SharePoint911 Blog Feed

SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Marketing Video - Part 6

Jennifer Mason — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:47:34 +0000

Body:

This is the sixth post in my series about a sample Marketing Intranet site. In this post we are going to be adding a Marketing video to the home page using the Media Web Part. This web part comes out of the box with SharePoint and can be used to display media files on any web part page. There are several configurations you can make that will allow you to customize how the video is displayed.

In our example we just want to display the most recent marketing campaign video on the Intranet site. Whenever the page loads we want the video to start to play. We can do this by adding the Media Web Part to the home page of our Intranet site.

Once the web part is added to the page, we will edit the web part properties to configure our video.

Once we click the option to configure the Ribbon will display the various configuration options available to us:

Here is a breakdown of the various options we can configure:

Option	Description	Example
Change Media	When selected the file will you choose will be uploaded to SharePoint and then configured to play in the web part.	When you want to select the media file to be displayed or you want to change the existing video to a new video.
Change Image	This image is the preview image that is displayed in the web part prior to the video playing. This is what the web part will display if the video does not start automatically.	Use this option to select or change the preview image for the web part.
Title	Sets the Web Part Title (visible in Chrome).	If you want to have a custom title. In most cases you would set this to something other than Media Web Part.
Start Media Automatically	Plays the media on page load.	If you want the media to auto play you would select this, otherwise it users will have to push "play" in the web part for the media to start.
Loop Until Stopped	Keeps the media playing on a continual loop until the user stops in within the web part.	If you want the media to keep looping you would use this option. Be careful on this one because you don't want to annoy your site visitors.
Styles	Sets the color scheme for the media.	This is the strip above and below the media file on the page. You have two options, Dark and Light.
Size	Sets the height and width of the web part.	You can configure the horizontal and vertical width of the web part. You can also elect to use the Lock Aspect Ratio option to ensure that the height and width are expanded or shrunk at the same scale. This should keep your media file from displaying distorted.

For my example Intranet site I have the media web part displayed in the top right corner of the page. I have it configured to play automatically but not to loop. This means it will play when users first hit the page but it won't keep looping. I figure they really only need to see it once. Each quarter when we have a new media message we will update the home page. This will be a good way to get people coming back to the site because they will want to see the new quarterly marking message. Here is a screenshot of my home page.

Something to Consider

Not all file types are supported in the Media Player web part. To see a list of what is supported, check out these links.

The most common asked out file format that isn't supported seems to be flash. If you have a flash video that you want to display on the page, here are some links for some alternate options:

Category: Office 365 Grid

Published: 2/10/2012 11:47 AM

Control Formatting of SharePoint Announcements

Laura Rogers — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:58:31 +0000

Body:

We like to give people the freedom to add content to SharePoint as they wish in most cases, and we like them to be able to add announcements on their site whenever they need to. Do you ever cringe when you look at a SharePoint site, because of some crazy font or ugly colors that were used in the announcements that are prominently displayed on the home page? In this post, I'll show you how to tightly control the formatting of the way announcements look on your site.

This solution will work in either SharePoint 2007 or 2010, and will work on any version such as Foundation or Enterprise. This is also a good fit for SharePoint Online with Office 365.

A quick little bit of background… I maintain the site for the Birmingham, Alabama SharePoint User Group, and every month I post an announcement about the next upcoming meeting. The announcement is formatted the same way each time, with the speaker's photo on the side and a certain font used for the name of their presentation, and a certain font used for the date, and a different one for the description. Each month when I was adding a new announcement, I decided it was taking too long to do all this formatting, even though it was the same every time, which is what prompted me to create a workflow. So, although my motivation was just efficiency, your motivation may be uniformity among announcements.

In my SPUG announcements list, I have specific field names such as the speaker's name, the sponsor name, the speaker's job title, etc. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to keep the field names pretty generic for this post.

Here are the steps:

Create an "Announcements" list, if there isn't already one on your site.
Create a list called "Create Announcements", using the list template "custom list".
Create the following columns in the Create Announcements list:
Green Header - Single line of text
Brown Header - Single line of text
Body - Multiple lines of text - Enhanced rich text
Photo URL - Hyperlink
Expiration - Date/Time
Then, I renamed "Title" to "Black Title"
In the Announcements list, a template must be created. Create a new announcement. Make up a title, and then put the cursor in the body of the announcement. Since I want to show the speaker's photo to the left of the session description, I create a table. On the Insert tab, insert a table that's got one row and two columns.
In the left cell of the table, type "Picture", as a placeholder. In the right cell, type the following:
Now it's time to apply the colors. Select the text, and apply your desired colors to each line, as so:
Click Save.
Open that same announcement back up, click to edit it, and put the cursor in the Body field. Open the HTML source code, like this:
Copy the HTML code to the clipboard. Open SharePoint Designer.
Create a new workflow based on the Create Announcements list. Name it "New Announcement".
Add an action to set a workflow variable. (In SharePoint 2007, the action is called Store Dynamic String) Call the variable BodyTextVar, and it is a string variable.
Click the blue word Value. Click the little ellipsis next to it (the button with 3 dots). Paste the contents of the clipboard, which is the HTML source code. Mine looks like this
<div class="ExternalClassF2152D91E5604C86AA56CB2DF7047264"><table width="100%" class="ms-rteTable-default" border="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td>Picture</td><td><p style="color: #000; font-size: 18pt"><strong>Black Title</strong></p><p style="color: green; font-size: 12pt">Green Header</p><p style="color: #8f6c2e; font-size: 10pt"><strong>Brown Header</strong></p><p>Body</p></td></tr></tbody></table></div>
In the spot of the code where you see the word "Picture", that needs to be changed to HTML code for a picture. The Photo URL field will be used. Basically, each placeholder in the code will be replaced with the name of the actual field from the list, like this:
Note that when you insert the Body field, be sure and change Return field as: Plain Text.
When you insert the Photo URL field, be sure to select Return field as: URL
I used the <Add or Change Lookup> button in the code, to insert where the fields need to go. For example, I replaced Green Header with the actual field called Green Header. Click OK.
In the workflow, add the action Create List Item.
Click the blue words This List, and pick Announcements.
Set the Title field to the current list's Black Title, and click the Add button. Add the body field, like this, and click OK twice.
One more field. Click the Add button. Choose "Expires" and match it to the current list's "Expiration". The Create new list item action will then look like this. Click OK.
Publish the workflow. Note that since we didn't change the workflow initiation (Start) settings, it is only set up to be triggered manually, which is fine for testing.
Before you create an item in the Create Announcements list, be sure to get the URL of a photo that's in a library in SharePoint, to paste into the Photo URL field. Create a new item in the Create Announcements list, and fill in all the fields. Run the workflow.
You'll notice that your new announcement gets created. Lovely! Any tweaking that needs to be done regarding formatting and alignment needs to be done in the HTML code that's in the first action "set variable" in the workflow.
Another enhancement: You may want users to be able to create items in Create Announcements but not create or edit items in the actual announcements list. This can be done. In the workflow, insert an Impersonation Step, and put those 2 steps inside of it. That way, you can take away the users permissions to contribute to the announcements list, and the workflow will still be able to create items in it, because it runs with the credentials of you, the person who published the workflow.
The web part view: In the Announcements list, create a new view. Make it a Standard view, and call it Web Part. Only check the box next to the Body column. Set the filter so that Expires is greater than or equal to [Today]. Uncheck the box next to Tabular View.
On the home page of your site. Go to the web part toolpane of the Announcements web part. Change the view to this new Web Part view that you just created. Click OK. What is this for? Now, your announcements will be fully displayed on the home page without being cut off, and since we inserted the title field into the body of the announcement, only the body field needs to be shown.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,announcements,publishing,workflows,Foundation,web parts

Category: workflows

Published: 2/7/2012 11:58 PM

Presenting…The Iowa SharePoint User Group!!

Todd O. Klindt — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:42:49 +0000

Body:

You’ve asked for it, you’ve begged for it, and now, all your prayers have been answered. The Iowa SharePoint UG (lovingly referred to as the IASPUG going forward) will be having its first meeting this month. I know you’re excited, so here are the important details:

When: Thursday February 16th, 2012, 4:00 – 5:30 PM

Where: Microsoft office at 1408 Locust Street, Des Moines

Fantastic web site: http://www.iowasharepoint.com

For our first meeting we’re going to talk a little about our goals for the group. Then John Baldwin from Pella Windows is going to talk about their SharePoint environment and experiences. Then I’m going to take the stage with a talk I call “SharePoint in the Trenches.” I’ll cover some of the more hysterical issues I’ve experienced as a consultant, and how you can avoid them. After we’re finished laughing at other people’s misery we’ll go home. There is a bar within walking distance of the office, so there might end up being a SharePint afterwards.

We’ll be updating the web site soon with some registration information, so you’ll be able to reserve a spot. While you’re waiting for the registration to go up, start planning your excuse for why you’ll be leaving work early in the 16th. Keep in mind that it is the cold and flu season, if you need help coming up with a reason to leave work.

If you have any questions or suggestions (besides “don’t’ let Todd speak”) leave a comment here, or hit me up on Twitter.

Category: SharePoint 2010

Published: 2/5/2012 9:42 PM

Display User Data Fields for a SharePoint List

Laura Rogers — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:31:14 +0000

Body:

You have all of this data in SharePoint, and you have all of this information about the site users, such as their department names, phone numbers, and much more. Instead of asking for site users to fill out all of their pertinent information every time they fill out a list item, form or survey in SharePoint, wouldn't it be nice to just use the information that is already there?

A while back, I wrote an article on how to report off of this data using Microsoft Access SharePoint: Find out About Site Users within Microsoft Access (Screencast). This method is flawed because once you create the report, there isn't a way to display it back in SharePoint… it's only in Access. I also wrote this post Pass Default Value From a Web Part Page to a New Item, which works okay, but you're really copying all that user data into some fields, which is really inefficient.

This week, I discovered a much better way than those other two, and it entails creating a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report. This solution can be used with all versions of SharePoint (not just enterprise). Before getting started, the prerequisites are that SSRS is already installed on a SharePoint web front end server, and it's all set up and integrated with SharePoint. Also, make sure that you are using SQL 2008 R2, or steps 19 and 20 won't work. You'll need the Report Builder Report and the Report Data Source content types added to a document library (I called my library "Reports"). For more information about SSRS, I did a presentation recently: Easy Reporting off of SharePoint Data.

In this example, I'm going to use a regular SharePoint tasks list, and the goal is to display the list of tasks, showing the "Assigned To" column, and also showing more information about each user that has a task assigned to them. (Note that part of these instructions are easier if you are working at the root level of the site collection, as opposed to a sub-site.)
Here's the final result. Those last two columns come directly from the SharePoint user information list:

In your Reports library, click the New button and choose Report Data Source.
Name it TeamSite, data source is Microsoft SharePoint List,and use your own SharePoint site URL as the connection string. Credentials has to be Windows authentication. Click OK.
In the library, click the New button again, and choose Report Builder Report. (If you've never used it before, you will be prompted to install it)
Note: if you get the error "To use Report Builder, you must install .Net Framework 3.5 on this computer", here is the resolution.
In the wizard, choose New Report. Click Table or Matrix Wizard.
Choose Create a Dataset, and click Next.
Choose to browse to find a data source, and navigate to the current library, which is where you already created the TeamSite data source, which is the one you want to select. Click Next.
Check the box next to your Tasks list on the left. (Note to make sure that there are some items in your list. It just helps to have test data.) Click Next.
Add a few fields to the Values section, by dragging them over. Click Next.
Since I didn't select any grouping on the Arrange Fields screen, on the Choose the Layout screen, all the options are grayed out. Click Next.
Pick a color preference on the Choose a Style screen, and click Finish.
If you'd like to preview your creation so far, click the Run button at the top, then click Design to close the preview. Go ahead and click the Save button at the top left, and drill down to your Reports library. Save this as TaskReport.rdl.
So far, we haven't done anything extraordinary, that's just a pretty report. Now it's time to add those user information columns that I promised you. Right click on Datasets on the left, and choose Add Dataset.
Call this new dataset UserInfo, and choose to use a dataset embedded in the report. Choose your TeamSite data source from the drop-down.
Click the Query Designer Button.
Check the box next to the User Information List on the left, and click OK.
(Note that only if you do NOT see the user information list, this is because it only exists at the root level of the site collection. You'll have to create a separate data source, call it "TopSite". Repeat steps 1 and 2, using the URL of the root site in your site collection. In the screenshot above, you'll be selecting the other, "TopSite".)
On the Dataset Properties screen, click OK.
A couple of columns can now be added. Again, the goal is to show extra information about each of the "Assigned To" people. Click to select the last column in the report, and choose Insert Column -> Right. Do this twice.
In the first new empty cell (not header), right click and choose Expression.
Paste this formula, click OK, and I'll explain it all in a minute.
=Lookup(Fields!Assigned_To.Value,Fields!Name.Value,Fields!Department.Value, "UserInfo")
Right click the next empty cell next to that one, pick expression again, and this one will have the job title:
=Lookup(Fields!Assigned_To.Value,Fields!Name.Value,Fields!Title.Value, "UserInfo")
In the column header cells, type titles for the new columns, "Assignee Department", and "Assignee Title".
Save. Close Report Builder. Now in your reports library, you can click to open this report (RDL file) and see how lovely it is.

Here's how that lookup formula really works…

The Lookup function has four sections, separated by commas:

Fields!Assigned_To.Value - This is the field in the current (tasks) dataset that is going to exactly match up to a field in the other (UserInfo) dataset. You can click Fields (DataSet1) (in the screenshot under Category) to pick from the list of all the other fields.
Fields!Name.Value - This is the field in the other dataset (UserInfo) that is going to exactly match with the Assigned_To field. In the user information list, the Name field is "Firstname Lastname".
Fields!Department.Value - this third part is the name of the field in the other dataset (UserInfo) that you want to display in this cell. To see a list of the names of the fields in that dataset, in the Category section of the above screenshot, you can click Datasets and then click UserInfo.
"UserInfo" - This fourth part of the formula is the name of the second dataset that you're looking up to. This is what we named it at step 13.

Anyway, that's it, I hope you have fun with this. I absolutely love SSRS. Don't forget that there's the Report Viewer web part, which will let you display your report on any page in SharePoint. Another side note that I may blog about separately is the fact that you can cache the data in your dataset, so that it doesn't take so long to render the report. It has to be a shared dataset to be able to do that, and we didn't do any shared datasets in these instructions, just for simplicity's sake.

Note, if you got stuck at step 15 and you still don't see the user information list, just paste this in the big white box called Query:

<RSSharePointList xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<ListName>UserInfo</ListName>
</RSSharePointList>

Here's the reference for the Lookup Function.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SSRS,SQL Server Reporting Services,SQL 2008 R2,Report Builder,User Information

Category: SSRS

Published: 2/1/2012 11:31 PM

Netcast 105 - So Many Things

Todd O. Klindt — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:36:03 +0000

Body:

Tonight's episode is jam-packed with great information, mostly from other people's blogs. I talk about how to troubleshoot the Sandbox Solution service, understanding the Logging DB, account permissions and SharePoint account permissions.

MP3 File

WMV File

M4V (iPod) File

Running Time: 41:17

Links:

Making sense out of the Logging DB

Update Alert URLs

Add words to SharePoint's dictionary

Site Collection storage is wrong

Sandbox Solution troubleshooting

App pool recycling blog post

Scott Hanselman's "Being a Phony"

Individual account permissions needed

Submit Form to a Secure Location

Laura Rogers — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:06:48 +0000

Body:

Forms and security. It is a common requirement to have a form that can be filled out, and when it is submitted, it goes to a location that the form submitter does not have access to. This is tricky because the users need to have contribute access to a list or library in order to create new items in it, but then if they can do that, they can access everything else in the library. There are many variations of this requirement, but in this post, I'll show how it can be done in a pretty simple way.

General overview: This concept can be done with either a list item or a library. (I'll just use the term "list" in this overview, just to get the general point across). Create a content type. Create two lists. Add the content type to both lists. List A "New Items" items can be created by anyone on the site, and List B "Locked List" is locked down so that only managers have permissions to access it. When new items are created in "New Items", a SharePoint Designer workflow runs an impersonation step that copies that item over to the "Locked List", and then deletes it from the original list.

This solution can be done out of the box with SharePoint 2010 (any version), and SharePoint Online with Office 365.

Since InfoPath is the most common thing that I use to create forms, and I get asked about this a lot, I'm going to use an InfoPath form in my example here.

If you don't already have a document library on your site called "Form Templates", go ahead and create it.
When you publish your form to SharePoint, instead of publishing it directly to a form library, publish it as a content type. Note that if your form has been published as an administrative template, that's fine too, but just less common. Click Next.
Choose Create a new Content Type, and click Next.
Name your content type, with whatever the name of the form is. Mine is a Check Request. Click Next.
On the screen where you specify a location for the form template, click Browse. Select the Form Templates library on your site, and give your form a name. I called mine CheckRequest.xsn. Click Next.
Pick your fields that you want to be columns, and click Next. Click Publish. Click Close.
Create two new form libraries. "New Check Requests" and "Locked Check Requests".
Go to the Library Settings screen of New Check Requests, and click Advanced Settings.
Change Allow Management of Content Types to YES. Click OK.
On the Form Library Settings screen, click Add from existing site content types.
Click Check Request (or the name of your own content type from step 4) and click the Add button to move it to the right side. Click OK.
Click the "Form" content type, and click Delete this content type.
Go to the Library settings screen of Locked Check Requests. Repeat steps 8 through 12.
In your InfoPath form, make sure that the Submit data connection is set up to submit the forms to the New Check Requests library.
Open your site n SharePoint Designer, and create a new workflow based on the New Check Requests library.
Name the workflow New Check Request, and click OK.
Put your cursor underneath the Step 1 box, and click the Impersonation Step button in the ribbon, so your screen will look like this:
Delete Step 1. Put your cursor inside of the Impersonation step and add the action called Copy List Item. Then add the action Delete Item below it.
Set up the copy so that it copies from the current list over to the Locked Check Requests. Then make it delete the current item. Like this:
Click Workflow Settings in the ribbon. Under start options, only put a check box next to Start workflow automatically when an item is created.
Publish the workflow.

Okay, it's done now. The key here is that the permissions will be set up as so:

People who need to be able to fill out the form: Give them Contribute permissions on the New Check Requests Library. Do not give them permissions on the Locked Check Requests library at all.
People who need to be able to access the whole list of forms that have been submitted: If they need to be able to *modify the forms that have been submitted, give them Contribute access to the Locked Check Requests library. If you only want them to be able to see the submitted items and not change them, just give them read access.
The key here is that when the workflow copies items over from one list to another, it uses the login of the person who published the workflow. The best practice for workflows with impersonation steps is to publish the workflow as the SharePoint admin account, and not someone's personal account. You know, just in case. You wouldn't want someone to leave the company and then none of the workflows function anymore, right?

Again, to reiterate…. This is just the most simple way to accomplish this goal. Of course, with impersonation steps in a workflow, you could change permission on each individual item in the list or library via workflow. It just gets kinda messy and hard to manage when you start delving into individual item permissions. The method in this blog post is simple because you the permissions are set at the library level.

Keep in mind that with some list types in SharePoint, such as a custom list, there is a setting in advanced settings that you can use. Unfortunately, this setting just doesn't exist in libraries.

Note: If people will be modifying the submitted forms after they have been moved to the Locked Check Requests Library, there is one more important consideration… the submit data connection. You'll have to create another submit data connection that submits to Locked Check Requests, because you probably don't want to have a bunch of duplicate files. There just needs to be a condition that looks to see if this is a form that has already been initially submitted. So, for example, you can create a field called "FormStatus". When the submit button is clicked, add an action to set a field's value, where you set the FormStatus to submitted. That way, you can create a condition so that if a form has already been submitted initially, then it gets submitted to the Locked Check Requests.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Office 365,Workflows,InfoPath,security,forms,SharePoint Designer

Category: InfoPath

Published: 1/26/2012 12:06 AM

SharePoint Project Deployment Error: Error occurred in deployment step 'Recycle IIS Application Pool': The local SharePoint server is not available. Check that the server is running and connected to the SharePoint farm.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:54:50 +0000

If you build your development environment on a single server then chances are your dev account is an admin (or your developing as a domain admin) and so you’ll never run into this. But if you have a more realistic development environment—which is never a bad thing—you may be google-binging this error and now you’re here

This shows up because the account under which the VS2010 process is running doesn’t have access to the appropriate databases to install your visual studio 2010 package. Since it is a development environment and we don’t care too much about permissions, I would just go ahead and make sure the user is a local admin on the SharePoint 2010 Server (which you should be developing on) and that your user is a db_owner on both the SharePoint Config and Content Database that you are developing against.

Also make sure VS2010 is running as Administrator.

If you care about permissions then we’ll just pretend you probably shouldn’t actually be doing any development against the server. You can try making sure that your user has the appropriate permissions to administer the server via PowerShell. Even if this doesn’t get your deployment story complete in Visual Studio, it isn’t much to get a PowerShell script together that does the deployment itself.

SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department - Part 1

Jennifer Mason — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:14:44 +0000

Body:

In this blog post I wanted to cover some of the basic options you have for working with different types of content on your SharePoint site. The example solution that I will be covering is a Marketing Intranet site that contains shared files that can be used and accessed by internal employees. Basically the site is a repository of content that users access as needed. Here is a screenshot of the solution home page.

The solution includes several main components, including:

A place to store the approved marketing images. These are the images that have been approved and tested and can be used in materials created by internal employees.
A place to the store the approved PowerPoint slides. These are the common boiler plate slides that everyone should be using in their presentations.
A place to access the latest marketing brochures.
A place to discuss marketing initiatives with the team.
A place to showcase the latest marketing video.

In this series I am going to create a post that covers each of the items referenced above and then a closing post that discusses some tips for site design and layout. The purpose of this series is to spark some ideas of different ways that you can organize and store different types of content. All the solutions I will be presenting are out of the box items. I find that these features are often overlooked, so I think it is very important to cover them in detail so that everyone is aware of the different things that can be done out of the box.

As I complete the additional items in the series I will be sure to update the links in the table below so that they are easily accessible from one location. If all goes well, I hope to have this series completed in the next week or so.

Post	Link
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department - Part 1	http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=98
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Storing Images - Part 2	http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=99
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Slide Library - Part 3	http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=100
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Marketing Brochures - Part 4	http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=102
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Marketing Discussions - Part 5	http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=103
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Marketing Video - Part 6	http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/blogs/jennifer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=104
SharePoint 2010, Office 365: An Example Intranet Site for a Marketing Department- Site Design Tips & Tricks - Part 7

Category: Office 365 Grid

Published: 1/19/2012 9:14 AM

How to handle downtime by sending all requests to one HTML page

Randy Drisgill — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:26:00 +0000

I had a nice little Sunday planned today, but it was interrupted by the SharePoint911 uptime monitors telling me that our web server had pooped itself (technical term… trust me). Shane did some poking around and found that the hard drive had died… we have backups but bringing it back online is going to take a bit (our clients always come first!). We decided to temporarily put up a maintenance page until we can bring the site back completely. I had to do some GoogleBing’ing to find a simple way to funnel all of the web links that point to our various pages and blogs to one page telling people we are working on the problem.

Turns out the solution is actually pretty simple. Any ASP.NET 2 app (including SharePoint) can funnel all web traffic to one HTML page just by placing a file named app_offline.htm into the IIS web root. Here is more information on the technique:

Taking an ASP.NET 2.0 Application Offline

I did run into two gotcha’s:

Make sure the file is over 512 bytes – Not sure why, but IIS thinks the file couldn’t possibly convey any useful information if its under that size and doesn’t use it.
Loading images on the page can be challenging, they need to come from another web app or server or you need to do a lot of extra work to encode them. I didn’t bother with this method but you can search for it on the web if you want… I just hosted the images from our public Dropbox folder.

Health Check - Happy New Year to you and your SharePoint servers!

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:40:20 +0000

Happy New Year. Hopefully you have recovered from all of the good times and/or you got some rest on the break.

I figured many of us have SharePoint 2010 deployments at this point that are mature. Which is awesome. But one thing I know about mature SharePoint farms is we often take them for granted. Below I am going to throw a couple of things at you to double check this week and make sure SharePoint is happy.

What is your build number?

You should be running at least service pack 1 at this point. Now if you are not I am not recommending blindly installing it on your production server. You should test it first. J But once you do let's get it on there. How do you check your build number? Todd has a great blog post here that will show you how to find your build number and then tell you what it means. He also has links to the different patches for download. Remember service packs are always good cumulative updates… you should only install them if you have a very specific reason and you have tested.

Check those health rules

We have all gotten used to the big read bar at the top of the page in Central Administration. We know that it is generally there because some of the rules can just never be made happy. But when was the last time you checked to see what problems it was reporting? Especially with some of the updates the rules have gotten better. So take a quick peek at the list today and see if there is anything you can remedy. No reason to have a broken farm.

Check your disk space

What the heck. I know when I was a full time systems guy I had scripts that checked drive space daily and reported back to me. But maybe you don't. Either way RDP into all of those servers and just make sure some rogue log or temp files aren't wasting a bunch of space. It will take you 5 minutes per server and might very well save you from having a bad day in the future.

How is SQL Server doing?

Whether you manage your SQL Server or you have a DBA who does it you need to ask the questions. This isn't a perfect list but off the top of my head I would ask:

How much free space do we have on the data drive? The log drive? The backup drives?
How long is that space going to last us at current growth rates?
When was the last time someone confirmed we can restore from the SQL backups?
Does SQL need any patches applied for general SQL Server health?
Anybody checked the SQL logs for errors?

Remember even though it is easy to say that isn't your job it is. If SQL Server isn't happy then SharePoint isn't happy.

What is your backup/restore plan?

I know you have one in theory but do you have one in actuality? When was the last time you did a practice restore? I will leave at this. You know if you have a bad feeling in your stomach right now or not.

Clearly this isn't an exhaustive list but you get the idea. Spend this slow week making sure that awesome server farm you built is still awesome. Next week you will start getting busy and will go back into firefighting mode. Don't make your next SharePoint touch point require a 4 alarm fire.

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

SharePoint Admin class in Orlando

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:56:36 +0000

I sat down to write a blog post but then my VM client decided it wanted to install updates and all of that chaos so I got distracted. Now I am out of time to write a helpful blog post. So instead I will put a quick post here to remind you that I am teaching my SharePoint 2010 admin class in warm Orlando, Florida the week of December 12^th. I don't know about you but Cincinnati (where I live) is very cold that time of year so I am looking forward to a company sponsored get away. Why don't you come join me?

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

Free Turkey Today!

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Update: I am an idiot. Here is the link to sign up. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/920583097

Unfortunately it isn't the kind you eat it is just more of Shane and Todd's cheeky shenanigans. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, two of SharePoint's biggest Turkeys are putting on a free webinar from 3 to 4 PM EST today 11/23/2011. The session will be completely informal where anyone can post SharePoint questions and they will give it their all to answer them. Cranberry sauce not included.

Fine print:

The meeting only holds 100 people so first come, first served.
When you register the email will come from Citrix. It is very common for it to get caught in junk/spam filters.
The session will be recorded but the recording will more than likely not be available after the fact.
Be sure to wear your comfy/stretchy pants so you don't get too stuffed.

We all know you aren't doing any real work today anyway so you might as well jump into the part.

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

PS – Why aren't you signed up for my admin class in Florida in December? You got somewhere better to be.

Find me at SharePoint Conference

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:29:13 +0000

Hopefully your bags are packed and you are ready to head to the Anaheim for the sold out SharePoint Conference next week. I know I am excited. Quickly I wanted to give you a list of my sessions and other events where you can stop by to say hello or heckle (whichever you prefer) next week.

Sessions:

All three sessions will be a good old time. My partner in crime Todd Klindt and I will do our best to entertain and hopefully teach you something along the way.

Understanding SharePoint Administration Part 1 Monday 11 AM Marriott: Platinum Ballroom 1-5
Understanding SharePoint Administration Part 2 Monday 3:45 PM Marriott: Platinum Ballroom 1-5
Planning and Implementing SharePoint 2010 Upgrade and Migration Tuesday 3:15 PM Marriott: Platinum Ballroom 1-5

Post Conference:

No Todd just me but it is a special all day deep dive into SharePoint 2010 administration on Friday. Should be lots of fun. I plan to beat as much knowledge into your heads as possible. The post conference is an additional registration. For more info check out http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/pre-post-conference-trainingpage.aspx#5

Free Books:

Who doesn't love free books. Todd, Steve, and I will be signing our SharePoint 2010 admin book at a few different places during the week.

Monday between 6:30 and 8:30pm we will be at the ESPN Zone at the Idera party signing books.
Wednesday at 3 PM we will be at the Rackspace booth. They bought a lot so come get one.
Wednesday evening during the Reception in the Exhibit hall we will be signing a few more books at the Rackspace booth.

Random events:

Tuesday from 12 to 12:30 Todd and I will be at the Quest booth doing some crazy thing. Some game show. Should be fun and requires audience participation.

At the booth:

SharePoint911 will have a booth as always. Come say hello. We have a whole bunch of fun people to meet there. For more info or pretty pictures of the team click here.

Randy Drisgill - MVP
Phil Jirsa
Todd Klindt - MVP
Jennifer Mason
Jonathan Mast
Raymond Mitchell
Larry Riemann
Laura Rogers - MVP
John Ross - MVP
Nicola Young
Shane Young – MVP

Even more important? At the booth we will be giving away stress reliever Cows, and two new mystery animals. J Very exciting. Be sure to Moo at anyone in the booth to get the mystery animals.

See ya there!

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Error:The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:21:39 +0000

I think a lot of people probably see this error at some point in time and they always assume it has something to do with the name of the project or the name of the feature. What is really happening here is that one of the file names within the package manifest is just too long. It can be any file… whether its deployed to a Mapped Folder, the Features folder, or whatever. What I typically do is go into Visual Studio, click on the option to show all files in Solution Explorer:

And then find the pkgobj folder. From there you can drill into the Debug/Release (depending on your build config) folder and sort through the various xml and element manifests to find some particularly offensive filenames. A good place to start would be the generated Package_Manifest.xml file. A lot of times if you have a particularly long project name then you can get stuck with stupid paths deploying to ControlTemplates (visual web part) folders and the like.

Also, I would always organize your SharePoint projects somewhere not in the default My Documents folder in Visual Studio. Put them somewhere off of a drive root. In my VMs, I like to have a separate virtual external drive that I put all of my project work on. So for example all of my projects come in at something like: F:\projects\

Come see me present at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim

Randy Drisgill — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:07:00 +0000

If you are planning to attend the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Oct 3rd-6th 2011, come on out to one of my sessions and say hello. I was fortunate enough to be selected to co-present a couple different sessions with John Ross this year. SharePoint911 will also have a booth at the show and a good portion of the team is likely to be hanging around there at any given time AND we should have our brand new (top secret) squishy farm animal to give away.

Here are the sessions I will be co-presenting. I think the session date and times are still somewhat tentative so be sure to check the schedule at the conference:

Creating Beautiful and Engaging Web Sites with SharePoint 2010
Monday, October 3rd – 11:00 am
Randy Drisgill & John Ross
Level: 200
mySPC Link

The process of building, branding and delivering a beautiful web site is more than just skin deep. In this session we will walk you through best practices for planning, creating and deploying engaging web sites with SharePoint 2010. We will also share best practices around the branding process with lessons learned and examples from real world SharePoint branding projects.

NOTE: I want to be clear that this session isn’t about the mechanics of creating master pages and page layouts. There is another session that covers that topic. This is more of an overview of what goes into making public facing sites that don’t look like SharePoint.

Branding and Customizing My Sites with SharePoint 2010
Wednesday, October 5th – 10:30 am
John Ross & Randy Drisgill
Level: 300
mySPC Link

The My Sites capability of SharePoint 2010 is the backbone of SharePoint's social capabilities. In this session, we'll cover how to customize your My Site deployment and how to apply custom branding. We'll also discuss how you can effectively control which web parts are deployed to your users.

Branding a Public Website on Office 365
Wednesday, October 5th – 3:15 pm
Randy Drisgill & John Ross
Level: 200
mySPC Link

Are you considering building a website with SharePoint Online? Did you know that your Office 365 subscription includes the ability to publish a public facing Internet Site as well as the Team site? In this session, we will walk you through tips and best practices on how you can brand an Internet Site that runs on Office 365 as well as how to add a little style to your internal team site.

Getting Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 (WSS 4.0)

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 08:34:03 +0000

It took me about five minutes to find the link to this download (which was about 5 minutes longer than I expected it to take). Figured I’d posit it here in case anyone else was looking…

Link Here

Getting REST (ADO.NET Data Services) working in SharePoint 2010 Tech Preview

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:44:20 +0000

This post applies to the Tech Preview version of SharePoint 2010, which happens to be the one I'm working with until we get our hands on beta 2.

In either case (TP or Beta 2) if you want to take advantage of the REST data feeds and/or the Client Object Model, ADO .NET Data Services will need to be installed before* (<-- that asterix means there's a caveat, because I got it to work w/out having it installed before) SharePoint 2010 (either Foundation or Server) is installed.

The biggest difference b/w the TP and Beta 2 versions of 2010 are the fact that TP targets Data Services CTP1 (from March 2009) and Beta 2 targets CTP2 (From September-ish). I had installed the CTP 2 and then installed SP Foundation 2010, didn't work. Then I had to uninstall ADO.NET DS CTP2, reboot, reinstall CTP1 and run a repair on my SPoint Foundation install. Then it worked!

BTW, all of this is running on Windows 7 ;)

Quick Tip: Creating a Custom SharePoint HttpHandler (ASHX) using Replacement Tokens

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:50:29 +0000

I’ve done this a few times recently, thought it would be good to share.

Since 2007 we’ve known that there was a handy little pattern for creating and deploying an HttpHandler within the SharePoint Environment. This same pattern holds in 2010. In this post I’m going to show how to create the httphandler in Visual Studio 2010, and also show you how to wire up the Class attribute in your .ashx file using Visual Studio 2010 replacement tokens.

In Visual Studio 2010 you would go about this by following theses steps:

Creating an Empty SharePoint Project
Add an application page to the project, but give it a .ashx extension
delete the filename.designer.cs file
delete all the markup from the .aspx page
remove the generated Page_Load method from filename.cs codebehind
make sure filename.cs has using statements for “System.Web” and “System.Runtime.Interopservices”
Inside Visual Studio go to the Tools menu and choose “Create GUID”
Select “5. [Guid(xxxx-xxx….)]”
Select Copy and close the Create GUID window
Now paste that line right above your public class declaration inside of filename.cs
At this point your filename.cs code file should look something like:
```
[Guid("61e934b3-6e24-4da4-93f4-0768fb0c468c")] 
public class handler : IHttpHandler 
{ 
	public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } 
	public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { } 
} 
```
Note above something that I believe is important: the GUID you have should be converted to lowercase (select it in Visual Studio and hit ctrl+u)
Now the next step is to wire the markup in the .ashx file up to our class that gets built into the Assembly. Open up the .ashx file and paste this single line into the file:
```
    <%@ WebHandler 
    Class="$SharePoint.Type.61e934b3-6e24-4da4-93f4-0768fb0c468c.AssemblyQualifiedName$" 
    %>
```
Note above that the GUID in the token should match the GUID on your class declaration from step 10. This should have been generated during step 9.
The last step is to make sure that visual studio pays attention to your .ashx files for token replacement. I could walk you through this step by step but there are clear instruction on MSDN here The final section in that document refers to “Adding Extensions to the Token Replacement File Extensions List “. Follow the steps in that section.

Now you should be all set with token replacements in your .ashx files! If you want to test this, right click your project in Visual Studio and choose “Package”. Navigate in the file system to <Project Directory>\pkg\<Debug|Release>\Project Name\Layouts\<path to ashx file> and open up the .ashx file. You should see the appropriate class/assembly reference!

Hope it helps!

SharePoint Saturday Columbus Redux and Presentation Follow Up

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:28:01 +0000

I spent a few minutes researching the word “Redux” to try to figure out whether or not the title of this post would be an appropriate use for it. I think I’m at least pretty close. It sounded like a cool word, anyway, and I wasn’t really willing to give that up.

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of presenting what I termed “Another SharePoint JQuery Session (UX)” at SharePoint Saturday Columbus. I opened the session by answering (or attempting to answer) the question of Why?—why would we choose to build solutions using JavaScript, JQuery, and JQuery UI?

I provided some bullets and slides, which you are free to review (PDF attached… somewhere in this post), but it all basically boiled down to the following:

JavaScript is pretty powerful, and its here to stay (I like to use the analogy: JavaScript is like a cockroach that’s awesome—it just never seems to die no matter what people try to do to kill it)
JQuery is a solid, third part library that really increases performance and developer productivity on the web platform. It gives us a “method to our madness” for implementing large, advanced JavaScript applications.
JQuery UI is a great solution for doing robust, cross platform User Interfaces. It also gives us ThemeRoller support so that we can provide one “branding” solution for any JQuery UI implementations

Next, I gave a brief demo of Balsamiq Mockups as I constructed a quick visualization of what our content rotator would look like within a SharePoint web page. Balsamiq was kind enough to donate a free copy of their tool to my session, which I raffled off after the session broke.

Next, I rolled into Demo mode and presented two sample solutions using JQuery, JQuery Templates, and JQuery UI. The first sample was a basic Content Rotator, I broke it down into three steps:

First, we showed how the the JQuery UI Tabs control can be used to transform plain old html into a tabbed container that rotated from one selection to the next every five seconds. We did this in two lines of JavaScript, but had static html in for this demo.
Then, we moved on to make the solution more dynamic: instead of transforming static html, we generated the html dynamically using JQuery Templates with some static JavaScript arrays that we initialized in our JavaScript file.
The last step, then, was to replace the static arrays with dynamic data that we pulled out of SharePoint. To solve this solution, we used the JQuery $.getJSON method to retrieve JSON data from a SharePoint Announcements list and transposed it into the same array structure that we had in demo 2. Suddenly, we had a content rotator that was being driven out of rich html content within SharePoint! And we did it all in 100% JavaScript.

In the second demo I showed how, with a little bit of JavaScript and C#, you could build a rich Multiple File Upload Page right into SharePoint. I referred to it as “the big finish”, though I’m not sure it impressed as much as I would had hoped.

For this demo, I utilized the JavaScript component known as Plupload. It is a rich asynchronous File Upload utility that has no server side dependencies. It provides a JQuery UI widget for ThemeRoller support and is 100% “theme-able” besides. It’s a fabulous tool that I’ve used for multiple client solutions.

To make my life easier, I did build an HttpHandler that I deployed the _layouts folder for this solution. This allowed me to POST each file to a static URL and then let some simple C# code add the file and attach my metadata, this reduced my JavaScript code surface significantly. Uploading the files using an out of the box component like the SharePoint Web Services or WebDAV can be done, but would take a significant amount of additional JavaScript code and I was trying to minimize my surface area as much as possible for demo purposes.

To make the demo a little more fancy, I showed how the JQuery UI AutoComplete widget worked by allowing the user to attach a “Level of Awesome” to each file that they uploaded. The Awesome Level was automatically tagged onto each document that the user uploaded in a column I created on my Document Library.

Then I closed up shop and had some great individual questions relating to JQuery and future-proofing the code and exploring the differences between fetching the data asynchronously using the REST APIs, and generating the static html on the server using ASP.NET.

If you attended my session, I would really love to hear your feedback. Please comment here, send me an email, tweet me… whatever. I really enjoyed this session and feel like it’s one that I can make more engaging and interesting. Also, if you run a User Group or are involved in any other community events, please let me know if you think this would be a worthwhile session. I would love to submit it anywhere it makes sense.

The deck and code samples can be downloaded from my SkyDrive, (link below).

After SharePoint 2010 database attach upgrade alerts have the wrong URLs

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:47:21 +0000

Database attach upgrades seem to be the norm these days for customers upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. I am assuming the reason for this is because they are very flexible and generally work pretty well. One of the flexible things about these type of upgrades is you can change your web application URL. Some customers are going from short URL to fully qualified (FQDN) like http://portal to http://portal.company.com. And some of our customers are making complete changes going from http://sharepoint.company.com to http://intranet.company.com. The nice thing about making these types of changes is for the most part a content database has no concept of the web application URL. If you go hunting through the database (which you should never do) you will see everything is relative. The site collections know their urls as / or /sites/sitecollection. That way changing the URL doesn't matter.

But then there are alerts. Alerts are hard coded to the web application URL that was used to create the alert. This is why if you have multiple URLs for you SharePoint site your alerts may be inconsistent. If your portal is setup so you can access it as http://portal or http://portal.contoso.com then whichever of those URLs you are browsing the site with when you click create alert will be the URL SharePoint sends out in the alerts. Kind of annoying for some people but it is what it is. The real problem comes if you switch URLs.

If you change your web applications URL (maybe during an upgrade but not necessarily) everything will continue to work great except for existing alerts. When you have an alert sent to you it will still have that original URL you used to create the alert even if that is no longer a valid URL. Boo!

Now if you do a Bing search of the internet you will find lots of people point to this TechNet resource http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508847.aspx which will prompt you to create a Windows PowerShell script to fix alerts. One small problem. The script only works to update the URL of alerts for the root site collection. In their script they confuse the web application URL and the site collection URL. To be fair I don't blame them. When you look at the configuration objects you will see it wants siteUrl and we have been taught that usually inside of SharePoint site = site collection. Unfortunately in this case siteUrl actual means web application URL.

In the beginning when we used their script to update http://portal/sites/old to http://portal/sites/new our alerts had the link as http://portal/sites/new/sites/new/list which has /sites/new twice.

So then I decided to look at things on my own. I created a new alert through the GUI and then used the following script:

Get-SPweb -site http://portal/sites/new -limit all | ForEach-Object {$_.alerts|foreach-object{write-host $_.user $_.properties["siteUrl"] $_.properties["dispformurl"]}}

This gave me a list of all the alerts for the site collection http://portal/sites/new and I saw the value for siteUrl was http://portal. Hooray!

So then I used this script to update just the alerts in that site collection:

Get-SPweb -site http://portal/sites/new -limit all |ForEach-Object {$_.alerts|foreach-object{$_.properties["siteUrl"] = "http://portal/sites/new";$_.update()}}

Success! But seemed silly to just fix the one site collection so then I wrote a better script that updates the entire web application:

get-spsite -limit all -WebApplication http://portal | get-spweb -limit all |ForEach-Object {$_.alerts|foreach-object{$_.properties["siteUrl"] = "http://portal";$_.update()}}

Now if you compare my script to theirs you will notice I don't bother with mobileUrl because no one I know uses it. Also, they rewrite some other properties. If you want to do the same you can piece together the two scripts to do it but for right now for my customers this is working.

Hope this helps

Shane

SharePoint Consulting and now SharePoint Training