Let's Talk about .. MOSS2007-Minimal Master Page

Today I modified the Master Page from the default master page. Do you know what the trouble I got? .. Yeah, the unexpected error occured. My colleague suggested me to create the minimal master page first. Even I didn't do what she told me but I think it's the good method to do when we have to start create the master page.

We should create the minimal master page since it contains all thing we need. There are the PlaceHolders that are used in. This method prevents you from spending time to look back the code again.

You can enter this page to see the instruction of creating the minimal master page..

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx

Let's Talk about .. MOSS2007-Excel Web Access

Today I participated the training course of How to apply MOSS2007 Excel Web Access. The instructor teached about the basic concepts of the important features of Excel Web Access in MOSS2007.

Interaction between Excel Service & Excel
- View the latest formular results.
- Refresh the live data from an extended data sources such as OLAP cube.
- Navigate the different worksheets, parts of the worksheets, or selected named items in workbook such as chart or excel table.
- Sort and filter data.
- Expand or collage levels of data and use a report filtering a Pivot Table report.

Security
- We don't have to worry about the security coz it leverages the security infrastructure provided by SharePoint.
- We can scale up add more CPU

Excel Service Config
- Excel Calculation Service

• Open SharePoint 3.0 Central admin site
• Click on Operation Tab
• Click on Services on the Server link from the topology and Service
  

Trusting the Location
- Workbooks must be placed in trusted location.
- Call to open fails if it comes from untrusted site.
- Trust a location using SharePoint 3.0 Central admin or Script.

Pivot Table (Pivot = round; rotate)
- Pivot Table reports are tables that organized and summarize info for easier analysis
- Its grapical representations of the same data
- PivotTable and PivotChart are interactive -> trend & relationships

Name Item
- Normally we user the name of the coumn as the name of variable we call, but when the column is changed, the formular got problems.
- In office 2007, we can refer it by the name instead of the column.

Parameterized Excel
- Interactivity

• we can define cell in excel as parameterized .
• we can work with the parameter task pane (the right-hand-side windows in OfficeEx. Textbox, list box ) -- Value of drop down in task pane come from SQL server. User defines, then export the parameter via the parameter task pane.
• we can see the changes in the data / reports

- Visibility we can show / hide sheet and/or part of data

Let's Talk about .. MOSS2007-Excel Services

My division executive suggessed the member of the division to read the MSDN article about the Excel Services. I think MSDN article is very useful when we want to know about the features of Microsoft's products.

The Excel Services is one of the new technology in MOSS 2007. The users can load, calculate, and display the Excel worksheets on SharePoint Server 2007. The important thing is the ability that user can the data to display, and maintain a single version of Excel worksheet without writing custom code.

Two primary interfaces for Excel Services are available:-
(1) Excel Web Access Web Part: you can view and interact with a live worksheet via browser.
(2) Excel Web Services: for programmatic access.

The user can view live, interact worksheets and save it within portal sites. It's able to analyze PivotTable reports and charts by browser.

The selected cells in worksheets can be edited by making the parameters to them. When saving the items that users choose to make viewable, they will appear in the Parameters pane in Excel Web Access.

Anyway, the users have to create a workbook by MS Office Excel 2007 because creating function is not enable in Excel Services.

Let's Talk about .. MOSS 2007

.. I have to use Microsoft SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 for the project that I was assigned. This is the first time that I use MOSS 2007. I know from MSDN Magazine that there are many better features than SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003.

MOSS 2007 is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or WSS 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0. Therefore, MOSS 2007 portal sites are created using WSS features and site definitions along with ASP.NET building blocks such as Master Pages and Web Parts and are added by ASP.NET components such as server-side controls and custom Web Parts. The special features are Portal and Search.

There are the extra dimension inside MOSS 2007 - Web Content Management, Document & Record Management, Business Process Integration and Forms, and Business Intelligence.

One of the Business Intelligence Features is the Excel Service which is a server-side version of the traditional Excel calculation engine on top of WSS 3.0. Users can see the numbers displayed by a worksheet within Browser.

For the Managing Documents and Business Processes, MOSS 2007 introduces "InfoPath Forms Services" that also renders the InfoPath within Browser. And we can use InfoPath 2007 Form Designer to create Web-enabled forms.

That's just a little introduction of the "Assembly and Configure" Philosophy application, MOSS
2007.

Let's Talk about .. Web UI Design

Let's start the first posting of this blog with the UI design for web page and web application. This step is one of all steps that makes problem with the many IT consultant companies. Not because of the hard of creating, but the style to make the user impressive with the result is very difficult to reach. About three or more times to change something is the normal case. So what the user interface is, it's the display that user has some interaction with.

The important target of the most UI is the user friendly. The good application shouldn't make the user confuse when using it. Even the duty of design is owned by the graphic designer, but talking among the user, programmer, and graphic designer is necessary task. The requirement of UI design can be got this meeting.

There are 4 important things that are vital for the designer to know before starting the job.

First, Color Palette - There are many lavels of the color palette we can define depended on the organization and the users. For example, the main color palette, the supporting color palette, the alert color palette, etc.
Second, the font type - The font type for the content should be the same for the whole web site.
Third, the resolution - Because in the past, there are many kinds of resolution people used. But in the present, the 1024 x 768 pixels is mostly used.
Forth, the page layout - We should start to write it in the paper, declare each part to each location. The header is normally located on top of the page. The nevigation menu is where we place the main function of site. The transaction area, which contains the site tools, is the source of the tools that facilitate the users to browse, search, or call some web applications. The size of content area is up to the requirement of users and up to how much the information will be
displayed.