SharePoint MindsharpBlogs

Twin Cities SharePoint Saturday

Todd Bleeker — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:49:05 GMT

My home town. Yeah! : )

Let's talk about the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon...

Read the details on the SharePoint Saturday site.

Discount on Microsoft Press Book's including SharePoint publications

Penny Coventry — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:12:00 GMT

Since the alliance between Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media went live late last year, over 200 Microsoft Press titles have been released in eBook format, all DRM-free - including some of the ones I've authored or co-authored. More details can be found at: 'New Adventures in Tech Publishing, or, "O’Reilly and Microsoft Press, Together? What’s Going on Here?”' and here: http://microsoftpress.oreilly.com/. The Microsoft Press blog also details some discount codes:

Save 40% on all Microsoft Press books and 50% on e-books! Use discount code: MSINT in the shopping cart.
Buy 2 books, get the 3rd FREE! Use discount code: OPC10 in the shopping cart.

Complete list of DRM-free ebooks

Some of my books that you can now purchase as an ebook are:

By the way, I'm working on the next version of these three books for SharePoint 2010.

Real World Project: Transparent Overlays for SharePoint Interface Enhancement (EUSP Article)

Christina Wheeler — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:37:02 GMT

Introduction

I have a client that wanted to convert their outdated HTML district website to an external facing SharePoint portal. The client was brand new to SharePoint and brought me in to build an external facing portal using MOSS 2007 Enterprise. After setting up the new farm it was time to brand the site and create content. The one thing I had the client do before I started branding the site was have them send me references to sites they liked along with a list of elements they liked about the sites.

Read the full Article on EndUserSharePoint.com

WSS v3 FAQ CLXXXIX - 7th - 13th March 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:57:00 GMT

Note: All of the addresses of the KB / Articles - 2007 Products / MS / Non-MS Articles below were valid at the time I added them to the WSS FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(Items are added to the WSS FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv3faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 7th - 13th March 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2007 KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;979439

MS10-017: Description of the security update for Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2007: March 9, 2010

9th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2005502

SharePoint's RSS Web Part does not connect to external RSS Feed when your proxy requires authentication (ver 2.0)

9th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2019030

Permissions Issue when creating Redirect Page or Custom Page on Publishing Site in MOSS 2007 (ver 5.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2015260

'Upload Multiple Files' control does not appear in SharePoint (ver 2.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2000658

Unable to Change the Default Physical Location of Content Databases on SQL server (ver 5.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2019395

SharePoint survey count is different between Number of Responses and Show all responses (ver 2.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2018558

SharePoint Unable to crawl content of specific type of files even with correct IFilter installed (ver 4.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2018721

SharePoint unique barcode value not created for documents in a library created from a template document library (ver 2.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2015265

SharePoint Copy Operation in Site Manager fails for users which are not Site Collection Administrators (ver 4.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2015264

Site grows unexpectedly when created from a custom site template (ver 3.0)

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2015895

Error: "Access to the path 'DRIVE:\blobCache\##########\' is denied." when using SharePoint webapps with different application pool identities (ver 3.0)

5th March 2010

Modifed

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2008668

Supportability regarding SQL collation for SharePoint Databases and TempDB (ver 4.0)

5th March 2010

I.b Forefront KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2015405

On a SharePoint server that is running Forefront

Security for SharePoint, you may receive an error message when you try to access a non-SharePoint site (ver 2.0)

8th March 2010

Modified

None

I.c InfoPath 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

I.d SPD 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

II. Articles - 2007 Products

New

A. Office 2007 Server Products

None

B. Other Office 2007 products

None

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2007 Products

None

IV WSS v3 FAQ

New or Modified

None

V WSSv2 KB Articles (plus SPS 2003 Hot fixes)

New or Modified

None

SharePoint Foundation 2010 additions and changes - 17 - 7th to 13th March 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:50:00 GMT

Note: All of the addresses below were valid at the time I added them to the WSS v4 FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(Items are added to the WSS v4 FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv4faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 7th to 13th March 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2010 KB Articles

New or Modifed

None

II. Articles - 2010 Products

New

A. Office 2010 Server Products

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff453933(office.14).aspx

Planning for eDiscovery (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263416(office.14).aspx

Physical records planning (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263464(office.14).aspx

Plan how records are collected (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261708(office.14).aspx

Create a file plan to manage records in SharePoint Server 2010 (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261982(office.14).aspx

Records management overview (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010

B. Other Office 2010 products

None

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee524056(office.14).aspx

Configuring Visio Graphics Service trusted data providers (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010 (despite the date not being update on the page!)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee524060(office.14).aspx

Visio Graphics Service: Create a Visio Graphics Service service applications proxy (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010 (despite the date not being update on the page!)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663483(office.14).aspx

Plan Visio Services security (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee524061(office.14).aspx

Visio Graphics Service: Configure Visio Graphics Service global settings (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 4th March 2010)

4th March 2010 (despite the date not being update on the page!)

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2010 Products

http://content3.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share1/4dfc/0/SPC14_348_Office14WhatsNewDevs_Durant_1024.wmv

SharePoint Conference 2009: What's New in Office 2010 for Developers (John R. Durant)

12th March 2010 (date added)

http://content1.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share10/9468/0/SPC14_227_DevelopAc14WebDBsinSPS14_McMinn_1024.wmv

SharePoint Conference 2009: Develop Advanced Access 2010 Web Databases and Publish to SharePoint 2010 (Ryan McMinn)

12th March 2010 (date added)

http://content2.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share15/37ce/0/SPC14_225_IntroXL14Top10Features_Javaheri_1024.wmv

SharePoint Conference 2009: Excel 2010 and Excel Services 2010: The Top 10 New Features You Need to Know (Pej Javaheri, Steve Tullis)

12th March 2010 (date added)

http://content1.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share15/251a/0/SPC14_228_CustomUIinOffice14UsingBackstage_Durant_1024.wmv

SharePoint Conference 2009: Office 2010 UI: Customizing with the Backstage View and Ribbon (John R. Durant)

12th March 2010 (date added)

http://content4.catalog.video.msn.com/e2/ft/share10/dd25/0/SPC14_402_OpenXMLDeepDive_Rajabi_1024.wmv

SharePoint Conference 2009: Open XML and the Open XML SDK (Zeyad Rajabi)

12th March 2010 (date added)

IV WSS v4 FAQ

New

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=77

V.0042 Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Team Solutions with SharePoint (Wrox - Amanda Perran, Shane Perran)

Modified

**Special Note: I re-checked all the books listed. If there were prices for a book for all the Amazon sites, I left the book without further editing (or getting march 2010 prices). I'll do that re-edit sometime but this was a sweep to update books with prices for as many Amazon sites as possible.**

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=7

V.0012 Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance, and Planning (Addison-Wesley - Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, Susan Hanley)

(prices)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=10

V.0013 Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design (Wiley - Randy Drisgill, John Ross, Jacob J. Sanford, Larry Riemann)

(French price; others updated)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=23

V.0016 Beginning Sharepoint 2010 Development (Wiley - Steve Fox)

(French and Canadian prices)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=24

V.0017 Beginning SharePoint 2010 Administration: Windows SharePoint Services 4 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (Wiley - Göran Husman, Christian Ståhl)

(additional author)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=26

V.0019 Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 20 SharePoint MVPs (Wiley - 20 SharePoint MVPs)

(revised Title; more information; UK, D prices added; still no US prices)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=21

V.0021 SharePoint Designer 2010 Unleashed (Sams - Kathy Hughes)

(later published date; revised prices)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=55

V.0023 SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide (Course Technology PTR - John L. Ferringer, Sean McDonough)

(prices updated; UK price added)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=73

V.0025 Sams Teach Yourself SharePoint Foundation 2010 in 24 Hours (Sams - Mike Walsh)

(prices added)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=63

V.0030 Professional SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management (Wrox - Andrew Connell, Chris Johnson, Ryan Duguid)

(German price added; others updated - French now N/A)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=64

V.0031 SharePoint 2010 How-To (Sams - Ishai Shagi)

(German price added others updated)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=66

V.0032 Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010 (Wrox - Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani)

(German price added others updated)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=67

V.0033 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed (Michael Noel, Colin Spence)

(German price added - others updated)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=69

V.0035 SharePoint Development with Visual Studio 2010 (Addison-Wesley - Eric Carter, Boris Scholl, Mike Morton)

(prices added)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=71

V.0037 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Companion (Microsoft Press - Bill English, The Microsoft SharePoint Community Experts)

(corrected Title; prices for more Amazons)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=72

V.0038 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator's Pocket Consultant (Microsoft Press - Ben Curry, Joyce Cox)

(corrected title; prices for all Amazons except Germany)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=74

V.0039 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development Unleashed (Sams - Robert Foster)

(more prices)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=75

V.0040 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step (MS Press - Penelope Coventry)

(more prices)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=76

V.0041 Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (MS Press - Ted Pattison)

(prices for all Amazons)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=78

V.0043 SharePoint 2010 For Dummies (For Dummies - Vanessa L. Williams)

(created a new one and then deleted the old one!)

Deleted

V.0002 SharePoint 2010 Site Administrator's Handbook (Manning Publications - Yvonne M. Harryman)

(This was a 2007 book that never made it and was supposed to come out as a 2010 book. The 2010 version still isn't listed in Amazon so removed)

Developing solutions with SharePoint and Claims – take my survey

Paul Schaeflein — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:50:52 GMT

Are you interested in using the new claims-based authorization (Windows Identity Foundation) in SharePoint? I want to hear from you!

I’ve created a single-question survey that should take only a minute or two. It is anonymous. (If you want to start a dialog, contact me thru the blog or Twitter.)

Thanks in advance!

EUSP Workshop – Create a Multi-media Center

Paul Schaeflein — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:13:57 GMT

Last week I had the opportunity to view the workshop put on by Mark Miller from EndUserSharePoint.com. I have to admit that I am not a real big “end user” of SharePoint. I am really an end user of Visual Studio. So it was very helpful to put myself in the shoes of others for a few hours.

I have a project coming up in which I need to build a video library in SharePoint. While I’m sure that I can build something pretty fancy, I don’t want to administer this library forever. That is where this workshop helped me: What concepts/actions are comfortable for end users? What issues will they face when using my application? What features does SharePoint provide that I can reuse?

So, it seems to me that EndUserSharePoint.com is not valuable only to end-users. Even bit-twiddlers like me can benefit. If you see a workshop that looks relevant to your project, I encourage you to attend. You won’t regret it!

SharePoint Survey: How Organizations are Staffing Their SharePoint Teams

Bill English — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:57:00 GMT

Recently, Mindsharp conducted a survey about staffing in our customers' deployments. In this extended blog post, I'll outline what we learned and will offer some inductive conclusions on how organizations are staffing their SharePoint deployments. I'll also draw out some other conclusions about the supporting data that is rather interesting. If you want to download a PDF copy of this post, you can do so by registering at the free content site at http://www.mindsharp.com/.

Methodology

The first step in obtaining this data was to send an email to our active customer list. In that email, which came directly from me, each customer was invited to participate in the survey. Those who responded were then sent the link to the survey. I did not send out the survey link to everyone on our list because I wanted to work with those who would take the time and effort to complete the survey. Those who responded, I surmised, would take the time to complete the survey. I was right – over 70% of those who responded to take the survey completed the survey. Given that the survey was about staffing, it was interesting to note some of the comments in interest e-mails I received back indicating pent-up interest in this topic:

"Although our experience is more like an account of what NOT to do, I think that perspective may be useful too."
This has been an area of great interest to us, but difficult to estimate. . . . .thanks for coordinating this effort. . . .
I would like to participate --- and I'm dying to know the results. I think SharePoint requires more time for support and development than anyone thought it would be and we are understaffed.
I need to provide some data points to management so this will come in handy.
Would LOVE to reply as we are a 2 man team supporting EVERYTHING SharePoint, including Site Admin training!

Basic Statistics

186 individuals completed the survey. There were no duplicate or secondary responses from the same organization, so our research represents responses from 186 different organizations. Not everyone completed the survey and I did include answers to questions from those who did not finish the survey. Hence, as we move through this survey and discuss the results, bear in mind that not all of the responses will equal 186. Some will be less, but none will be more. The first question was as follows:

1. What is the size of your organization - how many employees?
Under 50	8	4%
50-250	22	12%
251-500	12	6%
500-1000	22	12%
1001-2500	32	17%
2501-5000	26	14%
5001-10,000	24	13%
10,000+	40	22%
Total	186	100%

As you can see, the responses were evenly spread over the various sizes of organizations with the largest percentage coming from the 10,000+ user base.

The second question dealt with the number of desktops in their organization. The reason that I asked this question was because certain verticals, such as retail, can have a high number of employees who do not use computers (Wal-Mart or Target are good examples where there are a number of employees in retail positions that would never use SharePoint), so the more accurate way to assess an organization's potential to utilize SharePoint is to assess the number of desktops they have in their environment.

2. How many desktops are in your organization?
Under 50	7	4%
50-250	23	12%
251-500	15	8%
500-1000	26	14%
1001-2500	33	18%
2501-5000	29	16%
5001-10,000	25	13%
10,000+	28	15%
Total	186	100%

Again, as you can see, this survey was evenly distributed across small, medium and large environments with the largest percentage having between 1001 – 2500 desktops. 76% of the respondents have at least 500 desktops and 62% have over 1000 desktops.

We also needed to assess the different types of SharePoint implementations that exist in the respondent population. The reasoning behind is that those who purchased more features would naturally use more of those features in their environment (at least that was the hypothesis). I think the data will bear out that this hypothesis was incorrect. At any rate, the implementation numbers are as follows:

3. What type of implementation do you have?
WSS v2	0	0%
SharePoint Portal Server 2003	4	2%
WSS v3	22	12%
SharePoint Portal Server 2007 Standard	28	15%
SharePoint Portal Server 2007 Enterprise	132	71%
Total	186	100%

As you can see, the vast majority (71%) have SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise implementations. Surprisingly, very few were Windows SharePoint Services-only implementations. Now, this could be due to several variables that I didn't control for, such as whether or not those who implement Windows SharePoint Services-only farms tend to purchase or not purchase training services. Obviously, our customer list consists of those who purchase training for SharePoint, so organizations that do not make such purchases would not have been included in this survey because they wouldn't appear in our customer list. Moreover, those who utilized Windows SharePoint Services-only implementations may be the type of organizations who would like to purchase training, but lack the resources to do so, leaving them with the necessity of utilizing free educational resources from organizations like Microsoft or Mindsharp. That would tend to correlate with the notion that organizations with low resources would tend to not purchase SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint Server 2010 because of the licensing costs. Also, the high number of Enterprise deployments might simply indicate that most of the customers in our database have Enterprise Agreements (EA) that included SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise, so when they decided to deploy SharePoint Server 2007, they had no compelling reason to not implement the Enterprise version. This would, of course, run against best practices that would advise customers to purchase and deploy only that which is necessary to fulfill the business requirements developed to resolve a business problem. But I would suspect that in most environments, the thinking was "hey, we got it – let's use it. And let's install all of it even though we don't intend to use parts of it".

The thrust of this survey was to find out how organizations are staffing their deployments. But before we can dive into the staffing numbers, we need to better understand our basic numbers. It should also be noted that this survey is focused on SharePoint Server 2007 because SharePoint Server 2010 was not available for production at the time the survey was conducted.

Farm Size, Desktops and Number of Site Collections

From a hypothetical standpoint, it would seem to me that larger organizations would tend to have more servers in their farm and utilize more of the features in SharePoint Server 2007. So, the number of desktops in their environment because an organizing statistic against which much of this data is compared. I then proceeded to do basic comparisons between farm size, number of desktops and number of site collections.

The size of a SharePoint farm in this survey was defined as the number of physical (or virtual) servers in the farm less SQL, because is some environments; the SQL implementation supports a variety of applications in addition to SharePoint Server 2007. For most of the questions in this survey, I focused on their main production farm. The question was phrased as follows: "For your most important production farm, how many SharePoint servers are in the farm, not including SQL server?" Here is what we found.

First, for those organizations that had over 10,000 desktops, the number of servers in their farms was clustered toward what we would normally call the small or small-medium farm size. The horizontal axis denotes the number of servers in the farm. No one reported having 10 servers, so that data point was not reported. The vertical axis denotes the number of organizations that have that number of servers in their farm. For example, there are 14 farms in our survey that have only one server and those 14 farms came from the group that has 50-250 desktops. Moreover, there are 9 farms in the 10,000+ desktop group who have three servers in their main SharePoint farm. Here is the aggregate information.

I was surprised that the kurtosis of the curve was as positively skewed as it is across all sizes of organizations. I would have hypothesized that the skew would have been positive for smaller companies but negative for larger companies and normally shaped for medium-sized companies. For example, I would have expected that those organizations with 50-250 desktops would have installed farms with only one server (which is largely true) and I would have equally expected the 10,000+ crowd to have installed farms with 8 or 10 or more servers (which is not mostly true). But the data didn't bear this out at all. In fact, a surprising number of farms installed in the 50-250 group had three servers which are five more than the 251-500 group. And while some of those larger organizations have installed large farms, the majority (mode) installed three servers in their farm.

Since I didn't control for features or functions utilized in the survey, several plausible explanations for the positive kurtosis include:

Most farms are installed as a point solution for enumerated purposes
The SharePoint software is so efficient that farms installed as an enterprise service (as opposed to a point solution) really can run effectively on a small number of servers
Larger environments can afford higher-end hardware, so they can service more client demand with fewer servers
Larger organizations have more compliance and testing hurdles, more change management and rigorous processes to undergo in order to install more servers in a farm than medium-sized organizations, so the effort to clear 10+ servers in a SharePoint farm relative to the business requirements for utilizing SharePoint is not equal, leading the IT team to run the solution on fewer servers.
The larger organizations have not experienced deep penetration of SharePoint into their environment, so the current footprint of their deployment might be less than half of their total number of desktops

Now the opposite of what I've just written could be argued. In larger deployments, one could easily assert that in the larger organizations, management tends to be more risk adverse with higher requirements for fault tolerance, disaster recovery and backup/restore issues. These requirements would lead to additional servers in the farm, leaving us with the following explanations as to why larger environments tend to have smaller farms:

The individual answering the survey didn't know how many servers are really in the farm – s/he was guessing
The individual answering the survey under-reported the number of servers due to virtualization – there might be 12 SharePoint virtual machines running on 3 physical machines, so they reported 3 machines instead of 12.
The individual couldn't assess which production farm was the most prominent or "main" farm, so they reported on their own farm, which might be a smaller implementation in comparison with other production farms in their environment

The results are probably a combination of the bullet points above plus some points that I've not thought of. In any case, it's interesting to note that while Microsoft talks about farm scalability, the market isn't, generally speaking, implementing large-scale farms.

I also asked about the number of farms in their environment. I didn't specify production farms only, because test farms and development farms still need to be staffed – at least that was the assumption. Here is the data correlated for number of farms vs. number of desktops:

I think it's safe to say that the one response with 300 farms is a hosting provider or else they have an incredible amount of collaboration going on. Again, across the board, regardless of the number of desktops, the vast majority of implementations consisted of three or less farms. Clearly many are not even installing two farms, which means that they have a production farm but do not have a testing farm in which to conduct quality assurance routines on home-grown code. While the smaller environments have one farm – as I would have hypothesized – it is surprising that the three largest environments are not skewed in the direction of multiple production farms. Combining these two charts, one can see how most environments are standing up one or two farms with (generally speaking) three or less servers.

The reason for the few number of farms, I suspect, has as much to do with licensing costs as with anything else. I would suspect that by and large, organizations who have installed all of their EA SharePoint licenses have decided to "make due" with what they have and not go outside their EA to purchase additional licenses for other farms.

Now, I hypothesized that one strong indicator of robust collaboration is a high number of site collections in the farm. One would think that if there is persistent, pervasive collaboration in an organization, that the number of site collections will be high. Of course, this betrays my basic belief that an organization's collaboration should not be conducted in one or two site collections. Instead, I firmly hold to the position that the more collaboration an organization takes on in SharePoint, the higher the number of site collections there will be, due to any number of factors that are outside the scope of this post. The question that was asked was this: "How many site collections exist in your main SharePoint farm?" Here are the results:

The way to read this chart is to see the number of reported site collection on the horizontal axis and the number of organizations reported that number of site collections on the vertical axis for a given desktop range (yes, the number of desktops was a core element that I pivoted on several times). For example, there were two farms from the 10K+ desktop range that had over 10,000 site collections. On the other end, there were seven farms that had three or less site collections. You can see that some farms from the 10K desktop range had a relatively small number of sites collections (two were under 20) and yet there were two farms coming from the 5001-10,000 desktop range that had well over 5000 site collections in them.

I would make the assumption that those farms with a few number of site collections (under 50, to be arbitrary), have deployed SharePoint Server 2007 more often as a point solution and less often as an Enterprise service application. Conversely, those with a large number of site collections have done so, at a minimum, for its' collaboration features. Now, it is possible to install SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise as a point solution for collaboration features, but I would suspect that in most of those installations where there is robust collaboration, they are also utilizing other SharePoint Server 2007 features. Once could also surmise from this data that a number of implementations lack pervasive adoption this data doesn't tell us if these farms are experiencing poor penetration into the enterprise or if SharePoint Server 2007 was purchased for a limited functionality – perhaps one that doesn't involve the creation of a high number of site collections.

The data here was interesting. For example, the 10,000+ desktop range, there were two farms that had only one site collection (I'm assuming that those who responded know what a "site collection" is and that they are reporting accurately). Notice that in this desktop range, the kurtosis is not just platykurtic, it's really rectangular. This means that across the spectrum, there is no statistically significant variation or grouping in the number of site collections for those environments who have over 10,000 desktops.

Those who had less than 250 desktops had 500 site collections as the highest number reported for that group. Those who were in the 500 – 1000 desktop range reported the highest number of site collection as being 828. In the 2501-5000 desktop range, the highest number of site collections in a single farm was reported to be 5595. Generally speaking, as the number of desktops increased, so did the highest number of site collections in a single farm. But this may not be the most useful of data, since even the largest of environments scaled down to the smallest of the number of reported site collections.

What can be concluded from this is that there is no consistent pattern across the size of the farm relative to the number of site collections. However, as the number of site collections increased in a farm, so did the number of servers.

We also wanted to see if there was any correlation between the products in production and the number of site collections. This data is presented here:

The only real surprise to me is the number of SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise farms hosting less than 10 site collections. I was also surprised to see Windows SharePoint Services-only farms hosting site collections in the thousands. What both of these numbers tell me is that SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services are being implemented for specific reasons and that in some of these implementations, verbose, pervasive collaborations is not part of their design.

Now, what server roles are being utililized in these farms? Here is the data:

6. What role(s) do the SharePoint servers in your main SharePoint farm perform?
WFE	156	84%
Index	156	84%
Query	130	70%
Excel Services	85	46%
Document Conversion	23	12%
WSS Search	119	64%
Central Administration	156	84%
Other, please specify	36	19%

For other, here were the responses:

DocAve (2)
InfoPath Form Services (4)
AvePoint
Search Server Express
Project Server 2007 (4)
Anti-virus
Axceler (2)
Separate, dedicated SSP Server
WCM
SharePoint Server 2007 Search (2)
K2 BlackPoint (2)
OpenText CLM Services for SharePoint
Tsunami
Nintex Workflow

To have 186 respondents report that only 154 farms have Web Front End (WFE) servers is perplexing, to say the least. Perhaps those who filled in the survey didn't know what a "WFE" is – the acronym wasn't spelled out on the survey. Moreover, it is possible that 31 people simply chose not to fill in this question. But whatever the reason, the same 154 who have WFE servers also have index servers. The next most popular server role was the Query role. Happily, all of the farms that had WFE servers also had Central Administration running! In all honesty, I'm not convinced that this question was asked in the right way, so I view the data from this question with some suspicion.

Staffing for SharePoint Farms

Now that we have discussed the basic numbers, we can turn our attention to staffing. The first question I asked was this: "What is the FTE (full-time equivalency) of SharePoint farm administrators? (1.0 equals one full-time individual)". Please bear in mind that all of the staffing questions were focused on the respondent's main farm and were not supposed to cover staffing for "farms in the wild" or for multiple farm deployments. The reason for this was due to the complexity of putting together a survey that would elicit data with true positives to the exclusion of false positives or false negatives. Being this was my first survey of this kind, I tried to keep it simple.

Frankly, if you have multiple production farms, my first inclination would be to multiply these numbers here by the number of farms you have to arrive at an approximate number of FTE's needed for your deployment. This would, at least, give you an educated guess.

The responses are as follows:

As you can see, across all of the farm sizes and number of desktops, the majority of farms deployed had two or less full-time SharePoint administrators. Surprisingly, one farm in the 50-250 desktop range has three full-time administrators. But when you look at the raw count of those who have 2 or less FTE administrators, the number is 158 out of 186 respondents, or 85%. Notice also that the farms with the highest number of SharePoint administrators (4.5 – 5.0) came from the medium sized companies, indicating that the level of administration these farms need is more directly related to activity in the farm than the size of their deployment. Again, I would have assumed that the largest deployments with the largest number of desktops would have resulted in higher SharePoint administration staffs. But the data doesn't bear out this hypothesis.

A similar question to ask is this: As the number of servers increases in a farm, does the number of SharePoint administrators increase? The data comparison between the number of servers and the number of administrators is here:

The way to read this chart is to see the FTE equivalency of SharePoint Administrators across the bottom with the number of servers represented in the color bars. So, the highest bar on the chart would indicate that there were 11 farms that had 3 servers in them that had one full-time administrator. The last bar on the right would indicate that there is one farm with five administrators who have only 3 servers. Again, this data seems to indicate to me that the staffing for a SharePoint farm, from an IT Pro perspective, it more related to the functions of the deployment rather than the number of servers or the size of the deployment. From a higher perspective, I would postulate that those farms deployed as an Enterprise service will require more care and feeding (and thus more man-power) than those farms which are deployed as a single or multi-point solution. In essence, staffing becomes tied to business requirements (like everything else).

Other than the Farm Administrator, there is no other role more central to a SharePoint deployment than that of the developer. I did ask about the developer role and here is the data:

There appears to be a number of farms that have no on-staff developers at all. Since I didn't control for outsourcing of development activity, all I can report on is the number of FTE developers on staff. So those who reported having no developers on staff may be either confining their deployment functionality to that which comes out of the box or they are outsourcing their entire development effort. But again, the vast majority of farms deployed have two or less FTE developers. Out of 186 respondents, 149 (80%) have two or less full-time developers on staff for SharePoint. Moreover, just because an organization has someone devoted to SharePoint development doesn't mean that they are not also outsourcing some of their development work. Unlike administrators, who rarely outsource the administrator of their farms, development can be more readily and easily outsourced, so there is a variable here that might skew the reality of just how much development is going on in our SharePoint industry.

This survey also asked about other SharePoint roles on the overall SharePoint team. I was surprised by how many of the farms claimed to have SharePoint architects and how many large deployments didn't have architects:

In this survey, there were 28 farms that had over 10,000 desktops and 25 of those environments reported a SharePoint Architect. But of those who have on-staff architects, how many of them actually were full-time vs. part-time (and presumably splitting their time between SharePoint and other applications)? Nearly all of the architects were below 50% time on SharePoint with many being pegged in the .25 to .20 time range. This tells me the in-house architects are splitting their time and attention between SharePoint and other applications.

What does it take to be a good SharePoint architect? Well, what you want is someone is both technical and business oriented. Someone who understands business processes and has experience managing a team, a P&L and working with customers, partners and vendors. At the same time, this individual needs to understand the technology that s/he is architecting at a granular-enough level to be able to connect the business requirements to the features of the technology inside a scope of rules that is developed via collaboration between the stakeholders and the technology team.

Interestingly enough, those organizations with 10,000+ desktops report having only 6 Taxonomists (librarians). This means that only 27% have someone on staff who can help them grow and manage the putability, findability and organization of their information. In the 2501 – 5000 desktop range, there were 6 organizations who reported having a taxonomist, which means that 21% of those organizations are supported for taxonomy services. As our industry moves into the SharePoint 2010 era, with its' Metadata Services and improved organization features, these companies will come up against the very real problem of having to figure out how to organize their information with SharePoint in mind. The opportunities for training and consulting companies will be significant.

You've probably noticed that we had an "other" category. What other roles did people report on their SharePoint teams? Here is this data:

Third Tier Support
Records Manager
Common Solutions Manager
Search Administrator (2)
Project Server Developer
SharePoint Sherriff

I like the SharePoint Sherriff role. J Perhaps Mindsharp should start a certification for that role! But seriously, each of these roles was mentioned only once, except for the Search Administrator, which was mentioned twice.

When it comes to the search technologies, I've been persistently surprised at how little organizations utilize the full range of the search and indexing technologies. Especially when they have it "all" installed via the Enterprise version. With the advent of FAST and the improved search capabilities, coupled with the taxonomy services in 2010, it just seems to me that this is another area where our customer base will need to vastly improve both its server-side skill set as well as improving the end-user's ability to execute quality queries that will limit the number of false positives in their result sets. At this stage of the product's maturity cycle, to have only 2 search administrators out of 186 farms is surprising to me. It does demonstrate that SharePoint Server 2007 is not being deployed often for robust search and indexing deployments. Perhaps other products, like Autonomy or Google are still well entrenched and the sunk costs are a barrier of entry for SharePoint search. I don't know. But to be fair to the search technologies, I am assuming that a robust search and indexing deployment will require significant resources to support, most of which are FTE people who can troubleshoot crawl and result set issues.

I also wondered if any relationship exists between the number of servers deployed and the roles performed on the SharePoint team. Summary data is below. This data would be consistent with the data above: Since most farms have three or less servers in them (at least in the main production farm), then it would stand to reason that the vast majority of roles on the SharePoint team would be associated with those farms that have less number of servers.

However, this question asked about all of the SharePoint servers in their environment, not just their main production farm, so we find that the distribution of roles is relatively consistent across the farms, regardless of the number of servers.

Governance

I also asked a direct question about whether or not the respondents liked their current Governance plan. The question I asked was this: "Are you happy with your Governance of your SharePoint deployment? Why or why not?" Here is the summation of their responses:

Not Happy – 74 (40%)

Mixed - 54 (29%)

Happy – 58 (31%)

Surprisingly, less than 1/3 of the respondents are "happy" with their Governance plan and its' effect in their implementation. A full 40% stated that they are not happy with their Governance plan. In spite of all the articles, presentations, blogs, materials, advice, assistance or other messages about Governance since it became a hot topic in early 2007, the majority of the SharePoint customer community continues to work under a dissatisfactory Governance model. Why is this? The data didn't indicate any single reason or cluster of reasons for why they dislike their governance models.

However, I suspect (and this really is speculation on my part) the problem lies in the type of Governance advice and planning that is being given. Most of what I've seen starts with the SharePoint technology rather than starting with the business requirements of the deployment. There are really several layers to a strong Governance plan: the business layer, the technology layer and the enforcement layer. Governance isn't about the proper use of SharePoint unless you can tie those directives to business requirements. Governance isn't about technology only. Governance is about people and processes. Governance can't be (mostly, anyways) enforced via technology. Governance is best enforced via people – managers managing people. Managers doing spot checks in the technology to ensure that people are utilizing SharePoint according to the Governance rules is how most Governance needs to be enforced. People manage people, not technology. People enforce Governance rules, not technology.

From another perspective, Governance has two parts:

The rules by which everyone will utilize SharePoint
The designation of who will make and enforce the rules

Governance Matrix

Business Layer

Technology Layer

Enforcement Layer

Rules for Use of SharePoint

Based on business requirements, defines what the technology should do.

Derive from this what SharePoint should and should not do.

List out the method of enforcement. If the rule cannot be enforced, then it should not appear in the Governance Document

Designation of Responsible Part for Creation and Enforcement of Rules

<enter position title here>

<enter position title here>

<enter position title here>

Now, a few other items to keep in mind:

(Yes, I'm repeated myself here) If the rule cannot be enforced, then it should not appear in the Governance Document

The entire Governance document should be 10 pages or less. I've seen several 50-100 page Governance documents that have been developed and submitted as the standard to which people need to pay attention. In nearly all of these scenarios, the documents are ignored because they take too long to read and there are too many rules to remember. If necessary, keep your mammoth Governance document to help you feel better, but then write a short, concise version for your users to refer to. Short, simple, clear, and easy-to-read. That's part of the ticket to doing this correctly.
Train your users on the Governance, not just the technology. Third-party training companies like Mindsharp can only go so far in writing SharePoint materials for your users. There is a point at which you'll need to append those materials with your own materials. I advise that end-user education start with the Governance rules and the Business Requirements that led to the adoption of SharePoint Server 2007. Distilling the requirements and how those requirements solve certain business problems for your organization are a key way to gain buy-in from your user base as well as help them connect their use of SharePoint to the company's strategic goals.

So, I'll submit to the community for their collective consideration that most Governance is not working because it is not grounded in the business and technical requirements and most of the rules are not enforceable. Perhaps, at some point, I should publish a sample set of Requirement, Governance and Training documents for companies to consume. It would be a lot of work. Uffdah!

One other explanation might be that the Governance implemented has been excessive and without enforcement, leading users to ignore important directives. This is another way of saying they have a 100+ page Governance document that isn't read and is mostly not enforceable.

How to build a SharePoint Team

Lastly, I'd like to suggest some methods of building your SharePoint team. When implementing or growing your SharePoint deployment, it is best if you can start with the core support functions that are absolutely necessary and then build out your team from there. But follow the Best Practice of building out a team that can support a deployment based on business and technical requirements first. So, start with a SharePoint Governance Team:

Stakeholders
SharePoint Admin
SharePoint Dev
SharePoint Architect
Project Manager
Training
Business Analysts

Then, this team (in theory) can build out the Governance document. More likely, a subset of this team will actually do the writing with the full team discussing and giving approval/direction.

While the Governance is being written for your deployment, this team will also need education on SharePoint because they will not be as well versed in SharePoint as a Governance team needs to be. Their training should be as follows:

Team Role	Type of Education	Mindsharp Offering
Stakeholders, Project Managers, Help Desk, Business Analysts and Internal Training Staff	End-User + Overview on the connection between the business requirements and SharePoint's functionality	Power End-user Instructor-Led Course UserVersity Customized Solution (Call)
SharePoint Administrators and Developers	Farm Administrator Training Developer Training Web Design Training Search Administrator Training SQL Optimization Training Information Organization Training	5-day SharePoint Administrator Course 5-day SharePoint Developer Course 2-day Seminar on Organizing Information in SharePoint 3-day SQL Optimization Course 5-day Search Administration Course 5-day Web Designer Course
SharePoint Architects	Architect Education	1-day course on Architecting SharePoint for Your Organization (Call) 1-day course on re-architecting a SharePoint Deployment (Call)

After you have built and trained your SharePoint Governance team, you'll find that this same team, with minor modifications, can also be your ongoing SharePoint Implementation Team (SPIT) or your SharePoint Deployment Team (SDT). Things that your ongoing SDT will need to advise and make decisions on include taxonomy development, end-user education for new employees, changing business and technical requirements or establishing secure extranet policies.

This team is an ongoing effort that will exist in perpetuity. That is the best way to ensure your SharePoint deployment has the proper care and feeding support from everyone impacted by this technology.

Summary

I trust this post has been helpful to the community. I want to thank Mark Ferraz at SolutionsMark, Peter Serzo from Microsoft, and Joel Oleson. Any and all mistakes in this post are mine, not theirs, but I do want to thank them for reading through this post and offering suggestions on how to improve it. I suspect that there is much that I'm missing here, so please respond with questions and I'll see if I can give solid answers out of the raw information that hasn't been presented here. In addition, I anticipate that based on the feedback, I'll be doing a second round of surveys to further flesh out this information. Any advice or ideas would be greatly appreciated and can be posted here as a response to this blog or emailed to me at bill@mindsharp.com.

Bill English
Mindsharp

SharePoint Foundation 2010 additions and changes - 16 - 28th February to 6th March 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:30:00 GMT

Note: All of the addresses below were valid at the time I added them to the SPF 2010 FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(Items are added to the SPF 2010 FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv4faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 28th February to 6th March 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2010 KB Articles

New or Modifed

None

II. Articles - 2010 Products

New

A. Office 2010 Server Products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=39a38bbc-9abc-43b9-96de-02376e434b99

Physical Records Planning Worksheet (SPS 2010)

4th March 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1004e46e-efde-49e8-8254-2b1fe0e67649

Record Categories Worksheet (SPS 2010)

4th March 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4de94e17-4321-4397-9a97-53a38a15fcf8

In-Place Records Planning Worksheet (SPS 2010)

4th March 2010

http://downloads.ba-insight.net/next_pros.htm

SharePoint 2010 Search…What’s Next for SharePoint Pros (Lars Forstrup)

3rd March 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee805947(office.14).aspx

Multiple servers for a three-tier farm (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated ca 2nd March 2010)

2nd March 2010 (updated roughly then - article official date not changed from Nov 2009)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288040(office.14).aspx

Configure and deploy Web Parts (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 25th February 2010)

25th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287909(office.14).aspx

Manage Web Parts (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 25th February 2010)

25th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261736(office.14).aspx

Configure and deploy Web Parts (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 25th February 2010)

25th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff428120(office.14).aspx

Manage Web Parts (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 25th February 2010)

25th February 2010

B. Other Office 2010 products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=8e709e2e-c9a1-4c7e-90d6-a52bcc8e5daf

Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta - Virtual Machine

1st March 2010

C. Other relevant products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3afc2930-24c3-4a97-9850-aab507edb043

Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer's Guide (ver 1.1)

3rd March 2010

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2010 Products

None

IV WSS v4 FAQ

New

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=75

V.0040 Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step (MS Press - Penelope Coventry)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=76

V.0041 Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (MS Press - Ted Pattison)

Modified

None

WSS v3 FAQ CLXXXVIII - 21th February - 6th March 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:24:00 GMT

(Items are added to the WSS FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv3faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 28th February - 6th March 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2007 KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;979434

Description of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Cumulative Update server hotfix package (Sts-x-none.msp): January 18, 2010

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;979565

You cannot add members to a distribution group that is created across forests when the Incoming e-mail message feature is set up in Office SharePoint Server 2007

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;977860

Anonymous users are prompted for authentication when they use Explorer View to view a document library in Office SharePoint Server 2007

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;979271

Description of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package (Coreserver-x-none.msp): January 18, 2010

5th March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;979435

Description of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Cumulative Update server hotfix package: January 18, 2010

5th March 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fcc8dfd5-f3bf-497d-8001-2879de5d17b7

MicrosoftOfficeSharePointServer2007DeploymentGuideMicrosoftWindowsServer2008

1st March 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b5d0947f-445d-4d65-8af7-c018bd7be3ee

MicrosoftOfficeSharePointServer2007DeploymentGuideMicrosoftWindowsServer2003

1st March 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;978395

Description of the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Cumulative Update server hotfix package (MOSS server-package): February 23, 2010 (ver 1.1)

24th February 2010

Modifed

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;962935

You cannot upgrade from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2 after you install Office SharePoint Server 2007 on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 (ver 2.0)

4th March 2010

I.b Forefront KB Articles

New or Modified

None

I.c InfoPath 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

I.d SPD 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

II. Articles - 2007 Products

New

A. Office 2007 Server Products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=a40ba846-5b78-415b-bfe3-e10a4139939e

Achieving Meaningful Use Reporting Using Microsoft SharePoint and BI Suite

2nd March 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=277fefca-d62f-41bc-943d-79002254cfee

SharePoint Productivity Hub (site collection with training content etc.)

15th December 2009

B. Other Office 2007 products

None

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2007 Products

None

Speaking at SharePoint Summit 2010

Paul Schaeflein — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:56:19 GMT

Thanks to my friend and MAT alum Serge, I will be speaking in Montreal at the SharePoint Summit 2010. Sadly, I don’t have the entire week to stay and visit, but I will be there Monday.

If you’re at the event, please say hi!

Resolving TFTP Open Timeout Error – Win2008r2 and Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

Paul Schaeflein — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:57:45 GMT

I spent entirely too much time troubleshooting failures to PXE boot to my WDS server. So, I’m adding this page to the Bing decision engine.

The problem and resolution are in this KB Article:

The DNS Server service binds to all ports in the Windows Deployment Services port range on a server that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2008

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Michigan

Paul Schaeflein — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:09:19 GMT

A few days after my buddy Ben Curry talks about ECM, we are taking a road trip to Ann Arbor, MI to present at SharePoint Saturday. I will be presenting on PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer:

PowerShell is the new administrative environment and scripting language for Microsoft's server products. It provides tremendous benefits to developers as well. This session will show how to leverage PowerShell to understand the SharePoint API; how to use PowerShell to manage development and QA environments and how to create helpful (and efficient) scripts for general use.

Registration is open. I hope I see you there!

Chat with the SharePoint MVP Experts

Paul Schaeflein — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:36:01 GMT

Do you have tough technical questions regarding SharePoint for which you're seeking answers? Do you want to tap into the deep knowledge of the talented Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals? The SharePoint MVPs are the same people you see in the technical community as authors, speakers, user group leaders and answerers in the MSDN forums. This is the first time we have brought these experts together as a collective group to answer your questions live. So please join us and bring on the questions! This chat will cover WSS, MOSS and the SharePoint 2010 beta. Topics include setup and administration, design, development and general questions.

Monday, March 15, 2010

9:00 – 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time

12:00 - 1:00 P.M. Eastern Time

16:00 - 17:00 GMT

Join the chat room on the day of the chat:

MSDN: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx

SharePoint Best Practices Registrations Now Open!

Bill English — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:38:00 GMT

Registration now open for the August Best Practices Conference. http://www.bestpracticesconference.com. Early-bird rates through 5-31.

Bill English, MVP

SharePoint Foundation 2010 additions and changes - 14 - 21st - 27th February 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:21:00 GMT

Note: All of the addresses below were valid at the time I added them to the WSS v4 FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(Items are added to the WSS v4 FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv4faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 21st - 27th February 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2010 KB Articles

New or Modifed

None

II. Articles - 2010 Products

New

A. Office 2010 Server Products

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee956524(office.14).aspx

Using the SharePoint Foundation 2010 Managed Client Object Model with the Open XML SDK 2.0 (Eric White)

25th February 2010 (date added - article January 2010)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832800(office.14).aspx

A Brief Introduction to Enterprise Metadata Management for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Developers (Ken Milne, Paula Wing)

25th February 2010 (date added - article December 2009)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee816116(office.14).aspx

Displaying the Server Ribbon and Site Actions Menu on Customized Search Pages Upgraded to SharePoint 2010 Using Visual Upgrade (Dennis Doorn, Jo-Anne West)

25th February 2010 (date added - article November 2009)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee787051(office.14).aspx

Overview of the Fluid Application Model in SharePoint Foundation 2010 (Ricky Kirkham)

25th February 2010 (date added - article November 2009)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=183025

Technical Diagram: SharePoint 2010 Products Deployment

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167092

Technical Diagram: Services in SharePoint 2010 Products

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167095

Technical Diagram: Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167086

Technical Diagram: Hosting Environments in SharePoint 2010 Products

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167733

Technical Diagram: Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167099

Technical Diagram: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products Upgrade Planning

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167102

Technical Diagram: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products Upgrade Approaches

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167105

Technical Diagram: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products — Test Your Upgrade Process

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=f8cb362c-75ad-4cb9-9fbc-3abcdf6afeaf

SharePoint 2010 Presentations: Developer Conference Session Files

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748637(office.14).aspx

Plan for PerformancePoint Services security (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 18th February 2010)

18th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff356849(office.14).aspx

Plan Visio Services deployment (updated 18th February 2010)

18th February 2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2010/02/15/data-platform-improvements-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Data Platform Improvements in SharePoint 2010 (MS Team Blog - Ryan McMinn) (Ed: This is about Access 2010 + SP 2010)

15th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424394(office.14).aspx

Using a records archive versus managing records in place (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 12th February 2010)

12th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff393832(office.14).aspx

Configure mobile views (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff393833(office.14).aspx

Configure cross firewall access zone (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288142(office.14).aspx

Plan browser support (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617147(office.14).aspx

What's new in upgrade (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526(office.14).aspx

Plan browser support (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662542(office.14).aspx

Using Access Services with SQL Reporting Services: Installing SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Add-In (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=54e6aa02-c500-46ba-a930-bfd5c9f43edd&displaylang=en

Improving the Reach and Manageability of Microsoft Access 2010 Database Applications with Microsoft Access Services (updated 10th February 2010)

10th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c8cf1631-0f48-4a02-a18d-54b04eb7f0a7

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta Technical Library in Compiled Help format

9th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3629425d-1505-456e-89e2-ede95f75ffe5

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta Technical Library in Compiled Help format

9th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320(office.14).aspx

Choosing a business intelligence tool in SharePoint Server (updated 8th February 2010)

8th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748643(office.14).aspx

Set up and configure PerformancePoint Services (step-by-step) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff382636(office.14).aspx

Best practices for testing upgrade (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287730(office.14).aspx

Use a trial upgrade to find potential issues (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287938(office.14).aspx

Estimate how long the upgrade process will take and the space that you need (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff382633(office.14).aspx

Cleaning up your environment before upgrade (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288476(office.14).aspx

Troubleshoot upgrade issues (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff382634(office.14).aspx

Resume upgrade (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287878(office.14).aspx

Determine how to handle customizations (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff384151(office.14).aspx

Upgrade scenarios using Remote BLOB Storage (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287634(office.14).aspx

Attach databases and upgrade to SharePoint Foundation 2010 (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287821(office.14).aspx

Determine upgrade approach (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288753(office.14).aspx

Upgrade in place to SharePoint Foundation 2010 (updated 4th February 2010)

4th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff363732(office.14).aspx

Designing for in-place records management (updated 2nd February 2010)

2nd February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=7604212e-67a6-407d-ae5c-9bb9d6325e17

SharePoint 2010 Products Deployment

2nd February 2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2010/02/01/management-features-of-powerpivot-for-sharepoint.aspx

Management Features of PowerPivot for SharePoint (MS Team Blog - John Hancock)

1st february 2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/01/22/operating-system-requirements-of-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Operating System Requirements of SharePoint 2010 (MS Team Blog)

22nd January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee947140(office.14).aspx

Upgrading from Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 to SharePoint Foundation 2010 (Updated 21st January 2010)

21st January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff182925(office.14).aspx

Plan for profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 21st January 2010)

21st January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287900(office.14).aspx

Prepare the new SharePoint Foundation 2010 environment for a database attach upgrade (updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288775(office.14).aspx

Upgrade process overview (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662519(office.14).aspx

Administrative and service accounts required for initial deployment (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287628(office.14).aspx

Run the pre-upgrade checker (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc424954(office.14).aspx

Verify upgrade and review upgraded sites (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

B. Other Office 2010 products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cd9f97c4-bb88-4b8e-b69a-62921b63fb18

Microsoft Project 2010 “Ignite” training slide presentations

28th January 2010

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617150(office.14).aspx

What's new in upgrade (SharePoint Server 2010) (updated 11th February 2010)

11th February 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288751(office.14).aspx

Determine hardware and software requirements (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (updated 8th January 2010)

8th January 2010

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2010 Products

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/creating-web-databases-with-access-2010-and-access-services/10tm2t55l

MSN Video: Creating Web Databases with Access 2010 and Access Services (Joel Krist, iSoftStone)

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/getting-started-sharepoint-2010-creating-net-types-for-a-business-connectivity-services-solution/10toujpn7

MSN Video: Getting Started SharePoint 2010: Creating .NET Types for a Business Connectivity Services Solution (unknown)

25th February 2010 (date added)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394331(office.14).aspx

Visual How To: Connecting to a .NET Framework Source Using Business Connectivity Services in Office 2010 (Joel Krist - iSoftStone)

25th February 2010 (date added - MS date February 2010)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff181518(office.14).aspx

Visual How To: Converting Word Documents to PDF using SharePoint Server 2010 and Word Automation Services ((Michael Case - iSoftStone)

25th February 2010 (date added - MS date January 2010)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438731&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 3 of 8): Customizing Search Results (Level 200) (Steve Peschka)

16th February 2010

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Access/The-Access-Show-Client-performance-improvements-against-SharePoint-lists/

Channel Nine: The Access Show: Client performance improvements against SharePoint lists (D.J. Cole)

5th February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438273&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Migrating Public-Facing Web Sites to SharePoint 2010 (Level 200) (Rasool Rayani, Metalogix)

3rd February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032438723&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 2 of 8): Developing Rich Solutions in Silverlight (Level 400) (Bob German)

3rd February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032439294&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: BenkoTips Live and On Demand: What's New in Visual Studio 2010 (Level 200) (Mike Benkovich)

20th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438058&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 1 of 8): What's New for Developers (Level 100) (Paul Andrew)

20th January 2010

http://edge.technet.com/Media/PowerPivot-part-5-Management/

PowerPivot part 5 - Management (dashboard that gets installed in SharePoint 2010) (Andrew Fryer)

19th January 2010

http://edge.technet.com/Media/PowerPivot-part-4-Sharing-in-SharePoint-2010/

PowerPivot part 4 - Sharing in SharePoint 2010 (Andrew Fryer)

19th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032432970&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Project Server 2010 Project and Portfolio Management Reporting (Level 200) (Marc Soester, iPMO)

6th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032439061&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Developing Quality Applications in Visual Studio 2010 (unknown)

29th December 2009

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032433090&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Programmability (Level 200) (Chris Boyd)

17th December 2009

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032432954&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Office Project 2010 Overview (Level 200) (Keshav Puttaswamy)

16th December 2009

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032434988&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: An Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility (Level 200) (Wes Hutchins)

16th December 2009

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Access/The-Access-Show-Managing-Access-Databases-with-SharePoint/

Channel Nine: The Access Show: Managing Access Databases with SharePoint (Steve Greenberg)

1st December 2009

IV WSS v4 FAQ

New

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=64

V.0031 SharePoint 2010 How-To (Sams - Ishai Shagi)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=66

V.0032 Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010 (Wrox - Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=67

V.0033 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed (Michael Noel, Colin Spence)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=68

V.0034 Customizing Sites with SharePoint Designer 2010 (Course Technology PTR - Paul Stork, Daniel Galant)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=69

V.0035 SharePoint Development with Visual Studio 2010 (Addison-Wesley - Eric Carter, Boris Scholl, Mike Morton)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=70

V.0036 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services Unleashed (Sams - Tim Kashani, Ola Ekdahl, Kevin Beto, Rachel Vigier)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=71

V.0037 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator (Microsoft Press - Bill English, The Microsoft SharePoint Community Experts)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=72

V.0038 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator (Microsoft Press - Ben Curry, Joyce Cox)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=74

V.0039 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development Unleashed (Sams - Robert Foster)

Modified

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=5

V.0001 Professional SharePoint 2010 Development (Wiley - Tom Rizzo, Reza Alirezaei, Jeff Fried, Paul Swider, Scot Hillier, Kenneth Schafer)

(additional author)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=10

V.0013 Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design (Wiley - Randy Drisgill, John Ross, Jacob J. Sanford, Larry Riemann)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=73

V.0025 Sams Teach Yourself SharePoint Foundation 2010 in 24 Hours (Sams - Mike Walsh)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=28

V.0062 Professional Microsoft FAST Search: Customizing, Designing, and Deploying Search for SharePoint 2010 and Internet Servers (Wrox - Mark Bennett, Jeff Fried, Miles Kehoe, and Natalya Voskresenskaya)

(different author)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=33

V.0021 SharePoint Designer 2010 Unleashed (Sams - Kathy Hughes)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=29

V.0022 SharePoint Developers Guide: SharePoint Foundation 2010 (Thomson - Todd Bleeker, Paul Schaeflein)

SharePoint Deployment Best Practice Scenario

Bill English — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:11:23 GMT

In working with a customer yesterday, I was reminded again that what is a Best Practice in one environment may not be in another. Recall that a Best Practice is an action that aligns with your organization's business & technical requirements, culture, politics and security. It is intellectually simple, although the practical application of the action might be difficult. It aligns with the organization's strategies and represents an intentional action.

My customer has 6000 desktops and is in the F500 list. They are on a sharp growth curve to 15,000 desktops and have offices, literally, all over the world. It has taken this team 2.5 years to gain funding for their SharePoint deployment. Because the advent of SharePoint Server 2010 is just around the corner, we found ourselves in a discussion of whether or not to deploy SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint Server 2010.

This company currently has Office 2003 and Windows XP at the desktop. (A different customer I visited with earlier this week had the same scenario – I wonder if this is more common that we might know.) Anyways, we listed out on the white board the reasons for staying with 2007 and for going to 2010. Here was our thinking:

Reasons to Deploy 2007	Reasons to Deploy 2010
SharePoint Server 2007 is fully qualified and has passed all of the QA tests, SharePoint Server 2010 does not have a standard matrix yet for testing after the initial install	The metadata services and collaborative taxonomy are highly needed and desired in this environment. SharePoint Server 2007 doesn't provide this OOB
SharePoint eco-system is mature and needed third-party applications are available and supported	Eliminate an entire upgrade project from 2007 to 2010 by starting with 2007.
In-house IT administrators and developers are well versed in SharePoint Server 2007. Training would be needed to get them up-to-speed on SharePoint Server 2010.	Eliminate an entire learning curve for their user base by not having them learn 2007
They can get SharePoint Server 2007 installed and going in production in the next 2-3 months. SharePoint Server 2010, realistically, wouldn't happen until the 4^th quarter of 2010, at the earliest. Demand is high to get SharePoint NOW.	Several VP's are asking for 2010 and don't understand why SharePoint Server 2010 isn't being installed, especially since it has some of the key functionality that this organization needs.
Better learning curve to move to 2010 at the desktop from 2003, then introduce SharePoint Server 2010 at the server end.	Better learning curve to move to SharePoint Server 2010 and then move from 2003 at the desktop to 2010, skipping 2007.
Can customize 40-50 apps for SharePoint Server 2007. Many are already running on a test farm.	Can skip and entire customization upgrade effort by going to SharePoint Server 2010 now.
"We are not an organization that installs pre-SP1 software from Microsoft".

There were some other discussion points, but these represent the main points that we discussed. The last two points were something that could go either way, IMHO. Timing was a big issue – to wait until November/December of this year would be construed as a "miss" by many in this organization and was not acceptable. While the reasons to move to SharePoint Server 2010 were compelling, the decision continued to be to install SharePoint Server 2007 and then do an upgrade project to SharePoint Server 2010 in roughly 18-24 months. Their distrust in pre-SP1 software from Microsoft to be reliable and stable was apparent. (They are not alone in this perception. Many customers I've worked with are post-SP1 customers).

In this organization, the requirement that installed software on servers be run through a detailed quality assurance and set of custom qualifications was iron-clad. Their change management processes simply won't allow them to install product-level software without undergoing this internal compliance step. This decision represented a Best Practice for them because 2007 aligned with their immediate business requirements, technical requirements for product-level software, culture, security and politics. The fact that some VP's were asking about 2010 didn't rise to a level of a requirement and thus, for this decision, could be managed in a different way. Also, the taxonomy services in SharePoint Server 2010 while highly desired, were not a business requirement for the first phase of their SharePoint Server 2007 deployment.

This group was one of the most aligned, in-synch teams I've ever worked with. Usually, there are some tensions and politics within the SharePoint deployment team. This was not the case with this team. I'm looking forward to working with them as they move forward. I think this team will be highly successful and their deployment will be well accepted by their user base.

Bill English, MVP
Mindsharp

SharePoint User Group UK Meeting - Southampton

Penny Coventry — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:42:00 GMT

I'm presenting a session on Thursday 25^th March 2010 at Southampton University. My session at 18:30 is titled: "Best Practice for Designing and Deploying Workflow using SharePoint Designer 2007". I'll briefly look at the out-of-the-box workflows that come with SharePoint Server 2007 and then how to use SharePoint Designer 2007 for building workflow solutions. The second session starts at 19:30 when Ian Woodgate will do a quick tour of records management in SharePoint Server 2010. There will then be a break followed by Symon Garfield and "What is SharePoint?" and the New Speaker Slot at 20:45.

Location:
Building 06 (Nuffield Theatre) Room 1077 (Lecture Theatre A)
University Road,
Southampton,
SO17 1BJ‎

http://www.soton.ac.uk/about/whereissoton/maps/highfield_campus.pdf

And as usual, there will be a SharePint event afterwards.

Arrive around 6 pm for a 6:30 pm start.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 additions and changes - 13 - 17th January - 20th February 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:30:00 GMT

Note: All of the addresses below were valid at the time I added them to the WSS v4 FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(Items are added to the WSS v4 FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv4faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 17th January to 20th February 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2010 KB Articles

New or Modifed

None

II. Articles - 2010 Products

New

A. Office 2010 Server Products

http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2010/02/15/data-platform-improvements-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Data Platform Improvements in SharePoint 2010 (MS Team Blog - Ryan McMinn) (Ed: This is about Access 2010 + SP 2010)

15th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c8cf1631-0f48-4a02-a18d-54b04eb7f0a7

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta Technical Library in Compiled Help format

9th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3629425d-1505-456e-89e2-ede95f75ffe5

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta Technical Library in Compiled Help format

9th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=7604212e-67a6-407d-ae5c-9bb9d6325e17

SharePoint 2010 Products Deployment

2nd February 2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2010/02/01/management-features-of-powerpivot-for-sharepoint.aspx

Management Features of PowerPivot for SharePoint (MS Team Blog - John Hancock)

1st february 2010

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/01/22/operating-system-requirements-of-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Operating System Requirements of SharePoint 2010 (MS Team Blog)

22nd January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff182925(office.14).aspx

Plan for profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 21st January 2010)

21st January 2010

B. Other Office 2010 products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cd9f97c4-bb88-4b8e-b69a-62921b63fb18

Microsoft Project 2010 “Ignite” training slide presentations

28th January 2010

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2010 Products

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438731&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 3 of 8): Customizing Search Results (Level 200) (Steve Peschka)

16th February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438273&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Migrating Public-Facing Web Sites to SharePoint 2010 (Level 200) (Rasool Rayani, Metalogix)

3rd February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032438723&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 2 of 8): Developing Rich Solutions in Silverlight (Level 400) (Bob German)

3rd February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032439294&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: BenkoTips Live and On Demand: What's New in Visual Studio 2010 (Level 200) (Mike Benkovich)

20th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438058&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 1 of 8): What's New for Developers (Level 100) (Paul Andrew)

20th January 2010

http://edge.technet.com/Media/PowerPivot-part-5-Management/

PowerPivot part 5 - Management (dashboard that gets installed in SharePoint 2010) (Andrew Fryer)

19th January 2010

http://edge.technet.com/Media/PowerPivot-part-4-Sharing-in-SharePoint-2010/

PowerPivot part 4 - Sharing in SharePoint 2010 (Andrew Fryer)

19th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032432970&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Project Server 2010 Project and Portfolio Management Reporting (Level 200) (Marc Soester, iPMO)

6th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032439061&EventCategory=3&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Developing Quality Applications in Visual Studio 2010 (unknown)

29th December 2009

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032433090&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 Programmability (Level 200) (Chris Boyd)

17th December 2009

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032432954&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Office Project 2010 Overview (Level 200) (Keshav Puttaswamy)

16th December 2009

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032434988&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

MSDN Webcast: An Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 Extensibility (Level 200) (Wes Hutchins)

16th December 2009

IV WSS v4 FAQ

New

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=64

V.0031 SharePoint 2010 How-To (Sams - Ishai Shagi)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=66

V.0032 Beginning SharePoint Designer 2010 (Wrox - Woodrow W. Windischman, Bryan Phillips, Asif Rehmani)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=67

V.0033 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed (Michael Noel, Colin Spence)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=68

V.0034 Customizing Sites with SharePoint Designer 2010 (Course Technology PTR - Paul Stork, Daniel Galant)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=69

V.0035 SharePoint Development with Visual Studio 2010 (Addison-Wesley - Eric Carter, Boris Scholl, Mike Morton)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=70

V.0036 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services Unleashed (Sams - Tim Kashani, Ola Ekdahl, Kevin Beto,

Rachel Vigier)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=71

V.0037 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator (Microsoft Press - Bill English, The Microsoft SharePoint Community Experts)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=72

V.0038 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrator (Microsoft Press - Ben Curry, Joyce Cox)

Modified

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=5

V.0001 Professional SharePoint 2010 Development (Wiley - Tom Rizzo, Reza Alirezaei, Jeff Fried, Paul Swider, Scot Hillier, Kenneth Schafer)

(additional author)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=10

V.0013 Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design (Wiley - Randy Drisgill, John Ross, Jacob J. Sanford, Larry Riemann)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=28

(different author)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=33

V.0021 SharePoint Designer 2010 Unleashed (Sams - Kathy Hughes)

http://wssv4faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v4FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=29

V.0022 SharePoint Developers Guide: SharePoint Foundation 2010 (Thomson - Todd Bleeker, Paul Schaeflein)

WSS v3 FAQ CLXXXVII - 15th - 20th February 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:13:00 GMT

(Items are added to the WSS FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at www.wssfaq.com (wssv3faq.mindsharp.com) daily.)

From 15th - 20th February 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2007 KB Articles

New

None

Modifed

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;943102

How to enable the indexing of .xlsb files and of .zip files in SharePoint Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (ver 2.2)

29th January 2008

I.b Forefront KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;978300

Description of Hotfix Rollup 1 for Forefront Security for SharePoint with Service Pack 3 (ver 2.0)

17th February 2010

Modified

None

I.c InfoPath 2007 KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;827007

How to work with stored procedures by using script in an InfoPath form (ver 3.2)

23rd March 2007

(new to the site)

Modified

None

I.d SPD 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

II. Articles - 2007 Products

New

A. Office 2007 Server Products

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff380147.aspx

Customizing the Content Query Web Part in SharePoint Server 2007 (MSDN - Robert Bogue, Thor Projects)

19th February 2010 (date added - article dated January 2010)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff384274.aspx

Interacting with the Excel Web Services API for SharePoint Server 2007 (Spencer Harbar - harbar.net)

15th February 2010

http://blogs.technet.com/anneste/archive/2010/02/11/how-to-crawl-the-content-in-csv-files-in-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx

How to Crawl the Content in .csv Files in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Blog - Anne Stenberg)

11th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c73dfdd7-2096-491c-812f-ef529a7a2bc9

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Integration with IBM Systems Using Microsoft Host Integration Server 2009

7th February 2010

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3b895efc-5a55-488e-a40c-14df1c2e7033

Microsoft Online Services Mobility Solutions Description

5th February 2010

B. Other Office 2007 products

None

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2007 Products

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/ee818988.aspx

Microsoft "How Do I?" Videos: How Do I: Use the Permission Reporting Tool? (Hilton Giesenow)

17th February 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/ff368561.aspx

Microsoft "How Do I?" Videos: How Do I: Install Service Pack 2? (Hilton Giesenow)

17th February 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/ff368495.aspx

Microsoft "How Do I?" Videos: How Do I: Enhance User Profiles with BDC Data? (Hilton Giesenow)

17th February 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/ff356863.aspx

Microsoft "How Do I?" Videos: How Do I: Configure My Sites On My SharePoint Server 2007 Farm? (Hilton Giesenow)

17th February 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/ff184578.aspx

Microsoft "How Do I?" Videos: How Do I: Configure Federated Search in SharePoint Server 2007? (Hilton Giesenow)

17th February 2010 (date added)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/ee848812.aspx

Microsoft "How Do I?" Videos: How Do I: Install and Configure Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express? (Hilton Giesenow)

17th February 2010 (date added)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032430169&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Creating Highly Branded, Rich User Experiences in SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 200) (Ross S Freedman, Rightpoint)

10th February 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032430166&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Planning Your Internet Presence with SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 200) (Jim McPherson, Aspect)

27th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032438547&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Staffing, Methodology, and Governance for External-Facing SharePoint Sites (Level 200) (Andre Engberts, Razorfish)

20th January 2010

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032430161&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

TechNet Webcast: Migrating from Content Management Server 2002 to SharePoint Server 2007 (Level 200) (Rasool Ryani, Metalogix and Geordie Henderson, Metalogix)

13th January 2010

IV WSS v3 FAQ

New

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1298

V.251 Deployment for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1299

V.252 Installation guide for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1300

V.253 Planning and architecture for: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Part 1 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1301

V.254 Planning and architecture for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Part 2 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1302

V.255 Security for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1303

V.256 Getting started with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1304

V.257 Planning an extranet environment for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1305

V.258 Upgrading to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1306

V.259 Getting started with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1307

V.260 Governance guide for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1308

V.261 Security for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1309

V.262 Document management guide for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1310

V.263 Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1311

V.264 Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1312

V.265 Records management guide for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1313

V.266 Administering enterprise search for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1314

V.267 Internet presence scenario for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1315

V.268 Planning an extranet environment for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1316

V.269 Upgrading to Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1317

V.270 Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, Part 1 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1318

V.271 Planning and architecture for Office SharePoint Server 2007, Part 2 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1319

V.272 Installation guide for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1320

V.273 Plan and configure availability within an Office SharePoint Server 2007 farm (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1321

V.274 Planning and architecture, deployment, and operations for Office Forms Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/EditForm.aspx?ID=1322

V.275 Web publishing and planning guide for Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Microsoft - unknown)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=1323

V.276 SharePoint 2007 Tips, tricks and techniques (lulu.com - Saifullah Shafiq, Sadia Younas)

http://wssv3faq.mindsharp.com/Lists/v3%20WSS%20FAQ/DispForm.aspx?ID=1324

V.277 SharePoint 2007 End User (WSS/MOSS) (Architecting Connected Systems - Chris Givens)

Modified

None

V WSSv2 KB Articles (plus SPS 2003 Hot fixes)

New or Modified

None

BI using SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot Webinar

Paul Papanek Stork — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:39:30 GMT

Please join Chris Givens from Architecting Connected Systems and me for Part 1 of our webinar series entitled Business Intelligence Using SharePoint 2010 & PowerPivot. You’ll learn how to create powerful, extensible, ad-hoc BI solutions for your organization using a combination of Excel, PowerPivot (formerly codenamed Gemini), and SharePoint Server 2010.

The webinar will include live demonstrations and discussion of the following points:

The capabilities and target audience for this new technology
How self-service BI is transforming the way we think about and work with data
The myriad products & services that work in concert to deliver PowerPivot-driven BI
Advantages of self-service BI over traditional BI
SharePoint’s front & center role in the changing BI landscape

PowerPivot and SharePoint usher in a new era of self-service business intelligence and collaboration, which enables you to analyze and take advantage of the data and knowledge assets your organization already owns!

Sign-Up for the Seminar here:

http://www.sharesquared.com/resources/Pages/PowerPivotWebinar.aspx

Community Launch Event

Paul Schaeflein — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:49:29 GMT

I am excited to announce that I am hosting a SharePoint 2010 Community Launch event in conjunction with The Chicago Microsoft SharePoint Business Strategies Group.

We will have a short overview of SharePoint 2010 followed by a presentation on Enterprise Content Management by SharePoint MVP Ben Curry.

Come see the new Enterprise Content Management functionality in SharePoint Server 2010. Have you ever wanted to replicate a content type across many site collections with the click of a button? Have you wanted a centralized taxonomy that was easy to manage? Do you want to save time & money managing your information architecture? In SharePoint Server 2010, Enterprise Content Types and Metadata provide much more robust methods of data classification, retention, retrieval, and consumption. The agenda will include Content Type Syndication, Creating and Managing a Term Store, and integrating these solutions into sites, libraries, and Office 2010 applications.

Ben Curry (SharePoint MVP, CISSP, MCT, MCP, MCTS) is an enterprise architect specializing in knowledge management and collaboration technologies. As a Managing Consultant for Summit 7 Systems, Ben draws on his years of experience to manage the most demanding projects and system architectures while delivering powerful customized solutions based on the Microsoft Information Worker platforms. He has authored or co-authored 4 books on SharePoint Server, including SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices and the forthcoming SharePoint Server 2010 Administrators' Pocket Consultant, both by Microsoft Press.

Registration is now open.

WSS v3 FAQ CLXXXVI - 17 January - 14th February 2010

Mike Walsh — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:35:00 GMT

(Items are added to the WSS FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at www.wssfaq.com (wssv3faq.mindsharp.com) daily.)

(This usually applies. However I've been away for several weeks and there is still a backlog which will probably be added next week. Apologies that this listing is rather short - I've only checked out some KB articles since I came back)

From 17th January - 14th February 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2007 KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;976580

You cannot view the AreaNavigationSettings.aspx page in Office SharePoint Server 2007 after you create a relative URL

26th January 2010

Modifed

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;928033

Error message in SharePoint Server 2007 when you log on to the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 document library and then click "My Approval": "Unexpected query execution failure, error code 1205" (ver 2.0)

26th January 2010

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;953130

How to configure SharePoint Server 2007 and Excel Services for Kerberos authentication (ver 6.0)

26th January 2010

I.b Forefront KB Articles

New and Modified

None

I.c InfoPath 2007 KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;827007

How to work with stored procedures by using script in an InfoPath form (ver 3.2)

23rd March 2007

(new to the site)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;930892

Error message when you try to open an InfoPath 2007 form from a hyperlink: "Insufficient security privilege" (version 1.0)

27th January 2007

(new to the site) (supposedly just modified so why is the version 1.0?)

Modified

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;976416

Description of the Office InfoPath 2007 update: December 08, 2009 (ver 2.1)

16th December 2009

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;957385

Error message when you try to open multiple instances of an InfoPath 2007 form at the same time by using different input parameters (ver 4.1)

29th July 2009

I.d SPD 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

II. Articles - 2007 Products

New

A. Office 2007 Server Products

None

B. Other Office 2007 products

None

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2007 Products

None

IV WSS v3 FAQ

New and Modified

None

Mindsharp FaceBook Page

Bill English — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:09:00 GMT

Just a reminder that you can become a fan of Mindsharp's FaceBook page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mindsharp-Education/71973741690

Thanks!

Bill English, MVP

Data and Content Crunching with SharePoint 2010 Presentation

Kathy Hughes — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:02:00 GMT

Presenting at Sydney (Australia) SharePoint User Group, Tuesday 16th February, 2010, from 5:30pm onwards.

Come along to discover the capabilities of how to work with data sources and discover some tips and tricks on how to make your SharePoint sites come alive and for some REST'ful insights!

Further details and registration at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference 2010 Sydney, Australia

Kathy Hughes — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:39:00 GMT

16th and 17th June, 2010, The Hilton, Sydney, Australia

Don't miss the Australian SharePoint Conference for 2010, proudly sponsored by Microsoft and leading partners, and organized by members of the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint community. For details and registration, visit the following site:

http://www.sharepointconference.com.au

SharePoint 2010 Evaluation VHD with Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010

Todd Bleeker — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:05:02 GMT

This rocks! Microsoft has released a SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 evaluation VHD complete with everything including Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010 installed and ready to go. Download this excellent developer resource here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2

However, the post says that you'll need 50GB to install the two Hyper-V VMs. 50GB, Yikes! That said, my developer VM running Windows 7, SPF 2010 only, non-domain, non-standalone on top of a full SQL Server 2008 install is nearly 30GB.

Thank God for large external 2.5" drives.

Presenting at the Global SharePoint Users Group

Paul Schaeflein — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:06:52 GMT

While I wish that I needed to circle the globe to do so, I am presenting for the Global SharePoint Users Group next week. This is a virtual group, organized by Eric Harlan (@ericharlan) when he is not planning ski trips.

I will talking about Powershell for the SharePoint Developer. While Powershell is not new, it is new to most SharePoint folks.

Registration is required to get the Live Meeting information.

San Antonio SharePoint Users Group

Paul Schaeflein — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:54:31 GMT

I’m delighted to be returning to San Antonio after 20 years (I attended the COMMON Conference, for those of you who remember the System/36). The event this time is the San Antonio SharePoint Users Group. Tom Resing (@resing) has been patient enough to facilitate this trip.

I’ll be presenting on Elevated Privileges with updated demos on SharePoint Foundation 2010. I hope to see you there! Registration is now open.

I’m a bit sad that I’ll miss Amanda and Shane. :(

SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2010

Bill English — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:29:31 GMT

Registrations for the SharePoint Best Practices Conference will open on March 1 at www.sharepointbestpractices.com. This event will be help August 24-26 with a post conference on Friday, the 27^th. We'll be updating the web site and getting going on lining up speakers and topics for this conference. Be sure to include the SharePoint Best Practices conference in your line up of educational events this year. It will be held at the Reston Hyatt, outside of Washington, DC.

More details will follow as they become available.

Bill English, MVP

SharePoint Server 2010's ECM: Why Businesses Will Take 2010 Seriously

Bill English — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:42:00 GMT

When you stop to think about it, what is needed in order to have a robust Enterprise Content Management System? Would we not need the following, at a minimum?

Ability for users to create and manage content areas
Ability to upload information into the system with a low transaction cost
Ability to directly manage that information
Ability to find information in the system with a low transaction cost

In other words, how information goes into the system (Putability) will directly impact how the information comes out of the system (Findability). A good Findability architecture is built on a good Putability architecture, just like a good restore system is built on a good backup system.

In SharePoint Server 2010, there are three main part of the Putability architecture:

Managed Metadata Service
Content Organizer Feature
Default Metadata Values

When these three features (small "f") are utilized together, they for a coherent way to describe and place information in such a manner that it can be found easily. We find information mainly through search and navigation tools, though other tools like RSS, links, shortcuts and the like can be useful in finding information. But until SharePoint Server 2010, we've not had the tools embedded within the product itself to implement a robust Putability architecture.

Now that SharePoint Server 2010 has both robust Putability and Findability tools, I believe the market will begin to take seriously SharePoint Server 2010's ECM features. But make no mistake, a great deployment on paper coupled with sincere intentions on the part of those who are doing the implementation won't be enough to achieve success. Instead, they will need to manage (overcome?) the following ECM busters:

Lack of Governance (and its' enforcement) on how information will go into SharePoint
Lack of funding for a project that is hard to quantify the savings in real dollars
Lack of ongoing care and feeding of the SharePoint Server 2010 information management system
Resistance at the desktop to take the time to apply metadata to information
Lack of an overall Glossary on what the metadata column titles and value choices mean across the enterprise
No agreement between the stakeholders on what their overall end-result is supposed to be
No agreement between the stakeholders on the business requirements for improving the information management system

SharePoint Server 2010 provides solid reasons to choose it for an ECM system. I look forward to working with the community and our customers to ensure they implement ECM correctly, the first time, saving them serious dollars.

Bill English
MVP

The Basics on Content Type Syndication in SharePoint 2010

Bill English — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:59:00 GMT

What follows in this post is a brief sample of the type of courseware that Combined Knowledge and Mindsharp are writing for SharePoint 2010 as part of our participation in the World Education Alliance. If you're looking for SharePoint 2010 Training, we would invite you to join one of our Mindsharp or Combined Knowledge classes. Enjoy!

Why Publish Content Types?

There are four main reasons to publish content types. They are:

Consistency
Identity
Location
Lifecycle Management

Consistency

The first scenario is about consistency: Is it (the content type) the same across the enterprise? When one stops to think about it, content types and metadata are really about consistent governance and management and standardization of information in the enterprise. In other words, if I build out content type "A" in Site Collection 1, is it the same construct as when it is used in site collection 2? The MMS will answer this question in the affirmative and yet provide localized extensibility for greater usability of the content type in specific scenarios.

Identity

The second scenario is about identity: What is in the content type? When it comes to the enterprise, is this content type about the same topic with the same metadata? What metadata is in the content type? Understanding the construction of the content type helps us understand it's focus, purpose and meaning.

Location

The third scenario is about location: Where is this content type and how can I use it? The MMS will allow you to search for the content type, navigate to it, aggregate data with it and find data using it.

Lifecycle Management

The fourth and last scenario is about lifecycle: This scenario encompasses the creation, consumption and disposition of the content type in the enterprise. More specifically, the content type can be mapped to a document's lifecycle and then utilized across the enterprise in distinct ways. We'll use workflows to move the document from one lifecycle stage to the next, ensuring that compliance is enforced, tracked and audited.

Understanding Terms

The MMS has some terms that we'll use, so here are some terms and definitions:

Hub - A site collection designated as a "source" from
which we share content types throughout the enterprise
Content Type Syndication - Publishing, sharing, pushing
one or more content types across site collection, Web App.,
and farm boundaries

Note that a taxonomy is not the same thing as an ontology. And ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations. By contrast, when we refer to a taxonomy, what we're referring to is a hierarchy of objects that will likely include synonyms, equivalencies, parent/child relationships and metadata. In contrast, a folksonomy can be thought of as "free-form" without a hierarchy of terms from which to draw metadata values.

Content Type Publication

The core value of Content Type Publication is the ability to create a data element that has metadata, workflows and policies attached to that data element, and then publish it to the hub and from there, syndicate it to all web applications, site collections and sites in your farm and in child farms. For example, let's suppose your organization develops a policy that says all blog posts are to be expunged 12 months from the last date of modification. Well, you can develop a content type that includes that policy that will kick off a workflow to delete the blog post after 12 months. You'll then publish this content type to a hub and from there, syndicate it across your farm.

Publishing Content Types

Content Types are created within a normal content type gallery and then are "published" from a "normal" Site Content Type Gallery to a hub within the MMS. Each MMS gets one hub for CTS. If you need more than one hub in your farm, you'll need another MMS. It is not a requirement that an MMS syndicate content types nor is it a requirement that a service connection to an MMS consume content types from that service. Setting a site collection to be the hub enables necessary components on the hub for it to operate properly.

The elements that get published include the following:

Content Type with all the corresponding columns
Document Set Content Type
Policies
And workflow associations, but not the workflows themselves

You'll need to ensure the workflows are available downstream where the content types are going to be syndicated. Once those content types land in the destination gallery, they will be re-associated with the workflow(s). If the workflow doesn't exist in the destination site, then no assignment is made and the content type will function to the extent it can without the workflow.

For the content types that are on the hub site collection, you can perform the following actions:

Publish: this means that the content type is being syndicated for the first time
Unpublish: this means that the content type should no longer be in syndication. The effect of an unpublish action is that the content type is made read/write at the local level and is still available for use at the local level, but it's no longer available in a read-only version from the hub.
Republish: this action is used when changes to the content type have been made and you want to push those changes out to the consuming audience
Roll-up errors from consuming site collections: it is possible, in a scenario where there are thousands of content types being published from a single hub, that some content types will contain errors. In those instances, all of the consuming sites will report their errors back to the hub so that the content types can be fixed and republished.

From the consuming side of the syndication, you can:

Extend a published content type: consuming sites can add more columns to the content type in order to give that content type more specificity in the local environment
Derive from a published content type: this means that we can use that published content type as a place from which to inherit to create new, local content types
View import errors: this will allow the consuming site to view the errors that it is reporting back to the hub
Refresh all content types consumed from the Hub: this action allows the consuming site to erase all of the syndicated content types and perform a new, full download of the existing published content types from the hub. This can be especially helpful when the hub has been down or the consuming site has been down or connectivity has been lost and there is a need to capture all of the new, updated changes from the hub.

Setting up Content Type Publishing

There are several steps to setting up the MMS for content type syndication in your farm. First, you'll start at the site collection layer by associating the site collection with the MMS. The MMS is turned on from within Central Administration and the service-to-web application association is also executed within Central Administration. The site collection can be associated at the time the application service is created, as illustrated here, where we're creating a new human resource metadata hub at a new site collection called hrhub.

The MMS can use any site collection as its' hub for content type syndication as long as the owner of the MMS service has permissions to that site collection. The site collection hosting the hub does not need to reside in the local web application with which the MMS is associated. Once the hub is selected from within the MMS, the syndication service can be shared and all of the other consuming sites will need to consume from the shared services' hub. Technically speaking, the syndication is not a push technology, it is a pull technology. So the consuming sites pull the content types from the hub in a pre-configured frequency. That's why, in some ways, it's better to talk about the content types being published as opposed to be syndicated. However, be aware that the literature and informal blog posts will use both terms. In both cases, they are describing a publishing/pull architecture.

Note that the content types themselves haven't changed from SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010. They are still data elements coupled with metadata, policies and workflows. The content type galleries, aside from some UI changes, also look to be pretty similar.

So, in our example in this module, we're going to create a new content type named "Candidate Evaluation Form" (not illustrated) and then publish it to other content type galleries where it can be consumed and the metadata can be extended. Since the publishing is at the content type layer (not the gallery layer), we decide to put all published content types in the hub in their content type group.

We derived the Candidate Evaluation Form from the Document content type to create a new content type. The Candidate Evaluation Form contains these unique metadata elements (not illustrated):

Job Number
Department Number
Hiring Contact

Once the service application is started, you'll find the publishing action in the properties of the content type itself, "Manage Publishing for The Content Type". If this link doesn't appear, then that means that the service is not started or this site content type gallery does not reside within a publishing hub. Recall that each Managed Metadata Service can have only one hub and that content type publishing is not a requirement in order for the hub to be installed and to operate.

When you click on the "Manage Publishing for this Content Type" link, you're taken to the managectpublishing.aspx. page. On this page, you're able to perform the following actions:

Publish
Unpublish
Republish

Because this is the first time this content type is being published, only the Publish action is available. Until the content type has been published, it cannot be unpublished or republished.

The most common scenario for using the unpublish/republish actions is when you want to update the content type by either adding metadata to the content type or deprecating metadata from it. You can also modify other properties of the content type, but those scenarios will be less common. So let's assume that you want to update a published content type with new metadata while retaining the current metadata on the content type. Here are the steps you'd take to ensure the new metadata is published:

Unpublish the content type. This action will remove the content type from being pulled by consuming sites. Note that this action does not affect content types in consuming sites - their content types will continue to work as needed and as expected.
Modify the content type as needed.
Republish the content type: This action will put the updated content type back into the published role and the consuming sites will be able to pull the updates to the content type to their location and begin using the additional metadata

Consuming a Published Content Type

The first configuration element for the consuming site is to ensure the site is associated with the same application service. This is accomplished in Central Administration. Highlight the web application you wish to associate with the Managed Metadata Service application, then select Service Applications from the ribbon.

By default, all of the service applications appear in the Default group. But you can group the applications into different groups or you can select "Custom" and select your own mix of service applications to associate with the web application. In our illustration, we chose Custom and associated the HR metadata service and the user profile service with the Portal web application.

The act of consuming a content type that is published is a Site Collection Administrator act - in other words, you must have site collection admin privileges to set this up. The link you'll want to select under Site Settings is Content Type Publishing Hub. Note that in Beta2, these links in the site collection admin area are not in alphabetical order, so you'll have to hunt to find it.

That link will take you to the contenttypessyndicationhubs.aspx page. On this page, you will see the hub with which your site is associated. You can check the Republish all content types on next update check box if you wish or leave it blank. Leaving it unchecked will mean that you will not receive updates via the Republish action at the hub. Selecting the checkbox means that you'll re-copy all of the content types at the next update interval.

The update interval is run by the Content Type Subscriber timer service (one for each consuming site collection), which, by default, it set to run every hour at a randomized time between 0 and 59 minutes after the hour starts. You can customize the frequency of how often this timer service runs and, if needed, click the Run Now button (not illustrated) to force the consuming site collection to come to the hub and copy down the content types to their galleries.

Once copied down, the content type will appear under a pre-configured group called Published Content Types.

Once the content type is copied down to the consuming site, it can be extended with additional metadata and other, new content types can be derived from it. Moreover, only the Advanced properties are available on the published content type, with all of the other properties being set and controlled by the administrators managing the source content types at the hub. This means, for example, that you can't associate a different workflow with the content type than has been associated at the hub.

Notice also, that the interface will show the source of the content type to be the consuming site collection. This is because the pull action is a copy action, not just a set of pointers that point back to the source content type source. So the content type is copied and a new content type is created in the consuming site collection.

Bill English, MVP

Old Friends – New Possibilities

Paul Papanek Stork — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:09:20 GMT

In a post entitled “Time for a Change” a few weeks ago I announced my decision to leave Mindsharp and return to the world of fulltime consulting. At the time I hadn’t decided whether that meant a fulltime position with a consulting firm or restarting my own company called Don’t Pa..Panic Software. I’ve spent the last month talking to a number of companies and I’m happy to announce that I have accepted a position as a Senior SharePoint Architect/Lead Consultant with ShareSquared.

I’m really excited to be joining the ShareSquared staff. It means that I’ll continue to work with some of the best and brightest talent in the SharePoint community, just like I did at Mindsharp. I’ll be working with people like fellow SharePoint MVPs Maurice Prather and Gary Lapointe and other SharePoint notables like Keith Richie. I’m honored to be invited to join such a talent pool. So, if you are you looking for a team of SharePoint experts, then ShareSquared can help ... drop us a note.

Editing a SharePoint Master Page in Visual Studio 2010

Paul Papanek Stork — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:07:00 GMT

I’ll be the first to agree that the best tool for editing a SharePoint master page is SharePoint Designer (SPD). SPD is able to display both a code and “WYSIWYG” view of the master even if objects on the page are referenced using virtual directories, relative addresses, or addresses that contain dynamic placeholders. Because Visual Studio can’t open a SharePoint site in place it is unable to provide the same level of editing support. But the problem is that a master page edited in SPD is “customized” and can only be used for that one site (or a single site collection if publishing features have been enabled.) So it has become a best practice to create a custom master in a separate SPD development environment, export it to the file system, and then deploy it in production as an “uncustomized” master page using a feature in a solution. (I documented how to deploy an SPD 2007 master page as a feature in a previous blog here.)

Editing master pages in SPD 2010 continues to be the best practice, but it can be cumbersome for small changes to Enterprise master pages already deployed via a Feature. Sometimes its just not practical to upload the master to a Development site master page gallery, edit it in SPD 2010, and then download the edited copy to be packaged in Visual Studio 2010 and re-deployed to an Enterprise. In those cases it would be nice to make a quick edit in VS 2010. But VS 2010 is unable to interpret the master page in the context of a live site and defaults to the standard code view editor when opening a master page. This leads to two specific limitations that make even simple edits more difficult. As you can see from the screen shots below there is no support for expansion/contraction of code sections and Intellisense support is greyed out.

This makes it even more difficult to edit master pages in a code only view. To avoid these limitations you will need to tell VS 2010 which editor to use when opening the master page. To do this Right-Click on the Master page to be edited in the Solution Explorer and select Open With… from the context menu. A dialog will open showing all the different Editors that are available. Highlight the Master Page Editor (Default) entry and click OK to open the Master page using the Master Page Editor in place of the Source Code (Text) Editor. (Note: Although the Master Page Editor is set as the default just clicking on the master page in Solution Explorer will actually use the Source Code (Text) Editor. The screenshot below shows the master page after it has been manually loaded into the Master Page Editor using the Open With… menu. Notice the presence of both Expansion/Contraction Outlining and Intellisense.

A similar problem exists when opening .aspx pages that are not stored in the _Layouts virtual directory. You can enable full code editing of these pages by using OpenWith… and choosing Web Form Editor (default).

E-Discovery and SharePoint

Bill English — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:51:00 GMT

Oce' has an interesting white paper on e-discovery and what I term litigation readiness. You can download the paper here (but you must register, something I don't mind doing). Key findings of the paper include the following:

Attorneys agree that e-discovery preparedness is one of the most important functions of a corporate legal department (77%)
Yet less than 50% have implemented any type of e-discovery preparedness via internal processes or technologies. Reasons for this varied, but the most prominent was that it took the lawyers away from case-related activities
Law firms are developing e-discovery personnel to help their clients with litigation readiness
Most in-house firms are nervous about working with their IT staff to help with mitigation of e-discovery risks
60% of organizations, according to their in-house counsel, lack a fully implemented records management program
35% plan to implement a records management program in the next 12 months

Many will be choosing SharePoint as their Records Management system. Many will people who understand the triangle of services: technology, information architecture and business processes. Firms that can deliver these three skill sets will be in high demand.

Small and large organizations alike are in the bull's-eye when it comes to e-discovery. The fact that one in five corporations will be sued this year is no laughing matter. Forget that most of the lawsuits are frivolous. Responding to them still costs time, money, energy and employee attention. The opportunity costs can be significant. Organizing information with a view to mitigating exposure to liability for e-discovery will become a sunk cost that can't be recovered. Yet, if you're one of the 20% who will be sued this year, you'll be glad you undertook such a project.

You can learn more about e-discovery and how to organize information in SharePoint by attending my upcoming seminar on February 15 & 16. If you'd like, you can email me offline (bill@mindsharp.com) to ask questions about this seminar.

Bill English
Mindsharp

SharePoint Staffing

Bill English — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:13:00 GMT

When I go out and do design and architecture engagements with our customers, I'm routinely asked about staffing levels for their deployment. Often, I'm asked about what other companies and organizations are doing to staff their SharePoint deployment and support needs. So, after asking several customers if they would be interested in participating in a staffing survey and getting their consent, I thought I would post this and ask if others would be willing to participate in the same survey.

The survey will focus on your current SharePoint staff relative to the size and type of your deployment. In many organizations, SharePoint is "part-timed" within the same staff of those who support other applications. In some, it is full-timed. All you'll be asked to do is to estimate the FTE (Full-time equivalency) of the various SharePoint roles, then report on the number of SharePoint servers, number of site collections and size of content databases as well as if you have MOSS or a WSS-only implementation. We'll also ask about the number of SharePoint users in your environment and the number of overall desktops too. That will help all of us understand SharePoint penetration in most organizations. We will not ask about salary information.

The survey won't take long if you have the information needed for the survey. We'll releases the results back to those who complete the survey, but that means they will need to identify themselves in the survey to ensure that they have completed it. If you want to participate, please respond indicating as much to me (bill@mindsharp.com) and we'll send you the link to take the survey. If you are on our mailing list, an email went out today about this. If you've not received the email, please check your Junk Mail folder and ensure that email from Mindsharp is white listed on your email server.

I trust you've had a great holiday season and that you're on a good track for 2010. While it has been a difficult time for many businesses, it's also a great time to be thankful for what we have and to work harder to create a better future. Take care and I hope to hear from you soon. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Bill English
Mindsharp

Community Kit for SharePoint: Development Tools Edition – CKS:DEV

Todd Bleeker — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:53:36 GMT

Announcing CKS:DEV at http://cksdev.CodePlex.com

As you may know, Visual Studio 2010 has enhanced our ability to extend its functionality. Several SharePoint developer productivity extension projects have been merged into a single uber SharePoint Development Tools Edition of the Community Kit for SharePoint.

This excellent work is the collective effort of the following brilliant guys:


Matt Smith	Waldek Mastykarz	Wesley Hackett	Wouter van Vugt

While we have more ideas in the works, this initial release is already huge. It includes the following productivity aids (and more) categorized as follows...

Environment

SharePoint References - Adds a SharePoint tab to the Add Reference dialog.
Copy Assembly Name - Copies the assembly name of a SharePoint project onto the clipboard.
Sandbox Compile - Compiles the project against the SharePoint subset object model to ensure the code only uses subset OM features.

Exploration

View Feature Dependencies - Adds subnodes to the Feature node to drill down into feature dependencies.
View Feature Elements - Adds subnodes to the Feature node to drill down into feature element definitions. Also allows to open the XML definition of each element.
Activate / Deactivate Feature - Adds a content menu item to each feature node to enable and disable the feature on the current site, site collection, web application or farm.
List Site Columns - Browse site columns and view their properties.
List Themes - Browse themes and view their properties.
View Master Page and Page Layout Gallery - Adds the Master Page Gallery node which allows you to browse through Master Pages and Page Layouts. Additionally it allows you to view and edit the contents of the files from the Master Page Gallery.
List Web Parts - Browse Web Parts and view their properties.
Copy ID - Adds context menu items to various nodes to quick copy the unique ID value, for instance for features or content types.
Copy Web Part - Copies the .webpart definition to the clipboard to quickly paste a Web Part into a <AllUsersWebPart> node.
View List Event Receivers - Adds a subnode to the List node to drill down into Event Receivers associated with the List.
View Style Library - Adds the Style Library node which allows you to browse through the contents of the Style Library. Additionally it allows you to view and edit the contents of the files from the Style Library.
Get SPMetal Definition - Adds a menu item to lists and sites that allows you to generate the SPMetal definition for the given object.
Create Page Layout from Content Type - Adds a menu to content types that allows you to generate the contents of a Page Layout for the given Content Type.

Content

Sandboxed Visual Web Part - A visual Web Part that can be deployed as part of a sandboxed solution.
SP Metal Definition - Adds an SPMetal parameter XML file to the project and auto-generates the code based on that configuration using a Visual Studio Custom Tool (like resx files).
Custom Action Group - Simple XML based custom action group project item SPI.
Custom Action - Simple XML based custom action project item SPI.
Hide Custom Action - Simple XML based hide custom action project item SPI.
Delegate Control - Simple XML based delegate control project item SPI.
Console Application - A SharePoint Console Application template to easily create scratch applications.

Deployment

Quick Deploy Commands - Adds a submenu to the context menu of SharePoint projects that allow you to quickly deploy using any deployment configuration.
Auto Quick Deploy - If project-level properties are set, automatically copies deployed files into the SharePoint installation folder whenever a file is saved, or automatically copies deployed assemblies if the project is built.
Copy Assemblies - Copies all deployed assemblies to the relevant BIN folders and the Global Assembly Cache, for use as part of an X-Copy quick deploy.
Copy Files - Copies all deployed files into the SharePoint installation folder, for use as part of an X-Copy quick deploy.
Install Features - Installs the feature into the SharePoint feature storage, for use as part of an X-Copy quick deploy.
Upgrade Solution - Performs a solution upgrade instead of a retract / deploy combination.
Recreate Site - Deletes the site collection and recreates it with the same name, type and settings. Used to quickly create a new greenfield for testing.
Reset IIS - Resets the Internet Information Server which can be useful during testing of site definitions.
Reset Timer Service - Resets the SharePoint timer service.
Warm-up Site - Executes a HTTP request to the root of the current deployment site to warm it up after a IIS recycle.
Install Web Application Content - Copies Web Application specific content from the SharePoint installation folder into the IIS web application folders.
Run PowerShell Script - Executes PowerShell script(s)

Of course, we'd love to hear what you'd like to see us include in the next release.

PS: This is so big, I thought it was worthy of an inaugural tweet!

Signs of an Unhealthy Site Collection

Bill English — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:11:00 GMT

I was working with the crew at DePaul University this past week and we talked for a while about the danger signs that would indicate the unhealthy use of a site collection. So I thought I'd share some of our conversation with you all. Many thanks to the talented team at DePaul University for their input in thinking through this with me.

Constant Need to Move Information Out of the Site Collection to Keep it Within Prescribed Database Ranges

This is actually a constant battle for several of our clients who must keep information for X number of years, but still need to have that information available for collaboration within the site collection. Recommendation: programmatically move the oldest information to a file server or other location so that the newest information can be developed and utilized within the site collection. Use Scopes in search to group the two locations together for fast retrieval of information.

URLs longer than 256 characters

We've know about this for some time, but it seems to me that URLs that are longer than 256 characters represent either a lack of good user education or an information structure that is too deep (or both). Wide, but more shallow site collections will help prevent this problem.

Lack of good end-user education

Despite what you might have heard, SharePoint is not entirely intuitive. Users need education, not only on how to use it, but also on how to use it within your environment (think Governance training here).

Installation of untested home-grown code

Note that I'm not against home-grown code being installed and utilized in your farm. What I'm against is untested code. Site collections with untested code = high potential for disaster. This was brought home (not by DePaul), but by our theoretical (and tangential) discussion of how much code should be tested in a lab before being deployed in production.

Wrongly Secured Information

I suspect that most people don't stop to think about the site collection owners having access to every document and list item within the site collection. If information is placed in a site collection to which the site collection owners should not have access, then you have wrongly secured that information. It should be moved to a site collection whose SC owners can and should be able to see the information.

There were more items we came up with, but this is all I can remember. Perhaps I'll get the rest of the list and post it here at some point. Thanks.

Bill English
MVP, Mindsharp

Pew Research News Quiz

Todd Bleeker — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:02:06 GMT

Take the quiz yourself: http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/

Sadly, only 2% answered these simple questions about what is happening around them accurately…

WSS v3 FAQ CLXXXV - 10th - 16th January 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:24:00 GMT

(Items are added to the WSS FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at www.wssfaq.com (wssv3faq.mindsharp.com) daily.)

From 10th - 16th January 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2007 KB Articles

New

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2002760

ZIP files do not appear in the Upload Multiple Files on Vista (ver 7.0)

11th January 2010

Modifed

None

I.b Forefront KB Articles

New or Modified

None

I.c InfoPath 2007 KB Articles

New and Modified

None

I.d SPD 2007 KB Articles

New or Modified

None

II. Articles - 2007 Products

New

A. Office 2007 Server Products

http://www.harbar.net/archive/2010/01/12/technet-misinformation-how-not-to-use-kerberos-for-sharepoint-authentication.aspx

TechNet Misinformation: How NOT to use Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication (Spencer Harbar, Consultant)

12th January 2010

B. Other Office 2007 products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=47ffc540-1858-4d80-adee-e1cdb1a46090

Microsoft Forefront Server Security for SharePoint 10.x Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 (ver 6.0.5000.0)

14th January 2010

C. Other relevant products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=77f24c9d-b4b8-4f73-99e3-c66f80e415b6

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition VHD (ver 2.0)

14th January 2010

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2007 Products

None

IV WSS v3 FAQ

New and Modified

None

V WSSv2 KB Articles (plus SPS 2003 Hot fixes)

New or Modified

None

SharePoint Foundation 2010 additions and changes - 12 - 10th to 16th January 2010

Mike Walsh — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:18:00 GMT

Note: All of the addresses below were valid at the time I added them to the WSS v4 FAQ site and to this file. I can't guarantee that they still are.

(Items are added to the WSS v4 FAQ throughout the week so you will find new items more quickly by checking at wssv4faq.mindsharp.com daily.)

From 10th to 16th January 2010

NOTE: Amendments to KB articles are now only listed when a version is x.0. MS no longer change the dates of KB articles when version changes are minor.

I.1 2010 KB Articles

New or Modifed

None

II. Articles - 2010 Products

New

A. Office 2010 Server Products

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=2495b666-eb3e-4106-b5f8-85b1072289e5

SharePoint 2010 List Schema Designer for Visual Studio 2010 (Beta) (Note: code sample)

13th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee922609(office.14).aspx

Review upgrade best practices (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288046(office.14).aspx

Review system requirements for upgrade (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee922610(office.14).aspx

Review supported and unsupported upgrade paths (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288974(office.14).aspx

Create a communication plan (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748607(office.14).aspx

Overview of Remote BLOB Storage (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663474(office.14).aspx

Install and configure Remote BLOB Storage (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261992(office.14).aspx

Review upgrade best practices (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263322(office.14).aspx

Review system requirements for upgrade (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262747(office.14).aspx

Review supported and unsupported upgrade paths (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263345(office.14).aspx

Create a communication plan (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748649(office.14).aspx

Overview of Remote BLOB Storage (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748631(office.14).aspx

Install and configure Remote BLOB Storage (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748641(office.14).aspx

Enable a content database to use Remote Blob Storage (RBS) (SharePoint Server 2010) (Updated 7th January 2010)

7th January 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663471(office.14).aspx

Upgrade from a stand-alone installation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to SharePoint Foundation 2010 with Remote BLOB Storage (Updated 4th December 2009)

4th December 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748605(office.14).aspx

Enable a content database to use Remote Blob Storage (RBS) (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663473(office.14).aspx

Configure usage and health data collection (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748619(office.14).aspx

Configure diagnostic logging (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287879(office.14).aspx

Configure incoming e-mail (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288949(office.14).aspx

Configure outgoing e-mail (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee428292(office.14).aspx

Configure a mobile account (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee806880(office.14).aspx

About service applications and services (SharePoint Foundation 2010) (Updated 12th November 2009)

12th November 2009

B. Other Office 2010 products

None

C. Other relevant products

None

Modified

None

III WebCasts (+ PodCasts, On-Line courses) for 2010 Products

None

IV WSS v4 FAQ

New and Modified

None

SharePoint User Group UK Meeting - Nottingham

Penny Coventry — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 08:42:00 GMT

Cross posted from: http://www.sharepointdesignerstepbystep.com/Blog/

I'm presenting a session this Thursday, 14th January 2010 at Intelligent Decisioning Ltd Offices at Nottingham. The session is on "Branding SharePoint Sites: Using the browser and SharePoint Designer 2007/2010". The first session will cover what's possible in 2007 and then after the break I'll briefly cover what's happened to branding in 2010. After which, there will then be some 'tales from the trenches' from Sam Dolan, aka @PinkPetrol, on SharePoint Designs and Nikki Ashington on Accessibility.

I have some SWAG that I've brought back from TechEd 2009, North America, to give away, so make sure you attend.

Location:
Intelligent Decisioning Ltd Offices
Strelley Hall,
Nottingham,
NG8 6PE

For full directions please see the following link http://www.id-live.com/ (and click 'Contact Us')

And as usual, there will be a SharePint event event afterwards, at the Broad Oak pub, down the road in Strelley Village, where everyone is welcome.

Arrive around 6 pm for a 6:30 pm start.

[Update: 19/01/2010: Link to write up of meeting together with links to slide decks and other information http://macraem.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/suguk-nottingham-14th-january-2010/]

Exploring the SharePoint 2010 JavaScript ClientOM

Todd Bleeker — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 08:21:21 GMT

Here are the steps I’m using to explore the Properties and Methods of the SP.* Namespaces:

Navigate to a SharePoint 2010 Blank Site
Click on the Page tab (to load Fluent UI JavaScript files)
Press F12 to launch the IE Dev Toolbar
Click on the Script tab
Press the Start Debugging button (do this before you set the breakpoint)
Select the ScriptResource.axd file that includes MicrosoftAjax.debug.js in its header
Search for: _onReadyStateChange
Set a breakpoint on the first statement in this function (line 4708 in my build)
Refresh the Page in the browser to run code to the breakpoint (be patient while it spins up)
Click the Watch tab
Click the Click to add... textbox
Type SP and press <Enter>
Explore...

Way easier than dinking around in the debug.js files!

Initial SharePoint 2010 Guidance from Patterns and Practices

Todd Bleeker — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:14:42 GMT

Check out: http://spg.codeplex.com

Download/Viewing Options:

MSDN (online)
CHM
PDF
ZIP

This initial drop includes the following (each with its related documentation):

DropLocation\Docs\Setup.txt

Information about how to run the Visual Studio 2010 Solutions

DropLocation\IntegrationTest\SPGLib\Readme

Documentation on how to build and run the Integration Tests

DropLocation\IntegrationTest\SPGLib\Microsoft.Practices.SharePoint.Common.Test.sln

Integration tests (both xUnit and Web tests)

DropLocation\Source\SharePoint 2010\Microsoft.Practices.SharePoint.sln

SharePoint Configuration Manager and Service Locator (ported from 2007)
Refactored SharePoint Logger (now supports areas/categories)

DropLocation\Source\SharePoint 2010\Microsoft.Practices.SharePoint(With Tests).sln

Unit tests developed with the PEX/Moles framework

Pex is an Automated White Box Testing Framework for .NET from Microsoft Research. Read about Pex, Stubs, Moles, QuickGraph, MbUnit, and Reflector Addins. I’m not "mocking" it, but it really isn’t my thing.

Several videos can also be found on Channel9.

Abbreviating SharePoint Products and Technologies 2010

Todd Bleeker — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:09:41 GMT

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is not a part of Windows anymore.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is not labeled a Service anymore.

Both the "W" and the "S" in WSS are gone. So, using WSS will no longer work.

Windows SharePoint Services is now called SharePoint Foundation 2010.
It coincides with the other foundation products in the .NET framework.
Hence the new abbreviation SPF 2010.

Can't you see the synergy; the power of predictability?

SP 2010 = SharePoint 2010

SPS 2010 = SharePoint Server 2010

SPF 2010 = SharePoint Foundation 2010

SPD 2010 = SharePoint Designer 2010

SPW 2010 = SharePoint Workspace 2010

SPC 2009 = SharePoint Conference 2009 was about SPS2010

etc.

There are no outliers with this pattern. No races to offend, no overlapping products to get confused with, etc.

The only complaint of any consequence is that SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 were also commonly abbreviated SPS. Since SharePoint Server 2010 is the successor of those older versions, I actually think that using SPS 2010 is even more compelling. MOSS will be the only outlier in that sequence. But SharePoint Server 2010 is not part of Office anymore.

So, the server product that was sold on top of the platform had the following history of abbreviations:

SPS 2001 > SPS 2003 > MOSS 2007 > SPS 2010

The platform had a more sorted set of names: Office Web Components morphed into SharePoint Team Services (first actual install called SharePoint). Windows SharePoint Services (no version was typically associated with this release but it was generally accepted as 2.0) was released in 2003 followed by Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 (to differentiate between the 2003 and 2007 releases) and now SharePoint Foundation 2010.

So, the platform itself had the following history of abbreviations:

OWC > STS > WSS > WSS v3 > SPF 2010

While I agree that this last sequence is bad and I get why some want to use WSS v4 (or some other odd derivation: SS, WSF, MSF, etc.), see the top of this message. Both the "W" and the "S" are gone so WSS won't work anymore!

HTH,

Some SharePoint 2010 User Interface Terms

Todd Bleeker — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:51:00 GMT

What follows is my first attempt at identifying various areas of the SharePoint 2010 user interface:

Use SharePoint 2010 ClientOM to Show a Generated GUID as Toast in the Notification Area

Todd Bleeker — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:58:17 GMT

Drop the following script into a Content Editor Web Part:

<script>
ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(ShowGuid, "SP.js");
function ShowGuid(){
SP.UI.Notify.addNotification(SP.Guid.newGuid().toString());
}
</script>

Time for a Change

Paul Papanek Stork — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:59:58 GMT

If there is one thing in life that is a constant it is that things are always changing. New products are released, new technologies developed, and new job opportunities arise. I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to make a change like that in my life. I decided it was time to bid my position as a Principal Trainer/Associate at Mindsharp goodbye and return to the world of fulltime consulting. So two weeks ago I submitted my notice and yesterday was my last official day as a Mindsharp employee.

I’m taking the rest of the year off to spend some time with family and friends and get some serious writing done on a book I’m co-authoring with Daniel Galant about SharePoint Designer 2010. Then starting in January I’ll be back to deciding where I go from here. I’ve started talking to several companies about a position as a Senior SharePoint Architect/Developer. Or I may decide to go back to being an independent consultant for my own company, Don’t Pa..Panic Software. Whatever I decide I wish all my friends at Mindsharp well. Keep your eye on this blog. When I make a decision on where I’m going I’ll post it here.

Force IE7 Compatibility Mode in IE8

Christina Wheeler — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:42:00 GMT

Since the official release of Internet Explorer 8 many people are having problems with their custom branding for their SharePoint sites.

The way IE8 decides its rendering engine is based on certain criteria in your code or Master Page. IE8 will attempt to render a site as follows:

If it sees a valid DocType declared it will attempt to render the site in IE8 Standards Mode

If it doesn’t see a DocType it will attempt to render the site in quirks mode (otherwise known as pre IE7 rendering mode)

To correct this problem there are two different meta tag options:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

The first meta tag (IE=7) will force a page to render in IE7 mode no matter what. The second meta tag (IE=EmulateIE7) will force the page to render as IE7 would have rendered it historically. The difference between the two is that the EmulateIE7 meta tag will force the browser to look for a DocType before rendering in IE7 mode and if it doesn’t find one it will render in Quirks Mode.

If adding the meta tag to your Master Page make sure it is added first in the <head> before the CSS.

META Tags and Locking in Future Compatibility
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817574.aspx

Restricting Anonymous Access to Specific Pages in a SharePoint Site

Paul Papanek Stork — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 07:38:00 GMT

A question came up several months ago in one of the Developer Panel presentations at the Best Practices Conference about whether access to individual pages could be restricted on a SharePoint anonymous access site. One my friends who was on the panel replied that he didn't think it was possible. Since I had previously researched that question for a client I pointed out that it was indeed possible, but that it was not an intuitive process. My friend then jokingly asked whether I had Blogged on how to do it and when I responded "No" he pointed out that I shouldn't be discussing things in public that I hadn't Blogged on. It was a joke, but he was right. I left the conference fully intending to blog about the process the next week, but never got around to it. Its now the end of the year and things are slowing down a bit so I plan to fix that issue by blogging on several topics that have fallen by the wayside in the last year. This is just the first.

In a normal anonymous access ASP.NET web site access to specific pages can be restricted by modifying the NTFS security permissions on the specific file to exclude the IUSR_computername user from having read access to the file. But this model raises two issues when trying to do the same thing in a SharePoint anonymous access environment. First, SharePoint doesn't make use of the IUSR_computername account specified in IIS for anonymous access, so changing the SharePoint permissions associated with this account will have no effect. Second, although security permissions can be configured at the Web site, List/Library, or item level in SharePoint anonymous access can only be configured at the first two of those levels. Adding the IUSR_computername account as a SharePoint user and restricting item level permissions for that user has no effect on the permissions granted to an anonymous user. So on the surface there appears to be no way to configure anonymous access rights on a specific page or file to require that viewers of that page be authenticated.

But if you dig a little deeper into how anonymous access really works in SharePoint you discover that there is a way to require anonymous access for specific pages and files. First, you need to understand that anonymous access users in SharePoint are actually provided the same permissions that a user with the Limited Access permission level is given. When you configure anonymous access at the Web site, List or Library level in SharePoint you are telling SharePoint to allow all non-authenticated users access to objects at that level as though they had the Limited Access permission level. By default this permission level will be inherited by all objects below it in the hierarchy. It is this Limited Access permission level that gives anonymous users access to list items and documents. But that only works if security inheritance isn’t broken. If you edit the specific permissions on a list item or document, that item will only have the permissions you assign to it. Since you can’t manually assign limited access and anonymous access is not configurable at item or document level this security setting will prevent anonymous users from accessing the list item or document. When an anonymous user tries to access a document or list item that has specific security settings they will be prompted to log in.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (BETA) Blog Series: Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) User Interface (UI): Part 1

Corro'll Driskell — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 10:32:26 GMT

Corro'll Driskell

December 20, 2009

Happy holidays to all, I am Corro’ll (Corel) Driskell, a SharePoint Architect on the SharePoint platforms. As many of you know I do many things around the SharePoint platforms and found it difficult to pick a starting place since my involvement on the TAP program.

So, I wanted to kick off my blogs, referencing the SharePoint 2010 platform and its tools, with SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta). I will post a number of blogs, as a part of this blog series, referencing the many features of SharePoint Designer 2010, such as, the new User Interface (UI), the ribbon, and a number of other features. Bottom line, this blog provides an overview focusing on the UI of SharePoint Designer 2010. This is not a deep dive into the capabilities of SharePoint Designer 2010 (BETA).

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) allows Designers – non-programmers - and, encourages, Developers, and I mean encourage, to build web based applications on SharePoint’s latest platforms (SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010).

To start, you must locate SharePoint Designer 2010 in the Microsoft Office application group – its default location.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 1

One of the great things about the, new, SharePoint Designer 2010 experience is the initial start. Immediately, the user (Designers and Developers) is provided visual feedback upon the start of the application. It is my experience that the loading is rather quick versus the experience with the previous version, SharePoint Designer 2007.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 2

After SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) initially starts, you will notice that there are two primary focuses. The user has the option to Open a SharePoint Site or Create a New SharePoint Site. The new initial UI is a far step from the traditional experience of SharePoint Designer 2007. In fact, the user does not need to browse around the interface attempting to introduce them to the application. It is all there front and center.

In contrast, the fact that there is an option to use SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) on the My Site is discouraging. In another blog posting we will discuss the new features available on the, new, SharePoint 2010 platforms that afford the SharePoint administrators and Site Collection Administrator better control now is not the time to dive into those features, also, we will focus on the various options in more detail in a future blog as a part of this series.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 3

After, either, Opening the Site or Creating a New Site, the user is presented with the Site Setting information page. Of course, the most notable change, in the SharePoint Designer 2010 UI, is the presentation of the, new, Ribbon. Again, I will dive deeper in the various features afforded by the Ribbon in a later blog as a part of this series.

The Settings Page provides a significant amount of information , such as, the Site Information, Permissions, SubSites, also known as Webs, Settings and Customization. The fact that this Designer Dashboard, yes, I called it a dashboard, and no it isn’t Microsoft’s official terminology, is forthcoming with quite a bit of information. This information was, either, lacking or wasn’t as easy to obtain in SharePoint Designer 2007. Again, we will dive deeper into many of the features during this series in a future blog. Although the tab interface is not new to SharePoint Designer 2007, I find the tab interface in SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) a bit more inviting and user friendly.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 4

Lists and Libraries are nested in a simple view in SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta). It is more similar to a report versus a hierarchical structure, as leveraged in SharePoint Designer 2007. Also, I want to encourage you to focus on the changes in the context of the Ribbon’s interface as we navigate from the Site Settings page. Of course, we can witness a heavy use of the bread crumbs in the SharePoint Designer 2010’s interface. The bread crumb was presented as a simple navigation control in the SharePoint Designer 2007 interface. Again, there was an emphasis on the hierarchical structure.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 5

Workflows are also presented in a report form. The Workflows’ report provides summary information referencing workflows leveraged by the site or web. In the SharePoint Designer 2007 interface, Workflows were presented nested in a Workflow library or folder, depends on whom you ask. Again, there is an emphasis on the actual artifacts’ hosted on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Of course, there is a significant amount of new features for SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) and its capabilities to build flexible workflows. Again, we will dive deeper into those capabilities through-out this blog series.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 6

The Site Pages provides summary information about located in the Sites Pages Library. The Site Pages Library is used to create and store pages for a specific Site or Web.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 7

The Site Assets provides a reports view of files that are included on the pages of a Site or Web. In the SharePoint Designer 2007 UI, the storage locations for files included on the pages were stored in a number of locations, such as, the images folder.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 8

The Content Types page provided a summary report about the various collection of content types, leveraged by the Site or Web, to establish consistent management of content. Immediately, you will find information, such as, Group, Parent, Source and Description. Most importantly, the UI provides quick access to manage the various content types. SharePoint Designer 2007 did not afford users this type of reporting feature. We will explore this new feature further as a part of this blog series.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 9

The Site Columns UI provides a summary report referencing a collection of columns available to Lists, which includes, Column Name, Type, Group and Source. In the SharePoint Designer 2007 UI we did not have a central presentation of the linked columns for a Site or Web.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 10

The External Content Types summary reports provides information, such as, Display Name, Name, External System, Type and Namespace, about External Lists, also known as SharePoint Lists, that exposes data from various back-end repositories – databases, web services and other Line-of-Business applications. The beauty of it all is that this feature is provided in the SharePoint Designer 2010 UI.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 11

The Data Sources summary report provides information, Name, Type and Description, about the various data sources available to the Site or Web. The report is categorized based on type, for instance, Lists and Libraries. Again, this is a great presentation in the UI so that users are not required to leverage the hierarchical structure to obtain the information similar to the SharePoint Designer 2007 UI.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 12

The Master Pages summary report provides information, Name, Title, Content Type, Size, Modified Date, Modified By and Comments, about all of the artifacts, Master Pages, Page Layouts, images and xml files, found in the Master Page Gallery.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 13

The Site Groups summary report provides some information, Group Name and Description, about the various Groups with, some level, of access to the Site or Web. You have to ask yourself, where are the contributor settings. Again, we will dive deeper into the many changes in a later blog.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 14

The SubSites summary reports provide a list of the Sites or Webs within the hierarchical structure. The report provides information, such as, Site Name, URL and Modified Date.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 15

Finally, the All Files provides a summary report of all content for a Site or Web, which includes the SubSites. The information provided includes, Name, Title, Size, Type, Modified Date, Modified By and Comments. The significance here is users have a more efficient way to ascertain the information about the artifacts that make up SharePoint 2010 sites.

SharePoint Designer 2010 (Beta) UI 16

The overarching selling point is that SharePoint Designer 2010 encourages rapid building and deployment of, web-based, solutions that meet business needs, leveraging the various features – lists, content types, workflows and a number of other features – of an organization. Here is the catcher, there is no-coding. Included in this blog series, I will work to cover the various use cases and features.

Slides from SharePoint Saturday Kansas City: Customizing the Ribbon UI

Paul Papanek Stork — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 13:35:00 GMT

It’s been a week since I was in Kansas City doing a presentation on how to customize the new SharePoint 2010 ribbon. It was a busy week, so I’m just now getting a chance to make the slides and Visual Studio project that I used for the talk available for download. I’m hoping to transfer the talk in to a series of Blog posts over the next few weeks, so if you missed the original talk stay tuned. Here are links to the downloads:

Customizing the Ribbon presentation slides

Visual Studio 2010 demonstration Project

Load javascript client object model (sp.js) from a web part

Paul Schaeflein — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:04:08 GMT

I battled with this task for much too long. My solution is posted on the forums: Load javascript client object model (ClientOM) (sp.js) from web part

How to Increase SharePoint End User Adoption

Kim Lund — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:53:00 GMT

Depending on who you are in your organization, you may either LOVE SharePoint or HATE it. There are many promises on what SharePoint will deliver; however, have those promises become a reality in your organization? The answer may be the key to why your colleagues, employees, and end users use SharePoint or create work-arounds to avoid taking the time to understand it.

If you find that user adoption of SharePoint is avoided or slower than anticipated in your working environment, you are not alone. Many students that I have trained, consulted and listened to have expressed their pain points for SharePoint adoption. As I am blessed to work with and interact with many SharePoint users I have discovered and witnessed what works and what doesn't for successfully increasing people's use, acceptance, knowledge and confidence of SharePoint.

Pain Points

Some of the Pain Points I've heard expressed as it relates to slow user adoption are:

Employees Unaware of Powerful SharePoint Features
SharePoint Deployed Without Governance
User Community Not Involved in Planning SharePoint Site Use
End Users Expected to Create or Manage SharePoint Sites
Inefficient Use of Document Management Features
Uncertainty that Confidential Information is Secure
Added Training Needs Burden Staff
SharePoint Training Not Based on End User Needs
Help Desk Unable to Answer SharePoint Questions
Change in Organizational Culture Required for SharePoint to Be Accepted

How to

The key to overcoming these pain points and increasing end user adoption of SharePoint and achieving better buy-in from users at large is to develop a plan that includes:

Governance planning that includes:
- Key members from various business units - not just IT
- Focus on the vision and long-range goals
- Ability to adapt to changes in requirements
- Relevancy to needs of the organization
Taxonomy planning that includes:
- Governance team that will own and manage the taxonomy
- Classification of information according to categories
- Focus on the business, not on SharePoint
Communication plan that includes:
- What SharePoint is
- Governance and taxonomies for use in SharePoint
- Building excitement for what SharePoint will be able to do in their environment
- How it fits into the existing ecosystem of technologies
- What it might be replacing
- Discovering and building SharePoint advocates
A training plan that provides succinct training that:
- Focuses on the needs of individual users
- Available when needed
- Holds users accountable
- Teaches the technical "how-to" about SharePoint
- Shares the reasons and best practices for using SharePoint
- Incentivizes employees
- Provides key competency certifications that encourage and build confidence when key concepts are mastered

If any of these important steps are missing in a SharePoint adoption plan, you will find that the effectiveness of the other steps will be less. For example, if you have not provided governance and have a poor taxonomy plan, use of SharePoint will be inconsistent. When this occurs, even if users receive useful training, there will be confusion about the proper use of SharePoint features. Even if governance and taxonomy planning has been completed but this information is not communicated to employees, there will still be confusion and inconsistency with the use of SharePoint. Lastly, if you have planned for proper governance and taxonomy, communicated to your employees that SharePoint is coming, but then fail to train employees, end users will not know how to utilize the new features provided by SharePoint.

For this reason, in order to receive the anticipated return on investment (ROI) of a SharePoint deployment, the key for success in usability and user adoption is tied closely to implementing a plan that includes governance and taxonomy, communication to employees, and relevant training.

First Get Help!

If you think the suggestions included in the previous section are a tall order, you are right. You are probably not staffed to handle all of the steps that are recommended and you likely do not have the SharePoint expertise in-house to accomplish this plan. Mindsharp has the expertise, services, and products to help you implement all four key areas mentioned above. The biggest struggle for any company is a well thought out, effective training plan that meets the needs of the end user population.

That is why we developed UserVersity to deliver an end-to-end turnkey SharePoint communication and training program. We work with your staff to compliment the talent you have in-house, and then provide expertise in areas you may not have. UserVersity provides communication tools and a variety of training tools including:

Adoption Manager
E-learning
Online or in person instructor-led training
Quizzes
Certifications
Incentives and motivation for employees you would like to target

We are excited to be the first to offer such a flexible solution that encompasses all of your needs and provides a customized approach to training.

If you would like to learn more about this you can also attend a free 30 minute webinar about Increasing End User Adoption and about our UserVersity program. Please check out our website at http://www.mindsharp.com/Default.aspx?top=TRAINING&left=END_USER_ADOPTION

The following chart summarizes how Mindsharp and UserVersity can assist organizations when dealing with one or many of the pain points highlighted in this paper.

Pain Point	How Mindsharp Can Help
Pain Point 1: Employees Unaware of Powerful SharePoint Features	Mindsharp's UserVersity provides a communication plan that informs users about the key SharePoint features. Our communication plan includes e-mail templates, posters, and additional resources as requested.
Pain Point 2: SharePoint Deployed Without Governance	Mindsharp has SharePoint experts that can guide your governance and taxonomy planning or provide you with resources to assist your team in planning these important components.
Pain Point 3: User Community Not Involved in Planning SharePoint Site Use	Mindsharp can help obtain feedback about who should be part of the team that develops your SharePoint governance and taxonomy plans.
Pain Point 4: End Users Expected to Create or Manage SharePoint Sites	Mindsharp's UserVersity includes training in various formats that provides end users with the information they need to create and manage sites.
Pain Point 5: Inefficient Use of Document Management Features	Mindsharp's UserVersity provides training on correct document management including topics such as: Creating and saving documents Adding metadata Searching Collaborating Using check in and check out Version history Users can choose training that meets their needs and fits into their busy schedule.
Pain Point 6: Uncertainty that Confidential Information is Secure	Mindsharp's UserVersity provides training for end users on the topic of security. We provide thorough coverage on how SharePoint security works, as well as how to add or remove users from the SharePoint groups and permission levels. Users will gain confidence that they are securing their content appropriately.
Pain Point 7: Added Training Needs Burden Staff	Mindsharp's UserVersity provides an adoption manager that guides you through the program so you can make training decisions confidently. The advantage is that you are working with a SharePoint expert with years of training experience.
Pain Point 8: SharePoint Training Not Based on End User Needs	Mindsharp's UserVersity is structured to provide specific training for every role and function in your organization to ensure competency in appropriate SharePoint functionality. UserVersity provides over 90 different lessons that simplify SharePoint by breaking training into six key functional competencies. This allows end users to focus on the aspects of SharePoint that relate to them currently, and then grow into other areas as their use and knowledge of SharePoint expands. Training can be repeated when knowledge of a skill needs to be refreshed or reinforced.
Pain Point 9: Help Desk Unable to Answer SharePoint Questions	Mindsharp's UserVersity provides multiple ways to assist your Help Desk including: Mindsharp has the leading SharePoint experts on staff who can answer questions from your Help Desk employees. UserVersity has help desk crash courses to provide your IT and Help Desk staff with a thorough understanding of SharePoint. The Help Desk can refer employees to specific computer-based training modules that address the user's problem. This is another way to provide the needed help without the Help Desk employee guiding users through each step.
Pain Point 10: Change in Organizational Culture Required for SharePoint to Be Accepted	Training with Mindsharp's UserVersity helps users understand the value of using SharePoint functionality. It goes beyond showing the "how" to teach the best practices and answer the "whys" in SharePoint. This approach helps increase end-user adoption and satisfaction.

Summary

SharePoint is one of the fastest growing corporate technologies on the market today. In fact, SharePoint has surpassed anticipated sales within Microsoft but has the frequency of its use in your organization surpassed expectations? Just because your organization has deployed SharePoint does not mean it is being used successfully.

I have identified some of the reasons end user adoption of SharePoint is slow in companies and offered ways to change that slow adoption. If companies create a SharePoint adoption plan that meets end user needs, SharePoint will be a tool they depend on to work smarter and faster.

Content Query Web Parts and Anonymous Access

Christina Wheeler — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:42:00 GMT

If you have your site enabled for anonymous access and you use Content Query Web Parts (CQWP) when an anonymous user clicks on the links they end up with a "403" forbidden error. As it turns out the CQWP has all links go through the CopyUtil.aspx page instead of linking to the item directly. This page without customization, does not support anonymous access however there are two different workarounds to fix this problem.

Workaround:

1) Override the ContentQuery (ContentQueryMain.xsl) Web Part's XSLT to use "DispForm.aspx" instead of "CopyUtil.aspx".

        <xsl:if test="$UseCopyUtil = 'True'">
            <xsl:value-of select="concat('/_layouts/dispform.aspx?Use=id&Action=dispform&ItemId=',@ID,'&ListId=',@ListId,'&WebId=',
            @WebId,'&SiteId=',$SiteId)"/>
        </xsl:if>

2) Or you can create a custom CopyUtil.aspx page and override the AllowAnonymous property.

Unexpected Error in 2010

Kathy Hughes — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:38:00 GMT

If you happen to see the error message "An error has occurred" when attempting to open your SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 site, then check the Microsoft Geneva Claims to Windows Token Service is started. In SharePoint 2007, the same error message usually points to either a Web service or SQL service being stopped.

SharePoint Designer 2010 – I know, it’s Beta

Daniel Galant — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:38:27 GMT

So, like many other folks out there I’ve been playing with the new SharePoint Designer 2010 public beta, and also like many of you, I’ve been liking a lot of what I’m seeing. Still, I keep running across issues that I really hope get fixed before the release. This one has been plaguing the product since the early betas and I really hope it gets addressed before final release. As of now, SharePoint Designer cannot connect to a SharePoint site if you have any additional host headers attached to the site. For many organizations I would say this is a big limitation. As an example, say you have created your portal application at the following address, portal.acmeman.net. Now, for the sake of your internal users you decide to add the header of simply portal, so that your users don’t have to enter the entire FQDN when accessing the site. Your IIS would look something like this,

Unfortunately, now when you try and open the site from Designer you’ll get the following error,

Clicking OK will then present you with this,

The fix is to simply remove the offending additional header and the site will once again become accessible. Again, I will point out that this is still a Beta product and I have every confidence that Microsoft will have this working by release. None the less, I wanted to put this out there and raise some awareness of the issue amongst the Designer community.

SharePoint Saturday – Kansas City

Daniel Galant — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:04:00 GMT

On December 12th I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Kansas City, (ok, Overland Park actually). With all the great speakers and topics it should be a wonderful day. My understanding is they upped the registration to some 300 folks and that filled up pretty fast. I’ll be showing off what’s new and improved with SharePoint Designer 2010 and hope to see some of you there. Drop in and introduce yourself or just say hello.

SharePoint 2010 Beta Classes

Daniel Galant — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:59:00 GMT

Don’t miss your chance to get a look at what SharePoint 2010 has in store for you and your organization. Mindsharp, the leaders in SharePoint education are holding classes this December in both core technologies and development and there are still seats available. Let Ben Curry, author of the SharePoint 2007 Administrator’s Companion and Best Practices books be your guide as you discover what’s new in the 2010 release of SharePoint Server. With a redesigned interface, new features, enhanced social networking, new service applications and more, there is lots to see and discover in this release. For developers, Todd Bleeker, the SharePoint Wizard, will show you tricks and tips, the ins and outs and basically take you deep under the hood of the SharePoint API. Head on over to Mindsharp 2010 Beta Classes for more information and to reserve your seat today.

Configuring User Profiles in SharePoint Server 2010

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:30:00 GMT

[cross-post from www.kathyhughes.com/blog/]

Note: I've added the necessary links relating to SharePoint Server 2010 prerequisites, along with instructions for configuring the user profile synchronization service, at the end of this post.

Now that Beta 2 is out many of you will be installing and setting up new SharePoint 2010 environments and getting to know the product intimately ;-) However, I've seen a number of posts around issues when attempting to setup and configure the User Profile Service or User Profile Synchronization Service. I too had some issues with this service during my installation so I thought I'd share my experience here and also my eventual workaround so that it may help others.

First off, my environments consists of several physical and virtualized servers. I never use a standalone installation since that's not a fair indication of how people will use the product out in the real world and I need to fully test things like authentication scenarios. So in my initial test setup, I had x4 servers. All servers are running Windows 2008 R2 and the domain is Windows 2008 R2 (Windows 2008 R2 functional level). Server one is my DC/Exchange 2010/DNS/DHCP, etc; server 2 is SQL 2008 (patched as per pre-requisite requirements on Ji Lie's blog); server 3 is my main application server, including SharePoint Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 B2; server 4 is currently where I have a number of legacy systems.

I initially ran my 2010 install under my domain admin account. However, I'd set up a separate farm account in my AD and given that account the necessary replication permissions (per Dave Pae's instructions) and subsequently added that account as the farm account during install. The installation had an issue toward the end, where it couldn't fully deploy the user profile service. The error message suggested a timeout issue, but I wasn't convinced that it had completely failed.

Next, while still logged in as the domain admin account, I started the User Profile Synchronization Service on the Manage Services on server page in Central Administration. But the service hanged in the status of 'starting'. When I checked my Windows Services console, I could see that both the Forefront Identity Manager Service and Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service were set to 'Started'. So then I checked my Windows Application log and it was full of errors. I won't repeat those errors here, but you can see similar errors experienced by others in various posts on the 2010 forums, like this one started by Jeremy -http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/8fffb030-c118-4e36-94ab-8601b25f3a97.

Next, I checked the account under which both the Forefront services were running and of course it was the farm account I'd added during initial installation. So my next attempt was to stop the User Profile Synchronization service which was stuck at a status of 'starting'. To do this, I used the PowerShell cmdlet stop-spserviceinstance [guid]. For those reading this post unfamiliar with PowerShell, you'll need to firstly discover the GUID for the user profile synchronization service before being able to stop it. To do this use the get-spserviceinstance cmdlet first to enumerate and access all the service GUIDS. I used:

get-spserviceinstance >file.txt to save them to a file on my local drive for convenience.

Next, locate the GUID for the user profile synchronization service (it'll probably show a status of 'provisioning' in PowerShell) and use the following command:

stop-spserviceinstance [userprofilesynchronizationservice GUID]

This will eventually stop the service and the status of the service on the SharePoint Manage services on server page will show a status of 'stopped'.

Also, the two Forefront services in the Windows Services console should be set back to a status of disabled.

Next I logged in as the farm account I'd assigned during install and the same account under which the Forefront services was running. I then attempted to start the user profile synchronization service using this account, but once again the service got stuck on a status of 'starting'. And my Windows application event log was full of Forefront errors once again along with some additional SQL access errors.

I think what happened was that by initially using my domain admin account to start the service confused everything along with the encrypted key used by the Forefront services.

So, next I decided to reinstall SharePoint Server 2010 but this time I used the domain admin account and I also installed it on my SQL box. This time, everything mostly worked though I still had a timeout error toward the end of my installation. But, I could then successfully start my user profile synchronization service and import user profiles from my domain.

IMPORTANT: once you've successfully started your user profile synchronization service you may still see a message on the User Profile Service Application page under Configure Syncrhronization Connections that the server is unable to connect to SQL or Search Service, etc. Make sure you have started your Search service back on the Manage services on server page and then do an IISRESET. Dave Pae mentions the IISRESET bit on his blog post. Once you've done this then all should be good to go and you should then be able to Configure Synchronization Connections and Start Profile Synchronization.

Finally, because the user profile service hadn't completely installed using the SharePoint wizard, once I had everything configure including services started and profiles imported, I needed to go back to my Web application and add my user profile service into the available Service Connections.

To do this, go to your Web application and click Service Connections in the ribbon. In the Configure Service Application Associations dialog you'll notice the checkboxes greyed out. To make them editable, from the dropdown at the top of the dialog select [custom] and then go check the User Profile Service Application (or whatever you've named your user profile service app) and click OK.

I realize using the domain admin account isn't best practice, but if you need to get things working in your dev or test environments then it worked for me. I'll be doing some further investigation but for now my user profile synching is working. Another thought is around which authentication protocol you're using. Initially I used NTLM. I've now switched to Kerberos. But I'm not convinced that switching to Kerberos in the beginning would have resolved my initial issue.

My only problem now is that my organizational browser isn't rendering properly with or without Silverlight so that's the next thing to tackle...oneday! ;-)

Here are some relevant postings:

Dave Pae has posted some instructions on the SharePoint team blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/11/18/path-to-user-profile-synchronization-success-in-sharepoint-2010-beta.aspx

Ji Lie posted some great instructions here http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/19/user-profile-sync-setup-in-sharepoint-server-2010-beta.aspx

plus

Beta 2 installation instructions

http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/16/installation-notice-for-sharepoint-2010-public-beta.aspx (great post and it also includes links to other great resources on his blog including a list of all the pre-requisites (important for isolated environments) - http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/10/25/sharepoint-2010-pre-requisites-download-links.aspx.

Importantly if you're running Windows 2008 standard SP2 then you'll need to install the hotfix at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=KB971831&DownloadId=7285

if you're running Windows 2008 RC2 then you'll need to install the hotfix at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806

The SharePoint 2010 Beta bits are out!

Corro'll Driskell — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:31:06 GMT

The Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64) and Office SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (x64) bits are now available on the Microsoft Technet site. If you are not leveraging Microsoft’s Hyper-V, I would recommend leveraging VMware Workstation. Microsoft Virtual PC – even on Windows 7 - does not support the 64 bit platform. In fact, I don’t know how soon.

Get your SharePoint 2010 Beta bits here!

Presenting at Sydney SharePoint User Group 17th November 2009

Kathy Hughes — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:35:00 GMT

I'll be presenting a session on design and branding in SharePoint 2010 at tomorrow night's Sydney SharePoint user group (17th November, 2009, 6pm-8pm). It will be a similar presentation to the one I delivered at this year's Office DevCon and approximately 1.5-2hrs duration.

The presentation will cover new design approaches in SharePoint 2010, including theming, master pages and other rich client-side offerings.

See http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Sydney/default.aspx for location and registration.

I'm at the ATL users group Monday night, Nov 16th

Ben Curry — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:13:00 GMT

I'll be speaking at the ATL users group tomorrow night at 6:30 EST. For directions and more info, see http://www.atlspug.com/default.aspx.

The topics are:

Session 1	Installing SharePoint Server 2010
Topic Description	Much has changed from the 2007 version of SharePoint. I'll be discussing a server farm installation of SharePoint Server 2010 to include the new Shared Services model (service applications), how those will upgrade, and limitations of 2007 and 2010 integration. Just for fun, I'll also give you a quick demonstration of building service applications and configuration using Central Administration and PowerShell!
Session 2	Enterprise Content Management Upgrades in SharePoint Server 2010
Topic Description	Wow! We have some really cool features that are new to SharePoint Server 2010 - DocumentIDs, robust Information Management Policies, and Document Sets. BUT, one of the most anticipated features is the centralized taxonomy and content type hub. Come see a live demonstration and early best practices for creating a content type hub and managed metadata service.

My apologies for posting this late. I hope to see you there!

Ben Curry

Speaking at SEF2009 and Evolution

Penny Coventry — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:27:00 GMT

Cross posted from: http://www.sharepointdesignerstepbystep.com/Blog/

I’m presenting SharePoint 2010 sessions at the Swedish SharePoint & Exchange Forum (SEF2009), and at SharePoint Evolution Conference. (Beta 2 of SharePoint 2010 will be available this month, so make sure your register to get a copy). The sessions I am presenting at the two conferences are :

Swedish SharePoint & Exchange Conference 2009

Day 1: 16^th November 2009

11:00-12:00 "SharePoint 2010 workflows without code" – Best Practices Track:
Workflow in SharePoint 2010 has been revamped. The new SharePoint Designer 2010 can build reusable workflows as well as site and list based workflows. In this session we’ll cover the workflows built into SharePoint 2010 as well as how to build new and reuse workflows, the integration with Visio, and how to prototype workflows in SharePoint Designer for further development in Visual Studio 2010. More information on SharePoint Designer can be found at the following links:

Day 2: 17^th November 2009

11:00-12:00 "SharePoint 2010 and Access 2010 – Better together" – SharePoint Nerd Track:
Access has always been a great landing pad for data. Last year I did a presentation at the SEF event showing how well Access and SharePoint worked well together. Now the story is even better, so this session follows on the story. Access 2010 includes new performance improvement when connecting to SharePoint lists. In this session I’ll cover these as well as other improvements, such as, connecting to Business Connectivity Services (BCS) data and using Access Services. If you can’t attend SEF, then you can find out more about Access and SharePoint at the following links:

13:00-14:00 "Administrating SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell 2.0" – Best Practices Track:
In this session you’ll see how to use PowerShell to administer SharePoint 2010. We’ll cover some basic PowerShell commands and then jump into showing how to do day to day administrating of SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell. Useful PowerShell and SharePoint 2010 links are:

Zach Rosenfield’s blogs tagged with PowerShell
If you’ve still using CTP3 of PowerShell 2.0, then you really need to use the RTM version which can be obtain from links on Microsoft KB968929 page, make sure you upgrade to the WinRM RTM version at the same time. (The RTM versions of PowerShell 2.0 and WinRM are automatically included in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2.)
Read about PowerShell in the SharePoint 2010 Evaluation Guide.
Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Foundation 2010
SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Cmdlets Reference
Getting Started: Windows PowerShell for SharePoint 2010 Administrators

SharePoint Evolution Conference

More information of the two session I’ll be presenting will be detailed on this blog nearer the date. Of course by April 2010, I’ll know much more about SharePoint 2010 than I do now and I’m really looking forward to this conference. It’s at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference centre, which is where the European SharePoint Best Practice 2009 conference was held. That conference was a sell-out and I expect that the Evolution conference will also sell out, so don’t leave it too late until your register.

Upgrading to SharePoint Server 2010

Ben Curry — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:02:00 GMT

I'll be posting more about the upgrade process, but when you get the 2010 bits, be sure to already have SQL Server 2008 Cumulative Update 2 installed whether it's a new or upgraded install, but especially an upgrade. It kind of wrecked my upgrade when I had to re-start the config wizard after applying CU2.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958186

-ben

Note To Self: Reading and Writing Plain Text Email Messages in Outlook 2007

Paul Schaeflein — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:31:25 GMT

For years now I've been reading and writing messages in Outlook using plain text email. I know it is old school and there is a lot of FUD surrounding it but I still think it is a best practice. At worst it is my personal preference. However, whenever I build out a new laptop I have to once again remember where those pesky settings are to force Outlook 2007 to use plain text. Hence, this post:

Reading email in plain text:
Select Tools > Trust Center from the Outlook 2007 menu and click on the E-mail Security node. In the Read as Plain Text section, select both checkboxes. Click the OK button to save the changes and exit the dialog.

Writing email in plain text:
Select Tools > Options from the Outlook 2007 menu and click on the Mail Format tab. In the Message Format section, choose Plain Text from the dropdown list. Consolas Regular 10.5 is the default font which is currently my favorite (except for single quotes and commas it is clearly cleaner looking than the old Courier New) but if you click on the Stationary and Fonts... button you can choose whatever font you prefer. Click the OK button twice to save the changes and exit the dialogs.

That's all there is to it. Why these two options are so far apart is beyond me.

The unconverted masses will continue to send you HTML email, so you will occasionally need to see non-text content. Outlook 2007 makes that easy, in the message you are reading as plain text, simply click on the orange bar near the top of the message and select Display as HTML from the context menu:

God forbid, you may even find that you need to send an HTML message. Outlook 2007 also makes that easy, in the message you are writing as plain text, choose Options > HTML from the Format Group:

PS: Why does Microsoft insist on including a dash in the word email?

SharePoint: The Enterprise Content Management Platform, Part 1

Corro'll Driskell — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:33:16 GMT

Over the last year, In evaluating many organization’s business needs and requirements, it was quite clear to me that SharePoint was not deployed as a content management platform. There were a number of reasons for this fact, but I will only focus on two. First, there was the lack of an organizational roadmap. The fact that many organizations failed to develop a formal roadmap, before deploying SharePoint, hindered user adoption and failed to align, the various features of, SharePoint with organizational business needs and requirements. Second and equally important, there was a lack of executive support and stakeholders involvement. To put it differently, IT was left holding the bag.

There are a number of questions as to where SharePoint sits in the enterprise as it compares to other content management (ECM, RM and DM) platforms. Naturally, many would expect for SharePoint to replace many of the existing ECM platforms. On the contrary, SharePoint – in many organizations – co-exist with a number of other content management platforms. Or, I have found that SharePoint is, either, competes or integrates with the existing content management platforms. This point is further supported by AIIM’s (http://www.aiim.org/research) research; “State of the ECM Industry”.

Figure 8: Which of the following would you use to best describe your current or planned use of SharePoint in
your organization with regard to your existing ECM, DM and RM suite? N=233 (SharePoint users)

The question for many SharePoint Architects and Administrators is, “How do we overcome the SharePoint constraints?” Architects, administrators and consultants must clearly demonstrate a clear return on investment (ROI). But as insightful as that may be, it does not bear on the key issue at hand. The key issue is that decision makers do not view SharePoint as an enterprise solution in the content management space. As a result, senior management doesn’t view SharePoint as an organizational priority. It is my position that SharePoint 2010’s ECM features and Microsoft’s partner channel will fill in a number of gaps that would change senior management’s behavior. Today, SharePoint 2007 is an excellent choice as an organization’s ECM platform. But, an organization must build a formal roadmap for SharePoint.

In my next posting, I would like to take a closer look at SharePoint Governance and its value-add for building an ECM platform. Most importantly, leveraging a more structured approach to moving past a number of deployment road blocks.

SharePoint Consultant’s Salaries

Corro'll Driskell — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:20:46 GMT

As a Learning Consultant, I have assisted a number of System Integrators (SI) with tightly aligning training with their overall fiscal goals. Most importantly, we were able to measure the performance over time. Also, I have consulted and trained on the SharePoint platform. Over the several versions of SharePoint, I have found it to be amazing as to the salary ranges through-out the major cities. The fact that I live in the Atlanta surrounding areas, I place an emphasis on it.

On average, SharePoint consultants in the Atlanta area, yield about $100,000. When you take a look at the cost of living for Georgia – specifically Atlanta – you will find that is a great salary. In comparison to the standard of living as compared to other major cities, such as, Washington DC, Chicago, …etc.

The purpose of my blog is to encourage all to revaluate your training budgets and seek out training on the SharePoint platform. I assert that Microsoft’s commitment to SharePoint is well founded. Also, the next major version of SharePoint – SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 – is to beta this month. Again, it is time to ramp up on various features available. That is just my $19.11 worth.

SharePoint Server 2010 Site Directory (where did it go?)

Ben Curry — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:26:11 GMT

One of the first things many administrators will notice on a new SharePoint Server 2010 install is the lack of a Site Directory (well, lack of a Collaborative Portal template completely). If you've upgraded from 2007, then your current Site Directory will still work - otherwise, you're out of luck, kind of...

I got to looking around Central Administration:

and I noticed that we still had the Site Directory configuration settings. It looked just like 2007. So, how do we get the Site Directory back?

I first tried just unhiding the site template in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\1033\XML\webtempsps.xml:

Just change the Hidden="True" to Hidden="False"

But when I went to create a new site, it didn't show in the available templates. I also noticed in the xml (what appears to be a new function) VisibilityFeatureDependency= 5F3B0127-2F1D-4cfd-8DD2-85AD1FB00BFC. Hmmm... so what if we activate that feature on the Site Collection where we want to host our Site Directory? Yes - that works! You activate the feature by:

stsadm.exe -o activatefeature -id 5F3B0127-2F1D-4cfd-8DD2-85AD1FB00BFC

-url http://portal.contoso.msft

By the way, that feature is called PortalLayouts, if you are curious.

Getting there from scratch

Now, the easiest way to get a site directory is by first installing the feature, and second by creating the site. I created a Publishing Portal as the top level site:

Next, activate the feature on the Site Collection

stsadm.exe -o activatefeature -id 5F3B0127-2F1D-4cfd-8DD2-85AD1FB00BFC

-url http://portal.contoso.msft

Finally, create the sub-site via stsadm.exe (or you could do it from the UI if you unhide the template)

stsadm.exe -o createweb -url http://portal.contoso.msft/sitedirectory -sitetemplate

spssites#0 -title "Site Directory"

You now have a Site Directory!

Cheers, and I hope this helps.

Thanks to Jim Curry for hacking around a bit with me to solve this.

Ben Curry

SharePoint MVP

Office DevCon 2009 Australia schedule now available

Kathy Hughes — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:46:00 GMT

31st October and 1st November, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

The schedule for this year's Australian Office DevCon is now available at http://www.officedevcon.com.au/2009/Download/2009Schedule.pdf

Remember, if you plan on attending the event but haven't yet registered please do so by visiting http://www.officedevcon.com.au to ensure adequate seating and catering.

I'll be presenting a 90 minute session on design in SharePoint Server 2010, including page options, master page/s, theming and CSS, along with other new rich UI features, plus SharePoint Designer 2010 (now part of the 2010 development platform)! If you're currently working with SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 come along to learn about the new design features. If you're new to SharePoint, then you'll be able to see how to theme a SharePoint site and the various options for applying design.

See you there! Techtastic!

SharePoint 2010 Extravaganza Sydney Australia

Kathy Hughes — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:51:00 GMT

Only a few days away from our SharePoint 2010 Extravaganza event at Microsoft here in Sydney, Australia. Craig has updated the agenda, which now includes SharePoint 2010 overview, some deep dive and Visio Services.

Here's the lineup for the evening:

6:00 – News & Intro (Craig Bailey)
6:15 – Introduction to SharePoint 2010 (Kathy Hughes + Aaron Saikovski)
7:15 – Pizza break + networking
7:30 – Overview of Office 2010 SharePoint Integration (Alistair Speirs)
7:45 – SharePoint Workspace (previously known as Groove) (Alistair Speirs)
8:00 – Diving into SharePoint 2010 (Kathy Hughes + Aaron Saikovski)
8:30 – Visio Integration Services + SharePoint 2010 (Jamie Hutchins)
8:45 – Final demos + Panel Session Q+A
9:15 – Finish + networking

Further details and registration via Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=139617636781&ref=nf

http://sbtug.com

Firefox issues with WPF

Kathy Hughes — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:06:00 GMT

Be aware that there's currently an issue with Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5.30729.1 in Firefox browsers which may cause the below dialog to appear when launching certain Web sites in Firefox (in my case I'm running Firefox 3.5.3 and was accessing this site - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/ms442469%28office.14,lightweight%29.aspx - when I received the error dialog).

A recent article on Computerworld explains the current issue: -"Mozilla blocks Microsoft's sneaky Firefox plug-in": http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139518/Mozilla_blocks_Microsoft_s_sneaky_Firefox_plug_in?taxonomyId=125

New Workflow Functions with SharePoint Designer 2010

Daniel Galant — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:02:00 GMT

Now that the SharePoint Conference is under way, we can start talking about all of the cool things you will be able to do with the new version of SharePoint and its related products once it hits the streets sometime next year. First of all, let me start by saying that Steve Ballmer announced during the keynote this morning that the public beta for SharePoint 2010 will begin sometime in November. So keep your eyes and ears open for when you will be able to start downloading the bits and start your own explorations. For now, I’ll just tell you about some of the things that are coming our way to make working with and designing on SharePoint a bit more fun and cool. As with the current version, SharePoint Designer will still be a free product in its 2010 form. However, you will not be able to use it to customize your SharePoint 2007 farms, as it will only work with SharePoint 2010. So if you are going to be supporting both environments, you will need to use both tools. Don’t be discouraged, there are good reasons for this. In my upcoming posts I’m planning on discussing several of the key features and enhancements that are being made within SharePoint Designer 2010, such as a new interface, new security options, new management tools, new integration options and yes… new workflow features. In this post I’d like to focus on some of the enhancements that are being made to the workflow design options when using SharePoint Designer 2010.

You know how with Designer 2007, we can only create a workflow that is attached to a single list or library? Gone. You know how we have to get out Visio, or perhaps some other design tool, and draw out the logic flow of the workflow process (or at least you SHOULD be drawing out the logic flow of your workflow process), and then have that diagram close at hand as you start working your way through the Designer Workflow Wizard to create the actual workflow? Wouldn’t it be really cool if you could take that Visio drawing that you spent all that time creating and use it as a template for the workflow directly? Guess what. Would it be neat if you could create a workflow once, and then reuse that workflow again on another list? You got it. All these things, and more, are now possible with Designer 2010. When you create a new workflow using Designer you actually have three different types of workflows you can create. First, you still have the option to create a workflow that is specific to a list or library. Second, you can now create a Site workflow that is usable anywhere within the Site you are attaching it to. Third, we have the Reusable workflow that can be attached directly to a content type, or can be used by all content types. How cool is that?

It gets better. As I mentioned, there is now also integration between Visio 2010 and Designer 2010 such that you can map out your workflow logic in Visio using the new SharePoint Workflow Template, then export that design to a file and import that into SharePoint Designer where you complete the specific configuration options for the conditions and actions. I’ll be showing you how this is done in an upcoming post so be sure to check back here to see just how this is done. But that’s not all. You can also export a workflow you have created in Designer and import that into Visio and render it out as a diagram, modify the diagram, re-export/import and continue working with it. All this makes for a much more robust workflow design solution, and all still without having to write code.

Hey, have you ever wanted to modify those out-of-the-box workflows that Microsoft gave us? You can now. And yes, these can also be exported and diagramed out in Visio, just like your from scratch custom workflows. There are a number of new conditions and actions that are now included, out-of-the box, as well. Conditions such as, check list item permission or person is a valid SharePoint user. Some of the new actions include items such as lookup manager of a user, assign item for approval, replace list item permissions, or delete previous versions. You can also create an impersonation step, whereby that specific step of the workflow runs under the authority of the user that last edited the workflow itself, and not as the user who actually started the workflow on the item in the list. When you create a reusable workflow, you can specify new columns that the workflow will create in the list that it is is attached to using the Association Columns feature of the workflow creator. This allows you to have columns that are referenced within the workflow and be assured they will be included in the list where the workflow is being used.

We also still have the features that are near and dear to us, serial and parallel processing of actions, if/else branching, multi-step workflow design as well as task forms and initiation parameters. Although the Workflow Design wizard as you know it in Designer 2007 is gone, the addition of the Office Ribbon in Designer 2010 still gives us the control and context awareness for creating workflows and actually integrates more smoothly into the Designer work surface.

It seems that Microsoft did indeed listen to a number of the pain points we griped about with the current version and is making great strides to ease those pains in the new release. I, for one, am very excited about the improvements that are coming with the new version of SharePoint.

SharePoint Server 2010 Now and Then

Kathy Hughes — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:58:00 GMT

I’ve been working with an early SharePoint 2010 beta for the past couple of months and I must say I’m really excited about the new features, including new rich usability features. There are way too many features for one blog post alone!

So, to kick start things I’ve created a number of slides and videos, which I’ve listed below. These should help to whet your appetite and if you’re currently using SharePoint Server 2007 I’ve included some comparative shots in some of the videos. Of course, if you’re one of the lucky 7000+ people attending the SharePoint Conference currently underway in Vegas (USA) then you’re in for a real treat. Get ready for information overload!

Alternatively, go straight to Flickr to view the entire 2010 set at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathyhughes/sets/72157622621162114/.

Go straight to YouTube to view the entire Playlist at: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FD0BEEE947266904

SharePoint Server 2010 – Now and Then

Download the full slide PDF, including links to demos, from: http://www.kathyhughes.com/blog/downloads/SharePoint2010_NowAndThen_HughesKa.pdf

SharePoint Server 2010 is out

Kathy Hughes — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:22:00 GMT

As of today's keynote at the 2009 SharePoint Conference happening in Vegas, USA, SharePoint Server 2010 features have been publicly disclosed. A public beta is due out sometime November.

Today's earlier keynote is available on demand at http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx.

Stay tuned for lots of SharePoint Server 2010 goodness!

Hey Tim! SharePoint 2010 understands SQL failover

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:40:00 GMT

But for DBAs, you will have to set configure it. So no worries about SharePoint doing SP evilness.

Some Notes from Overview of Development Platform

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:51:00 GMT

NEW REST API

NEW Client Side APIs

Provides Simple API to Add, Retrievem Update, Manage SP List data with JaveScript and Silverlight

Snippet:

ClientContext context= new ClientContext(http://Server);

NEW LINQ (Language Integrated Query) for SharePoint

Wiki Fucntionality in SharePoint Team Sites with SharePoint 2010

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:52:00 GMT

Put Wiki entries dirctly into your team sites,

PowerPivot (Formerly Gemini) Announced at SharePoint Conference 2009

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:50:00 GMT

PowerPivot announced today.

My quick note:

What it is: In memory DB that runs on server or client to allow users to sift through massive amounts or data -- 100 Million Rows in Excel distributed as SQL Server Power Pivot for Excel and SQL Server Power Pivot for SharePoint

UPDATE: Right after my laptop's battery died I saw a demo of Sorting, Filtering, and Grouping on millions of items all of which took parts of a second.

Manage 1 Million List Items and 10 million documents in Document Libraries with SharePoint 2010

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:40:00 GMT

Also, you will have a new central taxnomy management solution that works not only for the whole farm but can be shared across MULTIPLE farms!

Time to start thinking about your upgrade path!

--From SharePoint Conference 2009

SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010...

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:17:00 GMT

...will not provide better support for 2007 development!

The new tools target new hooks in the new API

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Public Betas in November

James Curry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:53:00 GMT

During the SharePoint 2009 Keynote Steve Ballmer has announced public betas for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 in November 2009!

Stay tuned for more SP Conf 2009 news.

SharePoint Conference - First booth session done

Rick Taylor — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:42:00 GMT

My first session at SPC09 is now done. It was Part 1 of 2, "Upgrading to SharePoint 2010".

At first I was worried, because I was competing with breakfast being served at the same time. With 1 minute to go, there was one person in a seat. Bill English said, "Preach and they will come." He was right. I started talking to one person and 5 minutes later, the chairs were all full.

Part 2 will be tomorrow at 12:30pm. Need to make sure my demos work!

Packing for SharePoint Conference 2009

Ben Curry — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:17:00 GMT

I'll be at the Mindsharp booth talking about just about anything you want to chat about. I'll be in late Sunday night. I'll be blogging 2010 content starting on tuesday, but you can follow immediate details as they are release from NDA on twitter @curryben.

cheers, and see you in Vegas.

My First Book is Really Done!

Paul Papanek Stork — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:36:00 GMT

I turned in my last chapter in early June, but it didn’t seem real.
I finished reviewing the proof pages at the end of July, but I still wasn’t convinced.
I created ancillary material to promote the book two weeks ago, and I thought maybe I was done
But when I got home from teaching this week and found a copy of my new book had been delivered by the publisher it finally sank in.

I’m a published author!

I’ve contributed chapters to books for a number of years now and I’ve always wanted to have at least one with my name on the cover. I’ve started on books of my own at least twice before, but circumstances always interfered and I wasn’t able to finish them. This year I promised myself would be different and I’m happy to say it is. I spend the first 6 months of the year co-writing a study guide for the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 MCTS exam (70-631). The book will be on store shelves October 19, 2009, just in time for the SharePoint Conference in Vegas. You can also order it direct from Amazon. If you haven’t certified on WSS yet, pick up a copy of the book and bring it with you to Vegas. You can find me in the Mindsharp booth in the vendor area. I’ll be PROUD to sign your book.

The Super Simple Mindsharp Help Desk Link Feature

James Curry — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:14:00 GMT

Recently I came up with a simple way to add a Help Desk link to every page in a SharePoint farm. The method I used was a Farm scoped feature that changes the My Links control so that it displays a Help Desk link next to the standard SharePoint help icon.

One of the nice things about the method uses is that it requires no compiled code and no DLL. The solution consists entirely of an ASCX user control that is based on the standard My Links user control with the addition of the Help Desk Link. While the Help Desk link isn’t the prettiest that could be easily rectified by a person who isn’t stylistically challenge. (Meaning someone other than me!) It is also easy to change the text or if your familiar with .ASCX controls or .ASPX pages add an image or something fancy.

The actual link is comprised of only a handful of lines of code:

<td class="ms-globallinks">
<asp:LinkButton ForeColor="Blue" Font-Bold="true" Font-Size="Larger" runat="server" ID="HelpLink" Text="Help Desk" PostBackUrl="http://summit7systems.com"></asp:LinkButton>
</td>

For the sake of simplicity the three lines above were simply added to a copy of the MyLinks.ascx control which I named Mindsharp_HelpLink_MyLinks.ascx.

The entire control looks like this:

<%@ Control Language="C#" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="OSRVWC" Namespace="Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> <%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePoint" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePoint" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint" %>
<table><tr>
<td class="ms-globallinks"><SPSWC:MyLinksMenuControl id="MyLinksMenu" runat="server" /></td>
<td class="ms-globallinks"><asp:Literal id="hlMySiteSpacer" runat="server" /></td>
<%---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Only alter the codes contained between these comments.
Everything else is required to provide default MyLinks functionality

Change the Text property to alter the displayed text.
Change the PostBackUrl property to set the URL of your help desk.

Move the order of the <TD> to move the Help Desk link to the left of the My Links control.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------%>
<td class="ms-globallinks"><asp:LinkButton ForeColor="Blue" Font-Bold="true" Font-Size="Larger" runat="server" ID="HelpLink" Text="Help Desk" PostBackUrl="http://summit7systems.com"></asp:LinkButton></td>
<%---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Only alter the codes contained between these comments.
Everything else is required to provide default MyLinks functionality
---------------------------------------------------------------------------%>
</tr>
</table>

As noted in the comments in the User Control you can adjust the order of the Help Desk link by changing the order of its <TD> element in the user control’s table.

To actually display the control we need a control feature. SharePoint features require two types of files, a header file named Feature.xml and an Elements.xml file that does all the real work.

The feature header file, named the usual Feature.xml. looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Feature xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"
         Id="73F19725-4805-49d7-B239-5B0424590AA0"
         Scope="Farm"
         Title="Mindsharp Help Link"
         Description="This feature will add a Help Desk link to the every page of every site in the farm."
         ImageUrl="/S7S/s7sMini.jpg"
         >
<ElementManifests>
    <ElementManifest Location="Elements.xml" />
</ElementManifests>
</Feature>

This Scope=”Farm” property specifies that the feature will affect the entire Farm. That is, it will affect everywhere in your SharePoint implementation. If you would like more granular control you can change the Scope to the following values:

SCOPE Area of Effect

Scope=”Web Application” Effects an entire SharePoint Web Application and all Site Collections and Sites contained within the web application.

Note: This scope will require Central Admin access to activate.

Scope=”Site” Effects an entire Site Collection and all sites within the site collection.

Note: This scope will require Site Collection Administrator privileges to activate.

Scope=”Web” Effects a single site only.

The Farm scope has some nice advantages. It only needs to be activated and deactivated in one place. Also, it will effect any future web applications, site collections, or sites that are created after it is activated.

One nice touch that I like to add to features is a custom icon. I like to display the Mindsharp, Summit 7 Systems, or a customer logo in the list of features. This feature displays the Summit 7 Systems logo as specified by the ImageUrl property. You can specify your own custom image by placing the appropriate image file in the images folder and referencing it in the ImageUrl property. I would recommend placing it in a subfolder as I did with my Summit 7 logo. The ImageUrl property is relative to the SharePoint IMAGES folder in the 12 hive.

Therefore my custom icon is located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\S7S and is named s7sMini.jpg.

Feature header files are never very exciting because all the real work gets done by feature receiver or an Elements.xml file. The control’s Elements.xml file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<Control Id="GlobalSiteLink2" Sequence="99" ControlSrc="~/_controltemplates/Mindsharp/Mindsharp_HelpLink_MyLinks.ascx" />
</Elements>

The Control element makes this feature a Control Feature. Control Features place user controls within predefined regions called Delegate Controls. Our control targets the GlobalSiteLink2 which is normally occupied with the MyLinks.ascx user control that was used as the basis for the Help Desk Link user control. You could also override the behavior of the My Sites user control (MySiteLink.aspx) located at ControlId=”GlobalSiteLink1” or perhaps use the Small Search Input Box located at ControlId=”SmallSearchInputBox”. To learn more about the Control Ids and how they work open a copy of any SharePoint Master Page and search for “DelegateControl”. Be careful not change any of Microsoft’s master pages doing so is strictly not supported. You can copy a Microsoft master page and use it as a basis for customization.

The ControlSrc property specifies a the location of the user control that will be displayed. Microsoft has provided a default location for SharePoint user controls and have locate our user control in a subfolder there:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\Mindsharp

The 12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\Mindsharp file location maps ~/_ControlTemplates/Mindsharp/ Microsoft has created a virtual directory for user controls and /_ControlTemplates can be appended to any SharePoint URL making our Help Desk Link available everywhere in SharePoint.

No SharePoint project is complete without packaging as a Windows SharePoint Services Solution Package (WSP) and this one is not an exception. Although I often use WSPBuilder to create solution packages this one was so short (and I didn’t want an unneeded assembly in my WSP) that I simply created my own DDF and Manifest.xml files. (Actually, I cheated a bit I started with a WSPBuilder Manifest.xml file and altered it.)

The Manifest.xml file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Solution xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" SolutionId="cf27bd35-26a0-45a2-9000-4371d6dcd7a1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<TemplateFiles>
    <TemplateFile Location="CONTROLTEMPLATES\Mindsharp\Mindsharp_HelpLink_MyLinks.ascx" />
    <TemplateFile Location="Images\S7S\s7sMini.jpg" />
</TemplateFiles>
<FeatureManifests>
    <FeatureManifest Location="Mindsharp_HelpLink\feature.xml" />
</FeatureManifests>
</Solution>

The WSP.DDF file which I used in conjunction with MAKECAB looks like this:

;WSP CAB Generation
;Define the output directory and CAB file name (with a wsp extension)
;Include the following files in the CAB Root
manifest.xml
;Include Feature files (must be in AltHeader\ folder in CAB)
.Set DestinationDir="Mindsharp_HelpLink\"
12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\Mindsharp_HelpLink\Feature.xml
12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\Mindsharp_HelpLink\Elements.xml
;Include the User Control
.Set DestinationDir="CONTROLTEMPLATES\Mindsharp\"
12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\Mindsharp\Mindsharp_HelpLink_MyLinks.ascx
;Include Images
.Set DestinationDir="Images\S7S\"
12\TEMPLATE\Images\S7S\s7sMini.jpg

To automate the generation of my WSP I added the following to my Visual Studio Post Build Events:

cd "$(ProjectDir)"
:: Create a WSP CAB
MakeCAB /f WSP.DDF /d CabinetNameTemplate="$(ProjectName).wsp" /d DiskDirectory1="$(ProjectDir)wsp"
xcopy "$(ProjectDir)wsp" C:\WSP\ /yes

The Post Build Events automatically build the Windows SharePoint Services Solution Package to a folder within my Visual Studio project named WSP. The Post events then copy the solution package to C:\WSP.

Why do the double copy? Because solutions have to be added from the command line using STSADM.exe –o AddSolution and doing so is much more enjoyable when the file is near the root of the C: drive.

(Bonus content: Check out more on Post Build events, written by The Bleeker himself, at http://SharePoint.mindsharpblogs.com/Todd/archive/2009/09/04/SharePoint-Post-Build-Events.aspx)

That’s about it for this post except for a few last things:

The whole Visual Studio Project with WSP (in convenient .ZIP format) is located here: http://SharePoint.mindsharpblogs.com/Jim/Project%20Library/Blog_MindsharpHelpLink_Feature.zip
This post and the accompanying project are intended for educational purposes only, use at your own risk!
Thanks to Jason, Steve, Andrew, Adam, and Jerry all down in beautiful Huntsville, Alabama. See (most of) you at SharePoint Conf in Vegas!

SharePoint Meeting Minutes – Custom Master Page Problem

Christina Wheeler (Summit 7 Systems) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:57:00 GMT

One of my clients had a problem after they re-inherited a custom master page through an entire MOSS website. After they did this, the recurring meeting workspace hyperlinks under “Select a date from the list below” throws a "g_instanceID is not defined" JavaScript error.

This problem occurred because when a Meeting Workspace is created it uses it’s own master page called mwsdefault.master which is found in the TEMPLATE\GLOBAL directory in the 12 hive (c:\program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\Template\Global). This master page has placeholders and code that are typically not found in other master pages and the g_instanceId global JavaScript variable is declared in a script registered runtime by the Microsoft.SharePoint.Meetings.PropertyBag web control.

If you want to use your own custom master page you can fix this by merging the missing code located from the mwsdefault.master and put it into your custom master page. The Best Practice is to create a feature to automatically set Meeting Workspaces to your modified custom master page file.

To fix this problem in your custom master page you need to:

1. Copy the register Microsoft.SharePoint.Meetings tag prefix from the mwsdefault.master and add it to your custom master page.

<%@ Register Tagprefix="Meetings" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Meetings" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

2. Then copy the Meetings:PropertyBag control into your custom master page.

<Meetings:PropertyBag runat="server"/>

3. Save master page, check in (if necessary), and publish the major version or deploy it in your feature.

The 4 Esses of SharePoint

James Curry — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Working with a new customer I developed my guiding principle for SharePoint projects:

The 4S-es

Simple

SharePoint

Seldom

Sucks

In all seriousness, I teach developers that an exceptional developer solution is Lists, Views, and Preexistent Web Parts. No code written at all.

In order from best to worst for preexistent web parts:

#1 Out of the Box

#2 Web Parts Already Purchased or Developed In House

#3 Web Parts you can buy off the shelf

For developers every line of code we don't write is another line of code we can write twice as well.

From the big picture simple SharePoint is stable, familiar, and more likely to upgrade.

Best Practices Conference Wrap-up

Paul Papanek Stork — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 08:44:00 GMT

I just arrived home from the Best Practices Conference last week. The conference was EXCELLENT! There were lots of great sessions to hear, attendees to talk to, and friends to visit with. The next BP Conference will be sometime next August/September. Don’t miss out on that one if you didn’t get to this one.

For any of those who attended, I’ve attached the slide deck from my talk on Monday about Best Practices around managing Users, Profiles and MySites.

Users, Profiles, and MySites Presentation Slides.

	Business Layer	Technology Layer	Enforcement Layer
Rules for Use of SharePoint	Based on business requirements, defines what the technology should do.	Derive from this what SharePoint should and should not do.	List out the method of enforcement. *If the rule cannot be enforced, then it should not appear in the Governance Document*
Designation of Responsible Part for Creation and Enforcement of Rules	<enter position title here>	<enter position title here>	<enter position title here>

SCOPE	Area of Effect
Scope=”Web Application”	Effects an entire SharePoint Web Application and all Site Collections and Sites contained within the web application. Note: This scope will require Central Admin access to activate.
Scope=”Site”	Effects an entire Site Collection and all sites within the site collection. Note: This scope will require Site Collection Administrator privileges to activate.
Scope=”Web”	Effects a single site only.