Information Worker Main Feed

Poster : How SharePoint Fits Together – For End Users

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:03:03 +0200

This poster (PDF, 32b) explains how the sites fit together, where the server is, what you are responsible for, how it’s different to your file shares and what is connected to what. Print it in A3 colour for maximum effect. If the link delays in opening, you can locate it on my website under Downloads. If you [...]

SharePoint Saturday Talk on Enterprise Search

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:22:16 +0200

This last Saturday we had another successful SharePoint Saturday event here in Cape Town. Although I wasn’t able to be there in person, I submitted my talk as a video and I’ve uploaded it as a show for the podcast. Check it out at SharePoint Search Challenges And Tips.

Microblogging as a Business Tool

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:32:00 +0200

New home for Veronique’s SharePoint

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:51:28 +0200

Veronique's SharePoint blog home has moved.

Veronique's Blog Has Moved House

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:33:02 +0200

This blog is now hosted on WordPress. Please update your RSS feeds :

Old URL :

http://veroniquessharepoint.blogspot.com/

New URL :

http://veroniquepalmer.wordpress.com/

Microblogging as a Business Tool

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:34:00 +0200

Social networking is all the rage and you ignore the business benefits at your peril. There is still a lot of nervousness in business leveraging social networking tools, but with the right research and application and you can gain enormous benefit from these tools.

Twitter and Tweetdeck for example, have become invaluable to me as a business tool – it is an unending source of information and assistance in the SharePoint arena. I tweet 10 times more than I email or blog anymore; but for the benefit of my user base on different communication levels, I still send out all three. Joel Oleson is leading the way in this space and Endusersharepoint are hot on his heels. (Obviously there are many more, but my demographic is business users only).

I had no idea what this whole Twitter big deal was just a few months ago and thought it was a complete waste of time. Now, I can’t live without it and the benefits have been significant. Nearly all the information I send in my emails I source from Twitter. It doesn’t get hotter of the press than with microblogging.

Read how microblogging can benefit your business , then check out 17 tools companies can use internally to harness the power of tweeting if Twitter and the like are just too public.

Of course with SharePoint, there is always a way. Here is an easy, out of box work-around to start using microblogging in your company, (thanks Michael Gannotti). It’s not a complete or perfect solution, but it’s a start and it’s free.

SharePoint 2007: RSS Viewer Web Part and Kerberos

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:39:31 +0200

Went to a customer who had setup Kerberos but the RSS Viewer Web Part was still throwing the “does not support authenticated lists” message, even though Kerberos was setup 100% correctly.

Turns out the issue was with the FQDN of the sites, they had http://portal.company.co.za as their default mapping which RSS does not seem to like, once I added an internal default mapping to point to http://portal the RSS Viewer worked 100%. So the customer still access SharePoint using http://portal.company.co.za but SharePoint communicates with http://portal.

Not sure what the exact issue is with the FQDN, suspect if might be something to do with communication between servers; will let you know when I find out.

Regards,

Doug “bobTheBuilder” McCusker

Web Analytics With SharePoint Whitepaper – Now Available

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:23:45 +0200

“OUT-OF-THE-BOX”: How to get Web Analytics through using SharePoint out-of-the-box
“BUILD”: How to get advanced Web Analytics through custom solutions. E.g. shows how to use custom javascript to track user requests and report on that
“BUY / INTEROPERABILITY”: How to provide Web Analytics to customers preferring or already possessing 3rd party on-premise or SaaS solutions

Check it out here

Webcast: SharePoint Search Challenges & Tricks

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:19:18 +0200

“What, no episode this week?” I hear you ask. Yup, unfortunately that’s the case but it’s largely because I was prep’ing for our latest SharePoint Saturday event in Cape Town! I wasn’t able to be there in person, but I recorded my session as a video so I’m releasing it as an episode for The Moss [...]

Materials from community event posted – media player web part, organogram control and sample master page

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:37:06 +0200

Hi Community Friends,

Sorry for the delay in posting the materials I used to present the UX on SharePoint session at the last IW community. I have uploaded the contents to the events tab on the information worker web site. It includes the following:

presentation
sample master page, style sheet and images used
sample media player web part code
sample silverlight organogram control (team browser control)

http://www.informationworker.co.za/Pages/Events.aspx

Enjoy,

Michael

By default, SharePoint view wont group by column of type 'multiple lines of text'

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:23:00 +0200

Just thought I could save someone some time....

Imagine you are trying to create a SharePoint view, were you want to group by a specific column, but when you go to group-by drop down list, your column does not show up. Chances are that the column you are trying to group by is of type 'multiple lines of text'. Unless you can do some custom dev on this, a quick and simple solution will be to just change its type to 'single line of text', and your column will now appear in the group-by drop down.

The Mystery of the 1 to 30 Usage Log Files

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:58:25 +0200

*insert spooky music*

Ok so here is one that truly shows that I have no social life: a customer once asked me “why can we specify 1 – 30 usage log files, when configuring usage analysis processing?”, the answer to which at that time was “not entirely sure, but I know if you hit 30 it will stop recording usage data" – at least that is what the docs say :)

So, I left it for a while but then a mate asked the same question and days of working with WSS 2.0 started itching in my brain, this is what I found and it is still relevant:

Taken from the following document (modified to be relevant to WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007):

“

Inside this folder is a folder for every virtual server named using the Windows SharePoint Services virtual server globally unique identifier (GUID), and under those folders, a different folder for each day will be generated. The path of these folders cannot be modified.

You can configure the limit of logs to be created on a daily basis, with a maximum number of 30 log files. If you set a maximum number of n log files, this applies to each virtual server. This means that the log folders of each of the virtual servers (web applications) will contain at most n log files. In other words, if this number is set to 1 there will be 1 log file for each virtual server. Having many virtual servers (web applications) and having many log files might reduce performance during logging. You should consider increasing the number of log files if a front-end Web server (standalone or member of a Web farm) has log files with more than a million entries.

The front-end Web server might not have enough memory to memory-map a really large log file, which leads to a situation in which the log file might not get processed. Each hit that a front-end Web server receives uses approximately 200 bytes (B) in a log file. As a result, approximately 200 megabytes (MB) of RAM are used to memory-map a log file that contains a million hits. Memory mapping occurs only for several minutes during usage processing. Because log files are processed serially, when you have several log files, a smaller memory footprint results when a log file is processed.

Windows SharePoint Services logs HTTP 2.x information to the log files and does not log HTTP 3.x or HTTP 4.x information to the log file. When you use multiple log files, the log files are created at the same time, and all hits from one website are contained in the same log file. Usage data for a website is updated one time each day.

The number of requests that are sent to the back-end server during usage processing is proportional to the number of websites on the server. However, the memory footprint on the back-end server is not affected by the number of websites. The additional load that usage processing generates does not significantly affect the performance of the back-end servers on the server farm.

”

Regards,

Doug “bobTheBuilder” McCusker

SharePoint 2010 MSDN, your Developer Center

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:20:00 +0200

Folks SharePoint 2010 MSDN Site is up. Lets get ready for coding for sharePoint 2010: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference 2009 from a Distance

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:46:01 +0200

Sitting on the sidelines is no picnic when there are 7000 people having fun without you at #SPC09. So like thousands of others around the world, we sat glued to our laptops for days instead. The energy generated by the global SharePoint community for the keynote was felt in all four corners of the world – a ShareGasm if there ever was one ;-). We may have been sitting in suburbs in other world countries, but those few hours around the keynote felt like we were really there, and that was thanks to the thousands of tweets, pictures and blogs that were posted by those that attended. Thanks SharePointers!!!

Apart from all the great info shared on the sessions, there were underlying topics of conversation on Twitter, think it’s a fair representation of how these things go :

Day 1 – excitement, jetlag, food, SharePint
Day 2 – coffee, walking far, lack of sleep
Day 3 – beer and naps
Day 4 – irritability and exhaustion

This fun post is for the 7000 that were there that may not have gotten the big picture like we did. This is also for end users to see what’s in store for SharePoint 2010 – and how much we missed out on, sigh. This presentation (6MB, 2007 version) is a summary of my favourite photos and tweets posted over the past few days. (I don’t know anyone in the photos, they were just taken from the links supplied on Twitter). In the presentation:

Photos : keynote hall, speech, exhibit, how we kept up, around Vegas, parties Vegas style.

Tweet categories :

Getting there and day 1
On the keynote
On Steve Balmer
Geeks and nerds
Party consequences
Getting tired
What?
Appreciation
Marriage and divorce
Random stuff
On hotels and Vegas
On Twitter
Priorities
News for end users
What happens in Vegas...

There are thousands more photos all over the net, a search on Flickr has a great selection. Some people were so happy to be there they had to jump for joy, you can't help smiling at them. And of course there are plenty on Facebook too.

(Click here for the Office 2003 version, 10MB).

Enjoy.

SharePoint 2010 Beta available in November

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:46:00 +0200

Folks SharePoint 2010 Beta will be available in November. Be the first in line to be notified when it happens. Register here http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx yay