MOSS 2007 Content Deployment: make sure you’re in a good state before blowing a gasket

Spence has a great post on content deployment. Like he said, content deployment gets a bad rap as many of the issues people call PSS (err… CSS) about problems with content deployment. I love the way he classifies it… “ensure your platform hygiene before randomly abusing” MOSS and calling CSS. So true…

If you’re doing content deployment, or if you’re planning to use it on your project, I’ve got two words of advice: (1) read Spence’s post and (2) don’t wait until launch to test it out.

SharePoint under the hood - see real error description and callstack/stack trace

have always loved the nice SharePoint error messages that are presented when something goes wrong. My most popular error message is “An unknown error occured. Please contact your system administrator.”.

In order to see the real error messages as well as the stack trace of where the error happened within SharePoint, you have to do two simple things - in fact, this is mainly standard ASP.NET business:

In the web.config file of your SharePoint web application, edit these two entries:

Tired of not being able to save your WSS sites as templates because they exceed the maximum template size?

Well, courtesy of my buddy Todd Klindt, here’s a little unknown STSADM command that you can use to change all that once and for all. The command you need is:

TIP: Using code blocks in master pages throws error

If you want to use script tags for dynamic content in a master page, for example:  <%= DateTime.Now %> and you recieve the following error: Include the following in your web.config file to resolve this issue:

Duking it Out with the BDC Object Model in a Webpart

I created a webpart that could create document libraries pulling in client names and ids from a sql server instance.  Unfortunately, it did not work in the production environment for some reason or another, so my colleague thought it might be  a good idea to use his BDC Instance.  I thought this was a good idea, but I am not very familiar with code related to the BDC.  I went to MSDN and Sezai’s Blog to find some code.

SharePoint Governance

I’ve been very bad about blogging. I’m going to try to blog as often as possible! The last few weeks have been very busy. Not really an excuse, but TechEd 2007 and fiscal end-of-year responsibilities are a lot of work!

I’m in San Francisco for 2 days at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference. I was invited by Peter O’Kelly and Guy Creese to participate on 2 panels: 1) Unstructured Content: Lock It Up, Follow It Around, or What? and 2) New Realities in Collaboration and Content Management. The conference gave me an opportunity to connect with other folks in the industry and with customers and partners. One of the questions that came up was “How do I plan for my SharePoint deployment? How do I govern usage? How do I implement a plan?”

What is a Shared Service Provider?

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about a bit of overview. In MOSS 2007 there is this new concept of Shared Services Providers(SSP). The idea being that there are certain services that really make sense to centrally manage and share. A good example being profiles. With a SSP we can import all of the profile information from AD once and then our various web applications can consume the data. So maybe we have http://marketing and http://accounting it doesn’t make sense for each one to maintain identical profile information, they should share.

Missing UI Settings in the Object Model

Houston, we’ve got a problem.  It seems that there are quite a few settings in the ShaerPoint UI that are not supported in the Object Model.  Just yesterday, Sean Skinner discovered that when creating WSS sites programmatically the options to enable the navigation menus were missing.  A few weeks back, a client sent me an email asking how the advanced email settings in lists could be set during site provisioning.  Oops, those are missing from the OM, too.

Learning Gateway has been released on CodePlex

For everyone involved in SharePoint and Education this is a must have download.

http://www.codeplex.com/LG

SharePoint Screen Casts and Demos

Bob Fox one of the SharePoint MVPs recently included some screencasts on his blog. Watch for other screencasts coming down road. He’s listened to me, I bet he would listen to you if you had suggestions for him.

MOSS Profile Search LDAP query to remove disabled and service accounts

To put together the right query to get users that are not disabled accounts nor service accounts, you will need to add the following parameters to the query.

• (!userAccountControl=512) - removes disabled accounts
• (!userAccountControl=66050) - removes accounts with password set to never expire

Site Templates and Retaining Web Part Configuration Settings

Several folks have asked me about this recently so I thought I would post the answer.

Q:Why don’t site templates (STPs) maintain webpart configurations when I use them to create new sites?

Scenario:

•	You create a new list, such as a Custom List, on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site.

SharePoint Groups, Permissions, Site Security, and Depreciated Site Groups

had an email from one of Ted Pattison’s students on “security in SharePoint.”  When I first started reading it, I expected to have some question about server hardening or firewalls, but the question was about permissions.  It’s been so long that security meant permissions that I was a bit stumped.  Where did our info on permissions go?  Is this some IW thing?  I found some good content, but it can be confusing.  There are some decent quotes from the content on MSDN.

The basics are on the office.microsoft.com site, designed for the information worker.  I recommend starting here, it’s the easiest to understand and digest.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/CH100649861033.aspx