Quick Access to STSADM Command

1. Type Windows Key + Break to bring up the System Properties dialog.
2. Click the Advanced tab.
3. Click the Environment Variables button.
4. In System Variables, scroll down and highlight the Path Variable.
5. Click the Edit button

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog: Fix for the corrupted Virtual Machine on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Technical Resources DVD

As an added bonus for the nearly 14,000 TechEd attendees this past week in Orlando, a copy of the updated MOSS 2007 Technical Resources DVD was placed in every attendee’s conference bag. The DVD contains the following frequently requested content:

Working With The ASP.NET Provider Database

I was staffing the TLC booth with a couple other MVP’s / softies during TechEd this past week, which was pretty interesting. Answering the classic “What is SharePoint” was enjoyable along with the requirement that it be introduced in under 10 seconds or less, but there were a lot of good questions that were asked as well.

Since every security question was pretty much directed at me, I got to dig really deep into peoples gripes with SharePoint security which gave me some good ideas for some future software packages. My policy management solution that I am going to be releasing will cover a whole lot of them, along with its cascading permission functionality.

New Redirector WebPart In Testing

Probably the quickest I have ever changed around a package I released, I am re-releasing a new version of the redirector webpart that just doesn’t look at user profiles, but will also allow you to look at the relevant site groups that a user is a member of, and will allow a redirection based on that. I have also taken the time to refactor some of the code which cut some of its size down, and did post build optimization on the assembly. I am going to be releasing these as two separate packages, since the profile one works great for those whom have MOSS, and the site groups one works great for those whom are only running WSS.

Silverlight on SharePoint Using Data View Web Part from Ian Morrish

After seeing Simon Tocker’s work integrating Silverlight in to SharePoint 2003 Ian Morrish decided to kick things up a notch. He not only was able to pull from a WSS 3.0/MOSS library but he did so using the data view web part. Very cool Ian!!

SharePoint Governance - Key to a Successful Deployment

More and more businesses are realizing that the key to a successful deployment of a portal, collaboration solution, records repository… you name it.  Is a plan.  If fail to plan, you plan to fail.  Not sure who’s quote that is, but it begins to tell this story about not so successful deployments.

To help you succeed we have recently published a specific Governance and Information Architecture page on TechNet to help organize these key materials.

CruiseControl Webparts v1.2

My colleague Stef did some excellent work on the CruiseControl WebParts (v1.2). You can download them, including sources at CodePlex.

Allowing InfoPath forms to redirect to pages in other site collections

Ishai Sagi in his blog has shared a way to redirect a Infopath Form into a different Site Collection, this usually is not allowed without a workaround  . . . thanks for the tip! “So it seems that specifying a source from another site collection is impossible.

How to move a WSS 3.0 web

Ok…I’m sure this is a feature but I haven’t found it documented anywhere :)With MOSS we have the possibility to move a website to another position using the ‘Manage content and structure’ feature in the Site Actions menu.I already knew this functionality was also available in WSS 3.0 but I had to do it from the object model (rename the web’s url and use web.update())By accident I just found out you can already move a website using STSADM out of the box!The operation ‘renameweb’ needs two parameters to function: the url of the web you want to renamethe name of the new webApparently the ‘name’ of the web is NOT the title but the URL :o).

Autonomy to deliver search technology for SharePoint

Microsoft is partnering with Autonomy to deliver advanced search technology for large SharePoint and mixed environments. This will enable users to search more than 300 types of content, including relational data, unstructured data, video, voice, xml.

Excel Services in Sharepoint Server 2007 - in 1 slide

Every so often I come across a single slide that does a great job of explaining an important technology. This is a good example (especially if you see it with the build). Something I have always wanted (but alas never created) is a collection of such slides across all our interesting technologies. It would totally avoid my mediocre whiteboard skills in meetings I hold with my ISVs! (or check out the video I first watched a year back)

SharePoint interoperability with notes

Angus put me onto this interesting site for lotus notes interoperability with SharePoint & .net. Interoptips is run by Gary Devendorf, who invented LotusScript, i think.

Very large log files when using WSS Split tool

was recently called into a customer site due to an issue where they used the WSS Split tool on their 110Gb content database to split off a 27Gb site collection.  The process failed for them during the restore operation due to insufficient disk space because the log files generated by both the tempdb and new content databases turned out to be extremely large (much more than one would expect).

The WSS Split tool performs the following actions when run:

1. Write locks the site collection
2. Backs up the site collection to a file on disk
3. Deletes the site collection from the original content database pending a successful backup (from step 2)
4. Restores the site collection that was backed up (from step 2) into a new content database
5. Removes the write lock from the site collection

Real World Extranet Application with MOSS 2007

The Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Team Blog has a wealth of information regarding Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007.

One interesting thread is a three part seriies on Building a Real World Extranet Application with MOSS 2007, of which the first two parts have been posted. It is written by real work SharePoint MPV Shane Perran and lead architect Jared Rypkema.

Part 1 sets the stage in how to organize the site and defining the content types. The comments to the posting point to other articles that provide additional information as well.

Part 2 describes site and content customization (site branding), howto create custom pages, and how to separate the presentation.

Workflow Errors

In the stats of my weblog i see a lot of “Error occurred+Workflow” related type of searches, and as service oriented as I am I thought lets give you what you ask for. Two errors are very likely to occur when developing workflows: Failed on Start and Error Occurred. Also my experience is that the Cancellation and Error report usually does not provide much helpful info either. You can try checking the event log, but I find the log files are usually most helpful. 

Feedback web part

A while back I got a question that how would I solve “feedback feature request” for my customers case (platform was MOSS 2007). Idea is that from every page of the portal you could go and give feedback. And if you do give feedback it would be important to know that what was the page that “initiated” the feedback for the user. And even more… if that page has page contact set then feedback would be automatically sent to the contact. Of course the feedback form should look a bit different dependending of the site where user decided to give feedback. Normally there would be a lot of possibilities to solve this kind of “feature request”, but if you combine all the above… I’ll only got one good solution so it’s easy to choose what to write about this time

SharePoint SPY

This powerful free tool will allow you to spy into the internal data of SharePoint and compare the effects of making a change. Sharepoint Spy also allows you to compare settings between sites, lists, views, etc helping you troubleshoot configurations. Technorati tags: SharePoint…

How does SharePoint need to be configured for use with the Monitoring Server?

Document Libraries The SharePoint site(s) that you install PerformancePoint on must have at least one Document Library that is usable by PerformancePoint Monitoring Server as a place to deploy dashboards. Some of the default “templates,” such as “Blank Site” and “Report Center,”that SharePoint uses do not include a document library, so if you use those templates, you will need to create a document library yourself

Answers to FAQs about SharePoint Blogs and Wikis

Social computing is a hot topic these days, and we continue to get a lot of questions about SharePoint’s blog and wiki capabilities in particular. We will have much more to say and announce about SharePoint in the context of social computing soon, but for now, the answers to most of the FAQs can be found in the following white papers and articles:

What every SharePoint and EPM administrator needs to know about Alternate Access Mappings 

Useful links if you need to configure reverse proxy for instance:

 watch out for FormUrls in a content type feature definition

The MSDN documentation - Custom information in content types talks about how you can define custom edit forms for a SharePoint content type. It specifies how you can define both FormUrls  as well as FormTemplates within a XMLDocument node for a content type - for more information take a look at the Content Type Definition Schema.

I already took a look at how to do this using FormTemplates but I thougth that it would be more straightforward using FormUrls - so I created a new content type - take a look at (Warning - the next snippet does not work correctly - read the whole blog post …)

Rapid for SharePoint

Thanks to Mark for this one. ArtemisCorp have announced details of their first RAPID module. The ‘RAPID for SharePoint’ Classification system will be available in a range of versions towards the end of March 2007. It enables SharePoint 2007 to meet current Public Sector compliance requirements by supporting a range of Taxonomies including IPSV. Also includes a URL rewriting component that removes the unwanted ‘Pages’ element of a typical SharePoint publishing URL. Update: The pricing is now available..

MOSS and Kerberos Deployment

During a recent POC, I was reminded (again) that the double-hop problem is a thorn in the side.  For those living on another planet or a big rock and haven’t heard or experieced the double-hop, basically this occurs when our SharePoint page (or Web parts on the page) attempts to access resources on a server different from the SharePoint Web server.  In our scenario, we were utilizing Excel Services to present data contained inside a SQL Analysis Services cube.  In order to do everything we needed to do, we had to configure Kerberos for the MOSS installation.  Although it’s not rocket science, it can be painful the first time through

SharePoint Customization White Paper

For those doing customization, you might want to check out this white paper:

Overview

There were mostly 2 reasons:

1.      

It’s hard to find good tips about developing custom fields

2.       Some of projects require connected dropdowns functionality

 

So it was a task, more like a challenging journey. My first successful trial was a field, that creates several connected dropdowns dynamically. Worked like a charm.Then I realized that I can’t sort or filter the list by a single value. All dropdowns add into the same field value. No good.

 

 

Associate a site column to a content type using SharePoint 2007 Object Model