/Recent content in Latest Posts on Falchion ConsultingHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usCopyright © 2026 [Falchion Consulting, LLC](https://www.falchionconsulting.com) All rights reserved. Absolutely no portions of this websites content in text, images and or digital media format may be reproduced or re-transmitted in any form or media without the express written consent of Falchion Consulting.Mon, 20 Sep 2021 13:54:28 -0600/2021/09/spfx-for-sp2019-issues/Mon, 20 Sep 2021 13:54:28 -0600/2021/09/spfx-for-sp2019-issues/I’ve been working with SPFx for SharePoint Online for quite a while and have done numerous client projects for it but recently I’ve been asked to create a few SPFx web parts that would work on both SharePoint Online (SPO) and SharePoint 2019 (SP2019)./2021/00/set-detailslist-column-width/Tue, 06 Jul 2021 14:57:31 -0600/2021/00/set-detailslist-column-width/I was working on a recent SharePoint Framework (SPFx) project where one of the requirements was that a list of data be displayed using the DetailsList Office UI Fabric React control and specific columns needed the width set based on the data contained within the list./2021/05/migrate-email-fields/Thu, 13 May 2021 09:01:30 -0600/2021/05/migrate-email-fields/There are many challenges when migrating from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online and one of the more common ones that I’ve encountered is handling email enabled libraries. These are libraries in SharePoint on-premises which are configured to allow a user to send an email with an attachment to a specified email address and the attachment is then stored in the library as a file./2017/01/powerpivot-application-pool-crashes-on-data-refresh/Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:06:01 +0000/2017/01/powerpivot-application-pool-crashes-on-data-refresh/When troubleshooting SharePoint, you often have to dig several levels deep to discover the root of an issue. Recently one of my clients was running into an issue where the IIS application pool that was associated with their PowerPivot service application was crashing regularly at a specific time (within a minute or two) every day./2017/01/unencoded-cookie-value-breaks-sharepoint-modern-pages/Wed, 18 Jan 2017 20:33:49 +0000/2017/01/unencoded-cookie-value-breaks-sharepoint-modern-pages/Today I discovered an interesting issue with the new SharePoint Modern Library views on Office 365. One of my clients for whom I had built an application that loads some content within an iframe element on the site was suddenly no longer able to get the Modern Library pages to render correctly – they would simply show up as a blank page./2015/07/working-with-folders-and-files-using-the-sharepoint-rest-service-and-windows-powershell/Fri, 03 Jul 2015 22:49:51 +0000/2015/07/working-with-folders-and-files-using-the-sharepoint-rest-service-and-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the previous article, Working with Lists and List Items Using the SharePoint REST Service and Windows PowerShell, I showed the PowerShell equivalents to the examples in the Working with lists and list items with REST MSDN article./2015/06/itunity-sharepoint-online-article-series/Thu, 18 Jun 2015 17:22:24 +0000/2015/06/itunity-sharepoint-online-article-series/Update 10/25/2017: The ITUnity.com site no longer exists and as such my articles and author profile aren’t there any more. I’ve reposted the articles on my own blog and updated the links below to point to them instead of ITUnity./2015/06/moved-to-github/Thu, 18 Jun 2015 17:07:12 +0000/2015/06/moved-to-github/I’ve been pretty slow to learning how to use github for the management of my open source projects but I’ve finally managed to take the time to at least learn enough so that I could move my main projects over./2015/06/working-with-lists-and-list-items-using-the-sharepoint-rest-service-and-windows-powershell/Wed, 17 Jun 2015 22:26:57 +0000/2015/06/working-with-lists-and-list-items-using-the-sharepoint-rest-service-and-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the previous article, Using a Custom Windows PowerShell Function to Make SharePoint REST Service Calls, I detailed a custom utility function, Invoke-SPORestMethod, that can be used to make RESTful calls against a SharePoint REST Service endpoint./2015/05/using-a-custom-windows-powershell-function-to-make-sharepoint-rest-service-calls/Wed, 20 May 2015 02:14:15 +0000/2015/05/using-a-custom-windows-powershell-function-to-make-sharepoint-rest-service-calls/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the article, Using the SharePoint REST Service with Windows PowerShell, I detailed how to use Windows PowerShell to make simple RESTful calls against your SharePoint Online Site Collection./2015/04/using-the-sharepoint-rest-service-with-windows-powershell/Tue, 28 Apr 2015 01:17:58 +0000/2015/04/using-the-sharepoint-rest-service-with-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In a previous article, Connecting to SharePoint Online using the SharePoint CSOM API with Windows PowerShell and the related CSOM articles that followed it, I discussed how you can use Windows PowerShell to inspect and manage SharePoint Online Site Collections, Sites, Lists and List Items using the managed ./2015/04/completing-basic-operations-using-the-sharepoint-csom-api-and-windows-powershell/Fri, 03 Apr 2015 22:55:37 +0000/2015/04/completing-basic-operations-using-the-sharepoint-csom-api-and-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. As you start working with and exploring the CSOM API with Windows PowerShell, you’re likely to be doing some searches looking for examples of how to use it./2015/03/loading-specific-values-using-lambda-expressions-and-the-sharepoint-csom-api-with-windows-powershell/Tue, 31 Mar 2015 22:40:31 +0000/2015/03/loading-specific-values-using-lambda-expressions-and-the-sharepoint-csom-api-with-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the article, Using the SharePoint CSOM API with SharePoint Online and Windows PowerShell, I explained that when you call the ClientContext object’s Load method that only a subset of properties are typically loaded, usually most of the simple types, and that you’ll need to make another call to the Load method to get additional properties./2015/03/using-the-sharepoint-csom-api-with-sharepoint-online-and-windows-powershell/Tue, 24 Mar 2015 22:24:50 +0000/2015/03/using-the-sharepoint-csom-api-with-sharepoint-online-and-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the Connecting to SharePoint Online using the SharePoint CSOM API with Windows PowerShell article you learned how to get started using the SharePoint CSOM API to connect to your SharePoint Online Site Collection with Windows PowerShell./2015/03/connecting-to-sharepoint-online-using-the-sharepoint-csom-api-with-windows-powershell/Wed, 18 Mar 2015 22:04:58 +0000/2015/03/connecting-to-sharepoint-online-using-the-sharepoint-csom-api-with-windows-powershell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. As a developer working with earlier versions of SharePoint, specifically SharePoint 2007 and earlier, your options for working with SharePoint from off-server client applications was pretty limited./2015/03/working-with-the-sharepoint-online-site-collection-cmdlets/Thu, 12 Mar 2015 21:44:37 +0000/2015/03/working-with-the-sharepoint-online-site-collection-cmdlets/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell article you learned how to get connected to your SharePoint Online tenant using the SharePoint Online Management Shell and in the Exploring the SharePoint Online Cmdlets article you were introduced to the list of available cmdlets along with some details on the less commonly used cmdlets./2015/03/exploring-the-sharepoint-online-cmdlets/Wed, 11 Mar 2015 21:24:31 +0000/2015/03/exploring-the-sharepoint-online-cmdlets/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. In the article, Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell, you learned about the SharePoint Online Management Shell and you saw how to use it to connect to your SharePoint Online tenant./2015/03/introduction-to-the-sharepoint-online-management-shell/Thu, 05 Mar 2015 22:00:34 +0000/2015/03/introduction-to-the-sharepoint-online-management-shell/Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. With Office 365 now on SharePoint 2013, we finally have the long-awaited, and long-overdue support for using Windows PowerShell to manage SharePoint Online environments./2014/08/invoke-sporestmethod-using-the-sharepoint-online-rest-api-with-powershell/Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:48:41 +0000/2014/08/invoke-sporestmethod-using-the-sharepoint-online-rest-api-with-powershell/Earlier this summer I mentioned that I’d start blogging about some of my scripts that I have in my toolbox and I guess I’m a little behind in that but I guess better late than never./2014/07/_uls_expand_forced_logging_messages_-environment-variable-explained/Thu, 10 Jul 2014 21:52:07 +0000/2014/07/_uls_expand_forced_logging_messages_-environment-variable-explained/Have you ever been looking through the SharePoint ULS logs trying to troubleshoot one issue or another and come across entries such as this: [Forced due to logging gap, Original Level: <TraceLevel>] <Some message> {0} I was recently working with a client who noticed an message like this in the ULS logs and was baffled by the fact that the {0} was not being replaced with the relevant data referred to in the message text./2014/07/get-spcontrolelement/Tue, 08 Jul 2014 23:00:17 +0000/2014/07/get-spcontrolelement/I haven’t really done much blogging lately so I figured I’d try and get back into it by sharing some scripts from my collection. Over the years I’ve created tons and tons of little scripts here and there to help me solve one problem or another – whether it be some upgrade related thing or a content or build migration or just some random snippet to help me figure out what the heck is going on with my code or with SharePoint in general – I’ve got a ton of them just scattered all over the place./2014/01/announcing-my-custom-sharepoint-online-cmdlets/Fri, 10 Jan 2014 04:01:44 +0000/2014/01/announcing-my-custom-sharepoint-online-cmdlets/For quite a while now I’ve been pointing out the lack of cmdlets that are available for working with Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 (SharePoint Online) and I’ve mentioned several times that someone should really do something about that and that I’d love to be that person if only I had the time./2013/08/sharepoint-2013-version-16-0-0-1810/Wed, 07 Aug 2013 23:38:33 +0000/2013/08/sharepoint-2013-version-16-0-0-1810/So today I was doing some SharePoint 2013 app development against my Office 365 SharePoint 2013 tenant and I needed to view the HTTP traffic from the site in order to troubleshoot some issues I was having and I stumbled across something I found very interesting when I looked at the header details in Fiddler:/2013/07/my-first-pluralsight-course/Thu, 18 Jul 2013 20:48:00 +0000/2013/07/my-first-pluralsight-course/Throughout the years I’ve done numerous presentations related to using PowerShell with SharePoint and through them all I’ve often found myself wanting more time so that I could share more details./2013/06/parallel-sharepoint-tasks-with-powershell-2/Tue, 04 Jun 2013 22:20:11 +0000/2013/06/parallel-sharepoint-tasks-with-powershell-2/Today I was working on a deployment for a client which entailed activating a custom SharePoint Feature on about 1000 Site Collections. This Feature did a fair number of things and on average it takes about 10-15 minutes to complete in their test environment (which is pretty slow compared to their production environment which I’ve not yet deployed to but I expect close to a 5 minute run time per Site Collection once I go to production with it)./2013/02/provisioning-search-on-sharepoint-2013-foundation-using-powershell/Thu, 28 Feb 2013 02:56:54 +0000/2013/02/provisioning-search-on-sharepoint-2013-foundation-using-powershell/There was recently a twitter conversation between @cacallahan, @toddklindt, and @brianlala discussing provisioning Search on SharePoint Foundation and whether it was possible or not and somewhere during the conversation it was suggested that I might know how to do this (sorry guys for not responding immediately) – unfortunately I hadn’t actually done any work with SharePoint 2013 Foundation yet and so had not yet tried and thus didn’t know the answer (I knew there were issues and suspected a workaround was possible but I didn’t have a server built to test anything)./2013/02/sharepoint-evolutions-conference-2013/Sun, 24 Feb 2013 22:36:16 +0000/2013/02/sharepoint-evolutions-conference-2013/Today I finally got around to booking my travel for my favorite SharePoint conference – the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London England. For the third year in a row I have the honor of being able to present, and once again I’ll be covering the PowerShell side of things at the conference./2013/02/fix-the-trust-relationship-between-this-workstation-and-the-primary-domain-failed/Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:00:42 +0000/2013/02/fix-the-trust-relationship-between-this-workstation-and-the-primary-domain-failed/This short post is really just for my own memory as I keep bumping into this with my virtual machines but I figured others might also find it useful. Typically when I do SharePoint development I do everything on an all-up server but with SharePoint 2013 I’ve moved my Domain Controller to a separate server (where I also will install the Office Web Apps); however, if I leave any of my machines off for a while then the computer password will expire which means that things start to break and you’ll see errors like “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed./2013/02/announcing-my-sharepoint-2013-custom-cmdlets/Mon, 11 Feb 2013 05:05:26 +0000/2013/02/announcing-my-sharepoint-2013-custom-cmdlets/I’ve been putting this off for quite a while but I’ve finally pushed out a SharePoint 2013 build of my custom cmdlets. The reason it took so long was because I had to make a fair bit of changes to my existing stuff so that it would be easier to maintain both builds going forward./2013/01/using-powershell-to-manage-sharepoint-2013-online/Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000/2013/01/using-powershell-to-manage-sharepoint-2013-online/When SharePoint 2010 was released we had hundreds of cmdlets available for our on-premises deployments but when it came to Office365 we only had cmdlets available for manipulating our subscription details, users in AD, and Exchange Online (http://onlinehelp./2012/10/sharepoint-2013-powershell-cmdlets-changes-from-public-preview-to-rtm/Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:42:00 +0000/2012/10/sharepoint-2013-powershell-cmdlets-changes-from-public-preview-to-rtm/In a recent post I detailed all the PowerShell changes from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 Public Preview (part 1, part 2) – well, apparently I should have held off a couple of weeks because I’m now running the RTM version of SharePoint 2013 and have found that they have made a ton more changes./2012/10/windows-powershell-v3-ise-copy-as-html-add-on/Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:32:03 +0000/2012/10/windows-powershell-v3-ise-copy-as-html-add-on/In my earlier article where I pointed out some of my favorite features of Windows PowerShell V3 I noted one failing of the new Windows PowerShell ISE – the inability to copy text as HTML so that I can easily paste that HTML into my blog posts./2012/10/powershell-v3-a-few-of-my-favorite-things/Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:27:32 +0000/2012/10/powershell-v3-a-few-of-my-favorite-things/Now that SharePoint 2013 has been released to manufacturing and will be available for download soon I figured I’d go ahead and put together a quick post pointing out some of my favorite PowerShell V3 enhancements that you can use to improve your command-line usage of PowerShell as well as your automation scripts./2012/10/sharepoint-2013-public-preview-powershell-cmdlets-part-2/Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:37:26 +0000/2012/10/sharepoint-2013-public-preview-powershell-cmdlets-part-2/UPDATE 10/25/2012:SharePoint 2013 PowerShell Cmdlets: Changes from Public Preview to RTM for additional changes with SharePoint 2013 RTM. In my last post I identified all the new and removed cmdlets in SharePoint 2013 Public Preview./2012/10/sharepoint-2013-public-preview-powershell-cmdlets-part-1/Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:39:00 +0000/2012/10/sharepoint-2013-public-preview-powershell-cmdlets-part-1/UPDATE 10/25/2012:SharePoint 2013 PowerShell Cmdlets: Changes from Public Preview to RTM for additional changes with SharePoint 2013 RTM. In this first of two articles I will be identifying the cmdlets that have been removed in SharePoint 2013 Public Preview as well as all the new cmdlets that have been added./2012/09/im-speaking-at-sharepoint-live-december-10-14-in-orlando/Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:13:19 +0000/2012/09/im-speaking-at-sharepoint-live-december-10-14-in-orlando/I’ll be speaking at a brand new SharePoint conference for SharePoint administrators, developers and planners – SharePoint Live!, December 10-14 in Orlando, FL.http://bit.ly/SPSPK14 I’ll be presenting the following sessions: Getting Started with PowerShell for SharePoint/2012/06/replace-sharepoint-2010-web-parts-by-type/Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:13:29 +0000/2012/06/replace-sharepoint-2010-web-parts-by-type/Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to replace all occurrences of one web part type with another web part type? No? Consider this scenario: you are using the out of the box content query web part and you discover one of the numerous bugs with this web part or decide that you want to ensure that a specific XSLT file is always used or something like that, so you decide to create a custom content query web part by sub-classing the out of the box one; now you deploy your custom web part and remove the out of the box one from the web part gallery so that any new instance will now be based on your custom type./2012/05/international-sharepoint-conference-2012-follow-up/Tue, 15 May 2012 14:34:23 +0000/2012/05/international-sharepoint-conference-2012-follow-up/First off I apologize for the delay in getting this post out – I’ve been fraught with injuries and illness since my return from London and just haven’t had the time or mental capacity to think about writing anything./2012/03/exporting-and-importing-sharepoint-2010-terms/Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:51:21 +0000/2012/03/exporting-and-importing-sharepoint-2010-terms/Ever had the need to migrate Terms from the Managed Metadata Term Store from one environment to another? Do you find the flat, CSV, import approach provided out of the box to be insufficient (especially with its lack of support for alternate labels)?/2012/03/stamping-pdf-files-downloaded-from-sharepoint-2010/Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:27:00 +0000/2012/03/stamping-pdf-files-downloaded-from-sharepoint-2010/First off I want to clarify that the subject of this post is not my idea as it is something that my friend Roman Kobzarev put together for his company and I merely assisted with getting the code to work./2011/12/updating-sharepoint-2010-user-information/Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:51:32 +0000/2011/12/updating-sharepoint-2010-user-information/One of my clients recently had an issue where a particularly high profile user (CEO) had their title spelled incorrectly in Active Directory; unfortunately the error wasn’t noticed right away and now, despite changing the information in Active Directory, SharePoint was still showing the wrong title in the People Picker when granting the user rights to a Site Collection./2011/11/sharepoint-saturday-denver-2011-slide-decks/Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:02:16 +0000/2011/11/sharepoint-saturday-denver-2011-slide-decks/Last weekend I had a great time at SharePoint Friday/Saturday Denver 2011 – all the folks who helped organize the event did a fantastic job (and I have to say, it was nice this year not being one of the organizers as I was able to just enjoy the event for once which makes me appreciate their efforts even more)./2011/08/resetting-sharepoint-2010-themes-part-2-the-reset-sptheme-cmdlet/Sat, 20 Aug 2011 23:18:03 +0000/2011/08/resetting-sharepoint-2010-themes-part-2-the-reset-sptheme-cmdlet/Yesterday I threw up a quick post showing how to reset a SharePoint 2010 theme using a reasonably simple Windows PowerShell script. In that post I promised that I’d convert the script to a cmdlet and make it part of my downloadable extensions./2011/08/resetting-sharepoint-2010-themes/Sat, 20 Aug 2011 04:58:14 +0000/2011/08/resetting-sharepoint-2010-themes/UPDATE 8/20/2011: I’ve reworked this script and included it as part of my SharePoint 2010 cmdlet downloads. See “Resetting SharePoint 2010 Themes – Part 2, the Reset-SPTheme cmdlet” for details./2011/07/sharepoint-2010-sp1-public-api-changes/Fri, 08 Jul 2011 03:15:35 +0000/2011/07/sharepoint-2010-sp1-public-api-changes/I recently published a post detailing the SharePoint 2010 SP1 PowerShell changes and, in that post, I mentioned that I was probably going to detail the API changes. Well, here they are./2011/06/sharepoint-server-2010-service-pack-1-powershell-changes/Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:55:24 +0000/2011/06/sharepoint-server-2010-service-pack-1-powershell-changes/As most people know by now, Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 was released to the public today. There’s already been a lot of hype over some of the new capabilities such as the site recycle bin and some folks have documented/demonstrated some of the new PowerShell cmdlets that are available to manage this new feature; but what about all the other new and changed PowerShell cmdlets – there’s a bunch!/2011/06/getting-and-taking-ownership-of-checked-out-files-using-windows-powershell/Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:55:33 +0000/2011/06/getting-and-taking-ownership-of-checked-out-files-using-windows-powershell/Often when I’m working on a project I need to generate a list of all checked out files and provide that to my client just prior to release to production. Sometimes the client will manually inspect each of them and act as they see fit and other times they’ll ask me to just batch publish all of them (for which I use my Publish-SPListItems cmdlet)./2011/06/programmatically-setting-sharepoint-2010-calendar-overlays/Sun, 26 Jun 2011 04:51:28 +0000/2011/06/programmatically-setting-sharepoint-2010-calendar-overlays/I recently did a project where my client needed several calendars provisioned via a Feature Receiver when a particular type of Site Collection was created; they had one primary calendar and they wanted all the other calendars to be overlaid onto the primary one using SharePoint 2010’s Calendar overlay capabilities./2011/06/automating-sharepoint-2010-with-windows-powershell-2-0-now-available-and-the-bruins-win-the-cup/Sun, 19 Jun 2011 02:09:42 +0000/2011/06/automating-sharepoint-2010-with-windows-powershell-2-0-now-available-and-the-bruins-win-the-cup/This week was a particularly good week – one that I’ve been waiting to have for a *very* long time. Many who know me know that I’m a huge Boston Bruins fan – I grew up in New Hampshire and have bled black and gold my whole life (even during those late ’90s and early ‘00 years when many were ashamed to admit they were Bruins fans); well this past Wednesday, after 39 years, the Bruins finally brought Lord Stanley’s Cup home to Boston!/2011/05/monitor-sharepoint-user-profile-changes/Sun, 08 May 2011 01:13:23 +0000/2011/05/monitor-sharepoint-user-profile-changes/Today I got my copy of the May 2011 edition of SharePoint Pro magazine and was pleased to find the “Monitor SharePoint User Profile Changes” article that I co-wrote with my buddy Matthew McDermott!/2011/04/retrieving-and-configuring-the-sharepoint-2010-developer-dashboard-using-powershell/Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:22:51 +0000/2011/04/retrieving-and-configuring-the-sharepoint-2010-developer-dashboard-using-powershell/It’s been almost a year to the day since I’ve released my SharePoint 2010 cmdlets and, despite many good intentions to get them documented on my blog, things have just fallen by the wayside; this was primarily due to me going out on my own and writing my first book – but now that the book is done and I’ve begun to establish myself as an independent consultant, I believe it’s about time I start blogging about all these hidden cmdlets that I’ve created./2011/04/upgrading-user-profile-choice-fields-to-sharepoint-2010/Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:01:37 +0000/2011/04/upgrading-user-profile-choice-fields-to-sharepoint-2010/I’m working on an upgrade (database attach) for a client of mine and I ran into something somewhat unexpected with some User Profile properties – properties that used a choice field in 2007 (fields that allowed the administrator to define a list of values that the user could pick from) were migrated to Managed Term Store based fields when upgraded./2011/04/deploying-sharepoint-2010-solution-package-using-powershell-revisited/Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:35:38 +0000/2011/04/deploying-sharepoint-2010-solution-package-using-powershell-revisited/If you were at my PowerShell for developers talk at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference last week then you’ll know that I’ve never been all that happy with how I was approaching Farm Solution deployment, as detailed in an earlier post from sometime last year (Deploying SharePoint 2010 Solution Packages Using PowerShell)./2011/04/retrieving-sharepoint-2010-feature-activations-using-windows-powershell/Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:12:00 +0000/2011/04/retrieving-sharepoint-2010-feature-activations-using-windows-powershell/During my PowerShell for Developers presentation in London last week I promised to show and demonstrate a script for retrieving Feature activations; unfortunately I ran out of time and was not able to show this script to the degree that I’d intended so I decided to throw together this blog post./2011/04/european-sharepoint-best-practices-conference-wrap-up/Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:42:33 +0000/2011/04/european-sharepoint-best-practices-conference-wrap-up/I just got back from London and all I can say is, “Wow!” This was the first time that myself and my wife and daughter have ever been out of the US and we had an absolute blast – we did so much walking that we literally wore our shoes thin – it’s truly an amazing place with incredible history everywhere you turn./2011/04/windows-powershell-cheat-sheet/Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:28:13 +0000/2011/04/windows-powershell-cheat-sheet/While preparing for my two PowerShell talks that I presented at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference last week in London, I soon discovered that I had way too much content to present./2011/01/creating-powershell-help-files-dynamically/Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:04:01 +0000/2011/01/creating-powershell-help-files-dynamically/It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything useful due to all my writing efforts going to the book that I’ve been working on. However, I’ve recently wrapped up my last chapter for the book so I figured what better time to start focusing on my blog again./2010/11/real-world-sharepoint-2010-released/Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:12:00 +0000/2010/11/real-world-sharepoint-2010-released/Today I got the great news that the Real World SharePoint 2010 book has finally been released! This is my first ever publication and I’m truly excited to see it finally available./2010/11/november-2010-sharepoint-connections-decks-and-code/Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:11:00 +0000/2010/11/november-2010-sharepoint-connections-decks-and-code/The past few weeks have been very busy for me as I’ve just finished presenting at two different conferences, and as I don’t typically present at conferences this was kind of a big deal for me./2010/10/sptechcon-decks/Fri, 22 Oct 2010 07:10:00 +0000/2010/10/sptechcon-decks/I just wrapped up a couple of quick days at SPTechCon in Boston and had a great time! I don’t make it to too many conferences so it was great to see old friends again and of course I loved visiting Boston as once upon a time I used to live not too far from Boston and worked in the heart of the Boston financial district for quite some time./2010/10/service-accounts-and-managed-service-accounts-in-sharepoint-2010/Mon, 04 Oct 2010 06:58:00 +0000/2010/10/service-accounts-and-managed-service-accounts-in-sharepoint-2010/With SharePoint 2010 we now have the ability to allow SharePoint to manage various service accounts thus foregoing the need to have IT administrators manually manage password changes. This new feature is a great benefit to SharePoint administrators and security conscious admins in general as it allows us to easily enforce our corporate security policies by changing these passwords on a schedule, and the administrators don’t even know what the password is so the likelihood of a compromise due to a disgruntled admin, though not eliminated, is somewhat reduced./2010/08/announcing-aptillon/Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:50:22 +0000/2010/08/announcing-aptillon/Today I finally get to spill the beans on a secret I’ve been wanting to share for a while: today myself and six of my good SharePoint friends are announcing that we have formed a new consulting company!/2010/08/getting-an-inventory-of-all-sharepoint-documents-using-windows-powershell/Thu, 12 Aug 2010 06:49:45 +0000/2010/08/getting-an-inventory-of-all-sharepoint-documents-using-windows-powershell/I got an email today asking if I had anything that would generate a report detailing all the documents throughout an entire SharePoint Farm. As this wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked this same question I decided that I’d just go ahead and post the script for generating such a report./2010/07/big-changes/Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:15:00 +0000/2010/07/big-changes/Astute readers of my blog may have noticed that my blog header and byline have changed just a bit in the past week. For the past year I’ve been working as a Senior Architect at ShareSquared, a small SharePoint consultancy – last week I decided that the time was right for me to take a bit of a risk and leave the comfort of ShareSquared to pursue a goal that I’ve had for over 10 years: I’ve decided to go out on my own as an independent consultant!/2010/06/sharepoint-2010-service-application-charts/Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:47:39 +0000/2010/06/sharepoint-2010-service-application-charts/I, along with Paul Stork, recently gave a SharePoint 2010 deployment webcast where we discussed, among other things, Service Applications and some of the considerations that must be taken into account when planning your deployment strategy./2010/05/announcing-my-sharepoint-2010-powershell-cmdlets-stsadm-commands-now-available-for-download/Fri, 14 May 2010 06:46:37 +0000/2010/05/announcing-my-sharepoint-2010-powershell-cmdlets-stsadm-commands-now-available-for-download/I’ve been wanting to release the SharePoint 2010 version of my STSADM extensions for quite some time but honestly just haven’t had the time to migrate as many as I would have liked./2010/04/discovering-who-has-access-to-sharepoint-2010-securable-objects/Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:45:12 +0000/2010/04/discovering-who-has-access-to-sharepoint-2010-securable-objects/I’ve talked on several occasions about how we can easily use the SharePoint 2010 object model (OM) to discover who has access to a securable object (SPWeb, SPList, or SPListItem) and the fact that we can use the same mechanisms within PowerShell to create useful security/audit reports./2010/04/starting-the-sharepoint-2010-foundation-search-service-using-powershell/Sun, 04 Apr 2010 06:44:21 +0000/2010/04/starting-the-sharepoint-2010-foundation-search-service-using-powershell/It’s been a while since my last real SharePoint 2010 scripting post but we’re getting close to RTM so I figured I need to buckle down and play some catch up and get some long overdue posts published./2010/03/webinars-pod-shows-and-user-group-meetings/Sat, 27 Mar 2010 06:43:43 +0000/2010/03/webinars-pod-shows-and-user-group-meetings/I don’t usually do a lot of speaking or presenting but recently a lot of opportunities have come my way so if you’re interested in hearing me talk about SharePoint check out any of the following upcoming events:/2010/02/i'm-speaking-at-tec-2010-see-you-there/Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:43:00 +0000/2010/02/i'm-speaking-at-tec-2010-see-you-there/I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at the SharePoint Conference at The Experts Conference TEC 2010. Dates: April 25-28 Location: JW Marriott Hotel Los Angeles at L./2010/02/4th-grade-math-and-powershell/Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:42:10 +0000/2010/02/4th-grade-math-and-powershell/My 10 year old daughter came home from school today with a simple math problem that she had to solve and she asked if there was an easier way to solve the problem./2009/12/sharepoint-saturday-denver-2009-slide-deck/Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:41:29 +0000/2009/12/sharepoint-saturday-denver-2009-slide-deck/I recently presented at the SharePoint Saturday Denver event where I, rather rapidly, went through some SharePoint 2010 PowerShell stuff – the presentation was not meant as a general PowerShell overview but instead assumed that you already had at least a basic knowledge of PowerShell in general so that we could focus on SharePoint specific things./2009/12/creating-a-sharepoint-2010-enterprise-search-service-application-using-powershell/Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:40:29 +0000/2009/12/creating-a-sharepoint-2010-enterprise-search-service-application-using-powershell/The information in this post is specific to SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 and may need adjusting for the RTM version. In an effort to continue with my previous posts where I demonstrated how to build a basic farm and it’s site structure using XML configuration files and PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 I would like to now share how to create a search service application./2009/12/creating-a-sharepoint-2010-site-structure-using-powershell/Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:39:29 +0000/2009/12/creating-a-sharepoint-2010-site-structure-using-powershell/In a previous post I detailed how to use PowerShell to perform what would be otherwise done using PSConfig to create an initial SharePoint Farm. In this post I will continue the example and show how to create your web applications using a simple XML configuration file and a reusable script./2009/10/creating-custom-sharepoint-2010-cmdlets-using-visual-studio-2010/Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:40:33 +0000/2009/10/creating-custom-sharepoint-2010-cmdlets-using-visual-studio-2010/With SharePoint 2010 we now have the ability to create custom PowerShell cmdlets that can be deployed just like any other SharePoint artifact using SharePoint Solution Packages (WSP) created with Visual Studio 2010./2009/10/sharepoint-2010-psconfig-and-powershell/Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:38:19 +0000/2009/10/sharepoint-2010-psconfig-and-powershell/The information in this article is based on BETA 2 of SharePoint 2010 – there may be differences with the RTM release. Update 12/18/2009: I’ve updated the post to reflect BETA 2 changes and have considerably simplified the script removing all the dependencies on helper functions so that the core pieces required to build a basic farm are focused on rather than the complex elements to support tracing and error handling as I previously had it./2009/10/sharepoint-2010-stsadm-and-powershell/Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:37:00 +0000/2009/10/sharepoint-2010-stsadm-and-powershell/The information in this article is based on BETA 2 of SharePoint 2010 – there will likely be differences with the RTM release.` Finally, the NDA is lifted and we can openly talk about SharePoint 2010!/2009/09/setting-back-connection-host-names-for-sharepoint-2007-using-stsadm/Sun, 20 Sep 2009 06:35:35 +0000/2009/09/setting-back-connection-host-names-for-sharepoint-2007-using-stsadm/Not too long ago Microsoft introduced a security fix which addresses a possible attack vector in which malicious software tries to impersonate a local request, thereby bypassing certain constraints. The problem with this fix is that it introduces some issues for SharePoint servers, effectively resulting in 401./2009/08/setting-powershell-switch-parameters-dynamically/Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:34:45 +0000/2009/08/setting-powershell-switch-parameters-dynamically/I’ve been doing a lot of configuration driven PowerShell scripts lately and I had a bit of trouble figuring this bit out so I thought I’d write up a short post about it./2009/07/custom-sharepoint-2007-site-collection-creation-page/Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:33:57 +0000/2009/07/custom-sharepoint-2007-site-collection-creation-page/A lot of people that are using SharePoint 2007 (WSS or MOSS) for collaboration have either enabled self service site creation in which they allow their end-users to create a page using the scsignup./2009/07/download-my-custom-extensions-source-from-codeplex/Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:33:05 +0000/2009/07/download-my-custom-extensions-source-from-codeplex/I’ve been putting this off for a long time but I decided that it was time to push my source code for my custom STSADM commands and PowerShell CmdLets to CodePlex./2009/07/setting-list-properties-using-stsadm/Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:30:31 +0000/2009/07/setting-list-properties-using-stsadm/Recently I had a reader of my blog send me a modified version of my gl-addlist command in which he added some additional properties to set a couple of the SPList properties (specifically the versioning settings)./2009/07/recent-custom-stsadm-extensions-bug-fixes/Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:29:47 +0000/2009/07/recent-custom-stsadm-extensions-bug-fixes/For those that follow me on twitter (http://twitter.com/glapointe) you probably already know about these fixes but I’ll try to provide more details here. While I was waiting to start my new job (see my previous post) I decided to take a look at a few of the STSADM commands that I built and fix some things that’s been nagging me for a while./2009/07/deploying-sharepoint-files-not-handled-by-the-wsp-solution-schema/Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:29:06 +0000/2009/07/deploying-sharepoint-files-not-handled-by-the-wsp-solution-schema/I was working on a project recently where I had to deploy a settings file to the root of my web applications folder (where the web.config file resides). If you’ve ever had to do something like this before then you know that you cannot do this declaratively using the WSP’s Solution schema./2009/05/new-stsadm-commands-and-parameters-with-sharepoint-2007-sp2/Fri, 01 May 2009 06:28:16 +0000/2009/05/new-stsadm-commands-and-parameters-with-sharepoint-2007-sp2/I was working on getting SP2 installed so that I could write this post and then I saw that my buddy Todd Klindt beat me to the punch: http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=56f96349%2D3bb6%2D4087%2D94f4%2D7f95ff4ca81f&ID=127. But, as Todd only listed the new commands I figured I’d continue with what I was planning which was to show the commands and the new parameters added to existing commands./2009/05/backuprestore-now-supported-between-farms-via-april-cu/Fri, 01 May 2009 06:25:37 +0000/2009/05/backuprestore-now-supported-between-farms-via-april-cu/I just saw a very exciting blog post from Stefan Goßner regarding the April 2009 Cumulative Update (CU) – with this update you can now use backup and restore to move site collections between farms: http://blogs./2009/04/creating-default-site-groups-after-creating-site-collections-using-stsadm/Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:21:45 +0000/2009/04/creating-default-site-groups-after-creating-site-collections-using-stsadm/I got an email from Jennifer Davis today asking why, when she ran my gl-createsiteindb command, did the default site groups not show up in the site collection, specifically the “<site name> Members”, “<site name> Owners”, and “<site name> Visitors” groups./2009/04/getting-an-spwebapplication-object-using-powershell/Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:21:04 +0000/2009/04/getting-an-spwebapplication-object-using-powershell/A SharePoint deployment isn’t much of a deployment if there are no web applications. A web application in SharePoint contains one or more content databases, each of which can contain one or more site collections, etc./2009/04/powershell-cmdlet-name-changes/Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:20:29 +0000/2009/04/powershell-cmdlet-name-changes/Ever since I released my PowerShell Cmdlets I’ve been unhappy about my choice to use the -gl in the name of the cmdlet. I felt it would be useful for numerous reasons but I didn’t like that it “broke the rules” of cmdlet naming conventions./2009/04/getting-an-spfarm-object-using-powershell/Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:19:47 +0000/2009/04/getting-an-spfarm-object-using-powershell/There are several core SharePoint objects that PowerShell programmers may need to work with in order to manipulate SharePoint via PowerShell scripts. Getting these objects is pretty simple but not all that intuitive to users who are still trying to learn PowerShell and the SharePoint API./2009/04/importing-audiences-using-stsadm/Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:18:59 +0000/2009/04/importing-audiences-using-stsadm/I recently posted about exporting audiences using my gl-exportaudiences STSADM command. Of course an export wouldn’t be of much use if you didn’t also have an import so I give you gl-importaudiences./2009/04/exporting-audiences-using-stsadm/Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:18:15 +0000/2009/04/exporting-audiences-using-stsadm/I’d been wanting to build an export and import command for Audiences for quite some time but just haven’t gotten around to it. I’m currently looking for a good sample command to build during a possible talk at the next Best Practices conference so I decided to give this one a whack considering that I already had a good chunk of the code written and just needed to repurpose it./2009/04/configuring-sso-via-stsadm/Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:17:38 +0000/2009/04/configuring-sso-via-stsadm/I can’t actually take credit for this particular command – in fact I’ve never configured SSO so I personally don’t know much about it. I got the code from Stef van Hooijdonk who graciously provided the code he produced./2009/04/working-with-spwebinfo-objects-using-powershell/Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:16:52 +0000/2009/04/working-with-spwebinfo-objects-using-powershell/I know, I know, I’m way behind on documenting my PowerShell cmdlets – I will be striving to get them done as soon as possible. I’ve already documented one of them, the Get-SPSite cmdlet, and I will now continue with the Get-SPWeb cmdlet./2009/03/new-issue-with-stsadm-mergecontentdb/Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:16:13 +0000/2009/03/new-issue-with-stsadm-mergecontentdb/I just saw this post on the SharePoint forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/e9cd9836-5a50-42b3-bf2f-02338a3168f3 – it appears that there’s a possibility for data corruption when using the STSADM mergecontentdb command. The post details a few things you can do to reduce the possibility of corruption when using the command but it would appear that the hidden message is to use Backup/Restore until a fix is released./2009/03/why-i-dont-use-openweb/Sat, 21 Mar 2009 06:15:27 +0000/2009/03/why-i-dont-use-openweb/This has come up in various conversations recently so I figured I’d write up a short post about it. When trying to obtain an SPWeb object there are a couple of different options available using members of an SPSite instance./2009/03/mvp-summit-2009/Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:14:50 +0000/2009/03/mvp-summit-2009/I had an absolutely great time at the MVP Summit this year. It was great being able to sit with the product teams and see all the absolutely spectacular stuff that they’ve been working on./2009/03/follow-me-on-twitter/Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:14:15 +0000/2009/03/follow-me-on-twitter/I was having dinner the other night with lots of super star SharePoint MVPs where I ended up sitting next to Joel Oleson, Todd Baginski and Jason Medero – it wasn’t long and the subject of Twitter came up./2009/03/deleting-orphaned-event-receivers-using-powershell/Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:13:35 +0000/2009/03/deleting-orphaned-event-receivers-using-powershell/While looking through the event logs at a client of mine the other day I came across an odd error that was occurring regularly. Apparently they had developed a Feature which contained an Event Receiver which was programmatically bound to a series of lists./2009/02/synchronizing-quota-settings-via-stsadm/Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:12:55 +0000/2009/02/synchronizing-quota-settings-via-stsadm/When working with clients on their SharePoint deployment I often get questions about the quota templates and how they work. Quotas are kind of odd because of the disconnected nature of the quota template and the quota that is assigned to a site collection./2009/02/setting-the-master-page-using-stsadm/Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:12:03 +0000/2009/02/setting-the-master-page-using-stsadm/I’d thought about building an STSADM command to enable setting the master page of a site for quite a while but had opted not to do it simply out of principle – it’s generally a better idea to do this via a Feature and I didn’t really want to promote a bad practice./2009/02/sharepoint-best-practices-conference-wrap-up/Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:11:11 +0000/2009/02/sharepoint-best-practices-conference-wrap-up/The SharePoint Best Practices Conference has come to a close and I had a great time. I presented two topics, one on using Content Types to improve discoverability and the other on sub-sites versus site collections and I helped out on a couple of experts panels./2009/01/dont-use-the-preparetomove-stsadm-command/Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:10:21 +0000/2009/01/dont-use-the-preparetomove-stsadm-command/Todd Carter just published an interesting post about when to use, and more appropriately, not use the preparetomove command: http://blogs.msdn.com/toddca/archive/2009/01/30/preparetomove-away-from-running-this-command.aspx. Essentially if you have at least the Infrastructure Update (IU) installed then using this command will cause you issues./2009/01/spdisposecheck-released/Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:09:40 +0000/2009/01/spdisposecheck-released/This is a must have! If you do any kind of SharePoint development then you should strongly consider downloading the recently released SPDisposeCheck tool: http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2009/01/29/spdisposecheck-v1-3-1-is-released.aspx. This tool analyzes your assemblies and helps to identify potential memory leaks./2009/01/working-with-spsiteinfo-objects-using-powershell/Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:09:01 +0000/2009/01/working-with-spsiteinfo-objects-using-powershell/One of the first PowerShell cmdlets I built, Get-SPSite, addresses some common issues found with working with SPSite objects. I struggled with how I could provide a means to quickly and easily get SPSite objects while at the same time helping administrators so they don’t have to worry (as much) about object disposal./2009/01/replacing-navigation-urls-using-stsadm/Sun, 18 Jan 2009 07:08:00 +0000/2009/01/replacing-navigation-urls-using-stsadm/I was working on a project last Fall where a client of mine had a single site collection for their entire document library which was expected to be over 1TB. As a result of the large size of the site collection we decided to break it up into multiple site collections each contained within their own content database (we ended up with 12 in the end)./2009/01/recalculating-usage-statistics-via-stsadm-or-powershell/Thu, 15 Jan 2009 07:04:41 +0000/2009/01/recalculating-usage-statistics-via-stsadm-or-powershell/I was perusing through the SharePoint forums the other day and I came across an issue that someone was having with the usage statistics information for their My Sites site collections./2009/01/mvp-for-another-year/Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:03:36 +0000/2009/01/mvp-for-another-year/I just found out that I’ve been renewed as an MVP for another year! It’s been a crazy year – I started a new job allowing me to focus on SharePoint, I released somewhere around one hundred new STSADM commands, new PowerShell Cmdlets, lots of sample scripts, and two CodePlex projects (and that’s just the stuff I did on the side during my “free” time)./2008/12/initial-release-of-my-sharepoint-powershell-cmdlets/Sun, 21 Dec 2008 07:02:47 +0000/2008/12/initial-release-of-my-sharepoint-powershell-cmdlets/Update 4/25/2009: I’ve removed the -gl suffix from all my cmdlets – any examples using the -gl in the cmdlet name should be updated. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll remember that I recently pushed out a “beta” build of some SharePoint PowerShell Cmdlets for some initial feedback and reviews./2008/12/gl-fixpagecontact-deprecated/Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:03:50 +0000/2008/12/gl-fixpagecontact-deprecated/Woohoo! – I finally get to deprecate one of my commands – after creating and publishing 135 commands I discovered today that the August Cumulative Update fixes the issue that my gl-fixpagecontact command sought to address./2008/12/ensuring-a-valid-spcontext-via-feature-activation/Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:02:12 +0000/2008/12/ensuring-a-valid-spcontext-via-feature-activation/I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while but just haven’t gotten around to it. Have you ever needed to add a web part to a page during Feature activation?/2008/12/custom-field-types-and-wss-4-0s-xslt-based-field-type/Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:01:16 +0000/2008/12/custom-field-types-and-wss-4-0s-xslt-based-field-type/I just posted an article related to the List View Web Part and WSS 4.0’s XSLT-based List View Web Part – I had known about this change for quite some time but this other change was new to me./2008/12/custom-list-views-and-wss-4-0s-xslt-based-list-view/Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:00:01 +0000/2008/12/custom-list-views-and-wss-4-0s-xslt-based-list-view/Some of us have known about this for a while but we’ve been unable to talk about it until now – Microsoft released the following article two days ago: The CustomListView rule in Pre-Upgrade Checker can warn that customized list views that will not be upgraded./2008/12/ill-be-speaking-at-the-sharepoint-best-practices-conference/Mon, 08 Dec 2008 06:58:02 +0000/2008/12/ill-be-speaking-at-the-sharepoint-best-practices-conference/Catch me at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego, California. The conference will be held February 2-4, 2009. I’ll be presenting two topics, both currently scheduled for the last day, Wednesday:/2008/11/my-new-powershell-cmdlets-for-sharepoint-2007-feedback-requested/Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:57:13 +0000/2008/11/my-new-powershell-cmdlets-for-sharepoint-2007-feedback-requested/Okay all you PowerShell superstars out there that have been using my STSADM commands – I need your help! I’ve decided to teach myself PowerShell and see if I can’t leverage some of my STSADM experiences/code to expose some SharePoint functionality and I need some people who really know this PowerShell stuff to please take a look at what I’ve got so far and let me know if I’m way off base or not./2008/11/deactivating-features-at-different-scopes-using-stsadm/Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:56:28 +0000/2008/11/deactivating-features-at-different-scopes-using-stsadm/I just posted about one of my new commands, gl-activatefeature, which covers activating features at different scopes using STSADM. That article covers all the code necessary to not only implement the activation, but also the deactivation./2008/11/activating-features-at-different-scopes-using-stsadm/Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:55:33 +0000/2008/11/activating-features-at-different-scopes-using-stsadm/How many times have you had a Feature, either out-of-the-box or custom, that you have needed to activate at lots of different scopes or **re-**activate at lots of different scopes? To do this you may have found a way to get the list of site collections or webs and then somehow used that list in conjunction with the STSADM activatefeature command or worse you manually went to every site or web and manually activated or re-activated the Feature – this is extremely tedious and error prone as you may miss a site or web./2008/10/a-better-execadmsvcjobs-stsadm-command/Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:54:38 +0000/2008/10/a-better-execadmsvcjobs-stsadm-command/This is something that’s been bugging me for a long time – when you run the out of the box execadmsvcjobs command on a server it only ensures that pending jobs on that one server are executed – when it completes it doesn’t mean that jobs on other servers in the farm have completed./2008/10/colorado-springs-sharepoint-user-group-meeting-slides/Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:53:55 +0000/2008/10/colorado-springs-sharepoint-user-group-meeting-slides/I’m a bit late in posting this but it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I promised my slide deck and scripts so here they are: STSADM.pptx Change Password Script Sample Install Script And here’s the “quick and dirty” batch file that I showed which demonstrates an easy way to store the last 10 backups of all your site collections within a web application:/2008/10/change-password-script/Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:53:14 +0000/2008/10/change-password-script/I’d been meaning to post this for quite some time but just haven’t gotten around to it – as paranoid administrators we often find the need to change our service account passwords and doing so with a product like SharePoint can be a rather significant effort if you consider all the various accounts that may be used in a least privileges model./2008/10/changing-the-application-pool-identity-via-stsadm/Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:52:31 +0000/2008/10/changing-the-application-pool-identity-via-stsadm/This past week I presented at the local Colorado Springs SharePoint User Group meeting on using and customizing STSADM. The talk was really less about STSADM and more about SharePoint administration tips, tricks, and best practices – but we did create a new STSADM command from scratch during the meeting./2008/09/set-user-profile-picture-url-property-using-stsadm-revisited/Fri, 19 Sep 2008 05:51:41 +0000/2008/09/set-user-profile-picture-url-property-using-stsadm-revisited/A little over a year ago I created one of my first STSADM commands, gl-setpictureurlnewpath, which I developed in order to enable me to set the picture URL property for user profile objects to a new path as the result of the upgrade which resulted in the images going to a new library./2008/09/listing-event-receivers-using-stsadm/Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:51:00 +0000/2008/09/listing-event-receivers-using-stsadm/This post wraps up my event receiver posts. I just finished documenting the gl-addeventreceiver and gl-deleteeventreceiver commands and this final command would be gl-enumeventreceivers. This command is the simplest of the three as it’s just looping through all the event receivers belonging to the specified target and dumping the results out as XML./2008/09/deleting-an-event-receiver-using-stsadm/Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:50:20 +0000/2008/09/deleting-an-event-receiver-using-stsadm/I had some time so I decided to add the counterparts to the gl-addeventreceiver command that I just published. I created two new commands, gl-deleteeventreceiver and gl-enumeventreceivers. This post will cover the delete command and I’ll go over the enum command in my next post./2008/09/adding-event-receivers-using-stsadm/Sun, 14 Sep 2008 05:49:39 +0000/2008/09/adding-event-receivers-using-stsadm/A few months ago I created a CodePlex project that allows you to configure a library to allow the storing of web part page history. The project at its core used three item event receivers to listen to certain key events and either backup the page or restore the page based on the event./2008/09/windows-server-2008-default-impersonation-level-must-be-identify/Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:48:40 +0000/2008/09/windows-server-2008-default-impersonation-level-must-be-identify/If you’re configuring a Windows Server 2008 environment with SharePoint 2007 and are planning on using Kerberos make sure that you do NOT set the default impersonation level for the server to delegate as recommended in this support article: http://support./2008/09/create-a-publishing-page-via-stsadm/Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:47:52 +0000/2008/09/create-a-publishing-page-via-stsadm/I’m working on a project which is going to require the creation of about a hundred publishing pages which were going to have to be created by hand. I really didn’t want to have to sit there going through the UI to create all those pages so I threw together a new STSADM command that I could use via a script to create the pages: gl-createpublishingpage./2008/08/enumerating-email-enabled-lists-via-stsadm/Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:47:06 +0000/2008/08/enumerating-email-enabled-lists-via-stsadm/I can’t really take much credit for this command – fellow MVP Todd Klindt had a custom console application that he’d created to do the same thing but it was lacking some functionality and was not created as an stsadm extension./2008/08/updating-the-default-content-access-account-via-stsadm/Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:45:49 +0000/2008/08/updating-the-default-content-access-account-via-stsadm/This is one that I’ve been wanting to address for a while and I finally decided to sit down and just do it. If you’ve had your environment in place long enough to have to change the passwords you know that you can change most of the passwords using the out of the box STSADM commands – many refer to this support article from Microsoft on how to do this: http://support./2008/08/enabling-audience-targeting-on-a-list/Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:44:40 +0000/2008/08/enabling-audience-targeting-on-a-list/I thought I was done documenting my audience related STSADM commands and then I realized that I had completely forgotten one. The first audience related command I had created was to enable audience targeting on a list – I called it gl-listaudiencetargeting./2008/08/setting-the-audience-compilation-schedule-via-stsadm/Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:43:57 +0000/2008/08/setting-the-audience-compilation-schedule-via-stsadm/In an effort to wrap up my audience related STSADM commands I created a command that allows me to set the audience compilation schedule via STSADM. I had to do some disassembling to figure out how to do this and it turned out that the code was virtually identical to what I had done for the gl-setuserprofileimportschedule command./2008/08/importing-profile-properties/Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:43:14 +0000/2008/08/importing-profile-properties/The project that I’m currently on has a test environment in which many configurations were made to the user profile properties settings. I just began the process of building out their production environment and was faced with a minor issue – how do I get all the settings that have been applied to the test environments profile properties migrated to the production environment in a reliable and repeatable way?/2008/08/deleting-an-audience-via-stsadm/Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:42:39 +0000/2008/08/deleting-an-audience-via-stsadm/Using the commands I’ve created so far you can now create audiences, add rules, and display those rules all via STSADM. If you’re like me and you do a lot of testing of this stuff before you push out the final version then you’ll want a way to also easily delete audiences that you’ve created./2008/08/displaying-audience-rules-via-stsadm/Sun, 10 Aug 2008 05:41:24 +0000/2008/08/displaying-audience-rules-via-stsadm/Okay, so you’ve created your audience and used my gl-addaudiencerule command to add some complex rules to the audience. Three months later you’ve forgotten what those rules are and need to see them again – unfortunately you can’t do that via the browser, so what do you do?/2008/08/setting-list-content-types-using-stsadm/Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:40:36 +0000/2008/08/setting-list-content-types-using-stsadm/Sometimes when I’m working on a new Feature I find it easier to take certain snippets that I need to test and pull them out into custom STSADM commands. This enables me to quickly and easily test the core code and without having to go through all the deployment steps./2008/08/assigning-rules-to-audiences-via-stsadm/Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:39:50 +0000/2008/08/assigning-rules-to-audiences-via-stsadm/If you read my last post, Creating Audiences via STSADM, then you know that I’ve been working on a project which requires me to be able to script out the creation of audiences via STSADM./2008/08/creating-audiences-via-stsadm/Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:39:16 +0000/2008/08/creating-audiences-via-stsadm/The project that I’m currently working has a need to create a ton of audiences representing divisions, departments, locations, etc. We wanted to be able to include the creation of these audiences in our install script so that we easily recreate the audiences in various environments./2008/08/adding-a-list-view-web-part-to-a-page/Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:38:30 +0000/2008/08/adding-a-list-view-web-part-to-a-page/I had a requirement recently to show a view of a list from a child site on the page of a parent site. You can of course do this easily with a content query web part and then just manipulate the XSL to get the output to look the way you want but what if you want to be able to use the out of the box List View Web Part so that you get the toolbar and all the other stuff that the web part provides?/2008/08/delete-all-users-from-a-site-collection/Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:37:43 +0000/2008/08/delete-all-users-from-a-site-collection/I was chatting with my buddy and fellow MVP, Todd Klindt, the other day and he was asking if I had a custom command that would allow him to quickly delete all the users added to a site collection./2008/07/creating-listlibrary-folders-programmatically/Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:36:54 +0000/2008/07/creating-listlibrary-folders-programmatically/I’ve got this method that I keep copying and pasting into different solutions so I figured I’d post it here in case someone else could benefit from it. You would think that it would be really easy to create folders in a list or library but oddly enough (or, if you’ve done SharePoint development long enough you would say typically enough), it’s not./2008/07/creating-a-list-via-stsadm/Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:36:11 +0000/2008/07/creating-a-list-via-stsadm/I’m working on a project which involves scripting, via batch files, an intranet portal. We wanted to script the creation of the various division and department sites along with several lists that would be needed in each site./2008/07/web-part-page-history-codeplex-project/Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:35:26 +0000/2008/07/web-part-page-history-codeplex-project/Have you ever been working with a web part page (either a standard web part page or a publishing page) and made a bunch of changes to your web part configurations and content over a period of time only to realize sometime down the road that you need to revert to a previous version?/2008/06/trace-log-settings/Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:34:50 +0000/2008/06/trace-log-settings/It’s been a little while since I’ve released any new commands so I decided to throw one together real quick. Fellow MVP, Matthew McDermott, was working on a scripted install and had asked if I had anything to set the path for the ULS logs./2008/06/wss-build-of-my-stsadm-extensions/Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:34:08 +0000/2008/06/wss-build-of-my-stsadm-extensions/If you’re a WSS v3 user this will hopefully make you happy – I’ve reworked my custom extensions so that there is now a WSS specific build. This means that you can download the source and debug in a pure WSS environment and you will also no longer be plagued by commands being available but not working either at all (because they’re just for MOSS) or only partially because I had one small MOSS specific feature that’s not necessary for WSS./2008/06/moving-databases-the-easy-way/Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:33:25 +0000/2008/06/moving-databases-the-easy-way/I’ve seen this come up a lot so I figured I’d write a short post about it. A lot of people have been asking how to move their databases to a new server and to do this the way most people are prescribing you’ve got a lot of reading and a lot of steps to perform./2008/06/presetting-lookup-field-values-via-a-link/Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:32:40 +0000/2008/06/presetting-lookup-field-values-via-a-link/On a recent project I had a need to relate one list to another. The first list was a document library which stored project specs and the second was a list that contained user provided scores that were used to rank the projects./2008/05/content-deployment-qfe-pack-now-available/Thu, 22 May 2008 05:31:58 +0000/2008/05/content-deployment-qfe-pack-now-available/I just saw a couple of posts from AC and Spence regarding the release of the Content Deployment QFE Pack: http://andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2008/05/20/MOSS-2007-Content-Deployment-QFE-Pack-Now-Available-via-MSFT.aspx http://harbar.net/archive/2008/05/21/MOSS-2007-Content-Deployment-QFE-Pack-Now-Available-via-MSFT.aspx I won’t reiterate what they’ve already done a good job stating./2008/05/setting-metadata/Mon, 19 May 2008 05:30:54 +0000/2008/05/setting-metadata/In my last post I mentioned a project which required me to move documents from one list to another list in a different farm one folder at a time. Along with that was a requirement to set various field values (metadata) based on patterns in the folder name and/or filename./2008/05/profile-import-timer-job/Mon, 19 May 2008 05:30:11 +0000/2008/05/profile-import-timer-job/I was recently trying to debug some issues that I was having with the people picker that is shown when creating audiences and I found that I needed a way to manually trigger the distribution list import quickly but I didn’t always want to have to wait for the user profile import to finish./2008/05/exporting-and-importing-list-folders/Mon, 19 May 2008 05:29:34 +0000/2008/05/exporting-and-importing-list-folders/Those familiar with my commands know that I’ve got a few commands that I created to handle the exporting and importing of list items and lists using the content deployment API./2008/05/minor-update/Sat, 03 May 2008 05:28:17 +0000/2008/05/minor-update/I’ve pushed out a minor update to my code which affects several commands. Any command that took in an URL to a list view will now work with an URL to the list folder or the list view./2008/05/propagate-content-type-changes/Fri, 02 May 2008 05:23:37 +0000/2008/05/propagate-content-type-changes/This is something that I put together a while ago but I’m only just now getting to the point where I can document it. I was looking for a solution to a common problem of propagating changes to content types deployed via a Feature and I came across a post by Søren Nielsen./2008/05/fixing-invalid-page-contacts/Fri, 02 May 2008 05:22:28 +0000/2008/05/fixing-invalid-page-contacts/Update 12/29/2008: This command has been deprecated – the issues described below have been resolved with the August 2008 Cumulative Update (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956056 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956057). I’ve been doing a lot of migration work these days and if you’ve ever had to migrate content from one farm (or site collection) to another you know that all sorts of things can go wrong (many of which have been documented in one form or another on this blog)./2008/04/programmatically-setting-web-part-audience-targeting/Thu, 01 May 2008 05:21:34 +0000/2008/04/programmatically-setting-web-part-audience-targeting/I’ve been doing some work on my gl-exportlistitem2 and gl-addlistitem commands so that I can support the import of web part pages. I thought I was about done until I discovered that I had an issue with pages and web parts that were using audience targeting./2008/04/fix-variation-relationships-list/Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:20:41 +0000/2008/04/fix-variation-relationships-list/If you’ve read my recent post, Fun with Variations, then you know that I’ve been doing a lot of work with variations lately. One of the things that I had to figure out a solution to was how to prevent the hidden Relationships List from getting out of sync with the pages in our publishing site when we migrated content from our authoring farm to our publishing farm./2008/04/import-list-security/Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:19:52 +0000/2008/04/import-list-security/If you saw my last post, Exporting List Security Settings, then you know what this post is all about. I needed a way to be able to copy the security settings from one variation to another or from one farm to another./2008/04/exporting-list-security-settings/Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:19:15 +0000/2008/04/exporting-list-security-settings/I’ve been doing a lot with variations recently and have encountered numerous challenges with keeping data and lists in sync between the various variations. One of the things that we ended up implementing on my current project was a simple event receiver which copied items from one variation to another when that item was approved./2008/04/anyone-been-counting/Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:18:40 +0000/2008/04/anyone-been-counting/I just reached a milestone – 100 commands!!! And that’s not counting the 6 additional that are code complete but just not documented yet! When I originally set out creating this thing I expected that maybe I’d have a dozen or so commands but who knew that I’d keep finding so many things to do with STSADM?/2008/04/fun-with-variations/Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:17:56 +0000/2008/04/fun-with-variations/I’ve recently done a lot of work with my current client to get SharePoint variations working and as a result I’ve learned that you need to be very patient and persistent and keep a full bottle of Excedrin nearby./2008/04/breaking-change-to-my-extensions/Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:17:13 +0000/2008/04/breaking-change-to-my-extensions/If you’ve been using my extensions for a while there’s a good chance that you have one or more scripts written that use the extensions. If that’s the case then my apologies for this particular change – to prevent name clashes with Microsoft and other stsadm developers that are out there I’ve decided to bite the bullet and prefix all of my commands with “gl-”./2008/04/un-extend-web-application/Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:16:12 +0000/2008/04/un-extend-web-application/You may have read my recent post regarding a bug with SharePoint which occurs when you create or extend a web application using an invalid directory path. I found that the fix for the bug was pretty simple and just required updating the invalid path property so that the unextendvs or deletewebapp commands could work./2008/04/include-iis-with-disaster-recovery-backup/Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:13:02 +0000/2008/04/include-iis-with-disaster-recovery-backup/I mentioned in my previous post that I was doing a presentation at the local SharePoint user group meeting and wanted to create a simple command to demonstrate what is involved with creating custom stsadm extensions./2008/04/backup-site-collections/Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:12:20 +0000/2008/04/backup-site-collections/I wanted to do a presentation at the local SharePoint user group meeting recently and decided that I should show how to build a custom extension. I decided that rather than use an existing one I would build a new command from scratch./2008/03/extend-web-application/Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:11:30 +0000/2008/03/extend-web-application/I had some free time one night and decided to work on something that I’d had several people ask me about – extending a web application programmatically. Honestly I was surprised at how many people had specifically asked me to create this command./2008/03/bug-absolute-path-information-required/Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:10:37 +0000/2008/03/bug-absolute-path-information-required/I got an interesting email the other day from Chakir Said regarding a bug that he encountered with SharePoint. He mis-typed the folder path for the web application and unfortunately the UI page has no validation to make sure that a valid path was specified./2008/03/sample-install-script/Sun, 09 Mar 2008 06:08:21 +0000/2008/03/sample-install-script/I’ve mentioned a few times on my blog that I was going to post a sample install script which can be used to set up and configure a basic MOSS install (will also work with WSS but you’ll need to pull a lot out) and now I’ve finally got around to actually doing it./2008/03/solution-package-wsp/Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:07:18 +0000/2008/03/solution-package-wsp/I finally got around to doing what I should have done a LONG time ago – I’ve modified my source so that it now builds a WSP file when I build the project./2008/03/sharepoint-conference-2008/Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:06:23 +0000/2008/03/sharepoint-conference-2008/For those that have asked – yes, I’m at the conference – If you see a guy walking around with a Boston Bruins hat on, that’s me 🙂 Also – I’ve fixed the issue with the bad downloads – my connection from the hotel isn’t so great and when I went to upload the files last night they failed and I wasn’t able to fix until just now./2008/03/set-anonymous-access/Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:05:07 +0000/2008/03/set-anonymous-access/If you’re trying to configure a site for anonymous access via stsadm you can get most of the way using the out of the box extendvs (or my createwebapp) and authentication commands./2008/03/roll-your-own-custom-stsadm-extensions/Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:03:37 +0000/2008/03/roll-your-own-custom-stsadm-extensions/I decided I would make it easier for people who wish to create their own stsadm templates. I’ve gone ahead and created a CodePlex project http://www.codeplex.com/customstsadmtemplate) where you can download a starter project based on my custom commands./2008/02/import-site-columns/Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:01:32 +0000/2008/02/import-site-columns/In my last post I wrote about a command that I created to export site columns to an xml file because I needed the data for a Feature I was working on./2008/02/export-site-columns/Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:00:44 +0000/2008/02/export-site-columns/As I mentioned in my previous post about the gl-exportcontenttypes command I need to be able to quickly and easily get the CAML necessary to recreate site columns in a Feature./2008/02/export-content-types/Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:58:59 +0000/2008/02/export-content-types/I was recently working on a client project where there was an environment already setup with several custom content types and custom site columns that had been created. We wanted to reverse engineer those content types and columns so that we could create a Feature that could be used to deploy them into the various environments./2008/01/create-site-in-database/Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:57:54 +0000/2008/01/create-site-in-database/So you’ve got a content database (perhaps you used the gl-createcontentdb command) and now you want to create a site collection in that database. Problem is that you can’t do this easily via the browser and you definitely can’t do it via stsadm./2008/01/create-content-database/Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:57:14 +0000/2008/01/create-content-database/It’s pretty easy to create a content database via the browser and you can create a new content database easily enough when creating a new site collection via stsadm, createsiteinnewdb, or directly using addcontentdb./2008/01/set-the-welcome-page-for-a-web/Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:55:55 +0000/2008/01/set-the-welcome-page-for-a-web/When I did the gradual upgrade I found that several sites had the welcome page set to UpgLandingPgRedir.aspx when it should have been set to default.aspx. I didn’t have time to figure out why it was doing this but the fix was easy enough – I just had to change the welcome page back./2008/01/retarget-grouped-listings-web-parts/Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:55:13 +0000/2008/01/retarget-grouped-listings-web-parts/When we did our test upgrade I found that “almost” every single page that had a Grouped Listings Web Part (which is basically just a content query web part) had its source changed from showing items from the “Listings” list to instead show all items from the site./2008/01/list-all-welcome-pages/Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:54:33 +0000/2008/01/list-all-welcome-pages/After I had created the gl-sitewelcomepage command I needed a quick way to find all the pages that were pointing to the wrong place. To do this I hacked out this command which essentially just loops through a farm, web application, site collection or web and displays what the current welcome page is set to for each web./2008/01/apply-theme/Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:53:42 +0000/2008/01/apply-theme/This command came about as a result of wanting to be able to reset the theme of a web site when it was upgraded. I had created this code as part of the upgrade2 command and figured that I might as well pull it out into its own command so that it could be used independently of the upgrade command./2008/01/move-a-site-collection/Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:52:52 +0000/2008/01/move-a-site-collection/As part of the upgrade I was working on we wanted to move site collections from the upgraded location to a new location on a different web application. This can be done really easily using the backup and restore built-in commands in conjunction with the deletesite command./2008/01/namespace-and-filename-changes-plus-5-new-commands/Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:51:46 +0000/2008/01/namespace-and-filename-changes-plus-5-new-commands/I’ve just pushed out a new build which renames all the files and namespaces. If you download this latest build you will have to uninstall the previous build if previously installed./2007/12/save-list-items-and-files-to-disk/Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:38:11 +0000/2007/12/save-list-items-and-files-to-disk/I’ve seen numerous examples of people needing to save all the files from a document library or custom list (containing attachments) to disk. I didn’t necessarily need the ability myself for the upgrade we are doing but I did need a quick way to generate lots of different samples to make sure that my gl-addlistitem command was working correctly./2007/12/add-list-item/Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:37:18 +0000/2007/12/add-list-item/I’m about at my wits end with the deployment API. I had a fairly simple requirement of adding a custom list item into the site directory so that the top tasks would have some additional items post upgrade./2007/12/set-usage-analysis/Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:36:32 +0000/2007/12/set-usage-analysis/As part of our upgrade I wanted to make sure that usage analysis was fully enabled and configured so that site collection administrators could track how their sites were being used./2007/12/add-user-policy-for-web-application/Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:35:45 +0000/2007/12/add-user-policy-for-web-application/I needed to create this command in order to solve an odd permissions problem that I was experiencing. I had a web application (http://teamsites) which I’d setup and needed to start migrating sites to./2007/12/add-user-2/Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:35:06 +0000/2007/12/add-user-2/This is one of those commands that I really shouldn’t have had to create. All I wanted to do was use stsadm to add an AD group to a site collection./2007/11/set-audit-settings-for-site-collection/Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:34:19 +0000/2007/11/set-audit-settings-for-site-collection/In any financial institution auditing is crucial – it’s no different with my company – as such we wanted to make sure that there was at least a minimum level of auditing occurring at the site collection level./2007/11/search-scopes-and-rules/Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:33:33 +0000/2007/11/search-scopes-and-rules/Our previous environment had just one web application and no existing search scopes beyond the default ones. With our upgrade we wanted to (finally) take advantage of search scopes to help filter the result sets and make searches more relevant./2007/11/personalization-service-permissions/Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:32:43 +0000/2007/11/personalization-service-permissions/While walking another IT user through the SSP admin interface the other day I discovered that even though the user was a Farm Administrator that user was not able to get into certain pages within the SSP admin site (such as the profile properties page)./2007/11/customizing-mysites/Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:31:28 +0000/2007/11/customizing-mysites/This posting doesn’t actually have anything to do with stsadm (unless you count the fact that you need stsadm to install Features) but I figured I’d post this here regardless as I’ve seen a lot of questions out there regarding how to do this./2007/11/update-list-view/Sat, 17 Nov 2007 05:30:51 +0000/2007/11/update-list-view/One of the things I needed to do in order to get my Site Directory set up and working properly was to be able to modify the view that controls which columns appear when creating a new site collection./2007/11/delete-list-forget-about-forcedeletelist/Sat, 17 Nov 2007 05:29:59 +0000/2007/11/delete-list-forget-about-forcedeletelist/Okay – so I’m trying to test some import issues with lists and decide to export an existing list that has documents set the way I need them. I run my import test and realize I’ve got more work to do so I go to delete the list via the browser./2007/11/copy-list-security-permissions-settings/Sat, 17 Nov 2007 05:28:52 +0000/2007/11/copy-list-security-permissions-settings/I got a comment the other day on my blog about an issue with the copying/importing of lists. The problem was that the security settings on the list were not being preserved during the import./2007/11/user-profile-properties/Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:28:07 +0000/2007/11/user-profile-properties/After running our upgrade and inspecting the user profile properties on the SSP that we created it was quickly discovered that some properties needed to be modified. Some of the changes were as simple as determining whether or not the property should be visible on the profile page or whether the user should be allowed to edit the property and some of them needed to be mapped to the corresponding field in Active Directory./2007/11/user-profile-privacy-policies/Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:26:09 +0000/2007/11/user-profile-privacy-policies/One of the new features with SharePoint 2007 is the ability to determine who can see different profile properties when looking at a users profile page. This is a great and necessary feature as it makes sure that various privacy concerns are addressed./2007/11/export-import-and-update-list-fields/Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:25:18 +0000/2007/11/export-import-and-update-list-fields/One thing that’s been hanging over my head for a while is what to do about the Site Directory. The first problem was to get the business users to decide on where it should live (the master site directory that is) and what columns (or meta data) should be part of the directory (either new columns or changes to existing columns)./2007/11/debug-parameter/Fri, 09 Nov 2007 05:24:07 +0000/2007/11/debug-parameter/If you’ve downloaded my code recently you may have noticed that there’s now a -debug; parameter that’s been added to all commands. Basically I just got tired of manually adding in the System./2007/11/splimitedwebpartmanager-dispose-bug/Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:22:41 +0000/2007/11/splimitedwebpartmanager-dispose-bug/I found what I believe to be a bug and figured I’d pass along my findings. If you’re working with the SPLimitedWebPartManager object and call Dispose() on it there’s a minor problem – the Dispose() method does not dispose of the SPWeb object that gets loaded up – if you’re only using one instance this isn’t much of a problem but if you’re doing a lot of looping then you’ll eventually run out of memory on the server./2007/11/delete-a-list-using-forcedeletelist/Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:20:04 +0000/2007/11/delete-a-list-using-forcedeletelist/I’ve noticed a lot of people looking for a way to delete a list (based on search terms used to hit my blog). There’s a built in command called forcedeletelist which will do the trick./2007/11/set-navigation-settings/Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:16:59 +0000/2007/11/set-navigation-settings/A while back I had created a command which allowed you to set the navigation elements/nodes for a given site. The command allowed you to also set a couple of basic switches that appear on the Site Navigation Settings page (Home > Site Settings > Modify Navigation) but it didn’t allow you to set all the flags./2007/11/import-export-copy-and-delete-list-items/Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:16:00 +0000/2007/11/import-export-copy-and-delete-list-items/As part of my upgrade I’ve discovered a need to be able to add items to various lists. I considered a couple of approaches including creating a command that would allow me to specify the field names and values that I wanted to add to the list./2007/10/delete-web-application/Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:14:47 +0000/2007/10/delete-web-application/I had just finished creating the gl-createwebapp command and was about to go and delete the test web applications that I had created while testing the command and I discovered that there is no built in stsadm command for deleting a web application./2007/10/create-web-application/Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:13:47 +0000/2007/10/create-web-application/It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post – I’ve been traveling and taking some needed vacation time. But I’m back to work now and I’ve got a couple new commands that I just created today./2007/10/enumerate-effective-base-permissions/Wed, 17 Oct 2007 04:11:49 +0000/2007/10/enumerate-effective-base-permissions/I created this command because I was trying to debug an issue I was having. If you go through the central admin and remove a site permission for a web app (central admin > app management > user permissions for web applications) certain functionality that should work regardless of what setting you’ve removed no longer functions./2007/10/set-search-center/Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:10:56 +0000/2007/10/set-search-center/This was a pretty simple command to create and only took me a few minutes. Basically I needed to be able to set the search center for a site collection. You can do this via the browser by going to http://[portal]/[site collection]/_layouts/enhancedSearch./2007/10/replace-web-part-content/Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:10:12 +0000/2007/10/replace-web-part-content/If you’ve read some of my earlier posts you’ll know that I’ve been working on 3 commands to enable replacing content throughout the site in order to deal with the broken links I’ve encountered as a result of moving so many sites around for our upgrade./2007/10/1012-general-update/Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:51:00 +0000/2007/10/1012-general-update/Just a friendly reminder that if you are using these commands you’ll want to check back at this blog regularly. I’m sometimes posting updates to the download as often as 3-4 times a day or more depending on what I’m currently working on (there won’t always be a blog post corresponding to every update)./2007/10/a-better-import/Sun, 07 Oct 2007 03:49:33 +0000/2007/10/a-better-import/Some people may have read my post from a few days ago regarding the retargetting of the content query web part which was necessary because I had to move a sub-site from one site collection to another./2007/10/set-local-site-directory/Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:45:56 +0000/2007/10/set-local-site-directory/Way back one of the first commands I created was one which would allow you to set the Master Site Directory (gl-setmastersitedirectory). It turns out that because my company decided to have each division in it’s own site collection that I also needed to be able to set the local site directory (http://[host]/_layouts/SiteDirectorySettings./2007/10/publish-items/Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:45:07 +0000/2007/10/publish-items/I wasn’t planning on creating this command but then I ran my gl-replacefieldvalues command and forgot to pass the “-publish” switch in so now I was stuck with all these list items that needed to be published and/or approved./2007/10/apply-upgrade-area-url-mappings/Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:44:21 +0000/2007/10/apply-upgrade-area-url-mappings/As I mentioned in my previous post (Replace Field Values) I’m currently trying to solve the issue of broken links throughout the various sites that I’ve upgraded and moved around. The gl-replacefieldvalues command was the first of three that I’ve created./2007/10/set-web-part-state/Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:42:55 +0000/2007/10/set-web-part-state/As part of my upgrade I needed to be able to delete some web parts (closed or open) and close and open some web parts. In many respects this command, gl-setwebpartstate, is basically the twin to the gl-movewebpart command which I recently posted about./2007/10/retarget-content-query-web-part/Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:42:03 +0000/2007/10/retarget-content-query-web-part/As I was going through my upgraded and moved sites I discovered that the “Grouped Listings” web parts were not working on my webs that I’d migrated from a subsite to a site collection or moved from one site collection to another./2007/10/replace-field-values/Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:41:02 +0000/2007/10/replace-field-values/Because I’m doing so much moving around of the post-upgraded sites I’m running into lots of issues with broken links. In an attempt to solve this problem I’ve begun working on 3 commands./2007/10/move-a-web-part-on-a-page/Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:40:05 +0000/2007/10/move-a-web-part-on-a-page/This particular command was one that I didn’t actually need but rather I needed a starting place for a couple other commands that I did need (to be documented) and moving a web part seemed a simple enough starting place for manipulating web parts./2007/10/enumerate-page-web-parts/Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:39:23 +0000/2007/10/enumerate-page-web-parts/As part of the upgrade I needed to be able to fix some web parts that did not migrate correctly (either during the upgrade itself or as a result of moving a web)./2007/09/upgrade2/Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:38:18 +0000/2007/09/upgrade2/This is one of those things that I just shouldn’t have had to create. So I’m going through my upgrade and I come to the point where I’m ready to start scripting the upgrade of the individual team sites (I’d been focusing on the upgraded Areas up until now)./2007/09/my-site-settings/Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:37:23 +0000/2007/09/my-site-settings/This command replaces the gl-setmysitesnamingformat command as it includes the same functionality along with additional capabilities. I had originally created the gl-setmysitesnamingformat command to address a need to set the naming format of personal sites and I originally didn’t think I’d have to worry about the other settings on the My Sites Settings page but turns out that I did need to set one other field./2007/09/general-update/Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:36:39 +0000/2007/09/general-update/I’ve made numerous changes to most (not all) of the commands. Most of the commands now inherit from SPOperation so they now benefit from the better error handling and command argument processing./2007/09/update-v2-to-v3-area-url-mappings/Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:35:39 +0000/2007/09/update-v2-to-v3-area-url-mappings/So I’ve been moving my web sites all around, completely changing the hierarchy, creating new site collections, etc., and I discovered that whenever I hit a link that still pointed to an old bucket web (http://intranet/c16/ebusiness instead of http://intranet/topics/divisions/ebusiness) it loaded up a page called spsredirect./2007/09/a-better-delete-web/Fri, 21 Sep 2007 03:34:54 +0000/2007/09/a-better-delete-web/I recently had to use the built-in deleteweb command to delete a web site and was irritated to find that the command wouldn’t let me delete the web because it had sub-webs./2007/09/manage-content-database-settings/Thu, 20 Sep 2007 03:33:46 +0000/2007/09/manage-content-database-settings/We’ve recently started making some decisions as to the layout of our primary intranet site (the information architecture of the site that is). One of the things we decided was that we wanted all divisions to be in separate site collections but for each of them to share a single database./2007/09/add-site-administrator/Thu, 20 Sep 2007 03:32:39 +0000/2007/09/add-site-administrator/Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are the Farm administrator and you need to add a user (perhaps yourself) as a site collection administrator but you don’t want to be the site collection owner because you need a business user for that, you just want to be added as a site collection administrator?/2007/09/set-site-general-settings/Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:31:42 +0000/2007/09/set-site-general-settings/This command, gl-setsitegeneralsettings, is the replacement command for the gl-setsitecollectiontitle command. It’s basically just that command renamed and reworked to make it much more capable. The original command only allowed you to set the title of a site collection – this was just way to limiting so I changed it so that you could also set the description and the logo and this can now be done to any site, not just the top level site collection./2007/09/move-web/Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:30:47 +0000/2007/09/move-web/As part of my upgrade I’ve got several hundred web sites that need to be moved around (either from one web application to another or just to a different location with the same web app or site collection)./2007/09/delete-list-field/Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:29:24 +0000/2007/09/delete-list-field/One of the things I’ve been working on recently was trying to get the site directory into a useable state post upgrade. The main issue I needed to address was that the upgrade resulted in duplicate columns for Division and Region./2007/09/re-ghosting-pages/Fri, 14 Sep 2007 03:28:06 +0000/2007/09/re-ghosting-pages/After running a test upgrade I discovered that one page particular was showing up as un-ghosted (or customized) despite my setting the option to reset all pages to the site definition when I ran the upgrade./2007/09/importexportcopy-lists/Thu, 13 Sep 2007 03:24:57 +0000/2007/09/importexportcopy-lists/One of the challenges I’m currently trying to solve is related to the site directory. After my upgrade the site directory is a bit messed up (the upgrade seemed to have merged columns)./2007/09/enumerate-timer-job-definitions/Sat, 08 Sep 2007 03:24:01 +0000/2007/09/enumerate-timer-job-definitions/I created this particular command because I needed to get some additional information about service level timer jobs. If you go to Central Admin -> Operations -> Time Job Definitions (or status) you’ll see all the timer jobs for the farm./2007/09/site-directory-links-scan/Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:23:18 +0000/2007/09/site-directory-links-scan/I’m starting to work on getting our Site Directory configured and the first thing I noticed after performing my test upgrade was there were tons of links in the site directory to dead sites./2007/09/more-site-navigation-settings-commands/Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:22:21 +0000/2007/09/more-site-navigation-settings-commands/Last month I created a couple pretty basic commands to help me with setting the navigational elements of my site: gl-enumnavigation and gl-addnavigationnode. You can find information about those commands here: Site Navigation Settings./2007/09/convert-a-sub-site-to-a-site-collection/Wed, 05 Sep 2007 03:20:08 +0000/2007/09/convert-a-sub-site-to-a-site-collection/I finally figured it out! This was supposed to be one of those very simple tasks that I should have been able to do without any custom code. Turning a sub-site (or web) into a site collection (or top level site) turned out to be the most difficult task I’ve yet to face with SharePoint 2007./2007/08/fix-publishing-pages-page-layout-url/Thu, 30 Aug 2007 03:19:12 +0000/2007/08/fix-publishing-pages-page-layout-url/This command was created to fix an issue with our upgraded sites as well as issues I discovered with sites that had been imported to new farms. What happened was that after the upgrade (or an import) the Page Layout URL (page./2007/08/enumerate-available-page-layouts/Thu, 30 Aug 2007 03:18:22 +0000/2007/08/enumerate-available-page-layouts/I created this only because I needed to debug some issues I’ve been having with Page Layouts – try to convert a sub-site to a site collection and you’ll see what I mean :)./2007/08/copy-content-types/Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:17:27 +0000/2007/08/copy-content-types/This turned out to be a lot more challenging than I was expecting it to be. Duplicating a content type required that I learn a lot about how to programmatically create things like site columns and workflows associations and policies./2007/08/enumerate-features/Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:16:37 +0000/2007/08/enumerate-features/One of the tasks I needed to do for my upgrade was to convert a sub site to a site collection. This is something I’m still trying to get right as of this writing but figured I’d share a new command I had to create to help with that./2007/08/site-navigation-settings/Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:15:59 +0000/2007/08/site-navigation-settings/Setting the navigation is another common post upgrade/deployment task that should be easy to script. One of the challenges in using the commands I created was that it’s necessary to know the node ID of the navigational elements./2007/08/set-my-sites-naming-format/Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:14:37 +0000/2007/08/set-my-sites-naming-format/Update 9/25/2007: This command has been deprecated in favor of the gl-mysitesettings command. Update 9/18/2007: I’ve modified this command so that it no longer manipulates the database directly. The content below has been updated to reflect the changes./2007/08/set-available-site-templates/Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:13:43 +0000/2007/08/set-available-site-templates/One of the common tasks that administrators will need to perform across various site collections upon initial deployment is to set which site templates (and page layouts) are available for creating subsites and pages./2007/08/user-profile-default-access-account/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:12:23 +0000/2007/08/user-profile-default-access-account/This ended up being one of those simple commands to create that took way to long to figure out how to create. Fortunately though there is an API available for setting this property (unlike most of the profile import related tasks such as the timer jobs)./2007/08/user-permissions-for-web-applications/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:10:45 +0000/2007/08/user-permissions-for-web-applications/One of the nice things about SharePoint 2007 is that you now have the ability to control what permissions are available for a given web application. As an administrator this is nice because you can now prevent site collection administrators from handing out permissions which violate your security policies./2007/08/quota-templates/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:09:52 +0000/2007/08/quota-templates/The following is a list of quota related commands that I have created and are available for download from this site. gl-createquotatemplate Creating a quota template can be done using the central administration tool by going to “Central Administration > Application Management > Quota Templates”./2007/08/site-collection-title/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:08:43 +0000/2007/08/site-collection-title/Update 9/17/2007: This command has been made obsolete and removed from the package. Please use gl-setsitegeneralsettings instead. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. This is one of those that I thought I needed because during the upgrade the mysites application got hosed so was expecting to have to set the title manually./2007/08/set-user-profile-import-schedule/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:07:42 +0000/2007/08/set-user-profile-import-schedule/Update 9/18/2007: I’ve modified this command so that it no longer manipulates the database directly. The content below has been updated to reflect the changes. This particular command which I called gl-setuserprofileimportschedule, really drove me nuts./2007/08/setting-the-master-site-directory/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:06:57 +0000/2007/08/setting-the-master-site-directory/One of the things I needed my upgrade script to do was to set the master site directory. This can be done easily enough using the central admin tool (Central Administration > Operations > Site Directory Settings)./2007/08/set-picture-url-property/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:05:53 +0000/2007/08/set-picture-url-property/Within our SPS 2003 environment we stored employee pictures in a picture library. We then set the users Picture URL profile property to point to their picture in this library. The problem was that as soon as we upgraded the paths to these pictures no longer worked./2007/08/self-service-site-creation/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:04:49 +0000/2007/08/self-service-site-creation/For some web applications you’re going to need to have tight controls over who can create sites and who can’t. One simple thing you can do to prevent users from creating sites is to disable self service site creation./2007/08/security-for-web-part-pages/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:03:34 +0000/2007/08/security-for-web-part-pages/In SharePoint Portal Server 2003 we had allowed users to add web parts from the online web part gallery. In going to MOSS 2007 we decided that we no longer wanted users to be able to do this as it tended to reduce the security of the site and adversely affect performance (not to mention that fact that it was annoying having a weather web part on every page)./2007/08/portal-site-connection/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:02:36 +0000/2007/08/portal-site-connection/One of things I found that I had to do a lot with the upgraded site (or even a new, from scratch, portal) was to connect the various web applications and site collections to the main portal (results in adding a link to the top left bread crumb trail)./2007/08/migrate-profile-data-from-sps-2003-to-moss-2007/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:01:42 +0000/2007/08/migrate-profile-data-from-sps-2003-to-moss-2007/As we were doing our upgrade we realized early on that we did not want to keep the SSP as it was migrated during the upgrade process. The upgraded version just locked us into to many things that we didn’t like./2007/08/getting-started-with-stsadm-extensions/Fri, 10 Aug 2007 02:59:55 +0000/2007/08/getting-started-with-stsadm-extensions/Before I talk about the commands that I’ve created I wanted to spend a moment to show how I’ve approached the creation of the commands. If you’re faced with a situation like mine where you have to automate numerous MOSS configurations then you basically have two options – the first is to use STSADM (and possibly custom extensions) and the third is to just write your own console or WinForm app and plug away against the API./2007/08/why-an-stsadm-blog/Thu, 09 Aug 2007 01:48:39 +0000/2007/08/why-an-stsadm-blog/So this is my first posting to my first blog. I’ve been wanting to start blogging for quite some time now but either haven’t found the time or the inspiration. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of SharePoint work for the company I work for (Edfinancial Services).