| | | When it's a Live Labs Pivot. I have created an image pivot from screen shots of more than 1,500 SharePoint powered Internet sites. You can download Live Labs Pivot from http://getpivot.com The SharePoint Internet sites pivot can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/b4Z8NM (130Mb Zip). After you unzip it, click on the .cxml file and you should get this… 
I plan to host this pivot in a web part once the Silverlight 4 control for this is released (as per the MIX announcement). If you find any errors or omissions, please submit them to http://www.wssdemo.com/pages/comments.aspx | 20/03/2010 5:37 p.m. | 0 | When is a Pivot not a Power Pivot? |
| | | It is not clear from the feature set if they have added create/edit/save support for MindManager in SharePoint libraries but they have treated SharePoint as a data source for maps. Even a SharePoint site structure can be imported into a map. This was something that I had attempted using the MindManager xml file format and a Data View Web Part http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=438 . Their solution is much nicer… 
But it costs. Mind Manager can now link directly to SharePoint Task lists and create dashboards as well as consuming search results to provide related links in the map. For more information, check out the product page http://www.mindjet.com/products/mindmanager-for-sharepoint/overview | 24/02/2010 10:33 p.m. | 0 | Mindjet Provides SharePoint Support |
| | | Many SharePoint 2010 web parts now support Ajax features. I have used a Data View which supports this feature 
to provide the Twitter web part on my home page. 
The web part will update the contents every 60 seconds without refreshing the entire page. You can download the 2010 .webpart file from here… and import it onto a page on your own server (no server access required). | 18/02/2010 11:03 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 Twitter Web Part with auto refresh |
| | SharePoint 2010 | Using the Office Web Applications with a mobile device is very cool. I really like the Thumbnail Index view for browsing the pages of a large document.   There is currently a bug in Beta 2 if OWA is enable on a SharePoint 2010 server with My Sites enabled and anonymous access that causes the mobile view (e.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/m) to prompt for authentication. For wssdemo.com you can use the account corp\demouser pass@word1 The document in this demo can be seen here… | 11/02/2010 7:59 a.m. | 0 | Mobile Web Thumbnail Index view of SharePoint Documents |
| | | A new feature in SharePoint 2010 is validation of item creation based on either individual column value validation or an overall item validation based on multiple columns. In this post, I'm going to look specifically at the column validation option. An example of where this might be useful is for reducing automated blog comment spam. In the example below, I have added a column to my SharePoint Blog Comments list called Antispam. 
At the bottom of the column create page there is a new option to define the validation formula and message to display if the validation fails. In this example I require the user to enter the 3 character abbreviation for today. 
Note: Initially I tried using [Today] which is the notation for substitution in filter conditions. Thanks Chakkaradeep for reminding me of this. When a user creates an item the validation will be checked and rejected if validation fails. 
| 20/01/2010 7:51 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 Column Validation |
| | SharePoint 2010 | There are many options when it comes to applying metadata and taxonomy to SharePoint content. SharePoint 2010 introduces a new farm service to provide a centralized taxonomy that supports hierarchical terms. In 2007 we only had the choice and Lookup columns which are still available in 2010 so why would you still use the lookup column? 
Figure 1: Column choices in 2010 Many people would say that you should drop the old columns from use because they can't be shared across site collection but this is not correct as they can be shared across site collections using the Content Type Hub syndication feature of the Managed Metadata Service. Limitations on Multiple Selection Unlike the Managed Metadata column, the Lookup field allows column filtering on a single value even if there are multiple values selected for list items. The example below shows a look-up column that has multi-selection enabled and list items that have more than one lookup value selected. Filtering the column on a single value will still display matching items that have other values also (uses "Contains"). 
Figure 2: Multi-select lookup column filtering Unfortunately this lookup column can't be used in the new Key Filters list navigation option. This is where the Term Store based multi select column does work. 
Figure 3: Multi-select Term Store column filtering (Usability note: I think the new metadata navigation area should be at the top of the quick launch otherwise users may not notice they are available if the site has a lot of lists and libraries showing in the Quick Launch. ) So depending on how you want to use the metadata might determine the type of column that will work best. | 16/01/2010 1:50 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Lookup Column vs Term Store Metadata |
| | SharePoint 2010 | There are several places where you can use the built in SharePoint permissions (apart from Code and Site Permission administration. I have blogged about the SPSecurityTrimmedControl and ddwrt:IfHasRights uses in 2007 but there is the new ribbon custom commands in 2010 that also make use of the SharePoint permissions. So here is an overview of how you can use these permissions in the following scenarios followed by a complete list of the permission values. Ribbon Custom Actions You can add these to any list or library using SharePoint Designer from the List summary page 
The properties of the action allow you to specify the Rights Mask to control visibility of the action. 
SPSecurityTrimmedControl Class Conditionally renders the contents of the control to the current user only if the current user has permissions defined in the PermissionString. You can use this in your master, page layouts or web part pages. <Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="" ></SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl> Ddwrt xsl namespace You can use this in the Data View web part or any other web part that is derived from this (e.g. search or content query). <xsl:if test="ddwrt:IfHasRights(permissionMask)">
something...
</xsl:if> SharePoint designer also makes this function available in the xpath expression builder dialog. 
List of permissions and mask values: List/document perms | Mask | ViewListItems | 1 | AddListItems | 2 | EditListItems | 4 | DeleteListItems | 8 | ApproveItems | 16 | OpenItems | 32 | ViewVersions | 64 | DeleteVersions | 128 | CancelCheckout | 256 | ManagePersonalViews | 512 | ManageLists | 2,048 | ViewFormPages | 4,096 | Web level perms | Open | 65,536 | ViewPages | 131,072 | AddAndCustomizePages | 262,144 | ApplyThemeAndBorder | 524,288 | ApplyStyleSheets | 1,048,576 | ViewUsageData | 2,097,152 | CreateSSCSite | 4,194,314 | ManageSubwebs | 8,388,608 | CreateGroups | 16,777,216 | ManagePermissions | 33,554,432 | BrowseDirectories | 67,108,864 | BrowseUserInfo | 134,217,728 | AddDelPrivateWebParts | 268,435,456 | UpdatePersonalWebParts | 536,870,912 | ManageWeb | 1,073,741,824 | UseRemoteAPIs | 137,438,953,472 | ManageAlerts | 274,877,906,944 | CreateAlerts | 549,755,813,888 | EditMyUserInfo | 1,099,511,627,776 | special perms | EnumeratePermissions | 4,611,686,018,427,380,000 |
| 15/01/2010 8:51 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 Permissions |
| | SharePoint | | 9/01/2010 8:48 a.m. | 0 | Creating a SharePoint Statement of Governance |
| | SharePoint 2010 | The following certifications (According to the MS Partner web site https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40121316) should be available in June. IT Pro - 70-667 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover configuration of SharePoint 2010 including deployment, upgrade, management, and operation on a server farm. - 70-668 PRO: SharePoint 2010, Administrator
Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover advanced SharePoint 2010 topics including capacity planning, topology designing, and performance tuning.
Developer - 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development
Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led course designed for developers with six months or more of .NET development experience. Course covers what you need to know to be an effective member of a SharePoint development team using Visual Studio 2010. - 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications
Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led training course designed for development team leads who have already passed the Developing on SharePoint 2010 technical specialist exam. The course covers choosing technologies for and scoping a SharePoint project, best practices for SharePoint development, configuring a SharePoint development environment, advanced use of SharePoint developer features, and debugging of code in a SharePoint project.
| 8/01/2010 8:28 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 Certifications |
| | | I had always struggled to find a compelling use for Groove that related to my heavy use of structured data (Lists) but with SharePoint Workspace now supporting Windows Desktop Search, I think I have found the killer use for it (read: I'm really excited about this :-).
From Vista or Windows 7, you can add a search shortcut to the Workspace…
And then search directly from Windows Explorer…
And open an item directly from the search results…
To enable this, you need to Sync the list to a SharePoint Workspace from the List Tools ribbon as shown below.
(It would be nice if you could publish a link to initiate the creation of a workspace for a list, I suspect this uses the client OM rather than a URL Moniker. I will investigate this)
Note: if this is the first time you have used the SharePoint Workspace client there will be a few additional account setup steps.
You can then access the list data in the Workspace client.
Notes:
- I found that I had to experiment with the list views to find one that worked well for offline use.
- Group by views don't work as expected.
- Can't sort or filter on columns (need to create a lot more views or export to Excel).
To create a Desktop Search shortcut, click on the Search icon in the view above, search for *, and click Save Search.
Now I have a reason to complete all the SharePoint PowerShell commands and details in this list http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/PowerShell
You should be able to grab an offline copy of this list for yourself by using the guest logon corp\demouser pass@word1 but it looks like SharePoint Workspace requires contributor rights. | 7/01/2010 1:51 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Workspace Content in Windows Desktop Search |
| | SharePoint | From http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design_2009.html In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn't use earlier versions of SharePoint at all. 
Microsoft SharePoint has seen substantially increased use among well-designed intranets in recent years.
| 5/01/2010 11:12 a.m. | 0 | 5 out of 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 use SharePoint |
| | SharePoint 2010 | Nothing annoys me more than seeing structured information stored in a static HTML file (such as a blog or wiki) so I created SharePoint lists for the following: Enjoy... | 2/01/2010 10:20 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 Web Part and PowerShell Command lists |
| | SharePoint 2010 | I was playing around with custom list views assigned to a content type. This is much easier to do with SPD 2010 than it was with 2007.
As you can see, http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter is included in the code field rendering. 
Download the 2010 Site Template WSP http://www.wssdemo.com/Downloads/PSLibrary.wsp and load it into your solution gallery
(_catalogs/solutions/Forms/AllItems.aspx)
to create a site that includes this list (not tested on another farm so there may be some relative link issues, let me know if so). I would have created a list template for you (all the resources for SyntaxHighlighter are in a hidden folder in the list so it would be self contained) but there is a bug in Beta 2 which means that only the Title field is created L | 1/01/2010 3:16 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 PowerShell library |
| | SharePoint 2010 | Now that my site has been running on 2010 for a month I thought I would share some screen shots of the usage stats. 
Figure 1: Unique daily visitors 
Figure 2: Page Views 
Figure 3: Referring Sites 
Figure 4: Top Pages All of the reports allow you to specify time periods other than the default 30 days 
| 24/12/2009 3:59 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Server 2010 Site Collection Usage Analysis |
| | |
My new 2010 B2 multi-server farm for WSSDemo.com is built and I'm working through the DB Attach upgrade process. First results are not bad. I think there is going to be a lot of Data View editing required as you can see at the bottom of the screen shot where the Category value is a lookup column but it has not rendered with disable-output-escaping="yes".
| 14/11/2009 10:01 p.m. | 0 | My First SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Attempt on Beta 2 |
| | | Please read the License Terms...
1. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS.
• You may install and test any number of copies of the software on your premises.
• You may not test the software in a live operating environment unless Microsoft permits you to do so under another agreement. | 14/11/2009 7:03 p.m. | 0 | If you are planning on Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 |
| | | I'm leaving it up to the MVP's to blog about all the cool features in 2010 but will share some tips on ways to do things in a production environment that developers or "as-built" IT people always seem to do through the 20 click UI procedure.
One such example is that the account running the User Profile Synchronization service must have "Replicating Directory Changes" permission on the domain, even if you only want to do full imports.
You can do this with the Active Directory Users and Computers UI or with the command line:
dsacls DC=Contoso,DC=Com /G "Contoso\svcProfSync:CA;Replicating Directory Changes"
I place commands like in a server prep cmd file which, among other things, creates my service accounts, adds all the roles and features required for SharePoint installation, changes IIS settings etc... | 13/11/2009 11:25 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2010 User Profile Synchronization |
| | | 8 minute interview covering Steve's thoughts on SharePoint 2010 and the future.
Video | 13/11/2009 2:07 p.m. | 0 | Forrester analyst Matthew Brown interviews Steve Ballmer at SharePoint Conference 2009 |
| | SharePoint | New SharePoint 2010 content on the Microsoft download site.
|
SharePoint 2010: Developer Platform White Paper
This white paper provides an overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform for ASP.NET developers. |
|
SharePoint 2010: SharePoint Developer Platform Wall Poster
The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform wall poster (PDF format) shows a view of the SharePoint 2010 developer tools, community ecosystem, execution environment, Sharepoint Server 2010 workloads, and target application types. The poster is intended to be printed at 24 inches x 36 inches (61 centimeters x 91 centimeters). |
|
SharePoint 2010: Getting Started with Development on SharePoint 2010: Hands on Labs in C# and Visual Basic
Use these 10 hands-on lab manuals for SharePoint 2010 to get started learning SharePoint 2010 development. |
|
SharePoint 2010: Developer and IT Professional Learning Plan
This document provides information to help developers and IT professionals learn Microsoft SharePoint 2010. |
|
SharePoint 2010: Professional Developer Evaluation Guide and Walkthroughs
The SharePoint 2010 developer evaluation guide describes the SharePoint 2010 developer platform, including walkthroughs of some of the new capabilities for developers. |
|
Enterprise Search Planning for SharePoint Server 2010
This model describes primary architecture design decisions for search environments. |
|
Design Search for SharePoint Server 2010
This model describes the steps to determine a basic design for a SharePoint Server 2010 search architecture. |
|
SharePoint Server 2010 Search Architecture
This model describes the physical and logical architecture components of the search system. |
|
Getting started with BI in SharePoint Server 2010
Discusses the business intelligence tools available in SharePoint Server 2010 |
|
SharePoint Server 2010 Evaluation Guide
Introduction and overview of SharePoint Server 2010 for IT pros. |
|
SharePoint Enterprise Search
Compares and contrasts search technologies in SharePoint 2010 Products |
|
Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010
Describes common ways to build and scale farm topologies, including planning which servers to start services on. |
|
Hosting Environments for SharePoint 2010 Products
Summarizes the support for hosting environments and illustrates common hosting architectures. |
|
Services in SharePoint Products 2010
Describes and illustrates the services architecture, including and common ways to deploy services in your overall solution design. |
|
Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products
Illustrates how to deploy services across farms to provide centralized administration of services. |
|
Business Connectivity Services poster
Microsoft Business Connectivity Services enable users to interact with external data by using SharePoint lists and Microsoft Office 2010. |
|
Upgrade planning poster
Describes requirements and considerations for planning to upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010 |
|
Upgrading services poster
You need to give special consideration to the issues involved when you upgrade services from the previous version of SharePoint Server. |
|
Upgrade testing poster
To help ensure a smooth transition to SharePoint Server 2010, perform a trial upgrade to find issues likely to surface during the actual process. |
|
Upgrade approaches poster
This model describes the three basic approaches to upgrading to SharePoint Server 2010: in-place, database attach, or a hybrid of the two. |
|
Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint Beta 2
Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint prevents users from uploading or downloading documents containing malware, out-policy content, or sensitive information to SharePoint libraries. |
|
Microsoft Forefront Server Security 2010 Privacy Statement
This document describes the privacy policy for Microsoft Forefront Security 2010 for Exchange and Microsoft Forefront Security 2010 for SharePoint. |
|
Microsoft Online Services 2010 CTP Help
Microsoft Online Services 2010 CTP Help is a small set of documents that provide basic "Get Started" information for the July 2009 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Online Services 2010. |
|
SharePoint Products and Technologies: 2010 (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation
This download provides an early technical preview of the SharePoint Products and Technologies: 2010 developer documentation. | | 19/10/2009 8:01 a.m. | 2 | New SharePoint 2010 content for download |
| | SharePoint |
Microsoft has added jQuery and Ajax javascript files to its global content delivery network (CDN). Because the files cached on servers located around the world, browsers download the content from the nearest location, saving you bandwidth. This also allows browsers to reuse cached JavaScript files for Web sites that are located in different domains.
<script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
or
<script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
For more information see http://www.asp.net/ajax/CDN/ | 30/09/2009 7:42 a.m. | 0 | Using jQuery or Ajax on SharePoint Internet Site? |
| | Data View |
With over 1,000 Internet sites running on SharePoint listed on my site, I have been looking at ways to better present the list of sites. One scenario is to show similar sites based on the country and industry classification of the current site being viewed.
E.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/Web%20Site/websitedetails.aspx?ID=2850
This is the page people go to as a result of finding a site in the search results or from the home page summary of new content.
To enable this capability, I used SharePoint Designer (SPD) to create a new list view page and added 2 data views (DVWP's) for the list that contains web site details. If you are new to SPD and the DVWP the check out Laura Rogers article on EndUserSharePoint.com
The first DVWP is a single item view which is filtered on the URL Parameter value ID.
The 2nd DVWP has several parameters defined so that it can receive web part connection values from the first web part and use them in the data source query. This is much more efficient that just filtering the results.
I then create a Web Part Connection from the single item DVWP to the Similar Items web part.
Note: set the Target Action: = "Get Parameters From" rather than "Get Filter Values From"
After the connection is created, add one filter criteria at a time to the 2nd DVWP and confirm that it works.
You can specify default values in the parameters so that SPD still shows results in the 2nd DVWP after the filter is applied. | 27/09/2009 1:59 p.m. | 0 | Display Related items in Display Form Page |
| | SharePoint | Most poorly performing SharePoint sites are caused by underlying SQL server configuration, or lack there off, settings.
One of the big impacts of using SharePoint Central Admin to create content databases is that they will be based on the Model DB template.
This results in the following:
- Data File = 10Mb with auto grow = 1Mb
- Log File = 1Mg with auto grow = 10%
This means that almost every time a user saves an office document, SQL will have to "auto grow" the database files and there is an overhead to this operation. The SQL Disk Usage report will give you an indication of this impact on existing content databases that started with the default size.
This is a relatively small content database but has already been extended many hundreds of times with 45ms per second in this case.
Extending the Database (data and log files) manually to a size that would provide for 6/12 months projected storage requirements results in a noticeable improvement in end user response times not only for saving documents but in overall responsiveness of all sites in the database.
There is much more to designing a good SQL platform for SharePoint, this is just some evidence in case you didn't believe it...
| 9/09/2009 10:17 p.m. | 2 | Solve SharePoint Performance Problems in SQL Server |
| | SharePoint |
I was preparing my TechED NZ presentation last Saturday (apparently it was a sunny day) and thought I would share a sneak peek at some of the things you will see in the demo.
Clicking on the graph takes you to a full report
It is session OFC307 on Wednesday @ 2:20pm
Note: This is a Technical SharePoint presentation on how to integrate SSRS, I will not be teaching you how to create reports. | 7/09/2009 3:50 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint and SSRS Integration at TechED NZ |
| | SharePoint | My attempt at humour in a SharePoint 2010 presentation I did at TR9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZZLwAikdhA | 5/09/2009 8:05 a.m. | 0 | A new spin on the SharePoint Value Proposition |
| | SharePoint |
It may not be the only list of Internet sites using SharePoint on the internet, in fact there are now several other sites providing similar lists, and mine is certainly not the prettiest bit it is the largest (933 sites as of today). It is also based on a storage platform that provides a standards based API to access the list data (SharePoint OOTB web services) so anyone can extract the list of sites.
SharePoint allows me to restrict access to these open, standards based API's but I choose to allow people to fully interact with all that SharePoint has to offer unlike other open source blog or wiki platforms that do not provide such an extensive platform as SharePoint.
The problem is that every time I sit down to work on the look and feel of the site, I find a large list of new site to add to the list. I have a view of the sites which is grouped by month but I have recently been discovering more than 100 sites per month so this is not the most optimal view. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/WebSites.aspx
When I started the list I expected to maybe have 100 sites in the list and I had 14 categories. As the quantity of sites is almost 5 times greater than I planed I have found how hard it is to re-categorize the existing items. The current number of sites per category is:
I have experimented with a Silverlight Deep Zoom view of the site images but this is a manual compilation which takes too much time. I'm still looking for the best way to present this information. If anyone has any suggestions, please comment. | 2/09/2009 9:48 p.m. | 0 | The largest list of SharePoint Internet Sites |
| | SharePoint | Microsoft has developed the Productivity Hub http://bit.ly/1dYUE1 to help support your ongoing end user training efforts. I have installed this on WSSDemo.com http://templates.wssdemo.com:8080/sites/productivity for your viewing pleasure. The Hub is a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft's core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs. The Hub uses SharePoint Server's social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way. It's not often that I see my SQL Server very busy but the install of Microsoft's Productivity Hub training solution for SharePoint required several full index crawls and this was the result 
If you want reports like this on your SharePoint site then see my previous blog posting on SharePoint Reporting Services integration with SharePoint...
http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2009/01/03/Reporting-on-the-performance-of-your-SharePoint-SQL-Server.aspx
| 28/08/2009 2:01 p.m. | 0 | Microsoft Productivity Hub Training Site installed on WSSDemo |
| | SharePoint |
I'm often asked by customers how SharePoint can be used to personalize content for users. Although there are plenty of features in SharePoint to achieve personalization, you have to be able to come up with the rules that define an audience and then how you will identify the information that is relevant to each audience.
Wouldn't it be great if all information and content mapped to a comprehensive taxonomy and that we could automatically align the taxonomy with groups of people? Because this is not usually a simple thing to achieve, we need to prioritise the work required to start targeting information and content to users based on a number of factors.
Therefore, before we start talking about SharePoint personalization features, we need to identify the audiences, taxonomies, information /content sources, business priorities and the relationships between each of these.
You can start the process from an audience or content perspective (left vs. right). From an audience perspective, membership can be broken down into two types:
- Optional (opt in/out)
- Fixed (based on business rules)
Active Directory group membership or some other line of business application that manages access to information based on a user's role is a common way of defining audience membership but this often doesn't align to a taxonomy such as an EDRMS file plan.
Some audiences will be broad in scope while others will be very narrow.
There will be more than one taxonomy (internal and external), so look for areas of the taxonomy's that can be linked to audience properties.
Audiences will often not agree on which information is of most value. Prioritized personalization of information based on value to the business vs. level of complexity will help users understand the big picture.
Priority will be based on a number of factors:
- Volume of content (architectural impact)
- Value of content in helping make informed business decisions
- Structure of content (formal taxonomy vs folksonomy or none)
- Accessibility of the content (API's, iFilters, federated search etc)
Once all of these requirements have been identified, then we can architect a solution... | 25/07/2009 3:05 p.m. | 0 | Process to define personalization requirements |
| | SharePoint |
Today I was exporting a number of sub sites so that they could be imported as new site collections. After exporting the sites I used a batch file to delete them. For whatever reason (one that I'm not willing to admit to) I decided to <CTRL>C the batch file. This left the "Are you sure you want to quit?" message in the command window.
This resulted in a lock that prevented the web application from being able to render any sites in the content database. Given that this was a single site collection Intranet (this is why I have to move the non-publishing team sites into a managed path) it meant that nothing was working until I selectect "Y" to end the batch file!
Just as well I wasn't doing this on the production platform.
The other thing I wanted to confirm while testing this process was what areas would affect performance. Two key things I found were:
- Export – default is to compress the files, this uses %temp% as a temporary location for the uncompressed files before creating the file you specify in the command. I will be setting this to something other than the c: drive as my servers currently have 16Gb ram disks (upgrade to 32Gb is part of the server rebuild process I'm working on) for the boot partition which are almost full and I have some 5Gb sub sites to export.
- Deleteweb – requires SQL transaction log space = sub site size, even with simple recovery mode. Auto-grow for each document being deleted from a library was taking 300ms to 2 seconds each time (on a VMWare dev server with i-SCSI attached disk). Switching to simple recovery empties the log, then extend if required to match largest site being deleted.
| 22/07/2009 7:52 p.m. | 0 | Do not interrupt stsadm deleteweb command |
| | SharePoint |
In the 1990's a lot of effort went into developing Office templates and macros. There was even a thriving partner business in providing these services but I don't see this activity any more.
Simon Ruppertz-Rausch, from Microsoft's Business Strategy Consulting group, has published a whitepaper on "Achieving Business Success with your Collaboration Infrastructure".
For many years I have been advising customers that, to get the most out of their investment in Office and SharePoint, they should invest in a Productivity Advisor role but this is a much more comprehensive program to address this gap in current IT/IM thinking.
Figure 1: Governance structure & disciplines covered by an Information Worker Competency Center
Download the whitepaper from here http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=157169 | 20/07/2009 10:43 p.m. | 0 | Information Worker Competence Center |
| | SharePoint |
But, like me, you probably know a developer and they probably laugh at you when you say "you should develop on SharePoint".
Having trouble convincing developers to take you seriously?
I don't normally blog about other people's content but you need to check out this web cast by Jeremy Thake... | 7/07/2009 9:21 p.m. | 0 | I am not a developer |
| | SharePoint |
WSSDemo first went live on a beta of WSS 3.0 on 20/05/2006 (based on this resource entry ) and has pretty much looked the same for the last 3 years. The only thing that has really changed is the amount of content on the site. One area in particular that has grown is the list of public web sites that are built on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform. This list has grown to over 640 sites and I have included a highlight of 100 sites that I thought were the top ones that people might want to check out.
I see that someone has copied my idea (who knows what their source was;-) and, although I could be annoyed by this, it has instead spurred me into action. Rather than filling my pages with Google adds to make money from other peoples content, I have decided to start a SharePoint Gives Back donation scheme (corny, I know, but here is my plan).
I will let partners who have built sites on SharePoint for customers have:
- Their logo (160*160 px max) and hyperlink to any page, in the site list for each site they created.
- A link to any case study they may have for a site in the list.
- Listing in a new page showing donating partners who have built SharePoint sites with a preview of their created sites
All this in exchange for a US$100 or greater donation to https://donate.worldvision.org/.
The listing will be valid for 12 months from date of donation (email proof required). Partners can also be listed for Intranet sites so long as they can provide at least 1 screen shot of the Intranet (preferably 2 so that we can see some variety & MySite implementations) with the customers' permission for it to be used on WSSDemo.com (this will be another category in the site list).
If I get positive feedback from at least 10 partners then I will go ahead with this so please let me know via this form (no commitment at this stage but valid email address and partner name required) and lets raise some money for a good cause.
I hope to work on a graphical facelift for the site based on the VSeWSS 10 demo themes. I have used one of these themes on my NZ Community SharePoint Conference demo site http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/community so anyone with some creative ability who can help would be much appreciated (content is king but if it don't look cool, someone else will make it look cooler).
Finally, thank you to everyone who keeps encouraging me that WSSDemo is a valuable resource. | 3/07/2009 8:31 p.m. | 0 | WSSDemo.com in need of a facelift and SharePoint Gives Back |
| | SharePoint |
This is the demo site I built during my presentation on the Data View aka Data Form web part presentation at the New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference today. The PowerPoint deck is also on this site.
http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/community/
Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and the problem with one of the web parts in my demo was that I had select the wrong parameter value in the connection. That's what happens when you try and cram a 75 minute session into 45 minutes...
| 2/07/2009 9:04 p.m. | 0 | Demo site for NZ Community SharePoint Conference |
| | SharePoint |
It seems that I have a different experience every time I install this configuration.
A few key points if you are thinking of doing this:
- Integrated mode only works for SharePoint Web Applications on the Default Zone
- Integrated mode will not work on a Web Application that has Anonymous access enabled
If you have a multiple SharePoint Server Farm:
- Install the SSRS SharePoint Add-in on the server hosting Central Admin first
- Instruction say that you only require a "Files Only" install of the add-in on the other WFE's but this is not enough.
copyappbincontent stsadm command must also be executed on each WFE
- If using Kerberos and NLB, the DNS entry for the Web Application URL must be an A record, not CNAME
Even if you have configured Kerberos on your MOSS farm, clients might still be authenticating using NTLM if this is not an A record
(KerbTray and http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2009/06/12/Testing-SharePoint-Kerberos-Configuration.aspx will help confirm/debug this)
I struck all of these problems across 2 customers in the last 2 days...
This is probably a session I should have submitted for the NZ Community SharePoint Conference 2009. Maybe I will change one of my TechED NZ sessions to this. Would anyone attending NZ TechED be interested in this? | 18/06/2009 6:31 p.m. | 0 | Reporting Services 2008 in SharePoint Integrated Mode |
| | SharePoint |
I found this nice asp.net application by to test end-to-end Kerberos functionality.
http://blogs.iis.net/brian-murphy-booth/archive/2007/03/09/delegconfig-delegation-configuration-reporting-tool.aspx
By installing this application in a virtual directory of the IIS site hosting my SharePoint Web Application, I was able to confirm the SSRS reports hosted on the WFE would support integrated security through to the Reporting Server (SSRS not installed on the WFE) and that SSRS could connect to SQL or Analysis Services data sources also using integrated security (more on the enterprise deployment of SSRS on multi-server MOSS Integrated reporting solution using Kerberos in a future post). This required a triple hop impersonation.
Output from my test farm:
|
Process Identity
|
|
|
Domain Account? |
DOMAIN\svc-moss-app is a valid domain account.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
Only accounts that are in Active Directory (domain user or computer accounts) can participate in Kerberos. This is because it is the domain controller (a.k.a. Key Distribution Center) that grants Kerberos Tickets. Local accounts are not recognized by Active Directory and cannot obtain Kerberos credentials. SYSTEM, Network Service, and Local Service are considered domain accounts as long as the server is part of a domain, however, Local Service cannot obtain network credentials for communicating with back-end servers. | |
|
|
Has a valid SPN? |
A usable ServicePrincipalName of HTTP/Intranet.DOMAIN.org.net is configured on the DOMAIN\svc-moss-app account.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
This SPN will allow HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) clients to connect to this particular service using Kerberos when:
The target process is running as DOMAIN\svc-moss-app
...And...
The host name portion of the URL or connection string is intranet. |
|
|
|
|
Existing SPN's for DOMAIN\svc-moss-app:
HTTP/Intranet.DOMAIN.org.net
HTTP/Intranet
HTTP/mosswfe.DOMAIN.org.net
HTTP/mosswfe |
|
|
|
|
An SPN (Service Principal Name) is much like a UPN (Universal Principal Name). UPN's are unique names for identifying a domain user account whereas SPN's are unique names that usually identify a domain computer account. An example of a UPN would be "myAlias@america.microsoft.com" instead of the standard "AMERICA\myAlias". Domain computers are granted two ServicePrincipalNames of type "HOST" by default when they are joined to the domain. Domain users are not granted any ServicePrincipalNames because their unique identifying name is generally a UniveralPrincipalName. | |
|
|
Duplicate SPNs? |
There are no duplicates SPN's.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
Because an SPN is essentially a "username" for a service, a given SPN cannot be set on more than one account (user or computer account) at a time. If the same SPN is set on more than one Active Directory account, Directory Services will frequently create a ticket based on the account that has the "duplicate SPN". This "duplicate" is then sent to the server/service but the service will fail to decrypt the ticket propertly since it was created based on a different account. | |
|
|
Trusted for Delegation? |
Account DOMAIN\svc-moss-app is Trusted for Delegation with Kerberos Only when connecting to any service
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
When selecting "Trust for delegation" or "Trust for delegation using Kerberos only" (Windows 2000 version of Kerberos) the trusted account will be able to pass credentials to any other server or workstation in the domain. For this reason it is much more secure to use "Constrained Delegation" in a Windows Server 2003 domain. |
|
|
|
|
It is NOT necessary to trust this account for delegation unless it needs to PASS credentials onto another server. "Trust for delegation" does not effect whether or not a user can connect to IIS with Kerberos. It only effects whether the user's token can be passed on to another backend computer from the IIS server. DO NOT trust this computer or any other account for delegation when attempting to get Kerberos working unless a process running under that account will also be passing credentials. |
|
|
|
|
By default when using "Integrated Windows Authentication" through IIS, the authenticated user is granted a "Network Token" that cannot be passed to any other computers. When using delegation, the Token then can be passed to other computers as long as the user successfully connected with Kerberos credentials. This can have security implications because trusting an account for delegation essentially means that the account is being granted authority to do some actions that normally only a domain controller would be able to do. |
|
|
|
|
The dictionary definition for "delegation" is when one is appointed to act on behalf of another. So in Windows terms when an account is trusted for delegation that means that the account is trusted to act on behalf of an authenticated user. | |
|
Backend Server
|
|
|
Domain Account? |
DOMAIN\svc-moss-sql is a valid domain account.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
Only accounts that are in Active Directory (domain user or computer accounts) can participate in Kerberos. This is because it is the domain controller (a.k.a. Key Distribution Center) that grants Kerberos Tickets. Local accounts are not recognized by Active Directory and cannot obtain Kerberos credentials. SYSTEM, Network Service, and Local Service are considered domain accounts as long as the server is part of a domain, however, Local Service cannot obtain network credentials for communicating with back-end servers. | |
|
|
Has a valid SPN? |
A usable ServicePrincipalName of MSSQLSVC/SQL.DOMAIN.org.net:1433 is configured on the DOMAIN\svc-moss-sql account.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
This SPN will allow SQL (Structered Query Language) clients to connect to this particular service using Kerberos when:
The target process is running as DOMAIN\svc-moss-sql
...And...
The host name portion of the URL or connection string is sql. |
|
|
|
|
Existing SPN's for DOMAIN\svc-moss-sql:
MSSQLSVC/SQL.DOMAIN.org.net:1433
MSSQLSVC/SQL:1433 |
|
|
|
|
An SPN (Service Principal Name) is much like a UPN (Universal Principal Name). UPN's are unique names for identifying a domain user account whereas SPN's are unique names that usually identify a domain computer account. An example of a UPN would be "myAlias@america.microsoft.com" instead of the standard "AMERICA\myAlias". Domain computers are granted two ServicePrincipalNames of type "HOST" by default when they are joined to the domain. Domain users are not granted any ServicePrincipalNames because their unique identifying name is generally a UniveralPrincipalName. | |
|
|
Duplicate SPNs? |
There are no duplicates SPN's.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
Because an SPN is essentially a "username" for a service, a given SPN cannot be set on more than one account (user or computer account) at a time. If the same SPN is set on more than one Active Directory account, Directory Services will frequently create a ticket based on the account that has the "duplicate SPN". This "duplicate" is then sent to the server/service but the service will fail to decrypt the ticket propertly since it was created based on a different account. | |
|
Authenticated User
|
|
|
Domain Account? |
DOMAIN\Administrator is a valid domain account.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
Only accounts that are in Active Directory (domain user or computer accounts) can participate in Kerberos. This is because it is the domain controller (a.k.a. Key Distribution Center) that grants Kerberos Tickets. Local accounts are not recognized by Active Directory and cannot obtain Kerberos credentials. SYSTEM, Network Service, and Local Service are considered domain accounts as long as the server is part of a domain, however, Local Service cannot obtain network credentials for communicating with back-end servers. | |
|
|
Authentication Method? |
You have connected from your browser to IIS using Kerberos authentication.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
Although IE has successfully connected to IIS using Kerberos it is still necessary to ensure the rest of the items in this list are properly configured in order for delegation to work also. |
|
|
|
|
View authorization header (this is for informational purposes only) | |
|
Overall Status
|
|
|
Will Delegation Succeed? |
The current configuration is correct for Delegating credentials with Kerberos.
|
|
|
Explanation |
|
|
|
|
All the necessary items for delegating Kerberos credentials are configured correctly. | |
| 12/06/2009 10:09 a.m. | 0 | Testing SharePoint Kerberos Configuration |
| | Search |
I wasted a few hours on this last week and another couple of hours trying to confirm exactly under which circumstances the problem happens.
The Search Core Results web part returns some standard xml elements in the results. I wanted to get the document library name for documents returned in the search results. To do this you can use the <url> and <sitename> values with the substring-after XSLT function to trim the site name off the absolute URL which then lets you use substring-before / to get the document library part of the url (ignoring any folders that may exist in the file path).
The thing with XSLT string functions is that they are case sensitive and although the full item <url> in the results retains the case of any characters used when creating site and library names, the <sitename> element sometimes converts the site url to all lower case.
On one of my servers, if the document is in a folder of a document library of a site collection that has capital letter in the site name, the site url is converted to all lowercase. For all other documents in the root folder of libraries, the site url retains the correct case. On another server, any documents in a site collection under a managed path that has an upper case letter in the url suffers this problem.
The only thing I haven't tested is a search center sub site in the same site collection as a sub site with uppercase characters in the site name.
This means that I had to convert both the <url> and <sitename> values to lower case first (now that sounds like standard programming best practice anyway). | 9/06/2009 10:13 p.m. | 0 | Annoying Search Results Bug |
| | SharePoint |
My thinking on this after a customer asked me to define SharePoint Information Architecture (IM on IM ;-).
SharePoint Governance
Most Microsoft solutions are governed by the standards and guidelines that are focused around operations and development. These have already been well defined by Microsoft and various people in the SharePoint community. A key component of the SharePoint platform is the ability to manage information which requires IM disciplines normally found in EDRMS or Data Warehouse (e.g. Master Data Management) practices. The IM pillar of a SharePoint governance strategy must be defined in order to design and maintain an effective enterprise SharePoint platform.
Information management
Information management responsibilities are often spread throughout an organization. Examples are:
- Corporate Communications – Branding material
- IT – Network file Shares
- Applications – Database storage
- Legal – Record retention/disposal
- Web Master – Internet/Intranet content
(of these, the network shares are most out of control so best not have IT define the use of SharePoint ;-)
Figure 1: Three Pillars of SharePoint Governance
Microsoft is very good at providing documentation (timing aside) and certifications for the IT Pro and Development requirements for SharePoint but there is an equally if not higher importance to be placed on the business requirements of Information Management which is responsible for.
No substance here, that is reserved for the customer... | 8/06/2009 10:50 p.m. | 0 | Three Pillars of SharePoint Governance |
| | SharePoint |
I have never been one for regurgitating old or other people's presentations which means I create a lot of work for myself. These are the presentations I'm working on:
NZ SharePoint Conference, July 2-3 (Building apps/smash-ups with Data View/Form web part)
USA TechReady, 9 July 27-31 (SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Taxonomy stuff)
NZ TechED, September 14-16 (2 sessions, TBA)
Not as impressive as Joel's list... but I also have consulting utilization targets to achieve at the same time. | 7/06/2009 12:30 p.m. | 0 | Upcoming events for which I have to create presentations |
| | SharePoint |
Something new that I did today...
Scenario
- A Document library with metadata column for DocumentType.
- There are about 20 document types in the lookup and a site collection field that references this list.
- A Base Content Type that includes this lookup field
- 5 Content Types that inherit from the base
- Not all of the document types have an Office template which is why there are fewer content types.
When a user creates a new document from one of the content types that does have a 1:1 relationship with a document type (e.g. Fax) then I want the Document type value to be automatically selected in the Document Information Panel.
When you create the custom DIP form in InfoPath, under the Tools menu you will see a Default Values option which brings up this dialog box.
The default value is set to the item ID for the lookup value in the Document Types list.
When a new document is created using this content type, the correct metadata value is selected from the choice list
| 28/05/2009 10:14 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Content Type, Document Template and Default Metadata Choice in Custom DIP |
| | SharePoint |
Just wanted to highlight an update to the instructions on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261890.aspx that is not mentioned in many of the blog postings that also suggest how to build your MOSS slipstream install.
|
 Important:
|
|
Delete Wsssetup.dll because it may conflict with Svrsetup.dll.
Having both Wsssetup.dll and Svrsetup.dll in the updates folder for a slipstreamed installation source is not supported. |
I have to add a new WFE to an existing farm that is still running SP1 + the Infrastructure Update (nothing post that).
Should I:
- Add the new WEF using the original SP1 + IU update install and then upgrade the entire farm to SP2
or
- Upgrade the current farm to SP2 and then add the new WFE using the SP2 slipstream install
I would (and did) go for option 2. The main reason is that I want the most stable platform possible before introducing any architectural or application changes. | 9/05/2009 10:42 a.m. | 0 | Building a Slipstream SharePoint Install for SP2 – the Fine Print |
| | SharePoint | There have been several problems caused by security changes in .Net 3.5 SP1 that affect .Net 2.0 & 3.0 functionality that MOSS relies.
These issues can now be prevented by installing the hot fix mentioned in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959209/ before you install MOSS.
Note: the "local loopback" detection will still be an issue for host header address (or other DNS entries) that resolve to the local host.
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 (go with option 1 for productions systems). | 6/05/2009 8:20 a.m. | 0 | Installing SharePoint Server with .Net 3.5 SP1 pre-installed |
| | SharePoint | I have upgraded wssdemo.com to SP2 but not after trying the upgrade on several VPC's to ensure that all would go well. Of course there was one small problem. The Central Admin server installed WSS SP2 fine but the MOSS SP2 file failed with a generic MSI error 1603. A reboot of the server fixed this. The reboot however installed a number of other Windows Updates that were pending which caused search to stop working (I use a dedicated server for search so the loopback detection was blocking access). Next time I would reboot all servers in the farm before applying SP2 and then check the event & error logs for any issues before upgrading.
| 5/05/2009 7:32 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint 2007 SP2 |
| | SharePoint | | 1/05/2009 10:15 a.m. | 0 | New STSADM commands with SharePoint SP2 |
| | SharePoint |
If you look at the SharePoint Products and Technologies Baseline Site Hierarchies Visio diagram http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73124&clcid=0x409 you will notice the Multiple Site Collections sections talks about the maximum number of site collections being 125.
This does not match the guidance here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx which suggests a theoretical limit of 150,000 site collections. It seems the diagram focuses on the host header configuration (perfectly valid for ISP's hosting multiple customer WSS sites on one server but I've never seen it used on an Intranet deployment) and doesn't seem to align with managed path based site collections. I would add the following points to each section:
Description
Recommendations
- A single site collection storage requirements would exceed the recommended 100 Gb max content db size
Note
Multiple site collections can share a content db but the db should not exceed 100Gb.
A single site collection can't span content databases.
Managed path site collections is how My Sites are hosted.
Numbers
Under a managed path a Web Application can support up to 150,000 site collections (site collections are likely to be spread across multiple content databases)
Updated Picture
I have seen a recommendation that you don't have more than 10 or 15 managed paths and there was a note in WSS v2 that more than 100 managed paths would cause performance issues but I think the main thing to consider is that if you copy a content database to another farm you must have the same managed paths in the other environment or else you will not be able to resolve the sites.
I normally go with the following managed paths by default:
- Sites (this one is OOTB if you turn on "Self service site creation")
- Project
- Customer
- Team
Note: I think http://intranet/project/1001 looks better than http://intranet/projects/1001. You could change the default "sites" path to "site" or remove it all together. After all, everything is a site in SharePoint. | 29/04/2009 9:22 p.m. | 0 | Multiple SharePoint Site Collections in Baseline Site Hierarchies Visio Diagram |
| | SharePoint |
[Updated with more detail] My list of over 1,800 SharePoint resources uses content types to distinguish the metadata that is relevant to each type of resource (article, blog, download etc.)
If the content type is KB Article, I wanted the default display item page to be customised to render the Microsoft KB Article page in an iFrame within the list item page.
A list with content type management enabled has a folder per content in which you can place views. This helps organize all the content type specific forms (Display item, New item and Edit item) into folders.
Views created in the content type folders are not shown in the default list views drop-down
You can then specify the default item view per content type by right-clicking on the list folder in SharePoint Designer and select properties to set the supporting files value for the Display item form
Even though a url might link to the default page e.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/DispForm.aspx?ID=1534
it will redirect to the custom page automatically (try it...)
My custom view page uses a Data Form web part to display a single item.
To create this in SPD, just right click on the List name and select New/List View Page.
Edit the new view, delete the List View web part and insert a Data Form as a "Single Item View" of the list
Select the list item for which you are creating the view and select "Show Data" from the drop down
The web part is filtered by the ID Parameter that will be included on the URL.
Create the Parameter from the Data View properties
Then create a filter for the Data View
and substituted the row view template code withing the DAta View web part for this...
<xsl:template name="dvt_1.rowview">
<tr>
<td>
<xsl:variable name="urlprefix" select="substring-before(@URL, ', ')" />
<xsl:variable name="urlpostfix" select="substring-after(@URL, ', ')" />
<script language="javascript">document.title="<xsl:value-of select='@Title'/>"</script> <iframe name="I1" id="I1" class="MyFrame" width="100%" frameborder="0" src="{substring-before(@URL, ', ')}">Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.
</iframe>
</td>
</tr>
</xsl:template>
You can include this CSS style in the page to resize the iFrame height to match the current browser height (- sharepoint chrome height).
<style type="text/css">
.Myframe
{ width:100%; height:expression(document.body.clientHeight-170);}
</style>
| 27/04/2009 9:00 p.m. | 0 | Custom SharePoint display item pages per content type |
| | SharePoint | | 19/04/2009 11:22 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint becoming the Default Web UI |
| | SharePoint |
After the false start yesterday when the publishing review process obviously failed, we can now all see the post that some of the people who have nothing better to do than sit and watch RSS feeds had picked up ;-)
http://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx
For the SharePoint fans, the key bits are:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and enhancements designed to improve performance, availability, and stability in your server farms. SP2 provides the groundwork for future major releases of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
- An STSADM command line that scans your server farm to establish whether it is ready for upgrade to the next version of SharePoint and provides feedback and best practice recommendations on your current environment.
- SP2 offers support for a broader range of Web browsers.
- Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.
Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Server R2 will be supported on their release.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- The performance and stability of content deployment and variations feature has been improved.
- A new tool has been added to the STSADM command-line utility that enables a SharePoint administrator to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors.
Excel Services
- SP2 makes it easier to configure Excel Web Access Web Parts on new sites.
- Several rendering, calculation, and security issues have been resolved.
- Some display issues have been addressed.
- Improved compatibility with Mozilla Firefox browsers.
Forms Server
- Memory requirements and the page load times for large browser-rendered forms have been reduced.
- Browser rendering of various controls, such as the 'cannot be blank' asterisk and the rich text field has been improved.
Search Server
- Improvements to the reliability and stability of very large corpus crawls.
- Backup-restore has been improved.
- A new command has been introduced to the stsadm.exe tool that lets a SharePoint Administrator to tune the Query processor multiplier parameter.
- Improved accuracy in searches involving numbers.
Of course, those of us already running the February CU have most of this but there are some things that are clearly new. | 16/04/2009 10:39 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint SP2 take 2 |
| | SharePoint |
The RSS Web Part supports connections so you can create a connection between a list of RSS Links and the RSS Viewer Web Part.
You would think that the RSS Web Part would understand if it was being sent the Feed URL value from a list column formatted as a URL field (url, title) but it doesn't. If you create such a connection you will get the following error.
ProtocolError occured trying to complete the request. The server returned a status code of : BadRequest and the status description is : "Bad Request"
To solve this problem you can either:
- Use a single line text field to store the RSS url
- Modify the value passed in the connection to remove the url field title value
The following steps show you how to configure option 2.
After creating the web part page with the list and RSS Viewer web parts placed on the page (you can use the SharePoint Web UI or SPD to do this), you need to edit the page using SharePoint Designer, convert the List web part to a Data View, recreate the connection and look for the field that you selected to create the Hyperlink on (in my case this was the Author field) in the Data View code.
In code view, search for "ddwrt:GenFireConnection" and change the value of @RSS= in this line...
<xsl:variable xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" name="fields">@RSS=
To...
<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:ConnEncode(substring-before(@Your_URL_Field_Name, ','))" />
Here is an example web part page with the connection http://www.wssdemo.com/pages/blogrssview.aspx
I have created a custom Content Type list item view for SharePoint Blogs in my resource list. http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/blogs.aspx
When you select one of the blogs, you will be redirected to a page that shows the blog details in a Data View Web Part which is connected to the RSS View web part.
e.g. http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Resources/Blog/ViewBlog.aspx?ID=675 | 7/04/2009 5:17 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint RSS Web Part Connection FeedURL Value |
| | SharePoint | | 2/04/2009 9:45 p.m. | 0 | Must Have Free Tools for SharePoint |
| | |
Unfortunately, the April fool's day prank will be on all those people who don't run Windows Update and there probably won't be any good news on April 1. April 2nd will probably full of announcements that were deferred by a day to avoid being mistaken as a joke.
Of course, being in New Zealand, we experience any effects of date related issues first (viruses, worms or product bugs) but then we get to put April 1 behind us while you are still worrying about it. I'll let you all know if we survive ;-) | 31/03/2009 10:42 p.m. | 0 | You don’t make product announcements on April 1 |
| | SharePoint |
This platform can help customers with their enterprise content management requirements. Traditionally, these different types of content have been in their own silos managed by products that were designed with the specific characteristics required for that type of content.
Most products are built to meet the requirements of a specific type of content. Document and record management products have merged over time which reinforced the unfriendly/inflexible perception of these products. WCM and Collaboration platforms have a lot in common which is why we have seen these products start to merge and why they are quickly adopted because of their respective perceptions (feel free to substitute the perceptions above with your own).
Many organizations struggle with managing and supporting the multiple platforms used to provide these solutions. This is the advantage of a platform like SharePoint. It provides the foundation and much of the capability for ECM. It may not be the best of breed in all areas but is one of the few platforms that leverages a common set of services such as:
- Identity and security (Active Directory)
- Management (SharePoint Central/SSP Admin and System Center for all components from OS, Web Server, Database Server and Application Server)
- Development & Integration Tools (Visual Studio and Biztalk)
But it is also the challenge for SharePoint. How to provide all of these characteristics in one product?
This leads us onto the perception of SharePoint as a product. Is it one of no control, quick, unfriendly and inflexible? Because it is a very big platform, you can't expect to run setup.exe and have a successful solution in a short amount of time. Unfortunately, in commoditizing IT products, Microsoft has created a perception that our products are easy to install. We have been through similar cycles with other products such as Active Directory, Exchange Server and CRM where similar mistakes have been made – setup is easy but there is no shortcut for successfully delivering on the business requirements.
This is why so many people either don't deploy SharePoint correctly and have a bad experience or listen to all the people who had a bad experience and assume that SharePoint over promises and under delivers. The latter is partly Microsoft's fault for taking too long to provide enterprise guidance on planning, designing, building a SharePoint platform and providing guidance on how to map the business requirements to the product features (both OOTB and via the most appropriate and extensions).
It is not hard to find guidance on how to be successful with SharePoint (and it's not just about the technology). Here are some of the resources available:
- SharePoint Deployment Planning Services. SDPS is designed to help organizations plan an effective deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Microsoft even pays for this for many customers through Software Assurance Benefits. See https://iwsolve.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/sdps/ProgramOverview.htm
- The SharePoint Server 2007 Internal Buzz Kit includes everything you need to run an internal communication campaign for your SharePoint Server 2007 launch. See http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/gearup/Pages/General/BuzzKit.aspx
- Patterns & Practices SharePoint Guidance. This guidance helps architects and developers design, build, test, deploy and upgrade SharePoint intranet applications. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx
- Business Value Planning Services to help customer Business Decision Makers (BDMs) develop a plan to leverage the strategic value of the Microsoft Information Worker (IW) platform by improving an impactful business process, working with the customer to document, analyze, optimize, justify, sequence, and propose a plan to improve their business using SharePoint and Office.
I track many more resources on http://www.wssdemo.com (I still need to add another category for the resources which would be "Audience" providing filtering for IT Pro, Developer, BA and End-user).
I often hear (or read) of people struggling with SharePoint. In most cases they are complaining about problems for which there are solutions and some of them are simpler than you think.
One such complaint is that SharePoint creates silos. These people then compare SharePoint with a point solution for a blog or wiki engine which defaults to everyone having read access where as SharePoint defaults to one of two options; if it is a sub site:
- The creator is the only one with initial access.
- The new site inherits the permissions of the parent site
If "self service site creation" is enabled for the Web Application is enabled in Central Admin then only the site creator has access initially.
This is designed to give the creator time to prepare the initial content in the site before granting access to the site (SharePoint handles communicating to the invited contributors through an automatic email invitation). To ensure all users have access to a sites content it is easy to grant all authenticated users.
You can also capture the creation of new site collections in the Site Directory by configuring this option in the Site Actions menu of a site collection that is based on the "Portal and Collaboration" site template (Site Directory Settings menu under the Site Collection Administration category).
You can then define a classification scheme for your sites which is important when you may have thousands of site collections (better to have thousands of site collections than thousands of sub sites, more on that later).
The Site Directory will capture the Site Title, Description and any other "Choice" fields you specify in the Sites list. Don't just settle for the fields provided by the default Site Directory. I'll try and get a screen shot from a customer's site directory but here is a simple example of how I used the directory to be the home page for my template web application http://templates.wssdemo.com/.
Note: The site directory only automates the adding of new Site Collections. Sub sites are not added. A custom site provisioning solution could update the directory for sub sites as well as add additional site details such as Business Sponsor, Administrator or any information (stored in the property bag for the site during provisioning).
See "Creating a Custom User Site Provisioning Solution with SharePoint Server 2007" on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687711.aspx
That's enough for tonight... | 29/03/2009 11:00 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint is a Platform, a Very Big Platform |
| | SharePoint |
I have been busy for a few weeks (hence not many blog posts) on a proof of concept to replicate content between a central SharePoint server and some regional data centres hosting SharePoint which in turn support remote users.
The top level portal content (WCM and documents) are pushed out the regional servers and each remote site collections hosted on the regional servers is replicated back to the central server.
This is not a product endorsement but I thought I would share some of statistics from Infonic iOra SharePoint Replication.
This is the import from one site collection on the remote server. Of the 19 changes, 10 were new documents that were created from a template that contains 90% of the content already (file size was 328Kb each). You can see the 2 levels compression going on; size of content change that is uniquely different across all the files, and the compression of the difference information. 8Mb down to 35.3Kb which is then transferred via an IIS server which supports download resume to handle unreliable network connections.
And the coolness factor (Epsilon factor) makes it sound like Sci-Fi, but this is reality and important when you have 128K links with up to 300ms latency!
Network latency was simulated in the lab by http://www.shunra.com/ - love the Visio based configuration UI
The customer is also testing Citrix WANScalers which added another 2:1 compression to the above iOra file transfer.
| 24/03/2009 9:19 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Geographic Replication |
| | SharePoint | | 22/03/2009 1:45 p.m. | 0 | Must watch Mix 09 session: State of the Art in Web Site Design on Microsoft SharePoint |
| | SharePoint |
Most people think that you have to use the WCM features of MOSS to deliver a public facing web site. It is true that MOSS provides a very rich platform on which to deliver a WCM solution, if all you want is a simple but dynamic publishing site then you can't beat the value of WSS as a CMS. I have had several people asking me for any resources I had for how to deliver a public facing WSS site so I thought I would recycle the answers into a post.
SharePoint Designer is Microsoft's tool to customize the OOTB SharePoint UI. Watch these demos
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102199841033.aspx?pid=CH102201271033
Update: SPD is now FREE!
Better branding of the WSS site can be achieved with 3rd party solutions/frameworks:
Here are some examples of sites running on WSS...
http://www.wellington-college.school.nz
(created by a New Zealand company http://www.provoke.co.nz)
http://www.nordam.com/default.aspx http://fa.iwpco.ir/default.aspx
I don't track WSS public sites in the MOSS list any more but feel free to list any you know of in the comments of this post and I'll approve them.
This post will probably lead onto "Why don't we just use WSS for our corporate web site" and "What are the benefits of MOSS for WCM if I can do it with WSS" | 6/03/2009 12:29 p.m. | 0 | Web Content Management with Windows SharePoint Services |
| | SharePoint |
Many customers implementing SharePoint internally for their Intranet, collaboration platform, document management solution or any combination of these often want to disable or delay the rollout of personal My Sites. I completely understand why this is often desirable but there are many benefits provided by the Shared Services (SSP) in MOSS that you can still leverage without giving users their My Site.
These services are:
- Public user profiles – anywhere you see a user name in SharePoint you can click on the name and be taken to a rich (I would say "Web 2.0 Social Media") display of information about that user and their relationships within the enterprise
- My Profile – user editable properties (structured and unstructured) like skills, experience, education, languages, projects and hobbies etc
- My Links – Personal and sharable links that can be grouped by user defined categories
- Office "Save As/Open" default locations presented under "My SharePoint Sites"
If you want to take advantage of these features without enabling personal My Sites then these are some of the modifications you will have to make (I'm not enforcing any method here, just showing a simple method so that you can test the usability of these features).
The My Site link that appears on every SharePoint site can be changed to redirect to mysite/person.aspx page as per this post http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2008/12/23/Update-to-SharePoint-My-Site-redirect.aspx
The next thing you have to change is the 4 _layouts pages that are involved with the user profile menu items under "My Profile" in the Quick Launch location below to remove the top menu bar.
Edit the following files on the WFE servers (keep a backup of the originals so you can revert to the default behaviour when you do decide to deploy personal My Sites):
- Profile.aspx
- MyQuickLinks.aspx
- MyContactLinks.aspx
- MyMemberships.aspx
The following code should be added to the last line on each of these pages…
<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId="PlaceHolderTopNavBar" runat="server"></asp:Content>
Edit mysite/default.aspx page with SPD to remove the top navigation with the same command as above (can re-ghost the page to revert back to original later).
Browse to the MySite/_layouts/settings.aspx page and configure the Portal Connection and Search Site collection settings to link the My Site home page to your portal web application.
The only thing you can't do without a physical My Site is allow users to upload a picture in their profile (this can be locked down in the SSP User Profile settings).
To get the Office file dialog to show SharePoint locations ("Published Links to Office client applications" in the SSP based on Audience Membership and Site Contributor group membership), the following registry settings must be created on the clients (this is normally done for you when you create your personal My Site and get the popup dialog box asking if you want to do this).
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal]
"LinkPublishingTimestamp"=hex:b4,03,ab,49,00,00,00,00
The key can be deleted as long as the path is there. (will be recreated/reset by first Office application launched each day which will refresh the list of links by calling a web service on the SSP)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AppDataLow\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Portal]
"PersonalSiteURL"=http://AnyValidSharePointURL (used to determine the SSP url for the web application)
(I'll get a few more screen shots of this so you can see what I mean). | 5/03/2009 9:36 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint User Profiles, My Links and My SharePoint Sites without a personal My Site |
| | SharePoint | | 4/03/2009 8:26 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint public facing web sites discovered in February |
| | SharePoint |
I often have to take a customer documented business process or workflow from a Power Point presentation and convert it into a Visio diagram. This used to be a manual process of recreating all the shapes in Visio. Now there is a free Visio add-in that can do this for you.
Flowchart Converter provides the capability to convert Microsoft® Office Excel®, Microsoft® Office Word®, and Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® documents to Microsoft® Office Visio® documents (*1), which are more suitable for sophisticated process diagram with data visualization capability.
*1) Please note that Flowchart Converter may not faithfully reproduce some documents. Flowchart Converter converts AutoShapes, illustrations (including Clip Art illustrations), and others.
Features of Flowchart Converter (Free Edition)
Flowchart Converter (Free Edition) is capable of the following:
- Capturing figures and flowcharts created with Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for use in Visio® documents;
- Retaining connector connection information;
- Allowing you to identify graphics that have not been successfully converted (using the log view feature)
|
Flowchart Converter is recommended for those who want to
- Create flowcharts for internal controls and business operations using Excel®, Word®, and/or PowerPoint® and want to make effective use of existing assets through Visio®, a software program that allows you to make more sophisticated graphical presentations; and/or
- Add a variety of graphics to existing documents created with Excel®, Word®, and/or PowerPoint®.
|
Download from http://www.visio.jp/dl/us/flowconv/
Example PPT:
Converted to Visio Shapes:
| 2/03/2009 1:40 p.m. | 0 | Creating Visio flow charts from Office client diagrams |
| | SharePoint |
BVPS is designed to help customer Business Decision Makers (BDMs) develop a plan to leverage the strategic value of the Microsoft Information Worker (IW) platform by improving an impactful business process, working with the customer to document, analyze, optimize, justify, sequence, and propose a plan to improve their business using Office System. We provide a reliable, repeatable process for certified BVPS partners to conduct, and be compensated for 3, 5, 10 or 15-day engagements according to the level of their customers' Software Assurance benefits.
You can find out more about this service from https://iwsolve.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/BVPS/
When I tell partners what they should be doing, I like to practice what I preach so I went and did the "Delivering Business Value Planning Services" certification exam 074-674 (which is required to qualify for these engagements) yesterday and passed. I normally complete exams in less than half the time allocated so I thought I could squeeze this into the 1 hour gap in my schedule at TechReady 8 here in Seattle (there is a testing canter onsite for the event). Boy was I wrong about the time estimation for this one so I had to skip reading the last case study (30-40 minutes is allocated to each of the 5 case study's) and just answer the questions. There are no practice tests and I hadn't checked the study guide http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/74-674.aspx which says that" This exam has a Case Study format."
So partners, get onto it and customer, leverage those SA benefits... | 5/02/2009 6:51 p.m. | 0 | Use Business Value Planning Services to get more out of SharePoint |
| | SharePoint |
I had blogged about the federated search feature that was demonstrated at the PDC but now that more than 2.5 million people have downloaded Windows 7 there bound to be people running Windows 7 who also have access to a SharePoint server. File preview is my favourite feature.
You can create a .osdx file for your SharePoint server by following this format which is for my wssdemo.com site
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:ms-ose="http://schemas.microsoft.com/opensearchext/2009/">
<ShortName>WSSDemo Site</ShortName>
<Description>Search the Ian Morrish Sharepoint Demo site.</Description>
<Url type="application/rss+xml" template="http://www.wssdemo.com/search/_layouts/srchrss.aspx?k={searchTerms}&start={startIndex}&s=WSSDemo%20Content"/>
<Url type="text/html" template="http://www.wssdemo.com/search/Pages/Results.aspx?k={searchTerms}&s=WSSDemo%20Content"/>
<!-- Win7 M3 syntax -->
<ms-ose:locationProperties>
<ms-ose:property name="TreatLinkAsEnclosure">-1</ms-ose:property>
</ms-ose:locationProperties>
<!-- Win7 Beta syntax -->
<ms-ose:ResultsProcessing format="application/rss+xml">
<ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>-1</ms-ose:LinkIsFilePath>
</ms-ose:ResultsProcessing>
</OpenSearchDescription>
Or click on this link http://www.wssdemo.com/Downloads/wssdemo.osdx if you want to try out searching WSSDemo.com from Windows 7. If you want to add the osdx file to your SharePoint server then you will have to add a mime type to IIS for the .osdx extension = application/opensearchdescription+xml | 12/01/2009 10:57 p.m. | 0 | Create a Windows 7 Federated Search provider for SharePoint |
| | SharePoint |
Instructions on how to build this demo http://www.wssdemo.com/SlideShow/show.aspx
It would be simpler to just install a custom web part on your SharePoint server that provides this functionality but not everyone has server administration access to their SharePoint environment to do this.
That is why I love the Data View/Form web part. It is already installed on your WSS/MOSS server, all you have to do is configure it through SharePoint Designer or import an already created .webpart configuration file through the web ui and you have a powerful solution.
Assuming you have some experience with SharePoint Designer and used the Data View, you shouldn't have to many problems getting this to work. (if you are new to the Data View then I suggest you look at these webcasts http://office.microsoft.com/home/video.aspx?assetid=HX102200491033 and http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/sharepointdesigner/HA102540351033.aspx?pid=CL100738871033#2 )
Step 1
Create or use an existing SharePoint Picture library for the slideshow. Note: Silverlight only support JPG and PNG filetypes.
Step 2
Create a new document Library (I called mine SlideShow) and set the document template type to "Web Part Page".
Step 3
Download the files from http://www.codeplex.com/silverlightslideshow/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=9559
and upload the 6 .js files + the scene.xml into the document library created in step 2.
Step 4
Create a new web part page called "show" in the document library.
Your document library should now contain the following files...
Step 5
Open the "show" web part page in SharePoint Designer
Step 6
Add a Data View of the desired Picture Library to the web part page by selecting the data source and then inserting as a multiple item view
 It doesn't matter what fields from the data source are selected (first 5 by default).
Step 7
Change the Data View properties
Set the Filter value to only return JPG or PNG file types
You can also change the sorting if you would like the pictures displayed in alphabetical Title or date Created order using the Sort and Group task.
You have now completed the SPDatasource configuration for the Slideshow web part.
Step 8
Switch to Code View and remove the <Xsl> </Xsl> tags and everything in between.
Add the following line to replace all the xsl just deleted
<XslLink>slideshow.xsl</XslLink>
Upload this file http://www.wssdemo.com/SlideShow/slideshow.xsl (right-click the link and "Save-as")as slideshow.xsl to the Document Library containing the web part page.
Step 9
Save the web part page and view it in the browser.
Step 10
Experiment with the Slideshow options in the xsl file by using the default.html file that came with the original Codeplex project. You will see that there are many options you can place in the
slideSettings: {theme: THEME_RANDOM_STACK}
section of the createSlideshow function.
Future
Because this solution is hosted outside of a picture library view, we can use it to display images from any or all libraries in the site collection by changing the SPDatasource properties of the Data View. I'll show you how in a follow-up post. | 10/01/2009 8:26 p.m. | 0 | Creating the SharePoint Silverlight Slideshow |
| | SharePoint |
SharePoint provides the option to have a mobile view url for any list view. The problem is how you share that url as you certainly wouldn't want to type it into a phone because it would look something like this
http://www.wssdemo.com/_layouts/mobile/view.aspx?List=3d601dca%2D957f%2D4f4b%2Db120%2D430220475ea5&View=38511657%2D1885%2D48f8%2D8a76%2D43f32b976d9e
Now you can create a TAG that can be photographed by Windows Mobile device and iPhone cameras and converted into a unique reference that is then looked up online to determine what actions can be performed for this tag.
In my case, the built in mobile list view didn't work very well for a long list like this so I have started building a view using the Data View but without all the overhead of the master page, CSS and javascript files.
This also got me thinking about an offline version of the list. I just need to research the various mobile browsers support for javascript and xml data islands. | 10/01/2009 4:23 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint STSADM Command Reference Access from Mobile Phones |
| | SharePoint | | 8/01/2009 10:20 p.m. | 0 | Searching Dynamics CRM from SharePoint using the BDC |
| | SharePoint |
Try the beta of this great new tool from MetaVis Technologies http://www.metavistech.com/sharepoint
MetaVis Designer models SharePoint metadata and hierarchy in a graphical two-dimensional way providing an intuitive interface to design and maintain metadata structures. Users will be able to create, modify, document and share these models through extensive use of a rich graphical interface. MetaVis Designer is integrated with SharePoint allowing users to load, synchronize and provision metadata models into the application.
Here is a screen shot of one of my Content Type inheritance models...
| 8/01/2009 4:32 p.m. | 0 | Having trouble documenting your SharePoint Content Types? |
| | SharePoint |
Using the Data View web part and the concept of an XML Data Island, I was able to get the Mindjet HTML Viewer control to render data directly from a SharePoint list.
See the demo here http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/MindManager2.aspx (this will download the active viewer automatically).
The tricky part was grouping the list data to create the sub-topics. The XML format is very order specific and not well documented. I only have the evaluation copy of MindManager which doesn't have all the features.
| 6/01/2009 11:04 p.m. | 0 | Dynamic MindManager Map Generated from SharePoint List Data |
| | SharePoint |
But I often wish I had more influence on the way some projects are run.
Most organizations know there is lots of room for improvement in the way they manage and execute projects. Lots of emphasis is placed on Enterprise Project Management (EPM implies global resource and cost management plus reporting) but not much on how all the people involved in a project execute on the plan and deliver a good result.
Executing the plan is more than just updating task statuses and recording time. Most projects require people to share, track and collaborate on more than just a Gantt chart.
Handing around a project plan printout (schedule) during a project meeting just results in everyone commenting on how inaccurate it is and insisting that their updates to the plan be recorded by the PM.
Note: This project template is based on "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge" (PMBOK), Third Edition. Numbers in parenthesis (3.1.1.n) refer to the specific process numbering convention used by PMBOK. Additional details about the process can be found in the referenced section of the PMBOK Guide. This schedule shows activities in a standard start-to-finish dependency relationship. In reality, the processes overlap and the dependencies may need to change to reflect that. This template is intended to show the general flow of work in the PM Life Cycle.
One of the things I like to see in a project is visibility of the work streams. You can create a Visio WBS directly from MS Project by using this add-in http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=34c28a49-e14c-4a7d-8d49-90061fe08ab4&DisplayLang=en
You can then render the Visio WBS in a web part for all team members to see using this approach http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/visio.aspx. If the project has a SharePoint site, each stream may have its own sub site with information rolled up to the parent site.
You can use OOTB SharePoint features to facilitate project management or use one of the server admin templates from Microsoft that includes some project features:
There are also a number of 3rd party solutions that provide custom SharePoint templates to help with project management. E.g.
http://www.brightwork.com/
http://www.corasworks.com/Products/rApplications/rPrograms.asp
http://www.epmlive.com/features_Templates.aspx | 5/01/2009 12:09 a.m. | 0 | Thankfully I’m not a SharePoint Project Manager |
| | SharePoint |
Or any other SQL server for that matter...
Another task I managed to complete within a day was to get SSRS installed on WSSDemo.com's SQL server (still running 2005, upgrading to 2008 will wait for another day).
There are a number of reports you can get from the SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard which is a free download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1d3a4a0d-7e0c-4730-8204-e419218c1efc&displaylang=en
After installing this package, additional reports are added to SQL Management Studio. You can also import these into Reporting Services. After importing them you have to reset the Data Source for each report before running the performance_dashboard_main report from which you can launch all the other more details reports.
|
Historical IO Report |
|
|
|
|
|
Report Time: 1/2/2009 8:24:28 PM |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The following table shows the number of IOs performed for each database since it was brought online (normally server startup) and how this compares to the total IO across all online databases. |
|
|
|
|
|
Database Name |
% Reads |
Reads |
Read Wait Time (ms) |
Avg Read Wait (ms) |
% Writes |
Writes |
Write Wait Time (ms) |
Avg Write Wait (ms) |
% Total IO |
|
AdventureWorks |
0.03% |
26 |
270 |
10.4 |
0.00% |
6 |
12 |
2.0 |
0.00% |
|
AdventureWorksDW |
0.03% |
22 |
125 |
5.7 |
0.00% |
6 |
12 |
2.0 |
0.00% |
|
Ian |
0.05% |
35 |
273 |
7.8 |
0.00% |
6 |
12 |
2.0 |
0.00% |
|
master |
0.12% |
87 |
672 |
7.7 |
0.00% |
105 |
256 |
2.4 |
0.01% |
|
model |
0.12% |
88 |
735 |
8.4 |
0.00% |
18 |
51 |
2.8 |
0.00% |
|
MOSS_New_Content |
0.07% |
52 |
315 |
6.1 |
0.00% |
6 |
11 |
1.8 |
0.00% |
|
MOSS_Templates |
7.25% |
5394 |
53978 |
10.0 |
0.24% |
6200 |
4494 |
0.7 |
0.44% |
|
MOSS_Training |
2.21% |
1647 |
8525 |
5.2 |
0.11% |
2912 |
1127 |
0.4 |
0.17% |
|
mossdemo_Content |
0.49% |
365 |
1508 |
4.1 |
0.08% |
2042 |
657 |
0.3 |
0.09% |
|
msdb |
0.25% |
186 |
1718 |
9.2 |
7.93% |
204445 |
130085 |
0.6 |
7.71% |
|
MySite_Content |
0.57% |
427 |
2753 |
6.4 |
0.16% |
4048 |
1131 |
0.3 |
0.17% |
|
MySiteAccountManagerRole |
0.10% |
76 |
285 |
3.8 |
0.00% |
6 |
3 |
0.5 |
0.00% |
|
MySiteFinancialAnalystRole |
0.09% |
69 |
248 |
3.6 |
0.00% |
6 |
3 |
0.5 |
0.00% |
|
MySiteHRManagerRole |
0.08% |
56 |
210 |
3.8 |
0.00% |
6 |
10 |
1.7 |
0.00% |
|
ReportServer |
0.04% |
32 |
13 |
0.4 |
0.10% |
2696 |
2584 |
1.0 |
0.10% |
|
ReportServerTempDB |
0.06% |
44 |
25 |
0.6 |
0.03% |
745 |
989 |
1.3 |
0.03% |
|
SharePoint_AdminContent_a0e0098f-f4e2-43fb-9608-0f462fc357cf |
1.10% |
819 |
4351 |
5.3 |
0.00% |
20 |
8 |
0.4 |
0.03% |
|
SharePoint_Config |
0.30% |
225 |
2644 |
11.8 |
53.48% |
1379153 |
709271 |
0.5 |
51.98% |
| |
File Name |
% Reads |
Reads |
Read Wait Time (ms) |
Avg Read Wait (ms) |
% Writes |
Writes |
Write Wait Time (ms) |
Avg Write Wait (ms) |
% Total IO |
| |
SharePoint_Config |
69.33% |
156 |
2048 |
13.13 |
0.20% |
2784 |
1651 |
0.593031609 |
0.21% |
| |
SharePoint_Config_log |
30.67% |
69 |
596 |
8.64 |
99.80% |
1376369 |
707620 |
0.51412085 |
99.79% |
|
SharePointTrainingKit |
0.33% |
248 |
1170 |
4.7 |
0.01% |
339 |
231 |
0.7 |
0.02% |
|
SSO |
0.05% |
35 |
139 |
4.0 |
0.00% |
25 |
11 |
0.4 |
0.00% |
|
SSP1_Content |
0.37% |
278 |
1587 |
5.7 |
0.07% |
1910 |
496 |
0.3 |
0.08% |
|
SSP1_DB |
3.70% |
2754 |
72989 |
26.5 |
16.04% |
413664 |
517477 |
1.3 |
15.69% |
|
SSP1_Search_DB |
7.16% |
5332 |
92981 |
17.4 |
15.86% |
408991 |
6293620 |
15.4 |
15.61% |
|
tempdb |
56.72% |
42216 |
56133 |
1.3 |
3.14% |
80918 |
333505 |
4.1 |
4.64% |
|
WSS_Search_MOSSAPP |
1.06% |
792 |
10732 |
13.6 |
2.42% |
62502 |
46053 |
0.7 |
2.39% |
|
WSSDemo_Content |
17.63% |
13120 |
155213 |
11.8 |
0.32% |
8271 |
36427 |
4.4 |
0.81% |
| |
|
Grand Total |
100% |
74425 |
469592 |
6.3 |
100% |
2579046 |
8078536 |
3.1 |
100% | | 3/01/2009 10:36 p.m. | 0 | Reporting on the performance of your SharePoint SQL Server |
| | SharePoint |
Most products that store content are designed to meet the requirements of a particular discipline; collaboration, document management or record management. The challenge with designing a SharePoint solution is that you might need to meet the requirements of more than one discipline.
This is a slide from the Tech Ready session on Information Architecture I was going to present in February (that session is now the victim of the current economic situation which means I won't be able to attend :-(
The idea for this originally came from a table I saw comparing document and record management requirements that was published back in the 90's but do you think I can find it again?
Because this was a PPT I kept the number of characteristics down to 5 but there are plenty more. Feel free to share your thoughts about this with a comment. | 2/01/2009 8:36 a.m. | 0 | Conflicting Characteristics of Content Requirements in SharePoint |
| | SharePoint |
I decided that I should start and finish something for the first day of 2009. Fitting that it should be SharePoint project consisting of a Web Part that uses the Data View and Silverlight to turn the pictures in a picture library into a slide show.
http://www.wssdemo.com/SlideShow/show.aspx
99% of this is thanks to Frederik Hendriklaan and his SilverlightSlideShow project on CodePlex http://www.codeplex.com/silverlightslideshow which gets the list of images from an XML file. I used the Data View to format the picture library list data into an xml island in the format required by the existing Silverlight project.
I'll help the first person who comments on this post that wants to get it working on their own site. You just have to give me your picture library list GUID and I'll give you a .webpart file to import onto a page (no server code deployment required).
Happy New Year J | 1/01/2009 10:24 p.m. | 0 | Silverlight Slideshow of a SharePoint Picture Library |
| | SharePoint |
An important part of any introduction of SharePoint for better document collaboration/management as compared to a network share is to decide what documents to migrate.
The first question I always ask is "are you going to add any value to the documents by placing them into SharePoint?".
Bearing in mind that SharePoint storage is more expensive than a network share there has to be benefits for doing it. Just saying "we will be able to find it more easily by using SharePoint search" is not a valid reason because SharePoint can search the files in the network share.
So the documents that don't benefit from migration into SharePoint may still have to be kept on a network share. A simple strategy might be to mark the network share "Read Only" but there are often files that still need to be maintained in this location along with future files that are not suitable or supported in SharePoint such as MS Access databases or extremely large files such as CAD, TIFF images or video files. So what tools can be used to improve or extend the basic network share?
Most Architects and Administrators are unaware of the new features in Windows Server 2003 R2 and 2008. Most IT people seem to have learned the basics of Server 200 and assume that each version since then has just fixed bugs or changed the UI. One such feature is the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) which ships with W2K3 R2 and W2K8.
Figure 1: File Server Resource Manager Administration snap-in
FSRM enables administrators to restrict the use and propagation of files on network shares. File screening rules apply to all users in a folder tree or volume. Exceptions limiting inheritance of screening policies can be configured.
- Create file screens to control the types of files that users can save and to send notifications when users attempt to save blocked files.
- Define file screening templates that can be easily applied to new volumes or folders and that can be used across an organization.
- Create file screening exceptions that extend the flexibility of the file screening rules.
This is something the IT department would have to configure on the Network servers. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772675.aspx
I can see File Screens also being useful for creating a Media Share which would restrict users to only be able to add valid audio/video media file types. Links to these files along with associated metadata can be added to a SharePoint list or publishing solution (such as
FSRM also provides a simple way to quickly identify, monitor, and fix inefficiencies in storage resource management. Administrators can configure specialized reports or request reports in predefined outputs, including by:
- File size
- Least recently used
- Owner
- Duplicates
These reports could be useful in the information audit process before migrating anything into SharePoint. | 27/12/2008 12:14 p.m. | 0 | Dealing with network shares and a SharePoint deployment |
| | | Updated from 6 months ago http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2008/06/12/there-are-not-enough-microsoft-sharepoint-certified-technology-specialists.aspx .
Qualification | Qty 12/06/08 | Qty 26/12/08 | MCP (all) | 2,268,992 | 2,354,663 | Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Application Development | 1,852 | 3,726 | Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration | 6,384 | 11,090 | Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Application Development | 1,527 | 2,789 | Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration | 3,618 | 6,199 |
A reasonable increase but I still think the number of WSS certifications should exceed MOSS.
Make it your New Year's resolution to get (more) certified...
Exam 70-542 TS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Application Development
Exam 70-630: TS: Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring
Exam 70-541: TS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Application Development
Exam 70-631: TS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring | 27/12/2008 12:03 p.m. | 0 | Increase in SharePoint Certified Technology Specialists |
| | SharePoint |
Shortly after deploying this solution to redirect users from the Intranet web application to the My Site web application (as per this blog post) we found a small problem.
If you want users to be able to change their regional settings then there is still a valid reason for them to get to the _layouts/userdisp.aspx page. So the redirection code need to check for the URL parameter force=True and not redirect in this case.
So the updated code looks like this
<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%
// Don't redirect if user is trying to update "My Settings" for this site collection
// (Force=True) is the query string that specifies this action
if (Request.QueryString["Force"] != "True")
{
// Changes for SharePoint to redirect User Display to My Site if the user has a profile in the SSP
try
{
UserProfileManager profileManager = new serProfileManager(ServerContext.Default);
// Use the username from the User Information Item to get the full profile of an user
bool userExists = profileManager.UserExists(this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());
if (userExists)
{
Response.Redirect(profileManager.MySiteHostUrl + "Person.aspx?accountname=" + this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());
}
}
catch
{
// do nothing
}
}
%>
If you don't like the support limitations stated in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944105 with regards to modifying _layouts pages, then Keith Dahlby has posted a solution to turn this into a feature
http://solutionizing.net/2008/12/08/user-profile-mysite-redirect-via-delegate-control/ | 23/12/2008 9:42 a.m. | 0 | Update to SharePoint My Site redirect |
| | Technology |
Just in case anyone else strikes this problem...
SharePoint email alerts where being stripped of their HTML body at a customer site. The customer had added rules to prevent *** SPAM*** from being added to the subject line but the body of the email would be replaced with "഼".
Changing the outgoing email settings in the Central Admin to "Unicode UTF-8" fixed the problem. | 5/12/2008 11:06 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint email alerts and Tumbleweed Email Firewall |
| | SharePoint |
WSS is great and Search Server Express is great, put the two together and you have an awesome collaboration and search solution in one.
But Search Server Express includes WSS so why install both of them?
Answer: If you don't already own a full SQL Server license then you Search Server Express provides MSDE which is limited to 4Gb of storage where as WSS include SSEE which is only limited by your local disk capacity (content database and concurrent user load effects on performance aside). So install both products and get (almost) unlimited WSS storage and Search Server Express MOSS like search capability.
I wanted to install this configuration for my church office as it represents good value for money.
They already had a W2K3 Server license + Windows CAL's but no SQL Server. So I installed the following:
- WSS SP1 in Basic mode – provides unlimited storage SSEE database in single server only solution (no 4Gb limit like Express or MSDE)
- Upgrade to Search Server Express – adds SQL Server 2005 Express for the SSP Content and Search db (this gives you MOSS search functionality for WSS sites, web sites and Network Shares)
Note: due to memory requirements of 2 SQL instances and WSS Web Application you will need to tweak some memory setting but if you have more than 50 users you will probably need a minimum of 4 Gb, preferably 8Gb, of memory which implies 64Bit Windows.
Problems with default WSS Install
There are a few strange WSS settings when you install in Basic Mode. Most notably:
- No domain accounts used
- "SharePoint – 80" IIS Web Site created (default IIS web site is also on port 80)
- Web application on "SharePoint – 80" default zone security is set to Kerberos
Problem: if you change the AAM from the server netbios name to a friendly DNS name and add the host header to IIS, users can't login to the site.
Solution: Change the security provider for the Web Application Default zone to NTLM
Next, upgrade to Search Server Express following these instructions http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc297193.aspx#UpgradeBasic
The SSE upgrade instruction state that:
By default, the Search Server 2008 upgrade wizard creates the default Search Center site on port 80. If there is an existing SharePoint site on that port, the Overwrite Default SharePoint Site screen appears. On this screen, click one of the following options:
- Yes, overwrite the existing site with a new default SharePoint site.
- No, do not overwrite the existing site. Create a new SharePoint site.
- No, do not create a default site.
Problem: I do not get this prompt and the Configuration Wizard fails trying to create the sample data.
Solution: Delete the "SharePoint – 80" then using Central Admin:
- re-run the Configuration Wizard which will create a new "SharePoint – 80" web application
- delete the default search site collection created in the root of the new "SharePoint – 80" web application
- create a Collaboration site collection in the "SharePoint – 80" web application
- change the AAM settings if you don't want to use the server name + add IIS host header to "SharePoint – 80"
- configure the SSP search settings as required
Now you go to the Site Settings page of your new site on the "SharePoint – 80" web application and:
- create a new sub site using the Enterprise Search template
- set the site collection search settings to use the new search site
The last problem, if you used a host header, is that the crawler is blocked from accessing IIS regardless of the crawl account or Web Application Policy. Follow these steps to resolve http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 | 29/11/2008 10:45 p.m. | 0 | Installing WSS and Search Server Express to make a Search and Collaboration appliance |
| | SharePoint |
 With all the talk about Web 2.0, Social Computing and now the economic crisis, it is time to turn back to productivity and knowledge management.
If you are an employee and as part of your job you start researching the Internet or Intranet for resources, you eventually find something and add it to your browser favourites. That is great for you but there are probably other people in your organization that could benefit from your research so you do one of 3 things:
- Keep the link to yourself, why share?
- Email everyone the link with a short synopsis as to why you think they may be interested in it
- Share the link using some social tagging solution
We all know what is wrong with the first two options. There are several good public solutions for #3 like Del.icio.us but what if this research that you performed as part of your job contributes to the intellectual property of your organization? You would want to keep this information within the enterprise. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has provided this capability since it was released in 2006 through the My Links feature (in fact Portal Server 2003 even had this capability).
Figure 1: SharePoint My Links feature
The only real weakness in this solution is the lack of multiple tagging or tying the grouping to enterprise taxonomy. Lets hope this is improved in the next version, otherwise I see great potential for swapping this out for a 3rd party solution.
Figure 2: Tagging a link using the Grouping feature
I have posted a solution previously to allow users to add links while they are browsing non SharePoint sites from a browser favourite link here http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=62
Back to Knowledge Management... Combining the My Links that an expert has gathered and categorised along with his user profile, other users are more likely to discover these resources when they are searching for a particular topic.
Figure 3: User Profile fields to assist in KM
You could either have a SharePoint site per specialist subject area and use search results web parts (Core Results and People results parts) to exposes the people and information relevant to the topic, or a tab in the search centre for KM with customized web parts.
Back to productivity... Helping people find relevant information and authoritative resources quickly will increase productivity.
I can see this scenario being built in one of my demo images...
Just don't try and use one of those analysts ROI statements on the cost of time spent searching for information to justify a new purchase of anything, this post is intended for organizations that already own SharePoint Server but are not getting the full potential of its capability to deliver on productivity and KM. | 29/11/2008 3:17 p.m. | 0 | Get more out of your SharePoint Server |
| | SharePoint |
Udated Code: See http://www.wssdemo.com/Blog/archive/2008/12/23/Update-to-SharePoint-My-Site-redirect.aspx
SharePoint provides rich integration between content and users (Office Communicator presence information and a hyperlink to display user details). This can be seen everywhere a user name is assigned to a piece of content which can be:
- Created/Modified By details for any item display page or view that includes these columns
- Site group membership from settings page or web part
- People & Group column added to any list/library
- Workflow and version details
For Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, some customers find that clicking on a user name takes them to the My Site persondetails.aspx page while others only see the simple WSS userdisp.aspx page. Why is that?
All people links go to http://SiteCollectionURL/SiteURL/_layouts/userdisp.aspx?ID=17&Source=... And this page decides whether to redirect to the My Site provider defined in the SSP that the Web Application containing the content site collection is assigned to based on one of the following rules:
- Host name of the My Site web application matches the site from where userdisp.aspx is called (i.e. both web applications are running on different port numbers)
- The site collection where userdisp.aspx is called from has a Portal Connection setting which is set to the My Site url (this would add the My Site to the start of the breadcrumb navigation for OOTB master pages which most customers don't want)
Figure 1: WSS simple user details page (happy Adam?)
I found many references to this problem searching on the web and several proposed solutions that were flawed so, here is a solution that works and has been tested in a medium farm environment of 3 WFE's and 14,000 users in the profile db(thanks to my colleague Craig for refining my solution down to the 4 lines of code).
The solution would be for Microsoft to fix this. It is obvious based on the Intranet Web Application -> SSP -> MySite relationship that they are trusted.
My solution involves modifying the userdisp.aspx page in the 12\templates\layouts directory so you should review this article first http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944105
This solution doesn’t even require users to have a physical My Site or even permissions to create a My Site. All you have to do is verify that the public page has the correct permissions by browsing to the permissions page on the My Site Host.
Add the following line to the start of the first line in userdisp.aspx
<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
Add the rest of this code just before the final </asp:Content> tag at the bottom of the page
<%
// Changes to redirect User Display to My Site if the user has a profile in the SSP
try
{
UserProfileManager profileManager = new UserProfileManager(ServerContext.Default);
bool userExists = profileManager.UserExists(this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());
if (userExists)
{
Response.Redirect(profileManager.MySiteHostUrl + "/Person.aspx?accountname=" + this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());
}
}
catch
{
// do nothing, original userdisp content will be displayed
}
%>
There is a scenario not covered by this customization or the OOTB userdisp page and that is when the user has been deleted from AD, removed from the SPS User Profile and deleted from the Site Collection. The OOTB userdisp.aspx page just shows an error but in some customer environments there may be historical information about people who have left for auditing purposes (like their job title, cost center, termination date or manager were) which would be useful to display. | 29/11/2008 10:34 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint redirecting user link to MySite page - solution |
| | SharePoint |
Microsoft has just published this whitepaper to give you guidance on automating the installation of SharePoint. Although some might say "Others have already done this" or "I have a much better solution" it provides a good description of the process and, even better, has a good diagram showing the process.
Some of my tips:
- I build the Application Server first which makes it the Central Administration Server (may just be an error by the author)
- Use Powershell (bring on the day we deprecate the CMD shell. Unfortunately I know, it will never happen;-)
-
Think about all the default things that probably should be changed and automate the settings (adsutil.vbs is very handy)
- log file locations (for IIS and SharePoint), SharePoint Data location and index files.
- IIS Compression settings
- Web Proxy settings in web.config
- Don't install .Net 3.5sp1 as the base install (which includes 2.0 & 3.0 as opposed to 3.0) as there are a few issues, trust me. You can upgrade to 3.5 SP1 after SharePoint is installed.
-
Evaluate some of the CodePlex projects to automate configuration and administration.
- Search managed properties (use a dummy stp site template with all the list/library columns you want to index , run a full crawl, then script the creation of managed properties and scopes)
- User profile configuration (I had a customer with lots of custom AD attributes they wanted to import and display in the user profile. The SSP web UI is painfully slow to add and order these
- ULS Log viewer
We can build a 3 WFE + App server farm from the basic OS in about 1 hour including deployment of custom wsp solutions. It is worth the effort so get scripting... | 28/11/2008 9:28 p.m. | 0 | Using scripts to automate SharePoint Server 2007 installation |
| | SharePoint |
An interesting comparison of my site stats vs Joel Olsen.
Thanks to Joel for publishing some of his Google Analytics details. I noticed a few subtle differences between my stats (all of wssdemo.com, including blog) and Joel's.
- Direct vs Google are swapped around, hence the title of this post! (this is for one day...). As far as the keywords go, I'm just not famous :-(
Compare to Joel's traffic sources
- Non Search Engine referrals, the LinkedIn referrals relate to job offers from recruitment companies that want me to work in obscure places
Compare to Joel's Referrals
- Search Traffic (1 week) – I had a total of 16 search engines although I had never heard of 11-16
Compare to Joel's Search Traffic
- Technical Profile – almost identical
Compare to Joel's technical profile
- Global Reach – India is higher up for me, I think that might be all the MS PSS & PFE people there who click on my internal email signature when I answer their internal request for help emails.
Compare to Joel's Global Visitors
If Joel could install the CKS:EBE then his RSS feed issues would be solved. My Feed Burner subscribers per day are > 700. | 26/11/2008 10:34 p.m. | 0 | Where would I be without Google? |
| | |
For those who were at Sydney partner training I delivered yesterday, this is the application I said should be available any day;-)
StickySorter is an Office Labs sponsored spare-time project by two Microsoft employees, Julie and Sumit. The idea sprung from the need for project teams all over the world to gather and organize data using a collaborative process known as affinity diagramming. Since its inception, StickySorter has evolved into a desktop application so anyone can use it to collaborate and organize ideas electronically, using a familiar sticky note interface.
This could be an excellent tool to help capture document template and taxonomy requirements for your SharePoint Project
You can also define fields in the notes and all of the data captured can be exported to a CSV file.
Think; Tablet, Projector, remote users via Live Meeting...
Get it here http://www.officelabs.com/projects/stickysorter/Pages/default.aspx | 20/11/2008 8:00 a.m. | 0 | Free Card Sorting Application – StickySorter |
| | |
SharePoint document libraries support enforcing check out to make any changes to a document or its metadata. This is set in the Version Settings menu of the document library settings.
You might think that this option should be on by default but there are some downsides to doing this. The biggest impact to requiring check out is that you can't use the bulk editing Datasheet View. If require checkout is enabled, the Datasheet View will display "This view is read-only" message at the bottom.
Note: the Read-only indicator on the right is field specific.
If you don't enable the "Require Check Out" option then users need to be aware of how SharePoint prevents duplicate editing of a file (the following assumes Office 2007).
Explicit Check-Out
This happens when a user selects this option from the item actions drop-down menu.
There are three problems with this
- Assumption that the user knows to do this
- The drop down may not be available in the current view
- The document name is a hyperlink so the user may click on in their hast to edit it
(In WSS v2 and SPS 2003, selecting this option didn't actually open the document which confused users even more)
Implicit Check-out
If a user just click on the file name, the file will be implicitly checked out for a period of time dependant on the client OS (see my technical blog post on what happens when a user clicks on a hyperlink)
|
OS |
Timeout |
|
Windows XP |
15 minutes |
|
Vista |
60 minutes |
If someone else clicks on the file during this time, they will see the following message...
As soon as a user closes a file that is implicitly checked out, the lock will be released (regardless of whether they save their changes or not) allowing another user to edit the file.
Note: if Office crashes or there is a network outage or RAS disconnect, the lock may remain in place and you either have to wait for the timeout or initiate an IIS reset on the server that the user opened the document from (hard to determine in an NLB environment).
In a nutshell, a quick document edit doesn't require users to explicitly check-out a document (MS obviously realised that 15 minutes was a bit too short for XP for a quick document editing session).
Why give the users so many choices? Wait for my next post on the different reasons why documents are stored in SharePoint. | 3/11/2008 8:23 p.m. | 0 | Implicit vs Explicit Document Check-out in SharePoint |
| | SharePoint | | 2/11/2008 3:37 p.m. | 0 | Windows 7 Federated Search with SharePoint |
| | Silverlight | IIS 7 Smooth Streaming + Silverlight + Akamai distributed network!
Even in little old New Zealand, at the end of the Internet, this looks fantastic! Check it out http://www.smoothhd.com/
| 1/11/2008 10:05 a.m. | 0 | Internet Video like it should be |
| | SharePoint |
It also provides valuable reporting capability.
The critical conditions that the SharePoint Management Pack monitors are summarized in the following reports that can be easily viewed through the System Center reporting console. Rules can be defined to alter how and when data is gathered, influencing the contents of these reports.
- Alerts Report
- Most Common Alerts Report
- Event Analysis Report
- Most Common Events Report
- .NET CLR Data Performance Report
- .NET CLR Memory Performance Report
- ASP .NET Applications Performance Report
- Indexing Service Performance Report
- Logical Disk Performance Report
- Memory Performance Report
- MOSS Search Performance Report
- Network Interface Performance Report
- Paging File Performance Report
- Physical Disk Performance Report
- Process Performance Report
- Processor Performance Report
- System Performance Report
- Web Service Performance Report across your SharePoint environments.
 
To help SharePoint teams meet and report on service level targets, the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager, a solution accelerator available as a download, provides the ability to monitor availability and performance for the entire SharePoint service from both the user's perspective and from a backend perspective. Top-level views and drill down capabilities let administrators investigate and resolve problems before they affect service levels.
If you want assistance with Monitoring Service for SharePoint 2007 with System Center Operations Manager 2007 might be what you need. (OK, I am an MCS consultant but I'm not desperate for work, just letting you this option is available;-) | 30/10/2008 8:12 a.m. | 0 | System Center Operations Manager is more than just for Monitoring SharePoint |
| | SharePoint | There is so much video content available now days that can be used as a source of content for your web site (Internet or Intranet). This article shows you how to create a SharePoint Publishing Layout page that supports authoring a web page with the following features: - display a preview image which when clicked will start playing the video
- works with Firefox
We start by creating a new Content Type in the publishing site from the Site Actions>All Site Settings>Site content types
It is important that the new content type is based on the "Page" parent content type and that you save the new content type into the "Page Layout Content Types" group so that you will be able to find it in SharePoint Designer when it comes time to create a Layout Page. We now have a basic publishing page content type with the standard publishing fields...
 Select "Add from existing site columns" to add the following content fields: - Byline
- Page Content
- Page Image
The Page Image field will be used to store the image that will be displayed in place of the media player until the user clicks on it.
 Now we need to create a new field to hold the media file link. We use a plain text field so that either a http or mms link. Select "Add from new site column" to add the Video field and make it a type of "Single line of text". 
Now we move to SharePoint Designer to create a Page Layout template from the New Menu...
 "URL Name" is just the name of the template file that will be saved in the _catalogs/masterpage library.
"Title" is the text that will displayed next to the Content Type name when a user creates a page based on the Video content type (there can be multiple templates available for a content type). We now have a page layout based on the default master page...
 The Page Fields and Content Fields can now be dragged into the PlaceHolderMain area and any HTML/CSS formatting applied. I have based my Video page on the layout provided by the ArticleLeft.aspx template with the following changes: - Change the TD for the PublishingPageImage field to support an onclick event that will replace the image with the media player object
<td width="480" valign="top" onclick="videoCreate()">
<div id="Player">
<PublishingWebControls:RichImageField id="ImageField" FieldName="PublishingPageImage" runat="server"/>
</div>
</td> - Add the Video field to the Edit Mode Panel
<PublishingWebControls:editmodepanel runat="server" id="editmodepanel1">
<SharePointWebControls:TextField FieldName="Video" runat="server"></SharePointWebControls:TextField> - Add the following javascript after the </PublishingWebControls:editmodepanel> tag which will create the media player object when the user clicks on the image.
<script type="text/javascript">
function wmpCreate(url) {
var str = "";
var agt = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
var is_ie = (agt.indexOf("msie") != -1);
if (is_ie) {
// create the WMP for IE
str = '<object id="contentPlayer" classid="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6" width="480" height="320">';
} else {
// create it for FF.
str = '<object id="contentPlayer" type="application/x-ms-wmp" data="'+url+'" width="480" height="320">';
}
str += '<param name="url" value=""/>';
str += '<param name="uiMode" value="full">';
str += '<param name="autoStart" value="-1" />';
str += '<param name="stretchToFit" value="-1" />'; str += '<param name="windowlessVideo" value="0" />';
str += '<param name="enabled" value="-1" />';
str += '<param name="enableContextMenu" value="-1" />';
str += '<param name="fullScreen" value="0" />';
str += '</object>';
return str;
}
function videoCreate() {
var VideoSource = '<SharePointWebControls:FieldValue runat="server" id="MediaURLValue" FieldName="Video"/>';
document.getElementById('Player').innerHTML = wmpCreate(VideoSource);
var wmp = document.getElementById 'contentPlayer');
wmp.URL = VideoSource;
wmp.controls.play();
} (I found this media player script somewhere on the internet and have lost the reference but credit to who ever created it) The <SharePointWebControls:FieldValue...> allows us to use the content of a field without the html formatting that would otherwise be applied by SharePoint. We could use this method to get other page parameters such as video size etc. Our page layout template should now look something like this...
 Now we can save the page, check it in and publish it (this can be a tedious process during development so I often disable approval and require checkout on the Master Page library in a development environment). Now we must enable the Vide Page content type in the Pages library.
 We can now create a new Video page.
 To create the preview image for the page layout, go to _catalogs/masterpage/Forms/AllItems.aspx and edit the properties of page layout where you can enter the path to the preview image. This image should be saved in the _catalogs/masterpage/en-us/preview images folder. 
View a demo of this page here http://templates.wssdemo.com/sites/wcm/Pages/imm.aspx This page layout will only be available in the site collection in which it has been created in. You can turn this into a SharePoint Feature so that it can be activated in any site collection without having to go through these steps for each site collection. A good article on how to this can be found here...
http://weblogs.asp.net/jimjackson/archive/2007/11/05/create-a-new-page-layout-in-sharepoint-2007-feature-based.aspx | 27/10/2008 9:25 a.m. | 0 | Creating a SharePoint Page Layout to play video content |
| | | Ed Robinson the CEO of Aptimize has written this paper with guidance for measuring the performance of SharePoint Intranet and Internet sites. Aptimize produces the Runtime Page Optimizer ( http://www.getrpo.com) – a software component that instantly speeds up web pages, applying Yahoo’s rules of Exceptional Performance to ASP.NET and MOSS/SharePoint 2007 sites.
I use it on WSSDemo and have been impressed with the product and the level of support provided by the Aptimize team.
Ed is no stranger to SharePoint – he was a program manager for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, CMS and SharePoint, and now concentrates website performance software for the Microsoft platform. | 15/10/2008 8:27 a.m. | 0 | How to measure the performance of your SharePoint site |
| | SharePoint | Microsoft has provided a good sample checklist for organizations to evaluate a custom or 3rd party SharePoint solution against.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707802.aspx
The one thing I think it fails to mention is evaluating the impact on being able to upgrade your SharePoint farm to v.next (MOSS 2009?). Why is this important? We may only be 12-18 months away from the next version I'm sure organizations will be chomping at the bit to take advantage of all the cool new features coming in the next version (sorry, no spoiler here).
Customizations range in scope from:
- very simple – a web part that uses only SharePoint API to display list information
- medium – a feature that changes some default behaviours of SharePoint
- complex – an ISV application that leverages SharePoint as a platform but delivers entirely new functionality
This range of customizations should be expanded and a weighting added to each giving a cost/risk to upgrade/migrate in the future.
One area that I would be careful about is using custom site definitions. These were available in WSS 2.0 and virtual discovered by the development community by reverse engineering soon after RTM. This approach to SharePoint customization lead to some documentation and even some sample site templates being released but then along came WSS 3.0 and only OOTB site definitions were upgraded automatically. WSS 3.0 also offers new feature and solution deployment options which can help you to add functionality to the out-of-the-box site definitions in a supported way. I suspect the OOTB site definition + Features may provide a cleaner upgrade path for you in the future (assuming your feature meets the evaluation criteria in the Code Acceptance Checklist ;-)
If your SharePoint farm is used for multiple applications, both OOTB and custom, such as Intranet Publishing, collaboration and a 3rd part project management solution, I would use the Code Isolation design principal by installing the 3rd party solution in its own SharePoint Web Application with a dedicated IIS Web Application Pool. If, in the future, you find that the 3rd party solution is not supported and can't be upgraded to v.next, you can migrate it off to another (smaller) SharePoint farm (at the cost of the department who selected this solution in the first place) and get on with upgrading the main farm. | 9/10/2008 8:36 a.m. | 0 | SharePoint Custom Code Acceptance Checklist |
| | |
Over the last 28 years of my professional career, I've always had a desk to call my own.
This was what it looked like this morning
And this is what it looks like now...
(I got a concession to leave the PC on the desk. Trying to get power and an ether net connection into my locker was going to be a problem ;-) | 7/10/2008 10:22 p.m. | 0 | Hot Desking |
| | | | 4/10/2008 5:55 p.m. | 0 | New Site Permissions for SharePoint Visio model |
| | SharePoint | | 3/10/2008 8:33 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Administration Toolkit Batch Site Manager (BSM) |
| | SharePoint | I have used this tool to troubleshoot so many problems. I suspect my next need for it will be on a customer's SharePoint farm to see what impact their OS based anti-virus solution has and ensure that we have the correct exclusions in place.
Download from here... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
| 3/10/2008 7:17 a.m. | 0 | Sysinternals Process Monitor v2.0 released |
| | SharePoint |
I have just completed my most recent MOSS scripted install which included a slipstream install of the IU + latest hot fixes as described here. One of the few things that I still have to do manually is fix the DCOM errors that seem to very consistent.
According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920783 the 10016 & 7 errors do not impact SharePoint operation but I don't like to see any errors in the Windows Event Logs so today I set about finding a solution to automate the manual dcomcnfg.exe tasks required to fix this error (annoying when you have 9 MOSS servers in the solution) and succeeded. The solution was in a Windows SDK sample application http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa242178(VS.60).aspx
Thanks to one of my colleagues who compiled the c++ code for me, you can now add a command to your build script to fix this problem.
C:\Software\SharePoint>dcomperm -al {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} set YourDomain\svc-moss-ssp permit level:l
Download dcomperm from here http://cid-62b84429c3a8a991.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/SharePoint/DComPerm.zip
Syntax: dcomperm <option> [...]
Options:
Modify or list the machine access permission list
-ma <"set" or "remove"> <Principal Name> ["permit" or "deny"] ["level:l,r"]
-ma list
Modify or list the machine launch permission list
-ml <"set" or "remove"> <Principal Name> ["permit" or "deny"] ["level:l,r,ll,la,rl,ra"]
-ml list
Modify or list the default access permission list
-da <"set" or "remove"> <Principal Name> ["permit" or "deny"] ["level:l,r"]
-da list
Modify or list the default launch permission list
-dl <"set" or "remove"> <Principal Name> ["permit" or "deny"] ["level:l,r,ll,la,rl,ra"]
-dl list
Modify or list the access permission list for a specific AppID
-aa <AppID> <"set" or "remove"> <Principal Name> ["permit" or "deny"] ["level:l,r"]
-aa <AppID> default
-aa <AppID> list
Modify or list the launch permission list for a specific AppID
-al <AppID> <"set" or "remove"> <Principal Name> ["permit" or "deny"] ["level:l,r,ll,la,rl,ra"]
-al <AppID> default
-al <AppID> list
level:
ll - local launch (only applies to {ml, dl, al} options)
rl - remote launch (only applies to {ml, dl, al} options)
la - local activate (only applies to {ml, dl, al} options)
ra - remote activate (only applies to {ml, dl, al} options)
l - local (local access - means launch and activate when used with {ml, dl, al} options)
r - remote (remote access - means launch and activate when used with {ml, dl, al} options) | 2/10/2008 9:28 p.m. | 0 | Another step closer to the 100% scripted SharePoint installation with DcomPerm.exe |
| | SharePoint | | 11/09/2008 9:52 p.m. | 0 | Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Help and How-to |
| | SharePoint | Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Step by Step and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
I just noticed that these 2 great titles had been bundled together. Now this is something I would recommend a SharePoint site manager or power user get as a learning tool and reference.
And you can't beat the price http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735626006/ref%3Dnosim/wssdemo-20
| 11/09/2008 9:37 p.m. | 0 | The Microsoft SharePoint Step by Step Kit |
| | SharePoint |
I'm sure that will get a few people talking.
Anyway, if you want to know what SharePoint Designer can do then there are 3 options:
- Books
- E-Learning
- Instructor led training
I just received a book in the mail to review. "SharePoint Designer Tutorial" by Mike Poole from PACKT Publishing (170 pages).
The tutorial claims that "it is ideal for people new to SharePoint Designer who need to put together a working SharePoint site as quickly as possible. If you want to get started, and finished, as quickly as possible, this book is for you." So does it live up to its claims?
Two pages on "What is SharePoint" was a bit light in my opinion given that you can probably configure and use 80% of SharePoint's functionality from the browser. This leads onto the "Why Choose SharePoint Designer?" question which should have highlighted the features that you would be missing out on if you only used the browser.
The first half of the book is devoted to general SPD UI and basic WEB tasks without making any use of SharePoint specific features. The second half is where the action is with coverage of Data Sources and the Data Form Web Part. I was a little confused over the "Adding Graphs" section as this used a third party web part which didn't even support SPD design time configuration and had to be setup from the browser. The last quarter of the book gets very much into IIS server configuration, Forms based authentication and configuring Outlook Web Access for FBA so that Outlook web parts will work. I wouldn't consider this a common business site scenario.
The tutorial is well written with easy to follow instructions so if you do want to set up an IIS server with SharePoint & OWA for FBA Authentication and a web page with a couple of web parts, then it will get you started but I feel it didn't deliver on the claim of building a "SharePoint Site" which to me implies that I would be walked through the process required to build something like one of the Fantastic 40 templates.
| 11/09/2008 9:27 p.m. | 0 | If you can’t do it with SharePoint Designer, it’s not worth doing... |
| | SharePoint |
I was talking to a customer at TechED NZ who asked if there was a simple way to chart data from a SharePoint list. Thanks to VisiFire and the SharePoint Designer blog, I was able to throw this live demo together in a few minutes using the Data View web part. http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/graph.aspx
VisiFire supports animating the chart build, mouse-over datapoint details and lots more.
If you can't install Silverlight on your corporate desktop, this is what you are missing out on...
| 7/09/2008 2:02 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint List data displayed using Silverlight Charts |
| | SharePoint |
Or any online survey for that matter.
SurveyMonkey has published a great document on "Smart Survey Design" which is a collection of guidance from many sources.
E.g. a good checklist of concerns regarding the survey and question design that, as the survey designer, you should consider:
- Do the respondents feel comfortable answering the questions?
- Is the wording of the survey clear?
- Is the time reference clear to the respondents?
- Are the answer choices compatible with the respondents experience in the matter?
- Do any of the items require the respondent to think too long or hard before responding? Which ones?
- Which items produce irritation, embarrassment, or confusion?
- Do any of the questions generate response bias? Which ones?
- Do the answers collected reflect what you want in regards to the purpose of the survey?
- Is there enough diversity in the answers received?
- Is the survey too long?
- According to your test audience, have any other important issues been overlooked?
Download the document from here http://s3.amazonaws.com/SurveyMonkeyFiles/SmartSurvey.pdf | 6/09/2008 8:34 a.m. | 0 | How to create a good SharePoint Survey |
| | SharePoint |
I have had many people asking me how I built the demo that displays multiple pins on a map from a SharePoint list of locations. http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/map.aspx
You can do this with SharePoint Designer and the Data View web part. Nothing has to be run on the server as this is a "content" solution.
This demo was based on some examples from the SharePoint Designer blog but the problem is that the Virtual Earth API's have been updated since these articles were written.
So, here are some instructions that will hopefully get you up and running quickly.
Assuming that you have a list with Title and Description fields that includes 2 additional fields called "Lat" and "Long", create a web part page in SharePoint Designer and add a Data View of the list containing the locations. Here is the raw list from my demo http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/Location/AllItems.aspx
Add the following script and html to the page above the data view web part
<script src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=5"> </script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var map = null;
// Loads the Virtual Earth map control
function GetMap()
{
map = new VEMap('myMap');
map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(0,0), 1,'r' ,false);
AddPins();
}
// Places a pushpin on the map using the parameters given, iconurl is ignored
function AddPin(lat, lon, iconurl, title, desc)
{
var shape =
new VEShape(VEShapeType.Pushpin,
new VELatLong(lat,lon));
shape.SetTitle(title);
shape.SetDescription(desc);
map.AddShape(shape);
}
// Programmatically adds func as a handler for the onload event
// This method has been used by many developers, but the code is
// via the ViaVirtualEarth Wiki
// http://www.viavirtualearth.com/Wiki/Load+VE+control+without+body+onload.ashx.
function addLoadEvent(func)
{
var oldonload = window.onload;
if (typeof window.onload != 'function')
{ window.onload = func; }
else
{ window.onload = function()
{ oldonload(); func(); }
}
}
addLoadEvent(GetMap);
</script>
<div id='myMap' style="width:800px; height:600px;"></div>
Add the following XSL template section to the Data View web part
<xsl:template name="AddMapPins">
<xsl:param name="Rows"/>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[
<script type="text/javascript">
function AddPins()
{
]]></xsl:text>
<xsl:for-each select="$Rows">
<xsl:if test="not(normalize-space(@Lat) = '' and normalize-space(@Long) = '')">
AddPin(<xsl:value-of select="@Lat" />,
<xsl:value-of select="@Long" />,
null,
"<xsl:value-of select="@Title" />",
"<xsl:value-of select="@Description"/>");
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[
}
</script>
]]></xsl:text>
</xsl:template>
Find the following code in the Data View
<xsl:template name="dvt_1">
<xsl:variable name="dvt_StyleName">Table</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row"/>
And insert the following immediately after
<xsl:call-template name="AddMapPins">
<xsl:with-param name="Rows" select="$Rows"/>
</xsl:call-template> | 5/09/2008 9:22 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Virtual Earth Web Part without deploying any server code |
| | SharePoint | | 4/09/2008 10:00 a.m. | 0 | NZ Tech-ED 2008 |
| | | New Zealand is famous for its cheese. Unfortunately we have a very successful dairy corporative (Fonterra) who has managed to get such a high price for our dairy exports that the only way we can purchase it in NZ is to pay the same price as can be achieved overseas.
So, when I order a cheese board for my desert at the hotel I'm staying in tonight, I understand why they charge $16 for it but I expect to get more than 2 little pieces!
I'm also embarrassed for any overseas guests staying at the hotel and wanting to sample our fine range of cheeses... | 26/08/2008 7:19 p.m. | 0 | Sending out a search party for the cheese |
| | | So fast that I didn't believe it. I had the Vista Enterprise ISO file on the W2K8 host and it took about 2 minutes from creating the virtual machine, mounting the ISO, answering the start-up questions and logging into Vista. | 16/08/2008 3:47 p.m. | 0 | Installing Vista on Hyper-v is fast, real fast. |
| | SharePoint | Now that WSSDemo.com is running in a Hyper-v multi-server farm, SharePoint features such as the BDC and Data Form web part can't use Integrated security SQL access without configuring Kerberos. Many of my customers don't want to enable this (for whatever reason, fear of the unknown is my guess) just for the sake of SharePoint so I decided to try out SharePoint's SSO service to solve this problem on WSSDemo.com (and because I'm chicken and don't want to change the current web app authentication mode).
I have configured SSO in a single server VPC environment easily but trying to get it working in a multi-server environment proved to be a challenge.
My final steps (which I still need to repro to confirm) were:
- Start the Windows SSO service on the Central Admin server first and run it under a domain account (SSOService).
- Add the SSOService account to the MOS Farm Administrators
- Add the SSOService account to the local admin group on the MOSS Servers and give the account SQL Server rights (I just added it to the local admins group on the SQL server because this accounts needs to be able to create the SSO database).
- Logon to the Central Admin server using the SSOService account. This will light up all the settings links. If anything is wrong at this point you will either get a red error text saying the service can't be configured or when you click on the "Manage server settings" you get an Access Denied error.
- Configure the Server settings specifying the SSOService account as the SSO Admin account (the only way I could get it to work), then I could create the encryption key and application definitions.
- Now I'm trying to create a SQL data source in SharePoint Designer that uses SSO. Because my SharePoint designer is connecting to SharePoint over the Internet and only has HTTP access to the MOSS WFE, I can't complete the connection to bring back the list of databases (at least I think that is the problem) so I'm installing a Hyper-v virtual desktop OS with SPD installed that will be joined to the same domain as the MOSS farm.
If step 6 works, I will be able to continue this story. Stay tuned...
| 14/08/2008 11:19 p.m. | 0 | SharePoint Single Sign-on Service (SSO) |
| | | I made it to Seattle eventually. Had to go via Vancouver in the end and only just managed to check in for my connecting flight to Seattle with 1 minute to spare. There is no direct baggage transfer so I couldn't use the transfer lounge. Had to clear Canadian customs, wait for bag, exit agriculture (very lax compared to NZ where everyone's luggage gets scanned), lug it to the Air Canada ticketing counter to get a boarding pass then go through USA customs (in Canada – that was kind of cool), drop bags off, go through security, get on plane, never going that way again unless I stay a day or two in Vancouver.
For the last 3 nights I have not been able to sleep, not even a wink. I felt like I was going to fall asleep during the presentation I was giving at TechReady first thing this morning though and it probably showed.
Anyway, here are the links to some public resources I talked about in my session for any MSFT's who were there and wanted them.
Rather than letting SharePoint create sub-optimal databases, you can have a DBA create them in advance
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262869.aspx
Plan for administrative and service accounts (yes, you need a minimum of 5 AD account to setup MOSS)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263445(TechNet.10).aspx
White paper: Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=105623&clcid=0x409
White paper: Database maintenance for Office SharePoint Server 2007
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=111531&clcid=0x409
Predeployment I/O Best Practices, SQL Server Best Practices Article
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/pdpliobp.mspx
Single content db with many site collections and sub-sites can get badly fragmented user data and documents table index's.
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943345/ to REORGANIZE or REBUILD them
New SharePoint Central Administration UI tool to schedule locking/moving of Site Collections between content databases
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=263cd480-f6eb-4fa3-9f2e-2d47618505f2
P.S. Hotel wireless sucks when there are 400 MSFT's trying to use it simultaneously. 1Kb transfer rate for me L
| 29/07/2008 6:06 p.m. | 0 | Sleepless in Seattle, Literally. |