Lightning Tools

Gizmo have been happy users of the Lightning Storm Forums for a number of months now. Troy Cox was kind enough to spend a few minutes answering our questions on how they SharePoint and the forums:

Lightning Storm Forums case study

As anybody will know who has been involved with building and selling software products, pricing is the most difficult part to get right - and it seems this time with BDC Meta Man Web Edition we got it wrong! We described this as being an 'Enterprise Tool' and therefore expected only large companies would be interested in buying it. Of course if you describe something as 'Enterprise' there is a misconception that you can charge more for it!

We've certainly had lots of interest in BDC Meta Man Web Edition - but the sticking point has been the pricing. When we go back and analyze the sales of the original BDC Meta Man this makes sense:

1, Most companies do not need more than 4 licenses.

2, Only 2 or 3 people actually understand the structure of the database or system the organization wants integrated through the BDC

So with those two points in mind we've decided to drop the price of BDC Meta Man Web Edition to $3,000.00 for new customers. If you are an existing customer who has purchased BDC Meta Man please drop us an email and we'll be able to offer an even better deal.

We’ve just pushed out a new version of the Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint that I know a few of you have been waiting for! :)

The single new bit of functionality in this release is the ability to attach files to forum posts. Once you’ve downloaded and installed/upgraded the WSP solution you’ll need to make sure you have the option in the web part toolbar properties enabled:

This is here incase you are using the forums on an anonymous internet site and you don’t want just anybody attaching files!

When this option is enabled, after the Rich Text Editor you’ll see a link to ‘Attach File’

When you click on this it will change to a file upload control which allows you to select the file you want to add to the post:

Now when the post is made you’ll see below the main post text the attached file will appear. Currently we only allow one file attachment per post.

You can get a free trail of the forums from the forum homepage.

Today we’ve released a new version of the Lightning Conductor Web Part. This includes some exciting new features we know you are going to love! Here’s an embedded video to show you the new bits:

<br /><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=dde6364b-95a7-40fe-a41a-30a27b8fe0f7" target="_new" title="Lightning Conductor Web Part - new features">Video: Lightning Conductor Web Part - new features</a>

You can also watch a larger version of the screencast by clicking here.

Here’s a textual overview, click the images to make them larger.

Data Sources

The Lightning Conductor Web Part has new data sources which include the ability to Roll Up from ‘All Site Collections’. This makes the Web Part maintenance free as it means that as new Site Collections are created, they will automatically be included in the rollup. We also added the ability to selectively choose which lists and libraries you wish to include meaning that you can exclude a specific list from the results. The same feature was included for Sites so that some sites can be excluded from the rollup. The below image displays the Data Source Options in use:

Filters

The filters within the Lightning Conductor Web Part have been improved to allow two other ways of filtering content. Users without access to the Tool Part can now filter via a Quick Filters Toolbar which can be turned on or off as shown below:

The Lightning Conductor Web Part can also receive Filters from the Out of the Box Filter Web Parts that ship with MOSS. The below image displays the Current Filter Web Part connected to the Lightning Conductor Web Part:

Audiences

As well as applying Filters, the Lightning Conductor Web Part can hide content that is targeted to specific audiences, instead of displaying all content to every type of user. This is useful for lists such as announcements. Below you can see the Audience options available to show or hide content based upon the users profile.

'Eating your own dog food' is very important when building a software product. Not only do you use the product in a day to day fashion and therefore see little ways to increase it’s usefulness but you also become excited about it and working on it doesn’t seem such a chore when your own work tasks are being improved and impacted by it.

We’re going this right now with the Lightning Storm Forums on our Connect Site. We’ve used a number of different third party forum/feedback solutions for customers to get help and give feedback – but it feels so much nicer now that we are using our own tool. I’ve already got 3 or 4 tweeks and options I want to include that we’d have never become aware of if we didn’t use it ourselves.

Please do take 2 mins to check out the SharePoint forums on the Connect site, and give them a test using the test forum or ask a question.

The eventual aim is to get www.suguk.org running on the Lightning Storm Forum.

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Anyone that reads my personal blog will know that I’m always buying lots of good books. One of the good things about now having the new office is that I can bring them all in to share with everybody else! We will be implementing a one in, one out rule though!

(click for larger image)

A few books to shout out:

C# in Depth
Linq in Action
Framework Design Guidelines
Crystal Clear
Inside Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

They’re all good though otherwise they wouldn’t have been bought in!

<nick/>

We’ve just added to our support area the User Manual for BDC Meta Man Web Edition:

http://www.lightningtools.com/bdc-meta-man/web-edition/user-manual.aspx

Have a read, and make sure you try it out!

If you’d like to learn more about BDC Meta Man Web Edition you can attend one of our live web casts where we’ll walk you through the product and talk about its future plans. The sessions are

Wednesday 17th June 3pm GMT
Wednesday 17th June 8pm GMT

If you’d like to attend either of these please drop an email to support@lightningtools.com and indicate which session you want to attend.

<nick/>

Today we’ve just released a new version of the Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint. Here’s a quick run down of what’s new in this release:

Title column in Post list now set to improve how search results are returned

pubDate added to RSS feeds

Forums can now be ordered from within Forum Management view

You can now control the number of forums displayed before paging from the web part toolbar properties

Bug fix in RTE to support Korean language input

If you want to test the forum out visit the web parts page and download the free trial, and for existing customers you can get your download from the Downloads page after logging in.

We’re delighted to announce the first 1.0 release of BDC Meta Man Web Edition. The release of this is long overdue, and we’ll have a follow up blog post about why this is and what we’ve learnt so hopefully you can learn from what we did.

Please download the application from the BDC Meta Man Web Edition page and give it a try – it’s licensed the same way as the Windows version so you can install and run it, being able to create two entities, an association, and add it into the BDC. It really is quite impressive being able to design your BDC application in the browser and import it straight into SharePoint all from the browser. If nothing else this is a great example of what can now be accomplished in the browser with a great javascript libraries such as jQuery.

We’re also trying a different licensing type this time – by doing it by SharePoint Farm. This will make it simple to cost and easier to deploy and manage. If you’re an existing BDC Meta Man customer drop us an email as we will look to discount the purchase for you.

Big thumbs up to Phill and Hrayr who’ve been working very hard on this!

Many of you have tracked Lightning Tools progress throughout the 2 years we’ve been running. Building on the success of BDC Meta Man, thanks to the feedback and ideas from our customers we’ve been able to develop some other tools and web parts that you’ve also found very useful.

We’ve grown from a three man team working on one tool remotely in Moscow, Reading and Florida, to a 10 man team, working in even more varied places on multiple projects! Working remotely has its benefits:

- it keeps costs low

- it allows you to work without interruption.

Working remotely quite often means setting up an office in your spare room at home to work from, and this makes it difficult as work and life are not nicely separated – and for me at least, you can spend hours upon hours in front of your computer just because its there – not really focusing on anything. As our team has grown it has become more difficult to communicate with each other. Explaining problems, ideas and requirements will always be quicker face to face, and of course remote working can be quite lonely – you certainly need to make sure you get outside during the day and speak to people!

So with all this in mind Lightning Tools is really happy to announce we’ve opened an office in Reading. Slowly but surely we’ll look to relocate people who want to move across and also grow the team here by taking on some new recruits. It’s an exciting time for us all and we are really looking forward to the improvements it’ll bring in helping us communicate better and develop our tools quicker. The office can sit around 12 people, but to start with it’ll just be Phill and myself to get things going. So far we’ve only got 2 large desks for Phill and myself to work on, but we’ll be acquiring more as we go along – we’ll post some pictures as we gather more things!

If you’re ever in Reading and fancy stopping by for a cup of tea drop me an email!

City University of Seattle have taken the time to answer our questions about how they are using SharePoint and the Business Data Catalog. You can have a read of their responses here:

City University of Seattle, SharePoint and the BDC

If you’d like to take part in a Lightning Tools case study on how you are using SharePoint or any of our web parts and tools please let us know – nick@lightningtools.com

<nick/>

We wanted to give you some idea of the new features we’ve been working on for the Lightning Conductor Web Part. When you are rolling up lots of content from many different site collections it can be quite overwhelming the number of documents or list items that are returned. You can setup ‘permanent’ filters within the web part toolbar, but if you ever want to change these it is quite a few clicks to do so. What we wanted to implement was a quick way for you to be able to dynamically filter the results coming back.

To allow your users to use quick filters it is simply a case of selecting the option within the web part toolbar properties:

Once this is set you have two options for how to filter your information. You can use the out of the box filter web parts that come with MOSS 2007

(click image to enlarge)

or we’ve added the ability to do dynamic filtering based on values you type in to filter on. This is similar to how the Business Data List Web Parts work

The ability to filter in this way will let us show you how you can use SharePoint in a Getting Things Done kind of way – expect that blog post to be coming soon. This version of the Lightning Conductor Web Part is undergoing testing at the moment – we’ll have more news on a release date very soon.

Any questions, feedback or thoughts please leave a comment!

<nick/>

An issue that we’ve come across recently while refactoring some code – rather than opening an SPSite and SPWeb we changed to just use SPContext.Site.Web as we couldn’t remember why we hadn’t used this in the first place. Initial tests were good – however when we tried to view the web part as an anonymous user we got prompted with a login box even though we were running the code in an SPRunWithElevatedPrivileges block. It seems that when you use the SPWeb directly from SPContext the code using the object will always run as the user viewing SharePoint – regardless of the elevated privileges.

This is only an issue for us when anonymous users are trying to update something – so general viewing is fine. This is also a good pointer of where a comment in the code would have been useful!

There is a good code sample here:

<nick/>

We’re working on a couple of new features for the Lightning Storm Forums right now that have been requested by a number of customers. The first is to allow the forums to be reordered.

Pretty simple requirement and something fundamental for forum management!

The next thing is to allow users to attach documents to forum posts. We’ve been going backwards and forwards with this – should we allow multiple files to be attached, or just a single one. We’re going down the route of just attaching a single document for now and releasing the feature to get feedback. But if you have any strong opinions right now please leave a comment here…

Today we’ve released a new version of the Lightning Storm Forums. The main functionality that has been implemented is the addition of a TopicUrl field within the Posts list. This means that when you search and see a post list item you’ll be able to navigate to the web part view and see all the posts for a topic. You can see full details of it here and also how to go about updating a forum that may already have posts within it:

Lightning Storm Forums for SharePoint and Search.

Today we’re happy to let you know about a new release of BDC Meta Man. This isn’t a major release, more a few bug fixes and tweaks to make things better. The two main things to let you know about we have created support articles for:

Setting up incremental crawls for the BDC

Localization of BDC entity names

and we’ve also added

Localization of BDC column names.

We’ve just opened up the support pages of BDC Web Man with two walk through’s the show you how to get started with the tool with both Oracle and SQL Server. Here’s a few direct links for you:

BDC Web Man Support Area

BDC Web Services for SQL Server

BDC Web Services for Oracle

and of course we have the two screencasts on the BDC Web Man homepage.

Any more areas you’d like to see covered please let us know.

We’ve just released the new version of BDC Web Man. This is our tool that will generate WCF web services for you that you can easily integrate with the Business Data Catalog. Great if you are taking the web services/SOA route with SharePoint integration.

New in this version is the ability to connect to Oracle and generate web services…

and we’ve also improved the SQL Server functionality to now allow you to drag and drop SQL Views onto the design surface.

BDC Web Man is licensed the same way as BDC Meta Man, so you can configure the web methods for two entities and create an association between them to see exactly how things work. You can download the latest version from here:

http://www.lightningtools.com/bdc-web-man/default.aspx

Last week Lightning Tools attended the excellent SharePoint Best Practice Conference in London organized by Combined Knowledge. Many thanks for those that dropped by our stand and spoke to Harry, Phill, Nick or Brett.

Hopefully we were able to provide you with the information you needed on our products, but if you have any questions or comments please email support@lightningtools.com