and said that I would be able to reschedule them even though today was the last day to take them. I think he didn't know what he was talking about but it's worth trying. I am going to call tomorrow and see what happens. Anyway today was the last day to take the beta ASP .NET 3.5 70-562 and the ADO .NET 3.5 70-561 exams.

Blackle - Make Google Black

Google recently dimmed its lights observing the Earth Hour. Whether using a black background conserves energy or not is debatable and depends on the type of monitor that is used. One attempt at saving energy by dimming the background on one of the most popular pages online is Blackle. Blackle was developed by Heap Media, a company based in Sydney, Australia and founded in 2005. Heap Media "is committed to developing and growing leading online services with global reach."

Search Google in Black
www.blackle.com

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server Resources

I was looking online for Sharepoint information and training material and here are some excellent resources I found:

Free Sharepoint 2007 Server Courses by Microsoft
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR102146081033.aspx
Some of these course are very basic and are meant for general users not developers. For example, some of them teach the user how to upload or save a file directly from Word/Excel/Powerpoint to a Sharepoint server.

Sharepoint desktop training download.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7BB3A2A3-6A9F-49F4-84E8-FF3FB71046DF&displaylang=en

Sharepoint standalone and server training download
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102488011033.aspx

Sharepoing server home page
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/default.aspx

Sharepoint 2007 Server help page
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/FX101211721033.aspx

Sharepoint Server 2007 Virtual PC Harddrive Image
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&DisplayLang=en
This image runs a Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition machine. The virtual machine is for evaluation purposes and will expire after 30 days. You can login to the image using the following creditentials:
Username: Administrator
Password: pass@word1

Sharepoint Server 2007 Virtual PC Harddrive Image with Instructions and Walkthrough
https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=428&DownloadID=7004
This image has been expired but can still be used for an hour each time the virtual machine is started.

Let me know if you find this of help.

Checking OS and Browser with Javascript

I've ran into cases where different browsers and even the same browsers but on different OS's respond differently to CSS attributes. So in some cases it's best to check for the type of OS and browser and apply attributes accordingly. I recently had to deal with this issue for the Firefox browser on Mac.

It turns out that having an HTML element with a CSS opacity attribute interferes with Flash graphics on the web page if it lays over it. As far as I noticed this only happens currently when using Firefox on Mac. Since opacity wasn't a requirement and wasn't of importance I decided to take it out on that browser/OS combination. This is done by code like the following:


function checkOSBrowser() {
if(navigator.platform.indexOf("Mac") || navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Firefox"))
document.getElementById("myElem").style.opacity = "0.8";
}


To review, navigator.platform returns the current OS and navigator.userAgent returns the running browser name. It is generally better to use indexOf() or search() to look for the desired OS or browser than to use an exact match because if anything slightly changed with an exact match the match would fail. Take "Mac" for example. If you run navigator.platform on a Mac machine with Intel processors, the output would be "MacIntel" not "Mac." So if you don't care exactly what kind of Mac is running you should just use the indexOf() or search() functions provided by the Javascript String.