Is it possible to filter (using FilterZen) a standard Document Library by a specific user profile field such as Department, where Department is also a field in the List / Library? I cannot see a way of doing it like the out-of-the-box Current User Filter Web Part.

Can do! With a few tweaks. Truth be told, we've been meaning to roll out first-class native FilterZen support for the SharePoint Server (MOSS / SPS) User Profiles model for a bit now. We expect to finalize an update for this by early October 2011, ie. in the next 1-2 weeks.

But that's no excuse not to implement such a requirement in FilterZen right now, with the current version you have now available. Of course, if you're on MOSS 2007 / SPS 2010, you could just use the out-of-box Current User Filter Web Part right away and skip FilterZen entirely — but if you have other filters for your List or Library you'd like to apply with FilterZen, integrating a User Profile Property into your main FilterZen Web Part is an understandable need and this is how you do it:

Let's work from the original enquiry above. You have a List View / Library View Web Part on your page (or you work directly on a View Page for that Library) and the Library contains a Department field. We want to filter so that only documents are shown that apply to the current user's Department, as stored in the corresponding User Profile Property.

For now there are no other Web Parts on the page. Add to it an out-of-box Current User Filter Web Part, a FilterZen Transformer Web Part and a FilterZen Filter Web Part, in that order. Do not connect any Web Parts at this point. Since you can freely re-arrange the order of Web Parts on the page interactively, be sure we have the following Web Part order:

1. Out-of-box Current User Filter Web Part
2. FilterZen Transformer Web Part
3. FilterZen Filter Web Part
4. Your Library View Web Part

1. The Current User Filter Web Part

• For Filter Name, specify TempDepartment
• Under Select value to provide, pick Department
• Under Advanced Filter Options, tick the Send Empty if there are no values check-box option

2. The FilterZen Filter Web Part

Apart from any other filters your FilterZen Filter Web Part may contain, you will add a Text Filter named Department. This filter name refers not to the User Profile Property but to the target Library Field it is filtering! Apart from the name, the only other setting you need to set for this Text Filter is the default value which you will set to {$TempDepartment$} (or whatever name you used in step 1.)

3. Web Part Connections

Only now do you connect all Web Parts on the page, exactly as follows and exactly in this order:

• From the Connections sub-menu of the FilterZen Transformer Web Part, select ICellConsumer (Get Cell From) and then pick your Current User Filter Web Part.
• From the Connections sub-menu of the FilterZen Transformer Web Part, select IRowProvider (Send Row To) and then pick your FilterZen Filter Web Part.
• From the Connections sub-menu of the FilterZen Filter Web Part, select Send Filter Values To and then pick your List View / Library View Web Part.

At first glance, this possibly looks more complicated than it really is — in fact, it's a fairly straightforward sequence of simple steps, really! With the next FilterZen, as usual things will be even easier and even faster to implement. But even now, FilterZen's core flexibility let's you combine the (very few) remaining not-yet-fully-absorbed skills of out-of-box Filter Web Parts with its many rock-solid and tremendously useful capabilities already provided.

This was just one example of how experimentation with core building blocks and re-using basic capabilities can take you far beyond the myriad of built-in, "typical" turn-key use-cases. So keep exploring!

Except when it doesn't. With a growing user base, a tiny minority of edge-case users or misconfigurations that prevent the wizard from completing are to be expected, and this article applies only to them.

Always try deploy.exe first. As a reminder, when you download one of our SharePoint tools, you get a roxority_<Product>Zen.zip file, ie. roxority_FilterZen.zip, roxority_PeopleZen.zip etc.

Copy it to your SharePoint server (or in a multi-server farm environment, to the primary web front-end server, ie. the one hosting your SharePoint Central Administration) and extract this ZIP setup package on there.

Now, don't just double-click deploy.exe to run it: instead, right-click it and depending on the Windows Server version, you'll see either a 'Run as administrator' or a 'Run as...' option.

• If it's the latter ('run as...'), pick that option and then specify a user account that (A) has administrative rights on the machine AND (B) is also a member of the SharePoint Farm Administrators group (review it in Central Administration if unsure). Both conditions should be met for best results. (Better yet, you're already logged in to your Windows Server as such as user account.)
• If the former ('run as administrator'), be sure you're logged in to the server as a user account that (A) has administrative rights on the machine AND (B) is also a member of the SharePoint Farm Administrators group (review it in Central Administration if unsure). Both conditions should be met for best results.

Things should be smooth sailing from here, but if you belong to the less-than-1% of users where the deploy.exe wizard does not complete successfully, read on.

Manual step 1 — install via STSADM:

If you are about to install one of our add-ons, we have to assume you're already at least remotely familiar with the STSADM tool that ships out-of-box with every SharePoint installation. No need to be a command-line ninja, you'll just need one command:

• STSADM -o addsolution -file c:\fantasypath\<WspFileName>.wsp

Replace c:\fantasypath with the full directory path of the extracted setup package, which will contain between 2 and 4 WSP files. For <WspFileName>.wsp, substitute the WSP file appropriate for your environment:

Manual step 2 — deploy via Central Administration:

In SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007), go to Central Administration / Operations / Solution Management — in SharePoint 2010, go to Central Administration / System Settings / Farm Management > Manage Farm Solutions.

Next, select the WSP file you just installed in step 1 with STSADM. Click Deploy Solution and follow the on-screen instructions. Do this repeatedly UNTIL you have fully deployed the WSP to:

• all your content Web Applications applicable for this WSP
• the Central Administration Web Application (MANDATORY!)
• all Shared Service Provider (SSP) and Shared Resource Provider (SRP) Web Applications (MANDATORY!)

Manual step 3 — enabling, and then IISRESET:

Using farm-administrative credentials (best to follow the recommendations from the beginning of this article regarding deploy.exe), open any one page linked under the <Product>Zen Studio section on the Central Administration / Site Settings page. This should "enable" the software for full use in this SharePoint server farm, AND notify you about the success of this "enabling" operation too.

The software will not work unless and until this "enabling" procedure has been completed (just opening any <Product>Zen Studio page under Central Administration as per above should do this) and all web front-end servers in the SharePoint server farm have been IISRESET afterwards.

Manual step 4 — activate Site Collection Features:

In the root Web Site of your content Site Collection, go to the Site Settings page. In the Site Collection Administration section, click Site Collection Features (NOT Site Features!) and on the next page, activate the Site Collection Feature(s) you need.

Uninstalling our SharePoint WSP Solution Packages

Just like installation, your best choice for uninstallation is our deploy.exe wizard that is part of the downloaded roxority_<Product>Zen.zip setup package. But if you need to uninstall the solution package manually:

• first perform manual step 4 above, but instead of activating the Site Collection Features, deactivate them.
• then perform manual step 2 above, but instead of choosing Deploy Solution, repeatedly Retract Solution until it is no longer deploy to any Web Application.
• then perform manual step 2 above, but instead of choosing Deploy Solution, click Remove Solution.
• IISRESET all web front-end servers in the SharePoint server farm

Anyway, if you do encounter an Unknown Error (this has become spectacularly rare fortunately as our software has grown ever more stable over the last 2 years), then we need you to turn on Detailed Error Messages in your SharePoint environment. This is easy to do and absolutely non-dangerous, plus typically you will be reporting your issue from your QA, test or dev server rather than production. Here is what we need you to do.

Simply put, this gives you an easy tool that lets you fully redefine how PeopleZen displays or transforms certain user information, which is typically returned in rather raw form by your Data Source and may not be ready for human consumption as is.

I have tried to set up the Filter Web Part with an Issue List on SharePoint Server 2010 and everything seemed to work flawlessly except the List 'unfilters' every time it is auto-refreshed.

I have tried putting the filters in a Web Part on the List and applying it to a List in a Web Part where AJAX Options Asyncronous Refresh is enabled with the same result: the List unfilters every time it is auto-refreshed.

The strange thing is that it seems to work OK when AJAX Options Manual Refresh is applied to a List in a webpart?!

The main reason for this is quite simply that the PictureURL property is a URL field (storing only the HTTP address pointing to a picture file), whereas AD stores the entire image itself as a "binary large object" (blob). So any synchronization will involve downloading the pictures stored in AD, putting them somewhere HTTP-accessible, and then setting the PictureURL user profile property to the address of this copied image file.

We wanted a sync-all, batch solution — you launch it and it just runs — so we wrote a free tool to help you with this, greatly assisted (thanks again, Robert! :) by a User Profiles Web Part user who had a vested interest in such a tool.

We packaged this up with PeopleZen but you won't even need a license to keep using this free sync tool indefinitely. If you need the source code for more sophisticated customizations, simply contact us and we'll send it to you.

We have a WSS 3.0 store of documents that we would like to share. They are stored as list items and there are a number of different columns which help describe the documents. Some are quite straightforward, such as document name, document description, division and subdivision within the organisation that created the document. The one that is causing problems is a column called keywords. It takes its values from another list (sample values might be: climate change, air quality, litter prevention, noise pollution control). Since a document might be relevant to a number of areas, multiple keywords can be selected. I found that once multiple selections were allowed, a search scope allowing the user to narrow their search by keyword just wouldn't work. I would like to allow a user to narrow their search by organisational division, which I have done, and I'd like to be able to give them good functionality to filter the results that are returned. The filtering wouldn't just be limited to the keywords; it would also allow users to filter by date and author.

whether we use our own premier SharePoint Filter Web Part or the out-of-box ones, or attempt to create any other kind of Web Part connection:

• on a List View Page (AllItems.aspx etc.)
• in the browser, via the Connections option in any Web Part's edit menu
• in the context of SharePoint Server development deployments installed on physical 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate machines (the client OS doesn't matter in this discussion, Win 7 in this case is the server OS)

then the connection gets LOST — routinely, repeatedly, reproducably — as soon as the page gets freshly reloaded. Now, as long as you stay in the page state and perform other changes via post-backs, but keep the page view state alive (this is ASP.NET lingo but it'll have to do for now), the connection seems to stay alive, but re-initialize the page fully (not via an F5-postback but by fully re-navigating to it) and the connection is simply gone. All other modifications to your Web Parts and the page seems to have been persisted to the Content Database just fine, except for the connection itself!

Now of course the official recommendation is to use a Windows 2008 Server OS rather than Windows 7 for SharePoint Server deployments, and furthermore from the general design of SharePoint 2010 the customizing of List View pages with further Web Parts or even connections seems to be implicitly discouraged in the overall design — for example, you lose the List View selector drop-down menu in the Browse ribbon tab as soon as you add another Web Part to your List View page, and some indeed argue that such view aggregations and advanced behaviors should be realized in separate pages rather than the mere core View pages — but...

...as usual, theres a work-around to keep going:

quite simply, set up your Web Part connection in SharePoint Designer and it will be persisted for good. Of course now you have a customized, a.k.a. un-ghosted copy of the List View page in your content database (for no particular reason other than SPD always un-ghosting a page when you hit Save, even though the same customizations when done in the browser would not have resulting in such an un-ghosting since Web Parts and connections are neatly stored outside your page mark-up in the DB and are just merged with the page HTML by SPD when it opens it), but neither on your Windows 7 development server nor on most productive systems is this typically really an issue.

Previously, content managers, site designers or admins pre-configured individual filters with the proper settings for their end-users, but those had no way of customizing these. While this is still a valid use-case for many projects, with the new Dynamic Ad-Hoc Filters, end users can arrange and combine their own filters on the fly to search the List, Data View or other Web Part in a way that suits them in their individual, current situation.

• End-users can AND/OR combine multiple filters on the fly.
• The appropriate rich editors (date controls and people pickers) are shown when a field is selected, without a page post-back.
• End users can also search for "any field", for example "show me records where any field contains iron".
• Setting this up is a breeze, and admins can pre-define which fields and operators are allowed:

The highlighting needs to be explicitly enabled in the FilterZen Web Part settings tool-pane (in the Interactive Filters section, see above-right screenshot) and of course you can fully re-style and customize this using CSS: simply use the span.rox-hilitematch selector.