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By: Bart Tubalinal
Posted:
February 19, 2012 at 4:42 PM
This post has moved. New location
Future updates to the series will only be posted to the new location.
Intro
This is part two of the first series of posts I’m writing on developing native mobile apps using the Windows Azure platform. In the first part, I covered the basic setup of my azure storage, I walked through the steps of building the iOS Windows Azure Toolkit and using it in a project, and I wrote the code to use the toolkit in my model classes for the SpeakEasy app, a fictitious
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By: Bart Tubalinal
Posted:
February 18, 2012 at 8:11 PMThis post has moved. New location
Future updates to the series will only be posted to the new location.
Intro
A few weeks ago, I posted a video and a follow-up blog on why I think using Windows Azure as a middle-tier or backend platform for mobile is compelling. Remaining on the topic of Azure and mobile, I wanted to write a series of blog posts that show you how to use various Azure services to build a native mobile app. Through this series, I’m going to build an iPhone app called SpeakE
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
February 15, 2012 at 4:35 PMSituation So you’ve got this nice InfoPath form, and you want to pre-populate it with user information. This means you’ll need to somehow get the user’s login information into the InfoPath form. Unfortunately, there’s no simple or straightforward way to do this. Several blogs reference just calling the form’s User property and everything magically works in SharePoint. I can tell you from personal experience that this isn’t the case. There are other blogs saying to use a new field in the fo
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
February 3, 2012 at 10:15 AM
Whether you love or hate InfoPath forms, they occasionally do make things easier. However, the form viewer page comes from the FormServerPage type, which inherits directly from System.Web.UI.Page, meaning that it permits anonymous users to view the page and, consequentially, your form. None of the SharePoint access permissions, aside from folder-level permissions have any affect. Unfortunately, the page is located in the root layouts folder, so changing those permissions aren’t possible. Y
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By: Bart Tubalinal
Posted:
February 2, 2012 at 8:56 PM
Today, I posted a video blog discussing why using Windows Azure as a mobile backend platform is an attractive option. I wanted to quickly summarize the contents of that video and also supplement it with some helpful links.
Summary
Backend platform selection is important because, unless you’re talking about the most trivial of apps, most mobile applications will have some need to connect to backend services and data. It’s important to select a platform that’s flexible, scalable to your app an
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By: David Greve
Posted:
January 29, 2012 at 11:31 PM
I was recently asked this question by a customer, as we were starting to build out a migration process. My immediate thought was no, we need to migrate the mailbox first then assign an Exchange Online license to mailbox. The reason why this was first reaction was primarily due to BPOS. (BPOS was the version of Exchange Online prior to Office 365.) In BPOS, once you assign a license to user, their mailbox becomes active. This can be problematic when you are piloting some mailboxes and you are
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
January 26, 2012 at 12:57 AM
Step-by-Step Instructions
Before getting started I would like to point out the other blogs in this series. If you do not need help with the installation of the SQL Server 2012 bits then perhaps one of the other blogs will be of help.
Installation Order:
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Business Intelligence Configuration
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Installation and Configuration
SharePoint 2010 Installation for SQL Server 2012 (RC0)
Additional SSAS Instance Installations in SQL Server 2012 (RC0)
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
January 26, 2012 at 12:57 AM
Overview
With every new version of SQL that is released there are always a few changes and challenges related to the installation and configuration of all the tools within the BI stack. Admittedly, even with the ever changing toolset within the BI stack, this has gotten easier over time. Furthermore, the deep integration with SharePoint now makes it impossible to setup a VM and use the BI stack without it.
If you have never installed SQL server or any tools on the BI stack don't worry! The
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
January 26, 2012 at 12:56 AM
Overview
Please check out the other blogs in the series related to setting up each of the main SQL Server 2012 features. Links to each of the related blogs are shown below.
Installation Order:
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Business Intelligence Configuration
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Installation and Configuration
SharePoint 2010 Installation for SQL Server 2012 (RC0)
Additional SSAS Instance Installations in SQL Server 2012 (RC0)
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 Config
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
January 26, 2012 at 12:55 AM
Overview
If you do not already have SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot and SharePoint 2010 installed please check out one of the earlier blogs in this series. All of the blogs in the series are listed below. If you did not follow the SharePoint 2010 Installation for SQL Server 2012 blog then your PowerPivot configuration might vary slightly from what I shown below.
Installation Order:
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Business Intelligence Configuration
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Installation and Configurati
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
January 26, 2012 at 12:54 AM
Step-by-Step Instructions
I would like to point out that this installation is actually pretty simple for a brand new BI environment. If you are new to the series, please click on one of the other blogs in the series to get up to speed. If not, continue on!
Installation Order:
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Business Intelligence Configuration
SQL Server 2012 (RC0) Installation and Configuration
SharePoint 2010 Installation for SQL Server 2012 (RC0)
Additional SSAS Instance Installations in
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By: Ali Rizwan
Posted:
January 23, 2012 at 10:34 AM
If you are new to SQL Server 2012 like me, you might run into some issues when you are trying to create some Tabular Model projects. A Tabular Model is simply a new type of server mode in SQL Server 2012. It utilizes a new storage mode known as the Vertipaq storage engine that enables higher compression rates by storing and compressing data across columns. The columnar compression enables faster response times when the data is less variable in a given column as oppose to the variability
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
January 23, 2012 at 10:26 AMSituation If you’ve worked with SharePoint 2010 at all, I’m sure you’ve seen a ModalDialog popup at some point. This popup most often occurs when you’re creating or editing a list item. The item’s edit or create form is displayed by ModalDialog in an HTML iFrame. This frame allows for the nifty, AJAX-like popup, but it also means that the form code is segregated from the rest of the page. This isn’t really a problem with out-of-the-box forms, which use the Dialog master page. The dialog ma
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
January 22, 2012 at 1:30 PM
Have you ever come across a SharePoint installation that's been customized in an unsupported way? You look at the 12 (or 14) hive and see that files have been modified by hand? Not good.
As you may know, changing core SharePoint files is unsupported and can lead to problems when patching.
The best way to clean up modified SharePoint installations is to pull out the customizations and move them into new files as part of a solution package (WSP file). That makes it easy to re-deploy c
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By: Rem Purushothaman
Posted:
January 19, 2012 at 3:24 PM Everyone is aware of the key role search plays in a product or retail scenario. Websites like Amazon and Best Buy would be practically unusable without a way to easily search for products you are looking to research or purchase. Did you know that search can also play the same critical role in a corporate environment? Corporate networks today hold petabytes of information scattered across file shares, databases, SharePoint lists, individual employee computers and mobile devices. This information
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By: Darya Orlova
Posted:
January 11, 2012 at 10:37 AM
In the few weeks that I've been working on NewsGator customizations, this question has come up several times: Can you make everyone in an Active Directory group automatically follow a NewsGator community?
What it comes down to is that the administrator wants to manage groups in Active Directory and not have to duplicate that effort in SharePoint. This makes sense: group membership should be consistent within the organization.
In version 2.5, this is a built-in feature: you will be a
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By: David Greve
Posted:
January 6, 2012 at 2:24 PM
During part two of this 2-part blog series, Microsoft MVP and PointBridge Professional Services Manager Dave Greve talks about the importance of communications and training within an organization migrating to Office 365. He suggests tips to minimize help desk tickets, maximize adoption early on, provide better ground support during go-live and getting users ready and excited to ensure a successful implementation.
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By: Jagun Rimes
Posted:
January 6, 2012 at 12:54 AM
There may be a number of reasons why you or your organization may want to understand the impact a particular web part may have on the SharePoint farm. The information will allow you to understand the scope of sites that may be affected from a web part perspective. This information may be helpful in the following scenarios.
· Upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010.
· Need to remove all instances of web parts
· Communicating change of web parts.
· Modificatio
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By: Jason Sloan
Posted:
January 5, 2012 at 2:23 PM
It's becoming more and more common to see Lync deployments with a single SIP domain in organizations that have multiple geographically dispersed pools. However, deploying Lync within this scenario can cause quite the confusion due to the different URLs Lync uses in each pool. Typically, you can only have one set of URLs for an entire SIP domain, regardless of the number of pools. The biggest problem: How do you keep conference URLs active for everyone else when one pool fails? In this article,
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By: Jason Sloan
Posted:
January 3, 2012 at 4:10 PM
Deploying Lync Server 2010 is a process I simply enjoy doing. When the presales and design sessions are complete, I'm ready to start the deployment process as quickly as possible. It never fails, however, that something always makes the deployment wheels spin as we get started. This blog post is a simple post, but nonetheless something I feel can help streamline a painful discussion point with a client; Extending the Schema.
First, let's quickly review a few important points of extending the
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
December 30, 2011 at 10:29 AM
With the recent release of the Lync Mobile client for Windows Phone 7, Android, and iPhone, I've seen numerous companies thrilled about the opportunity to extend Lync further within the enterprise! For companies interested in deploying Lync Mobility, the Lync Server Cumulative Update 4 is required. For deployment steps, I highly recommend reading the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Mobility Guide and Jeff Schertz's blog.
After working with various customers to deploy the new Mobility service, occ
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By: Darya Orlova
Posted:
December 29, 2011 at 7:18 PM
If you have NewsGator on your SharePoint site and want to refine the look or functionality of some items in the newsfeed, there is a good chance that you will be building a custom activity type.
Here are a few examples of where custom activity types can help:
· items from a non-community list trigger posts to the newsfeed
· disable "share" functionality for particular newsfeed items
· send out updates from a group account without forcing your users to remember an extra set of a
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 29, 2011 at 6:37 PMSince the beginning of 2011, I’ve had the good fortune of being involved with several projects involving the claims authentication capabilities introduced in SharePoint 2010. The scope of these efforts have ranged from small proof-of-concept demonstrations to large Internet and Intranet production deployments. Some involved custom built Security Token Services (STS) and others relied on vendor-provided products like ADFS 2.0 and Ping Federate. As a sort of unofficial evangelist for this sort of
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By: David Greve
Posted:
December 21, 2011 at 3:16 PM
During part one this 2-part blog series, I talk about the importance of user experience during migration to Office 365. Microsoft offers many capabilities that ensure an optimal user experience such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Directory Sync and Exchange hybrid services. Additionally, I point out options for organizations with external messaging systems to provide a rich co-existence experience using third party tools.
Keep an eye out for part 2 in the coming weeks.
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
December 13, 2011 at 11:58 AM
Sunday night at about 7pm Chicago time, I downloaded and installed the Lync Mobile client for Windows Phone 7. In a sad reflection on what passes for excitement in my life, I had been checking about a few times an hour Saturday and Sunday; I probably hit the App Marketplace 50 times on Sunday before striking gold.
I quickly sent a message to the rest of the PointBridge UC team and a bunch of us began fiddling around with the new client.
First I should mention: you need to read and follow t
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By: William Tseng
Posted:
December 6, 2011 at 10:56 PMFor an example of the processing pipeline itself, check out Jeff Monnette’s blog here. The FAST Processing Pipeline is a great method of feeding in your own Crawled Properties into FAST, and then being able to expose those properties by mapping to managed properties and searching on them. We ran into a situation with some custom code which stored ratings and comments for a document together in a column, which caused a mess when FAST showed the data. While I’m not going to go into what the entire
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By: Callie Jones
Posted:
December 6, 2011 at 10:40 AM
The beginning of December marks Microsoft Lync 2010's first anniversary. Two thousand and eleven has been a successful year for Lync, so let's take a look at some of the milestones Lync has accomplished in just 12 months.
About 3 million enterprise users use Lync 2010 for their telephony needs versus a traditional PBX.
Forrester research found the ROI on Lync is more than 300 percent, while companies could see a breakeven point as early as 7-8 months after deployment.
Lync has grown 25 pe
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
November 30, 2011 at 3:24 PM
I have written several posts providing insight into some technical challenges that I have encountered while helping my customers upgrade to Exchange 2010. Upgrading any technology within a computing environment requires time and effort, and with some of the technical challenges I've already documented, some of you may be wondering if upgrading your Exchange environment is worth the effort. For this post, I thought I'd provide some insight into why my customers have been upgrading to Exchange 2
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
November 29, 2011 at 3:01 PMSituation Wouldn’t it be nice to start a specific SharePoint list workflow on each item in a list? Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to do this out of the box in SharePoint or Nintex, even though it’s just a few lines of code. You could always grab all of the list items and then loop through each one and start a workflow, but this is complicated and cumbersome. Solution Using Nintex Workflow 2010, it’s incredibly easy to create a simple to use and configure workflow action that can start
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
November 29, 2011 at 2:28 PMGetting YouTube videos to PAUSE nice with each other I don't know if YouTube had in mind for us to put more than one video on a page. It didn't seem like it when I set out to make one player pause other videos when it was played. By the end I found that YouTube had enough hooks in the player API to make it possible. Barely. Contributing factor: I was looking to accomplish this with the bare-bones elements without any plug-ins such as "swfobject." I googled and binged and asked Jeeves b
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By: Mo Omar
Posted:
November 28, 2011 at 8:55 AMBuilding on my first post around Office 365, I’ve decided to post a short video blog series on addressing common myths around SharePoint Online. The first video in the series talks a little about the flexibility of SharePoint Online, options for developing solutions in SharePoint Online, and finally, the ability of using ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) to create a single sign-on experience between SharePoint Online and an on-premise AD implementation. I’m planning on covering some m
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
November 21, 2011 at 5:30 AM
SharePoint deployments succeed or fail based on adoption and adherence to business goals, not technical functionality. It doesn't matter how pretty your SharePoint site is or how many features you pack in. Perception is reality, and if people don't perceive value, it's failed.
Along those lines, communications planning is paramount for winning hearts and minds. Whether deploying a small upgrade or embarking on a transformational change from another system, engaging end-users early and t
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
November 21, 2011 at 12:59 AM
One of my clients running Exchange 2003 was using over 400 email domains and was trying to setup coexistence with Office 365. One of the requirements for this is to create remote domains both on-premises and in office 365 for each primary SMTP domain and currently there is not a way to automate this (Exchange 2010 SP2 due to be released shortly will do this automatically). Until then here is a small script to automate this process on premises.
$file="c:\scripts\transcript.txt"
If
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
November 21, 2011 at 12:29 AM
Recently I had completed setup of Office 365 coexistence for a client using Exchange 2007 and verified mail flow to/from Office 365 and free busy lookups. Abruptly one day mail flow stopped to Office 365 and Exchange console was showing the message "The certificate status could not be determined because the revocation check failed."
After a quick search on the web, I found this article on Exchange team blog here but none of the scenarios applied in my case. Mail flow stopped to
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By: David Soderna
Posted:
November 14, 2011 at 10:23 AMLast week, I left you with the first 5 points to how social creates value in the workplace. Continuing that blog, here are the top 5.
#5
Increased Collaboration Potential: Collaboration is more than creating and sharing. It is difficult for organizations that reward individual behaviors and accomplishments to truly collaborate. In order to effectively leverage the collaboration potential that social technologies provide, we must find ways to encourage teams to work together and contribu
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By: David Soderna
Posted:
November 10, 2011 at 8:57 AM
The term 'Social Business' has many different meanings; for some, it describes how businesses leverage social networking services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to market or sell their services. While this externally facing definition is certainly valid, 'Social Business' also describes how companies are using social networking concepts and technology to enable their employees to interact in new and exciting ways.
Not unexpectedly, many organizations fear a mysterious productivity drain
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By: Callie Jones
Posted:
November 9, 2011 at 1:59 PM
My previous company was like many organizations; we battled time zone barriers and needed to communicate with a mobile workforce. I used 5 different tools on a daily basis to communicate with my colleagues. In hindsight, especially as a Lync user now, it’s easy to see how much productivity was lost in those 5 disparate technologies. Setup hassle aside, the time my team lost trying to connect with each other was frustrating and took away from the time we needed to be collaborating and working.
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By: Mark Drespling
Posted:
November 9, 2011 at 10:56 AM
No organization builds a SharePoint environment with the goal of creating a poor user experience. Yet, many organizations do not plan for, adopt and design for an intuitive, user-friendly SharePoint environment.
So, why does this happen? It often stems from not understanding the business case behind user experience design and the value it will bring to the enterprise. In the case of SharePoint, the tools it provides usually solves many critical business problems – collaboration is not efficie
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
November 4, 2011 at 9:19 AMI recently had the pleasure of working with one of our customers to implement Lync Server 2010 Enterprise Voice with Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 7.1.3. The integration between the two systems went pretty smoothly. During our testing phase though, we uncovered an issue with ringback. When a PSTN user or a Cisco IP Phone user would dial a Lync endpoint, the PSTN user and/or Cisco user would hear silence (no ringback) until the call was answered by the Lync user or diverted to Exc
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By: David Greve
Posted:
October 23, 2011 at 5:59 PM
Many global organizations are seeking ways to deliver authentication to their global sites, in the most optimal way. With Office 365, you have the ability to provide your end-users a single sign-on experience with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), integrating with Office 365. In order to leverage ADFS, you have to plan out your authentication strategy. The major item you need to know about ADFS is how it routes the user to the ADFS servers. Today, DNS is primarily used to refe
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By: Callie Jones
Posted:
October 20, 2011 at 2:27 PM
Intranets have long been the standard for sharing secure information within an organization, but they can be challenging to manage, especially when left to one person or group, and consequently, the information could become stale or employee involvement low.
So how do we make sure our intranet is valuable and the investment maximized? By adding a social layer to your intranet, you’re adding familiar communication tools – ones that your employees already use on a daily basis in their personal
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By: Mo Omar
Posted:
October 19, 2011 at 6:13 AMA hot topic throughout the SharePoint Conference 2011 earlier this month was the evolution of Microsoft’s cloud-based offering, Office 365, and more importantly, it’s successful adoption within large enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses. Within only 12 weeks since it’s release, millions of customers have taken advantage of the enterprise-class capabilities offered by Office 365. Strategic Benefits of Moving to the Cloud In a struggling economy, organizations big and small are aggres
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 18, 2011 at 11:15 AMAs most people will have heard, Microsoft officially acquired Skype last week. There are precious few details about what the end-state is going to look like with Lync and Skype integrated; or even what Microsoft really plans to do with Skype. With so little information available directly from either party, I decided to read between the lines and try to draw some conclusions on my own.
Microsoft's Strategic Direction
With an $8.5 billion dollar price tag, Skype was the largest acquisitions ever m
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
October 17, 2011 at 9:55 PMSituation You’re looking for a way to semi-automate the back-loading of of scrubbed data from your production environment to your development/test/staging/whatever environments. There are several reasons you’d want to do this that I don’t need to get into here. The problem is that your production environment is well-used and full of a bunch of data, both personal and proprietary. This data must therefore be scrubbed to shrink its size and remove anything that shouldn’t be in a non-production
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
October 17, 2011 at 9:23 PM
I have a lot of customers who have deployed Enterprise Vault within their email environments. In many cases, these customers have deployed Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 and have been using ISA Server to publish OWA and Outlook Anywhere to the Internet. These customers have then upgraded to Exchange 2010 and replaced ISA with TMG. This type of upgrade presents some challenges simply based on how Enterprise Vault works. Specifically, when an end user accesses an item stored in Enterprise Vault,
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By: Ali Rizwan
Posted:
October 17, 2011 at 4:37 PM
I wanted to share my experience with the new features of Mobile Entrée and how to leverage your existing Microsoft Business Intelligence investments as a starting point to building out the mobile platform. Mike Burger posted earlier regarding Mobile Entrée (found here). He stated the fact that it can integrate with SharePoint and render reports in Excel in the mobile browser. These are very compelling features in trying the solution out. I am impressed with the ability to finally share my E
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By: Bart Tubalinal
Posted:
October 14, 2011 at 12:43 AMThere is no denying that mobility is currently a hot topic. Staggering forecasts by various analysts have made capitalizing on the mobile applications market a top priority for many organizations’ CIOs and CTOs. However, before diving headfirst into mobility projects, it is important to consider various factors in order to define a clear strategy that addresses the many opportunities and challenges that mobility presents for your organization.
During Q4 of 2010, smartphone sales surpassed globa
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By: Apryl Crossland
Posted:
October 12, 2011 at 4:31 PM
System Specs
SharePoint 2010 farm hosting multiple web apps using claims authentication. Each web app has multiple zones.
Symptoms
After a code deployment we were unable to access the Intranet zone (NTLM Authentication) for all claims-based we apps in the environment.
The following is the error that was encountered when trying to access the sites in IE.
The following is the error that was being captured in the Application event log.
Log Name: ApplicationSource: Mi
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
October 4, 2011 at 6:30 PM
The SharePoint Conference is in full swing! Despite a groggy start for some attendees (thanks to AvePoint's late-night "Red Party"), Tuesday continued the great stream of content.
While a peek at the next version will have to wait until at least SharePoint Conference 2012, excitement and innovation around SharePoint 2010 are still in vast supply.
Six Key Themes from SharePoint Conference 2011
I've attended a mix of sessions focusing on IT, business, and development and s
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By: Matt Morse
Posted:
October 4, 2011 at 3:28 PMYesterday concluded day one of the 2011 Microsoft SharePoint Conference. While the 2009 SharePoint Conference unveiled SharePoint 2010 - and we learned today that the 2012 conference will reveal the next version - this year’s conference focuses on how businesses are using SharePoint, best practices and ultimately, how to take SharePoint to the next level and drive user adoption. Watch this quick video recap, shot from the friendly confines of the PointBridge booth:
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By: David Soderna
Posted:
October 3, 2011 at 6:54 PMIt's been an interesting and exciting first day at SPC11. Everything from the facilities to the overall organization to the drive and excitement are what we've come to expect from a big Microsoft Conference. SharePoint has truly invaded Mickey Mouse's neighborhood.
What's also impressive is the impact the SharePoint Community has on shaping the conference. From the conference breakfast where giant screens of streaming tweets provided some dining entertainment to the keynote itself where our
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By: Callie Jones
Posted:
September 29, 2011 at 3:02 PM
In less than a week, Disneyland will be better suited to be called SharePointland. Technology gurus will descend upon Anaheim, Calif. October 3-6 to learn the latest and greatest from Microsoft SharePoint, network with colleagues at the larger-than-life social events and hopefully leave with more knowledge than they came with.
Although this will be my inaugural SharePoint Conference, PointBridge is in no shortage of veterans eager to advise and guide to optimize attendee experience. Here a
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By: Bart Tubalinal
Posted:
September 26, 2011 at 2:08 PM
I was debugging an issue with a heavily customized SharePoint site where users were unable to save any changes they made to SharePoint list views. Since this was a heavily customized site with several custom list definitions, my initial thought was that we may have botched a list definition or two and made these lists and list views non-modifiable. However, I also tested creating an out of the box SharePoint List and found out that its views were not modifiable as well. In order to isolate the
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
September 20, 2011 at 1:38 PMAll over the web, there are plenty of links to how to interact with SharePoint 2010 via the Client Object Model. Unfortunately, these interactions are all done via the compiled Client Object Model, not the Silverlight or JavaScript versions. That means you have to do the translation to JavaScript or Silverlight yourself. For Silverlight, that’s not particularly difficult, but keep in mind that the entire Silverlight object model is a subset of the Common Language Runtime (CLR). However, nowh
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By: William Tseng
Posted:
September 7, 2011 at 1:22 PMWe were having some issues dealing with single and multi-value fields in SharePoint and how FAST interprets them for the index. The distinction between them is actually quite important and can have an impact when it comes down to refining your search results. In our example, we were dealing with a multi-value site column lookup field in a list. FAST does some interesting things with multi-value and single value fields. For example, let’s use a Crawled Property called ows_region. If the field fo
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 6, 2011 at 10:50 AM
Office 365 supports the ability to create Shared Mailboxes, right through the UI or through PowerShell commands. The Shared Mailbox is essentially an unlicensed mailbox with no direct logon capabilities. This means you cannot open the mailbox directly, within the Outlook client. What you can do is open the mailbox with an existing licensed mailbox, as long as you have permissions to the Shared Mailbox and at the right levels.
What this leaves you with is the inability to create specific O
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By: Micgelle McMillan
Posted:
September 2, 2011 at 3:41 PM
I was asked to add a search in a library using SharePoint Online that would bring the results in a “Grid View,” which essentially meant we want to filter our list items and we don’t want to use the default search at the top of the page (This Site: ___).
Originally I read a post about doing something similar, but it wouldn’t work for many commenters and myself included (I can’t remember the original article) however I do remember the error. The method worked, only returned results from the
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
August 27, 2011 at 8:30 PM
Here's the scenario:
You publish SharePoint content using UAG
Users want to share links via email/IM
When the recipient clicks your link, they're prompted to log in
After authenticating, they're redirected to your SharePoint homepage instead of the original link
The reason for this is that UAG only has one <FORM/> action target that is set to your homepage.
The good news is that UAG keeps your original link in its 'orig_url' parameter. We can use Javascript in SharePoint to look
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By: Brian Hulse
Posted:
August 26, 2011 at 2:41 PMOn my current project we are doing a migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Updating our current authentication scheme (a mix of .Net forms and Windows authentication) to utilize claims authentication is one of the requirements for this project. One major difference between how SharePoint treats users in SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 claims authentication mode is the username it reads to resolve users. In SharePoint 2007 these were pretty plain representations of a username you
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By: Rem Purushothaman
Posted:
August 26, 2011 at 10:25 AM
ESP comes with standard synonym dictionaries for several languages which can be used to provide synonym support during search. However, these dictionaries, while being pretty extensive are fairly generic and only contain the terms that are common for a specific language. Often, there is a need to support synonyms that are specific to a subject domain like medicine, real estate or construction, you will need to handle custom synonyms during search. ESP handles synonymy through something called
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
August 25, 2011 at 10:39 PM
You want your iPad users to be able to scroll your SharePoint 2010 site with one finger.
It can be done with the two finger swipe but it doesn't work as well and visitors may not know that. The solution involves using CSS to disable the - ribbon positioning system - so that the ribbon is no longer stuck at the top of the browser. But at the same time you don't want the ribbon positioning disabled for browsers on the desktop. Because that is where the content owners are likely to do their edit
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
August 24, 2011 at 11:36 AMIf you’re looking to support iPhone on a SharePoint 2010 site that is configured to use an external identity provider like Ping Federate, ADFS 2.0, or a custom STS, you will likely run into this issue. However, you may notice everything works just fine with iPad. Fortunately, the issue can be reproduced on the desktop using Firefox or Safari by emulating the iPhone user agent and you’ll be able to see what’s going on in Fiddler. As seen in the above screenshot, you’ll notice an additional redir
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
August 24, 2011 at 10:40 AM
In a world where data is collected for almost everything, companies often find they have trouble figuring out what to do with it. Theoretically companies could report on all their data, however, the larger the dataset gets the more money it will take to setup the infrastructure to support it. For most companies, especially those that are new to Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, this is not realistic.
For this reason it is just as important for companies to put in the time and e
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
August 18, 2011 at 6:36 PM
I ran into an issue recently that, although was a quick fix, there was not much information posted about it. The problem came during the configuration of AD FS for single sign-on with Office 365, when AD FS looks for the Program Data container to add the specific application and certificate information within Active Directory.
Error:
"You do not have sufficient privileges to create a container in Active Directory at location CN=f2e868b0-f4f5-4648-8dda-5a031d478753,CN=ADFS,CN=Micros
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
August 17, 2011 at 6:00 PM
SharePoint 2010 top nav problem on touch devices
You may have noticed that the out of the box SP2010 site nav is not quite usable on a touch screen device like an iPad. The top nav is a list of links, to put it simply. When the links are hovered on, with a mouse, a fly-out menu appears. Since touch devices do not have "hover" the fly-out menu does not appear until the item is clicked. But a click takes you to the target URL of the link so you are unable to choose a link from the fly
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By: Teo Nedev
Posted:
August 17, 2011 at 11:29 AM
If you happen to install PowerPivot on a SharePoint server that has prior SQL Server installation (SQL engine, Analysis Services, Reporting Services etc.) you will run into problems.
You may see error that the installation was unable to register Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SharePoint.Integration.dll assembly. Or if you are really lucky, you may get by far more helpful error message "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".
You generally need 3 steps in order to
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
August 11, 2011 at 3:28 PM
Overview
Lync Server 2010 is extremely granular when it comes to routing voice calls. Lync administrators can configure a voice call to load balance between multiple PSTN gateways within a single site or failover to a PSTN gateway in a second site in the event the primary PSTN gateway fails. After numerous discussions with colleagues and clients, I thought I'd share my thoughts on the difference between the two configurations.
Table 1 below provides a voice routing overview. There are two
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By: Teo Nedev
Posted:
August 8, 2011 at 8:50 AM
I spent considerable time last week trying to build 2-node FAST for SharePoint 2010 implementation. Creating the setup.xml file and building the admin FAST node was the easy part, but trying to connect the non-admin node is what took up most of my time.
(The default FAST installation creates 3 example files under C:\FASTSearch\etc directory, they are named deployment.sample.single.xml, deployment.sample.multi1(2).xml, most of the time you can tweak them to suit your needs instead of trying to
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By: Micgelle McMillan
Posted:
July 29, 2011 at 3:31 PM
Many times when we begin a project we start by sitting down with the user and drafting a requirements document. After a few days of organization we come up with wireframes and a general idea of what we understand, and then we wait for user feedback. This is the way things are done, but is it the best way? In SharePoint creating a page and adding a web part is pretty simple and the configurations take a large amount of the time. What would happen if we designed these sites with the user, inst
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
July 27, 2011 at 3:30 PM
How many versions of a typical document do you need to keep? 5? 10? 100?
SharePoint content databases often get cluttered with redundant versions of the same documents. In some cases, I've seen presentation libraries with less than 10 GB of active content, but hundreds of GBs of content due to gradual changes.
If you're ready to clear out old versions, SharePoint 2010's Management Shell makes it easy. The script below will iterate through all lists and update them to keep only the
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By: Ajay Ram
Posted:
July 21, 2011 at 9:40 PMThe top navigation menu in SharePoint 2010 by default allows one level. If like me you had created the custom master page by copying over the controls from default v4.master page, the top navigation menu is controlled by the ASP menu control "TopNavigationMenuV4". The number of levels of sub sites accessible in the top navigation menu is controlled by the "MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels" property of the menu control.
<SharePoint:AspMenu
ID="TopNavigationMenuV4"
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
July 18, 2011 at 3:35 PM
SPPersistedObject is an important element in SharePoint 2010. It’s SharePoint’s main way of storing information across servers and acts as sort of the central brain of the application. Any data stored in it is guaranteed to be there in perpetuity. This makes SPPersistedObject a very useful class, but it’s not without its drawbacks. One of the most frustrating and least documented is the change that occurred in the class between SharePoint 2007 and 2010. Suppose you want to change this cla
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
July 17, 2011 at 7:05 PM
Social component in SharePoint 2010 is actively used in intranets. Users share thoughts, links and documents with other users using the functionality provided by SharePoint 2010. Users can tag pages which are a part of the intranet site or they can tag links which are external. Anytime any of the above actions occur, an activity is created. The activities created are displayed to users where ever the “Recent Activities” web part is placed. The web part gathers all the activities depending on s
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By: Brian Hulse
Posted:
July 15, 2011 at 4:38 PMNote: The below method is good for both single sign on and persistent login scenarios in a SharePoint environment with anonymous access enabled. I recently had to wrestle with implementing single sign on (SSO) between two SharePoint web applications that have anonymous access enabled. If you have read Programming Windows Identity Foundation (I recommend you do if you are planning on implementing claims authentication) you would know that to implement SSO between two secure SharePoint web applica
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
July 14, 2011 at 1:45 PMA little while ago, I was working on a project that needed to display user pictures. These pictures were to be stored in a Picture Library specific to the site collection of the application in SharePoint 2010. If the user didn’t have a picture, for whatever reason, a default silhouette picture was to be displayed instead. The easiest way to implement this is by using the onError handler that the Document Object Model (DOM) provides for image tags as part of the HTML specification. Whenever a
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
July 12, 2011 at 4:46 PM
One of the items I love about Microsoft Lync is the fact that I can plug my Lync certified headset (Plantronics Blackwire C420) into my laptop and instantly begin using it to make and receive telephone calls. This morning, I plugged my headset in to join a Lync Online Meeting and the audio started playing through my laptop speakers. As much as my colleagues love listening to me ramble, I thought I should try to resolve the issue…
If you by chance run into a similar experience, below are a fe
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
July 11, 2011 at 10:42 PMWe recently ran across an issue a customer was having with the migration of “My Site” content to SharePoint 2010. In their case, the target configuration was Claims Mode using an external STS for authentication. They upgraded their web application to claims-mode, converted the users to SAML claims principals, and then configured the User Profile Service to synchronize with Trusted Identity Providers. Profile synchronization ran fine. However, whenever a user clicked the “My Content” link, a bran
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By: William Tseng
Posted:
July 8, 2011 at 2:15 PMSo everything was hunky-dory in the FAST world. User Contexts and Site Promotions were getting along, scopes did their thing, and life crawled along. Your Content SSA chugs along and suddenly… A year after the original FAST installation took place, the unthinkable (well, unexpected and forgotten) happened. The self-signed FASTSearchCert.pfx certificate expired! If you have never run into this problem before, or were unaware that it was occurring like myself, you may look at many areas before you
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
July 7, 2011 at 2:08 PMOne of the cool new features of Visual Studio 2010 Web Application projects are web.config transforms which allow you to use different settings in your web.config file without needing to remember to change them every time you compile the project. More information can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465326.aspx. In a nutshell, you can provide additional settings and modifications to the web.config that Visual Studio compiles at runtime into a single web.config file. Th
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By: Ross Burger
Posted:
July 6, 2011 at 9:12 PMWhen using the Quest Migrator tool to migrate a client from Lotus Notes to SharePoint Online/Office 365, you are provided with a very straight-forward interface to migrate DB's and applications to the new SharePoint environment. However, when trying to keep consistency between environments checks and modifications are needed to ensure the items are correctly migrated. One such trick is to migrate already populated fields to the new SharePoint environment.
If your basic job is setup correctly
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
July 6, 2011 at 12:13 AM
It is almost impossible to have a conversation about Business Intelligence these days without talking about mobility. Mobile internet and data consumption is growing rapidly and it doesn't look like that is going to change any time soon. There are many mobility options to choose from but not all of them work on all mobile devices. Some require heavy custom application development so many companies are investing heavily in buying their work forces smart phones or tablets so that all users can c
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By: Teo Nedev
Posted:
July 5, 2011 at 2:40 PM
There are couple of blog posts out there that talk about how to change passwords for SharePoint 2010 manages service accounts. You can do it using the GUI (Central Admin) or powershell.
I actually had to go through this exercise recently, and what I found is that certain service applications will stop working after the passwords have been updated. Specifically, the user profile synhronization service stops, and the search service application enters paused state.
After you change the
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
July 2, 2011 at 1:15 PMSharePoint 2010's rich text editors make it pretty easy to format text and insert media, but they also make it difficult to embed Flash content. In order to streamline the HTML generated by the Content Editor Web Part and other edit boxes, Microsoft decided to automatically remove non-essential tags. Any time we try to embed a Flash file or other add-in that uses an <OBJECT/> tag, SharePoint removes it upon being saved.
So how do we add Flash to a SharePoint page? The trick is to us
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
July 1, 2011 at 7:00 PM
Last month, I had the distinct honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Chicago. Kudos to the organizers for putting on another great event.
Here are slides from the two sessions I presented:
Office 365 Deployment Strategies
Moving to Office 365 provides the perfect opportunity to clean house and get SharePoint back on track. Whether starting fresh or migrating existing sites, early planning will facilitate long-term success in the cloud. This session will explore deployme
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By: Ross Burger
Posted:
July 1, 2011 at 3:46 PMWhen introducing SharePoint to new users it is important to have a forum where users can reach out for help. To accomplish this, as simply as possible, I created a simple Help Desk page. All you need to create this page is:
Create a group of users who will manage and respond to the tickets
Create a "Help Desk" page or site that all users will have access to
Create two lists
The first list will be on the "Help Desk" page and will serve as a place for users to submit their is
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By: Stan Ageev
Posted:
July 1, 2011 at 3:04 PM
A few weeks ago I was part of a small group of PB'ers lucky enough to attend a SharePoint Saturday event held in Lisle, IL. Although I was not able to make it by 8AM, I was just in time for free lunch and a great session by Virgil Carrol, a head of Monkey Consulting specializing in MS SharePoint technologies, on SharePoint Information Architecture (IA) Silos. The session was about 3 hours long and covered lots of different topics on IA and its importance in today’s business world.
So
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By: Ajay Ram
Posted:
June 30, 2011 at 5:02 PM
Creating managed metadata fields is a bit different than creating fields of other types. Managed metadata fields are required to be linked to a term set before they can be used. The two types of taxonomy fields are TaxonomyField and TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti. The TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti is used for a multi valued managed metadata.
TaxonomyField field = new TaxonomyField(web.Fields, "TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti", name);
TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(site);
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
June 30, 2011 at 2:44 PM
I am sure most administrators have received a request to create several AD accounts due to acquisitions, mergers, or for other reasons. I had one of those requests which consisted of populating an AD environment that was to be used for Directory Synchronization with BPOS/Office 365. There are a lot of Bulk AD scripts out in this little world wide web of ours and there are also third party applications that you could use too (for a price); however, in the pursuit of scripting, the following cam
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By: Ross Burger
Posted:
June 30, 2011 at 2:15 PMISSUE:
When working with several clients to get them started with SharePoint Online, many clients are not yet ready to give users the full functionality/customizations that the "My Site" feature provides. Whether it is the social features, personal features, or just the creation of a personal site, many clients feel like they need their users need to have more training/conformability with SharePoint before giving them access. These features are now relatively easy to turn off, if you
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By: Ajay Ram
Posted:
June 30, 2011 at 12:21 AM
The Official File web service in SharePoint is used to submit files to a record repository. When the file gets submitted the metadata of the document is parsed and matched to a routing rule in the record center. One of the parameters passed to the SubmitFile method is metadata (properties) of the document.
public static OfficialFileResult SubmitFile( SPWeb web, byte[] fileToSubmit, RecordsRepositoryProperty[] properties, string strRecordSeries, string
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 29, 2011 at 10:28 AM
Background
Brien Posey has an excellent post explaining the steps required to mount a recovery database in Exchange 2010. His post can be found here. While assisting one of my customers restore email data using a recovery database, I learned some lessons that I thought I'd share. In this instance, my customer needed to restore data from a backup created using NetBackup. The customer initially tried to use NetBackup's granular restore technology to recover the data in question but they were u
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By: Michael Tolly
Posted:
June 27, 2011 at 10:11 AMThis past Thursday, I attended a Mobile Meetup hosted by Solstice Consulting and I felt it was very engaging and interactive. Many topics were covered ranging from mobile UX/UI to cross-platform development to marketing an application. The meetup was run in an Open Space Technology format. This enabled there to be many topics discussed in smaller groups that could delve more deeply into a single topic rather than the discussion barely covering a broader variety of topics. As someone who has
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By: Kiran Kakanur
Posted:
June 22, 2011 at 1:07 AM
In SharePoint 2010, you can use FAST Query Language (FQL) to query the FAST Search Server content index. In this blog, I will show how you can use the Query Web Service and the KeywordQuery class to execute an FQL query against the content index.
You need to ensure the following has been completed, before you can use FQL to search the content index:
· FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint has been installed and configured. Here is a good TechNet resource.
· Managed propert
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By: Erik Enger
Posted:
June 21, 2011 at 4:12 PMI thought I'd share a little utility I wrote using PowerShell and PrimalForms a while back. Having done numerous migrations using CSV files I'm always looking for ways to speed things up, especially when dealing with the tedious tasks of working with CSV files. Frequently I would have to create or combine CSV files for various migration-related tasks. Using Excel was becoming cumbersome. Since I had been doing a lot of PowerShell scripting, I'd thought a script might make things easier. So, afte
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By: Ajay Ram
Posted:
June 20, 2011 at 9:09 PM
Recently I was working on upgrading a custom router from SharePoint 2007 to 2010. This blog points out some of the deprecated methods and provides details on the new methods replacing it.
In SharePoint 2007, IRouter interface provided the definition for the method OnSubmitFile. The OnSubmitFile allows users to process and route documents that are uploaded to a content organizer enabled site. In SharePoint 2010 IRouter interface is replaced by the ICustomRouter interface. The method signature
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 18, 2011 at 10:19 AM
During a recent Exchange 2010 Deployment, my customer was experiencing 3 different Exchange 2010 issues that were all solved with the same fix.
Issue #1:
Customer was unable to move mailboxes from one database to another on the same Mailbox Server or between Mailbox Servers. The following error was returned when attempting to move mailboxes:
MapiExceptionNetworkError: Unable to make connection to the server. (hr=0x800004005, ec=2423)
A screen shot of the error follows:
Issue #2
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 15, 2011 at 11:34 PM
Background
I recently struggled with the inability to move mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 while helping one of my customers. The environment consisted of a Single Exchange Organization residing in a Single Forest with Multiple Domains within the Forest. The Exchange 2003 Servers and the Exchange 2010 Servers resided in the same Forest, but Different Domains.
The challenging part about this issue was the fact that 80% of my mailbox moves completed successfully while 20% were
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By: William Tseng
Posted:
June 15, 2011 at 11:23 PMWell I didn’t (and wasn’t eligible) win a Xbox 360 with Kinect or multitudes of free raffle prizes at my first SharePoint Saturday, but the experience was very worthwhile. SharePoint Saturday is a great place to make connections, meet people from all aspects of SharePoint, and as always, try to learn something new about the platform. I have been working deeply with SharePoint for the past six months, and everyday there is something new and exciting (or unusual) that I manage to pick up. The ses
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By: David Greve
Posted:
June 15, 2011 at 4:04 PM
We’ve migrated many users from an external messaging system, like Lotus Notes or GroupWise to Office 365. On one of our migrations, we ran in to an issue with a migrated user. When this user tried to logon with their AD credentials (ADFS deployed), they would constantly be prompted for their logon credentials. When we logged on to the Office 365 portal, we immediately received Access Denied for that user.
Initially we thought it was just a bad license assignment. So we removed all of
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By: Stephanie Hasz
Posted:
June 14, 2011 at 5:01 PMI was working on a a PowerShell script the other day and needed to do something I’ve done many times before with no trouble: count the items in a directory. In the past, I’ve gone about this in one of two ways: (Get-Item $Directory).GetFiles().Count (Get-ChildItem $Directory).Count For this particular solution, I needed the number of files in the child directories as well, so I opted for Get-ChildItem as Get-Item doesn’t have a recurse parameter. I tested this in a very basic script on a di
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
June 14, 2011 at 1:25 PM
Nearly all organizations that have deployed any version of Exchange now recognize and understand that allowing Port 80 access from the Internet directly into any Exchange Server is not exceptionally secure, and is therefore not desirable. I personally will not deploy Exchange for any of my customers unless they publish Exchange to the Internet using a hardware appliance or software application such as Microsoft's TMG Server. In addition to pre-authenticating end user credentials, TMG can also
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
June 12, 2011 at 9:28 PM
If you have the P1 plan, you get a public web site that you can customize. This is pretty neat. Office 365 gives you plenty of tools to create your own look and feel.
Here is an overview of the basic functionality provided to customize your site.
You can set the width of the page or you can make the site full width.
The ribbon has three tabs. The first one is used for navigation. The second and the third tabs are used to design the site.
When you select the option of editing the w
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By: Teo Nedev
Posted:
June 10, 2011 at 5:04 PM
I run into very interesting problem when trying to modify the topology of my search service application. I was basically trying to move my administration component and index role to another server in the same farm, but the wizard kept crashing with TimerJob timeout error.
When looking at my target server (where I was trying to place my admin and index role), the search service would be in status Error Staring and the application server log would show
Search Method failed with unexpect
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By: Stephanie Hasz
Posted:
June 10, 2011 at 1:01 PMOne of the most irritating things that can happen while you’re debugging is this message: When you sit at any one breakpoint for too long (longer than the ping maximum response time), this error will appear and terminate your session. If you’re anything like me and my fellow team members, you’ll blindly click “OK” and start over with an extra dose of frustration. Luckily for us, our tech lead, Mike Becker, actually read this message one day and provided us with the solution. It’s so simple,
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By: William Tseng
Posted:
June 8, 2011 at 11:53 AM What we are doing: 1.) Create a Managed Property from a Crawled Property Managed Properties are great! FAST pulls and indexes Managed Properties for multitudes of things, including boosting and search scopes. They are core to your FAST User Experience and an essential part to configuration When a FAST crawl runs, it will pick up site column data and create a crawled property for that site column (given that there is data associated with this site column). In order to query this site column di
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By: Michael Tolly
Posted:
June 8, 2011 at 11:20 AMProfileSubtypes allow administrators to create alternate views for different user to display or hide different user profile properties. However, going through the process of manually changing each profile property could be substantial if there are numerous profile properties on your UserProfileServiceApplication. Therefore, being able to automate the process with a feature, service, or console application would greatly reduce the time spent creating and defining the ProfileSubtypes. Adding new
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 2, 2011 at 12:56 AM
Problem:
During one of my projects I found that the SSAS query log table seemed to be periodically getting truncated. I would notice this because I would run some queries against the cube, watch them get logged into the logging table, and then a few hours later they would be gone! I could not figure this out and it kept erasing all of our historical usage data! I eventually tracked down the issue, explained in this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article. Every time we were using Synchronization to
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 2, 2011 at 12:37 AM
Have you ever used the SSAS out of the box functionality to log queries? This can be used to see how many queries are run, how long each query runs, and which users are running the queries. If not, check out this blog for a description of some dashboards that can be created from this log table. If so, have you ever noticed that the time SSAS attaches to each query is in UTC?
Here is the create statement for the default query logging table created by SSAS when logging is turned on:
CREATE T
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 2, 2011 at 11:46 AM
One of the most popular questions after an SSAS cube is moved into production and users begin accessing the data is, "Who's using the cube?" It makes sense right? After spending a lot of time and money getting an analysis cube built, who wouldn't want to know what the usage was like? Luckily, there is an easy and slick way to surface all of this information.
First, turn on query logging for SSAS. This can be done in SSMS. Connect to the cube, right click on the instance of SSAS, an
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By: William Tseng
Posted:
June 1, 2011 at 3:36 PMPowerShell is a powerful tool when combined with FAST. When dealing with a large site collection with multitudes of taxonomies and sites underneath it, promoting sites and keeping user contexts from environment to environment can be a long and taxing job, especially when you are working with the SharePoint/FAST UI. Luckily, this is where PowerShell comes in and saves your day. User Context Properties In SharePoint, you can create and edit user contexts through the UI. Under Site Settings –> F
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By: Michael Tolly
Posted:
June 1, 2011 at 9:42 AM To add a global filters in the Activity Stream Web Part are available to all users of the social networking site, editing the ActivityStream.js file located in the {14}/TEMPLATE/LAYOUTS/NG/Scripts folder is needed. The ActivityStream.js file created the filter list on page load. The filters call the ActivityFeed.svc web service to retrieve the data from the database. The ActivityFeed.svc web service is located at {site}/_vti_bin/ng/activityfeed.svc on sites with NewsGator installed. Adding a
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
May 31, 2011 at 10:14 PM
If you have noticed, Lync’s personal note does not sync with your “My Site” status. It would’ve been great if there was a way to set the My Site link in the Lync client and it would automatically set the status.
To accomplish the above we have to use the Lync client SDK which can be downloaded from here.
The Lync Client SDK provides a rich set of API to communicate with the Lync server. The API actually uses the Lync client’s endpoints to communicate with the L
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
May 27, 2011 at 1:06 PMWith general availability of Office365 in the horizon, new features are being activated every day. One such long-awaited feature is activating users via Powershell instead of from the portal site. To do so follow these steps:
Download the MSOL services module from here: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/Office365-enterprises/ff652560.aspx
Connect to office 365 with following commandlets
$cred = get-credential (enter your Office365 administrator credentials when prompted)
Connect-m
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By: Brian Ringley
Posted:
May 27, 2011 at 10:05 AMLast week, I attended 2 days of Fast Track Data Warehouse and 3 days of Parallel Data Warehouse training at the Chicago Microsoft Technology Center presented by Jim Carroll, Ross LoForte and John Plummer. It was an intense, thought provoking week, to say the least, with so much information I could not possibly touch on all of it in this one post. Instead, I will provide a high-level summary of the similarities and differences between the two approaches and the new market penetration Microsoft ho
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
May 27, 2011 at 9:37 AM
In preparing for a migration to Exchange, BPOS, or Office 365 testing is crucial. The advantage to using a third party tool such as Quest Notes Migrator for Exchange is the ability to easily modify certain attributes, such as the SMTP Target Address, for migration testing purposes.
In this scenario, the object is to prepare the environment and NME tool for migration testing using test accounts for validation. The testing will validate the proper configuration of the migration consoles and pr
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
May 25, 2011 at 10:30 PM
Have you ever tried enabling a user for Enterprise Voice or Exchange Unified Messaging and received an error stating the action could not be completed due to a duplicate record? I've surprisingly ran into this issue more than once recently. Whether a telephone number was used for testing purposes and simply forgotten about or caused by inaccurate documentation, below are a few tips to quickly identify a duplicate telephone number in Lync Server 2010 and Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging.
Lync
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
May 24, 2011 at 6:20 PMTo change the frequency of Dirsync:
1. In Windows Explorer, locate the Microsoft.Online.DirSync.Scheduler.exe.Config file in the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Online Directory Sync. This is the default installation location. 2. Start Notepad, and then open the Microsoft.Online.DirSync.Scheduler.exe.Config file. 3. Change Value="3:0:0" to the time period that you want. Use Hours:Minutes:Seconds format to specify the time value. 4. Save the file, and then exit N
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By: Shalini Pasupneti
Posted:
May 24, 2011 at 5:49 PMIn migrating from Notes to Office 365, the outlook shared address book or GAL only showed users who have active accounts in Office 365. As you can imagine this creates problems for users who have been migrated to Office365 as they are unable to find addresses of users whose mailboxes still reside in notes. All users were populated with mail and proxyaddresses attributes in AD and Directory Synchronization was running for several weeks. As a workaround, Office 365 users were setup to use an LDAP
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By: David Greve
Posted:
May 16, 2011 at 7:19 PM
While planning your migration to Office 365, you have a couple options when provisioning Shared Mailboxes in Office 365. Microsoft does not charge you to create Shared Mailboxes in Office 365, if you do it right. Here are your options to create Shared mailboxes.
Typically, when planning a migration from a Lotus Notes or GroupWise messaging system, we will create/update all of our accounts in Active Directory and allow directory sync to populate them in Office 365. After doing so, you the
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 13, 2011 at 3:03 PMExchange 2010 Unified Messaging is a great voicemail solution, especially for anyone with SIP-compliant PBX like Cisco or Avaya. At PointBridge we've had good success migrating people off Cisco Unity in particular. In fact, we recently migrated a 2000-user customer from Unity to Exchange UM, cutting everyone over in a single night. The project was a huge success, but along the way we ran into something interesting with Exchange UM and the G729 codec: Microsoft doesn't support it.
Background
Exch
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
May 12, 2011 at 1:07 PMIf you missed my last post on automating deployments across domains with Team Build 2010, you can find it here. The Problem In this post, I’m going to discuss automating deployment of a database project to a database using Team Build 2010. Out of the box, you can build the database project, but that doesn’t actually deploy the database or create the deployment script. To do that, you’ll essentially need a custom step in your automated build. This can be especially important if your soluti
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 10, 2011 at 1:36 PM
One of the very useful new features of Lync 2010 Phone Edition is support for LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) to allow phones to receive configuration information from the switches they plug into. If you have any experience with Cisco IP Telephony, you know that Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is used for similar purposes to assign voice traffic to a separate VLAN. This works great, but really only with devices (like Cisco phones) that speak CDP.
LLDP is an open standard that's been evol
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
May 3, 2011 at 12:51 AM
Recently, I had the pleasure of deploying a new Lync Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) at a customer site. If you're unfamiliar with SBA functionality, a SBA's primary function is to provide voice resiliency in office locations where direct internet connectivity to the main data center/central site is lost. I won't go on and on about the SBA feature set, so additional information can be found here.
Each SBA manufacturer (AudioCodes, Dialogic, HP, and NET) has their own flavor of initial inst
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By: Brian Ringley
Posted:
April 29, 2011 at 10:23 AMMicrosoft recently released a free Excel 2010 add-in which uses PowerPivot to analyze your schedule from your Outlook calendar. The add in, named Calendar Analytics Tool, has two main benefits. The first is that it is extremely useful (and cool). By using the familiar Excel pivot table functionality, including Slicers, you have the ability to graphically display all of the meetings for a given period of time by: meeting topic, who was involved, categories and the details behind the high level st
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
April 29, 2011 at 9:26 AM
There is plenty of documentation out there on how to install the XMPP gateway with OCS or Lync (references provided at the bottom of this post). This blog will not focus on the installation of the XMPP Gateway, but rather what to do if you receive TLS errors on the Lync Edge server when communicating to the XMPP gateway.
If TLS issues pop up on the Lync Edge server, odd behavior could be experienced with Gmail such as complete instant messaging failure, one-way instant messages, and/or unkno
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By: Steven Johnson
Posted:
April 25, 2011 at 4:42 PM The Knowledge Management Process is one of the new processes that were introduced with ITIL v3. ITIL Knowledge Management components are visible within many other Service Management processes. The Knowledge Management process introduces a common, central knowledge repository called the Service Knowledge Management System. Leveraging SharePoint 2010 as a Presentation Layer Portal of a SKMS will be discussed in a later blog post. The SKMS couples the infrastructure-focused Configuration Manage
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By: David Greve
Posted:
April 20, 2011 at 8:46 PM
As many of you are aware, Office 365 will not have BlackBerry services out of the gate. BlackBerry services are expected to be available, for free, later in the year. So what are your options? Well, the quick answer is to just move all your BlackBerry devices to a device that supports ActiveSync. Realizing this is not feasible for most organizations, for one reason or another, there has to be other options to jump on to Office 365 before BlackBerry service is available… Well there are s
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
April 19, 2011 at 4:28 PM
Scenario
You have this Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service that runs on plain old vanilla Internet Information Services (IIS). Somewhere along the line, you want to convert this service to run on SharePoint. You'd like to achieve this conversion with a minimal amount of effort because you're basically inserting another layer into the stack which is essentially unneeded.
There's a lot of information out there about this topic, but most of it is about how to create a SharePoint ve
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
April 18, 2011 at 2:24 PMRecently, I wanted to use the List web service in SharePoint 2010 to retrieve data from a SharePoint list that has lookup columns in it. There doesn't appear to be any documentation indicating that this would be a problem. The List web service is a new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service that provides strong-typing of list elements from client code. This helps make your code more readable and faster because nothing is being cast to and from Object for transport.
With strong typing
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By: Ajay Ram
Posted:
April 15, 2011 at 1:35 PM
In Digital Marketing one of the most commonly used functionality is the catalog. I recently worked on a solution where SharePoint’s unique features helped build a flexible, robust information request/catalog module. One of our main goals was to ensure that the information in the catalogs can be maintained by non-IT staff.
We implemented a solution capable of handling multiple catalogs from a single list. A SharePoint list was created to store information about the items such as product de
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By: Seth Broweleit
Posted:
April 14, 2011 at 12:23 AMScreen readers: A screen reader provides access to browsers and web sites for users with Visual Disabilities by reading information on the screen aloud. The following is a short list screen reader options for web developers to consider. If you are interested in hearing your site read try Webanywhere - an online screen reader. If you are looking to test your site(s) and meet accessibility standards then try NVDA. JAWS®: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.aspIndustry
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By: Teo Nedev
Posted:
April 13, 2011 at 7:49 PM
If you downloaded the redesigned Fab 40 templates (there are actually substantially less than 40 templates for SharePoint 2010 as of yet) from here , you may run into difficulties when trying to create your sites. Apparently, there are multiple features that need to be installed on the site collection ahead of time, and the site creation wizard will keep complaining.
For example, you may see error message regarding feature 6c09612b-e1ef-4867-8396-531430c60f2 not being activated, and as so
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By: Stephanie Hasz
Posted:
April 12, 2011 at 5:28 PMThe InfoPath Form Web Part is pretty handy, but its options for behavior upon submitting are less than ideal. The only options available are leaving the form open, closing it, or opening a new one. Luckily, InfoPath Designer 2010 offers a fairly painless solution. Let’s start with a basic form. This is going to be our default view, but we’ll need two more to handle the submit and cancel actions. Select the Page Design tab on the ribbon and click New View. Name the new view “Submit,” and a
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By: Andrew Schwenker
Posted:
April 11, 2011 at 1:48 PM
Here's the situation: you have a Team Build server on your main domain, but you have separate development environments that aren't on the same domain as the Team Build server (for whatever reason). You want to be able to use the automated drop functionality built into the Team Build workflow, because it's robust and heavily integrated into the workflow.
The Problem
You want to use the drop functionality, but, being on different domains, the credentials of the build service are less than us
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
April 11, 2011 at 1:00 AMI consider InfoPath Forms Services to be one of the most underrated features of SharePoint. When combined with workflows, InfoPath allows us to streamline most day-to-day tasks. Sometimes that takes a little creativity...
A scenario that I've run into a few times now is trying to find the first non-null value from a given set of fields. Most recently, I created a production log in InfoPath where each row represented an hour's worth of parts successfully produced. I wanted to be able to r
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By: Bert Johnson
Posted:
April 10, 2011 at 4:45 PMMy favorite thing about SharePoint is its friendly and vibrant community. Having already attended a few fantastic conferences this year, including yesterday's standout SharePoint Saturday in Twin Cities yesterday, I'm excited about the slew of other events coming up. 2011 is a huge year for SharePoint.
I'm planning to attend:
April 25-27: SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast Boston - I'll be presenting on "Customizing SharePoint Online"
April 30: SharePoint Saturday St. Loui
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By: Teo Nedev
Posted:
April 8, 2011 at 1:20 PM
I recently encountered peculiar problem when configuring FAST for SharePoint server in my lab environment. I was using the MS technet document
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381267.aspx
After configuring the two Search Service Apps (Content and Query) and starting full crawl, I was able to see items in the default search content collection "sp" by running
Get-FASTSearchContentCollection -name "sp"
The problem was, even though the items were supp
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
April 7, 2011 at 3:58 PM
Microsoft provides documentation on how to create single common area phone accounts, but there is limited documentation on how to actually create the common area phone accounts in bulk. Below is a breakdown on the bulk account creation process.
Script Prerequisites
Create a New Client Policy to Support Hot-Desking
As indicated in the TechNet article, a client policy should be created to enable hot-desking on common area phones. The PowerShell command below performs the following function
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By: David Greve
Posted:
April 7, 2011 at 11:13 AM
As an organization we perform a variety of email migration types. Often times, even lately, we have seen quite a few Lotus Notes and GroupWise customers getting ready to migrate to Exchange Online (BPOS and Office 365.) These organizations vary from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands. When planning an Exchange Online migration, most customers try to avoid or minimize any sort of coexistence period. This means we have to plan for a large number of users (email objects) to migrate
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By: Stephanie Hasz
Posted:
April 6, 2011 at 10:07 PMSo, you’re interested in PowerShell, but aren’t sure if you want to jump right in to writing your own cmdlets? No problem; there are plenty of built-in ones to get us started. Let’s take a look at a few different ways to use cmdlets: calling them directly from PowerShell, stringing multiple cmdlets together using the pipeline, and writing a simple script to automate these tasks. Say you want to rename a file. Just open PowerShell and use the Rename-Item cmdlet. It takes two parameters: the path
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
April 6, 2011 at 9:52 AMTo create a search results web part that will dynamically create a search query and render the search results is pretty easy. Create a new web part and inherit the CoreResultsWebPart.public class MySearchWebPart: CoreResultsWebPart
{
public MySearchWebPart(): base()
{
// Initialize the search results web part here…
//e.g this.ResultsPerPage = 10;
//Set the Fixed Query here.
this.FixedQuery = “Some Query”; // Build query based on some criteria
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By: Amol Ajgaonkar
Posted:
April 5, 2011 at 9:40 AMRecently while adding a web part to a page layout, I came across a weird behavior. Whenever I added a web part to a page layout in the web part zone, the chrome showed up fine but when I added the web part outside the zone and published the page layout the chrome would not be displayed. Resolution: I was using the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart class as the base class for my web part. When I switched the base class to Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart the chrome starting sho
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By: Bob Moore
Posted:
April 4, 2011 at 11:18 PM
I was recently engaged on a project where we needed to create our own password vault for the execution of our API calls to external systems. The first cut of the encryption used Triple DES. Triple DES was great except we had to store the key in our code. The thought of storing the key in the code is fine if security is not a concern. Obfuscation was discussed, but I have encountered at least one de-obfuscator that worked well, so that was ruled out. Since our goal was to make the storage
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By: David Greve
Posted:
April 1, 2011 at 4:12 PM
In Office 365, you are provided with a “parent” site collection that you cannot delete/ remove. Any other site collection created is considered a site collection down level (sub site collection) to the parent site collection (for the purposes of being a shared space.) Typically (if required) you would link the breadcrumbs together by creating a portal site connection. This connection essentially adds the parent site collection to the breadcrumb navigation on the sub site collection. If you
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By: David Greve
Posted:
April 1, 2011 at 2:01 PM
While working in SharePoint Online for Office 365 I noticed a few columns missing while creating a SharePoint Designer workflow. I was running SharePoint Designer from one of my many test virtual environments, which have worked successfully in the past. Some of the columns were showing up, while others were not. After a bit of digging, I discovered that although I had the connector (old version at the time) installed, I did not have the SharePoint site listed as a trusted site. Once adding
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By: Stephanie Hasz
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 3:49 PMSay you’ve become the office expert on food trucks. There are a lot of hungry people in your office, and you just don’t have time to keep them all updated on mobile meatballs. Why not add a Twitter list widget to your intranet site so they can track the trucks themselves? The Content Editor web part sounds like the perfect place to insert the code that Twitter generates for you. So, you add a web part to your page, open the HTML source editor, and paste in the widget script. You’ll get a war
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 2:26 PM
Prior to any migration, proper planning and testing should always be performed. Such is the case if you have voicemail integrated into Lotus Notes using non-standard forms and want to include voicemail as part of your migration plan.
Using Quest's Notes Migrator for Exchange (NME), which the latest version 4.4.x includes the capability of migrating from Lotus Notes directly to BPOS and Office 365, you can easily modify the tool to include any non-standard forms.
In this migration to BPOS s
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By: Steve Mierop
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 1:05 PM
Programmatically creating Outlook meeting request has been a hot topic for me over the past few weeks. I found myself in a scenario that required me to send a meeting request from a user and was using the System.Net.Mail namespace to do the job. While creating the meeting request, a limitation surfaced as result of the approach I was using. I used the code from the blog below as a foundation to start with.
http://weblogs.asp.net/bradvincent/archive/2008/01/16/creating-vcalendars-progr
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By: Steve Mierop
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 9:53 AM
We've all experienced it before, those "Wow, I can't believe it's that easy" moments. Exchange Web Services Managed API makes sending emails, creating appointments, querying folders/calendars, and generating meeting requests extremely simple. When it comes to programmatically duplicating Outlook functionality (given Exchange is running the show), the Exchange Web Services Managed API is definitely worth looking into.
There's some good documentation online, but the object mo
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By: Andy Olson
Posted:
March 31, 2011 at 9:37 AM
Background
When I help my customers upgrade their Exchange environments from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, a key element that I focus on is end user impact. If the upgrade is executed correctly, most end users should never know that an upgrade occurred. In fact, in most instances, the only difference end users will notice is that the OWA interface is greatly enhanced. With this in mind, something I always strive for is to make Exchange 2010 upgrades transparent to end users who use the Out
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