SLC SharePoint Element

2012-05-17T10:53:00.003-07:00

September 22

Top 6 New Features for SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows

on 9/22/2010 11:56 AM

Category: SharePoint 2010; Productivity; Business Processes; Workflows

Hannah Short, Business Analyst, Allyis, Inc.

Hannah works as a Business Analyst on the solutions team at Allyis. Her primary role is to collect, review, analyze, prioritize and document business and system requirements. She has extensive experience designing, developing and administering custom SharePoint team sites and has implemented successful SharePoint solutions for clients such as Microsoft and Anchor QEA.

What are my favorite new features for SharePoint Designer workflows?

1. Reusable workflow

This new feature allows you to create a workflow that can be applied to as many lists or libraries on the site as you need. The reusable workflow can be attached to a list or library using both SharePoint Designer or using the workflow settings page in the UI. In addition, the reusable workflow can be associated with a particular site content type. The workflow can then only be activated only on lists or libraries containing that content type, which eliminates the need to build a check content type action into the workflow itself.

2. SharePoint Designer ribbon allows easy access to workflow building blocks

The SharePoint Designer ribbon is your one-stop-shop for all the tools and parts you need to create your workflows.

3. Workflow action prompt

You can now type your workflow logic directly into the workflow. SharePoint Designer will prompt you with the possible actions that match what you are typing. This makes creating each step in your workflow much more efficient.

4. Customize out of the box workflows

Using SharePoint Designer, you can now customize the out-of-the-box workflows that come with every SharePoint site. This means that you can make small tweaks and adjustments to the pre-configured workflows without having to create your own custom workflow from scratch.

5. Impersonation step

The impersonation step allows the workflow to perform all actions within that step with the permissions of the author of the workflow, not the person who initiates the workflow. This means that the workflow can perform actions the user would otherwise be restricted from doing on the site – for example copying an item or document to another library to which the user has only visitor access.

6. Two-way import/export between SharePoint Designer and Microsoft Visio Premium 2010

This new feature allows SharePoint workflows to be built visually using tools in Visio 2010 and exported directly into SharePoint Designer. Using the Microsoft SharePoint Workflow template in Visio (found in the “Flowcharts” template section), you will get access to all the actions and conditions available within SharePoint Designer. The screenshot above is only a small sample of those available. In addition, workflows already created within SharePoint Designer can be imported into Visio for visual representation.

Bonus! Workflows no longer have to be tied to a list item

Although not specifically a feature of SharePoint Designer, there is a new feature for 2010 and I believe it is worth mentioning: Workflows in 2010 do not have to run on a single list item or document. The new Document Set feature of SharePoint Server 2010 allows you to bundle together different types of documents into groupings that make sense for your business. Rather than having to run a workflow on each individual document within the set, you can now run a single workflow on the entire Document Set.

How to Improve Workflow Performance in SharePoint Server 2010

2012-02-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Throttle

The workflow throttle setting controls how many workflows can be processing at any one time on the entire server farm. This setting does not control how many workflows can be "In Progress" concurrently, but rather how many can be actively using the processor. When this number is exceeded, workflow instances that are started and events that wake up dehydrated workflows are queued for later processing. The default value is 15. This setting is per farm, so the number of front-end Web servers is irrelevant.
The impact of this setting is that when a workflow starts, the number of currently active workflows is checked. If it exceeds the throttle number, the workflow is not started and instead, a timer job is created to try running the workflow later. If the number of currently active workflows is less than the throttle setting, the workflow is started.
You can check the current throttle setting by running the following command:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle
You can change the throttle setting by running the following command, in which you can replace 25 with the new value:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-throttle -pv "25"
The throttle property exists to allow you to control how many resources workflows require in your environment. Because you cannot designate dedicated "workflow servers" the way you can for index or query servers, this mechanism prevents workflows from overrunning your environment.

Batch Size
The batch size property can be secondary to the throttle property. This fact applies only in Scenario 1 (discussed earlier), where we are dealing with initial workflow starts. If the throttle setting restricts a particular workflow instance from starting (because too many workflow instances are running), no work items for that instance are released, regardless of the batch size setting. In this case, the UI shows a status of "Starting" for the workflow instance. The workflow is run by the timer service when the throttle limit is no longer exceeded.
An important point regarding your throttle setting is that workflows that are being run by the timer service do not count against your throttle limit. From a performance perspective, then, the throttle prevents the W3WP process from being overloaded, and the batch size setting prevents the timer service from being overloaded. Working together, and in conjunction with the workflow timer interval and the workflow timeout (discussed later), these settings help to keep your environment running smoothly while still handling the work necessary for thousands of workflow instances.
You can check the current batch size setting by running the following command:
stsadm -o getproperty -pn workitem-eventdelivery-batchsize
You can change the batch size setting by running the following command, in which you can replace 125 by the new value:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn workitem-eventdelivery-batchsize -pv "125"

Timeout

he timeout setting specifies the amount of time (in minutes) in which a workflow timer job must complete before it is considered to have stopped responding and is forced to stop processing. Jobs that time out are returned to the queue to be reprocessed later.

The default timeout period is five minutes, which should be sufficient for most environments. However, if your workflows require more time to start, complete tasks, or modify other workflows (especially when running under load), you must increase this property value. Understand, though, that if a workflow instance encounters a problem that causes it to wait for a response (from an external system, for example) before the first commit point, you could encounter throttle issues because that waiting workflow instance is still considered part of the count of your currently running workflows that the throttle property monitors. This condition could prevent other workflow instances from processing.

You can check the current timeout setting by running the following command:

stsadm -o getproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-timeout You can change the timeout setting by running the following command, in which you can replace 10 by the new value:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn workflow-eventdelivery-timeout -pv "10" 

Workflow Timer Interval The workflow timer interval specifies how often the workflow SPTimer job fires to process pending workflow tasks. This interval also represents the granularity of delay timers within your workflow. If a timer is set to delay for one minute, but the interval timer fires only every five minutes, the workflow delays for five minutes, not one minute. 

For performance considerations, if your workflow creates a lot of work items, you can use this setting, in conjunction with the batch size, to control the processing of those settings. For example, with a batch size of 100 (the default) and a timer interval of five minutes (the default), Windows SharePoint Services processes at most 100 work items every five minutes. If the batch of 100 work items for one workflow instance finishes processing in two seconds, your workflow instance is sitting idle for 4 minutes and 58 seconds. This may be acceptable; it may not. Decreasing this interval setting allows more batches to process by causing the timer to fire more often and request more work to do; but it also means that workflow processing consumes more server resources.

The minimum value for this setting is 1, which means that the timer will fire every minute.

You can check the current interval setting by running the following command, in which you replace the URL with a valid path to a SharePoint application:

stsadm -o getproperty -pn job-workflow -url http://myWssServer You can change the interval setting by running the following command, in which value is a valid SPTimer schedule string:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-workflow -pv value -url http://myWssServer

Infopath form services in sharepoint 2010

2012-01-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

Some times Infopath form services are not available in sharepoint(2010) under general application settings in central admin.

How to get this links?

Follow this steps to get the infopath form services in sharepoint cetral admin.

1) Install the feature "IPFSAdminWeb" either by using stsadm or PS(Powershell)
2) After this feature is installed the infopath form services will be availabel, if this feature is not available then we need to activate this feature explicitly in sharepoint central admin. This can be done through stsadm or PS.

3) If everything works fine then well and good but some times when we click on infopath form services then we will get the page not found error.

Then there should sharepoint version problem. If sharepoint Client Access License is installed then this will cause the problem.

4) How to change the version
Open SharePoint Central Administration and went to the (i.e. upgradeandmigration.aspx on the Central Admininstration site).
In the "Upgrade and Patch Management" section click on the "Convert farm license type" link to bring up the Conversion.aspx page.
Enter in the new product key and convert to the "SharePoint Server with Enterprise Client Access License" edition.
Now go back to the General Application Settings page in SharePoint Central Administration and you should now see the "InfoPath Forms Services" section with its links.

The Wiki Homepage Feature

2012-01-04T19:18:00.001-08:00

The Wiki Homepage Feature

When you create a blank site in SharePoint 2010 the homepage (default.aspx) will be a web part page as usual. But now there’s a new feature called “Wiki Page Home Page”.

When you activate the feature it creates a document library called “SitePages”, adds a wiki page named “default.aspx” and set it as the new homepage for the site.

The feature transforms your whole site to a wiki. Every time you create a new page it will create a new wiki page and store it in the “SitePages” lib (similar to the publishing features in 2007).

For sure you can tag Wiki pages as any other page as described in my previous post Managing Metadata in SharePoint 2010.

Content

While in SharePoint you could only write some rich text, you now could upload files (will be stored as a separate file) and add Web Parts.

No joke, you can now add Web Parts at any place within the wiki rich text!

[[Wiki Linking]]

In SharePoint 2010 you will get an intellisense like linking experience. That’s kind of cool :-) Just an enter [[ and press ctrl+space

You can now link easily pages, lists, items, documents and views.

Enterprise Wiki Layouts

Additionally there’s a new Site Collection feature called “Enterprise Wiki Layouts” for creating a large-scale wiki with categories and page layouts.

Seems to be correlated with the publishing infrastructure, because the feature add a new page layout content type. This means you can create wiki page layouts with SharePoint Designer 2010.
Click and see the beautiful new SharePoint 2010 error message.
Never mind this a technical preview and lot of things already work great. Can’t await to continue with the beta in November…

PDF Ifilter SharePoint 2010

2011-07-15T12:28:00.001-07:00

These notes are based on SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 (made publicly available in November 2009). Once the product has officially launched on 12 May 2010, an update will be posted if any changes are made to the process. The process is very similar to SharePoint 2007, with minor changes to folder location (14 instead of 12) and a slightly different administration user interface in the browser.

SharePoint Server 2010, like its predecessors, includes indexing and search capabilities. But what doesn’t come out of the box is the ability to index and search for PDF documents. PDF is a format owned by Adobe, not Microsoft. If you want to be able to find Adobe PDF documents, or have the PDF icon appear when viewing PDF files in a SharePoint document library (see image above), you will need to set it up for yourself. This post describes how to.

Download and install Adobe’s 64-bit PDF iFilter*http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025
Download the Adobe PDF icon (select Small 17 x 17) – http://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html
1. Give the icon a name or accept the default: ‘pdficon_small.gif’
2. Save the icon (or copy to) C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
Edit the DOCICON.XML file to include the PDF icon
1. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
2. Edit the DOCICON.XML file (I open it in NotePad, you can also use the built-in XML Editor)
3. Ignore the section <ByProgID> and scroll down to the <ByExtension> section of the file
4. Within the <ByExtension> section, insert <Mapping Key=”pdf” Value=”pdficon_small.gif” /> attribute. The easiest way is to copy an existing one – I usually just copy the line that starts <Mapping Key=”png”… and replace the parameters for Key and Value (see image below)
5. Save and close the file
Add PDF to the list of supported file types within SharePoint
1. In the web browser, open SharePoint Central Administration
2. Under Application Management, click on Manage service applications
3. Scroll down the list of service apps and click on Search Service Application
4. Within the Search Administration dashboard, in the sidebar on the left, click File Types
5. Click ‘New File Type’ and enter PDF in the File extension box. Click OK
6. Scroll down the list of file types and check that PDF is now listed and displaying the pdf icon.
7. Close the web browser
Stop and restart Internet Information Server (IIS)*² Note: this will temporarily take SharePoint offline. Open a command line (Start – Run – enter ‘cmd’) and type ‘iisreset’
Perform a full crawl of your index. Note: An incremental crawl is not sufficient when you have added a new file type. SharePoint only indexes file names with the extensions listed under File Types and ignores everything else. When you add a new file type, you then have to perform a full crawl to forcibly identify all files with the now relevant file extension.

That’s it. If you now perform a search, PDF files should be displayed in results where they match the search query, along with the PDF icon on display in results. The icon should also be visible in any document libraries that contain PDF files.

Object Model Server Architecture

2011-06-21T22:23:00.001-07:00

Collaborate with Colleagues Using SharePoint My Sites

2011-06-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

Today, I want to share one of the ways you can get the most out of the social capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 by promoting the use of My Sites within an organization.

There’s a lot of buzz today about social networking within an organization, and with good reason! According to Gartner, “It is no longer a question of if an enterprise should invest in social software, but when, from which provider and for what business purposes.” and by 2015, 40% of large enterprises will have a corporate "Facebook," for circulating both business and personal data. (Gartner, Predicts 2011: When Social and Business Processes Collide, November 19, 2010) When done right, enterprise social networking can be a very valuable tool in helping employees find colleagues with the expertise they need to solve a problem or better serve customers. SharePoint has included My Sites since the 2003 version, and today in 2010 they are better than ever at helping people locate one another and the critical business information they share, enabling everyone to do their jobs more efficiently and feel more connected across the enterprise.

Now onto the good stuff! SharePoint My Sites is only as valuable as the information people contribute, which you can do easily by leveraging tools such as tagging, document and photo libraries and colleague connections. So in an already busy work environment, how do you ensure your employees understand the value of My Sites? Below are some tips for driving adoption in your organization.

Identify a select group of early adopters who can spread the word about My Sites among their colleagues. Showcase them through email, a newsletter or an Intranet feature story, citing personal examples of how My Sites has improved their everyday work life. Also, reach out to the avid consumer social network users in your organization to become early adopters and promoters of safe, secure social networking inside the organization.
Use My Sites as a marketing tool inside organizations. For example, smaller teams within a larger organization can boost their profile by making sure their My Sites are completely utilized. Each team member can list expertise, share documents, tag material and update newsfeeds, making them easier to find in an organization. In fact, simply saving your documents to your My Site will make it much easier for people to find out what you know and benefit from your work. It is much easier to find files by looking up people in SharePoint.
Make My Sites your own. Custom skins that live on top of SharePoint allow organizations to brand My Sites, helping drive interest and loyalty. The theme might be for your department, role, or a corporate HR-sponsored initiative—whatever is most relevant for your business.
Incorporate filling out My Sites as part of an employee orientation. This helps quickly drive adoption and ensures employees know how to properly utilize the tool. Many of your new employees will already be familiar with these tools as consumers and successful job seekers.
Encourage high-profile executive involvement. When your executives share, they set the tone for everyone. Using the built-in blog on a My Site is a great way for executives to share trip reports, reflections on the business, and career development tips. This knowledge is shared more visibly and persistently than in email and encourages other employees to share their experiences as well.

We use My Sites widely across Microsoft, and from personal experience, it has helped me engage colleagues more quickly, locate expertise and find the information I need to not only do my job better, but be more efficient. When I can find the right contact for a customer by doing a people search, take advantage of colleagues’ presentation by finding it on their My Sites, or stay in touch with a colleague through their personal updates, SharePoint is enabling me to benefit from the power of social computing in the enterprise. That makes me more productive, effective and connected in today’s fast-paced world of business.

Sharepoint Cool UI....

2011-06-05T19:32:00.001-07:00

I was scanning around last night for SharePoint 2010 news and came across some Microsoft images showing the updated default UI and it’s use of Silverlight, cross-browser support and extended API.

SharePoint 2010’s default UI uses the ribbon UI of office 2007 and 2010, however this is optional and upgrades from legacy master pages and installs will default to the old style. Also they have a preview option for showing what would happen if you enabled the ribbon using your master page layout.

SharePoint 2010 now supports using LINQ without any funky abstraction through the web services natively. Also Visual Studio 2010 is reported to have a visual designer for SharePoint web parts now (yay!).

SharePoint 2010 makes use of Silverlight, shown is a Silverlight chart control reporting on data within the document library. Hopefully they also do media streaming web parts using Silverlight but haven’t heard either way on that bit.

You can define simple color style themes instead of relying on the premade ones that were included in 2003 and 2007. Customization without development time.

SharePoint 2010 upgrades Firefox and Safari to Tier 1 browsers. Meaning you can do everything you’re used to doing in IE only in SharePoint with all the major browsers. While Chrome wasn’t mentioned as it uses webkit like Safari it most likely works fine too.

Overall SharePoint 2010 is a cool tool!!!

Why Governments Buy Microsoft Online Services ( this is a reading) Check it out

2011-06-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

Reflecting on Memorial Day, when Americans remember how military veterans safeguarded fellow citizens through their service, today I’m also recalling how Microsoft’s services contribute in the public sector. We have developed and now manage a suite of online services to assist government organizations in many ways.What factors were important to governments which selected these services, and why did they buy Microsoft services, in particular?

Learning about many government agencies which chose Microsoft online services, I found common criteria and themes. Most chose the services, in part, to save money. Many evaluators considered the need to optimize use of resources. Many discussed how compatibility with existing applications and how user acceptance created momentum to select new services from Microsoft. Finally, several government customers cited the importance of data security and archival in their decision-making.

Saving Money while Delivering Valued Services
Many governments are withstanding increased economic pressures from lower tax revenues in difficult economic times. While individual administrations have specific needs in serving employees and citizens effectively with IT, Gopal Khanna, Chief Information Officer for The State of Minnesota, captures today’s mantra, do more with less.

“As states battle growing deficits, they are continually being asked to do more with less. Rethinking the way we manage our digital infrastructure centrally, to save locally across all units of government, is a crucial part of the solution. The private sector has utilized technological advancements like cloud computing to realize operational efficiencies for some time now. Government must follow suit."

The value of the online services to government operations come into play. Randy Paul, Klamath County, Oregon’s Director of Information Technology made the case for the Business Productivity Online Suite hosted solution on two fronts: costs would be reduced significantly and performance and dependability would improve significantly. The City of San Francisco cited significant value for their administration, along with cost savings. The city went with Microsoft Exchange Online because it complemented the other Microsoft applications already in use, it provides anywhere email access, protects information, and the online solution helps the city achieve a 20% mandated budget reduction.

Unifying services across an entire Italian province provided great savings: $213,000 annually. Ennio Fumagalli, Provincial Council Delegate, describes his application at the Provincia di Lecco:

“All municipalities face the same challenge of providing government services to citizens at reduced costs, yet their email and collaboration services don’t always work together. Some municipalities use open source solutions with varied functionality and pricing, which makes budgeting difficult and means some jurisdictions have better services than others. Different systems make it a challenge to communicate and share calendars and arrange multi-jurisdictional meetings. Town halls keep their data on-premises, so it’s difficult to share information necessary to make decisions at the provincial level.”

Earlier this week, we told you how the Municipio de Humacao chose Microsoft Online Services over Google Apps, freeing $90,000 from their IT budget using cloud-based email. It was just what they needed: a solution which would respond to cost-cutting pressures while providing employees a responsive, comprehensive email service.

Using Resources Optimally
IT teams inside and outside of government must deliver services, hopefully inventive ones, regardless of economic constraints. Peter Schaak, Assistant Director of IT for the Village of Schaumburg echoes the do more with less mantra and cites strategic ambition in light of implementing Exchange Online.

“We’re anxious to help balance the workload,” Schaak notes. “The government sector is in a ‘do-more-with-less’ economic situation, so we’re hoping to free people up to switch back to a little more proactive IT administration and away from being purely reactive.”

Klamath County sought accountability in IT service delivery. Paul of Klamath County explains how Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) increased his team’s effectiveness:

“The BPOS system administration has allowed us to take the resources needed to manage e-mail down to about .25 FTE… BPOS has helped us achieve our goal of moving toward a highly managed IT service.”

The county’s BPOS deployment vastly simplified its internal management initiative to implement a fee-for-service scheme to better rationalize support services, including IT. The result has been smarter allocation of scarce resources at a time of flat county revenues.

Value is key. After all, Microsoft Online Services are productivity solutions, at the core. The city of Buda, Texas is one place where value was a key consideration. The city chose BPOS for improved employee productivity, better operational efficiency, effective use of IT resources, better collaboration, and to create a more flexible workflow.

I like the way Shawn McCarthy, research director with the market analysis firm, IDC, sums it up:

"Basically, cloud services give government IT departments the opportunity to relieve some pressure on them. Every department needs email but every department doesn't need to manage their own email server. When you maintain servers, they need upgrades, patch configuration management ... Going with the cloud lets IT managers focus on what is core to their divisions."

Compatibility and User Acceptance

The implementation at the State of Minnesota brings new considerations. What is the effect of online services on employees and the existing infrastructure? Microsoft expects that their implementation will require little retraining of state employees, limiting service disruption, because BPOS already works with Office. Microsoft also expects seamless migration from existing IT resources because BPOS leverages familiar technologies. According to the state’s Office of Enterprise Technology (OET):

“OET is working closely with Microsoft to ensure a successful migration to BPOS. The goal is to create as little impact to the user as possible, but users will notice dramatically increased email capacity (from 100 MB to 5GB per user) and increased collaborative functionality, making it easier to move seamlessly between email, SharePoint, Instant Messaging and conferencing.”

The Provincia di Lecco evaluated IBM Lotus Notes, Google Apps, and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. According to CIO Fabio Annoni:

“We chose Microsoft cloud services for its complete range of offerings and because it aligns closely with the IT environments at the municipalities, where everyone uses Microsoft Office.”

For the province, this standardization on Microsoft products and services enabled efficiency.

The most recent Microsoft Online Services customers see synergy in using both Microsoft products and services. The city of San Francisco went with Microsoft after considering Google Apps, in part, because Exchange Online complements the other Microsoft applications that the city already uses, while the City of Winston-Salem felt the choice would be well-accepted as most employees have used Outlook before. In fact, according to Winston-Salem CIO Dennis Newman:

"To fully invest in Google Apps meant we would have to uninvest in Microsoft Office licensing. To take away Office from our users would not be well received unless it was saving us money."

I’m happy to know that standardization through Microsoft Online Services could help the State of California, a government under acute economic pressure, reach strategic goals. According to state CIO, Teri Takai:

“This is part of our efforts to consolidate and standardize information technology infrastructure to reduce costs and enhance productivity. Technology strategies such as cloud computing are key to executing the mission of our office which is to strengthen IT project oversight, increase transparency in technology spending, increase cost savings and define specific targets to reduce energy usage.”

Data Security and Data Archival

Finally, safeguarding and preserving governments’ and citizens’ data is very important. In particular, the Municipio de Humacao evaluated Google Apps and Evelyn Howe, Information System Administrator found:

“…the Google solution did not offer the security that we needed. Some city offices actually forbade us to use Google.”

As part of Klamath County’s choice of a Microsoft solution, Director of IT, Randy Paul noted from previous experience the importance of reputation. That is, a reputable hosting provider often has more domain expertise to address the details of things like spam and phishing, and for ensuring appropriate redundancy and back-up capacity. In addition to choosing the standard Microsoft BPOS suite, Klamath County’s installation also included an archiving module that helps to ensures that the county is compliant with federal and state record-keeping and retention mandates. Paul observed:

“Our new Microsoft archiving is far more elegant than what we have had in the past.”

Information security was a key consideration in the City of Carlsbad, California’s selection process. The city needed to confirm that any hosting partner could provide the required level of security and reliability for its messaging solution. Director of IT, Gordon Peterson stated:

“We had to make sure that if we went with a hosted e-mail solution it could match the best practices and security levels needed. The other area of concern for us was availability. Our messaging solution is a mission-critical application that everyone expects to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

After investigating different e-mail storage and protection options, the city determined that the Microsoft data center provided more security than the city’s own facility. Bob Fries, IT Manager for the Enterprise Systems Group contributed:

“We were reassured that Microsoft Online Services could deliver the security and privacy requirements necessary to protect the city’s records.”

I hope that your IT service choices help you provide solutions that assist your employees, and are cost-effective for your communities and constituents. Please let me know what needs are particularly important in the government you serve.

Schedule SharePoint Backup using Powershell

2011-06-05T19:14:00.000-07:00

Here’s a script you can use to deploy your SharePoint 2010 Solutions:

Add this lines of text to notepad and save the file with a .ps1 extension

_______________________________________________________________________
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell –ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

$SolutionPackageName = “YourSolutionPackageName.WSP”

$SolutionPackagePath “YourSolutionPackageName\YourSolutionPackageName.wsp”

$solution = Get-SPSolution |where-object {S_. Name -eq $SolutionPackageName}

if ($solution -ne $null) (

if($solution.Deployed -eq $true){

Uninstall-SPSolution -Identity SSolutionPackageName -Local -Confirm:$false

}

Remove-SPSolution -Identity $SolutionPackageName -Confirm:$false

Write-Host “Installing Solution...”

Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $SolutionPackagePath

Write-Host “Deploying Solution...”

Install -SPSolution -Identity $SolutionPackageName -Local –GACDeployment

(make sure that PowerShell allows scripts using Set-ExecutionPolicy = Unrestricted)

Schedule SharePoint Backup using Powershell

2011-06-05T19:10:00.001-07:00

Here’s some steps for creating a scheduled backup of SharePoint using Powershell:

1. Create this PowerShell script:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
Backup-SPFarm -directory \\FQDN\SharePointBackup -backupmethod Full

using notepad and save the file in a folder and name it Backup.ps1

2. Start Windows Task Scheduler, and create a new task using this options:

Name: Every Day SP Backup

Trigger: Daily > Every day 00:00x

Action: Start Program PowerShell.exe with argument c:\PathToBackup.ps1

Permission: Run the Task as an account that has farm permissions and add the password + check “un whether user is logged on or not” and “run with highest privileges.”

3. Monitor the backup operation:

1. Central Administration > Backup and Restore Job Status page > Refresh the page and examine the information that is presented on the page.

2. Also take a look at the Backup and Restore History, and here you’ll find if your task completed or not

Difference between Foundation 2010 and Server 2010

2011-06-05T18:54:00.001-07:00

Access Services √

Use Access Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to edit, update, and create linked Microsoft Access 2010 databases that can be viewed and manipulated by using an Internet browser, the Access client, or a linked HTML page.

Business Connectivity Services √ √

SharePoint 2010 includes Microsoft Business Connectivity Services, which is a set of services and features that provide a way to connect SharePoint-based solutions to sources of external data and to define external content types based on that external data.

Central Administration (Redesigned) √ √

Central Administration has been redesigned in SharePoint 2010 to provide a more familiar experience and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.

Digital Asset Management √

SharePoint Server 2010 includes a new asset library specially designed for managing and sharing digital assets such as audio, video, and other rich media files.

Enterprise Search √

With the new capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010, search administrators can configure an optimal search infrastructure that helps end users find information in the enterprise quickly and efficiently.

Excel Services √

Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 can be used to publish Excel client workbooks on SharePoint Server 2010.

Managed Metadata √

Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items in SharePoint Server 2010. The Managed Metadata Service supports the use of managed metadata, as well as the sharing of content types across the enterprise.

PerformancePoint Services √

PerformancePoint Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Records Management √

In SharePoint Server 2010, you can manage records in an archive, or you can manage records in the same document repository as active documents.

Social Computing √

SharePoint Server 2010 includes social networking tools such as My Site Web sites and social content technologies such as blogs, wikis, and really simple syndication (RSS). These features are built upon a database of properties that integrates information about people from many kinds of business applications and directory services. You can adapt content to each user while enabling administrators to set policies to protect privacy.

Visio Services √

The Visio Graphics Service is a service on the SharePoint Server 2010 platform that enables users to share and view Visio diagrams and enables data-connected Microsoft Visio 2010 diagrams to be refreshed and updated from a variety of data sources.

Upgrade √ √

Review upgrade requirements and find out about new upgrade tools and options, including information about the pre-upgrade checker, Visual Upgrade, and the test-spcontentdatabase Windows PowerShell cmdlet.

Claims-Based Authentication √ √

SharePoint 2010 incorporates a new authentication model that works with any corporate identity system, including Active Directory Domain Services, LDAP-based directories, application-specific databases, and user-centric identity models.

Health Monitoring √ √

SharePoint 2010 includes an integrated health analysis tool called SharePoint Maintenance Manager that enables SharePoint Server to automatically check for potential configuration, performance, and usage problems.

Sandboxed Solutions √ √

You can deploy sandboxed solutions to quickly and more securely solve business problems. Sandboxed solutions are like farm solutions except in the following ways: they are rights-restricted and have a more permissive deployment policy than farm solutions; they are limited to the site collection to which they are deployed; and their server resource usage is monitored against an administrator-controlled quota for the site collection.

Windows PowerShell √ √

Windows PowerShell is the new command-line interface and scripting language specifically designed for system administrators.

Books you need to get ASAP!!!

2011-06-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

These books are great!!!

One Response to Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Team Solutions with SharePoint

2011-06-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

I’m only 2 chapters into the book, but so far its great. I have read several SP 2010 books in their entirety, so I’m used to the quality of what is out there and while none of what I have read is bad, alot of it isn’t as straight forward as this book. I love the try it out sections – very unique! I’ve searched through the table of contents and index as well as the coverage of topics is very good – comprehensive!

For me, an admin/developer for the most part, this book comes in handy to let me know and try out alot of the functionality that exists through the front end of the product. Development in SP hides in the background and emulates alot of the UI based functionality, but its great to know how to do it both ways. Top that with knowledge of governance and decisions and you too can be a SP analyst!

Sharepoint 2010 Designer is Free. Below you can download it here.

2011-06-05T17:51:00.001-07:00

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=566d3f55-77a5-4298-bb9c-f55f096b125d&displaylang=en

Sharepoint 2010 Central Administration Console... Basic 1 on 1

2011-06-05T17:49:00.000-07:00

SharePoint Designer for Beginners

2011-06-05T17:24:00.001-07:00

SharePoint 2010 helpful Tips to pass the Exam.

2011-06-05T17:11:00.001-07:00

SharePoint 2010 Certifications

Exam 70-573 - MCTS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development

Working with the SharePoint User Interface (19%)
Developing Web Parts and Controls (21%)
Developing Business Logic (19%)
Working With SharePoint Data (22%)
Stabilizing and Deploying SharePoint Components (19%)

Exam 70-576 - PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications

Prerequisite is 70-573
Creating an Application Design (19%)
Designing UX (17%)
Managing Application Development (18%)
Optimizing SharePoint Application Design (15%)
Designing SharePoint Composite Applications (13%)
Designing SharePoint Solutions and Features (18%)

Exam 70-667 - MCTS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring

Installing and Configuring a SharePoint Environment (25 percent)
Managing a SharePoint Environment (26 percent)
Deploying and Managing Applications (24 percent)
Maintaining a SharePoint Environment (25 percent)

Tip:Concentrate on Health Monitoring & Records Repository.

Exam 70-668 - PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator

Prerequisite is 70-667
Designing a SharePoint 2010 Farm Topology (27 percent)
Planning SharePoint 2010 Deployment (26 percent)
Defining a SharePoint 2010 Operations Strategy and Business Continuity (25 percent)
Planning for Search and Business Solutions (22 percent)