Sharepoint 2007 and Instant Messaging

After installing Office Communications Server 2007 last week, I have now integrated it with our Sharepoint Learning Platform.

To do this, I first activated web access for the communications server as described here > http://www.ocspedia.com/CWA/Activate_CWA.htm This basically meant that users can simply browse to a web page and then launch a pop up window that allows them to instant message people from there, it also means users don't have to have a client such as MSN Messenger or Office Communicator installed.

I then created a new site in our portal and within that I added a 'Page Viewer' web part and pointed it to https://OurServerAddress/quicksignin . Now as soon as you browse to this page of our portal, Instant Messaging pops up and your are automatically signed in, hurrah!

Installing Office Communications Server 2007

Teachers at our school were beginning to ask about the possibility of adding Instant Messaging functionality to our Learning Platform, so I turned to Office Communications Server 2007. Today I got it all installed and working.

The installation wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped, this was due to some remnants of an old Live Communication Server 2005 installation we had messed around with a few years ago. Our Active Directory was a little confused to say the least and when trying to activate the new OCS 2007 server I was confronted with an error; 0xC3EC7814 Pool is not ready. When I first installed OCS2007 it seemed to be tying itself to the wrong location in AD, opening up ADSIEdit confirmed this.

In ADSIEdit, when I expanded the Domain > System > Policies > GUID of the Default Domain Policy, the RTC information was residing there. The correct location is Domain > System > Microsoft > RTC Service > Pools. I'm guessing if yours doesn't look like the screenshot below, you'll get the same error:




The solution for me was to run the following commands to unprep both our domains, then unprep our forest.

LCSCmd.exe /Domain[:] /Action:DomainUnPrep


LCSCmd.exe /Forest[:] /Action:ForestUnprep


Then from the OCS setup, prep the domain and forest again from scratch, installation was then successful.

Now it's all working, i'm very impressed. From within Sharepoint or Outlook (anywhere you see a person's name basically!) you can see their online presence (green dot for online, red dot for offline etc) and if you want, start an instant messaging session with them or transfer files etc.

You Tube within Sharepoint

It is possible to display videos from You Tube within any of your MOSS 2007 sites. Simple go to http://www.youtube.com/ and find a video you want to display. To the right of the video you'll see a section 'titled' embed with a load of code next to it. You need to highlight this code and copy it.

Next, navigate to your Sharepoint site, and add a 'Content Editor' web part. In the settings of this web part, click on 'source editor' and paste in the code you copied. It will look something like this:

Click 'save' and the editor will close, click 'ok' in the web part settings and you'll be taken back to your page. You're new You Tube video should be displayed there.

Learning Platform on my PS3

Over the course of this Summer I have installed Microsoft ISA Server 2006 as our firewall, this has given me the means to secure our Learning Platform with certificates and an 'https' address. The cool part though, is how simple it has been to get Forms Based Authentication (FBA) working, thus doing away with the pop up password prompt. This now allows access to our Learning Platform from a multitude of devices our students may have, Wii's, PS3's XBox 360's, PDA's etc. meaning they're never too far away from being able to access their homework!

See below for some images of my Playstation 3 accessing our school portal.

Podcasting Webpart

The Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint is now available for download here > http://www.codeplex.com/pks

It allows you to have a library of Podcasts hosted on your Sharepoint site and for other users to rate them YouTube style. Over the next few days i'll be integrating it with our Learning Platform. I shall post my findings here...

Dragging and Dropping files to and from MOSS 2007 from home

A lot of our teachers prepare lesson plans etc at home and want an easy way of adding them to the school portal, rather than having to go through the process of opening up internet explorer, browsing to the school portal, logging on, then browsing to their site, then uploading their documents... PHew! There is an easier way. You can give them folder on their desktop that links directly to whatever site on your portal that you want, they simply drag and drop their files into or out of this folder.

To accomplish this, when the teacher is at home, they need to open up the school portal site in the usual way and log on as they normally would. They then need to navigate to the document store they wish to use, this may be located on their own personal site, or a faculty saite, wherever.

Within the document store, you will see various options along the top (providing your tech people have given you the correct permissions), 'New', 'Upload', 'Actions' and 'Settings'. Click on 'Actions', then 'Open with Windows Explorer'.

Vista Users: Within the window that pops up, in the left pane, right-click on the folder name and select ‘Send To’ desktop.

XP Users: In the folder that opens, click on the little icon that navigates up a level (next to the back and forward buttons), then right click on the folder icon you want to link to and select ‘Create Shortcut’. Say Yes to the prompt asking if you want it to be created on your desktop.

You will then see a folder on the desktop that you're able to add files to, when you then navigate to the portal via a web browser, you'll see all the documents have been added to the relelvant document store without you having to go through the Upload process. Please bear in mind that you will still need to enter your username and password the first time you access your folder.

Adding a News Feed to your personal site

Many of our staff have found it useful to add news feeds (RSS Feed) to their personal site or 'My Site'. This is very simple to do:

It is possible to add an ‘RSS News Feed’ to you personal site on sharepoint (the ‘My Home’ tab within ‘My Site’).

News feeds can be added from any external website where you see the red/orange RSS logo.


To add a feed, firstly you need to browse to the website you want to take the news from, and then click on their RSS logo, this takes you to their news feed. See the example of the BBC News site below:

http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml


Once you have clicked on the logo, you’ll be taken to the page containing their news feed, the address of it should end in ‘.xml’.

The BBC News one for example is ‘http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml’

You need to highlight this address in your browser, then right-click on it and copy it.

Browse back to your ‘My Site’ and navigate to the ‘My Home’ tab.


This page is your personal space and can contain whatever you want. To add the feed, you need to click on ‘Site Actions’ which is in the top right corner, then ‘Edit Page’.

From here, you need to select which area or ‘zone’ on the page you want to the news feed to display, the top zone for example. Click on ‘Add a Webpart’.

This brings up a window in which you can select which webpart you want to add. You need to expand ‘All WebParts’, then scroll down to ‘Default’ and tick ‘RSS Viewer’.


Click on the ‘Add’ button.

The RSS Viewer webpart will appear on your page and display the following text:

Web part is not bound to a feed. Open the tool pane to set the feed Url.

Click on the ‘Open the tool pane’ hyperlink.

This opens the properties of the webpart on the right of the page, in the box labelled ‘RSS Feed URL’, you need to right-click and paste in the address you copied from your chosen website (BBC News for example).


If you expand the ‘Appearance’ section, you can also give your webpart a name, this can be anything you like e.g. ‘BBC News Feed’.

Finally, you can click on the ‘OK’ button at the bottom of the webpart properties pane, then click on ‘Exit Edit Mode’ at the top right of your page, below ‘Site Actions’:

You should now see your news feed each time you access your page.