Headlines for sharepointpedia

SharePoint Präsentationen auf Slideshare

Michael Greth — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:55:53 GMT

Zwei interessante Präsentationen zum Thema “Email und SharePoint” und “Anpassung und Design von SharePoint” von Kathy Hughes habe ich auf Slideshrae gefungen:

Emailing MOSS

View more presentations from Kathy Hughes.

Blooming SharePoint Design

View more presentations from Kathy Hughes.

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, Office 2010

SharePoint und Barrierefreiheit

Michael Greth — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:12:00 GMT

ContentandCode hat bei der Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) ein Portal mit einem hohen Grad an barrierefreiem Zugang umgesetzt und dazu ein Video online gestellt.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Die Website dazu gibt es hier

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, Office 2010

SPPD126 SharePointPodcast

Michael Greth — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:02:00 GMT

Direkter Download: SPPD-126-2009-09-28

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Veranstaltungen

Thema Aktuell

DMS EXPO 2009 in Köln Nachlese
Interview mit Patrick Püntener von itsystems
ShareConnect Vorträge
Interview mit Rainer Ganser und Chris Müller
Buchtipp: Erfolgreiche Portalprojekte mit Microsoft SharePoint: Praxishandbuch für die erfolgreiche Steuerung von SharePoint-Projekten von Reiner Ganser und Christoph Müller

Tipps Entwicklung+ Design

Tools

Woodys Free SharePoint Twitter Integration Components

Dies und Das

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, Office 2010

Feedback: sharepointpodcast (at) gmail.com

Background: PROJECT SWIRL - THE SOFA MIX
Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth

SharePoint – Meeting Workspace Scenarios

Sean Wallbridge — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:59:00 GMT

I've been asked to put together some SharePoint 'Meeting Initiation' scenarios, so here they are, presented as 'business requirements' and the techniques necessary to get rolling. Once you have created a meeting workspace, keep in mind that they are full, SharePoint sites that you can tune, custom ... (More)

Comparing myself to Uncle Bob Martin

Andrew Woodward — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:00:38 GMT

Before last week, I attended Roy Osherove’s TDD Masterclass, I do not think I would have had the “you know what’s” to be able to put up an alternative solution to one of Uncle Bobs (aka Robert Martin) examples of doing Test Driven Development, but here I am publishing the the solution I arrived at and suggesting that my solution better servers the values of Readability, Maintainability and trustworthiness.

In Uncle Bobs defence his post is dated Apr 2006 and the art of Test Driven Development has moved on leaps and bounds in the past few years.

The Problem

Write a class named “PrimeFactors” that has one static method: generate.

The generate method takes an integer argument and returns a List<Integer>. That list contains the prime factors in numerical sequence.

To see the details and how it was previously solved.

My Solution

Although the original is coded in Java and mine in C#, there is enough similarities for you to be able to understand both - weird that really

The Tests

using System.Collections.Generic;
using NUnit.Framework;

namespace Product.Tests
{
[TestFixture]
public class CalculatorTests
{
private Calculator c;

[SetUp]
public void SetUp()
{
c = new Calculator();
}

[Test]
public void Generate_Zero_ReturnEmptyList()
{
List<int> result = c.Generate(0);

Assert.AreEqual(0, result.Count);
}

[Test]
public void Generate_One_ReturnEmptyList()
{
List<int> result = c.Generate(1);

Assert.AreEqual(0, result.Count);
}

[TestCase(2)]
[TestCase(3)]
[TestCase(5)]
public void Generate_PrimeNumber_ReturnPrimeNumber(int expected)
{
List<int> result = c.Generate(expected);

Assert.AreEqual(expected, result[0]);
}

[TestCase(4,2,2)]
[TestCase(6,2,3)]
public void Generate_NonPrimeNumberDivisableByTwo_ReturnTwoProducts(int number, int firstPrime, int secondPrime)
{
List<int> result = c.Generate(number);

Assert.AreEqual(firstPrime, result[0]);
Assert.AreEqual(secondPrime, result[1]);
}

[Test]
public void Generate_NonPrimeNumberWithThreeProducts_ReturnThreeProducts()
{
List<int> result = c.Generate(8);

Assert.AreEqual(2, result[0]);
Assert.AreEqual(2, result[1]);
Assert.AreEqual(2, result[2]);
}

[Test]
public void Generate_NonPrimeNumberNotDivisableByTwoWithTwoProducts_ReturnProducts()
{
List<int> result = c.Generate(9);

Assert.AreEqual(3, result[0]);
Assert.AreEqual(3, result[0]);
}
}
}

The Production Code

using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace Product
{
public class Calculator
{
private const int SMALLEST_PRIME = 2;

public List<int> Generate(int i)
{
List<int> primes = new List<int>();

int divider = SMALLEST_PRIME;
while (HasPrimes(i))
{
while (IsDivisable(i, divider))
{
i = AddPrimeToProductsAndReduce(i, primes, divider);
}
divider++;
}
return primes;
}

private bool IsDivisable(int i, int divider)
{
return i%divider == 0;
}

private bool HasPrimes(int i)
{
return i >= SMALLEST_PRIME;
}

private int AddPrimeToProductsAndReduce(int i, List<int> primes, int prime)
{
primes.Add(prime);
i /= prime;
return i;
}
}
}

I understand that showing the final solution does not prove the value of TDD, I will be posting a web cast of this process to really show how TDD helps you code to evolve and also how I adhere to the Red, Green, Refactor steps to achieve readable, maintable and trustworthy code.

Where do I think mine is better?

The Tests

The tests all adopt the naming convention Method_Scenario_Behaviour

The Act and Assert are kept separate for readability.

I have not used any logic in my tests, unlike the list()method used in Uncle Bobs.

The Production Code

No magic numbers, I have extracted well named constants.

Refactored the logic in ther generate method into more readable methods. For example line 14.

1: while (HasPrimes(i))

Is much easier to understand than the line

1: for (int candidate = 2; n > 1; candidate++)

I don’t like the way the while loops were refactored into for loops to reduce the code. If you look closely at the for loop above you will see that it does not follow the normal convention where the evaluation part is related to the incremental part.Â This I feel makes it easy to misread and hard to read if you don’t miss it.

Overall I think that the my code, although longer than Uncle Bobs is much easier to read and therefore easier to maintain.

I would love to hear feedback on the code, perhaps I have a couple of refactoring’s that could improve it still further.

Daily TDD Kata - now I’m doing what Jack does

Andrew Woodward — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:40:12 GMT

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Roy Osherove’s Test Driven Development Masterclass, I will post in a few days more on this but can say this is one of the best training courses I have ever attended.

During the course I got to learn about the Kata technique, something I had heard about but had never investigated.

Kata is a Japanese word describing detailed choreographed patterns of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. most commonly known for the presence in the martial arts.

The theory is that if you practice a common technique regularly (every day) over time the actions will become natural and automatic, you will have muscle memory. During the course Roy introduced the idea of coding a reasonably detailed solution, using all of the good TDD practices (Red, Green, Refactor), every day so that the techniques used become second nature, the act of coding something using TDD is natural.

Over the course of the week the class went from being unable to code half of the problem in 30 minutes, to being able to complete the solution. The obvious productivity’s aside, I will discuss this in a future post, it was clear that every developer in the class was able to master a new technique. In fact I have tweeted with some of the class members who were doing the same code Kata on Saturday morning.

So what does Jack do?

Although he did join me in my Sunday morning Kata I am not saying that Jack has been doing these coding Katas for years. No, Jack has been doing Kumon mathematics since he was 4 years old.

Kumon is a math and reading enrichment program. Students do not work together as a class, but progress through the curriculum at their own pace, moving on to the next level when they have achieved mastery of the previous level. Mastery is defined as speed and accuracy. They only progress when they have mastered the skills through practice and repetition.

Kumon sheets (numbers of questions) are completed daily, they build up the students skills in mental arithmetic and techniques by repeating them often. Jack, like all new students, started at a level that is below their current ability but through which they can quickly progress. Jack started at level 6A and moved quickly through the numbers bonds and now has an amazing ability to do mental maths. Although challenging at times Jack has continued with his daily Kumon (KATA) and had reached the G-League before starting high school, an amazing achievement.

So I can now say that Jack and I will be doing our daily Kata together, perhaps aiming to master a different art, but taking a daily step closer to achieving that mastery.

Kata is definitely something that will become a way of life for people at 21apps, the value is real and measurable, the personal satisfaction is infectious.

ShareConnect 2009 in Mainz Nachlese

Michael Greth — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:56:00 GMT

Montag bis Mittwoch letzter Woche war ich auf der ShareConnect in Mainz und habe u.a. dort zwei Vorträge gehalten, dazu gibt es hier die Präsentationsfolien

Session SharePoint und Enterprise 2.0
Session NoCode Lösungen mit SharePoint Designer

Fabian hat seine Präsentationen auch schon online gestellt

Alles in allem fand ich die Veranstaltung recht gelungen, auch wenn der SharePoint-Teil in der Basta vergleichsweise klein ist – aber das kommt noch :-).

Es war wie immer super, viele bekannte Gesichter zu sehen und auch neue Kontakte auf der Konferenz zu knüpfen.

Ich bin jetzt Besitzer eines intelliBOOKs, der digitalen Variante der dot.NET Magazins und mehr. Ein Netbook mit eine AIR-Applikation, die den Zugriff auf das Online Archives des dot.NET Magazins ermöglicht. Und wie mir Masoud Kamali, CEO von S&S Media, saget, ist damit noch viel mehr geplant. Sicher ein spannendes Konzept. Wer mehr dazu lesen möchte dem empfehle ich den Artikel in Robsblog INTELLIBOOK: Erste Eindrücke vom Netbook aus dem S&S Verlag

Ich habe dem NetBook auf der Rückfahrt nach Berlin im Zug erst mal Windows 7 verpasst – fast ohne Probleme nur WLAN wollte nicht so richtig, aber nach dem ich den WLAN-Treiber im VISTA-Kompatibilitätsmodus installiert habe, kann ich jetzt auch per WLAN ins Internet.

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, fantastic40

Renaming Server core

Daniel Brown — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:06:08 GMT

Body:

With my use of Server core as domain controllers in all my SharePoint environments (Various demo, development, test, hosted, etc), I get pretty sick of the lengthy way I used to rename freshly installed Windows Server 2008 Core Servers.

You see, when you install Server Core, it gives you same default generated computer name and it is pretty much the first task I want to perform with a new installation. But How?

The traditional process I used was to type “hostname” into the cmd window, copy and then type out the netdom line and paste the hostname into it.

Well that was the process I used up until tonight when I finally got sick of it!

Instead I have developed a scripted way to do this instead using environment variables and promoting you for a name, here is the batch file:

Computer name as an Argument (RenameServerCLI.cmd NEWSERVERNAME01)

@echo off
IF "%1" == "" GOTO Error

netdom renamecomputer %COMPUTERNAME% /newname:%1
goto Exit

:Error
echo Please specify a computer name i.e RenameServerCLI.cmd NEWSERVERNAME01

:Exit

Prompt for Computer Name

@echo off
SET /P NEWPCNAME="What is this computers new name? "
netdom renamecomputer %COMPUTERNAME% /newname:%NEWPCNAME%

These scripts have worked great in my unattended deployment of SharePoint Servers scripts though the use of Windows Deployment Services, in which I have the ability to rapidly deploy various deployment configurations and environments suited to my clients needs.

Ranging from Server operating systems such as 2003, 2008 & R2 and Clients such as Windows XP, Vista and , I can rapidly deploy any number of virtual machines in any number of environments.

I love scripts. Scripts are repeatable time and time again. If something happens with the deployment, its because its like that in the script. Even if its wrong, its exactly what it was told to do!

The 2 scripts can be downloaded from here.

Category: Cool Stuff

Published: 27/09/2009 12:36 AM

Attachments: http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/341/RenameServerCLI_2_1D70952D.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/341/RenameServerCLI_thumb_1D70952D.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/341/RenameServerOrginalWay_2_1D70952D.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/341/RenameServerOrginalWay_thumb_1D70952D.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/341/RenameServerPrompt_2_1D70952D.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/341/RenameServerPrompt_thumb_1D70952D.png

If you are using SharePoint 2007 + Windows 7 and getting SLOW transfer rates within document libraries…

shane — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:36:02 GMT

If you are using windows 7 and moss 2007 you may find things get REALLY SLOW while moving files in document libraries. This rather obscure fix worked for me, maybe it will help you as well.

I spent some time today doing some work on a site whereby I needed to add a large amount of images to the style library of a SharePoint Site Collection. To speed up the process of course I would select the Open with Windows Explorer option so I could just paste the required files in with ease.

Instantly I would notice a significant freeze and then subsequently extremely low speeds when uploading. Since this was my first time experiencing this, I immediately tried a different server to see if the problem had to do with network settings on the server. I experienced the same thing on multiple servers.

We then tried to replicate on other desktops and it turned out everything was fine on Vista running IE7 or IE8 connecting to the same document libraries. Finally in the end, a little searching lead me to the forums where a user had pointed out that this issue can be resolved by going into your IE Settings and turning off Automatically Detect Settings.

So if you run into extremely slow speeds uploading to a SharePoint Document Library via Windows Explorer (Webdav), do the following from IE.

Select Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings and unselect the option for Automatically Detect Settings.

I was totally surprised that this was the fix so I had to provide some extra search engine love for the forum post that saved me…

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itpronetworking/thread/600a9825-0ba1-4c15-93f6-fc99c64b4930

SharePoint Shop Talk Recap (09/24/09 edition)

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:23:04 GMT

We finished our 8th SharePoint Shop Talk open Q&A session yesterday. During that session, we covered the following topics:

How to send out a highly formatted email from a workflow created using SharePoint Designer.
- Check out this link for a treasure trove of great SPD info and email: http://tinyurl.com/cssworkflow
Where to find information on the differences between SharePoint 2010 and especially Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (the free version of SharePoint).
We discussed jQuery maintenance and management. More specifically, “where should the jQuery go?” We had a great discussion around this topic and one interesting new ideas (to me) is the idea of a content delivery network. This bing search pulls up a lot of interesting data on the subject: http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft+content+delivery+network&FORM=DLSDF7&pc=MDDS&src=IE-SearchBox
- Special mention to Jan Tielens’ CodePlex project on installing jQuery to an internal network as a feature that can be managed like any other feature in a SharePoint environment. Look it up and consider using it if you’re leveraging a lot of jQuery in your environment: http://www.codeplex.com/smarttools
- While you’re at, check out Marc Anderson’s jQuery work as well: http://mdasblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/jquery-library-for-sharepoint-web-services-v0-2-10-released/. He’s very responsive to comments from the community.
Someone mentioned that parts (or maybe even all) of the up-coming mega conference in Las Vegas in October will be broadcast over the internets. Check out this site for more information: http://www.week3.org/Events/default.aspx
We talked about RSS. That discussion covered a lot of ground. There’s a CodePlex project that does better RSS than what you get out of the box and www.endusersharepoint.com has some good articles up by Laura Rogers on how to use DVWP to build really good RSS sessions.

That about covers it. People seem to be getting a lot of help from these so we’ll keep them going.

In a burst of efficiency, I’ve already set up next week’s SharePoint Shop Talk session. You can register here: https://www.livemeeting.com/lrs/8000043750/Registration.aspx?pageName=h6hm9ptg8zt7302t

If you want to participate, fire off an email to questions@sharepointshoptalk.com, hit me up on twitter (@pagalvin) or leave a comment here.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Shop Talk

Fantastic 40 Demos auf MSDN CodeClips

Michael Greth — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:57:16 GMT

Gerade gefunden: auf MSDN Solve CodeClip gibt es einige Videos zu den Fantastic 40 Templates (was das ist findet man ausführlich mit weiteren Tipps im Wiki)

Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
Funktion, Installation, Einrichtung und Anpassung des Server Admin Templates: Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
Call Center
Funktionsweise, Installation, Einrichtung und Anpassung des Server Admin Templates: Call Center
- Call Center in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Teil 1
- Video dazu Call Center in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Teil 1

Business Performance Reporting
Funktion, Installation, Einrichtung und Anpassung des Server Admin Templates: Business Performance Reporting

Board of Directors
Funktionsweise, Installation, Einrichtung und Anpassung des Server Admin Templates: Board of Directors
- Board of Directors Teil 1: Vorstellung
- Video dazu Board of Directors Teil 1: Vorstellung
- Board of Directors Teil 2: Einrichtung
- Video dazu Board of Directors Teil 2: Einrichtung
- Board of Directors Teil 3: Anpassung
- Video dazu Board of Directors Teil 3: Anpassung

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, fantastic40

SharePoint Kaffeetasse 127

Michael Greth — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:24:36 GMT

Administration

Suche

Webcast

TechNet Webcast: Projekt Gemini in SQL Server 2008 R2 ? Teil 1: Die Clientseite - Self Service BI in Excel (Level 200)

Office 2010 – Office Web Apps

Kostenlos und ohne Einladung Office 2010 WebApps als Test für alle

Anpassung

Tipps

Metadata, Default Values and Required Columns

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, Office 2010

SharePoint Saturday Melbourne Australia

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:46:00 GMT

It's happening again! This time in Melbourne, to the South of Sydney, and expected to be a huge event with the focus on 2010.

When: Saturday November 14th, 2009.

Where: Melbourne, City

Details: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/melbourne/default.aspx

The registration site has just been opened up. It's free to attend but you'll need to register to guarantee your spot.

Look forward to seeing you there on the 14th to share some SharePoint (2010) goodness.

Presentations uploaded email in MOSS and design in MOSS

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:34:00 GMT

I've uploaded the following two presentations to Slideshare:

MOSS has mail! Integration, storage and management of e-mail in MOSS - http://www.slideshare.net/kathyhughes/emailing-moss

This is the presentation I delivered at the Quest community event in Sydney back in July, along with Joel Oleson and others. It is a substantial slide deck - the title is self explanatory.

Blooming SharePoint - http://www.slideshare.net/kathyhughes/blooming-sharepoint-design

This is the presentation I delivered at the first Australian SharePoint Saturday held in Sydney back on August 8th. A couple of people recently pointed out that the presentation hadn't been uploaded to the SharePoint Saturday Sydney site so I've added it to Slideshare where it can be accessed. It covers aspects of design and consideration around design best practices in SharePoint sites.

Announcing Office Devcon 2009 Australia

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:11:00 GMT

This year's Australian Office Devcon will be held at the Queensland University. That's right! We're changing from our regular Sydney location and heading up to the sunny North of the country.

When: Saturday 31st October and Sunday 1st November, 2009

For details and registration please go to www.officedevcon.com.au. It's free to attend but we do ask that you register so we can organise other essentials - like food!

The focus of this year's event is around both the 2010 client and 2010 server, including SharePoint Server 2010, InfoPath 2010, Visio 2010 and the rest of the 2010 Office suite of products. You'll get a solid overview of the new products and how you can use them to solve everyday business requirements.

You'll also get to see some of the rich integration features between the varioius products. Plus you'll get to speak to the presenters who've been heavily involved in beta testing and are keen to receive your questions.

Looking forward to the event!

InfoPath SharePoint integration videos now online

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:39:00 GMT

As mentioned, I've recorded and uploaded the InfoPath / SharePoint integration demos I did at both TechEd Australia and the Sydney Windows User Group last week. You can view them either at You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F2DC3FFE979EBF89 or at Screencast at http://www.screencast.com/t/mdkzlORRD (note, I think you'll need the TechSmith codec in order to view the videos on Screencast).

The demos show various OOB tips 'n tricks including how to leverage SharePoint views in an InfoPath form, and also how to configure and switch views so that InfoPath will switch between either a browser only view or a rich client view depending on whether the user has the IP rich client installed.

Also, in conjunction with the videos, check out the SharePoint views technique on the InfoPath team blog at

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2007/01/15/populating-form-data-from-sharepoint-list-views.aspx and also details for the configurable view startup options

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/HA101514391033.aspx using the xdEnvironment:IsBrowser() and not(xdEnvironment:IsBrowser()) expressions.

Other videos include the demos I did around the Helpdesk site, including routing forms using workflows and leveraging views and data view Web parts to represent InfoPath data once submitted to SharePoint.

Virtualization schmackdown post-mortem

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:56:00 GMT

Back in August, Sydney Business and Technology User Group (we / SBTUG) held a virtualization schmackdown evening at

Microsoft in Sydney. We were fortunate to have representatives from VMWare, Citrix and Microsoft at the event to each represent their virtualization technologies.

It was one of those 'we just had to do it' nights. We'd received a number of questions from people at our earlier SBTUG meetings, mostly around what they should/could use to virtualize their enterprise and development environments. More specifically, we received questions from peole about which product they should use and also which product/s were supported for running particular Microsoft servers. Some had heard conflicting reports that SharePoint Server 2007 was not supported if running on VMWare ESX. So the schmackdown evening was the ideal opportunity for people to come along to have those kinds of questions addressed and to also gain a better understanding of the various options around both desktop and server virtualization.

We had a full agenda which covered VMWare workstation and ESX; Microsoft's Hyper-V server and virtual PC/Virtual

Server; and Citrix XenServer.

We had just over 60 people in attendance, as well as a Melbourne user group who tuned in via LiveMeeting

and Roundtable. There were a number of ex-Citrix colleagues who turned up, including my old boss Martin Duursma,

Citrix Labs CTO, and Michael Harries also from Citrix Labs.

At the beginning of the evening, we ran a quick poll and discovered:

5% of people in the audience were new to virtualization and had come along to understand what their options were

80% of people were using virtualization products from multiple vendors

We didn't get an exact breakdown on which product people were using, but the majority of people who responded to

the poll were using VMWare desktop and/or server virtualization.

A couple of people were using standalone Hyper-V server while others were using Hyper-V in conjunction with Windows

Server 2008. Several people were in the process of upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2 / Hyper-V.

We saw how Citrix XenServer integrates with Microsoft Hyper-V.

During my overview presentation I mentioned Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). This

online tool located at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm includes a 'Support Policy

wizard' to help you determine which Microsoft servers are supported on which type of virtualization technology. For

example SharePoint Server 2007 SP2 is shown to be supported on VMWare ESX 3.5 running on Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit. Speaking of which, Aaron Saikovski has a recent blog post around his experience installing SharePoint in a VMWare environment which you may find interesting - "Windows Server 2008 R2 - NLBS and VMware – Workaround!" -

http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronsaikovski/archive/2009/09/13/windows-server-2008-r2-nlbs-and-vmware-workaround.aspx,

I also showed some of Emantra's (Aussie hosting company based in Brisbane) hosted virtualized offerings and pricings. If you are interested, please visit

http://www.emantra.com.au/ for further details and enquiries. Special thanks to Mark Rhodes from Emantra for

providing those details for the event.

In terms of my development virtualized environment, firstly I listed obvious reasons why I need to use virtualization. My reasons are more from a SharePoint developer/designer perspective. For my second presentation I demonstrated VMWare Workstation 6.5, which supports the 64bit server architecture and which I currently use on my main laptop/mobile workstation. The following list shows some of the applications I run within my virtualized environments:

SharePoint Server 2007 and 2010
32bit and 64bit machines
SQL 2000 SP2, SQL 2005 and SQL 2008
Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010
(servers) Windows 2003 R2, Windows 2008 R1 and R2
(clients) Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
SPD 2007, SPD 2010
Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010
Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010
Multiple domains (x versions) and Web front-ends

....

To wrap up the evening, and following all the presentations, all the presenters joined together for a panel - ask the V experts panel - so people could ask questions. This was probably the most popular part of the evening and was a very interactive panel discussion! I won't say the evening or the panel session was completely free of 'vendor bashing' (those instances were boo'ed), but all in all everyone who attended the event got a lot out of it and went away with information to help them make decisions around where to go next with their virtualized environments / choices.

All of the presentations, including additional material submitted by the various vendors and a summary of some of

the panel Q&A, from the evening can be found on the SBTUG SkyDrive at http://cid-

6085fcdbc00a4c4f.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/SBTUG - see the 2009_August folder.

I'd like to once again thank Steve Gross from VMWare, Jeff Alexander from Microsoft Australia, Dino Soepono and Scott Lindsay from Citrix for their excellent presentations throughout the evening. Special thanks to Mark Rhodes from Emantra Web hosting for providing details on Emantra's hosted virtualized options and also to Mark Snell and Frank Mulcahy from Experteq for following up on a couple of the speakers for the evening. And finally thanks to Jon Harshem

(graphic artist) for creating a special VEEK logo for the event. Once again many thanks to Microsoft for providing the venue and the necessary network/equipment hookups for the event. And of course, our user group leaders - Craig Bailey and Nick Rayner.

Planning for SharePoint 2010 – Upgrade Planning Part 2 Moving the Databases

Chandima Kulathilake — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:49:16 GMT

Body:

Please read Part 1 of this post series before you continue.

In this post I will highlight how to move your (32 bit) SQL Server tier to 64 bit.

In the case of moving your data tier there are few prerequisites that you should consider. In this case we have the assumption that your new 64bit SQL server deployment has followed best practice guidelines for SQL server. From a SharePoint point of view you should consider the following to enable effective management of your existing content databases or any new databases you are creating. SQL Server 2008 or 2005 (64bit) are both supported when moving to SP2010. Details about preparing your database server can be found here (TechNet).

This may be a good time to also plan what your SQL maintenance regime would look like for your new data tier. Start with Database maintenance guidance for SharePoint Server on TechNet. Most important though is that you should read up about Kimberly L. Tripp’s extended blog post series on these tasks in detail. If you are not an SQL server expert or have a DBA who usually looks after your SharePoint SQL databases make sure that they read the series of posts as well.

Remember we are now moving our data tier. At the end of the process you will have your 32 bit farm (APP and WFEs) pointing to a new 64bit data tier.

Moving your Databases

When moving from your 32bit source SQL server to a new 64bit SQL server there are two paths you have to consider. In my example the topology of the final destination 64bit farm is as follows. SPWEB1 , SPWEB2, SPAPP1 and SQLSERVER08 (all 64 bit). At the end of the database only tier you will have a configuration that will reflect MOSSWEB1, MOSSWEB2, MOSSAPP1 (32bit) and SQLSERVER08 (64bit). The options that you have is to completely build a new farm provided that you have the hardware available or just build as you go along. In the case of you doing the big bang approach you can choose to build an entirely new farm and only move the associated web application content databases or you can move all of your databases.

One of the recommendations when deploying your SharePoint farm is to use a combination of DNS record or a SQL Server alias for SharePoint servers to connect to, rather than the actual name of the SQL Server. This gives you the flexibility to move SharePoint databases to another SQL Server instance in the event of general maintenance.

Example: You can move from SQL\sharepointsql to SQLSERVER08\sharepointsql

By using an alias name to connect to (ex: sharepointsql.yourcompany.com), you can save a lot of effort of doing manual steps and a full re-index post deployment. In the case of this scenario both options are considered. To set this straight what you should do is setup this alias and use the stsadm renameserver command to rename the name of the SQL instance prior to carrying out your database move.

Let’s first look at what databases we need to backup. You can find out about all the databases used in your SharePoint deployment by doing a site audit as described in my previous post. At a high level these are.

Databases for Shared Services Providers (SSPs)
Search databases for SSPs
Content databases
Search database
Central Administration content database
Configuration database

You can get a full view of your backup tree using stsadm –o backup –showtree you can use this to note down the databases which are are part of your deployment.

Note: We are not backing up the databases using STSADM or the SharePoint GUI but rather using SQL server management tools on the source 32bit SQL server to backup the databases. Please note that if you are using Single Sign On (SSO) in your deployment you should read this TechNet article first.

Once you have a list of your databases you can choose to backup and restore the databases or alternatively detach all the databases from the source 32bit SQL Server and copy and move the MDF and LDF files and re-attach them to the 64bit destination SQL server and restart the farm.

Before you do that you need to document and identify and test what the overall steps are for your chosen scenario. (Please make sure you read and understand and plan everything before you do anything that involves your PRD SharePoint deployments)

In the case of moving to a SQL server with the same instance name you can follow these steps. (We are only moving the data tier in this scenario)

Record which Web applications are associated with the SSPs. To do this you can use the STSADM command stsadm –o enumssp –title [nameofssp] This information can be used to re-associate Web applications with the restored SSPs and do your testing and troubleshooting
Prepare to backup SSPs
To back up SSP settings type

stsadm -o backup -directory <UNC path> -backupmethod full -item <SSP name>

Stop the source 32bit farm, stopping the farm ensures that no data is written to the databases before you can move all the databases then back up databases using SQL server management studio or chose to move them via detaching them as mentioned earlier
The following services should be stopped prior to making any backups of the databases. The reason for this is that unless you stop the associated SharePoint services the SharePoint Configuration db will be out of sync.

Make sure you go to the services snap in on the application server and stop all of the following services on the 32bit source farm MOSSAPP1 (32bit)

Microsoft Single Sign-On service
Office Document Conversions Launcher service
Office Document Conversions Load Balancer service
Office SharePoint Server Search service
Windows SharePoint Services Administration service
Windows SharePoint Services Search service
Windows SharePoint Services Timer service
Windows SharePoint Services Tracing service
Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer service

Once the above services are stopped go to command prompt on the source 32bit application server and type : iisreset /stop and proceed to backup the databases
Databases to backup : Content databases, Central Administration content database, Configuration database, Windows SharePoint Services Help Search database. The other databases in the farm are backed up and restored at the same time as the SSPs
Copy or move the database backup files to the destination 64bit database server
On the destination database server, restore the databases that you backed up or attach (which ever the option you are going for)
Copy to the destination database server all the SQL Server logins, fixed server roles, fixed database roles, and permissions for these databases. Refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918992/ for information on copying user logins from instances of SQL server
Shut down the 32bit SQL server instance
Redirect DNS alias to the farm to reference the new 64bit database server
Restart the 32bit server that is running Central Administration to apply the changes and ensure that the services, Web sites, and application pools associated with the deployment are started
Restore the SSPs from the backup created previously
Start all the services on MOSSAPP1 (32 bit)
Test and troubleshoot

By the end of this process your deployment should look like this!

In the next post we’ll look at the next two tiers Tier B and Tier C.

Technorati Tags: Planning,Deployment,SharePoint,SQL Server

Published: 25/09/2009 7:49 a.m.

BlogTitleForUrl: planning-for-sharepoint-2010-–-upgrade-planning-part-2-moving-the-databases

Categories: Deployment;Administration;SharePoint 2007;SharePoint 2010

Attachments: http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/226/BackUPSSPFull_2_10D32DF3.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/226/BackUPSSPFull_thumb_10D32DF3.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/226/image_2_7BE1AB7F.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/226/image_thumb_7BE1AB7F.png

Column limits for SharePoint lists

Cornelius J. van Dyk — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:24:08 GMT

Body:

<<<WSS 2.0 / SPS 2003 ONLY>>>

FYI, there are limits to the number of columns you can create in a SharePoint list. See http://support.microsoft.com/?id=823555

Later

Category: SharePoint

Published: 9/24/2009 1:22 PM

Recovering files from blue screened Windows XP

jopx (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Today my Windows XP showed me a very unwelcome BSOD… booting in safe mode, last known configuration, nothing helped. Unfortunately I still had some files on the machine which I definitely needed to recover – Hirens Boot CD to the rescue – amazing tool… definitely a lifesaver.

Technorati Tags: windows+xp,boot+cd,recovery,microsoft

SharePoint Shop Talk Thursday 09/24 @ 12:30 PM EDT

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:20:54 GMT

Registration is up and ready for tomorrow’s SharePoint Shop Talk at 12:30 PM.

During these conference calls, a panel of experienced SharePoint pro’s take your questions via email, via live meeting or directly over the phone. We do our best to provide independent expert advice on all topics related to SharePoint.

Email your questions to “questions@sharepointshoptalk.com”, twitter them to me, leave a comment here or just show up on the call and ask.

We also welcome and seek insight from audience members.

You can read some recaps on previous SharePoint Shop Talk sessions on my blog.

This week we already know we’ll be addressing questions relating to workflow (a constant favorite) and search to name a few.

</end>

Subscribe to my blog.

Follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Shop Talk

Capacity Planning.

Stephen (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:04:00 GMT

Definitive article on MOSS 2007 capacity planning, well worth another look since it has been updated: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

I'm super Xcited about Xceed Datagrid for WPF 3.5

Cornelius J. van Dyk — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:48:59 GMT

Body:

OK, so the title of this post is a bit of a pun on the Xceed component, but nevertheless, I'm really excited about the possibilities of this component for some of the tools I'm building. Just look at this silent demo to see for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAE8UGwHwUA

I want to thank the crew over at Xceed for participating in the MVP 3rd Party Offers program. Look for my review of the Xceed component in the near future.

Later

Category: Programming

Published: 9/23/2009 6:52 AM

Low impact text changing in SharePoint with jQuery

Bil Simser — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:08:00 GMT

Mike Smith over at Tech Training Notes had a nice simple post a few weeks back on changing the default text displayed at the bottom of stock web parts in SharePoint. For example discussion boards show this text when it's blank:

"There are no items to show in this view of the "Test" discussion board. To create a new item, click "New" above.

That's great but what if the "New" link isn't avaiable (if you turn off the full toolbar and put a discussion list on a page this would happen). Or what if you don't like calling it a discussion board (for various reasons) and want to say forum. Or want to provide additional information.

His solution is a little bit of JavaScript and then pushing his function into an array _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames (which is a list of scripts SharePoint will run when the page loads). Here's the original version:

   1:  <script type="text/javascript">

2:

   3:  function ChangeDiscussionMessage()

   4:  {

   5:      var a = document.getElementsByTagName("TD")

   6:      for (var i=0;i<a.length;i++)

   7:      {

   8:          if (a[i].className=="ms-vb")

   9:          {

  10:              if (a[i].innerText.indexOf("There are no items to show in this view")>-1)

  11:              {

  12:                  a[i].innerHTML = "There are no active discussions";

  13:              }

  14:          }

  15:      }

  16:  }

17:

  18:  _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("ChangeDiscussionMessage")

19:

  20:  </script>

Here's a more simplified jQuery version:

   1:  <script type="text/javascript">

2:

   3:  $(document).ready(function(){

   4:      $("td .ms-vb:contains('There are no items to show in')").text('There are no active discussions');

   5:  });

6:

   7:  </script>

P.S. I'm still trying to find time to write up the blog post from this last weekend's code camp and will post the SharePoint developer resources soon!

Examples of Recent Work from Trinkit

Zac Smith — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:37:00 GMT

We've been pretty busy over the last 6 months working on a variety of projects and I would like to share a few of these with you today. Some of the projects have been for clients, some for friends; a few have been big, most have been small. All of them were fun to make.

Environment Canterbury
Environment Canterbury is the regional council working with the people of Canterbury to manage the region's land, water and air. This site was released just a week ago and was built using SharePoint Server 2007 (of course!). Was a super fun project and we are really happy with the final result.

Kinloch Golf Club
The Kinloch Club was voted one of the Top 10 new golf courses in the world for 2007 by the prestigious U.S. Travel and Leisure golf magazine - making it the only course outside of North America to be included in that Top 10.
This site was built using asp.net and CMS functionality was provided by Umbraco (http://umbraco.org/).

New Zealand Garden Sheds
New Zealands top supplier of high quality steel garden sheds. This is a PHP site built on WordPress.

Good Golfing
The website and blog of Renee Fowler, a great golf coach based in Wellington. This is also a PHP site built on WordPress.

Chilli Jam
A podcast blog for cutting edge dance music. Yet another PHP site built on WordPress.

Netcast #24 - Most Fun You Can Have With Your Pants On

Todd O. Klindt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:55:13 GMT

Body:

In this episode I discuss what patch level your SharePoint farm should be at, and some free SharePoint training for your company. No animals were harmed in the filming of this netcast, honest.

MP3 File (Subscribe)

WMV File (Subscribe)

iPod File (Subscribe)

Running Time: 28:07

Links:

Issues with August 2009 CU

Use the June 2009 CU for now

Free (as in beer) SharePoint Training

As always, bandwidth for my netcast downloads is generously provided by the rock stars at RackSpace. Check them out.

Next week I'll be doing viewer mail.

Published: 9/22/2009 1:55 PM

Netcast #23 – Special Holiday Show

Todd O. Klindt — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:52:55 GMT

Body:

In this week's netcast I talk about the Admin Toolkit that really came out. I also discuss some of the public information about SharePoint 2010. Finally I cover why it always seems one leg of a card table is shorter than the rest.

MP3 File (Subscribe)

WMV File (Subscribe)

iPod File (Subscribe)

Running Time: 37:26

Links:

SharePoint Admin Toolkit

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peak

Bandwidth for my netcast downloads is generously provided by RackSpace. Check them out.

See you next week, where my topic may very well be SharePoint Training. I'll be at the Microsoft Project Conference next week, so I may or may not be broadcasting at my regular time.

Published: 9/22/2009 1:52 PM

Custom Field Type: Site Reference (part 1)

Waldek Mastykarz — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:53:15 GMT

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a project that strongly relied on meta data. The project is all about finding the right information in a strongly fragmented collaboration environment. One of the parts of the project was publishing news messages related to specific collaboration areas.

The background

The project I mentioned is an Intranet environment meant to support the organization’s collaboration process. It consists of many different areas like Topics, Projects, Departments, etc. Any of these areas can contain a number of sub areas which facilitate many other items like projects, trainings, etc.

Organizing the information wasn’t the only challenge. Next to being able to store the knowledge in a logical way, the customer wanted to improved the awareness of the progress of all the different projects. In order to do that the customer wanted to be able to publish news messages which would contain the updates. Every news message should be related to the specific area so that it can not only be found using search but can also be included in drill-down content aggregations.

What’s in the box?

One of the things SharePoint would offer you out-of-the-box would be to create a News area for every single collaboration site on the Intranet. In the context of a project I worked on however it would have some serious drawbacks.

First of all you would have to create a Publishing Site under every single collaboration site. You could of course merge these two and provide a custom Site Definition, but then the customer wouldn’t be able to use any of the standard templates.

Additionally, as I already mentioned, the collaboration environment is very likely to become very fragmented: consisting of many collaboration sites. While the customer wants the people working on the project to publish some information about the progress of their work, he doesn’t expect it to be many news messages. So would it be really worth it to create a whole new News site for a couple of news messages only?

I considered these and a few more possibilities and then I came up with the following solution: a Site Reference field.

Site Reference field

What I thought it would help the customer was a Custom Field Type using the standard SharePoint Site picker allowing the users to pick any site within the Site Collection and store its URL as metadata so it can be used for search and content aggregations.

Site Reference field step-by-step

Covering the basics

Let’s start off with creating a Custom Field Type. Because we will be storing the URL of a site, let’s derive from the standard SharePoint Text Field Type:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;

namespace SiteReferenceFieldType
{
  public class SiteReferenceFieldType: SPFieldText
  {
    public SiteReferenceFieldType(SPFieldCollection fields, string fieldName) : base(fields, fieldName)
    {
    }

    public SiteReferenceFieldType(SPFieldCollection fields, string fieldName, string displayName)
      : base(fields, fieldName, displayName)
    {
    }
  }
}

Also let’s create a fldtypes_SiteReferenceFieldType.xml file which will provision our Custom Field Type to SharePoint:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<FieldTypes>
  <FieldType>
    <Field Name="TypeName">SiteReferenceFieldType</Field>
    <Field Name="ParentType">Text</Field>
    <Field Name="TypeDisplayName">Link to a website</Field>
    <Field Name="TypeShortDescription">Link to a website</Field>
    <Field Name="UserCreatable">TRUE</Field>
    <Field Name="ShowInListCreate">TRUE</Field>
    <Field Name="ShowInSurveyCreate">TRUE</Field>
    <Field Name="ShowInDocumentLibraryCreate">TRUE</Field>
    <Field Name="ShowInColumnTemplateCreate">TRUE</Field>
    <Field Name="FieldTypeClass">SiteReferenceFieldType.SiteReferenceFieldType, SiteReferenceFieldType, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6aeba8d1a7d7cac5</Field>
  </FieldType>
</FieldTypes>

Now let’s check if everything works correctly while it’s still simple and easy to debug:

Now let’s add the Site Picker to our custom field.

First of all we need a custom control to override the default TextBox rendering:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;

namespace SiteReferenceFieldType
{
  public class SiteReferenceFieldControl : BaseFieldControl
  {
     // code ommitted...
  }
}

This is the place where we will add all the Site Picker logic. Before we start adding the picker functionality we need to register the Field Control with the Field Type:

public class SiteReferenceFieldType: SPFieldText
{
  // code ommitted...

  public override Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.BaseFieldControl FieldRenderingControl
  {
    get
    {
      Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.BaseFieldControl fldControl = new SiteReferenceFieldControl();
      fldControl.FieldName = InternalName;
      return fldControl;
    }
  }
}

With doing the above we’ve covered the basics and are now ready to add the picker.

Adding the Site Picker

While you could try to figure this out on your own, Christopher White has done it already for you. All you need to do is to grab the JavaScript snippet from his article and add it to the Custom Field Type:

public class SiteReferenceFieldControl : BaseFieldControl
{
  protected TextBox SiteUrlValue;
  protected IButtonControl OpenPickerButton;

  /// <summary>
  /// Alt-text for the Launch Picker Button
  /// </summary>
  protected string PickerButtonText = "Pick a website...";

  protected override void CreateChildControls()
  {
    if (Field == null)
    {
      return;
    }

    base.CreateChildControls();

    if (ControlMode == SPControlMode.Display)
    {
      return;
    }

    SiteUrlValue = new TextBox
    {
      ID = "SiteUrlValue",
    };
    OpenPickerButton = new ImageButton
    {
      ImageUrl = "/_layouts/images/cat.gif",
      ImageAlign = ImageAlign.AbsMiddle,
      AlternateText = PickerButtonText
    };

    ((ImageButton)OpenPickerButton).Attributes.Add("onClick", "LaunchSitePicker(); return false;");
    Controls.Add(SiteUrlValue);
    Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("&nbsp;&nbsp;"));
    Controls.Add((ImageButton)OpenPickerButton);
    Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("<br/>"));
  }

  protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
  {
    if (ControlMode != SPControlMode.Display)
    {
      ScriptLink.Register(this.Page, "PickerTreeDialog.js", true);
      AddSitePickerControlClientScript();
    }

    base.OnPreRender(e);
  }

  private void AddSitePickerControlClientScript()
  {
    EnsureChildControls();
    string script =
    "var lastSelectedSiteSmtPickerId = null; " +
    "function LaunchSitePicker() " +
    "{ " +
    "if (!document.getElementById) return; " +
    "var siteTextBox = document.getElementById('" +
    SPHttpUtility.EcmaScriptStringLiteralEncode(this.SiteUrlValue.ClientID) +
    "'); " +
    "if (siteTextBox == null) return; " +
    "var serverUrl = '" +
    SPHttpUtility.EcmaScriptStringLiteralEncode(
    SPContext.Current.Web.ServerRelativeUrl) +
    "'; " +
    "var callback = function(results) " +
    "{ " +
    "if (results == null || results[1] == null) return; " +
    "lastSelectedSiteSmtPickerId = results[0]; " +
    "siteTextBox.value = results[1] + '/'; " +
    "}; " +
    "LaunchPickerTreeDialog(" +
    "'CbqPickerSelectSiteTitle'," +
    "'CbqPickerSelectSiteText', " +
    "'websOnly','', " +
    "serverUrl, lastSelectedSiteSmtPickerId," +
    "'','','/_layouts/images/smt_icon.gif','', " +
    "callback); " +
    "}";

    this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(
        typeof(SiteReferenceFieldControl),
        "LaunchSitePicker",
        script, true);
  }
}

As you probably noticed on Christopher’s article you need a TextBox to store the value. We’ve already added one. We’ve also added an image button to call the Site Picker.

Let’s have a look at the results so far:

Before you can use this Custom Field Type you have to do one more thing. The underlying Field must be able to retrieve the entered value as well as it must be able to enter the existing value into the Field Control. You can implement it by overriding the Value property of the Field Control:

public override object Value
{
  get
  {
    EnsureChildControls();
    return SiteUrlValue.Text;
  }
  set
  {
    EnsureChildControls();
    SiteUrlValue.Text = value as string;
  }
}

That’s all. Right now we have a fully working Custom Field Type using the SharePoint Site Picker.

As you have probably noticed it’s not exactly the same control I showed you at the beginning. In my case I took it a bit further. In the next part of this article I will show you how you can make the control ready only and how to support the required field. In the meanwhile you can download the code from CodePlex.

Download Custom Field Type: Site Reference (part 1) (13KB, ZIP)

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SharePoint 2007,MOSS 2007

The New Efficiency Launch Event

Daniel Brown — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:48:24 GMT

Body:

Just a quick note about www.TheNewEfficiency.com, a new online event which is taking place on September the 30th at 1:30AM Adelaide Time (GMT:+9:30).

Should be some cool highlights with Windows 7, Windows Server, Exchange and various other technologies form Global Leaders, such as Ford and Intel.

See you online at 1:30AM on September 30th!!

Category: Event

Published: 23/09/2009 12:18 AM

Attachments: http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/340/image_2_69BFD2B6.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/340/image_thumb_69BFD2B6.png

Windows 7 Launch Party

Daniel Brown — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:12:18 GMT

Body:

Howdy all,

I just registered for a Windows 7 Launch Party, I figure its a good excuse to get together and talk Windows 7 for a bit.

If you are interested in attending the Windows 7 Launch Party, Click here to register your interest.

More details to come as they come to hand, Im hoping to get some freebies out to attendee’s!

Stay tuned or drop me an email if your interested!

Category: Event

Published: 22/09/2009 11:42 PM

itgroove - Server Best Practice - If it ain't an Application Terminal Server, turn off all the damned noise!

Sean Wallbridge — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:20:06 GMT

One of the things I often do, to avoid a whole bunch of noise (and extra 'busy-ness' on my servers) is turn off the automatic connection of printers, etc. in RDP. I mean, if I'm just managing the Server via an RDP connection, do I really need COM ports, printers, default printers and other crapola t ... (More)

SharePoint Training Hub

Sean Wallbridge — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:04:00 GMT

Microsoft has produced a SharePoint Site Collection (that you can integrate into your SharePoint site, if you have MOSS - not WSS, sorry), called the "Productivity Hub", which can help with the adoption and education of SharePoint and the other standard Microsoft Office Products (and in ... (More)

SharePoint Event Receivers ListTemplateId Values

Cornelius J. van Dyk — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:03:00 GMT

Body:

If, like me, you write custom event receivers against SharePoint lists on a regular basis, then you no doubt have had a run in with trying to locate the proper ListTemplateId value to use in your Elements.xml in order to properly register your new event receiver.

Anyway, if you dig deep enough through the WSS 3.0 SDK, you'll find it in the "General Reference/Features and Templates/Working with Features/Feature Schemas/Event Registrations/Receivers Element" section... or you could just click here: :-P

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms431081.aspx

Anyway, I'm always digging for this one, so I thought's I'd just put it out on my blog for quick future reference for anyone (including myself) looking for it!

Later

Category: Programming;SharePoint

Published: 9/21/2009 4:56 AM

Setting Back Connection Host Names for SharePoint 2007 Using STSADM

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Lapointe) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:15:00 GMT

Not too long ago Microsoft introduced a security fix which addresses a possible attack vector in which malicious software tries to impersonate a local request, thereby bypassing certain constraints. The problem with this fix is that it introduces some issues for SharePoint servers, effectively resulting in 401.1 Access Denied errors. Spence Harbar does a great write-up of the fix and the options available to get your SharePoint environment working again so I won't re-hash all that...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Office Devcon 09 is just around the corner!

Daniel Brown — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:23:42 GMT

Body:

Website: http://www.officedevcon.com.au/

Office DevCon is an annual community-driven conference that allows Microsoft Office developers and power users to come together in one location to hear expert speakers present on a wide range of Microsoft Office-related topics.

Come along and discover how to do things you never knew you could do with the Microsoft Office suite of products.

What's covered?

We have Microsoft and industry experts from around the world who will present advanced topics the following products.

Access
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
InfoPath
Groove
SharePoint

This year Ill see you in Brisbane as I will be attending and with a little bit of luck, presenting on some cool SharePoint things!

-DB

Published: 20/09/2009 2:53 PM

Attachments: http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/338/image_2_1E29A958.png
http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Attachments/338/image_thumb_1E29A958.png

Patching a mirrored farm with minimal downtime

sptblog — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:01:15 GMT

For administrators of large SharePoint server farms, a newly-published article describes how to update server farms that use database mirroring, while incurring minimal perceived downtime for users. This solution is for enterprise customers who have high-availability needs and infrastructure. The article describes a step-by-step process for Office SharePoint Server farms that incorporate SQL Server mirroring. You can achieve similar results on Office SharePoint Server farms that are set up in a clustered server environment.

In brief, the solution requires that you:

· Disable mirroring and set the mirror databases to read-only

· Route network and database traffic to the read-only databases

· Apply software updates to the offline servers

· Route network and database traffic to the updated servers

· Apply software updates to the secondary farm

· Re-enable mirroring and set the mirrored databases to read/write

To read the full solution, see Configure a server farm for minimal downtime during software updates

NULL SID Error (Event ID: 4625) and Application Pool Identity

Reza Alirezaei — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:46:20 GMT

Issue:

Environment:A medium server farm.
Identity:A brand new custom domain account with no special permissions assigned.
Action : Assigning the domain account as the application pool identity when creating a new Web application.
Error Message: Invalid Username or password.
Point of confusion: The same credentials work like a champ when logging to a test box in the domain. I can also add the user to a SharePoint group.
Event Log and ULS Log : Nope,nothing!
Googling (mmmm...Binging) : No dice!

Steps to find the real error:

Tried a simpler password by taking out the "!" because I was aware of some issues with usual culprits -%,&,$ etc used in app pool password.
Added the user to a test site and tried to login - Yup... the user can NOT login to any SharePoint sites ; so there was something wrong! DUH!
Checked the Event log and that was where the following nasty little error rears its ugly head all over.This event was generated when actual logon request of the last step failed not when the central admin "Create or extend Web Application" was throwing "invalid username or password". It was generated on the WFE where access was attempted.

PLAIN TEXT

Log Name: Security
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing
Date: 18.09.2009 12:34:06
Event ID: 4625
Task Category: Logon
Level: Information
Keywords: Audit Failure
User: N/A
Computer: xxx.ch
Description:
An account failed to log on.

Subject:
Security ID: NULL SID
Account Name: -
Account Domain: -
Logon ID: 0x0
....

Resolution (or Workaround!):

Deleted the account and recreated it.

Accessing SharePoint Document Libraries via Webdav with Windows 7

Amanda Murphy — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:40:25 GMT

So if you run into extremely slow speeds uploading to a SharePoint Document Library via Windows Explorer (Webdav), do the following from IE.

Select Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings and unselect the option for Automatically Detect Settings.

I was totally surprised that this was the fix so I had to provide some extra search engine love for the forum post that saved me…

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itpronetworking/thread/600a9825-0ba1-4c15-93f6-fc99c64b4930

My new favourite iPhone App

Sean Wallbridge — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:24:00 GMT

I guess it's been out a few weeks now, but tonight I was introduced to WYSE PocketCloud for the iPhone. At the moment (sale?) is it a $20 app (looks to be $30 in October) and for that price, I had to have it and try it. So, I did. And gosh darned it, it worked right away. Brilliant. Here's a quick ... (More)

Did you know 2.0

Andrew Woodward — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:18:19 GMT

A while ago I posted a link to what I regarded as a great Power Point presentation (Shift Happens), but more importantly it was a really eye opening message.

In keeping with the Shift Happens theme, this has been updated and is now on You Tube as ‘Did you know 2.0?’

Always worth showing people just to get get them to really think about the future.

And a further update to this in the Did you know 4.0.

They have also started a Wiki page to discuss this further http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com/ - join the debate.

Easier Silverlight Development against SharePoint

Matthew McDermott — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:55:36 GMT

I have been spending quite a bit of time lately working with Silverlight 3 and SharePoint. One of the first big shifts for me is that Silverlight Development is Client development. Silverlight runs in the browser, but it runs on the client, so no SharePoint Object Model code. You have to access all of the goodness that is SharePoint through its web services.

Once you get started on your project you add a Service Reference and point at your desired SharePoint Web service. You will immediately run into the Visual Studio Warning:

Could not locate cross-domain policy at 'intranet.doghousetoys.com': Web services might not be accessible at runtime by your Silverlight application.

This is the desired behavior for a production Silverlight app. You don’t want a Silverlight application running on one domain calling malicious code from another domain. Yet in development that means that to run against (under, whatever) SharePoint you need to host your whole test harness inside of a SharePoint application. Ask a designer to do that and their head will pop off. Go ahead, ask ‘em! You’ll see. That means that it can take hours (or days) to get a designer rolling with Silverlight against SharePoint.

There is hope

Then I found this post by Tim Heuer about his Client-Access Policy helper for Visual Studio. This cool little helper lets you configure a client-access policy file for you web server. Then all you have to do is drag and drop it from your project into the root of your SharePoint site.

Visual Studio will still complain about the file missing, but when you run you project locally you will be able to hit the SharePoint web services without a problem.

Disclaimer

The file I use in my production environment is “wide open”. I don’t recommend this for Production implementation for security reasons. That said, here is the file I use.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>      
<access-policy>       
    <cross-domain-access>       
        <policy>       
            <allow-from http-request-headers="*">       
                <domain uri="*"/>       
            </allow-from>       
            <grant-to>       
                <resource include-subpaths="true" path="/"/>       
            </grant-to>       
        </policy>       
    </cross-domain-access>       
</access-policy>

Planning for SharePoint 2010 - Upgrade Planning and Guidance OFC306 TechED NZ Session Notes

Chandima Kulathilake — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:29:27 GMT

Body:

Here is a detailed outline of what I discussed and presented at my TechEd session on Wednesday 16th September in Auckland – New Zealand titled Planning for SharePoint 2010 - Upgrade Planning and Guidance OFC306. Thanks to all of you who came along to the session. This is a first in a series of posts and White Papers that I will publish as part of an ongoing series on planning to upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. Needless to say that I will only cover planning aspects and will NOT be talking about any new features or functionality of SharePoint 2010. Please visit the SharePoint team blog for details of SharePoint 2010.

System Requirements for SharePoint 2010

This has been common knowledge for a while and the SharePoint product team announced that SharePoint 2010 will only be available in x64 (64bit) versions. Therefore the first step is to plan to move, migrate or upgrade your SharePoint infrastructure to 64bit.

SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only
SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2
SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005

For complete system requirements visit : http://tinyurl.com/SP2010SysReqs

In my session and in the series of posts these are the scenarios that I wanted to showcase.

I have a 32bit SharePoint farm I need to migrate this to a 64bit farm
I have a plan to move to a 64bit SharePoint farm but I don’t know how
I am already on 64bit SP 2007 and SQL 2008 64bit so I want to upgrade to SP2010?
I am a newbie to SharePoint and want to learn..
We want to start our project with SharePoint 2010
I am still using SPS2003 what can I do?

Auditing and Planning for your server deployment

One of the first steps that you need to do in ensuring the success of your deployment is to conduct a current system audit and put in place a test environment to test your approach. In any scenario you will need to have a separate environment to be able to test and debug any issues. You can use your existing SharePoint DEV and STG servers or you could use a separate virtualised environment. Considerations that you will need to make when planning is the amount of disk space you will need for backing up and restoring SQL databases.

*Note: Even building your pre test/pre upgrade deployment will be a good test to ensure that you can replicate your server farm.

Evaluate – Existing Server Platform and Audit

Conducting a SharePoint audit should be carried out periodically as part of your administrative regime in your deployment regardless. If you are managing a medium to large SharePoint farm servicing a large number of applications and site collections then this should be a regular audit and document process. There are quite a few tools that you can use to conduct an audit of your existing SharePoint platform. The most common tools that you can use today are as follows.

Using STSADM
SharePoint Administration Toolkit V4.0 (SPDiag) http://tinyurl.com/SPAdminKit
Central Administration in SharePoint (GUI)
Using SharePoint Manager from Carsten Keutmann – http://www.codeplex.com/spm
Using PowerShell

What option or tool you chose is up to you. You should document the following once you have done your audit.

Servers
Accounts
Web Applications
Databases
Installed Updates
Solution Files
Custom Code
Site Collections

The above screenshots show using STSADM to identify content databases associated with a web application. You can also output these as text or xml files to be included as part of a report. For a complete list of available commands in STSADM type “stsadm –help” or for a particular command “stsadm –help commandname”.

After you have done your audit you should be able to now plan out what your strategy is. You may find your self in the following scenarios with regards to your current status of your server farm.

Move - Use the procedures for moving a farm or components when you are changing to different hardware (large disks, more processors)
Migrate – From 32bit to 64bit (or Content from a source farm to a destination farm)
Upgrade – Apply new updates and or Service Packs to SharePoint Server 2007 or upgrade to vNext (SP2010)

In my session I introduced the tiered phased approach. This approach is outlined so that you can plan and move your existing 32bit SharePoint 2007 farm to a 64bit SharePoint 2007 farm.

The idea of the tiered approach is a flexible approach which allows you to move different tiers of your farm depending on your requirements and so forth over time. In some cases you may wish to do the “big bang” approach and move all tiers of the farm in one go. This is also OK provided that you have enough servers etc ready.In my series of blog posts or white paper (If I finish it soon) will guide you through the process.

In my next post I will showcase the planning steps required for carrying out Tier A – Phase 1 which is to move your SQL (32bit) server to a 64bit capable SQL server and move all the associated SharePoint databases.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,MOSS,WSS,SharePoint 2010,Upgrade,Deployment,TechED NZ

Published: 18/09/2009 7:29 a.m.

BlogTitleForUrl: planning-for-sharepoint-2010-upgrade-planning-and-guidance-ofc306-teched-nz-session-notes

Categories: Administration;Deployment;SharePoint 2007

Attachments: http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/EnumContentDBS_2_64256035.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/EnumContentDBS_thumb_64256035.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/image_2_64256035.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/image_thumb_64256035.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/OutPut_2_64256035.png
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Attachments/225/OutPut_thumb_64256035.png

DMS EXPO 2009 Interviews Teil 2

Michael Greth — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:42:15 GMT

Wieder zurück von der DMSEXPO 2009 ist heute die Nachbearbeitung der Interviews auf der Tagesordnung, im 30 Minutentakt wird hier ein Interview nach dem anderen geschnitten, gerendert und auf YouTube hochgeladen.

Und so folgen hier die Video3 (Harald Holz, NTEAM) und Video 4 (Lucas Piras, itfunction), beide Partner aus Berlin.

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, DMS EXPO 2009

Evan and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Sean Wallbridge — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:10:00 GMT

Our son is a big ham and he had been practicing his Indiana Jones impersonation and we made it into a little movie this morning as well, I wasn't motivated to go to work yet. Enjoy :-) YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c32nN3skHEU

Dear Google Mail – Will someone in Support please respond?

Sean Wallbridge — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:25:00 GMT

Dear Google Support – Is anyone home? Ok, this blog post is my next step in trying to get Google Support to respond to my requests for assistance. I'm on *BUSINESS DAY* "8" (yes, "Eight") with no response. And for all you Google lovers (excuse makers), this is for the ... (More)

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed

Ishai Sagi [SharePoint MVP] (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:24:00 GMT

A code I was running against user profiles failed with the error: "Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed due to the following error: 80070422."
The reason was that the search service was disabled on the server, and since adding user profile properties that are indexed requires the search service, this error is understandable (although not very user friendly).
solution is obvious - start the search service.

Visual Sourcesafe 2005 setup fails

ssa — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:56:42 GMT

Scenario: To work on an old project, I need to setup SourceSafe 2005 on a machine that already has .NET Framework 3.5 installed. I start the installation but mistakenly unplug the power cable and system shuts down. Next time I start the installation, I get “Setup failed” error message. Setup fails because it cannot find Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 installed on the system. I found following link while searching for the solution:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/e59f8083-3ebc-4b90-ae35-c4e3fcd33606

It has some good suggestions but not valid in my case. I knew something went wrong because the computer was unplugged when setup was running. If you go to “Add and Remove Programs” in Control panel, you will see .NET framework installed. In my case, there were different versions installed. From .NET 1.1 to .NET 3.5, all versions were installed. There was one instance that did not have any version number shown next to it. I removed this instance and during uninstallation, it gave message that “Installation of Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 was suspended. Do you want to continue and remove the installation” (I don’t remember the exact wording). I clicked YES and this instance was uninstalled. Next, I tried to run the setup again and this time SourceSafe was installed successfully. The reason why I am posting this is because while searching Internet for the solution, I noticed several links/posts that gave miscallaneous solutions but none mentioned uninstallation of the corrupted or incomplete installation of the .NET framework. So this is also a solution, if you have tried all other options and still cannot install SourceSafe because of Document Explorer error, simply uninstall the .NET framework and run the SourceSafe setup again. Be careful if you have Visual Studio and related programs running. Make sure you uninstall the .NET framework version that is causing the problem. In my case, it was the one without any version number.

Avoiding those “Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page” in IE8 when editing SharePoint Publishing sites

Andrew Connell — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:37:07 GMT

Just stumbled across this via Randy Drisgill’s blog. It’s nagged me forever, but never had a clue what was going on.

People get this when they are editing their Content Editor Web Parts… not that they are good or anything. Basically IE8 acts a bit different when calling certain JavaScript methods. The quick and dirty fix is to uncheck the Enable native XMLHTTP support option in IE’s advanced options.

Great find! Read the following post for all the details on the issue and a fix.

» IE8 to SharePoint-‘Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?’

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,publishing,wcm,moss

SQL Keywords Reference (RESERVED)

Sean Wallbridge — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:27:00 GMT

I ran into a situation today where I had a beautiful plan, diagrams and naming convention all set to go, for a new 4 FARM SharePoint Implementation. I had planned on having two SQL Instances created, one called INTERNAL (Intranet, etc.) and one called EXTERNAL (Internet/Public, etc.). The p ... (More)

DMS EXPO 2009

Michael Greth — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:25:03 GMT

DMS EXPO 2009 in Köln ich bin 2 Tage auf der Dokumentenmanagementmesse und habe gestern hier am Microsoftstand 15 Interviews mit den einzelne Partnern geführt, die Lösungen rund um SharePoint anbieten. Ich habe wieder viele neue Anwendungen kennengelernt. Die ersten beiden Videos habe ich schon mal online gestellt, der Rest folgt bis zum Anfang der nächsten Woche zusammen mit den Partnerinfos auf SharePointPartner.de

Gleich halte ich meine Vortrag 5 Tipps zum Kostensparen mit SharePoint – mal sehen wie viele Zuhörer sich um 9:15 Uhr schon im Auditorium einfinden.

Immerhin ich verschenke ein Buch SharePoint Designer 2007 Das Handbuch – wenn das nicht zieht;-)

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointCommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, Office 2010