This week at TechEd, I had the pleasure to present two sessions. The first one had the attendance of 175 and the next one was 225. I had a great time doing them and if you were one of the people present at the session, I hope you had a good time watching the awesome power of SharePoint Designer and InfoPath at work.

I mentioned in my sessions that I’ll be posting the demos of both of my sessions as screencasts on my site. What happened in LA (at TechEd) will not stay in LA . So here they are. Below you will find the links to the screencasts for to both of my sessions.

Note: These screencasts will stay public for 30 days after which they will be moved to Subscribers Only area.

Top Five Ways to Make You a Hero with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007

Use the Data View web part in SharePoint Designer to manage multiple list content. Connect information from one list to another, pass parameters and edit data back in the data source. Then learn how to attach a workflow to the Data View to automate processes. Lastly, this video shows how to attach the site master page to streamline the page’s look and feel.

Automate Business Processes using InfoPath Forms with integrated SharePoint Designer Workflows

In this video, a MS Word form is first converted to an InfoPath form then the InfoPath form is enhanced with Validation, Conditional Formatting and Rules to fetch data from a SharePoint list. Subsequently, the form is published to the Forms Server in SharePoint. Lastly, a workflow is created using SharePoint Designer to automate the forms processing

The registration for SharePoint Saturday Chicago is now open: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=138439

It’s a free event open to All. Come join us and spend a Saturday with us to learn all sorts of ‘SharePointy’ things.

While teaching the InfoPath/Workflow class last week, I had the need to restrict a textbox control in an InfoPath form to only contain emails. If an invalid email is inserted, it should throw a validation error. Out of the box, the patterns provided by InfoPath are very limited. It only provides patterns for Phone Number, SSN, and Zip code:

I thought surely somewhere out on the web I would find the pattern needed for this, but to my surprise, I couldn’t find “a working one” (doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, but I just couldn’t find one after an extensive search). Here are the ones I did find and either they just didn’t work or were limiting in nature:

• http://bharatsukhwal2000.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!CDD1BF7F2239C3B!213.entry
• http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/29731834/email-fomatting-pattern.aspx
• http://www.infopathdev.com/forums/p/2868/6062.aspx

So I ended up creating a simple pattern myself:

.+@.+\..+

This might not catch All types of invalid emails, but it does catch quite a lot of them. Hope this post helps someone experiencing the same frustration as I did last week.

The Professional SharePoint Designer 2007 book that I co-authored with Woody and Bryan has finally hit the shelves. I hope this book can help fill the knowledge gaps on this Awesome (but often misunderstood) product.

“Do the sites that I delete go into a Recycle Bin as well?” I have heard that question enough times now that it prompted me to make a screencast (link listed at the bottom) about just that. The answer by the way is No. While deleted items from lists and libraries and even deleted lists and libraries themselves end up in SharePoint’s recycle bin, deleted sites do not go to the recycle bin. They’re just… well Gone… deleted from the database completely.

Not to worry, there’s still hope. Microsoft’s internal IT team came up with a solution to this and created a mechanism to backup any site just before it’s deleted. They have made this solution freely available online at http://www.codeplex.com/governance/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3830 (location shown in picture below)

If you implement the solution properly, the whole process happens automatically and is hidden from the user’s perspective. After the site is archived and deleted, the administrator for the site gets an alert telling her that the site has been deleted and archived.

The Check In/Out functionality is pretty awesome in SharePoint document management, but isn’t it a pain to have to check in each document separately if, let’s say, as an Admin you have just migrated 100 documents in a document library and they all appear to be in a checked out state?

I get this question asked a lot: Can you check in multiple documents at once? The answer is Yes you can! It is done using the “Site Content and Structure” page (see pic below) which is only available in MOSS Standard or above.

Following will be the Table of Contents for the SharePoint Designer book (currently due to come out by Dec 31, 2008).

Disclaimer: As with any pre-release book, changes to the TOC are possible.

Part I, “The Basics”

Provides an overview of SharePoint Designer, SharePoint technology, and their relationship to one another.

Chapter 1: Exploring SharePoint Designer

Chapter 2: SharePoint from the User’s Perspective

Chapter 3: SharePoint from the Administrator’s Perspective

Chapter 4: SharePoint from a SharePoint Designer’s Perspective

Part II, “Customizing the SharePoint Look and Feel”

Shows how to use SharePoint Designer to customize various aspects of your sites.

Chapter 5: The Anatomy of a SharePoint Page

Chapter 6: Using SharePoint’s CSS Editing Tools

Chapter 7: The Anatomy of a Theme

Chapter 8: Publishing Master Pages and Layouts

Part III, “Applications without Programming”

Shows how SharePoint Designer can create many powerful applications that in the past would have required considerable programming effort.

Chapter 9: Building Your Own Workflows

Chapter 10: Working with SharePoint Data

Chapter 11: Advanced Data Access: External Data and More

Chapter 12: Working with Forms

Part IV, “Programming on the Client Side”

Demonstrates some tools provided by SharePoint and SharePoint Designer to enable even more custom interactivity.

Chapter 13: The Content Editor Web Part

Chapter 14: The SharePoint Client-side Object Model

Part V, “Beyond SharePoint Designer”

Takes you far past the built-in capabilities of SharePoint Designer with extensions, add-ins, migration, and conversion tools.

Chapter 15: Creating Workflow Elements in Visual Studio

Chapter 16: Custom Web Parts

Chapter 17: SharePoint Designer Add-ins

Chapter 18: A Little Administration

Appendix A: A Brief History of SharePoint and SharePoint Designer

Let me first start by saying that SharePoint Designer (SPD) is not for everyone. I believe it does have its place with the Power Users, and Site Administrators within the organization, but if not used properly, it can severely damage your sites and potentially your whole Portal.

My reasons for liking it are the following features in SPD:

1. Creating Sites and Lists and Libraries within those sites
2. Being able to backup your sites or site collections. Also, you can restore your site at any location
3. Designing powerful Workflows for a list or library within a site
4. Using the Data View web part to create mashups of data from a variety of sources
5. Reporting on site usage
6. Working with the Web Content Management features of SharePoint (creation of Master Pages and Page Layouts based on Content Types)
7. “Prettying” your sites using Cascading Styles – using SPD makes it pretty easy to manage this process

And that’s not all… there’s even more stuff you can do with SPD.

Over the years, I have presented many conference sessions (at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, SharePoint Connections and SharePoint Advisor) on a variety of topics within SPD. So it just seemed natural to foray into writing more formally about the product and educate people on the intricacies of using SPD. With that said, I would like to officially announce at this time that I, in conjunction with a couple of co-authors, am writing the Professional SharePoint Designer book by Wrox publications. The release date is set to the end of this calendar year. Here is a snapshot from the book’s web page on Amazon:

Web parts can be targeted to a specific audience in order to push information in front of a group of people for whom it’s relevant. Using this feature, you can place several web parts on a page, but when a user navigates to the page, they only see the web parts which are relevant to them.

An audience that you target the web parts to can be a SharePoint Group, Active Directory Security Group or Distribution List, or even a Global Audience (which by the way is setup through the Shared Services administration). The intended target audience is specified from the web part properties task pane in the “Advanced” section as shown below

Now here’s a very important point to keep in mind:

Targeting content to an audience is not the same as securing that content. Audience targeting and the SharePoint security mechanisms are two very different things and should not be confused with each other.

If you have been building your solutions using SharePoint even for a little while, you know that there are multiple ways of accomplishing the same goal. SharePoint gives us such a vast array of tools that it is easy to get lost or get confused when trying to decide how to architect your solution.

Being a trainer, I get all sorts of “best practices” questions on a regular basis. Questions such as:

• How do I use My Sites in an effective manner within my company providing access to some people, but not others. Also, what is the recommended quota for a My Site?
• I heard that the performance starts degrading after 2000 items have been added to a list (Not true. It’s actually 2000 items per view in a list). How many items should I have in a list?
• When I try to upload a file, I can’t get anything uploaded past 50MB. Is that the limit? (it’s actually 2GB and its configurable)
• We have 500 GB worth of documents in our current intranet environment. How do I plan for capacity when I’m porting them over to our new SharePoint environment?

All of these (and many many more) are legit questions that should be asked when you are planning out your deployment and even as you are creating solutions on top of an existing SharePoint environment. Thankfully, Microsoft has created a site now dedicated specifically to compiling these best practices in one location. Here is the address to the site:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx

Definitely worth checking out this site and bookmarking it. Enjoy!