OK, so lots of hype and excitement out on the Interwebs today, as Steve Jobs unveils the 3G iPhone. For people living in this Great Southern Land (Australia) such as myself, this is a slightly big deal in a geeky kind of way, as iPhones have not been available here up till now. OK, so yada yada and lots of blog posts and technorista foaming at the mouth and so on.
The iPhone looks blandly nice (or maybe it was having an "average hair day"), black for the 8Gb model and a choice of white or black for the 16Gb model. GPS now built in as predicted but other that and the whole 3G thing, not really very different from the original. Yawn.
The only thing I want to know is whether it opens Office documents nicely. I want to be able to, at the least, view Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs. Ideally, I want to be able to edit them. I don't want to have to be web connected to do so. So far, no one seems to have any clue as to how well it will meet this need. For me, this is the key thing that would turn the iPhone from a phone with an unique interface, but little else to recommend it, into a business capable smart phone.
So if you find and answer to the question, drop me a comment.
Update: Found references to "Office support" here and here. But what does that actually mean? Opens documents or does it "Google style"?
Update 2: Noticed in the Keynote that Steve clicked on an attachment in an email and opened it. However, this looked to me like an image he was opening and not a document.
Update 3: This article about native Office applications on the iPhone appeared on the webs today (15th of July). Quoting the final paragraph, "Dataviz told us yesterday that unspecified technical issues were holding up the development of office suites for the iPhone. Joswiak said he didn't know of any such hold-ups, but then added that there might be issues with applications each having their own file space. "There's no cross-application file structure," he said."
I've been working on my first Sharepoint 2007 site. Actually, it's a WSS site as I am not using Sharepoint. The site I have created has very limited functionality, and is intended to allow the company I am working for centrally maintain a register of a certain type of action they are qualified to perform and provide a link to all of the documents related to this action, and WSS is sufficient for this.
So what I have is the Sharepoint equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet (a custom list), which lists the actions and all the associated attributes, and I have a Document Repository, broken into folders. Each document in the Document Repository has two custom attributes - a action type flag and a business unit flag. Each action in the custom list has an action type attribute and a business unit attribute, and when a user selects "Related Documents" from the customised Actions drop down for a list item, Sharepoint does a search in the Document Repository for documents where the business unit and action type flags match the data in the selected action in the custom list.
So far so good. However, to make the experience within Sharepoint similar to what the users are used to and easier, I have made a custom workflow that fires when a new document is created and works out what folder within the Document Repository the new document is being uploaded to. In other words, I am trying to make the document itself explicitly aware of its location, and specifically the folder it is in. Each of the folders in the document repository are named for one of the business units. So the idea is that the document metadata will automatically contain the business unit name that owns the document.
This is where the problem emerges. A user enters the Document Repository, and begins to upload a document. At this point, the workflow fires off. Before the workflow has completed, the screen refreshes to allow the user to edit the metadata for the document, in this case the title, name, action type flag and business unit flag. The metadata displayed is the metadata that the document was uploaded with, but meanwhile, in the background, the workflow has updated the document's business unit flag attribute. The user clicks the check in button, and because the metadata that the document had when the page was rendered and the metadata it has now the workflow is finished is different (irrespective of whether the user entered any changes for these fields), the process errors.
Server Error in '/' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The file Document Repository/BusinessUnit/Document.JPG has been modified by SHAREPOINT\system on 22 May 2008 11:36:50 +0800.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: The file Document Repository/BusinessUnit/Document.JPG has been modified by SHAREPOINT\system on 22 May 2008 11:36:50 +0800.
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace:
[COMException (0x81020037): The file Document Repository/BusinessUnit/Document.JPG has been modified by SHAREPOINT\system on 22 May 2008 11:36:50 +0800.]
Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.AddOrUpdateItem(String bstrUrl, String bstrListName, Boolean bAdd, Boolean bSystemUpdate, Boolean bPreserveItemVersion, Boolean bUpdateNoVersion, Int32& plID, String& pbstrGuid, Guid pbstrNewDocId, Boolean bHasNewDocId, String bstrVersion, Object& pvarAttachmentNames, Object& pvarAttachmentContents, Object& pvarProperties, Boolean bCheckOut, Boolean bCheckin, Boolean bMigration, Boolean bPublish) +0
Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.AddOrUpdateItem(String bstrUrl, String bstrListName, Boolean bAdd, Boolean bSystemUpdate, Boolean bPreserveItemVersion, Boolean bUpdateNoVersion, Int32& plID, String& pbstrGuid, Guid pbstrNewDocId, Boolean bHasNewDocId, String bstrVersion, Object& pvarAttachmentNames, Object& pvarAttachmentContents, Object& pvarProperties, Boolean bCheckOut, Boolean bCheckin, Boolean bMigration, Boolean bPublish) +199
[SPException: The file Document Repository/BusinessUnit/Document.JPG has been modified by SHAREPOINT\system on 22 May 2008 11:36:50 +0800.]
Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.AddOrUpdateItem(String bstrUrl, String bstrListName, Boolean bAdd, Boolean bSystemUpdate, Boolean bPreserveItemVersion, Boolean bUpdateNoVersion, Int32& plID, String& pbstrGuid, Guid pbstrNewDocId, Boolean bHasNewDocId, String bstrVersion, Object& pvarAttachmentNames, Object& pvarAttachmentContents, Object& pvarProperties, Boolean bCheckOut, Boolean bCheckin, Boolean bMigration, Boolean bPublish) +240
Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem.AddOrUpdateItem(Boolean bAdd, Boolean bSystem, Boolean bPreserveItemVersion, Boolean bNoVersion, Boolean bMigration, Boolean bPublish, Boolean bCheckOut, Boolean bCheckin, Guid newGuidOnAdd, Int32& ulID, Object& objAttachmentNames, Object& objAttachmentContents, Boolean suppressAfterEvents) +933
Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem.UpdateInternal(Boolean bSystem, Boolean bPreserveItemVersion, Guid newGuidOnAdd, Boolean bMigration, Boolean bPublish, Boolean bNoVersion, Boolean bCheckOut, Boolean bCheckin, Boolean suppressAfterEvents) +182
Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem.UpdateOverwriteVersion() +88
Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SaveButton.SaveItem(SPContext itemContext, Boolean uploadMode, String checkInComment) +178
Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SaveButton.SaveItem() +58
Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SaveButton.OnBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs e) +249
System.Web.UI.Control.RaiseBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs args) +35
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnCommand(CommandEventArgs e) +115
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +163
System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +7
System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +11
System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +177
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1746
Not good, huh!
Anyway, it turns out this is a fairly well known problem (even though Googling the error doesn't come up with much). Two good posts that started to lead me in the right direction are here and here. It turns out, that for me, the solution was as easy as making sure I had a mandatory or required field/column with no default value entered for the uploaded documents. The workflow would then have to wait until the user entered the requisite information and checked the document in, before firing. Problem solved.
