SharePoint BUZZ

One of my most popular posts on this blog is the How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series with ...

Here's some links to the best articles on SharePoint 2007 in the blogosphere: SharePoint Team blog provide us with a Visio logical architecture design samples file to give you a jump start on your own design and a Debugger "Feature" for SharePoint community. Thank you SP Team! SharePoint Solutions blog released free Utility Quickly and Easily Configures Forms Based Authentication for SharePoint Ronalus simplified everyone's life by providing stsadmWin 2007 Corro'll Driskell at Mindsharp blogs about Audiences by design…. Or, Not as enabling audiences on a library allows the user to target content to a specific group of people however you do run into problems when configuring audiences on a document library with multiple content types Penny Coventry has a great post on Performing a SharePoint Gradual Upgrade using STSADM Find it hard to use the new Ribbon interface? Then try AddInTools, which will revert the Office 2007 Ribbon interface to the classic Office 2003 menu driven interface Harber has updating his popular Application Pool Manager Recycler - which is a must download for SharePoint Administrators / Developers Joel Oleson has two great posts on Master Page and Themes on WSS sites in MOSS discussing the differences between site.master and system.master; while his post ROI from File Shares to SharePoint discusses security and value between both approaches

Just browsing around at all the wonderful blogs that have started up and I have to say, its refreshing. SharePoint 2007 has definitely become one of the most welcomed versions of SharePoint. This might have been caused by the blogosphere, global community or just the great features that ...

The Employee Lookup Web Part allows you the ability to search against user profiles that you import from the Active Directory. Its not a process that is real time but does allow you to setup import schedules for incremental changes. In my last post, How To Configure Employee Lookup Web Part Series - Part 1, I walked you through configuring the data connection for user profile import. Now I will walk you through intiating the user profile import from your data connection and then how to include that in your search. Initiate User Profile Import I'm assuming you have the data connection to the Active Directory configured and ready to go. Here's what you need to do now: In User Profile and Properties, click on Import Schedule and set it up for anytime you require. Go back to User Profile and Properties. NOTE: Import schedules are based on how frequently your company makes changes to employee data. Click on Start Full Import. From here you can keep refreshing the screen to see the progress. This takes approx. 1 min per 100 user profiles (depending on your server). Once complete, view the Import Log and filter to see if there were any errors. You have just uploaded the user profiles from your Active Directory and have setup Incremental Import Schedule for incremental updates to your Active Directory. Now its time to include the user profiles that you have imported into your content sources.

Want to allow users to search / lookup employees through the Active Directory? The Employee Lookup webpart, for a SharePoint 2007 publishing portal, does not work right out of the box - as it needs to be configured. As I continue learning and start sharing my experiences with the SharePoint community, I thought I'd share my notes on how to get the Employee Lookup Web Part working. A client I had worked for a few months ago, was for some reason or another, using an Excel sheet for searching and maintaining phone numbers and company information. I recommended and configured the Employee Lookup webpart to pull data from the Active Directory. What is the Employee Lookup Web Part? The Employee Lookup Web Part allows you to search your company's active directory for contact information. Advanced search fields that are provided are First and Last Name, Department, Title, Responsbilities, Skills and Memeberships. This web part works once you define the Active Directory to import user profiles from (thanks Puneet). This tutorial will walk you through importing user profiles from Active Directory and populating the web part so users can perform searches against the data. Before importing user profiles, you must configure profile import settings. First, you set up an import account for a specific server running the Active Directory directory service (or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Then you enable and schedule full or incremental imports. [source: MOSS 2007 Central Administration Help]