Adding users to SharePoint dynamically at first request after authentication

That title says it all! Well I was working on case where SharePoint was configured to use external authentication. This external authentication was hosted outside SharePoint and it could be used by many other services too. End users of SharePoint would notice redirection to this external service when they click Login in the UI. And after succesful login they would be redirected back to SharePoint. All of that stuff would be done in secure way of course.

Tips and Tricks From MOSS 2007 Development Training

• do not change identity account of application pool that is used by WSS v3 from ISS mgr, change it from WSS admin site
• if something needs to be accessible to all sites, deploy to _layout\[yourCompanyName] folder
• get CAML IntelliSense by create a file named as sharepoint_catalog.xml contains the following

Whitepaper on MCMS 2002 migration to MOSS 2007 by Sezai at the Vivid Group

Vivid Group White Paper: MCMS to MOSS upgrade.
:: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 ::

The White Paper Applies to:
Microsoft Content Management Server 2002
2007 Microsoft® Office system

This White Paper provides details of the process involved in migrating a Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 Website to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Publishing Internet Site

http://vividgroup.com.au/pages_2004/news_27032007.asp

MSDN Webcast: Developing Windows SharePoint Services Workflows

See, I do listen to you!  You asked for this additional webcast (well, I know, I didn’t finish presenting all of the information during the initial installment!) - so here it is - July 6th 12-1pm PST.  Sign up and I’ll ’see’ ya’ there. 

MSDN Webcast: Developing Windows SharePoint Services Workflows (Level 200)

“Under the Hood” white papers for Fantastic 40 Application Templates and Splendid 7 My Site Templates now available!

Ever since the releases of the ”Fantastic 40” Application Templates for WSS 3.0 and “Spendid 7” Role-Based My Site Templates for MOSS 2007 during the past several months, many people have asked, “How did they build this or that?” or “Why would they build it this or that way?” So, I’m very happy to announce that the “Under the Hood” white papers for both sets of templates are now available for you to download via the hyperlinked titles below!

Connected Lookup Field

The attached code demonstrates the extended lookup field. Such field can be used to display any hierarchical structures, such as org charts, city-stat-country chains etc.

The biggest challenge and advantage of implemented design was to build a Connected Lookup Field as a listener to other Connected Lookup Fields. In contrast with multi-value column, each field is a separate column itself. That allows use of built-in WSS functionality such as filtering and sorting by column.

Don’t forget: Web Services/SOAP isn’t the only path to XML from SharePoint

A technique we used extensively in STS still applies to WSS: How to get data from your SharePoint lists in XML format. It’s actually quite simple, and you don’t need to use web services to get it.

WSS supports a number of protocols to interact with the data. SOAP and WEBDAV immediately come to mind for most of you, but you may be forgetting the elusive URL Protocol (GET). Luckily for you, it’s simple to use, and returns data in the MS-standard rowset stream format.

Rather than go into a bunch of detail, let’s put ourselves to work, shall we? Follow along with these steps, and you’ll be pleased with the results, I’m certain.

Error Creating MySite - Hotfix Available

I recently came across the following two errors during the creation of Mysites.

From MOSS:

“There has been an error creating the personal site. Contact your site administrator for more information”

From the Event Log:

“The site site_location could not be created. The following exception occured: Value does not fall within the expected range.”

The following hotfix fixed it. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937207

Pagelayout deployment with feature not working

Here’s a fun little fact for you.

I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out why a pagelayout I defined in the provisionedfiles.xml of my feature wasn’t appearing in MOSS when I deployed the feature. I assumed it was an error in my XML. This was partly true but it turns out this was just a symptom of a bug in MOSS XML parsing.

Here’s an example of a pagelayout configuration section in my feature:

Managing your sites & site collections with stsadm

Here are a bunch of commands in stsadm that I find useful every now and then to manage my sites and site collections.

1. Backup a site collection:  stsadm -o backup -url http://urlname -filename <filename>

2. Restore a backed up site collection:  stsadm -o restore -url http://urlname -filename <filename>

3. Backup a single site: stsadm -o export -url http://urlname/sitename -filename <filename>

Testing SharePoint timer jobs in a development environment

Okay, I’ve been so goddamn busy, that it sucks that I have so much to blog about, and no time to do so.

Anyway, here is something that I know everyone will find useful at some point or the other.

SharePoint 2007 has a number of timer jobs. These are things that run on a scheduled basis, you can go check out a list of them at

Central Administration > Operations > Timer Job Definitions

Hints for Membership Providers (Authentication Providers) with SharePoint

I’ve done work with membership providers more than a few times now and I have developed a love-hate relationship with them within the context of SharePoint.  It’s not that membership providers don’t work.  They do.  You can absolutely make them work.  However, it’s also true that there are a lot of landmines in the way.  I wanted to provide a few of my experiences with Membership providers that may be helpful for you…