The Curving Learn

Advanced Search Web Part Problem after SP1

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:21:00 +0000

After applying SP1 for MOSS we found that the Advanced Search Web Part doesnt work if you have the 'Show Properties' option unselected. It displays the error;

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

A frantic google later and i came across the hotfix pack for February 08 which contains a somewhat suprising number of fixes and ultimately my ray of light : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948947/en-us

So overall lesson when applying SP1 - make sure you grab the post SP1 Hot Fixes. Spence Harbar has a nice cumulative list over on his blog.

'Open Mike' - May 5th 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:39:00 +0000

Sydney SharePoint User Group is pleased to bring back Mike Fitzmaurice to Australia– Monday May 5th 2008

Would you like to find out;

How can you leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint technologies to provide a platform for collaboration, ECM, search, BI and social computing?
The interoperability with MOSS and other line of business applications such as SAP?
How SharePoint and Office can be the people friendly face of service oriented architecture?

Well we’ve got just the man to answer those burning questions... Microsoft’s Mike Fitzmaurice, Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS, has kindly agreed to hold a lunch time ‘Open Mike’ session when he visits Sydney in May.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Please click here to register for this event.

Registration opens at 12:30pm and the Q&A session commence at 1:00pm. The May User Group will be held at the Microsoft’s office, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde, Sydney.

Food & Refreshments will be provided.

‘Open Mike’ – Mike Fitzmaurice Q&A
Date: Monday May 5th 2008
Time: 12:30-2:00pm

Visit http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney for further information.

Mike Fitzmaurice is an Enterprise Technology Strategist at Microsoft, advising customers, partners, and Microsoft teams on portal, collaboration, and search technology. He spent the past five years as a Technical Product Manager for Windows® SharePoint® Services and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server, focused on developer evangelism and interoperability issues. He joined Microsoft Corp. in December 1997 as a senior consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services, overseeing several development initiatives involving Exchange Server and SharePoint technology for a wide range of customers. Before joining Microsoft, Fitzmaurice served as Director of Research and Development at Advanced Paradigms Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based Microsoft Solution Provider Partner, as well as a five-year tenure as IT Director of the National Association of Broadcasters.

Sydney SharePoint User Group April

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:02:00 +0000

Emailing MOSS!

In this session, presented by SharePoint MVP Kathy Hughes, we’ll look at managing and integrating e-mails with MOSS sites, including Exchange 2007 managed folders (journaling feature), the latest Colligo Contributor (3.0) and e-mailing document libraries and lists directly. We’ll consider security, metadata, offline access, e-mail attachments and server and client considerations. We’ll also look at the pros and cons of different types of e-mail formats.

Date: Tuesday, 15th April 2008
Start time : 17.30
End time: 19.30
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

For further details on the Sydney SharePoint User Group check out the website http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx

New WCM Site : http://www.agl.com.au

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:17:00 +0000

The company I work for, UniqueWorld, have recently deployed another WCM solution on MOSS.

Check it out @ http://www.agl.com.au I'm sure you'll agree its a pretty hot looking site ;-)

The design is courtesy of a 3rd Party design agency http://www.newgency.com.au/ so further proof of the ability to skin SharePoint Sites so that they don't look like SharePoint Sites!

Well done to all the guys on the implementation!

Sydney SharePoint User Group February

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:03:00 +0000

Continuing with the 100% MVP speaker precedence for 2008 ;-) this months user group sees MOSS MVP Kathy Hughes presenting on the Business Intelligence features within MOSS.

We’ll cover the built-in BI features, such as the Report Centre, Excel Services and integration with Office Excel and Access, as well as extended BI features introduced through Reporting Services, SQL Server 2005 and the latest Microsoft BI offering, PerformancePoint Server 2007.

As always the pizza is on us! See you there.

Date: Tuesday, 19th February 2008
Start time : 17.30
End time: 19.30
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

For further details on the Sydney SharePoint User Group check out the website http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx

Sydney SharePoint User Group January

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:27:00 +0000

The first user group session for 2008 sees SharePoint MVP Ivan Wilson presenting on Site Collections and their Owners.

Ivan will cover many different aspects - from how to administer Site Collections, to deciding how many you should have.

Date: Tuesday, 15th January 2008
Start time : 17.30
End time: 19.30
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

For further details on the Sydney SharePoint User Group check out the website http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx

MOSS SP1 Fix List

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:45:00 +0000

Avoiding the temptation to be the millionth blogger to say that SP1 has been released I thought id take a different tack and link to the list of issues that SP1 resolves. Also the WSS 3.0 SP1 Fix List can be found here

Hands up for volunteers to go through the lists and check them off ;-)

Removing 'This Site' from the Search Control

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 07:19:00 +0000

I was recently asked to remove the 'This Site' scope from the Search scopes drop down in the header of my custom master pages, and as I wasn’t quite sure how or why it got there it sounded like it would provide a nice challenge for the afternoon.

Firstly the reason why they are there; this turned out to be due to the fact we were simply using the Search delegate control normally included on OOTB master pages/page layouts, which looks roughly along the lines of...

< asp:contentplaceholder id="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat="server">
< sharepoint:delegatecontrol runat="server" controlid="SmallSearchInputBox">
< /sharepoint:delegatecontrol>
< /asp:contentplaceholder>

By default this control includes contextual scopes ('This Site'/'This List') as well as the custom scopes that you have defined for your site collection.

It looked a little light weight and puny so i swapped it out with the much bigger tougher looking;

< spswc:searchboxex id="SmallSearchBox" 
runat="server" 
registerstyles="false" 
textboxwidth="160" 
usesitedefaults="true" 
dropdownmode="ShowDD" 
suppresswebpartchrome="true">
< /spswc:searchboxex>

The property that we need to look at here is the DropDownMode property, by setting its value to 'ShowDD_NoContextual' we successfully get rid of the 'This Site' contextual scopes.

Job done...

Or so I thought...

What I didn’t count on was my List view pages (AllItems.aspx) doing whatever the hell it pleases and ignoring the change I’d made to my master page. When I went to view the list I was given not only a ‘This Site’ contextual scope but for extra value a ‘This List’ contextual scope.

Some digging around lead me to discover that for some rather strange reason MS have made the ViewPage.aspx template (located at %12hive%\Template\Pages) explicitly overwrite the Search placeholder with the simple search control detailed at the beginning of this post. I’m baffled as to why given that the Form.aspx template located in the same place doesn’t do the overwrite!

As the majority of OOTB lists use this ViewPage.aspx to create its default AllItems.aspx it puts one in quite the little predicament.

I'd love to hear suggestions on how to get around this without simply modifying the OOTB ViewPage (naughty, naughty) or writing another JS hack. ;-)

Removing 'Alert Me'

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 03:20:00 +0000

I hunted around for ages trying to find out how to remove this little sucker, it turned out to be a permission level within the site collection.

Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings > Advanced Permissions > Settings > Permissions Levels >

Select the ‘Read’ permission level then unselect the ‘Create Alerts’ option.

This will stop all users with the 'Read' permission (usually all authenticated in a typical intranet deployment) from being able to create alerts, although users with the contribute, full control etc permissions will still be able.

Alternatively you can disable the create alerts feature altogether from central admin by following these steps…

Central Admin > Application Management > User Permissions for Web Application

Unselect the ‘Create Alerts’ option.

Sydney SharePoint User Group November

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 05:15:00 +0000

This months user group sees AvePoint present some considerations when implementing disaster recovery within your organisation and how their award winning backup and recovery solutions targeted at the Microsoft SharePoint Platform can help.

Date: Tuesday, 20th November 2007
Start time : 17.30
End time: 20.00
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

Also a reminder that this is the final session for the year, as we dont hold a December session.

Sydney SharePoint User Group October

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:03:00 +0000

This months user group will feature an interactive session with Microsoft SilverLight Evangelist Michael Kordahi. Michael will present demonstrations on this new technology and explore how it can be incorporated into your SharePoint environment. Following that there will be an open floor to probe Michael further on the technology and fire him ideas and questions.

Additionally we will have a short 'real world' SharePoint presentation where one of the user group members will present on their experience using WSS for a public facing site.

Date: Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Start time : 17.30
End time: 20.00
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

Sydney SharePoint User Group : New Site

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:43:00 +0000

We now have a new digital home for the Sydney SharePoint User group -http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney

Making use of the SharePoint Community Kit we now have a WSS3.0 site up and running to bring our members all the neccessary information for user group events, presentations and other community news. This is the first stage of making the user group site a more interactive experience for our members so visit the Discussion Board and post your comments, feedback and suggestions.

Also be sure to visit the site and subscribe to the Events RSS Feed to have Event details drop into your favourite RSS Reader.

Tip: Customising Content Query Web Part XSL

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:07:00 +0000

There has been a plethora of articles on customising the XSL of a content query web part, some even from Microsoft ;)

I wont run over the step by step process but just add to this wealth of information a little tip on making the XSL a little easier to manage and support.

As we have learnt the XSL used to render the output is split into 3 files;
ContentQueryMain.xsl
ItemStyle.xsl
Header.xsl

All three of these files will exist in the '\Style Library\XSL Style Sheets\' library of a site created using the Publishing template.

Instead of modifying these files it is possible to create your own custom XSL style sheets for each and tell your CQWP to use these by specifying the properties as follows;

HeaderXslLink = "/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customHeader.xsl"
ItemXslLink = "/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customItem.xsl"
MainXslLink ="/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/customMain.xsl"

Event: OZ-IA/2007

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:55:00 +0000

This coming weekend (22nd/23rd Septemer) is the Oz-IA/2007 conference in Sydney, specfically geared towards Information Architecture and UX. The conference promises two days of sessions, comprising of technical workshops, case studies and interactive workshops on all things IA.

Being in the information management arena i take a very keen interest in this subject so will be attending in the hope of learning lots of great stuff about IA/UX and how i can apply these techniques, methods etc when defining and delivering SharePoint solutions.

Heres an idea of the topics/presentations being covered;

Ethical issues and information architecture - Donna Maurer
Designing sites people love - balancing emotion with business reality - Elizabeth Pek & Andy Coffey
Semantic analysis in IA - Matthew Hodgson
Exploring multidimensional tagging frameworks - Scott Parsons
Open your mind - map it! - James Breeze
Information Architecture of Wikis - James Matheson
- Hurol Inan Landing Page Optimisation
“There’s no I in team” – a case study in collaborative information architecture - Patrick Kennedy
ROI in Information Design: where IA figures in ID - David Sless
Rise to Play a Greater Part – Delivering Specs in the Bigger Picture - Faruk Avdi
Analysing Quantitative Data - Steve Baty
Is length still an issue? - Iain Barker
Love in an elevator - selling the value of IA to business - Stephen Collins
User Research in virtual worlds - Gary Bunker & Gabriele Hermansson
Get out your pinking shears, it’s time to cut a few patterns - Sharon Varley
Fast, cheap & somewhat in control - 10 lessons from the design of SlideShare - Rashmi Sinha

Further information on presentations here: http://www.oz-ia.org/2007/program/sessions

Visit the website for further details and to register : http://www.oz-ia.org/2007/

See you there!

technorati tags:Information, Architecture, User, Experience, OZ-IA, 2007, SharePoint, UX, IA

Sydney SharePoint User Group September

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 07:52:00 +0000

We have a very exciting presentation at this months Sydney SharePoint User Group; MVP Kathy Hughes will be revisting the presentation she gave at this years TechEd on branding and customising MOSS sites.

TechEd in Rearview: Branding and Customizing Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) Sites

With the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, building and deploying a robust content-centric site has become quick and efficient.

And, with each site deployment comes the need to alter the site look and feel. In this session we review components of the user interface and their interworking relationships that ultimately create the rendered page. For the majority of the session, you will learn how to brand a site and customise the user interface through use of master pages, CSS, and page layouts. In addition, we touch on interface customisation of site navigation and branding site administrator screens. By the end of this session, you will see a site that is completely branded and easily stands apart from the out-of-the-box look and feel of SharePoint.

Date: Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Start time : 17.30
End time: 20.00
Venue: Unique World, Level 14, 24 Campbell St Sydney

Further details and registration information are available at http://sps.uniqueworld.net/sydney

technorati tags:MOSS, branding, customising, SharePoint, Sydney, User, Group, TechEd, 2007

Stefan Goßner : Content Migration API - 4 Part series

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:14:00 +0000

Bookmarking this 4 part series on Content Deployment and Migration which goes into great detail on using the Content Deployment API to acheive importing and exporting of Site Collections, Lists, Document Libraries List Items etc.

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Sydney SharePoint User Group August

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 04:13:00 +0000

This months Sydney SharePoint user group sees a double team from LivePoint with Brad Saide presenting on the Business Data Catalogue and Han Duong hosting a discussion on Customising SharePoint Themes.

Following on from this Jey from K2 will be showcasing their BPM Product K2 'blackpearl'.

For more information see http://sps.uniqueworld.net/Sydney/default.aspx

technorati tags:Sydney, SharePoint, User, Group, August, BDC, Themes, LivePoint, K2

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Debugging in SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:01:00 +0000

A recent project required us getting a good understanding of existing code and sorting out some bugs that we're occuring. In order to get a handle on what was occuring we had to setup debugging and add some expectation to the 'Unexpected Errors'!

The first step is to enable debugging in the web applications web.config by making the following changes;

<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="false" ...> 
<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="true" ...>

<customErrors mode="On" /> 
<customErrors mode="Off" />

<compilation batch="false" debug="false"> 
<compilation batch="true" debug="true">

Kudos to Renaut Comte on this tip.

There is also a Killer post from Vince Rothwell with a whole bunch of tips for debugging SharePoint exceptions.

And of course, with features being the new black, there has been a feature created that you can simply install and activate on your server and see it surface in the Site Actions menu. "The feature provisions a simple page, which executes the System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch statement, causing an exception to be thrown and the debugger to be auto-attached." Very Cool!

Head on over to the SharePoint Team blog for more information on this;
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/04/10/debugger-feature-for-sharepoint.aspx

The feature is part of a bigger SharePoint 2007 Features pack available on CodePlex

technorati tags:SharePoint, MOSS, WSS, Debugging

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Request a Hotfix web form

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:49:00 +0000

Im sure many of us have had to request a hotfix at some stage ;-) now its even easier than making a call to the product support line - you can request it using a web form!

https://support.microsoft.com/contactus2/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1410&WS=hotfix

Simply provide a few details such as the country/region, KB article number and a hotfix will be emailed to the email address provided.

technorati tags:hotfix, support

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RSS Web Part Error

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:23:00 +0000

I was receiving the following error in my logs after id deployed a RSS Web Part at a client site:

RssWebPart: Exception handed to HandleRuntimeException System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server

Id seen a similiar problem to this resolved before but couldn't find the information so thought I would post for future reference

Adding the following to the system.net node at the bottom of my web.config sorted error right out;

technorati tags:MOSS, RSS, Web Part, Error, Proxy, 2007

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MOSS 2007 RTM bug : Content Deployment : Strange Characters : Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Thu, 24 May 2007 07:56:00 +0000

Another content deployment post revisited. This problem, as i mentioned in my previous post, was confirmed as a bug with MOSS 2007 RTM and due to be fixed in SP1.

Peter Hoplar, however, continued his hunt for the encoding problem and has written a 2 part post in great detail;

'Hunting the encoding problem in content deployment' - Part1 and Part2

Content Deployment Problem : Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint : Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Thu, 24 May 2007 07:15:00 +0000

In a previous article i blogged on how to get around a 'Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint' error that i had cropping up in a Content Deployment Routine. This unfortunately doesn't mean that you won't see the error again! I've had this error return so some further research lead me to comments posted on Ton Stegman's content deployment blog by Ryan Steeno.

To summarise Ryans comments, after some extensive tracing (understatement) he ascertained that having the versioning settings of any of the Site Collection Libraries (Images/Documents/Style) set to Allow Multiple Only seemed to resolve the issue.

Note : There are also reports of this error using the stsadm utility import/export operations which Peter Holpar has managed to resolve.

MOSS 2007 RTM bug : Content Deployment : Strange Characters

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Wed, 02 May 2007 01:23:00 +0000

I've been experiencing some problems with strange characters appearing in deployed content pages on a WCM site.

So far i've found that if my RichHTML field contains a ' ' (in the HTML code view) once it has been deployed to my target server it gets rendered as an Â.

I've also noticed that the apostrophe and quote marks pasted in from word result in â€™ and â€œ (begin quote) / â€ (end quote) once the content deployment job has run.

Microsoft have confirmed that this is a bug with MOSS2007 RTM and have promised a fix in SP1.

In the meantime, this can be worked around by a bit of fiddling in the source content. Open up the page in edit mode and using the RichHTML editor replace word pasted apostrophes and speech marks.

technorati tags:MOSS, 2007, Bug, Content, Deployment, Strange, Characters, Â, â€™, â€œ

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SPS 2003 Upgrade to MOSS 2007 : /_layouts/mngsubwebs.aspx

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Tue, 01 May 2007 02:51:00 +0000

I've come across a permission problem which has tripped me up after what i thought was a successful upgrade from an SPS2003 site to MOSS 2007.

In my old SPS2003 site every site (approx 50) uses a 'Links' web part at the top of the landing page that contains a link to '/_layouts/1033/mngsubwebs.aspx'. If i browse my old SPS2003 site with just read access then no problem. However, i try the same links on the upgraded MOSS 2007 site using a read only account and im confronted with 'Access Denied' messages.

The workaround i came up with was to change the link to :

'/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx?ShowSites=1'

The shows a similar view.

technorati tags:MOSS, 2007, Upgrade, mngsubwebs.aspx, access denied

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Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Marriage) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:26:00 +0000

A few months back a colleague of mine, Ivan Wilson, posted on trying to work out the best approach to developing on MOSS 2007. It didn't really spark much debate but i've just come across an excellent MSDN article by Eric Charran that discusses team based development.

technorati tags:Development, MOSS, 2007, MSDN

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