Many sites and blogs already reported the new, but I’m posting it anyway since the buzz has been confirmed and it’s exciting:

SharePoint 2010 release date has been confirmed: launch date May 12th and RTM in April

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/03/05/sharepoint-2010-office-2010-launch.aspx

As I reported on one of my first posts about SP2010, one nice thing that has been implemented within the new User Profile Service Application, is the presence of the Organization Profiles.

I was browsing for some info about it (since today I was discussing on the usage of this component with Marco Rizzi); there is not yet much information around this topic and I came across this post by Peter Gerritsen which reports some nice information.

The whole idea is to have a new type of Profile for “Organizational” needs: Using the Organization Profile (and also beeing able to extend it using Using Sub-types) this feature can be used in order to create several type of organizational aggregations, depending on your company needs. In example: Divisions, Departments or even Legal-Entities (in case of a multi-company group).

Main issue when you were implementing this using Moss2007 is that all your hierarchy logic was build around the “Manager” property of users, but: what happen if your manager change job, and your office or department do not have a new manager assigned in time? Or what if a manger have two different role inside two organizations? You’ll end up having a broken/unclear hierarchy.

This component try to address this need.

Every organization can have defined who is the “leader” of this organization and who are the members.

Members can be included also by automatically include direct reports of the leader so based on the company hierarchy.

The members could also be associated by ActiveDirectory groups.

The nice nice thing about it is… that you will need to develop all the UI and end-user functionality by yourself 🙂

As far as I found so far, currently there is no any impact on the User Profile page and this information, although present, won’t be displayed. Peter in his post refer that MS did not make it to complete this feature since it has many different interesting approaches and evolution path.

As always, what we can do is to leverage on this infrastructure to build our logic if we need to include this type of information. The Object Model exposes all information from the class Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.OrganizationProfile 

As far as I analyzed it. It is currently not that stable yet: some components do not work 100% correctly, but we know it has not been release yet (so there is always time for some bugfixing)

HTH

Alberto

As far as I know, this will be the first SharePoint Saturday held in EMEA Region.
This formula of events held on Saturday, is pretty famous in the US, but not as much in Europe. We’ll see how it goes.
This version is an online one. It wouldn’t have been possible to organize an in presence event like it is for the SPSatrurday in the US.

Though, It would be nice to have one in italy too. Claudio Brotto, one of the italian mvp, is already a speker of the current emea chapter.

Follow the buzz on twitter: #SPSEMEA

I’ll be joining online sometime on Jannuary 23rd, 2010 (there’s a conflict with the italian UGIAL.NET 5th conference, which for the second time is on my own company’s offices).

We’ll see how it goes.

As I posted on this “warm-up” post I am running my personal blog using Telligent Graffiti CMS, main reason: I like telligent’s products and approach, and I wanted to test this product of them on my shoulder.

I am very happy about it, set it ip and customezed it very quickly; the bad thing is that its future is not clear yet (is it sometime it is not updated). Anyhow, for the time been, I keep using it and sometime I need to implement some changes.

This time I wanted to stop Google analytics, which I implemented on the site, to track my own site access (or generally speaking, any access from an administrator)

To accomplish this, I found this article by google “How do I exclude my internal traffic from reports?” , which reports how to set-up a custom filter to exclude traffic coming with special conditions.

Among this, there is the option to set a variable, using a JavaScript call

pageTracker._setVar(‘siteadmin_access’);

This variable is set within the Analytics cookie, which last for some time (but since cookie can be reset, I wanted to be set for all admin sessions)

Having understood that, I then needed to define how, within Graffiti CMS, to execute this javascript call: it needs to be executed only from the users which I wanted to exclude.
I then went through the “Graffiti CMS” official documentation (read: I went through someone else code to find out stuff similar to mine 🙂

The result is the following: to modify the layout page of the theme you are using (in my case SleepyBlue) which can be found here: Home > files >themes > SleepyBlue > layout.view

On the bottom of the page, befor the </html> closure, I added the following code:

#if ($macros.IsNotNull($user))
#if($macros.CanViewControlPanel($user))
<script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._setVar(‘siteadmin_access’);</script>
#end  
#end

Note: Since this call needs the pageTracker object to be instantiated, it require the Analytics call to he executed before.
Within Graffitics CMS, there is a specific call to include a generic analytics plug in, which is:

$!data.Site.WebStatistics

This call, in my customized-theme case, is called within the <head> section of the page.
(if you’re wondering where the Goolge js need to be defined in graffiti: go to the “Control Panel > Site Options > Settings > Web Statistics”)

Now all I needed to to, is from the Analytics Settings to create a filter:

From the Analytics Profile, add a new Filter.

Using IE8 Developer Toolbar, I verified that the cookie was corretly setup

As you can see, the cookie expires is in two year 🙂

HTH,
Alberto

This year ended with a good news: I will be speaking at the #SPOC2010 Microsoft SharePoint & Office Conference, scheduled for 9-11 March 2010.
It is a real pleasure to be there among the twenty speakers of the conference.

I will be presenting a session dedicated to the new social features, which are pervasive within many of the new functionality of the next version of SharePoint; my session’s mate will be Marco Rizzi with whom I am sure we will bring a lot of knowledge on this.
Nowadays you don’t develop “social applications” in the enterprise just because it is fancy or it is fun (even though it is more fun than developing standard applications 🙂 ). Most of the application that are currently been developed, or that are already in use, can leverage social functionality to connect people to people, colleague to colleague or employee to partners, so that the interaction between people is more effective and productive, and produce more relevant shared information.

More details to come 🙂

This is the official site: http://www.sharepointconference.it/

See you there!