As SharePoint pro’s, we can generally meet almost any kind of requirement with the platform, but for some of them, we know in our hearts that:

This is yet another blog post on comparing dates in XSL in a data view web part.

I also reject the “it’s already been done” argument. So what if it was? The terrible consequence is that people who are looking up your topic via bing will now find two or five or a dozen articles. Who cares? I always prefer to find several articles on the same topic when I go searching the tubes for stuff. Different points of view, different writing styles, different approaches to the same problem – they all help me understand what I need. In my opinion, the community is no where close to reaching a saturation point on good quality blog articles on any topic in the SharePoint world.

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the last year or so and I don’t see any easy answer. It really boils down to education and training. I think that SP 2010 is going to change the game a bit and it’s going to play out differently and in slow motion as companies roll out their SP 2010 solutions over 2010 and beyond. In order to succeed, End Users will need to transform themselves and get a little IT religion. They’ll need to learn a little bit about proper requirements analysis. They will need some design documentation that clearly identifies business process workflow, for instance. They need to understand fundamental concepts like CRUD (create, update and delete), dev/test/qa/prod environments and how to use that infrastructure to properly deploy solutions that live a nice long time and bend (not break) in response to changes in an organization.

The problem seems to have been an adobe plugin, “Air” or their flash plugin – I don’t really know what it’s called or care all that much. It turns out that it’s not compatible with a 64 bit environment (which is *totally* reasonable; it’s not like 64 bit is the kind of thing that anyone except ***crazy*** companies want to support or anything). I tried to uninstall it but that experiment only lasted about 15 minutes. It turns out that a ridiculous number of sites are using flash tech (I may be the last one to realize this on the planet). So, I can’t live without it and I can’t use IE8 64 bit.

BPOS is an insanely feature rich platform. Exchange, SharePoint (MOSS Standard!), presence, instant live meetings – it’s a lot of functionality that I would sorely, sorely miss if I had to live without it. My business would be severely impacted without it. Could I find replacement functionality? Probably, but I think I would have to cobble it together from a variety of other vendors, complicating my life. BPOS has so far proven itself to be stable and reliable. For the right kind of customer (like my company), BPOS is worth strong consideration.

With the exception of the forms based authentication module and a handful of InfoPath forms, this project is using nearly all out of the box SharePoint functionality. Before I wrap up this min-case study, I want to point out something very important – no on involved with this project (aside from my company of course) has any idea that a thing called “SharePoint” is playing such a fundamental technical role. Nearly all of my end users view this as “the web site.” Our client values us because we’re solving their business problem. SharePoint is a great technical blob of goodness, but done right, that’s irrelevant to end users. They need a problem solved, not a wonderful blob of technology.

I’ve been working a great deal with InfoPath in the last month or two and I’ve realized that I follow a certain pattern with all of my forms. I think that this pattern is widely followed, at least for certain kinds of forms, so I decided to put this in place as a “Starter” template. It includes all the common bits that a form ought to have as well as some structure for the data elements of the form.

One of the first things I thought, once I started to play around with jQuery, was whether we could use it to secure a SharePoint view. The answer is “no” (or at least, I’m not claiming it’s possible). However, it is certainly possible to make it difficult for people to see a particular view.

Previously, I wrote about how to use jQuery to locate and hide a text field on a form. I didn’t care for the specific approach (I was chaining parents – that’s simply isn’t done these days, at least in families of quality).