C5 Insight: SharePoint

Microsoft Collaboration and Virtualization: A Real World Deminar

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Who: C5 Insight
What: Live Event
When: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM EST
How Much: $0.00
Event Type: Live Event
Register

Easy Way to Get Relative Path of SharePoint 2010 Site via PowerShell

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:24:00 +0000

The more I learn and get to know PowerShell, the more I love it. I am able to perform what used to be time-consuming tasks (many hours or days) in seconds (after you write the script of course). While writing a script recently to perform some tasks on numerous SharePoint sites (webs to be precise), I was constructing URLs for the sites and using as variables and I needed only part of the URL (the managed path). After a little poking around, I found a nice easy way to do it.

Some Quick Background

In SharePoint (among other things), URLs can be of two different types, absolute and relative. The absolute URL for an object is the full path direct to that object, where the relative URL is an abbreviated path that combines the base URL and the current location. Let’s look a couple examples:

Absolute URL

http://portal/sites/hr/shared documents/newhire_policy.docx

Relative URL

/sites/hr/shared documents/newhire_policy.docx

The relative URL removes the base URL http://portal, which is the root web of the web application. This becomes important especially if you use SSL on a web application, where you allow access via SSL and non-SSL, or if you use Alternate Access Mappings. If you use absolute URLs, the other website will never get used. This is why it is crucial to use relative paths to URLs in your navigation links like a good SharePoint administrator. But I digress… on to PowerShell!

Without checking, I first solved this problem the complicated way. I would enumerate the full URL, and then only grab the text 5 or however many characters I wanted to remove. You can do this by using $webURL.Substring(3), where 3 is the number of characters you want to remove. If you do this, be sure to do this on the URL as a string, NOT a web object as Substring is not a method on the web object, but is available on strings. You could have also have used the TrimStart method as well I suppose.

This worked, but there had to be a better way! In PowerShell, I think one of the most powerful commands to get to know is Get-Member. Using this, I discovered a property called ServerRelativeURL on both a site object (site collection) or web object. To see this, you pass (pipe) the site or web object to the get-member command like this:

   1: get-spweb http://contoso.intranet.com/it/sandbox | get-member

This returns all methods and properties of that object (our subsite in this case). There are two properties that are related, Url and ServerRelativeURL. So let’s look at this:

$web = get-spweb http://contoso.intranet.com/it/sandbox 

$web.ServerRelativeURL

The result is:

/it/sandbox

Voila! Exactly what I needed. We can then store this in a variable, and use it wherever we need it. As you might expect, Url returns the absolute URL of the object. I strongly encourage you to investigate get-member, It opens up some many possibilities to view and/or various properties of almost anything. Hope it helps!

Application Data Integration – Part Three, Timing and the Rules

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

They say ‘timing is everything’. I don’t necessarily agree that it’s everything, but it is an important ingredient in the design of your integration. It’s always my first reaction to go ‘real-time’ with an integration project. Scoping and requirements gathering will then bring me to a place where a part of the integration may not work designed to run as real-time. Every business is built on processes that serve them well, or at least served them well back in the day. There are times when transaction volume will preclude using real-time methods for translation. Running the process, because of the volume, may have such an impact on the system, that user can not tolerate the sluggishness of the system during business hours. Perhaps there is a business process that does not make data available until after business hours. There can be any number of business process scenarios that would dictate utilizing a batch integration process rather than a real-time integration process.

Business processes are not the only consideration when designing your integration. The environment, and specifically the hardware that the integrated systems reside on, can play a key role in determining the integration process to use. For example, if your integration design requires polling a record set for the net-change data, that polling can effect performance. But to a greater extent, the record set that is returned will typically populate any RAM that is available, and if there is not enough RAM to hold the entire return record set, then it will occupy static drive space. Depending on how large the net-change record set is, that’s been returned, stealing all available RAM can seriously impact performance of the system. Conversely, you may have designed a multi-threaded integration process, such as utilizing a message queue as a pickup point for the extracted net- change data. Where running a multi-threaded process, you are able to translation a larger volume of data in a shorter period of time, but, that process will be very CPU intensive.

So, when developing your integration design, keep in mind that batch processing is memory intensive and multi-threaded processes are CPU intensive. Depending on the environment you’re working in, you may have the inclination to build one type of integration process, but the impact of that process would be too costly in terms of system performance and end-user satisfaction.

Ok, so you have one part of your integration setup, great. You’re integrating customers from your CRM system to your ERP system, fantastic. You turn on the integration, and not too long afterward, folks from the finance group are complaining that there are customers in ERP that don’t belong in the system. “What’d?, you say. I thought you wanted customers integrated in both system?”. The response from finance is that some of these aren’t customers, they are only prospects. Ah, so not all customers are the same in the CRM system.

This is a very typical scenario. The CRM system breaks down ‘customers’ into different customer types. Only ‘customers’ that have actually bought something are to be integrated into the ERP system. So, you need to be able to filter records in order to meet the requirements of this business rule . That filtering can take place in two different places, a) at the time of discovery of the net-change data or, b) during the translation process of the net-change data. If you have used a query to discover the net-change data, you may only need to add something to the WHERE clause of the query, to ensure that only records that meet the business rule criteria are discovered. If the application has it’s own net-change method, but cannot be modified to filter the records, you will need to build the filtering into the translation process rather than in the discovery process. There can, however, be some advantages to filtering at the integration process level. Let’s say that you only want purchasing customers being integrated into you ERP system, but you would like to see an aggregated view of all new customers that have been added to the either system. When you filter out the customers at the translation point rather than the discovery point, you have the records discovered in the net-change process, so, the entire record set can be used to create customer, by type, reporting.

Another. more complex example would be; sales orders being placed in the ERP system and then translated to one of several warehouse systems for processing. In this case, you not only have to filter the record set, but you also have to determine what translation processes will be used to ensure the sales order record is consumed by the correct warehouse system. As you can see, business rules will have a huge impact on how you might design your integration process. The entire solution may incorporate many different net-change discovery methods as well as many different data translation methods. Don’t get caught building a useless solution, wasting time and money. Dig deep into the requirements in order to develop the best integration processes for the given scenario your are working under.

As promised, this series is intended to be somewhat high level, but, I hope through some of the topics covered you have become a little more familiar with Application Data Integration. It can be tricky stuff to get your hear around; there are a lot of issues to consider. Not digging deep enough for the requirements can be very costly, not only monetarily, but also with adoption by your end-users if your integration is tied to a new business system implementation. Knowledge is power, so I hope I’ve charged your batteries a little.

Application Data Integration – Part Two, Net-Change

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:30:00 +0000

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

In order to manage the volume of data flowing between systems, you must choose a net-change model to discover just the data that needs to translate. There are traditionally four basic models to choose from, one of which will discover the net-change data. They are not all equal though, so choosing will depend somewhat on the system(s) you’re working with and somewhat depend on the data model of the system(s) with which you’re working.

The four methods are as follows, in best practice order:

Application Method – this method is the most reliable and system efficient. It relies on the system, or application, to find the net-change data and produce it in a format that is easily translated and consumed by other systems. Some of the advantages of the Application Method are;
a) It typically can support deletes. In other words, records deleted by end-users can be traced to the other integrated systems, and if the business rules permit, will delete those records as well.
b) It is more likely to produce the net-change data in the order in which it was changed. This could become important if the net-change data is being produced in logical but separate extracts. One example would be if the system that is producing the net-change data, splits a sales order into a header file and a detail file. The consuming system will likely have referential integrity rules that would not allow details to be consumed before the header.
c) It has, typically, very little impact on the producing system, providing an un-noticeable effect to the end-users.
d) Reliability is a key factor. If the application is running, then net-change is being discovered and made consumable for other systems.
Tracker-Table Method – Also known as the shadow table method, the tracker-table method is somewhat invasive, but is very useful in cases where the data model does not always supply a last modified date/time stamp on each record. The tracker-table method does just what it says, it tracks the records that have had a change made to them. It is invasive because it requires creating objects in the database of the system. The idea being, create a table with at least three columns (ObjectName, RecordId,ChangeType). This is the tracking table. Then, place triggers on the tables which you are interested in seeing the net-change. The triggers are designed to modify the tracker-table in the following ways;
a) If there is an insert on the table (a new record created), the trigger will add a record to the tracker-table with three values; 1 - the table name where the changes came from, 2 – the recordId that was created when the record was committed, 3 – an identifier of the type of action that was performed (i.e. I = insert, U = update, D = deleted).
b) If there is an update made on the table, the trigger will search the tracker-table to find the ObjectName/RecordId that corresponds to the record that was updated. When the match is made, the trigger then adds a ‘U’ to the ChangeType column indicating that the record corresponding to the recordid in the tracker-table, has been updated..

Now that the net-change has been identified in the tracker-table, a mechanism needs to be developed (or a third-party tool employed i.e. Scribe or Informatica), to poll the tracker table for records with an ‘I’, ‘U’ or ‘D’, then join the recordid to the base table and retrieve the record that was changed. Once retrieved, set the ‘ChangeType’ in the tracker table back to NULL. Then simply choose the frequency that you want to poll the tracker–table for ‘I’, ‘U’ or ‘D’.
Last Update Date Method – This method is non-invasive and can be as reliable as the Application and Tracker-Table methods. With this method you simply create a mechanism (or a third-party tool employed i.e. Scribe or Informatica) to poll the data-object for records that are new, or have an last update date/time stamp that is greater than the last time you polled the data-object. There are a few other caveats to the WHERE clause but, essentially that’s all there is to it. Here’s the kicker. The reason that this method is 3rd in the best-practice ranking is because it is dependent on the clocks being used in the comparison, being synchronized. If for some odd and perplexing reason one of your applications is getting it’s date/time from the desktop clock (or some other unreliable source), you would most likely end up with records falling through the cracks. You must make sure the clocks you are using to compared and stamp are reliable.
Comparison Method – If you must discover your net-change records, and none of the first three methods can be applied, this may be your last option. The Comparison Method (or snapshot method) consists of making a copy of the recordset in which the net-change data resides. Then at some point after that first copy, take another copy of the object and compare each row/column for the differences. This is an extremely laborious method, but at times, desperate men must do desperate things.

Lastly, what to do with concurrent updates to a record. End-user #1 in sales, opens John Smith’s contact record to add a new cell number. At the same moment End-user #2 in finance, opens John Smith’s record to update the billing address. With applications like Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and SharePoint, the application logic will manage the concurrent changes and will make sure both are recognized and able to be discovered as net-change, and translated. Other than that, it’s the ‘last out wins’ method.

In my next post in this series, we’ll take a look at working the business process rules and application rules, into the integration process, and, at what frequency should the integration run.

Convergence Report 1: The Future is Collaborative at #CONV12

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:45:00 +0000

After concluding the first day at the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event here in Houston, TX, I can summarize my feelings in one sentence, “It is a great time to be alive and working on collaboration!” Why do I say that? Here are a few brief insights:

Collaboration Has Changed Us

The initial general session opened with a song that was composed by artists working from different locations around the globe. It was impressive to hear music that these individuals put together without having met each other. During the session, I was taking notes on my slate using OneNote – these notes were syncing with our SharePoint server back at the office. I was also having chat discussions with colleagues both at the event and back at the office via Lync and email. Later, I was on a Skype call with a new prospect in Australia. And it began to sink in how much things have changed over the past 10 years. The idea of collaborating in real time, or even iteratively, with people around the globe, has moved from an idea to the norm.

The Future is so Bright…

But as much as things have changed, the future is even brighter. I’ll do a separate blog on some of the changes to expect with the rollout of new versions of Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and Windows in the next 12 months, but here are facts you may not know about Microsoft:

95,000 employees in over 190 countries and over 600,000 partners – that is a tremendous amount of human thinking contributing to innovation
1.5 million people use Microsoft products – and they’re using competing products too, forcing Microsoft to continue to innovate
The spend $9 billion in R&D annually – if I heard it correctly, they’re in the top few companies in the world in R&D spend – this will translate into exciting developments over the next 5-10 years that we’re not even envisioning today

Collaboration Done Right

After many years of working as a Microsoft partner, one of the things I have grown to appreciate is their approach to the market. Make no mistake, I don’t drink all of the Microsoft kool-aid and I know that many have a very negative view of Microsoft just because they are the “big kid on the block.” But they are doing a lot of things right and they get very little credit for it. Specifically:

Open Ecosystem: Although many would argue that Microsoft software is not “open” (which is true and, in my view, is a good thing), their ecosystem is open. What does that mean? Simply that they do not prohibit others from publishing improvements or add-ons to their products. Anyone can publish a Windows program or CRM add-on (for example) without being forced to go through a “closed” marketplace that may mark it up or may eliminate competitive products all together. The downside of this is that some low quality products can find their way to the market – the upside is that individual companies and developers have much more freedom to innovate (even if that means competing with Microsoft).
Choice: Microsoft gives both customers and partners the ability to choose. I had a number of conversations on the first day of the event with customers that said they began working with another company that made it very easy to get started, but they quickly felt trapped. In some cases I heard complaints about working with a vendor that did not do knowledge transfer – so they could never learn enough to function on their own if they wanted to. In other cases, I heard that businesses were frustrated because they were trapped in someone else’s cloud that was expensive and limited what they could do. Microsoft has always worked to provide options (such as the ability to host in their cloud, a partner cloud or a private cloud), and to provide transparent access to knowledge.
Partners: Microsoft has always been dedicated to supporting a partner channel. Although they are not always perfect in their execution of their partner programs, they have created millions of jobs around the globe in partner businesses. They also understand that partners will often need to work with firms that compete with Microsoft; they may wish it were otherwise, but they understand how partner businesses work. There is a downside – there are some partner firms out there that do less than high-quality work or that may have low-integrity sales practices; but there are also many thousands of partner firms to choose from that provide local, regional, national and global options to businesses located anywhere on earth.

I realize that this sounds a little bit like an advertisement for Microsoft. From what I’ve seen, however, Microsoft attracts an undue amount of criticism. I have, admittedly, sometimes been in the chorus of voices offering (hopefully constructive) criticism. But this is an organization that is having a tremendously positive impact for their customers, for their partners and for their employees. With the values they have in place, I hope they thrive for a long time to come.

Having been around collaboration (from the process, technical and human sides) for over 20 years, I’m more excited than I’ve ever been before about the prospects for the future. Not just because of what Microsoft is doing, but because of how the entire world is changing. Here’s to working together to use collaboration to make positive changes, provide tools that enable us to express a genuine care for colleagues and customers, and free people and businesses to innovate!

Application Data Integration – Part One, Overview

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:17:00 +0000

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM, Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains. One example might be the keying of a ‘large’ order by a sales representative into CRM or Salesforce. Having real-time, two-way data integration in place, that order would go directly from the crm system to your ERP/MRP system for processing. That in turn will reduce inventory and alert the operations team, signaling the purchasing department that orders need to be placed to backfill inventory and, signaling the operation manager that they will need to increase production to fulfill the ‘large’ order. In some cases the integration of data can trigger an alert that will notify outside vendors directly that inventory needs to be replenished.

With access to current inventory levels within a sales rep’s CRM or Salesforce system, sales reps can make better informed customer promises with regard to when items will ship and/or if ordered items will be backordered. This greatly improves customer satisfaction and adoption of the new CRM or Salesforce system. Other advantages (among a plethora) is integration into SharePoint as well, where lists can be compiled to help make better business decision as well as having vital documents at your fingertips, which ever application you are currently using.

This is just one small example of how application data integration can improve adoption, and also improve the client’s business prospects. My purpose in this blog is not to discuss the business benefits of data integration, but explore some of the architectural hurdles in designing the real-time, two-way data integration processes. In a short series of blog entries, we’ll examine:

How data is discovered for translation

When to discover data for translation

What data to discover for translation

How to handle concurrent data modification

How to incorporate the client’s and the application’s
business rules into the integration processes

We will, by no means, cover all the detail that goes into data integration, but will cover, at a high level, some of the hurdles and how to overcome them. In some cases, there will be a choice of methods to accomplish a task, so, we’ll also talk about the best method to use in particular situations. Some methods are tool agnostic, some will highlight how a tool like Scribe Insight provides easy access to data and the business rules around the data. We’ll also see that many of the methods are application agnostic, meaning they can be applied to any system to system integration.

Data integration can be tricky stuff if it’s your first time tackling the subject. Whether you are implementing a solution, or just need to talk comfortably about integration, there are several things to be careful of, but having said that, like anything else, it’s just a matter of experience before your comfort level is one that keeps your knees from shaking and your palms from sweating.

Get a CRM Bible at Convergence 2012!

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:29:00 +0000

This weekend I’ll be packing my bags and heading off to Houston, TX to attend Microsoft Convergence 2012 to experience all of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM goodness I can get. I’ll plan to publish at least a couple of blogs while I’m there on whatever news or tips I can pick up. Feel free to leave a comment here if you’d like to request any specific topics

Are you planning to attend? Great! Ping me and let’s plan to chat. It would be great to network with individuals who are looking for career opportunities or who would like to chat about the challenges that you are experiencing with your CRM project. I’ll hook you up with a free copy of our CRM 2011 Bible if you don’t already have one (or if you want a second copy for your nightstand).

Game-Changing Dashboards Combining SharePoint and CRM

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:54:00 +0000

SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now. Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM). Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance? Simple. Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business. Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.

First off, we created great dashboards using native CRM 2011 functionality (such as views, charts and, of course, dashboards). We used these for a while in production to ensure that they were producing the kind of information we could use to drive behavior and/or make better business decisions. This includes setting goals and using the goal management features of CRM to help individuals understand exactly where they stand relative to expectations.

Next, we did the same with SharePoint. We looked at the kinds of information that is not in CRM that we would want to report on. This includes things like financials, summarized project information (although this information is tracked by us in CRM, the native charts do not have sufficient functionality to present the dashboards we needed, so we used Excel services in SharePoint to render this kind of information) and the company calendar. Some custom SharePoint information can be added, such as a Wiki where you enter daily announcements or a “welcome” message when you know a client will be visiting the office that day.

Third step? The CRM dashboards can be merged with SharePoint by using Iframes or Web Resources within the CRM 2011 dashboards. These components can “hold” the content that we want to present on our dashboards from SharePoint. We can then trim away the CRM “flash” (such as the ribbon and menu) just by calling the correct URL so the dashboards are presented as a “kiosk”.

The last step: put large screen monitors, that can connect to the web, in key locations in your business. In the nearby image, we’ve placed a monitor near our main entrance where people gather regularly; and we have another one in another office area down the hall. These monitors are configured to show the desktop of a nearby computer (in our case, we’re running the Android OS on these monitors and they remote desktop to the machine, but many other options exist to enable this). We also downloaded remote control apps that can run on iPhone, Windows Mobile or Android so that we can interact with our dashboards with our mobile devices (including our Kindle Fires – very cool!) Multiple dashboards can be setup so that they dashboard rotates periodically, and so that information is refreshed periodically.

That’s how we did it – but it can work a bit differently depending on your situation. One area that many larger businesses may need for their dashboards is a true BI (business intelligence) dashboard that combines data from multiple sources into a data warehouse and then renders that on a dashboard. This, too, can be presented on an interactive monitor. Adding a touch screen to this will be the ultimate, “Minority Report” experience … can’t wait to add that!

Interested in how to change the game in your organization with great dashboards? Click here to contact us and let’s talk about it!

Tips to Avoid Login Prompts in SharePoint

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:54:00 +0000

One of the most common issues I hear when implementing SharePoint for new clients, or supporting an existing SharePoint environment is the dreaded login prompt. There are multiple reasons for the password prompt, but I'll try and cover the basics here. Personally, I haven’t had to login to our internal company SharePoint in at least 6 or 8 months! How can you achieve this SharePoint nirvana? Let’s walk through the common steps to avoid having to login to SharePoint, whether opening the site or when opening documents. Here’s a quick rundown.

1. Internet Explorer Security Zone
2. Windows Credential Store
3. Prompts When Opening Documents

Internet Explorer Security Zone

Generally, one of the first things you need to do is add the SharePoint site URL or domain to a more trusted security zone in your web browser (we’ll focus on IE for this post). SharePoint uses activex controls and other features that need to be trusted to run correctly. Here’s what you need to do.

Open Internet Explorer, and click Tools –> Internet Options. This will vary depending on your version of IE. In IE9, click the gear icon in the top right corner, then click Internet Options.
Click the Security tab, then highlight the zone Local Intranet, then click the Sites button.
Ensure “Automatically detect intranet network” is checked. Enter the URL of the SharePoint site. What I suggest here is to use a wildcard entry, to ensure it covers as much as possible. So you could enter http://portal.company.com, or what I recommend is *.company.com.
Click Ok on all the windows, and close the browser. Go to SharePoint, and you will likely get prompted. On this prompt (as seen above), click the checkbox “Remember my credentials”.

Windows Credential Store

This is typically needed when your SharePoint server isn’t in your local network environment. Whether you knew it or not, Windows XP or Windows 7 (who uses Vista anyway) has what is called a “credential store” or vault. It stores usernames and passwords used to connect to websites and other network computers, and online services like Live ID or Exchange. A credential should get stored here from the above prompt when you click “Remember my credentials”.

To access the credential store, you can try this shortcut by typing the following in the Start -> Run command: “control keymgr.dll”. If this doesn’t work, you can get there by going to Start –> Control Panel, then picking Credential Manager in the large icons view.
Under the Windows Credentials heading, look for an entry for the SharePoint URL. If you don’t find one, enter a new one by clicking Add a New Windows Credential.
Enter the information as it requests. You can enter the direct URL as in the IE security zone, or you can also use wildcards like *.domain.com. Enter your username and password just as if you were logging into SharePoint.
Close IE if you had it open, then try SharePoint again. You should not get prompted.

Getting Prompted When Opening Documents

Another common problem with SharePoint is you get prompted for login credentials when opening or editing documents from a library. At least with Windows Vista and Windows 7, this is a known issue and lucky for us, there’s a hotfix! See the following Microsoft KB article:

Prompt for Credentials When Accessing FQDN Sites From a Windows Vista or Windows 7 Computer

Some items of note:

If you have Windows Vista, you need to download and install the hotfix file, and apply the registry setting.
If you have Windows 7, it already has the hotfix included, and you just need to complete the registry setting.
If you are the IT admin, I would recommend creating this on your machine, and saving the key to a .reg file you can send to users, or set in your desktop image.

You will follow the steps 1-7 near the bottom of the article. As in the above steps, you can use the wildcard like *.domain.com for the entry. Close the registry editor, and enjoy opening documents free from login prompts!

While we’re here, I have to share one other thing that I see all the time that I haven’t seen documented.

Problem with Explorer View Being Slow

I fought this for a long time. Every time I would try to use Explorer View, it would work, but it would a LONG time to come up, like 30 seconds. My coworker could open Explorer View and it would open in about 1 second. The fix turned out to be the fix I’ve seen for other weird strange issues with SharePoint. Here’s how to fix it.

Open Internet Explorer, and click Tools –> Internet Options. This will vary depending on your version of IE. In IE9, click the gear icon in the top right corner, then click Internet Options.
Click the Connections tab, then click the LAN Connections button at the bottom of the window.
Check the state of the first checkbox “Automatically detect settings”. This will likely be checked. Uncheck it!
Click ok until all windows are closed, and close IE. Open SharePoint, and try to open a library in Explorer View. It’s magic!

SharePoint 2010 Ratings and Custom Content Types

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:37:00 +0000

There are numerous cool new features in SharePoint 2010, and I’ve found that integrating them into custom solutions are not always straightforward. I found this to be true with ratings as well. Ratings are one of the new social tagging features that gives users a 1–5 star graphic to rate content. You can find a high level overview of social tagging features here on TechNet.

Normally this isn’t a problem. For example, you have your normal Shared Documents library, and you want users to be able to rate content. No problem right? We go into the library settings, and then click on Rating Settings. We simple click Yes, and hit ok. Too easy:

This adds two site columns to the library called:

Number of Ratings
- Stores the total number of ratings
Rating (0-5)
- Stores the average rating of rated content

So everything’s working and dandy. Well, what if we need ratings on a custom content type that is being deployed across the farm? Who wants to go into every library and set that by hand? There’s always PowerShell, but there’s a problem. When I use the above normal library setting on a library with a custom content type, the ratings fail to get stored. If you check the ULS logs, I saw this:

RatingSync: Unexpected exception processing . Error:Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Invalid number value. A number field contains invalid data. Please check the value and try again. ---> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8102001A): Invalid number value. A number field contains invalid data. Please check the value and try again. 0x8102001a

Awesome. So what do we do? It’s really easy, we just need to add the rating columns to the custom content type itself. To do this, edit your custom content type (located in the site content types gallery of the root site in the site collection most likely). Click Add from existing site columns, and add the two columns named above. After doing this, I was able to set ratings without error. You HAVE to add them both or it won’t work!

Now, one last item of note on this. Ratings are not stored instantly. They work off of two timer jobs that are accessible via Central Administration on the SharePoint server:

User Profile Service Application – Social Data Maintenance Job
User Profile Service Application – Social Rating Synchronization Job

By default, they run hourly so your ratings changes wouldn’t show for an hour. To speed this up, edit the timer job and change the schedule to some shorter minute value. Or can you run them manually on demand for testing purposes.

TechNet Content for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 Now Available on Amazon!

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:52:00 +0000

There was no big fanfare on this and could have been easily missed, and I thought it was worth repeating. Microsoft and the content publishing team have compiled their downloadable content and made available on Amazon in a nicely bound book! It’s great for all those out there that would stay up late at night feeling guilty for killing so many trees printing it yourself. You can find the the download links here on TechNet. I will include the information here as I’m just nice like that. I also didn’t say they were the cheapest around, but price varies by book ($66 is a little steep in my opinion).

Getting Started with SharePoint 2010	This book provides basic information about the capabilities of and requirements for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Planning guide for sites and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Part 1	This book provides information about planning for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include site security, governance, and enterprise content management.
Planning guide for sites and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Part 2	This book provides information about planning for site and solutions created by deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include business intelligence, site creation, web content management, and enterprise search.
Planning guide for server farms and environments for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book provides information and guidelines for making decisions about system architecture for a deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include system requirements, authentication, and business continuity management.
Capacity planning for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book provides information about planning for capacity and performance requirements for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include sizing, performance testing, software boundaries, and capacity case studies.
Business continuity management for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	Provides information about business continuity management, which consists of the business decisions, processes, and tools you put in place in advance to handle crises. Information includes features of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that are likely to be part of your business continuity management strategy.
Upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book is designed to guide administrators and IT professionals through the process of upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Deployment guide for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book includes information deployment scenarios, step-by-step installation instructions, and post-installation configuration steps for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Operations guide for servers and server farms for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This document describes how to operate and maintain your servers, server farms, sites, and solutions in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Remote BLOB storage for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	How to use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 together with Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express to optimize database storage resources.
Technical reference for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book includes technical information about the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provider for Windows PowerShell and other helpful reference information about general settings, security, and tools.

You can click here if you want to see all books available from the Microsoft Office System and Servers Team publisher on Amazon as there is other content available for SharePoint 2007.

Submitting a Document Set to a SharePoint 2010 Repository in Workflow

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:48:00 +0000

Every so often while working in SharePoint, you encounter a feature that has almost no documentation or you can’t find anyone with a similar issue. This happened to me when I was trying to configure a workflow to move a document set to a Records Center. After I got this to work, I wanted to try and save others the grief and frustration that I experienced. If “Unknownerror” means anything to you, this post is for you.

Who Would Use This?

This action might be useful in document management scenarios, where documents have a formal “approval” process, and management policies are defined to “expire” them to meet retention policies. Once expired, they would be removed from the current location and moved to another location, specifically a Records Center in this case where they sit waiting to be purged from the system.

A Detailed Look

Let’s cover some background. For this to work, there is some pre-work and configuration that has to be done. You have to have configured content organizers on the source and destination sites and routing rules. I won’t cover that here. This post is just to explain a particular component in this overall process.

The workflow action we are talking about is Send Document Set to Repository. It is NOT available with SharePoint Foundation, you have to have at least SharePoint 2010 Standard or higher. The only official documentation for usage from Microsoft is here. Here is their explanation:

This action is initially displayed in workflow steps as Submit Document set using this action to this destination content organizer with this explanation (Output to Variable: submit file result). It allows you to move or copy the document set to a document repository. A document repository can be a library in your SharePoint site, or a site on its own like the Document Center, that routes records to a specific destination based on rules that you define.

Following is an example of what the action might look like in a workflow step:

Submit Document set using Copy to DocumentRepository:GUID with Copy final bill of Material to repository (Output to Variable: Copy Document Set to repository)

To add When you add this action to your workflow, it looks like this:

Let’s break this down:

this action – Choose your method of submittal. You can choose either to Copy, Move, or Move and Leave a Link.
this destination content organizer – This is the URL to the destination Record Center site (with the content organizer configured).
this explanation – This is text that will get logged to the workflow history list when this action is executed.
Output to Variable: submit file result – This variable will store the output from the command, with success or any error messages and log them to the workflow history list.

The big question is what do do you enter for the destination content organizer? From the Microsoft article above, it’s “documentrepository:GUID”. Is this the GUID of the Records Center site? The Drop Off Library? A few bloggers have said it should be the link to the web service. Which is it?

The answer is they’re both right. The Microsoft article is correct, but it also doesn’t tell the whole story. To correctly work, you should enter the URL of the content organizer web service on the Records Center site. It should be entered in the format:

http://portal/recordcenter/_vti_bin/OfficialFile.asmx

If you enable verbose diagnostic logging for Workflows, you will see that SharePoint converts the first portion of the URL to , with the GUID is the ID property of the Record Center site collection. The Microsoft article should really be updated to reflect this.

Potential Errors

When this doesn’t work correctly, the error is vague to say the least. All you will see is Unknownerror. Great, thanks, that’s really helpful. To get any kind of decent error message, you need to up the ULS logging to verbose for the Workflow categories. You can find directions here on TechNet. Once that is set, run the workflow again and you should get more specific errors. There can be errors like:

OfficialFile::SubmitFile: Encountered error when sending file http://portal/testsite/Documents/DocSet_Test.zip to documentrepository:2fdee837-9501-4305-b15a-0bf5fb9a8832/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx: The URI prefix is not recognized.
The documentrepository:2fdee837-9501-4305-b15a-0bf5fb9a8832/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx site is not properly configured for this request.
OfficialFile: File http://portal/testsite/Documents/DocSet_Test.zip was not saved at router location /recordcenter/DropOffLibrary. Exception Object reference not set to an instance of an object. thrown at:
at Microsoft.Office.RecordsManagement.RecordsRepository.OfficialFileCore.SaveFileToFinalLocation(SPWeb web, EcmDocumentRouter router, EcmDocumentRouterResultProperties resultProps, Stream rgbFile, Hashtable fileMetaData, String strSourceUrl, String strUserName, Boolean bCopy, Boolean bIsDocSet, Boolean bIsDropOffZone, SPListItem& itemFinal)

All of these errors are caused by the fact that the content organizer isn’t setup correctly. The best way to test this is manually by creating SendTo rules in Central Administration to the Records Center and try to move the document set. If it works, you should be good. If not, check the configuration. In my case, the document set content type wasn’t added to the drop off library. Once I corrected this and had proper routing rules setup, it moved fine, and I got Success in the workflow output.

Tip: How to Rename a SharePoint 2010 Server

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:27:00 +0000

Even if you’ve planned your SharePoint project properly, or it might be years later, you need to rename your SharePoint 2010 server. This quick tip covers this on SharePoint 2010 which is a much cleaner experience than it was in 2007. There is an STSADM switch that can handle it, but for 2010, there is a certain procedure to yield best results. I was able to do this on a single SharePoint server earlier and it worked great! This was a single SharePoint server with SQL on another server.

For 2010, there’s a new PowerShell cmdlet for this very thing, Rename-SPServer. This is this article on TechNet covering the procedure. It has you renaming the server itself first, then fixing up SharePoint. However I’ve heard of issues with that, and I had better results by doing it in reverse. That is, running the PowerShell to fix up SharePoint then renaming the server. Here is what I did:

Tell SharePoint about the new server name via PowerShell. This is done via the Rename-Server cmdlet. Of course get-help is your friend to get details and examples, however the context help of the cmd (and the technet article for that matter) IS WRONG! It’s funny, because the example is right, but the explanation isn’t. Go figure, nobody’s perfect. Anyway, you give the command the old and new server names. TechNet says the old server name is in the form of a URL. That throws an error. It should just be . So the whole command would be like:
```
   1: Rename-SPServer –identity “old_server_name” –name “new_server_name”
```
It should complete, and return a message stating “WARNING: You may also need to update any alternate access mappings referring to . Now just rename your server through the system properties and reboot.
Once the server comes up, Central Admin still came up for me, and on the old URL. But after an IISReset, that stopped working (as expected). I was able to access Central Admin via the new server name. Go ahead and check the Alternate Access Mappings for the Central Admin web application to ensure it is pointing to the new name. Correct as necessary. You could also use the cmdlet New-SPAlternateUrl to add an entry for the Central Admin URL.

That’s it! Of course if you like, you could write a quick little PowerShell script that would do all this for you. If you need to do STSADM, you would run the following (assuming its in your system path):

   1: stsadm -o renameserver -oldservername  -newservername  

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Day 4

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:47:00 +0000

Well, today’s the last day of the conference. I know, it’s very sad, but a great time was had by all. This was my first big conference, and I really enjoyed the experience. There were 3 breakout sessions today back to back with the day closing out with lunch in the early afternoon. It’s hard to believe they crammed 240 sessions in 3 and a half days! I got to rub elbows with some of the greats in the industry, bloggers, authors, MVPs and lots of folks from Microsoft. If there’s one tip I can give, it’s to stay in a hotel close to the conference! It was awesome to be able to be in 1 minute walking distance. You have to be able to drop off all the freebies in your room.

I started the day with John Holliday’s discussion on Creating an Easy to Use File Plan Builder for Your SharePoint Records Center. This was really interesting, and offered yet another use case for InfoPath. He covered the basics of the importance and makeup of a file plan, and went on to demo his solution. This wouldn’t be necessary for small Records Center implementations, but when you have hundreds or even thousands of document types each with management policies, these would be almost invaluable. Can you imagine creating thousands of content types, with folders or document libraries and then configuring the same number of content organizer rules for each of the folders? I don’t think there’s enough money in a project’s budget for that. With a little custom code and an InfoPath form, the creation and complete configuration of the Records Center site, content types, information management policies can be 100% automated. The flow would be for an admin user to fill out an InfoPath form (representing the file plan) with the required data (document type, category, disposition rules, role assignments and how they want the records sorted. Via an event receiver, the custom code fires that would create a Records Center site (or could configure an existing site) and create the necessary document libraries, folders, retention policies and user security. There are other ways to do it besides InfoPath (like Excel or an XML file), but I think this is a great solution for a large Records Center implementation.

Then I sat in on Gary Lapointe’s session on a behind the scenes look at how they build Microsoft Visio’s public marketing site on SharePoint 2010 and how they customized the Content Query Web Part, showcasing taxonomy content targeting. He discussed the customized solution and why you would need to customize the CQWP with code. I then poked my head in the the Step-by-Step: Building Search Driven Applications That Matter session by Scot Hillier. If you ever wanted to get some ideas on how you could use search to build applications in SharePoint, this was a great demo-driven session.

For my very last session of the conference, I decided to attend Christina Wheeler’s session on how to package up Publishing features. Her demo seemed to be working better than in the CQWP session yesterday, and it was a really informative session on how to take package up all those master page customizations you worked so hard on for deployment in another environment.

The conference is over, but I had a blast and met a lot of great folks. If you ever get the chance, Whether you are a consultant, business user, or developer, there was something for everyone. Now I’ll spend the next week downloading all the PowerPoint slide decks and session recordings. See you next year!

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Days 2 and 3

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:38:00 +0000

Whew what a wild couple of days! I didn’t get to blog last night so I figured I would combine yesterday and today. The sessions have been really good.

Tuesday – Day 2

Tuesday started with the Todd Carter’s session about Extending SharePoint Health & Monitoring. He put on a good show, giving details on web analytics and diagnostic logging, and how to extend them using custom providers to get detailed reports. Very cool stuff! Then I attended one of the more popular sessions of the day by Microsoft Certified Master Scott Jamison, Best Practices Around SharePoint 2010 User Profiles. Now this topic is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, but I’ve come to a place where I accept the UPA for what it is, even with its shortcomings. He got a volunteer from the crowd (a fellow MCM and MCA Spence Harbar) to configure the UPA live. This was really more of a part 1 of 2, where Spence would take it deeper under the covers and show how to implement it via the UI and PowerShell.

The afternoon started with a session with Eric Harlan, on Creating Awesome Dashboards with SharePoint, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer. This was a cool session, and it turns out was similar to the solution presented in Eric’s fellow Microsoftee Ira Fuch’s book Enterprise Application Development in SharePoint 2010. It wasn’t the same solution, but Eric showed how to configure a similar solution, and rethinking your definition of “dashboard”. No longer are dashboards relegated to KPIs, graphs and charts, but can include using InfoPath form web parts. Interesting!

Along the same lines, I ended the day following Keenan Newton on a journey Automating Business Processes with SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Designer, InfoPath 2010 and Workflow. This was part 1 of 2 sessions outlining the solution, and creating the base forms and initial workflow to complete the overall solution for automating an HR new hire onboarding process. Would you like to be able to have HR fill out a form for a new hire that would automatically generate an offer letter Word document, pre-filled with the user’s data, start an approval workflow once the person accepted, and then automatically create a user account in Active Directory? This session was for you.

Wednesday – Day 3

I spent this morning with Nikos Anagnostou and Lesly Goh discussing Best Practices for Managing Corporate Metadata and Taxonomies. Together, they provided guidance on good design practices for Managed Metadata. For example, when designing your taxonomies, you should try to organize them as behavioral, organizational or navigational. I then attended a Design Best Practices session by Laura Rogers and Darvish Shadravan (authors of the InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Step by Step book soon to be released). This was a refreshingly deeper level session, with demos and discussions on how to avoid pitfalls with InfoPath form services performance and troubleshooting with Fiddler and around data connections. It was very lively, as he would stop periodically and check for live tweets for questions and give out swag to the tweeters. He passed on Microsoft’s top 3 call generators for InfoPath 2010. They are:

Security
Data Connections
Publishing forms

After lunch, I attended the part 2 session of Scott Jamison’s UPA session from Tuesday. Spence Harbar discussed Enterprise Deployment Considerations for the User Profile Service. Who better to learn from than a Microsoft Certified Master and Architect, the highest levels of certifications attainable? Ironically, there wasn’t anyone in the room that was syncing more than 25,000 users so we didn’t have to discuss issues there. We watched Spence actually provision a UPA via PowerShell live on stage, and it worked! He showed us how to workaround the Sync DB dbo database issue when creating the UPA service application via PowerShell. In short, you can use Get-Credential and Start-Job cmdlets to do a runas.

Then it was on to part 2 of Keenan’s session of completing the HR process automation. He showed how to configure the BCS entities properly, and the web service he wrote to talk to AD. I believe all his source will be available post conference.

I ended the day on one of the more technical sessions covering a Deep Dive on the Content Query WebPart with Christina Wheeler. She tried to show how to configure and customize the CQWP to change the columns and covered best practices around internal column naming. Avoid special characters at all possible as it will get nasty to chase down. For example, a space in a name translates to _x0020_. Keep that in mind when using customizing your XSL.

Long days but there were lots of good stuff to digest. Tomorrow is the final day, but it will be packed too!

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Day 1

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:58:00 +0000

The first day started with the big keynote with all of the about 7500 attendees! That’s a lot of people lovin’ some SharePoint in one place! Well, let me back up. On my way into the convention center for breakfast before the keynote, I noticed there was all this noise outside. Turns out a software vendor and SharePoint competitor called Huddle had hired a marching band to play a few tunes right outside the conference and march through. In my opinion, quite childish. Anyway, on the good stuff …

Walked into the keynote speech, and was entertained by the sweet sounds of DJ Keenan Kameleon. He’s a Senior Product Manager with the SharePoint Team at Microsoft. I’m told you can listen to his music mix from the keynote online here. Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Management was up first, and gave some updates on some numbers. Can you say 62 million licenses sold of SharePoint with 125 million users? The overall theme for the conference is Productivity Delivered, which celebrates all the excellent work and solutions that customers and partners have developed on the platform. I won’t bore you with all the details, but you can read more on the MS SharePoint Team blog.

There was a very sweet demo of some extremely high end redundancy and failover for a SharePoint farm. Can you say 1TBs of RAM and 80 CPU cores? The test sites were loaded with 130 million documents totaling 14TB in a single content database, and that’s without Remote Blob Storage. A FAST search query returned 130 million results in .23 seconds. That’s FAST! Their assistant pulled the network plug live on stage, and we all watched while clustering failed over every database in the farm in under 15 seconds. Wow!

They also announced a new Certified Architect certification for SharePoint. You can read all the juicy details on the team’s blog. They also made another announcement – details on the SharePoint Conference 2012. Looks like it’s going to be held in Las Vegas in the middle of November.

I started with my first session with the antics of Todd Klindt and Shane Young from SharePoint911 for their Understanding SharePoint Administration session. After that I went over to see Laura Rodgers and Darvish Shadravan for their book signing of their book InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Step by Step. Needless to say, we had some good InfoPath discussions.

It was lunch, then off to the afternoon sessions covering Records Management with the CTO from GimmalSoft, and ended with a bang with the session by Scott Jamison Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability. He’s a great speaker, and gave some very useful and practical recommendations to get your search results more accurate and useful. The single most important takeaway I’ll share from this session was about the Title field, and how important it is that this field is accurate.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–The Pre-Game Show

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:14:00 +0000

Wow, the time is finally here for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011! What an exciting time this is for SharePoint. The product celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary recently, and it has come a long way! The latest release SharePoint 2010 is really a game changer and is continuously expanding it’s presence and impact in the industry. This conference celebrates the product in a way that is just amazing. There are so many people from all over the world coming together for a single purpose – to share knowledge.

This year’s conference takes place in sunny Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Convention Center. Every hotel in a 15 mile area is SOLD OUT! Ok some of that is probably Disneyland. After checking in to my hotel and getting settled, I walked across the street to the convention center to check things out. I got registered and checked out the venue. This place is huge, three floors of SharePoint goodness! There are lots of great-looking sessions, and I narrowed down the ones I want to attend.

The conference officially started this evening when they opened up the Exhibit Hall for a Welcome Reception from 6 – 9pm. There are a lot of people here (and vendors). I have never seen vendor booths like this before. The booth for fpweb.net had stairs to a 2nd floor overlook. Nice! Talked to the nice folks at O’Relliy Press, Idera, Mindsharp, Quest Software, AvePoint and K2. I think that was just on one row. As you can see, there were already a lot of SharePointers checking things out:

I’m looking forward to the festivities that start tomorrow with the keynote speakers and then the sessions. More to come from Anaheim so stay tuned!

Published Content Type Column Order Fixed in August 2011 CU

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:20:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 has many new and very useful features, one of them being new functionality with content types via the Managed Metadata service application. It allows you to specify a content type hub, a central location for managing content types. You can then publish those content types to subscribing site collections. This opens up a lot of flexibility to manage content consistently.

Recently I ran into a scenario where I had configured content types in the hub site, and set the column order and published the content types. After awhile I had made changes to the root content type column order and re-published those changes. I found that the settings for the columns were updated (hidden, required, etc.) but the changed order did NOT update. This is fairly significant to users of a document management system as you don’t want your optional “Enterprise Keywords” field showing first with a required important required column at the bottom. Oh the humanity!

In doing some testing, I noticed that on an environment with the recently released August 2011 cumulative update for SharePoint 2010 applied, the changed column order updated. Great! It’s always nice when Microsoft fixes bugs. The fix for this issue is actually contained in KB2553031. You can verify this fix is in the August 2011 CU by looking at the list of fixes in the SharePoint 2010 Server package, and sure enough that KB is included. Looking through the KB in question, you find the actual listed fix in the “Issues that this hotfix package” fixes section:

Consider the following scenario:

You create a new content type in a content type publishing hub on SharePoint Foundation 2010.
You publish the content type to subscribing sites.
You change the column order in the content type publishing hub.
You republish the content type to the subscribing sites.

In this scenario, the column order is not updated on the subscribing sites.

That’s definitely our issue. I guess the biggest takeaway here is that is really pays to dig through all the KB hotfixes included in a cumulative update. You never know what issues are getting fixed!

Workaround

As a side note, there is a workaround of sorts if you can't install Service Pack 1 then the August 2011 CU. By default, when content types are published in other site collections, they are marked as read-only in the destination site collection. You can change the order by performing the following:

Click Advanced Settings on the content type site settings screen:

Change the setting “Should this content type be read only?”” from Yes to No. Click Ok to save.

Now you have your options to change the column order.

What To Do When the SharePoint ‘What’s New’ Web Part Isn’t Available

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:11:00 +0000

It’s well documented that the What’s New web part can be very helpful in showing recent information about content in a list or document library. It’s also well documented that to be able to add this web part in SharePoint 2010, you have to activate the site feature “Group Work Lists”. But what happens when you go to Site Actions –> Site Settings, click Manage Site Features and activate the feature, but the web part is still missing from the available web parts list?

More than likely if this happened to you, you are on a sub-level site and not the root site in the site collection. One clue to the issue is to go to Site Settings and look for the Web Parts gallery. If you don’t see that gallery, go to the root site in the site collection and go to the Web Parts gallery. Look through the list, and most likely you will not see the whatsnew.dwp web part in the list. So what to do?

Luckily this is an easy fix. All you have to do is activate the same site feature Group Work Lists, but do it on the root site in the site collection. After you do this, go back into the web part gallery, and look at that:

It’s there now, so we’re in business. Now go back to your sub-site and try to insert the What’s New web part:

So why is this? Certain functionality are only scoped at the site collection level like templates, web parts, solutions, master pages and page layouts. So you have to activate them on the root before they can be available on the sites in the lower hierarchy. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

To learn more about this web part and how to configure it, SharePoint MVP Laura Rogers has written a nice blog post on the subject (among many others)!

Creating a Weekly Team Status Report in SharePoint 2010 Using Wikis

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 04:51:00 +0000

Everyone has meetings they have to attend on a frequent basis, and we all want to get through them as quickly as possible (so we can get back to our game of angry birds). We need to have a quick and easy way for team members to provide an update on their assigned duties, as well as a streamlined method of reviewing them during the meeting. Since we’re lucky that our company has invested in SharePoint, let’s use it! This method I believe provides a very quick and easy way to accomplish your goals for capturing the information without using complicated add-ons or any other heavy lifting.

This is the final result. Cool huh? Nothing fancy, but it does the job (sometimes simpler is better). This is driven by a wiki page library, where every team member gets their own wiki page. You could just have one wiki page and sections where everyone just updates their text, but then you would have multiple people trying to edit that one page 15 minutes before the meeting, and get frustrated with all the merge conflict warnings. If everyone gets their own page, no conflict warnings. Let’s see how it’s done so everyone is happy.

First we need the library to hold all the pages. Create a Wiki Page library called WeeklyTeamStatus. We name it without spaces so the URL doesn’t contain %20, but we’ll fix it in a minute.

Let’s go ahead and fix up the display name then we can add a column to let us control how whose page shows in the list. Click Page off the ribbon then Library Settings, then under General Settings, click Title, description and navigation. Change the title to Weekly Team Status. This way the URL doesn’t contain spaces, but you get the friendly display name.

Now let’s create the new column. Let’s call the column Show in List? of type Yes/No. Feel free to add a description if you like. This will allow us to show or hide the user’s status page in the overall list.

We need to create web pages for each team member to update their status. From the wiki library, click Pages from the ribbon and View All Pages.

Add a new page for each team member. Click Add new page, then enter the name of the page for the team member.

If you look at the first screenshot of the final solution, this works by editing the home.aspx page for the library, adding some general text for the meeting, then adding the content of the team member pages. Click the Home page link from the list, and edit the page (Home.aspx). Delete all of the text that’s there (how to use this library, etc.), and add your text. This would include perhaps phone dial-in information, announcements, or guidelines for the meeting.

Now we need to get all the pages on the Home page. Below the text, insert the existing Weekly Team Status list. The result is obviously not the view we want. We want to display the contents of each team’s page in the list instead of a list of pages.

Edit the Weekly Team Status web part on the Home.aspx page; the properties of the web part will be on the far right. Under Appearance, we want to set the Chrome Type to None. This will hide the name of the list on the page. To help make refreshing the content easier, also go under the AJAX Options and click the checkbox for Show Manual Refresh Button. Now edit the current view under the List Views heading.

We want to only show the Name (linked to document with edit menu), Modified, and Wiki Content columns. Change the sorting order to sort by Name in ascending order then Modified, and also set the filter to only show items when Show in List? is equal to Yes. By setting this flag on the properties on each team member’s page, this will control whether or not it appears in the list on the main page.

To show the content of the each page the way we want, expand the Style heading, choose Newsletter. Click Ok and save your page.

That’s it! Now your team members can edit their own pages to provide their status updates. When it comes to meeting time, just open the home.aspx and everyone’s updates will show in alphabetical order, and the last time they provided an update. Each team member clicks their name to get to their page, then they edit that page to provide their updates. Team members could insert more than just text, they can insert show task lists, charts or excel data. Just before the meeting is started, you can just hit the fresh button on the list instead of having to refresh the entire SharePoint page.

To take this a little further, you could restrict permissions on the home page so that team members don’t edit that page by mistake, and only give modify permissions so that each member only have access to their own page. If you have trouble with white spaces between the top and bottom, you might need to open the page in SharePoint Designer 2010 or edit the html.

Improvements in SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:12:00 +0000

Some of you may have heard by now that service pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products has been released. There have been some blog posts out there that talk about the improvements in SP1 and major reasons why SP1 is actually a good thing! What I wanted to do here is look at some improvements that perhaps have been overlooked. First let’s get the basics out of the way so you can see the big picture like everyone else. Here’s a list of recent blogs on the subject:

Stefan Gobner’s Post on SP1’s release
Joel Olson’s 10 Reasons SP1 Rocks
Joel Olson’s SharePoint 2010 SP1 10 Best Practices Post
The MS Product Group Overview of SP1 Features
The MS Product Group Release Notice of SP1
SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Whitepaper
Microsoft KB Known Issues with Office and SharePoint 2010 SP1
Microsoft KB Description of Office Web Apps SP1
Spence Harbar’s What’s the Fuss? Post

As with all previous update guidance, they are recommending to apply the foundation update, then the server update, then run the configuration wizard (psconfig). There is a slight deviation however. In this case, as Stefan Gobner’s post points out, the product group is recommending to also apply June 2011 cumulative update. See here for more details.

I didn’t set out to do this, but as I was looking over the fixes included in SP1, I realized there are some quite nice improvements that aren’t as flashy as SQL Denali support or having the Site recycle bin. First we need the list of changes that weren’t coming from previous cumulative updates, which you get here. Let’s take a look by category. As the file states, these descriptions vary in detail, and often don’t specify how it was fixed, just what the issue was.

Search

There are lots of fixes here, and there isn’t one that just jumps out at me. There are performance improvements, API enhancements, crawl topology fixes, and they even fixed some text in the PowerShell example help.

SharePoint

Obviously there are a ton of fixes here, and you can see where they mention the popular ones like I mentioned above. There are security improves like where the copy/move UI is visible to users who aren’t site collection admins (BAD)!

Prior to SP1, SharePoint administrators could not set a limit on the number of Broadcast Slideshow attendees through a PowerShell cmdlet. Beginning with SP1, this functionality is included.

I’m not how many folks out there are avid PowerPoint Slideshow Broadcast users, but it’s nice to have the ability to configure the feature more.

Generation of news feeds on My Sites is governed by the Activity Feed Timer Job. Before SP1, this timer job was turned off by default over privacy concerns regarding news feeds. Therefore, no activities were generated on the My Site news feed by default. Starting with SP1, a setting on the My Site Settings page for User Profile Service Administrators provides control over news feed behavior. The Activity Feed Timer Job is now always enabled, but administrators can use this new setting to opt in or opt out of news feeds.

Spence Harbar mentions this is in a blog post just recently published, but I will repeat here as well. There are two things here. One is that the Activity Feed Timer job is enabled now by default because too many people complained feeds weren’t working out of the box. There is also now a setting to enable or disable the newsfeed on My Sites as shown here:

You cannot customize the runtime behavior of the Social Security Trimmer, which is used when you retrieve social data, such as tags, notes, ratings, or Newsfeed data.

Again, Spence outlines this issue and I will defer to his post on this topic.

Before SP1, there was no convenient way for users to select a video frame to set as the Thumbnail. Starting with SP1, this functionality is provided through the "Video Thumbnail Picker" feature.

I have personally struggled with this, so this is a nice new addition.

The Media section of the ribbon contains two buttons that are nonfunctional for editing or creating blog posts, "Audio and Video" and "From SharePoint" under Images.
Alerts do not function correctly in several scenarios.
You move a site collection, but the config database updates fails. Therefore, the site collection is not available in the new location. It is also not available in the original location because was deleted.
Before SP1, you could not have some pages rendered in Internet Explorer 9 document mode (instead of Internet Explorer 8). Starting with SP1, a control is available that lets you set individual pages to be rendered in Internet Explorer 9.
Before SP1, the Title field on attachments was a required field. Therefore, users had to supply a title to save a document. Starting with SP1, the Title field is no longer a required field.
Calendar view is not rendered correctly when the browser window is resized.

Some issues or bugs are under some obscure combination of circumstances that you will never see, but this one I have seen. Let’s have a look. You’re looking at your normal SharePoint calendar:

Now in IE, “restore down” or resize your window and watch that SharePoint calendar mysteriously shrink:

Have no fear, just hit F5 to refresh and all is well. Or you could install service pack 1.

URLs to documents in document libraries are very long and include the Source parameter when the URL is copied (e.g., by right-clicking and selecting Copy Shortcut). In SP1, the Source parameter is not included in a copied URL, so the URL is much shorter.

This is a very welcome fix. Todd Klindt has a blog post on an add-on that will create and manage short SharePoint URLs for you. Check it out!

Conclusion

I just finished installing SP1 on a development environment that had Project Server, Office Web Apps and SharePoint of course. I have to say, things went fairly smoothly overall. I did have to work through a couple issues with IIS app pools not started and the User Profile Service, but when don’t you have to fix the User Profile Service? As with all fixes, test test test!

A Not-So-Common Web Service Found in SharePoint (2007 and 2010)

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:18:00 +0000

In our day-to-day client work, we recently stumbled upon a web service that is installed with SharePoint, but honestly had never implemented. In fact, the web service is not listed on either MSDN page for SharePoint 2007 or 2010. However, we have now tested this web service (and plan to use it very soon), so I wanted to share our findings with the community.

[Note: This post will not focus on how to call a web service or work with the results]

The web service is aptly named the Spelling Service and actually leverages code from the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace. The web service can be found at the following URL: http://sharepointsite/_vti_bin/spellcheck.asmx. In a nutshell, you simply pass the web service 'chunks' of text, and it will identify whether or not any of the words are misspelled. Additionally, you can also specify the language (LCID) or a Boolean flag to auto-detect the language based on the word(s) submitted.

When the response is returned, the XML will contain various nodes (as seen in the screenshots below), which include the index of the text 'chunk' where spelling errors appear, the words 'flagged' and the type of spelling error that occurred (RepeatWord or UnknownWord). An additional node that you will notice is the offset field, which identifies the location in the input where the misspelled word begins. Lastly, a spellingSuggestions node is also returned which includes the misspelled word and a list of suggestions in the sug node.

Sure, there are other spelling web services out there, but we can see endless possibilities with this, especially if you already own SharePoint (Standard or higher). I can easily see us leveraging this for Dynamics CRM as well as many other integration projects in the future.

Enough of the details, here are some screenshots from our own internal tests of this web service.

SOAP Message:	SOAP Response:

SOAP Message:	SOAP Response:

All About SharePoint 2010 ULS Logging

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:14:00 +0000

I use SharePoint’s ULS logs almost daily when supporting and administering SharePoint (2007 and 2010 for that matter). Let’s look at what it is, and how it can help you troubleshoot issues in SharePoint 2010.

What is this “ULS Logging”?

Like most (but not all) features in SharePoint 2010, logging did get an upgrade from 3.0 / 2007. First of all, what is ULS? It stands for Unified Logging Service (ULS). It is the engine that handles creating a detailed trace output of all of the events that occur in SharePoint. It is dependent on the Windows service “SharePoint 2010 Tracing”. By default, SharePoint creates these log files in the file system in the “14 hive”:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS

These log files are written by SharePoint in real-time and contain information regarding event logging per its configuration in Central Administration.

New for 2010

SharePoint 2010 introduced some new features with regards to trace logs. Here are some of the highlights.

Correlation IDs

One big struggle with the ULS logs is that they were very hard to try and find where a specific error occurred. You might have known when it happened, but it was very difficult to find the correlating specific error in the actual log. Microsoft introduced the concept of a Correlation ID. The way this works is that every event in SharePoint is given a unique GUID string. Related events are grouped together by the same Correlation ID. So for a given event, all of the actions that take place have the same correlation ID. This way, you are able to very easily find the grouping of events that relate to each other. When an exception occurs, the Correlation ID is shown. Once you have that ID, that is when you dive into the ULS logs. We’ll go into detail on that shortly.

Event Throttling

In 2007, the interface used to configure event throttling for events wasn’t all that great. You had some flexibility to set the severity level logged by category, but it was a little clunky:

In 2010, it has been changed significantly to help make modifications easier, especially being able to determine what level of logging has been set for which categories. You can also easily reset all modified settings back to default. Typically these options are modified when you are troubleshooting an issue on a specific component. Here’s what the new UI looks like:

Event Log Flood Protection

This is a new option for 2010. This new feature, as it’s name implies, prevents the event log from being flooded with duplicated events. This is just good practice to enable.

Trace Log Configuration

Here’s how the settings looked in 2007:

The trace log settings also got an upgrade in 2010. Here’s the same section in 2010. They really got smart and gave us some options to be able to prevent the server from filling up with logs. As I understand it, after the number of days to store log files has expired, it prunes the logs from day 1. The next day it will prune day 2 and so on so that there will always only be 14 days worth of log files. You also have a new option to be able to restrict the log files by file size as well.

Microsoft has some best practices for configuring these diagnostic logging settings on TechNet. Now let’s take a look at how to use the ULS log files for troubleshooting.

ULS Usage

How to Configure the Tracing Settings

For the sake of this post, we are focusing on SharePoint 2010 so all steps are specific to the 2010 interface. To configure ULS logging settings, you have to access Central Administration. Under Monitoring, click Configure diagnostic logging.

How to View the ULS Logs

The ULS log files are text files that SharePoint creates in the convention .log. You could, in theory, use notepad to read the ULS logs. I would advise against that if you want to retain your sanity. Microsoft has provided (along with at least one on Codeplex) a viewer to look at the ULS log available here. Between the two, I personally like one from Microsoft because it has more features and I just think is better. In the viewer, you can either watch the ULS logs real time, or open a previous log file.

Troubleshooting with the ULS Logs

So when would you actually use all this? Well, I’m sure in your life using SharePoint you will eventually encounter an error (sorry Microsoft, no one’s perfect). When you see that dreaded error message, fret not! If you’re not already, you’re going to have to remote on the SharePoint server. Now open your trusty ULS log viewer. You have two choices here to find the exact error in the ULS logs:

Hopefully you will be able to reproduce the error at will. So open the logs in a real time view, and find the error.
Or, you can’t reproduce at will, so you will have to do a little hunting. If you know about when it occurred, you can open a log file and search.

Let’s look at the ULS log viewer. To open the logs in real time, click File –> Open From –> ULS.

On the next dialog, choose the default option “Use ULS feed from default log-file directory”, then click Ok. Then watch the fun! If you want to see a particular log, it’s just as easy. Click File –> Open From –> File. It defaults to the LOGS directory, and browse the list to find the ULS log file you want. You can see the date/time, process, product and category, severity level, Correlation (remember that?) and a detailed message of each event.

One of the cooler features that makes it easier to find the correlation ID is the correlation tree. Click the button on the toolbar in the top right corner (Toggle Correlation Tree) which will open on the left. Change the drop down to Correlation, and find the ID from the error.

You can of course search and find certain text if you’re looking for something specific. One thing I’ve done a lot in the past is when troubleshooting the User Profile Service (and who hasn’t?). You can filter the view by category like this:

This will only show events that relate to the User Profile Service. When you provision a User Profile Service, there are a known certain events that you should see, and this makes it very easy to see and watch. I encourage you to check out other features as well like the Smart Highlighting. You can also change the level of events that are displayed.

In another blog post, we’ll look at a related feature, the SharePoint Health Analyzer! I hope this has been helpful, and encourages you to check out your ULS logs!

Manipulating UI Elements in SharePoint 2010

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 06:03:00 +0000

As we mentioned in a previous post, SharePoint 2010 uses a client dialog framework for elegantly showing forms in a dialog box without having to leave the current page. In this same post, we also mentioned the IsDlg URL parameter, and how it can be added to nearly any page to prepare it for showing in a dialog (essentially a 'quick-n-dirty' way of removing the navigation, quick launch, etc.).

Armed with this knowledge, we assumed that we could use the IsDlg feature for a recent project, which required a specific page on SharePoint to be shown without any 'standard' UI components (navigation, title bars, ribbon, quick launch, etc.). After constructing the page, we navigated to the URL adding the IsDlg=1 parameter and everything looked perfect; a quick win (so we thought). However, what I have not yet told you is that the page we were viewing was a 'new form' for a list, which requires submitting the page to save the data back to the SharePoint list. As we tested the form and submitted the data, we were immediately presented with a JavaScript error. After a short bit of investigation, we realized that the IsDlg parameter is nice, but certainly not fool-proof.

Here's what happened:
By adding the IsDlg=1 parameter to your URL, you essentially tell SharePoint that this page is being displayed in a the client dialog framework (i.e. a dialog box). At this point, it has to make some assumptions, and one of these is that you are actually doing what you say you are (go figure!). In our case, we were not actually using the dialog box, but were instead showing the page directly in the browser and using the parameter to simply remove the UI elements from our page. Behind the scenes, with the assumption that you are in fact in a dialog box, SharePoint tries to close the page and/or navigate to another page upon submission of the form being shown in the dialog box. When the page is shown without the dialog, certain client objects do not exist, which essentially leads to 'object not found' errors when the JavaScript code executes to close/navigate from the dialog box.

** I should note that this does not affect display forms or static pages which do not submit a form. **

Our Solution:
Many of you may remember the plethora of CSS tricks used within Content Editor Web Parts (CEWP) in SharePoint 2007, and sure enough there are similar tricks for SharePoint 2010. By simply identifying the IDs and/or CSS classes being used by certain UI elements, we are able to elegantly hide these from the page, essentially simulating the IsDlg parameter.

The CSS:

   1: <style type="text/css">

2:

   3: /* Top Nav */

   4: #s4-titlerow {

   5:     DISPLAY: none

   6: }

7:

   8: /* Ribbon */

   9: #s4-ribbonrow {

  10:     DISPLAY: none

  11: }

12:

  13: /* Quick Launch */

  14: #s4-leftpanel {

  15:     DISPLAY: none

  16: }

  17: .s4-ca {

  18:     MARGIN-LEFT: 0px

  19: }

  20: </style>

The CSS above can be placed into a CEWP to hide the Top Navigation, Ribbon, and Quick Launch UI elements. In our case, we packaged this into a single DWP file named Simulate_IsDlg.dwp. We can now reuse this code on any form as needed.

NOTE: Now that the ribbon has been removed from your page, you may find it difficult to place the page into Edit mode to add/edit web parts. Here are two quick methods for you:
1) Add the toolpaneview=2 or toolpaneview=3 parameter to your URL. Each opens a different version of the Add Web Parts menu.
2) Add the contents=1 parameter to your URL and close the CEWP web part which hides the ribbon (you can add it back by adding a web part and selecting "Closed Web Parts").
* There are more methods, but none better than one of the above options; we prefer option #1.

UPDATE 06/30/2011: 3) You can add the DisplayMode=Design parameter, which will place the page in design mode as well. There are quite a few other flags for this parameter as well, which I'll cover in a future blog post.

BONUS TIP: Parameters can be added to the source URL parameter as well. For example, after completing a SharePoint survey, you may want the user to be redirected to a thank you page, which is free from UI elements as well. To do this, we can simply construct the source URL parameter as: source=/pages/thankyou.aspx?IsDlg=1.

Resolve an TCP 10061 Error with the SharePoint 2010 User Profile Service

Tue, 31 May 2011 04:56:00 +0000

I went to go run a manual sync of the User Profile Service in SharePoint, and was unable to get to the Service Application. After reviewing the ULS logs, I found this error:

UserProfileConfigManager.StartSynchronizationForOneManagementAgent: Unexpected exception: System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotFoundException: Could not connect to http:// /ResourceManagementService/MEX. TCP error code 10061: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it IP address:port. ---> System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it IP address:port.

Luckily this error has an easy fix. This error occurred because one of the two ForeFront Identity Manager services that the User Profile Service depends on wasn’t started. Go into Services.msc and check to ensure both services are started:

You should be able to start the service without an issue and this should allow you to connect to the User Profile Service again.

I will give a strong word of caution here though. The User Profile Service can be touchy and when functioning properly, the services does not stop for no reason. I would be sure to keep a close eye on it and if it happens more than once or twice, I would investigate further to ensure you have configured the UPS properly with all service accounts having the proper permissions. You can read more about the requirements at the following resources:

I would strongly encourage all to apply the latest cumulative update possible (though SP1 is releasing soon) as they have many updates and fixes for the User Profile Service.

How to Remove a User from a SharePoint 2010 Site Collection

Thu, 12 May 2011 02:34:00 +0000

I was troubleshooting a recent issue with the User Profile Service, where I would make a change to a user account in Active Directory (like a spelling correction). The Profile Sync would occur and I would verify that the correct spelling was in the profile. However, the change did not replicate to the site collection like it was supposed to. This normally happens via a SharePoint timer job named User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization. It’s described function is:

“Synchronizes user information from the user profile application to SharePoint users and synchronizes site memberships from SharePoint to the user profile application”

Well for whatever reason, it wasn’t doing that. To correct the issue, there can be a couple fixes:

Make a change to one of the fields via Central Administration like Title. Save this change, then re-open the profile and set it back to what it’s supposed to be. This will sometimes force the sync to run properly.
Remove the user from the site collection and re-add them

This is what did it for me. To do this, perform the following:

As a site collection administrator, click Site Actions –> Site Permissions
Click into any existing group (like site Owners). The URL will be something like http://server/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupID=28.
Change the 28 to a 0. The list should now show you All People.
Find the user who isn’t updating, click the checkbox by their name. Click Actions, Delete Users from Site Collection.
Now add the user back to the appropriate group, and their spelling should be correct.

SharePoint Tip: Use Claims Authentication for Your 2010 Multi-Tenant Web Application

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:21:00 +0000

I had setup a test environment to test out and play with the new hosting functionality of SharePoint, also called multi-tenancy. When you create your main web application that will be used to house the tenants, you have the option to have it use Claims Based or Classic Mode authentication.

Well I had chosen Classic mode, and went on my merry way. It wasn’t long before I ran into problems. The major issue I was having was that search was failing to crawl the tenant sites with access denied. If I configured the default access account to use an account that was a site collection admin, things would crawl. I had checked all the bases, but nothing would work. The main aspect of multi-tenancy is that each tenant site subscription is configured to look at a single OU in Active Directory ONLY. Since the crawl account couldn’t be in each tenant’s OU, that’s a problem. But, this is just supposed to work!?

It turns out that the problem was with the authentication. After converting the existing web application to Claims based authentication, my standard default search account was able to successfully crawl my tenants, and I could finally get some search goodness. Big thanks to Maxime’s article on this on MSDN.

Maxime also pointed to Steve Peschka’s article on how to convert a webapp to claims from classic. It works great, and are the correct steps. Don’t be fooled by imitators!

Resolve Search Crawl Error When Using Self-Signed SSL Certificate with SharePoint 2010

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 02:44:00 +0000

While configuring a SharePoint farm for a client the other day, I came across a simple but problematic error with search. We had requested a full SSL certificate for the farm, but I was a self-signed certificate so I could work with the site. After configuring search content sources and I kicked off a full crawl, I got this error in the crawl log:

“The secure socks layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled.”

Wells that’s a bummer. Luckily there’s an easy fix. What you need to do is configure search to “Ignore SSL certificate name warnings” via Central Administration. TechNet has the documented steps. After making this change and running a full crawl, voilà!

Success! Of course you should get an official SSL certificate, but sometimes you get by with what you have.

SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Parts - Using Script Managers & AJAX

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:44:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 introduced a quantum leap forward with the introduction of Visual Web Parts development integration with Visual Studio 2010. Most developers that have worked with SharePoint for any length of time are familiar with hosting custom ASPX pages inside SharePoint web parts. Doing so allows us to present robust applications and interfaces inside the SharePoint portal and fully utilize all of the robust security features and other goodies that come with SharePoint. The introduction of Visual Web Part development eliminates the need for separate web sites and pages since the custom web part becomes an integrated component of the SharePoint application. All of this comes without having to use STSDEV, VSeWSS, or the like. We can simply build the web part right inside Visual Studio and click Deploy! A really great feature is the ability run & debug right from Visual Studio without any special configuration required. All of this greatly simplifies and expedites the development of custom enhancements to a SharePoint application and is no doubt Microsoft’s response to the fact that the number of SharePoint developers continues to grow, as does the number of SharePoint implementations.

For those who have not yet delved into Visual Web parts, this link will take you to MSDN for a quick jump start: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231579.aspx

One of the advantages of using custom web parts and ASPX applications is the ability to integrate data & functionality from outside systems, such as ERP applications, into the SharePoint environment. Users can view live orders, inventory data, or other mission critical information and even make updates without ever leaving the portal. In order to provide this robust functionality, we often need to use data grids, combo boxes, tree views, etc. to provide a fully functional user experience. All of this is possible (and easy) with the Visual Web Part development environment. One can even utilize 3rd party controls such as Telerik or Infragistsics .NET AJAX controls. Essentially, most anything you can do on a stand alone ASPX.NET page can be done with your web part. There are a few catches, though.

To provide your users with the best experience, you will naturally want to utilize the AJAX functionality that most web controls now provide. Your web part is going to reside on a page that will be served up by the SharePoint server and this host page will contain its own script manager by default. Unfortunately, this script manager cannot “see” the controls on your web part and therefore cannot control AJAX responses for them. You will find that simply including a script manager on your web part like you would do on a stand alone ASPX page will not work either. The two script managers will conflict with each other and the SharePoint master page will prevail. Fortunately, there is a simple solution for this that makes both script managers happy and allows them both to work in harmony.

You will note that when the Visual Web Part project is created that you will get three files, one of which is the code file which contains methods that add controls to the Web Part and generate custom content within the Web Part. The key method in this file is the CreateChildControls() method as shown below.

protected override void CreateChildControls()

{

    Control control = this.Page.LoadControl(_ascxPath);

    Controls.Add(control);

    base.CreateChildControls();

}



The trick is to add your script manager here and configure the affected controls rather than to perform these actions in your ASPX as usual. Below is an example demonstrating how to add a Telerik RadAjaxManager and RadAjaxLoadingPanel to the web part and to configure several controls. This sample uses the Telerik control, but any script manager control can be used. The key point is to add the controls and configure them here. This will provide the full AJAX functionality within your web part while allowing SharePoint to also function normally.

protected override void CreateChildControls1()

{

    Control control = Page.LoadControl(_ascxPath);

    Controls.Add(control);

    // Ajax manager & loading panel

    RadAjaxManager RadAjaxManager1 = new RadAjaxManager();

    RadAjaxLoadingPanel loadingPanel = control.FindControl("RadAjaxLoadingPanel1") as RadAjaxLoadingPanel;

  

    //Add first control (DataGrid1) and updated controls

    Control ajaxcontrol = control.FindControl("DataGrid1");

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, (RadGrid)control.FindControl("DataGrid2"), loadingPanel);

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, (RadGrid)control.FindControl("DataGrid3"), loadingPanel);

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, (RadToolBar)control.FindControl("RadToolBar1"));

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, control.FindControl("ComboBox1"));

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, control.FindControl("ComboBox2"));

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, control.FindControl("RadPanelBar1"));

    // Add second control (ComboBox1) and updated controls

    ajaxcontrol = control.FindControl("ComboBox1");

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, (RadGrid)control.FindControl("DataGrid1"), loadingPanel);

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, control.FindControl("ComboBox2"), loadingPanel);

    RadAjaxManager1.AjaxSettings.AddAjaxSetting(ajaxcontrol, control.FindControl("RadToolBar1"));

  

    // continue as needed

}

In summary, you can create your web part in Visual Studio utilizing whatever controls suit your needs. Once in place, implement your script manager inside CreateChildControls() and configure as needed. Prepare your end users to be dazzled.

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:30:00 +0000

Which clients should we focus more time on? Are there any clients that we should consider firing? How can we find new clients that look like our best current clients? Do we have clients that should be more profitable?

These are the questions that many B2B firms are asking themselves as they think through how they should prioritize their client list. So read on for some of the how’s and why’s of establishing a client scoring system.

What is a Client Scorecard?

Client scoring is a way to develop a consistent client scorecard (or client report card) for every client that a business serves. The scorecard serves a number of purposes, including:

Identifying best customers, and providing them with a higher level of service
Identifying worst customers and, in some cases, discontinuing service to them
Finding past customers who have a great score but are now inactive, and re-activating them
Identifying prospects that are similar to your top customers for acquisition efforts
Identifying lost high value customers, and determining why you lost them and how you can improve your performance

Every sales and marketing manager will tell you that it costs many times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain or upsell an existing one. Client scorecards are all about leveraging your hardest won and greatest asset – your current customer base!

“It is 5-10 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.”
-Gartner Group

But sometimes the best way to define something is to define what it is not...

A client scorecard is not the same thing as lead scoring. Lead scoring focuses on the likelihood of converting a non-customer into a customer, whereas client scoring focuses on the value of existing customers. Maybe we’ll talk about lead scoring in a future post.
A client scorecard is not limited strictly to active customers. Client scorecards can include both inactive customers (in fact, this can be one of the most important segments for evaluating client scorecards) and prospective customers. In the case of prospective customers, your scorecard may be more focused on (dis)qualifying prospective customers that are showing the signs of becoming the kinds of customers you do not want in your portfolio.
A client scorecard is not the same thing as client profitability. Profitability is an important factor, but profitability may not tell the whole story about the value that a client contributes to your business.
A client scorecard is not limited to objective data. There are many subjective drivers of business value that should influence your scorecard.
A client scorecard is not a “score.” Although one output of a scorecard may be a single score, keep in mind that there are many components of a scorecard that should be evaluated – a high score or a low score do not tell the whole story about a client relationship. For example, many of the data points for new clients (or even prospective clients) may be unknown – resulting in a lower score until these items can be evaluated.

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Like all projects that are worth investing in, a successful client scorecard project requires far more than the CEO taking a Saturday morning to write down the attributes of a good client – and handing those off to IT to add to a CRM system. Sadly, most businesses tend to take that approach – and end up wasting time, making their CRM systems unnecessarily complex and generating scorecards that no one uses.

1. Get Your Team Involved

The people who work with your clients every day already have a good idea of what makes and good client and what makes a bad client. The agenda for the session is pretty straight forward:

Put your clients into lists of good and bad – focusing on longer-term clients so you have a good understanding of how the relationship has evolved.
Discuss what the characteristics of the clients in each group are – the goal here is to define what makes one group different from the other (most businesses are surprised at some of the findings at this stage)
Determine at what stage of the relationship this information can be known and which role (or which system) will capture it

For this meeting, you should use an outside facilitator and a proven methodology. The reality is that most meetings of this type are ineffective because as soon as one person shares an idea, the rest of the group begins to evaluate the idea and respond to it – creativity is stifled, politics come into play and the results from the session are weak.

You will want to get beyond the basics (i.e. profitable customers are all good; unprofitable customers are all bad) and get to some of the leading indicators of profitability; you will also want to recognize that some “hidden variables” can make even your most profitable customers undesirable (i.e. requiring an extremely high level of service, a brand that may damage your own reputation, an approach to your team that is demoralizing). Most businesses also need to recognize that profitability can be an elusive calculation, so subjective variables can play an important role.

2. Evaluate Public and Private Data

You should do some analysis of both internally available data (such as from your accounting or CRM systems) and external data (such as data available from D&B) to see if any of this plays a role in differentiating your top customers from your bottom customers. For example, you may find that certain industries tend to outperform others; or you may find that you tend to do better with private or public companies. This can be a very important source of scorecard data because it doesn’t require your team to do extra data entry to create the scorecard. For larger enterprises, predictive modeling methods can be used as part of this evaluation.

3. Talk to Your Clients

Conduct interviews or surveys with your customer list. They are likely to tell you things about themselves that your own internal team did not identify. This can be an important source of information that helps you qualify prospects or new customers. This early qualification can help you focus your resources on the prospects that are most likely to convert into long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships.

4. Define the Criteria

Now comes the hard part, you need to winnow the list of criteria down to a minimal amount of new data that your team will need to begin to track. The more information that you can get from internal or external systems (see item #2, above), the better. But you should expect to require your team to capture some additional information on their own. Remember that a successful scorecard system incorporates both objective information (i.e. hard numbers that you are likely to be able to pull from other systems( and subjective information (i.e. opinions of team members that will need to be keyed into the system). Ideally, you will limit the items that your team needs to key in to a list of 5-10 items.

5. Capture the Data

Now comes the hardest part – you have to actually start capturing the data.

This is where most scorecard projects fall apart. Either they require too much manual data entry that is time consuming for employees that already have enough to do. Or they require a herculean effort to integrate data from disparate internal systems. Or both. There may be no way to completely go around these issues, but here are a few suggestions:

Keep it Simple: The temptation is to jump right in and develop a “dream scorecard” in the first stab at this type of project. Keeping the scope of the project simple will save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration.
Understand the Scope: Even if you can’t keep the project simple, it is important to fully understand the scope of the project so you will know what you are getting into. Most projects of this type fail simply because the organization loses interest in making it a priority long before it is ever completed.
Piggyback on Other Projects: In large enterprises, there are almost always multiple projects going on with a goal of unifying information across different systems. Rather than starting a project dedicated to the scorecard, see if you can piggyback on an existing project that may already be gathering much of the same information.
Automate What you Can: The more effort you can keep off the backs of the individuals who will have to use the scorecard, the better. Automation can come in two flavors: (1) automate capturing scorecard metrics that are already available elsewhere – so no one has to re-enter data; (2) provide process mapping and automation for data that needs to be gathered manually – this can include an annual process, updates made at the conclusion of each project, etc. Modern BPA (business process automation) tools built into CRM and other tools can handle much of the heavy lifting in this area.
Provide Ongoing Training and Support: I cannot overemphasize this point. It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses put a tremendous amount of time into the IT part of projects like this – and almost no time in getting their team up to speed on how they need to participate.

6. Collaborate

“If you build it, they will come,” may work in the movies, but not when it comes to rolling out client scorecards.

You will need to ensure that the salient information from the scorecards is distributed to the individuals who will need it. And you will need to ensure that referencing the scorecard becomes a part of your corporate culture. This means that scorecard data needs to appear on your internal portals, dashboards and on many of your client related reports. Discussing the scorecard needs to become part of the every day conversation in your sales, service, accounting and customer management conversations.

7. Train, Support, Improve, Repeat

Your scorecard project will require plenty of care and nurturing. You will need to constantly monitor the business process you established for creating scorecards to ensure that the team is following it. You will need to work with the team to ensure that the scorecard management process is not too time consuming (this is particularly true during the early days after the initial launch). In addition, the criteria for your scorecards will need to be reviewed and updated periodically as the economy, your customers, your competitors and your understanding of the marketplace evolve.

Next Steps

Developing a client scorecard does not have to consume a tremendous amount of time. With proper planning and session facilitation a mid-sized business can launch client scorecards in just a few months; larger enterprises may take longer. If you’re using modern collaboration, dashboard and CRM tools, you can significantly simplify the process of maintaining scorecards for your team. Take the first step of facilitating a session with your team to get started.

SharePoint Tip: Searching SharePoint From Windows 7

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:09:00 +0000

I believe that one of the most under-evangelized areas of SharePoint is its Windows integration. Consistently, we find that many users simply assume they have to use the Web interface to access SharePoint, but you can actually do a majority of your daily document management and collaboration work without ever accessing SharePoint via the Web. In fact, my ratio of Windows to Web SharePoint use is probably 75:25; 75% of my document management and collaboration work being done completely within Microsoft Windows.

In this tip, we focus on searching SharePoint from Windows. The screenshot-filled instructions below will walk you through downloading the search connector provided by your company or SharePoint, installing the connector, and using it in Windows 7.

At C5 Insight, we have created our own Search Connector that points everyone to our Search Center site. We have also customized the search connector for our organization, and provided this to our employees, rather than everyone having to use the default SharePoint connector.

To build your own search connector, you can start here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd742958(v=vs.85).aspx
You can also use SharePoint's default search connector that is available on the search results page.

Check out the walkthrough here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff899315.aspx#BKMK_O14AsAFedProvider
Regardless of the search connector you choose, if you have never downloaded the connector, you will be prompted to add the connector to Windows.
Once added, you will notice that there is a new search option in your left navigation, and the focus is on the search text box in the upper right corner of the Explorer window.
You can immediately begin searching, and this search will cross all boundaries, including individual sites (depending on the scope of your search connector).
Tips and Tricks:
a. For quicker access, rearrange this search connector in your "Favorites" section

b. For even faster access, pin to your Start Menu or add a Quick Launch button

i. To pin to your Start Menu, simply drag the search from your Windows Favorites navigation to the Start Menu.

ii. To add a Quick Launch button, first do this, then you can add this shortcut in the same manner - one-click access to SharePoint search.

c. By default, the search view is set to "Content." You can change this as you would with any view in Windows, just under the search bar. Content is a nice view, since it actually shows you portions of the file and also does "hit highlighting."

d. You can adjust your sort as well, but by default, I would ensure your results are sorted by Search ranking, Descending. Right-click to get to this menu.

e. Quotes and filters in the search box work on SharePoint as well!

i. Only "SharePoint 2010" PowerPoint presentations.

ii. "SharePoint 2010" documents where Amber Butler was an author.

iii. "SharePoint 2010" documents modified after 1/1/2011

i. You can easily save a search for quickly finding similar documents at a later time

j. Lastly, with one click, you can open this search in the SharePoint site for additional filtering and refinements.

i. Once opened in the Search Center, all refinements are available on the left.

As you can see, there are many ways to integrate SharePoint with Microsoft Windows, and this was only for search! Our goal is to always add value for our clients, and Windows integration is a huge time saver and productivity booster. We hope this has been helpful for you as well.

The Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible is Almost Here!

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:30:00 +0000

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible is only a few weeks away (March 1, 2011) from being available! After lots of hard work and long hours, we’re going to celebrate by giving away five copies of the book for free!

To be entered to win a free copy, just sign up to follow C5 Insight on one of the various social channels that we offer (you must have a United States mailing address to be qualified). You can click here to select a social channel to follow. We’re planning to select 5 winners on March 21, 2011 (or once we have 200 new followers across our social channels – whichever comes first).

Or, if you’re in a hurry, then use the link to the left to order your copy today (our kid’s college funds thank you)!

For those of you who are interested in SharePoint 2010, the book includes a chapter on the “out of the box” SharePoint integration and a special appendix on customized SharePoint 2010 / CRM 2011 integration written by Curtis Hughes.

What’s next? We’ve created a site for the book (www.dynamicscrmbible.com) and we need to get the finishing touches on it ... Gotta get going!

Get Social: More Options for Following Us

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:40:00 +0000

Some Background

At the beginning of 2010, our two companies (StreamLogic and Customer Connect) merged to become C5 Insight. One company focused on Microsoft SharePoint and cloud application development. The other company focused on CRM (Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com) and sales and marketing strategy.

When we merged our blogs, we started to receive feedback that we were providing an overwhelming amount of information. Our blogs included high level strategic and best practice information, as well as detailed technical tips for developers and administrators. They also included information on all of the different solutions that we support. So most of those who were following us found that they were getting some information that wasn’t useful for them. In addition, options for following us were limited to email or RSS feeds.

Something had to change!

The Social Channels

So we decided to take a page out of our own Social CRM playbook (it was a typical case of, “the cobbler’s children are the ones with no shoes.”) At a later date, we’ll share details about Social CRM and our specific strategy as a separate blog. For now, suffice it to say that:

We took feeds from our: Blog Site, On Demand Video Site and Live Event Site.
We then parsed them out by role and solution type.
And we made them available across the most popular social channels.

Voila – a lot of blood, sweat and tears for us delivered a much more relevant way to consume the information that you want. And it’s all free to you (we guarantee that you’ll get your money’s worth).

If you want to learn a bit more about Social CRM, check out this video.

Current C5 Followers

If you’re currently following one of the older C5 Insight feeds, we encourage you to look at the new options. You will find that you can filter what you’re receiving to just the information that is most relevant to you. Plus, some of our old channels will soon be discontinued – so take the time to sign up for one of the new ones.

www.c5insight.com/follow

The Free Giveaway

Another exciting bit of news at C5 Insight – we have just completed authoring a book, “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible.” There’s even a special appendix on advanced SharePoint integration. To celebrate the book and our new social channels, we’re giving away 5 free copies of the book.

Where do you sign up? I’m glad you asked. We’re going to give away the 5 free copies by randomly drawing from a list of all of our followers once we reach 200 new followers across all of our social channels (or on March 21, 2011 – whichever comes first). So be sure to sign up to follow us by March 21!

Or, if you’re in a hurry to get the book, go ahead and click the image to order it from Amazon.com. If we draw your name as a winner, you can get a signed copy to treasure for generations to come!

So, be sure to sign up for the social channel of your choice today!

www.c5insight.com/follow

Grant Management

SuperUser Account — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 09:47:36 +0000

Grants Manager is designed to help educational institutions and government organizations to quickly deploy a new grant management system or compliment an existing one. The solution addresses vital business needs in the PS grants and financial aid management space. This video provides an overview of the Grants Management solution. Contact C5 Insight for more information or a live demo.

How to Format in PowerShell Webcast Available

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:07:00 +0000

For everyone starting to learn PowerShell, it’s hard to know where to start. Thomas Lee (author of his blog Under the Stairs and a PowerShell MVP) worked with the great folks at PowerShell.com and Idera to put on a very useful and pertinent webcast on how to format PowerShell output. It’s one in a series called PowerShell Power Hour. Think about it, every command in PowerShell you run outputs data. Wouldn’t you like to know how to get it to display like what you want?

What’s the different in Format-List and Format-Table? What’s a hash table? Can we format currency? He shows you! This is not for someone who’s never used PowerShell before, but for those who are learning commands, getting some output, and need some tuning. You can access the webcast at PowerShell.com’s site after registering for free. It’s also available at Idera’s site as well.

If you need more of a getting started tutorial, check out the first webcast in the series “Getting Started with Windows PowerShell” by Tobias Welner (PowerShell MVP) here. If you’re looking for more focused PowerShell information for SharePoint 2010, Joel Oleson wrote a great post on this topic.

Accelerated Sales with Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010

SuperUser Account — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:59:29 +0000

Combing the power of Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010 can significantly accelerate sales processes. This video includes an overview of dashboards, goal management, SharePoint integration and quote management.

Social Media and Dynamics CRM

SuperUser Account — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:24:16 +0000

Social networking is changing how customer relationships are formed and maintained. Not only is this new paradigm affecting how businesses work with customers, but it is also changing the way that employees collaborate with one another. But the core principals of social networking (decentralized, customer or stakeholder driven, opt-in) are often at odds with the way most businesses structure their CRM solution (centralized, company control driven, targeted). This session provides a strategic framework for integrating your website, CRM and social channels. It includes 3 examples of how to integrate Dynamics CRM with social networking for improved marketing, customer service and collaboration.

Changes Not Saved to SharePoint 2010 "Activities I am Following" Edit Profile Page

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:58:00 +0000

Recently, one of my colleagues came to me with an issue he was having with SharePoint. After making sure it wasn't friendly "user error", I determined this to actually be a bug in SharePoint 2010 RTM. Here's the issue:

On your SharePoint 2010 RTM farm, go to your My Site Profile page, and edit it. You are able to change the "Activities I am following" once, and save. But when you do it again, save and double-check, the change was not saved. What gives?!

“The list cannot be displayed in datasheet view” Error on SharePoint 2010

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:14:00 +0000

I recently came across this and wanted to be sure everyone is aware of this limitation. With the new release of Office 2010 including 64-bit support, there has been some confusion about which version to install. Microsoft has been clear in their recommendation:

Install the 32-bit version for most needs to maintain ActiveX control compatibility and other tools
Install the 64-bit version if you use Excel spreadsheets 2 GB in size

For whatever reason, say you installed Office 2010 64-bit on your machine, and you happily go to your shiny SharePoint 2010 site (or WSS/MOSS), open up a list, and hit Datasheet View. To your surprise, you see this:

Don't Use Spaces When Naming Things in SharePoint

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:05:00 +0000

You know who you are out there. We've all done it, because it’s such an easy thing to fall into. You're just happy as a clam with your shiny new SharePoint site, and you're all ready to create some content. First up, a document library. We love our shared documents, right? Well, how many times after awhile do you find yourself emailing links to files like:

http://intranet/Shared%20Documents/June%20Assessment/Rev2%20Standard%20Quote%20for%20client.xls

Final Word on the Fab 40 Templates for SharePoint 2010

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:15:00 +0000

So we’ve all been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to hear from Microsoft about the fate of the “fab 40” templates for SharePoint 2010. Well, they finally have made a decision. You’re not going to like it. Read the full details.

The bottom line from the article:

Microsoft is not releasing new versions of these templates for SharePoint 2010 Products.

Quick Tip for Uploading Multiple Files to SharePoint 2010 Picture Library

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:34:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 is great at many things, and one of the new integrations with Office 2010 is with uploading multiple pictures to a picture library using the Office Picture Manager.

Say you you’ve got a bunch of logos you want to get into your new fancy 2010 picture library. You would click Upload –> Upload Multiple Pictures right?

Opening PDFs in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 03:42:00 +0000

In SharePoint 2010, you may have noticed a bit of interesting behavior when trying to open a PDF file; we certainly did. In fact, I’m surprised more people have not come across this in their 2010 environments, or perhaps the users simply thought this was the appropriate behavior and didn’t want to inform IT. The issue is this: when you click on a PDF document to open it in your browser (or Adobe Reader) directly from SharePoint – it does not allow you to do this. As you will notice in the screenshot below, there is no “Open” button as there should be. As you can imagine, this defeats the purpose of SharePoint if you are required to save the file before opening it, and we simply had to discover why this was occurring. We're in SharePoint daily, and we continually discover new settings, especially in Central Administration. What we discovered is an additional security setting on the Web Application level, which instructs SharePoint to send information to the Web browser in an ...

SharePoint Dialog "Lightbox" Usage and Tricks

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:13:00 +0000

If you have spent any amount of time with SharePoint 2010, you have seen the “lightbox” feature which allows the SharePoint user to remain on the same page, providing a pop-up dialog box, while dimming the background – very Web 2.0!

This “lightbox” dialog can be enabled/disabled within any list in the Advanced Settings.

How to Re-Create Default Security Groups in Multi-Tenant SharePoint 2010 Environment

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:17:00 +0000

If you’ve been dabbling in SharePoint 2010's new hosting (multi-tenant) environment and been creating host-named site collections, you have may noticed that the default SharePoint security groups typically created by default are not there in the root web. These include:

Members

Owners

Visitors

These are created by the SharePoint API, and apparently isn’t called properly when host-named site collections are created through PowerShell in a multi-tenant environment. This ONLY happens in a multi-tenant environment. Even if you create the host-named site collections through PowerShell in a non-hosted environment, the first time you visit the site, you might be prompted to choose the site template and to create the default security groups.

So how do we get them back without creating them manually? Read on...

Change Tag Spelling and Capitalization in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 02:55:00 +0000

The ability to tag EVERYTHING in SharePoint 2010 is one of my favorite features.

But, if you’re like me, you sometimes create a personal or enterprise tag hastily. And you know what they say about haste … you end up with typographical errors or inconsistent capitalization.

And, if you’re like me, it REALLY bugs you to see all of those inconsistencies in your terms.

Enabling Adobe PDF in SharePoint 2010

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:06:00 +0000

This morning I had the task of getting PDF indexing to work in search on our new SharePoint 2010 installations. There are various existing blogs out there, so I thought I would combine what I used into one place.

The majority of the steps to get this working are documented here at Nick Gratten’s SharePoint blog.

You will also need the adobe PDF small icon. The best place is to get directly from adobe here. Download the 17x17 small icon.

If you are copying the files from another UNC file server (say from your 2007 server) onto Server 2008 (or R2), Explorer might block the files to protect you from yourself. Right click the file, click properties, and make sure you don’t have the option to unblock. If you do, click Unblock.

There have been discussions around if this works on SharePoint 2010 Foundation. While officially I’ve seen where it’s said it is not supported, there are apparently workarounds.

Get Your Head in the Clouds – with Cloud Computing

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:03:00 +0000

Cloud computing has been the subject of much conversation (and hype) for about a year now. Our 4 City Tour (www.successaccelerators.com/4city) focused on this, as did some recent research with one of our partners (white paper forthcoming) and our partner Salesforce.com has long led the charge in the cloud computing conversation.

This past week, cloud computing took center stage at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC. From all indications, cloud computing will be the number one area of focus for Microsoft for the next 12 months (or more). So just what is cloud computing, why is it important to you and what is Microsoft doing that will impact it? Let’s tackle each of those questions in sequence.

SharePoint 2010 Granular Restores

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:24:00 +0000

I wanted to take a minute and talk about a really cool new feature of SharePoint 2010 relating to backups – Granular Restores. While doing some test migrations from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010, we needed to choose the best method to selectively move data from an old site to a new site.

In SharePoint 2010, you have the ability to restore content (down to the list level) from an unattached SQL database. How cool is that! Here’s the new Backup and Restore options in Central Admin:

SharePoint in Plain English

SuperUser Account — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:00:16 +0000

A very brief and informative video on the fundamentals of document management and collaboration in SharePoint.

Best Practice: Should SharePoint Replace Your File Servers?

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:51:00 +0000

One of SharePoint’s popular features is Document Management, which leads many organizations to migrate their data from files shares or their Document Management System over to SharePoint. Is this best practice? Let’s not be hasty, and look at the various things to consider on both sides of the coin.

User Adoption and Ideas for Getting Everyone On Board

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:43:00 +0000

Although the idea of user adoption is not a new idea, we consistently find our clients asking for more ways or better ways to get users to “use the system.” Depending on the scope of the project, we always recommend some level of governance and training for our clients to get the most from their implementation. These are critical pieces of the overall solution that we feel play a significant role in whether or not the product is accepted or rejected by the users.

In addition, with the recent release of SharePoint 2010, this topic has once again become a priority for many of our clients looking to implement this new version. While superior to the previous version in far too many ways to mention here, the user interface has been completely enhanced with the “Ribbon” interface first seen Office 2007. For users of SharePoint 2007, this will be a slight learning curve to use the new interface, but as with Office 2007, once learned the productivity and efficiency will increase exponentially.

SharePoint 2010 World Premiere

SuperUser Account — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 is a leap forward for document management, collaboration, intranet portals, business intelligence and much more. View this video to learn the fundamentals of SharePoint and some of the new functionality available in SharePoint 2010.

Closing vs. Deleting a Web Part from a SharePoint Page

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:18:00 +0000

I was reminded today about the difference of removing vs. deleting a web part from a site page today. There’s already a great blog on the subject and it can be found here.

The quick and dirty is that when you either choose to “close” on a web part or click the “X” in edit view, this does NOT remove it from the page, it only hides it. There is a Closed Web Parts gallery where this closed web part gets placed, and if there are enough closed web parts, it can significantly decrease your pages load time, as it still loads the closed web parts.

SharePoint 2010 Communities: Allow Users to Connect, Innovate and Share

SuperUser Account — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:50:00 +0000

Social computing promotes sharing and openness within communities. Learn from customers how their enhanced people-centric collaboration solutions empowered their users and improved performance within the organization.

SharePoint 2010: What is in each version?

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:11:00 +0000

Like SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 comes in three different versions. However, the version names have changed and what is available in each version is different. So if you’re moving from the SharePoint 2007 world to the SharePoint 2010 world, it can be a bit confusing (it has been for me). The versions are:

SharePoint Foundation 2010: This is the version freely included with Windows Server and is comparable to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server (WSS) 2007. It includes many of the basics and may be all that a small business needs to get started with SharePoint.
SharePoint Server 2010 – Standard: This is the next level of SharePoint and includes important features such as Enterprise Search and My Sites (including the social media components) that most businesses will find important. This is comparable to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
SharePoint Server 2010 – Enterprise: This adds more functionality to Standard including better business data connectivity (for connecting to CRM and accounting applications, for example), Excel Services (for showing Excel info in SharePoint – very nice functionality for allowing users to create their own enterprise dashboards), and a number of other advanced workflow management, Office integration and analytics tools.

“The given key was not in the dictionary” Error When Creating Managed Account in SharePoint 2010

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:51:00 +0000

When I was configuring a new installation of SharePoint Server 2010 the other day, I hit a snag when creating a Managed Service Account while creating a new Web Application. My existing Application Pool account wasn’t listed and I couldn’t choose the “Configurable” option to manually type it in. I attempted to make the existing application pool AD account a managed account, but got the error:

“The given key was not in the dictionary”

To correct this error, you need to go into Active Directory and make a security change:

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Menu Preview

SuperUser Account — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:01:51 +0000

Quickly and easily find and use relevant features with the new contextual SharePoint Ribbon.

Web Marketing with SharePoint 2010

SuperUser Account — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:52:43 +0000

Digital Marketers today need to launch an increasing amount of websites quickly and easily. SharePoint 2010 shows marketers how to be competitive and build their business through digital marketing.

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites Drives Revenues

SuperUser Account — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:39:03 +0000

See how Seek.com brings job seekers, employers, and advertisers together.

What Can SharePoint Do For You?

SuperUser Account — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Improve Productivity, Efficiency, Agility. Catch a glimpse of the exciting work customers are rolling out across their enterprise. See what SharePoint 2010 can do for you

SharePoint 2010 Search Demo

SuperUser Account — Sun, 09 May 2010 08:16:00 +0000

Take a tour of the search capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010

Better Together: Microsoft CRM and SharePoint

SuperUser Account — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

SharePoint and Dynamics CRM are both powerful development platforms. This video takes a look at how these tools are being combined to accelerate performance.