SharePoint Mulitple Field (Connected) Lookups

Another project, another roadblock thrown up by SharePoint.
We needed the ability to look up multiple values off of one field-basically we needed a Phone, Fax, email based off of a name. This is where Codeplex comes into play, and the Connected Lookups Solution that Leonid Lyublinski of Microsoft created, fits in with this need.

This solution creates a new Column Type for your list, Connected Lookup Field, that uses the basic lookup functionality and upgrades it considerably. It creates a "Parent Column" that is the reference point for the subsequent "Value Columns". This is what it looks like:


There are some limitations in regards to list size (1000 items seems to be the most it can handle) as well as some nesting issues that Leonid references here.

The Code itself is available for Download from Codeplex here. It is an automated install, very simple to perform, and once it is installed, very easy to use.

"Name Active X Control" component prompt in IE for external facing web sites

Here is something new I had not come across before, so I'm posting it for my reference as well as hopefully helping others who may run into this........

Recently I was involved with creating a new web site for my company in SharePoint. After running through dev and UAT environments we moved it to production and turned it on to the outside world. As soon as we did, an alert regarding a "Name Active X Control" started appearing on many of our browsers. (Of course only the IE flavors 7 and 8- Firefox, Chrome and Opera were fine.) After browsing around a bit looking for the issue I found this Microsoft KB entry.

The KB article suggests 2 steps to solve, one add the site to the trusted site list, this is the reason we missed this in testing, our UAT and Dev environments were internal intranet sites, automatically trusted by the browsers. (As you can imagine we have changed our QA process) The second step is involving editing the init.js Java Script and renaming the file and calling that new file something other than init.js.

The root cause is SharePoints' presence awareness, but as other blogs (Thanks to Mossman - I'd do a link but for some reason the blog post seems to have vanished) have stated you'd think they'd come up with a more specific name rather than the spooky sounding name.dll.

SharePoint and Regulatory Compliance Part 3 (The EU gets involved)

It seems that I have stumbled on to an easy to blog about theme recently with the use of SharePoint and regulatory compliance. Another SharePoint article came to my attention recently regarding the European Union's new MiFID regulations that are going into effect on November 1st.

The above article is from the Windows Financial services magazine and has a MS outlook (outlook as in forecast, not the email client) on how the new EU MiFID regulations will affect companies and how SharePoint can fit in to filling some of these regulatory requirements. Again using existing Microsoft infrastructure, SharePoint can be a great resource in regards to complying with these regulations.

SharePoint 2010 Best Practices Analyzer

One of the features of SharePoint 2010 that I was most interested to see was the Best Practices Analyzer. Judging from this video demonstration, the BPA is a customizable feature that will run jobs to check your environments health, then list the issues it finds along with fixes for those issues (being Microsoft hopefully the fix won't direct you to a page that says "There are no known fixes for this issue", which seems to happen a lot for MS directed linking.) This is the the integration of the previously available BPA, not sure how much different it is though until we actually see more of it in action.
It seems that there is a list containing these jobs and it allows you to customize what is run, when it is run and also an option on whether you wish to have the job fix the issue per MS recommendations. In theory a great idea, not sure how it will work in practice though.
A couple questions stick out for me. What if these 'fixes' will disable or remove some functionality without the administrator knowing? I can just imagine that troubleshooting nightmare.
Also are all features turned on by default? I remember back from a previous life I was involved with a MOM implementation and when we first turned that on everything was enabled and it took weeks of tuning to get the environment functioning, nowhere near as to what the BPA seems to be, but none the less what MS thinks is imperative could be a nuisance for an Admin to deal with.
Those are just some quick thoughts on the BPA, take a look at the video of SharePoint 2010 and let me know what you think.