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By: Brian Hulse
Posted:
February 24, 2010 at 11:08 AM SharePoint 2010 has finally done away with displaying list data using CAML with the XSLT list view web part. Now you can take advantage of the flexibility that XSLT can offer you. This is not to say that you can’t use your previous CAML statements in SP 2010, they are still supported, but hopefully after you see what is possible with the new XSLT list view web part you will leave CAML behind. There are two main ways that you can change the view of your data. Use conditional formatting just lik
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
February 12, 2010 at 11:09 PMI was recently trying to restore an environment at a client site and kept getting access is denied. This baffled me because the account I was using had the proper database permissions to perform the task at hand and is a local admin on the server. The user is the account that I was used to create the web application.
It turns out the the user performing the restore needs to be a site collection administrator to restore from a backup. So in review the user account must have the proper righ
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
February 7, 2010 at 11:10 AM There are a few scenarios where you may want to use Outlook to access an Exchange Online mailbox but cannot use the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In client. This could be due to installation or operating requirements of the client (some OS versions are unsupported) or maybe users don’t have the required permissions to install software but can at least modify Outlook profiles. Take note that this is a completely unsupported approach and might not even work on some platforms. The intent is for
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 29, 2010 at 8:00 AMWhen setting up a new BPOS site for clients the first conversation I make sure to have is about their on-premise Active Directory solution. Most companies already have a domain even if they are currently using Notes or Groupwise for a messaging solution, I haven’t seen a fully native Novell operation where no Windows domain authentication is in place in quite a long time. But often in the midst of messaging migrations there is also some type of Active Directory transition planned or in progres
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
January 23, 2010 at 10:31 AM If you weren’t already aware, Microsoft release an out-of-band update (not release during the normal Windows Updates Cycle) on Thursday that impacts almost all versions of Windows and IE. You need to get this installed ASAP. Details from Microsoft are listed below. This alert is to provide you with an overview of Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002, the Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer, released (out-of-band) on Thursday, January 21. This bulletin addresses eight vulnerabilitie
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
January 23, 2010 at 10:16 AMJust a reminder that if you are running Windows 7 RC1 your time is quickly running out. Microsoft posted this to their TechNet Site, Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010. On June 1, 2010 your PC will completely stop functioning. Unfortunately there is no upgrade path from RC to RTM so y
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 8, 2010 at 8:15 AM
When planning a migration up to Exchange Online, or even when working with a current customer that has already noticed this, there is one important distinction to be aware of regarding how Contact Objects are handled in the BPOS-Shared realm. Whether or not Directory Synchronization is (or will be) used with an on-premise Active Directory domain is also important.
Created in the Cloud
First off, an administrator can simply create a contact directly in the Exchange Online environment using t
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 7, 2010 at 4:38 PM(Okay, before I get hate mail for two iPhone related blog articles in a row let us get back to business). One of the more common questions I get when migrating clients up to Exchange Online is where can they view mailbox size information for all of the users online. This is typically more often asked during Exchange on-premise migrations where administrators are used to being able to retrieve that information from the Exchange Command Shell. Unfortunately the Microsoft Online Services Administr
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 7, 2010 at 4:18 PMSo, I just ran into this issue and thought it would be worth documenting. During countless pilot migrations of users from various mail platforms to the Exchange Online portion of BPOS I’m surprised I’m just seeing this for the first time. The Scenario Where this appears is with a standard end-user scenario of a single Microsoft Outlook profile configured for POP or IMAP access to some hosted mailbox. Also iTunes is installed on the same computer and the iPhone is configured to synchronize Cont
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 5, 2010 at 4:26 PM Although the new Voice Mail Preview feature in Exchange 2010 has (rightfully) grabbed most of the spotlight in terms of neat new features in the product, there is another change in 2010 that is equally as important to anyone who is using an iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync. Previously when my corporate mailbox was on an Exchange 2007 mailbox server I was not able to hear Unified Messaging Voice Mail messages directly on my phone, not at least without dialing into Outlook Voice Access to retrieve
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
January 4, 2010 at 3:53 PM A great new feature in SharePoint 2010 is the content organizer. In SharePoint 2007, the only way to manage your documents was to use the Record Center Site template which didn't really provide flexibility. Now in SharePoint 2010, the routing engine and supporting settings are encapsulated in a feature that can be activated in any site. Enable the feature 'Content Organizer' at the site level: Once the feature activated, you will notice two new settings links appearing on the site settings pa
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By: Apryl Crossland
Posted:
January 3, 2010 at 3:51 PM
The Managed Metadata Service is a highly configurable service application that controls three distinct features: keyword store, managed terms and content type publishing. The access to and control of these three features needs to be considered individually when determining the structure of the service applications and connections among the various web apps in the farm(s).
The content type hub is designated at the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) service application level which creates a wh
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By: Apryl Crossland
Posted:
January 3, 2010 at 3:50 PM
In Part I of this topic we covered the considerations for content type publishing that relate to keyword/managed terms. In this part we'll cover considerations for content type publishing as they relate to content type administration.
Again, the content type hub is the designated site collection that will be used to publish and administer content types to all subscribing sites. There can only be one content type hub per Managed Metadata Service (MMS) service application and any site in a web
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
January 2, 2010 at 7:29 PMIn my previous post, I demonstrated how to enable a SharePoint 2010 web application for claims authentication. As a result, it could be seen that all relevant windows account information (account SID, logon name, group membership) is automatically consumed from Active Directory by the SharePoint Security Token Service (STS) and transformed into claims, which as the basis for the SPUser object. Except for a handy web part, no extra configuration required. It’s all “out of the box”. I then went on
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By: Daniel Herzog
Posted:
December 30, 2009 at 11:46 PMI recently had to create a custom web part that could consistently display list items in a consistent manner, and it had to allow the user to point it at any list with any filtering and sorting criteria. Rather than build my own filtering and sorting funcitonality, I found it easier, more user-friendly, and more flexible to leverage SharePoint's list Views.
The idea is simple - let the users create a view, complete with sorting and filtering rules, and then use that as the basis for selecti
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By: Daniel Herzog
Posted:
December 30, 2009 at 11:12 PMSharePoint Designer 2010 makes it easy to create a workflow. What's even better is that you can export that workflow, import it into Visual Studio 2010, and add code and custom activities.
You may find that exporting the workflow to a WSP in SharePoint designer fails. Luckily there's a simple workaround once your workflow is deployed to a SharePoint 2010 site.
Go into that site and save it as a template (via Site Settings).
Then download the WSP from the site template gallery.
Now
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
December 30, 2009 at 2:13 PM
I decided to expand on one of Travis Neilson's posts called Introducing Documents Sets. Being the eternal developer that I am I decided to write a blog on how to create a Document Set using C# and the new object model for SP2010.
In trying to figure out how to do this, I though I would try the 2007 way and add a new ListItem to my test document library....well that didn't work so well. While I was looking at the code for the NewDocSet.aspx page I stumbled upon a new assembly and namesp
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
December 30, 2009 at 1:58 PMAfter being shown the Managed Metadata Service and the Term Stores in SharePoint 2010, I felt the need to figure out how to create all of the items that were shown to me in code. Below is a list of new classes that we will be using to accomplish the task:
TaxonomySession
TermStore
Group
TermSet
The code below will create a new group called "A Group" and then create a TermSet and populating the TermSet with items. Here is the code:
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 29, 2009 at 11:30 PMOne of the most intriguing of the many new features that SharePoint 2010 brings to the table is a completely new mechanism handle user identity. This mechanism is based on the Windows Identity Foundation (formerly known as “Geneva”) and it opens the door to many new possibilities for securely and seamlessly integrating SharePoint with partner organizations, Internet social networking applications (think Twitter and Facebook), 3rd party identity providers (Yahoo!, Windows Live, Google), other Sh
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 29, 2009 at 10:53 PM
For the past month or so I’ve been giving Windows Identity Foundation a very close look, especially where it relates to SharePoint 2010. I’ll be posting a series of blogs on this subject and I thought it might be useful to start off with a quick introduction on how to access the claims from which an SPUser object is derived. I feel this is very helpful for folks who are looking to learn more about that what this stuff is all about. As they say, seeing is believing!
The good news is this is fa
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
December 29, 2009 at 10:41 PMIn previous versions of SharePoint it was impossible to add corners to a Web Part with just CSS (unless you were building sites for only the latest browsers). The best way was to style a container DIV on the Page Layout and put a Web Part Zone inside. Then, a Web Part in that zone would appear to have round corners. This method greatly reduces the flexibility of SharePoint because there can only be one Web part in each Zone for the effect to work. Styling Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 has become
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 28, 2009 at 11:35 PMThis is just a quick heads up on the Play-on-Phone feature in Exchange 2010. I was testing several of the new UM features in my lab and one that had me scratching my head was Play-on-Phone which allows a UM user to play messages at their internal extension or any number they choose, providing the dialing rules and policies are in place to allow that. This is a useful feature for connections that might not provide audio functions, such as a kiosk or corporate desktop. This is also useful when pri
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
December 27, 2009 at 10:49 PMThe backgrounds in SharePoint 2010 were designed to allow end users to change gradients by simply picking solid colors on the settings page. For example if you choose an orange background color the result is a fade from orange to lighter orange. The change can be very subtle but is an effective way to create an attractive site. This is a significant upgrade from older versions of SharePoint where, in order to change the branding, you would have had to undertake the time-consuming task of editin
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By: Raja Ayyapusetty
Posted:
December 24, 2009 at 10:10 AMTo enable the scope picker next to search input box I started off with the 2007 approach of writing a custom feature and giving it higher priority as mentioned in this MSDN article. Even after setting the search control’s DropDownModeEx property to “ShowDD” it wasn’t displaying the dropdown. After some struggle I stumbled up on the search settings option under site collection settings. As shown in the screenshot below, it gives us an option to show or hide the scope picker next to the search inp
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 17, 2009 at 10:11 AMFederation is certainly a welcome and interesting feature in Exchange 2010. Being able to share calendar information with other organizations will greatly improve collaboration efforts, especially with shops leveraging both on-premise and Exchange Online services for their information workers. There is a modest amount of information on this feature and how to set it up in the form of TechNet articles, blogs and even a webcast. I read through the available material and webcast set out to try and
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
December 15, 2009 at 4:36 PM
One of the improved features in Exchange 2010 is multi-mailbox searching. While you could do this to a degree in Exchange 2007 it usually required too many rights to delegate it to a compliance officer and the searches had to be run from PowerShell so it was often problematic for the user to perform these searches on their own and too burdensome for the administrator to do it on behalf of the user. The normal Exchange search you’re used to doing is still available in case of other requirements
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
December 14, 2009 at 10:08 AMA client just had a nasty little issue with Rights Management Server today: it stopped working. Yeah, that's a pretty bad issue. As it turns out, anyone with RMS and Office 2003 will have this same experience. From the KB:
Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS) or Rights Management Services (RMS). Customers will also not be able to save Office 2003 documents p
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 8, 2009 at 10:23 PMOK. OK. We here at PointBridge don’t always work with bleeding edge technology. And who can resist a chance to blog about FoxPro! I’ve recently been working on converting some DTS packages to SSIS and ran across a strange issue with the OLE DB provider for Visual FoxPro 9.0. Long story short, I created a connection manager that pointed to a “free table directory” that hosted a couple of .dbf files. No big deal. I was able to validate connections in BIDS and also run a preview from the OLE DB
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
November 21, 2009 at 9:26 AMFollowing on from mass BPOS account activations you can now perform mass password resets with the latest Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools. The PowerShell script below will read in a list of BPOS accounts and reset the password. The two fields you need in the CSV file are the email address and desired password. See the BPOS password requirements before establishing a new password. In the script below you can choose not to force the user to change the password you assign to them by changi
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
November 19, 2009 at 10:15 AM Just a word to the wise, if you are looking to setup SharePoint Server 2010 you may want to use Windows Server 2008, not R2. Otherwise when you go to setup The User Profile Service Application you are going to get the issue below. Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\Profile\client.config line 56) Stayed tuned as I will update this blog with the hotfix
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
November 18, 2009 at 5:19 PM
One of my most popular posts to date has been the post to open Stsadm at any point in command prompt. I have updated this post for SharePoint 2010. This will save you from having to type C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\bin every time you need to run Stsadm.
Open Environment Variables
From Server 2008 open the Advanced System Properties Control Panel – either by right-clicking My Computer and going to Properties then Advanced System Properties or by go
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
November 18, 2009 at 12:39 AM Bulk account activations are now available with the latest Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools. If you're like me performing this in the past was a pain since you had to activate the accounts through the web portal which allowed you to activate only a handful of accounts at a time and collecting the passwords for delivery to the users was excruciating too. We now have a solution! The PowerShell script below will read in a list of BPOS accounts and activate them in BPOS. The fields you ne
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
November 10, 2009 at 11:22 AMThis week Microsoft has begun the process to migrate all the current discussion forums for Unified Communications-related topics into a single category. As with any migration there is both an upside and a downside to these changes. Most importantly, going forward it will be much easier for users to locate the correct forum in which to pose a question on a specific OCS-related problem they are experiencing as there are not many different categories across multiple sites with similar topics to c
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
November 9, 2009 at 4:18 PMI just returned from the 5 day SharePoint 2010 Ignite Training for Developers in Amsterdam. The training was an invitation-only opportunity for Mircrosoft's top-tier partners to get hands-on experience with the latest and greatest features in the upcoming SharePoint release. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to go to this event and to have had such an in-depth look at what should prove to be one of Microsoft's most exciting product releases ever. We learned about the many new
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
November 8, 2009 at 4:17 PM
This probably won’t impact folks too much when the public beta of SP 2010 hits, but I thought I’d put this up in-case others out there in the community are having this issue. After a new build of my virtual machine with a pre-release version of SP2010, I saw the User Profile Application Service was failing with the following error: “User Profile Application’s connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or User Profile Service may not have been started. Please contact your admi
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
November 6, 2009 at 10:47 AM
Sharepoint 2010 includes out-of-the-box support for RESTful access to list data via the ListData.svc service. This service makes it easy to write client-side applications that consume data from SharePoint lists. The service is a significant improvement over Lists.asmx (which is still supported) in that it natively supports Atom or JSON formatted responses allowing AJAX applications to access data in a format that is ready to use with JavaScript or XSLT.
Getting Started with ListData.svc
Bec
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
November 4, 2009 at 5:19 PMIf you are running Microsoft Office 2010 and are having issues opening documents off Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (WSSv3 applies) and are getting the error Could not open “http://*.*” then you may want to check your internet settings. In Local Area Network Settings of Internet Explorer (Tools, Internet Options, Connections, LAN Settings) try un-checking the Automatically detect settings checkbox. No need to reboot just open the file. Seems to have done the trick for me.
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
November 2, 2009 at 10:49 PMI was doing an Stsadm addcontentdb in SharePoint 2010 and noticed that there is a percentage meter that runs to let you know how far along your process is. This is great news for anyone that has imported a large site and wondered if it was actually working or if SharePoint was hung up.
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
October 27, 2009 at 10:28 AMWith SharePoint 2010, LINQ to SharePoint is now fully supported. It now offers the ability to work with strongly typed objects as well as the ability to use the LINQ syntax which is easier than using CAML. Another great advantage of using LINQ to SharePoint is that you can join SharePoint lists which can be very powerful.
In order to use LINQ to SharePoint, you will need to have entity classes created. Rather than having to create them manually which would take a long time, Microsoft provided a
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
October 26, 2009 at 11:33 AMSharePoint 2007 didn't have any client object model; as a result, only the server side api could be used to access SharePoint data when creating a Windows, WPF, Console, Silverlight or ASP.NET applications.
SharePoint 2010 now provides the infrasctucture to easily use SharePoint data from those client applications thanks to the client object model. You can now have your client applications easily access SharePoint properties, Lists and Document Libraries eventhough those client applicaitons mi
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
October 23, 2009 at 4:47 PM
I decided to expand on one of Travis Nielson's posts called Introducing Documents Sets. Being the eternal developer that I am I decided to write a blog on how to create a Document Set using C# and the new object model for SP2010.
In trying to figure out how to do this, I though I would try the 2007 way and add a new ListItem to my test document library....well that didn't work so well. While I was looking at the code for the NewDocSet.aspx page I stumbled upon a new assembly and namesp
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By: Matt Morse
Posted:
October 21, 2009 at 12:57 AMI’m attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas where Microsoft has just taken the wraps off of SharePoint 2010. Since it’s a new product release and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of keeping the lid on the functionality in the new product until now, there’s a very high level of excitement and interest. The individual breakout sessions have generally been good. I plan to write about a number of topics going forward (as I’m sure many other folks do, as well), but here a
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
October 20, 2009 at 2:20 PMCheck out my SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Posts:
1. SharePoint 2010 Insights - Reporting Services and Chart Web Parts
2. SharePoint 2010 Insights - Excel Services and Visio Services
3. SharePoint 2010 Insights - PerformancePoint Review Part 1 of 2
4. SharePoint 2010 Insights - PerformancePoint Review Part 2 of 2
Enjoy!!
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 20, 2009 at 12:36 AM
External Lists are a great new feature in SharePoint 2010 that allow you to expose your Business Connectivity Services (formerly known as the Business Data Catalog) entities to end users through the familiar SharePoint list UI. This feature supports both reading from and writing to your line-of-business data sources via SharePoint. The major benefit of this is that it allows users to get at and update all of the data they need for a particular business process in one place regardless of whethe
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 10:08 PMIn the next version of SharePoint it is clear that Microsoft thought out the backup/restore strategy a bit more than MOSS. If you are someone that has ever had to do a subsite restore from a content database, you know what I am talking about. I will break down the three top improvements when it comes to backup and restores in SharePoint 2010. Backup Site Collection from Central Administration First off, there is the ability to backup an individual site collection from Central Administration.
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 10:07 PMOne of the major improvements in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to centrally manage your farm health directly from SharePoint Central Administration. The Health Status menu gives you an at-a-glance view of services and issues on the farm as well as a place to fix these issues. Located in the Monitoring section of Central Administration, Health Status runs diagnostics on the system and compiles the results of this into an easily viewed report. For easier viewing the results of this report are
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 10:04 PMSetting up SharePoint 2010 in a single server environment is even easier than it was on MOSS. The Microsoft SharePoint Product and Technologies 14 Preparation Tool (or as I like to call it the prep tool) takes a wizard approach to checking for and then setting up perquisites for SharePoint’s installation. The prep tool (packaged with the preview edition of SharePoint 14) is pretty limited with options and you pretty much get all or nothing. I am hoping before RTM you will get more choices.
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By: Daniel Herzog
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 3:08 PM
SharePoint 2010 is official! The SharePoint Conference is underway in Vegas.
Pointbridge has posted quite a few SP2010 blog entries - see them here:
Office 2010 Wave Blogs
I contributed three so far myself:
Quick Managed Metadata Overview
Enforcing Relationships in Lookup Columns
Column Validation in SharePoint 2010
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 2:46 PMA long awaited new version of SharePoint is finally here (public Beta in November). WOO HOO!!! I have been working on the SharePoint platform since 2004. When SharePoint 2007 first came out, it changed the game from development perspective. Unlike the 2003 version, the 2007 version was based on standard ASP.NET 2.0 platform; all of the sudden the web part development became easier and the development community could use their ASP.NET 2.0 programming skills and apply them to SharePoint without l
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 11:12 AMTo add a button to the ribbon in SharePoint 2010 we use the SPUserCustomAction class. Get hold of the SPList object whose ribbon you want to customize. Access the UserCustomActions property and create a new instance of the SPUserCustomAction class. Set the appropriate properties of the new instance. Call update on the SPUserCustomAction instance. There are different locations where the button will be added depending on the properties being set. If you don’t set the CommandUIExtension prope
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 11:09 AM There are different ways of adding your own custom actions to the ribbon in SharePoint 2010. The ribbon is made up of tabs and groups. Each tab consists of Groups. So when we want to add a custom action we need to identify the correct tab and group. This is referenced by Tab.Group ID. 1. SharePoint Designer Using SPD 2010, open the list that you want to customize. You can see the Custom Actions section on the page. In the Ribbon, click on Quick Step and you will get 5 options to choose fr
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 11:07 AMEnterprise Content Types and Service Applications are interesting features of SharePoint 2010. Enterprise content types can be used to provide a consistent entity definition to different web applications. Consider an example of a textile company who has implemented an Extranet and an Intranet application. Their clients can log on to their extranet site and order different products. To add a product the client needs to fill up a form. The form data will be stored in a list on the extranet. The li
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By: Matt Morse
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 8:42 AMNote: The contents of this post are based on the SharePoint Server 2010 technical preview, and are subject to change without notice. Microsoft has invested in a number of areas in SharePoint Server 2010, and many of those investments are aimed at making SharePoint an even more serious contender in the ECM space. This post will be an overview of the new records management capabilities of SP2010; I will follow this with a detailed treatment of a number of the areas that are mentioned below. A Brie
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By: Hersh Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 19, 2009 at 3:29 AMSo, after spending a lot more time than I would have liked on locking down the sessions I want to attend at the SPC, I finally narrowed it down to these. Due to my background in development, most of these are development tracks. I plan on watching the IT tracks once they are available online. I have a feeling that with the 250 sessions planned, once the conference starts, I won’t end up sticking to the sessions listed below and may have to change my game plan based on how things go. It’s funny
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
October 18, 2009 at 11:51 PMIn my previous posting about the many enhancements to workflow created in SharePoint Designer 2010, I mentioned that approval processes can be applied to both documents and document sets. Seeing how the latter case is a new feature in SharePoint 2010, I thought it might be a good idea to at least explain the basic principles of document sets. The Basics As the name implies, a document set represents a collection of closely related documents. In SharePoint 2010, document set functionality is a
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By: Raja Ayyapusetty
Posted:
October 18, 2009 at 8:32 PMIt’s no secret that you are not supposed to touch SharePoint databases but there certainly are some scenarios which would tempt you to at least read from them; mostly for performance reasons. For example, if you want to do some kind of reporting with data pulled from lists spread over 15K sites, it’s not a terrible sin to read from content database directly. So, if in any shape or form your code is interacting with database directly you have some work to do to make it work in 2010. It shouldn’t
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By: Raja Ayyapusetty
Posted:
October 18, 2009 at 8:26 PMSharePoint 2010 introduces a new way of adding custom dev to SharePoint: Sandbox solutions, also called User Solutions. Solution deployment we are all used to in SharePoint 2007 still exists in SP2010 but those solutions will be called Farm solutions. Sandbox solutions are scoped to site collection and each site collection has its own gallery of these solutions which can be found in the site settings page. When you create a Visual Studio project using any of the SP 2010 templates it asks us wha
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By: Jon Norton
Posted:
October 18, 2009 at 7:20 PMWhen preparing to upgrade SharePoint 2007 to 2010 you will need to run the pre-upgrade scan tool include with SharePoint 2007 SP2 as in the article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262231.aspx. When completed, you may see upgrade scan failures for orphaned site collections such as the one below.
Removing these orphaned sites is important for a clean migration.
There are two basic types of orphaned sites; Configuration Database and Content Database orphans. Configuration orphans ar
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
October 17, 2009 at 5:38 PMIn my last post, I discussed some nice workflow visualization features that will be part of the Office 2010 suite. In this post, I’ll review some of the improvements you can expect to see in upcoming releases of SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2010 and SharePoint 2010. There’s quite a lot to talk about here and this is by no means a comprehensive review. The larger point is that Microsoft is adding a tremendous amount of new functionality for “codeless” workflow in 2010. And I believe this is goin
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 16, 2009 at 6:49 PM
I have often found that I need to quickly get at the fields defined on a SharePoint list. PowerShell provides an easy mechanism for getting at this and any other data exposed by the SharePoint object model.
Here are the steps to follow to get at the field definitions on a list called "test" in the root web of a site called "http://sharepoint.local".
1) Load the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly into your PowerShell session so that you can utilize the classes defined wi
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
October 15, 2009 at 4:51 PM
If you are like me you have spent a lot of time fighting with BIDS to get every connector within SSIS to line up perfectly straight...ahhhhh!!!
Thanks to Steve Jackson for this great tip on how to easily format and align all of the items within an SSIS package. I have fought with this before and had become excellent at holding down the CTRL key in order to slowly move items once I drag them close enough to almost make all the lines straight.
Can't wait to try this out! I wonder if th
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By: Daniel Herzog
Posted:
October 15, 2009 at 12:06 AM
Managed Metadata is an interesting and powerful new feature of SharePoint 2010. This is a very high-level overview of the feature. I'd suggest following along in your own SharePoint 2010 environment.
The Termset
A Managed Metadata Termset is a hierarchy of terms that are managed at a central location and that can be made available for use as metadata on SharePoint entities, like list items.
Here's how it looks when using managed metadata in a list column. In this screenshot
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 11, 2009 at 11:31 PMEnterprise Content Types and Service Applications are interesting features of SharePoint 2010. Enterprise content types can be used to provide a consistent entity definition to different web applications. Consider an example of a textile company who has implemented an Extranet and an Intranet application. Their clients can log on to their extranet site and order different products. To add a product the client needs to fill up a form. The form data will be stored in a list on the extranet. The li
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By: Hersh Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 11, 2009 at 5:33 PM
So, after a really long time, I am getting back to blogging about SharePoint. Can’t be a better time than this as I get ready to attend the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas with about 7000 SharePoint Peeps. It’s going to be fantastic. So, to start out, here is some information I gathered in preparation for the conference.
Logistics Here is a snapshot of a map I found online for the Strip; the original can be found here
If you are attending the conference and haven’t rented a car,
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
October 9, 2009 at 12:36 AM There are different ways of adding your own custom actions to the ribbon in SharePoint 2010. The ribbon is made up of tabs and groups. Each tab consists of Groups. So when we want to add a custom action we need to identify the correct tab and group. This is referenced by Tab.Group ID. 1. SharePoint Designer Using SPD 2010, open the list that you want to customize. You can see the Custom Actions section on the page. In the Ribbon, click on Quick Step and you will get 5 options to choose fr
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 8, 2009 at 4:31 PMIn my previous post, I went through the details of setting up a read-only BCS entity using Visual Studio. Now we will explore how to make our entity read/write.
To add create, update, and delete capabilities to our entity we first need to go add these methods to our entity in the model.
1) Add a create method to the model
To add a create method, go to the BDC Method Details pane in the model view, pull down the Add a Method dropdown, and select Create Creator Method.
Update the details of the
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 8, 2009 at 4:28 PMIn SharePoint 2010, the Business Data Catalog has been renamed Business Connectivity Services or BCS. SharePoint 2010 also includes a new type of BCS entity based on a .NET type. Using Visual Studio 2010, you can create a .NET BCS entity to connect to data in any line-of-business system via code. In this first post of two, I will walk you through the basic set up of an entity solution in Visual Studio and how to deploy your entity to your SharePoint 2010 environment. In my next post, I will
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 8, 2009 at 4:26 PMWith SharePoint 2010, PowerShell replaces STSADM as the preferred administrative shell for SharePoint. STSADM will remain for backwards compatibility purposes, but there are many reasons to make the switch to PowerShell. First, there are nearly 500 SharePoint related cmdlets available out-of-the-box which cover all of the functionality available through STSADM plus much more. Second, it is much easier to write complex scripts in PowerShell than it is in DOS batch files. Third, for scenarios
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 8, 2009 at 4:18 PMWith SharePoint 2010, PowerShell replaces STSADM as the preferred administrative shell for SharePoint. STSADM will remain for backwards compatibility purposes, but there are many reasons to make the switch to PowerShell. First, there are nearly 500 SharePoint related cmdlets available out-of-the-box which cover all of the functionality available through STSADM plus much more. Second, it is much easier to write complex scripts in PowerShell than it is in DOS batch files. Third, for scenarios
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
October 8, 2009 at 4:11 PMHere is a generic extension method to get back an enum value from a string. It improves upon the Enum.Parse method by doing the following: 1) it encapsulates the cast of the value to the enum type; 2) supports an optional case-insensitive search; and 3) returns a boolean to indicate success or failure (rather than throw an exception).
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
October 7, 2009 at 3:17 PMJust when you thought there couldn’t possibly be more reasons to use Windows 7; I will throw one more out there, mounting VHD files directly to your workstation. There have been countless occasions where I needed something off of a VHD and I would need to boot up the virtual or install Virtual PC just to copy contents of a VM. Detailed below are the few steps required to mount your VHD files. Open Computer Management Click the Windows Button (formally known as the Start Button) and right-click
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 7, 2009 at 3:02 PMAs a follow up to my previous post on the CWA PIN Length issue - I have something that solves the issue - for now. Of course it's not officially supported by Microsoft etc. etc. (MS says it will be fixed in Wave 14… grr!!!) but I think this a pretty clean way to change the display text.
It occurred to me that instead of messing with the ".resource" files (which were in some sort of binary format) that contained the offending string, we could just modify the bit of HTML that was calling
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
October 5, 2009 at 10:25 PMOne of the challenges I’ve always had with writing workflows is documenting them, especially workflows written in SharePoint designer. As consultants, we inevitably have to turn our work over to somebody to support it. So the handover typically occurs with screenshots from SPD or even a Visio diagram that depicts how the workflow is supposed to work. Its a very time consuming process and can sometimes result in misinterpretation. The same can be said with early stages of workflow design. Wh
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 5, 2009 at 11:50 AM
(10/07/2009 - I've updated this issue in a newer post)
I noticed something odd a while back when we deployed OCS 2007 R2 for audio conferencing: that the webpage where users go to reset their PINs always says that PIN length must be a minimum of 5 digits.
Even if you have set your PIN policy in OCS to be less than 5 (in my case, 4) that text in the message never updates.
I'm no web development genius, but I figured changing a "5" to a "4" in HTML was well wit
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
October 1, 2009 at 10:06 PM
In the next version of SharePoint it is clear that Microsoft thought out the backup/restore strategy a bit more than MOSS. If you are someone that has ever had to do a subsite restore from a content database, you know what I am talking about. I will break down the three top improvements when it comes to backup and restores in SharePoint 2010.
Backup Site Collection from Central Administration
First off, there is the ability to backup an individual site collection from Central Administratio
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 1, 2009 at 2:21 PMGood news: OCS can now federate with lots of other vendors, including Google and IBM Sametime.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-01ucinterop.mspx
This is great news for the UC world in general.
More info to follow on how it actually works in production…
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
September 30, 2009 at 11:50 PM
Sometimes we find it useful to create patch features which are used to add new elements to our existing SharePoint sites. Oftentimes, these patch features make use of some of the same files as the larger features that are used for provisioning new sites. To support the creation of these patch features without manually copying the files that are shared across features, use Visual Studio file links and a customized MSBUILD target to automate the copy process. Here's how it works.
First, in the
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
September 30, 2009 at 7:14 PMSetting up SharePoint 2010 in a single server environment is even easier than it was on MOSS. The Microsoft SharePoint Product and Technologies 14 Preparation Tool (or as I like to call it the prep tool) takes a wizard approach to checking for and then setting up perquisites for SharePoint’s installation. The prep tool (packaged with the preview edition of SharePoint 14) is pretty limited with options and you pretty much get all or nothing. I am hoping before RTM you will get more choices.
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 10:18 PMOne of the major improvements in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to centrally manage your farm health directly from SharePoint Central Administration. The Health Status menu gives you an at-a-glance view of services and issues on the farm as well as a place to fix these issues. Located in the Monitoring section of Central Administration, Health Status runs diagnostics on the system and compiles the results of this into an easily viewed report. For easier viewing the results of this report are
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 8:37 PMReporting Services:
There really isn't much to say about Reporting Services within SharePoint 2010. This is due to the fact that SSRS is already prolific within MOSS 2007, however, there are a few very important facts that should be pointed out.
At least for now, SSRS cannot be setup and configured with SharePoint 2010 unless it is installed and configured on SQL Server 2008 R2 (Kilimanjaro). I was very surprised by this since many existing customers will be forced to upgrade to 2008 R2 in ord
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 8:22 PMExcel Services (Excel):
A new addition to Excel within Office 14 is Sparklines. Sparklines are an easy way to show a trend within a data set. Interestingly enough, even though these do look like a type of graph, they are simply conditional formatting! The new Sparklines can be found within the "Insert" tab of the ribbon as shown below:
There are three different types of Sparklines. The Line, Column, and Win / Loss. Once you have inserted some Sparklines into an Excel workboo
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 8:06 PM
Welcome to the second part of a two part blog series covering the functionality of PerformancePoint within SP2010. In the first part I covered the functionality of PerformancePoint specifically in regard to how it is integrated with SharePoint. In this part I will more specifically cover the enhancements to the PerformancePoint content such as Dashboards, Scorecards, Filters, etc. The topics for Part 2 are listed below.
Part 2:
General Enhancements - there have been improvements in ho
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 7:52 PM
I am actually quite impressed with the initial evaluation of the new functionality with PerformancePoint and SharePoint 2010 (SP2010). In a series of two blogs I will try to point some of the big changes and improvements that are going to be included with the release of SP2010, specifically in relation to PerformancePoint Services. Some of the topics I will cover within the two blog series include:
Part 1:
Ease of Installation - the setup to get PerformancePoint up and running is a lo
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 7:36 PM
Introduction:
I recently worked on a quick SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) project with a client that had a need to be able to query large datasets (potentially over 300,000 rows by 30 text columns wide). The report needed to be very dynamic, meaning that the report would need to allow the end user to run the report to return all of the data, or if they chose, filter on any of the columns to limit the end result. Not only this, but the query to pull the data needed to join to almost as
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 12:59 AM
Overview:
Oftentimes when developing a cube there will be a need to limit which dimensions and measures a user can view within the cube. For the purpose of this blog, the steps and processes needed to develop a solid security model are out of scope; however, I will offer four different techniques which can be used in order to test the cube roles once they are setup.
Ideas for testing roles come from my personal experience as well as from the book, "Expert Cube Development with Microso
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
September 28, 2009 at 5:45 PM
Here are 5 of the master images that contain multiple sprites in SharePoint 2010.
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
September 27, 2009 at 10:33 AM
In version 2.0, PowerShell includes the capability to execute commands on remote computers via the WinRM service. WinRM is Microsoft's implementation of the WS-Management protocol. We recently took advantage of this capability to automate SharePoint solution upgrades to our integration environment from our build server.
This can be accomplished in four easy steps:
1) Upgrade both the client machine (build server) and the server machine (a web front-end in the integration farm) to use Power
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By: Daniel Herzog
Posted:
September 26, 2009 at 10:09 AMIn SharePoint 2010 we can now have a greater level of control over the realtionship between a lookup column and the items in it's source list.
When you create a lookup column, you'll see the option to create a relationship:
These relationship enforcements are a powerful way to ensure that your list item metadata maintains its referential integrety.
One interesting thing is the behavoir of the Recycle Bin when you have Cascade Delete set on a column. If you delete a source ite
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 24, 2009 at 8:26 AMDuring the deployment of an OCS Communicator Web Access Server there is a setting that is not covered in much detail in the documentation: the Communication Server Listening Port. No default or suggested value is given, as shown by this screenshot of the virtual server creation wizard: This port is used by the Communicator Web Access Server to listen for inbound communications from other OCS servers. When an additional Virtual Web Server is added to the same host, as is common when both Int
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By: Will Robinson
Posted:
September 23, 2009 at 11:29 AMIn SharePoint 2010, there is a new social collaboration feature on a person's MySite called "Interests". SharePoint matches content that is tagged by other people with tags you enter in your profile. In the technical preview, the only way to edit the Interests profile property is through Central Administration.
The profiles screen is no longer under Shared Service Providers. It can be found under Application Management | Manage Service Applications | People | Manage.
Under Man
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 22, 2009 at 4:39 PMThere are a pair of related Office Communications Server 2007 topics I wanted to expand on from previous blog articles that I’m still seeing come up quite often in both day-to-day projects and in the Microsoft discussion forums. One of them is centered around adding and supporting additional SIP domains. And because the two most common topics in OCS-related issues are Certificates and the Edge Server, it makes sense that deploying certificates on an Edge Server might just be the other topic.
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 17, 2009 at 9:18 AM
The typical OCS deployment these days is using Windows Server 2008 instead of Server 2003 for the host OS now since R2 and Server 2008 have been out for some time, so a certain issue has begun to pop up in some deployments. Basically, if an R2 Edge server is deployed on Server 2008 and three separate NICs are used for the three external Edge roles then some routing problems can typically be seen. Previously on Server 2003 this was not a problem, but something has appeared to change in the be
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
September 14, 2009 at 10:27 PM
SharePoint 2010 uses the “sprite” technique in some of its default layouts. Sprite is a method of showing multiple images on your site that are really just a portion of one larger image. A benefit is that it reduces HTTP traffic since you are downloading more images in one request. You can read more about the technique in these blogs:
CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death | IE6, CSS Sprites and Alpha Transparency | How To: Optimize Your Site with Image Sprites
For this blog I will get
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By: Daniel Herzog
Posted:
September 10, 2009 at 1:41 AM
The ability to easily validate the column values entered into list items is a welcome addition to SharePoint 2010. I'd like to walk thru 2 simple example s of how to use column validation, at the column level, then at the list level. I'll then point out some specific notes about this feature.
Simple Example #1 - Column Level
Create a new column on a list, and click "Column Validation":
Add a validation Formula, and a message that will display if validation fails:
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
September 3, 2009 at 4:39 PMWorking with the Content Editor Web Part quite a bit lately I noticed a frequent (and annoying) error when committing changes to that web part. After making changes and clicking OK in the Web Part Properties Window IE would freeze and about 15-30 seconds later display the error below. Are you sure you want to navigate away from the this page? The page took too long to save. You can click “Cancel”, and then try to save the page again. If you click “OK”, you might lose unsaved data. Press
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
September 3, 2009 at 3:14 PMDesigner workflows can be great but I certainly ran into some major frustrations working with them with Designer 2007. One of those frustrations was not being able to associate a Workflow with a specific Tasks list. SharePoint will, be default, take the first Task list available and associate the workflow to that list. Fine you might say but if in time, you need to change that workflow/task association, you were pretty much in for trouble.
Fixing this is not straightforward as we can't control
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
September 3, 2009 at 2:06 PMSharePoint Search 2010 offers new query capabilities that were not available in SharePoint 2007. Some of the new capabilities added are not ground breaking as most of them can be found right now somewhere on CodePlex or are available for sale by third parties. But, it's exciting to have those new functionalities finally as part of SharePoint out-of-the-box. Reality is that sometimes, it's difficult and risky to use code at a customer coming from CodePlex or somewhere else as it might have a too
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 1, 2009 at 7:57 PM
Done with Session 01 of the 24 PASS Webinar. This was by far the largest live meeting I have been a part of with over 450 users. I will not have time to write a complete review of all the webinars, however, I will add updates in this blog posts comments as I go along!
For the first session the sound did seem to cut out a bit, and some of the slides were a bit behind, but overall a good start to the 24 hour event. Taking notes the best I could as the webinar went along, these were the
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 1, 2009 at 6:53 PM
I am about ready to start my first of eleven meetings for the 24 hours of PASS webinars. I only have two webinars tonight with a break in between so I should have time to add updates as I go along.
It will be a little more difficult to add updates as I go tomorrow since I have meetings every hour from 4am until 11am, and then again from 2pm to 4pm. Even though the day is packed I should still have time to add comments to my blogs in order to quickly add updates (rather than write a full
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 1, 2009 at 1:54 PM
Starting tonight PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) will begin broadcasting webcasts for 24 hours straight. These webcasts include many topics, however, I am most interested in those surrounding SQL Server Maintenance and Business Intelligence. As of now I plan on attending at least 11 of these sessions (more depending on my ability to keep my eyes open!) which start tonight (9/1) and run every hour until the conclusion tomorrow night (9/2). Here is a list of all the webcasts
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 28, 2009 at 4:19 PMMicrosoft has just released a new white paper on using certificates with Office Communications Server. Although entitled “OCS 2007 R2 Deploying Certificates” it actually covers both 2007 and 2007 R2 versions of OCS. This is a very comprehensive document (just short of 100 pages) that covers everything from basic requirements down to specific scenarios like sample LCSCMD commands for requesting certificates for a reverse proxy. A number of the common problems and misunderstood areas have been a
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By: Tony Pagnusat
Posted:
August 27, 2009 at 5:02 PMOne of the nice features of Live Meeting 2007 is to be able to record your meeting and play it back at a later time. One disadvantage is that you cannot play that video if you are running a 64-Bit version of Windows. A way to remedy that is to convert the file to Windows Media Video WMV file format. Microsoft has a tool available here where you can download the product.
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 27, 2009 at 2:34 PMI've been fiddling with QoS and OCS for the past few days and have some insights to share.
First important point is that OCS will support QoS via DSCP marking. But it is not enabled by default on any OCS servers or clients, but can be enabled. Microsoft has some pretty useful info on how to make that work. Straight from TechNet on the MS philosophy of QoS:
Although Office Communicator Server 2007 has been designed to work without any QoS framework, it is possible to configure the media stack to
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 25, 2009 at 2:14 PMThese are some pretty basic notes, but worth calling out for the benefit of users new to the OCS Deployment Wizard. Troubleshooting deployment issues is pretty common and the logs are the best place to start from. During the various setup wizards in OCS each step typically concludes with a window reporting either successful or failed results. It’s recommended to review each log even if the wizard completes successfully as there could be one or more warnings worth looking into. Some warnings c
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
August 20, 2009 at 10:11 AMI recently started to work with Hyper-v to build a 64 bit environment as Virtual PC 2007 is not supporting it.
I started to go back and forth between Hyper-v and Virtual PC 2007. I immediately noticed that my all my vms in Virtual PC 2007 would not perform well. They would take forever to start, the Active Directory indices would systematically be rebuilt on start, some services could not be started properly, and the overall performance was very poor.
The problem is coming from the fact that Hy
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 19, 2009 at 7:35 AMAlthough I find it best practice to deploy two separate certificates on an OCS R2 Communicator Web Access server, there are times when using a single certificate for both server-based MTLS and client-based SSL communications are the best approach, mainly cost if an internal CA is unavailable and all certificates are being purchased. The problem is that getting a single certificate to work for both roles will typically fail if you follow the current guidelines. The official OCS R2 documentation
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
August 13, 2009 at 3:22 PMSilverlight 2 and 3 provide a Silverlight server side control that takes care of generating Silverlight object tag and all the necessary components in the HTML for you. The control also provides a default template that is automatically displayed to the users who don’t have Silverlight plug-in installed on their machines. Figure 1: Default Silverlight Install Experience The default template works, but it doesn’t look good and it doesn’t contain any of your company’s branding. Wouldn’t it be nice
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 13, 2009 at 11:04 AMIn a recent deployment OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise Edition was deployed to a physical server running Windows Server 2008 that began to exhibit problems immediately after the first reboot. Basically the server failed to respond to network traffic and was unreachable via RDP or other previously listening services after restarting. Upon connecting to the console locally the server had apparently dropped off the network, as indicated by the system tray Network icon displaying as disabled. After checki
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 5, 2009 at 10:17 AMTypically in a basic deployment there are times when Windows workstations and servers which are not members of the internal Active Directory domain need to communicate with OCS servers. This could be attempting to sign-in to Office Communicator installed on a test workstation on the internal corporate network, as well as a perimeter-network server (like ISA or and OCS Edge server) attempting an MTLS connection to an internal OCS server. This also applies to external workstations trying to sign
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 4, 2009 at 1:04 PMTypically when restarting services in Windows most people use the Services snap-in or the net start/stop commands, but the OCS Management console offers a simple way to stop and start services in a pre-defined order. I investigated the behavior of this to learn what the preferred order or service dependencies may be (if at all) within OCS. Unlike Exchange Server, where a number of services are dependant on others on the local system, none of the core OCS services are dependant on other c
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By: Prasham Sabadra
Posted:
July 20, 2009 at 1:15 AM
In our project, we were facing a weird problem while using our custom master pages on MOSS publishing portal, getting an “Access Denied” / “401-UnAuthorised” error while accessing the portal for Anonymous User Access(Internet Zone). If we apply any other default master page site works fine. Finally got the solution, just want to share the solution.
Problem :
In master page code behind we were accessing DefaultPage property of PublishingWeb class. Problem is while accessing “DefaultPag
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
July 16, 2009 at 8:37 PMI recently ran into an interesting SharePoint problem on a client project. I had a publishing page content type that used multiple site columns and some of these columns had default column values, but when I used my content type to create pages, SharePoint didn’t select any of the default values. Obviously, my first debugging step was to check my site column definitions and my content type definition, but I didn’t find any issues with my schema. COLUMN DEFINITION<Field ID="{guid}"
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
July 11, 2009 at 1:29 PMThere are times when I am not connected to a network, but I still want to be able to view a SharePoint site on a VPC with the my local host’s browser. But I can not do this if the VPC doesn’t have an IP address from a DHCP server. Enter the loopback adapter. Here are the steps: Setup the adapter on the host. • Open the Device Manager and then right-click on the root node of the device tree (your machine name). • Select "Add legacy hardware."• Next• Click “Install the hard
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
July 2, 2009 at 11:02 AM
Byron Spurlock has a blog article that briefly talks about the different topologies for Edge servers in R2 but I wanted to go into a little more detail and highlight a few seemingly small, but important changes introduced in R2 that sort of flew in under the radar as all the other neat features in R2 took center-stage.
Pre-R2 Topologies
Firstly, anyone versed in OCS should know that when deploying an Edge Server you could select what roles you wanted to install, with a few limitations. The f
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
July 1, 2009 at 10:03 AMSharePoint provides an out of the box (OOTB) blog site template to create blogs, but the blogging site and capabilities that come out of the box with SharePoint don’t include an easy to use blog client. You can create a new blog post entry by using SharePoint UI; however, the problem with SharePoint UI is that it doesn’t provide a rich editor to create dynamic posts. Figure 1: SharePoint OOTB New Post UI Fortunately, there is a free blog client available from Microsoft that works very well with
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
July 1, 2009 at 12:20 AMIf you are a SharePoint developer, you probably needed to use Visual Studio debugger to debug nasty little bugs in your SharePoint applications at some point. The process to debug applications on SharePoint requires attaching the Visual Studio debugger to your SharePoint IIS worker process (w3wp), but often times you will find that there are multiple w3wp processes running on your machine. Figure 1: Visual Studio *Attach to Process* menu option Figure 2: Visual studio *Attach to Process* popu
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
June 30, 2009 at 10:41 PMI’ve been developing some workflows recently in SharePoint Online and ran into an interesting issue I thought I’d write about. Basically, I encountered an error (“Error updating a list item”) every time I tried to assign a group to a standard task. The funny thing was that assigning to groups worked fine when using the custom SharePoint Designer “to do” items, but in my case I really needed to create standard tasks. Here was the error: I actually found the solution in this thread. Basicall
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 25, 2009 at 1:51 PMIn keeping with this month’s apparent theme of troubleshooting Live Meeting and Audio Conferencing problems for external users, I ran into yet another weird one. This time we have a pretty basic Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployment with Enterprise Voice using a NET VX1200 media gateway with Cisco Call Manager 4.1. All OCS features are deployed and working with best practices followed for nearly every piece of the puzzle; no cutting any corners. The latest round of OCS patches have
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 23, 2009 at 12:19 AM
Introduction:
In the scenario I am about to describe trusted accounts and domain accounts were used in order to allow Reporting Services to run in SharePoint Integrated mode. This was the initial installation of SSRS within the organization and needed to be done using trusted and domain accounts since SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) was configured in a multi-server environment without Kerberos enabled. It was our intention to provide functionality so that if a user was given access t
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 23, 2009 at 11:36 AM
Introduction:
There are a couple logical steps to take to troubleshoot any error or issue that arises while users attempt to access the SSRS reports from a report library in SharePoint integrated mode. If a user complains that a report does not properly render or that an error is given after clicking on a report there are a couple logical steps to take in order to quickly identify the issue and resolve it. Some steps that I typically take are listed and described in the following section.
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 23, 2009 at 10:19 AM
Introduction:
It is sometimes inevitable that data within an SSIS package will need to be loaded from flat files. If you have ever had to develop with SSIS you know that it can be quite finicky with its data types. I have found that it is sometimes even worse when the data is coming from flat files because the package would fail before I could even apply a data transformation within the data flow task. Below there is an example of a common error I get when working with flat files in SSIS:
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 22, 2009 at 8:11 AMJust a quick note regarding an error I recently ran across. A client was experiencing problems with Dial-In Conferencing after a recent deployment and during troubleshooting the issues I ran across this pair of errors in the Front-End server’s OCS event log: OCS Audio-Video Conferencing ServerEvent ID 32018“The Audio-Video Conferencing Server encountered an error when requesting credentials from the A/V Edge Authentication Service.” OCS Protocol StackEvent ID 14502”A significant number of con
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 15, 2009 at 12:12 AMI have encountered a few issues when working with STSDEV under source control and if you are not aware of those issues, you might end up wasting a lot time trying to figure out what is going wrong.
Updating the targets file
When changing the target file, you would think the changes would instantly take effect but they don't. For example, the path of your STSDEV might be different from the path your colleague has so naturally , you would go and update it properly so that is works in your environm
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 15, 2009 at 10:23 AMI thought it would be useful to post an entry on how to retrieve recurring events from a calendar list. If you ever had to display recurring events, you probably noticed no list items are created for those events in the calendar list.
In order to display those items, I had to do a bit of digging... I noticed that the "Current Events" view from the calendar list would display those recurring events giving the illusion that they were actual unique list items.
Using SharePoint Solution G
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
June 12, 2009 at 10:30 AMToday I ran into a problem getting SharePoint to flush the object cache via the UI or STSADM. Neither approach worked so I tried manually deleting the files from disk. This, however, resulted in an exception being thrown because SharePoint was still expecting to find the files at their previous location.
Finally, I resorted to turning off BLOB caching for the web application in which I needed to see updated content. This worked! The process I followed was this:
1) Turn off BLOB cachi
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 11, 2009 at 4:55 PMMaybe you have wondered what is the difference between the SPWeb.AvailableContentTypes and SPWeb.ContentType, I know I did. Reading intellisence, I couldn't really tell which one to use, they both seem close to being identical:
I decided to work with SPWeb.AvailableContentTypes but ran into problems when trying to update my content as I was continually getting the "The collection cannot be modified" error.
Turns out that the SPWeb.AvailableContentTypes is a read-only property. No
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 11, 2009 at 4:35 PMOne of the requirements on my last project was to have a tag cloud web part to link to various articles and blogs. I found a web part that does just that here.
If you have to customize the html of those tags according to their weight, check out an updated version of the previous web part posted on codeplex that let you do that. Find it here.
Another cool little web part is the SharePoint Quick Surverys. Sometimes, it makes more sense to have a user fill out a survey from a home page ra
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 3, 2009 at 3:44 PM One of the biggest cost-saving benefits of Office Communications Server 2007 has been the integrated Web Conferencing features, a.k.a. Live Meeting. Many companies currently pay for off-site host conferencing services like Microsoft's own hosted Live Meeting, or WebEx just to name a few. In the same way that R2’s Dial-In Conferencing can reduce costs by eliminating the need for a hosted phone bridge service, all versions of OCS can offer the same cost-cutting advantages by bringing Live Meet
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
May 29, 2009 at 8:53 AMWhether troubleshooting a problem or performing regular maintenance it is sometimes necessary to reset the passwords on the service accounts used by OCS. Best Practice Microsoft’s recommendation is to configure each service account to never have their passwords expire, but some organizations may have policies limiting or completely banning that type of approach. In most cases it is best practice to retroactively disable password expiration on each Active Directory User Account used by OCS, as
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
May 15, 2009 at 4:10 PMI had to come up with some XSL for a client to display multiple bios and and pictures per data row. I did a bit of searching and put together my XSL based on some stuff I had read. There was no real example like I am about to show you. Here is the scenario...the client wanted the information stored in a list within SharePoint and wanted to display it in the following manner:
Image 1 Name Title Bio Link
Image 2 Name Tit
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
May 15, 2009 at 1:37 PMI am working on an internal project that requires me to create and delete sites from a remote SharePoint site. My first thoughts were "this will be easy I will use web services to do it". Well I was wrong, the admin service only deals with site collections and not sub sites, so I had to do it the old fashioned way...RPC. I read a blog when I was looking for an example that said SharePoint designer uses RPC. I then started fiddler and SPD and created a site and deleted a site. This
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
May 15, 2009 at 10:47 AMThere’s a great scene in the movie Alien where Tom Skerritt’s character, Dallas, has a (somewhat eerie) conversation with the ship’s computer, named Mother. By conversation, I mean Dallas asks the computer questions and Mother responds with meaningful answers. Whenever I see it, I think of two things: I’m sure its not a mistake that, given the name of the computer, the room looks like a womb. One day, we will all interact with computers like this. You may understand why I thought of this afte
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
May 12, 2009 at 4:41 PMTalking with a colleague of mine today, I was explaining how sites in SharePoint are lost once deleted. Meaning, a deleted site will not be saved to the recycle bin like a list/item/document would be for example. This is the expected behavior out-of-the-box.
Now, you could use an event handler to override the WebDeleting method
and either prevent the user to delete the site or make a copy of the site and its content somewhere so that it can be retrieved if it is ever needed.
A solution was al
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
May 11, 2009 at 10:20 PMAs you might have guessed from my recent blogs, I have a bit of a security orientation with the work I do. Personally, I find the subject to be both interesting and important, especially given the rapid advancement of the kinds of collaboration technologies that PointBridge specializes in. And its not just the technical advancements, but the changing social dynamics and expectations with information sharing that, in my opinion, greatly increases the importance of this conversation. That’s why
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