Quiescing - Can You Use It In a Sentence?

There is a feature in MOSS that enables you to gradually shut down the farm for maintenance.  This feature is called “Quiescing.”  I have to admit, this isn’t a word I use everyday, so I looked it up on Dictionary.com and found the following:

“become quiet or quieter”

“To render quiescent, i.e. temporarily inactive or disabled. For example to quiesce a device (such as a digital modem). It is also a system command in MAX TNT software which is used to temporarily disable a modem or DS0 channel.”

Here is how Microsoft spins it:

Setting up the Office HTML Viewer to Support Users Without Office

The Office HTML Viewer server provides support for users who want to view the content of files in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services document libraries, but do not have Word, Excel, or PowerPoint from Office 97, or a newer release of Office, installed on their local computer.

This is a free download from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c62e0232-9bf6-48fc-829e-5c34d5c8b15f&displaylang=en

Display Version and Other SharePoint Metadata in Word 2003 Documents

You can view and edit text columns from a document library from a Word 2003 document. For example: 

This is a great integration point between Office and SharePoint, but there are a couple a gotcha’s you should be aware of, and the following very reasonable and realistic requirements for a document management solution will highlight them.

SharePoint Metadata Integrity Checker Utility 

The metadata features of SharePoint 2003 and 2007 enable you to customize, sort, group, filter and search documents and lists.  In SharePoint, this equates to adding columns that describe and categorize list items.  SharePoint 2007 takes a more disciplined content management approach with the introduction of site columns and content types.

Returning SharePoint Folder Item Count In C#

A question was posted on the newsgroups on how to build a reusable method that could return the item count from a specified folder, here is one that works just fine:

Select For Unformatted Code

C#:

1. private int GetItemsForFolderInt(SPFolder folder)

2. {

3. int i = folder.Files.Count;

5. foreach (SPFolder myFolder in ((IEnumerable) folder.SubFolders))

6. {

7. i += GetItemsForFolderInt(myFolder);

8. }

9. return i;

10. }

So, you would of course have to use recursion and recall the method itself within the declaration, and the output of this would just an integer.

SPD.. nice to have

Wouldn’t be nice to have the ability in SPD when you are creating workflows to copy/paste some blocks instead of clicking all the same things together for each step?  Doesn’t matter if it’s about the conditions or the actions. Either way it would save a lot of time and it would be more efficient don’t you think? :) 

Underscores and hostnames

As you can read from the following post Underscores are evil: IE may block SP from using session cookies by Sean, it’s not recommended to use underscores in your hostnames / urls together with SharePoint (or any other webapp that depends on cookies). And here is why plus how you can fix it if you used an underscore : 

How to setup and Configure Forms Based User Administration Feature Release 1.0 Beta

IMPORTANT UPDATE (14th July 2007)

Please note that this is now part of the SharePoint Community Kit Project (CKS). All future releases and enhancements will be released via CKS.

http://www.codeplex.com/CKS

With WSS V3 and MOSS 2007 you can leverage ASP.Net pluggable authentication modules. This enables a WSS site to leverage user authentication other than Active Directory or Windows based logins.

Step by Step Tutorial. Creating Workflows for Windows Sharepoint Services and MOSS2007 (part 5/20)

step1

step2

step3

step4

step5 

Using Microformats with your SharePoint Data

Hi everyone, Jon Campbell here again with another technique on how to take your data presentation to the next level. This time around I am going to focus on using Microformats to display your data.

I won’t go into a lengthy history of what microformats are or how they are used (interested readers should check out microformats.org or the book), but the basic gist is that microformats are the middle ground between computer readable data (like a vCard) and human readable data. Instead of “Jack Smith” just being two words on the page that a search engine needs to assume is a name, as a page author we can say that it is in fact a name. By doing so a browser or other program could list all the people mentioned on a page, allow you to export them as a contact to Outlook, or provide special functionality for mapping an address. This harmony is achieved by using “semantic HTML” to represent the data in a way that is both computer readable and can be styled easily via CSS.

How to get a filtered RSS feed of a SharePoint List

Email alerts on SharePoint document libraries and lists can be based on a view but RSS feeds are for everything in the list. If you want a filtered RSS feed then you can use the Content Query web part (this one is for the person using a Spot watch to get SharePoint tasks).

As an example, my resources list on wssdemo.com has over 1,000 items but if I wanted to create a feed of just the public web sites hosted on MOSS from this list I would add the content query web part to any web part page, specify the filter condition and enable the RSS feed

Small trick with the My Places Bar in Word 

Small trick with the My Places Bar in Word To enhance the user interaction experience of a SharePoint environment, it’s a nice little trick to add a shortcut to a SharePoint site or list to the My Places Bar. Since we had forgotten all about this trick and stumbled upon it today, we’re documenting it in this post. In Word 2003…

WSS FAQ additions and changes LXIII - 9th - 15th July 2007 

MOSS security white paper

this white paper describes the MOSS security model http://www.jornata.com/presentations/MOSS_Security.pdf

MOSS 2007 People Search Issues 

Unable to search for People within MOSS 2007.  Specifically, the People Scope within your SSP Search Settings shows 0 people after successfully importing User Profiles from your LDAP service. I finally resolved the people search issue I have encountered since I first installed SharePoint, so I have decided to document it for someone else that might have the same issue. The main issue was that I could not search for people from SharePoint sites, however, there were no issues in importing User Profiles as indicated by over 3000 user profiles in the User Profiles of my shared service.

MOSS 2007 Install 

I recovered the install post I had worked back in February but it does not have the detals with regards to:

• The .Net 2.0 intall
• The WWF install
• The .Net 2.0 “Allow” configuration

So I’m trying the MOSS2007 install again with practically none of my prior knowledge available.  And since I’ve been in HELL for the last three months writing the most lameass validation documents for SPS2003, I am little more that a mumbling idiot when it come to MOSS2007.

The SharePoint Farmer’s Almanac: A very common prescan problem that stops you from doing your upgrade

I have gotten the same email from several people and the fix has been the same just about every time so I thought I would publish the conversation here. Hopefully some searching of the web will help save a couple of email stamps. Mr. Pugglesworth: What should I do if I want to find out if my SharePoint (WSS v2 or SPS 2003) is ready to be upgraded?

The Administrative Commands of Windows SharePoint Services

I’ve had a project that I’ve been working on for a while. Back in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services V2 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 days it was very difficult to understand where administrative commands were.  Things have gotten a lot better with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  However, there are many times when I’m still unclear on where commands are.

Using client operating systems for MOSS development 

We are forced to use the MOSS 2007 installed Windows Server 2003 environment for development. Since, this is not applicable in most scenerios, I have tried to prepare my Windows XP computer as a MOSS 2007 development environment and I the result was a success. I have explained the details of preparing a client operating system as a development environment for MOSS 2007 in this article. Check it out

Pause or delay activities error on MOSS 2007

I wanted to pause a workflow for some time in a workflow for MOSS 2007. The activity pauses the workflow but the next activity is not executed. After some time, the workflow stops with an “Unhandled Exception” error. I had created the workflow with SharePoint designer and used the pause activities, and I thought that it may be a bug of SharePoint designer, but I also tried to pause the workflow with Visual Studio 2005’s delay activities, the result was the same. After some googling..

Error while configuring Reporting Services Add-in for MOSS 2007

Some of us might get the “A new member could not be added to a local group because the member has the wrong account type” error while configuring the Reporting Services add-in for MOSS 2007. When you click on the “Grant Database Access” link on the “Application Management” tab of the central administration site, on the upcoming page, you have to give the server name and instance name of the report server.

SharePoint’s core.css stylesheet: Put it to where it belongs!

When rendering CSS stylesheets, SharePoint puts core.css always as the last stylesheet. This post is about how to change this sometimes unwanted behaviour.

 OK, why bother with how CSS Stylesheets are rendered? Imagine you create your own Stylesheet overriding a lot of the SharePoint styles defined in core.css (and as you know, there are really “some” styles you might override ).

Changing Recipient of “Access request for a site” Emails

By default SharePoint 2007 automatically configures the access requests for a particular site to go to the person who created the site. This is not always what you want and you may find yourself receiving  “Access request for a site” emails for sites you setup, but don’t actually manage. You can change this by doing the following:

Programmatically Compiling Audiences in MOSS 2007

When new users are added to our MOSS sites, we wanted to make sure that they go into the correct Audience as soon as possible. Since the ‘Manage Audiences’ functionality of the Shared Services Administration allows for daily updates only, we needed a more granular way to re-compile our defined audiences. We ended up writing a small application in order to do this.

The first thing we had to do was to make sure that our Profiles were up to date. If new users had been added, but their information had not been downloaded, compiling the audiences wouldn’t do any good. The code snippet below illustrates how we update the profiles.

SharePoint Blogs: Randomly Displaying a Single SharePoint Item on Refresh (i.e. Item Rotator) 

Occasionally you want to display a single SharePoint list/document library item at random on screen refresh. Possible uses include rotators for quotes, images, or featured documents. I did some searching on the web for a solution, but outside of writing custom web parts, I did not find anything. I developed the following solution using SharePoint Designer and a Data View web part. This will work well as long as you can live with the following constraints: You don”t have any gaps in your ID numbers. A gap will result in a blank result on that particular refresh.

Content Editor Web Part (CEWP), XML Web Services and JavaScript

As my first blog post, I’ll discuss at a high level three things that I feel are the most powerful tools available to SharePoint admins who have some (client-side) development skills.  The Content Editor Web Part, XML Web Services and JavaScript.  Subsequent posts will describe real-life examples of how this has helped in the SharePoint implementation that I manage.

SharePoint Blogs: Changing Recipient of “Access request for a site” Emails

By default SharePoint 2007 automatically configures the access requests for a particular site to go to the person who created the site. This is not always what you want and you may find yourself receiving  “Access request for a site” emails for sites you setup, but don’t actually manage. You can change this by doing the following: Navigate to the site in question Navigate to People and Groups > Site Permissions > Settings > Access Requests Change the Send all requests for access to the following e-mail address: to the proper address.

SharePoint Blogs: “Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object” error!

If you set the regional setting of a site collection to Turkish, you get the “Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object” error when you try to change the permissions of a list or a library. This is a bug and there is a non-public hotfix for this bug. You can call your local Microsoft Support phone number and ask for the hotfix for the article number KB931636 . After you apply the hotfix, you have to run the “SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard”…