Pedro Serrano

CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition: customer testimony

2008-05-22T23:17:27.4140000+02:00

Video: Citizen Service Platform in Porto

You can read the Case Study here.

"The Best of Techdays 2008 ITPro" - Innovation Day - Electronic Public Sector: Gov 2.0

2008-05-16T11:59:38.8030000+02:00

Hi all,

Daniel Dias Pereira will be presenting our Board Meeting solution on a live webcast this afternoon.

His presentation will be in portuguese:

Webcast 26 - "The Best of Techdays 2008 ITPro" - Innovation Day - Administração Pública Electrónica: Gov 2.0

- CaveDigital (Daniel Pereira): Reuniões e Colaboração Digitais;

A solução CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007 vem potenciar a Modernização Administrativa ao nível dos Decisores de topo, permitindo que as suas reuniões passem a ocorrer no plano digital, contribuindo assim para a diminuição drástica do consumo de recursos naturais e do impacto ambiental, bem como para potenciar o aumento da agilidade nos processos de tomada de decisão. Na sua variante Town Hall Edition, esta solução dá resposta às Reuniões de Câmara, desmaterializando por completo o fluxo de trabalho, desde a elaboração das propostas até à sua deliberação em Reunião de Câmara e resultando também na criação automática de minuta de acta.

Será demonstrada a solução implementada na Câmara Municipal do Porto, onde a plataforma supracitada estima-se (baseado em dados recolhidos desde a entrada do sistema em funcionamento) permitir a poupança de até 30 àrvores por ano, para além dos ganhos na qualidade das propostas e tempo de preparação de cada Reunião de Câmara.

To subscribe to this webcast, go to: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032379345&Culture=pt-PT

Cheers!

Microsoft Local and Regional Government Solutions Forum [21st - 23rd April 2008]

2008-05-02T17:52:57.0980000+02:00

Hi everyone!

Last week both me and Daniel Pereira went to Porto for the LRG Forum where the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform was launched.

On this event we did two presentations, one showing the Executive Portal for Porto Council and another demoing our contribution for the CSP, using a lite version of our solution.

The Porto Council Executive Portal is based on our solution for Council Meetings: CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition, which has already beaten the initial estimated Return Of Investment - we initially estimated that 11 trees would be saved yearly.

Based on live data, we can now estimate, so far, that Porto Council will spare 30 trees per year by lowering drastically their paper consumption. These yearly 4 tons of wood, still had to be converted to paper. Since this isn't happening anymore, that's around 51 million Kw/year that don't get spent on doing so, 1.3 tons/year of solid waste that don't happen anymore, 3 tons/year of CO₂ like gases that don't get generated and released to the atmosphere anymore and 91000 litres/year of water that don't get consumed anymore.

Another interesting fact is that prior to our solution, a staff of 4 people where needed, fulltime, to provision Council Meetings at Porto's (lots of photocopying had to happen). This staff of 4 would work for 2 weeks on average to prepare 1 Council Meeting (2 meetings happen regularly per month). Now, roughly, 1 person can do this work in 1 afternoon. That's around 7296 work hours freed yearly for more productive and value-adding tasks.

The cool thing is, summing on the national prize this project had already received, during the LRG Forum, the project got awarded another recognition, this time international: Sustainability Award - City of Porto and CaveDigital, Portugal.

To name a few, our solution is built on top of the following technologies:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
Windows Workflow Foundation

For more information on our solution, please visit: http://www.cavedigital.com/bm/

For more information on Microsoft Citizen Service Platform, please visit: http://www.citizenserviceplatform.com/

Paper calculations thanks to http://www.papercalculator.org/

Hummm... this seems a tad smaller than I expected...

2008-03-20T03:02:04.8730000+01:00

Keeping up with the usual flow of information sharing in the hopeless effort of saving others the troubles and perils I go through, I'm documenting here my first trip to Redmond, Seattle ;-)

Last week I had 2 full days of meetings at Microsoft campus in Redmond, regarding this project our company is participating on called Microsoft Citizen Service Platform (let's call it CSP ;-)). It was really nice to meet all the folks and talk about über-geek stuff, with special kudos for the OCS guys, which won the «best meeting award»! :-)

For CSP we'll be delivering a Lite version of our solution for Board Meetings on its edition for the Local and Regional Government market, the CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition and which is in use at Porto Town Hall Council (the second largest iconic Portuguese city (also known as Oporto)).

Video: City of Porto

But let's get back to the reason why I'm writing here about, which is, how I got there, and that's where the fun begins.

It all started on the previous week - my flights were booked and the person in charge for making that happen emailed me my e-ticket.

Saturday I hopped on the first flight from Lisbon to Frankfurt...

At Frankfurt they flagged me for security check... so there I was waiting for 10 mins looking at a guy on the phone holding my passport and thinking «hey, this isn't my first trip to the US». Good thing from this was that on my next flight to San Francisco they moved my seat to Business Class.

At San Francisco I realized my luggage didn't fly there with me... Tried to fill in a bagage claim but they instructed me to do so on my final destination... so I hopped on my next flight to Redmond/Bend... «Bend?» I inquired myself... «just go with the flow».

When I landed at Redmond Municipal Airport, the first thought on my mind was «hummm... this seems a tad smaller than I expected».

I procceded to fill in a bagage claim and while giving the hotel address the lady behind the counter inquired «this address is Washington state... we're in Oregon». A sinapse storm occured instantly as my brain reached for the stored geographical represenation of North America. «Humm, Seattle isn't in Oregon ... what's going on here?»... So I procceded to explain that I was heading for the Microsoft campus at Redmond, Seattle, and that's when it hit me: «I'M ON THE WRONG REDMOND!»

Lucky me, NOT!, being a Municipal Airport, they closed at night, so I could only catch a flight to Seattle on next early morning. The people there were really nice though, and the lady behind the counter was kind enough to give me a ride to a nice dinner called Sharis (or something similar to that) where I sat for a few hours and got back to the airport. People at the «wrong» Redmond are actually really nice ;-)

After arriving at the airport and checking-in, guess what? They flagged me for security check again, yes, at municipal airport ... So there I waited for 10 minutes again, while they went through my backpack and laptop zzzz ...

Finally hopped on the flight to Seattle and there, got a cab to my final destination: Redmond, Seattle, Washington State ;-)

Bottom line, it took me more than 30 hours to get there, so... make sure they send you to the right Redmond. ;-)

Cheers!

It seems we're redefining time now ;)

2008-02-29T11:27:51.5305860+01:00

The day when midnight had 80 minutes ;-)

Cheers!

Happy New Year 2008!!

2007-12-29T21:28:43.9370231+01:00

May good things and excellent moments happen to all of us :-)

Have fun and accomplish successes!

Cheers.

Merry Xmas!

2007-12-25T23:31:53.2841577+01:00

I hope you all have a good one! :-)

Workflow error in SharePoint 2007: Failed on Start

2007-12-13T05:14:50.4826786+01:00

Today we were getting this error while trying to start one of those out-of-box Approval workflows: Failed on Start .

After much pain and trial-erroring, we finally got it working thanks to this post we found online:

«...
Changing the identity of the application pool to a user with administrative rights can cause the workflow to “fail to start“. If this sounds like something you've done, try changing it back to network service and try running the workflow again. (worked for me)
...»

Thanks to Raghu Iyer for posting a solution ;-)

Document Library item's author is current user?

2007-12-02T15:30:56.3340000+01:00

If you ever want to check if a document library item's author is the current user, here's the code snippet on how to do it:

SPFieldUserValue authorUserValue = new SPFieldUserValue (myWeb, myItem[ "Author" ].ToString());
if (myWeb.CurrentUser.LoginName == authorUserValue.User.LoginName)
{

// your code will go here
}

Hope this takes away pain from anyone trying to use GetByID ;-)

P.S.: sorry all of you I haven't yet replied to your emails - I've been on the road and jumping airports a lot, so life is kinda hectic which is making it hard to keep up with my mailbox.

The Ingenuity Point: VOTE FOR US!!

2007-11-10T14:01:43.6350000+01:00

Hi everybody!

Please vote for our solution - CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition - for Council Meetings on the Clean Technology vertical for the Ingenuity Point contest.

Our solution renders Council Meetings paperless, thus saving a LOT of trees per year :-)

Plenty of SharePoint, Windows Workflow Foundation and Office 2007 ;-)

Thanks for your support!!

«HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)» when you try creating subwebs programmatically

2007-10-25T02:04:45.4200000+02:00

You're getting «HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)» when you try to create subwebs using a custom site definition programmatically?

For a quick work-around, just add this to your Assembly.info.cs file, re-compile and re-deploy:

using System.Security;

...

[assembly:AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers]

Signing and making your code trusted should also work, but if you're on a tight spot, this code will probably get you some air to breath :-D

Hope this helps someone out there ;-)

«Error: File not found.» when you upgrade WSS v2 to WSS v3 with anonymous access

2007-10-11T19:25:09.4456366+02:00

Florin just emailed me requesting to help on letting the word out on with the solution for this problem he was facing, so here it is, on his own words:

«If you upgrade from WSS 2.0 to Wss 3.0 and configure WSS 3.0 with anonymous access, you might get the following error while trying to create websites:

Error: File not found.

Looking at the Verbose Logfiles, you might get the following Error message:

Application error when access /_layouts/newsbweb.aspx, Error=A aplicação Web não foi encontrada em http://www.myportal.com/blogs/2a.

Verifique se escreveu o URL correctamente.

Se o URL tiver de fornecer conteúdo existente, o administrador do sistema poderá ter de adicionar um novo mapeamento do URL do pedido à aplicação de destino.

em Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite..ctor(SPFarm farm, Uri requestUri, Boolean contextSite, SPUserToken userToken)

em Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPNativeConfigurationProvider.LookupSite(String requestUrl, Int32 iisInstanceId, String& siteUrl, Int32& zone, Guid& appId, Guid& siteId, Guid& databaseId, String& databaseServer, String& databaseName, String& databaseUsername, String& databasePassword, Boolean& useHostHeaderForSiteName) ........

Resolution:

1. ISA 2004 Web Publishing Rule (additional configurations over the default rule):

    A. Forward the original host header instead of the actual one

    B. Requests appear to come from the original client

2. WSS 3.0 Configuration:

    In SharePoint 3.0 Administration page -> Operations -> Go to Managed Paths (Mapeamentos de Acesso Alternativos)

    Set the Internet Url equal to the public FQDN of the website used by ISA 2004 to publish the your portal, e.g. www.myportal.com.

3. IIS Configuration:

    Add the public FQDN as Host Headers in IIS for the website extended with WSS 3.0, e.g. www.myportal.com.

I hope that this can help someone.

Greetings!
Florin Zamfir»

Cool, eh? ;-)

Exam 70-630: TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring - DONE

2007-08-21T17:24:44.1160000+02:00

Both me and Daniel Pereira just did 70-630. Instead of bragging about it, let's just say it's done, with style ;-)

SharePoint & .NET Web Developers wanted :-)

2007-07-29T14:02:20.8415285+02:00

string [] chrMsg = new string [] {
"C" , "A" , "N" , " " , "Y"
, "O" , "U" , " " , "C" , "O"
, "D" , "E" , "?" , "
" , "S"
, "e" , "n" , "d" , " "
, "y" , "o" , "u" , "r"
, " " , "C" , "V" , " "
, "t" , "o" , " " , "r"
, "e" , "c" , "r" , "u"
, "t" , "a" , "m" , "e"
, "n" , "t" , "o" , "@"
, "c" , "a" , "v" , "e"
, "d" , "i" , "g" , "i"
, "t" , "a" , "l" , "."
, "c" , "o" , "m"
};

«SIMILE» - timeline goes SharePoint ;-)

2007-07-20T18:47:03.8210000+02:00

Three or four weeks ago I did this during a weekend (yes, had no sleep...)

Basically, I integrated the Timeline from SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) into a SharePoint web part which consumes event itens from a SharePoint Calendar list.

I really fancy on how I might be using this in the future :-D

DO YOU CODE? More help wanted!

2007-07-20T18:01:56.1083482+02:00

CAN YOU CODE?

As our company continues evolving, we're opening more coding slots on our ranks.
This said, we're looking for ASP.NET 2.0 Web Developers for projects in Portugal (Lisbon) using:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
SQL Server 2005,
ASP.NET 2.0,
C#,
XML and webservices,
Office 2007,
... ;-)

Speaking, Reading and Writing Portuguese is a MUST HAVE.
Availability for travelling is a MUST HAVE.

For how long will you stay on the side-lines? ;-)

Send us your CV, past work screenshots and details we should know about, and let us know why (in your opinion) we should pick you to join our team :-D

Yes, we are hiring again!

2007-06-13T19:08:37.2910000+02:00

Tired of being on the side-lines?

We're looking for ASP.NET 2.0 Web Developers for projects in Portugal (Lisbon) using:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007,
SQL Server 2005,
ASP.NET 2.0,
C#,
XML and webservices,
Office 2007,
... ;-)

Availability for travelling is a MUST HAVE.

For how long will you stay on the side-lines? ;-)

Send us your CV, past work screenshots and details we should know about, and let us know why (in your opinion) we should pick you to join our team :-D

Excel 2007 Add-in: Synchronizing Tables with SharePoint Lists

2007-06-10T02:08:38.1649038+02:00

Great news!

Just got this by email (which I have negleted to read and reply to properly lately with all the fuss which is going on) from José Silva:

Excel 2007 Add-in: Synchronizing Tables with SharePoint Lists

This add-in works with Excel 2007 to synchronize data in a table with a list on a SharePoint site.

This workaround helps us all to deal with the fact that the ability to update SharePoint lists from Office Excel 2007 is deprecated in favor of publishing and synchronizing lists using Office Access 2007, so now you can use the Excel 2007 SharePoint List Synchronizing Add-in to update SharePoint lists from Office Excel 2007.

I still think deprecating this feature was not a very happy decision. Being able to play from Access 2007 is great, but loosing Excel functionaly? ... C'mon guys!! ;-)

SPRoleDefinition role = ElevatedSite.RoleDefinitions["Full Control"]; results in SPException!!!

2007-05-30T16:42:28.3514503+02:00

SPException ...

Pedro Santana just shared this with me ...

Now, who had the idea of translating the role ID for full control on MOSS 2007 pt-PT ?

... naughty you! ;-)

MSDN Labs for Workflow

2007-05-12T19:47:51.8625782+02:00

Patrick's been kind enough to share again more goodies and gems with the rest of us ;-)

« MSDN Labs for Workflow

Busy myself these days preparing a number of Visual How-Tos on different workflow topics (but of course SharePoint-related); I am happy to learn that Serge Luca was involved in a set of MSDN labs that are available for download. Workflow is an exciting subject and quite important in the world of SharePoint, so download them and try them out.»

Go get it lads! :-D

FEATURE: Download all documents from a document library

2007-05-12T19:37:23.7264292+02:00

Looking for a way to allow downloading all files contained on a document library?

Thanks to Bart Gunneman, now you can ;-)

For those of you who were wondering ...

2007-05-02T21:07:12.7370000+02:00

Yes, I am still alive :-D

And to prove it:

Just been busy, good busy :-D

Cheers, ;-)

Outlook 2007 Performance Update

2007-04-20T10:44:02.6430000+02:00

Via Tasks and Time Management in Outlook blog,

«... the latest update for Outlook 2007. It has several performance improvements and should improve the general responsiveness of Outlook when reading, moving, deleting and downloading e-mail messages for users who have large mailbox files (.pst and .ost files) stored on their computers. It also has a fix for a delegate/manager calendar related privacy issue, where delegates to a user’s calendar could potentially view calendar items marked as “private” when searching for items in the manager’s calendar.

Here are the links:

Outlook 2007 update: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C262BCFD-1E09-49B6-9003-C4C47539DF66

Outlook 2007 for Business Contact Manager patch: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b1fadb55-e4e1-4f67-a69a-3e6bf9b130f0&displaylang=en ...»

It does work :-D

Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best

2007-04-20T00:05:32.9715848+02:00

SharePoint team posted on their blog about the newly released whitepaper: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best.

Want to understand which levels of integration are available for each of the client and server versions of Office?

You can download it here.

CaveDigital: more help wanted :-)

2007-04-09T13:18:46.0586215+02:00

Yes, we're hiring again, for those interested, here's the description in Portuguese:

Cargo/Posição: Programador(a) Web .NET

· Nome/Designação da empresa: CaveDigital - Consultadoria e Soluções Informáticas, Lda.

· Localidade/Distrito: Lisboa

· Tipo: Full-time

· Descrição da oportunidade:

Procuramos Webdeveloper .NET (M/F) com o seguinte perfil:

§ Conhecimentos de HTML, CSS e Javascript

§ Conhecimentos ASP.NET (C#)

§ Conhecimentos de SQL Server 2000/2005

§ Conhecimentos de XML

§ Disponibilidade imediata

§ Procuramos pessoas pró-activas, com iniciativa, humildes e trabalhadoras, com forte espírito de equipa, boa capacidade de comunicação, motivadas e com paixão por aquilo que fazem

Os interessados deverão enviar os seus CV’s, exemplos de trabalhos, nacos de código, etc, para: recrutamento@cavedigital.com

New SharePoint and Office 2007 books

2007-03-03T22:14:04.7940000+01:00

A great new deal of books are reaching the market, which waits hungry for office & sharepoint 2007 knowledge!

Inside MOSS 2007 (Patrick's), which I'm waiting eagerly for :-)

Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 and Forms Services 2007 (Scott Roberts & Hagen Green), which I reviewed and find a good source for all that is InforPath and Forms Services 2007 (holds your hand from novice to intermediate).

Workflow in Office 2007 (David Mann), which I'm reading now and so far, so great ;-)

CaveDigital: help wanted :-)

2007-01-30T22:21:40.3330000+01:00

We're hiring, for those interested, here's the description in Portuguese:

Cargo/Posição: Programador(a) Web .NET

· Nome/Designação da empresa: CaveDigital - Consultadoria e Soluções Informáticas, Lda.

· Localidade/Distrito: Lisboa

· Tipo: Full-time

· Descrição da oportunidade:

Procuramos Webdeveloper .NET (M/F) com o seguinte perfil:

§ Conhecimentos de HTML, CSS e Javascript

§ Conhecimentos ASP.NET (C#)

§ Conhecimentos de SQL Server 2000/2005

§ Conhecimentos de XML

§ Disponibilidade imediata

§ Procuramos pessoas pró-activas, com iniciativa, humildes e trabalhadoras, com forte espírito de equipa, boa capacidade de comunicação, motivadas e com paixão por aquilo que fazem

Os interessados deverão enviar os seus CV’s, exemplos de trabalhos, nacos de código, etc, para: recrutamento@cavedigital.com

Internet Explorer 7: Get the latest flash player problem

2007-01-29T20:14:08.7034881+01:00

Running Internet Explorer 7 and getting the «Get the latest flash player» error message while trying to visit flash web sites?

Go to C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash and run FlashUtil9b.exe .

This ought to fix it. ;-)

Hope this helps someone out there.

WSS v3 SDK & MOSS 2007 ECM Starter Kit RTM, and more!

2007-01-23T12:36:55.5734982+01:00

Great news, Windows SharePoint Services v3 Software Development Kit and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Content Management Starter Kit are final and out now :-)

You can download these here:

WSS v3 SDK

MOSS 2007 ECM Starter Kit RTM

There's also a new starter kit out on the ECM blog: Taxonomy/Tagging Starter Kit for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

«Currently, the kit allows authors to attach tags to content and readers to specify tags in which they are interested. Using this information for a specified content source, a customized Content Query Web Part shows only the items that match a reader’s respective tags.»

Mayday, Mayday! I've been tagged!

2007-01-09T16:23:36.4870000+01:00

It's true... I've been tagged... Thanks to Mart :-), guess it's my turn now to tell the world 5 things most people probably don't know about me:

I started my own company back when I was in College, with 2 years still ahead of me to finish it. Started on a basement, hence it's name «CaveDigital» (translated: DigitalBasement). I had very little experience on what managing your own company meant and very little knowledge of the burocracy involved. There were times when I slept 4 hours a week, to be able to cope with both work and college, and... let's not discuss how much money I had in my pocket to get by monthly... first project ever (from a commercial perspective) was EUR 150.00, we (3 persons) worked for 3 months and got EUR 50.00 each out of it. Now, this little thing founded back in 2000, has it's own office (on a first floor :-)) and we keep recruiting. Its success lies on the family environment and quality of the people who work on it: every single one :-) It is cultural, and I am thankful for that! If I could go back, I would do everything again for a very simple reason: what I do for a living, I'm lucky to do it for fun :-D
Enough on the work topic. Back when I was a teenager I did a lot of 3D stills and animation, using tools like 3DSMax and I like anime/manga cartoons, but never have time now to actually enjoy it.
I surf, whenever I get a chance to grab my board and drive to the beach - which is rarely now, but I'm really hopeful that someday I'll be able to change that. Whenever I go surfing, I have a lot of fun and my anxieties go away. I also like to snowboard, but this one I happen to enjoy even more rarely...
Patrick Tisseghem, Mart Muller and Maxim Tarassenko are the people responsible for convincing me to blog. If whatever I type here hurts your eyes, it's their fault! They started this. Oh, and my blog is kindly hosted by Maxim!
Last but not least: everyday, whenever I go over my day on my mind, I'm always thankful for the time I spend with my better half, Xana, and how we're always present for each other, for good or bad. Thank you Xana :-) - hey, when will you start blogging? ;-)

Next in line? hummm

I'm tagging the following people:

Patrick Tisseghem (U2U)
José António Silva (Microsoft Portugal)
Daniel Pereira (CaveDigital)
Marcos Alves (CaveDigital)
Vitor Castelo (CaveDigital)

Windows Live Messenger stopped working ...

2007-01-06T02:29:11.3480000+01:00

Important! Read entire post first!!

Today, after arriving home, I was no longer able to connect to Windows Live Messenger :-S and was getting the following error code: 80048820 and Extended error code: 80048416.

When clicking Troubleshoot, the key ports failed...

After struggling with my laptop, and a few web searches latter, I finally got it back working:

Close your Windows Live Messenger
Open Internet Explorer
Go to Tools > Internet Options
Under the Advanced Tab, under Security make sure the «Check for server certificate revocation» is unchecked and that «Use SSL 3.0» is checked.
Close Internet Explorer
Restart Windows Live Messenger

This fixed it for me :-) but ... hummmmmmm ...

I was intrigued by what was happening, and why the check for server certificate revocation was causing this failure, re-checked this option again in Internet Explorer and continued investigating, until I found out that my system was set for February (how?? :-O, was in January when I left the office, my last sent email confirms me this :-S) ... tunned it back to January and Messenger started working fine.

So, when you face this issue, first thing first - check your time and date.

Hope it helps someone out there.

Happy New Year!

2006-12-30T12:51:52.9270000+01:00

Wish you all a 2007 full of successes and happiness!

Windows SharePoint Services v3 Application Templates

2006-12-28T23:09:02.7429964+01:00

Via Bart,

«[WSS-V3] Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates - downloads...

hot hot hot?

This download includes a set of Version 2.0 Application Templates that have been upgraded for Windows SharePoint Service 3.0. The upgraded templates are offered in English only.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=35EBF87F-BF98-4E6F-9987-E861533E3A8D&displaylang=en »

Get it on ;-)

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-24T14:46:15.2508480+01:00

Wish you all a Merry Christmas! :-D

Skipping lunch for nice photos

2006-12-21T20:37:52.6170614+01:00

We took a shot at skipping a normal lunch for going for a ride for nice photos:

Lagoa do Fogo (Fire Lagoon) Photos

you definitly have to visit the Portuguese islands of Açores (Azores) ;-)

Back to work ;-)

How to hard code the language of Outlook Web Access interface

2006-12-21T20:23:36.2110000+01:00

While deploying another Microsoft Learning Gateway project here in Azores, we were struggleing, both with Ricardo Machado and Rui Silva, with Outlook Web Access ... some users were getting their OWA folders set to english, and we need to enforce these to be all in Portuguese.

While searching for a solution, we found that the default folders' language is set for each user on the first login, meaning, for example, that if you login for the first time to your account using an english interface, your folders will be created in english.

We then found this KB article:

«How to hard code the language of OWA interface
SUMMARY
This step-by-step article describes how to hard code the language of the Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface.»

So we fired Visual Studio up and did what had to be done, deployed the .dll and it seems to have solved the issue.

If you need the .dll for this ISAPI filter (for forcing pt-PT (Portuguese-Portugal)), I'm attaching it to this post - use at your own risk, I provide no support for it, but hope it is useful to someone out there and that it helps out. :-) For instructions on how to deploy, follow the KB mentioned above.

OWALanguageForce3.zip (76.63 KB)

«An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 6, position 50.» while accessing /_layouts/2070/settings.aspx

2006-11-30T19:13:34.7080000+01:00

Applies to:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003)
Windows SharePoint Services v2 (WSS v2)

probably applies as well to ASP.NET applications with similar problem (web.config xml malformed)

Problem:
When trying to access a SharePoint site settings ( /_layouts/2070/settings.aspx (if your SharePoint is in English), or /_layouts/2070/settings.aspx (if your SharePoint is in Portuguese), etc.) and get the following error:

«An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 6, position 50.»

Cause:
This error was caused by a «&» char on a custom webapp's Web.config stored under the LAYOUTS/2070/LPUtilities folder:

While parsing this file, when the «&» char was hit, an exception was thrown with the error message mentioned above.

Solution:
The «&» char must be substituted with a Html Entity:

Hope this helps someone out there. ;-)