Guru-Web

Trust me, I’m digitally signed

2011-10-09T18:59:00.001+11:00

InfoPath has this concept of trust levels. A form template can be running in one of three levels of trust – Restricted, Domain or Full Trust. By default, InfoPath uses the Restricted trust level. This prevents you accessing any resources outside of the form template. If you add any managed code or data connections, InfoPath will raise the trust level to Domain. Sometimes your template needs to include code that requires the Full Trust level. If that’s the case, then you need to jump through extra hoops to enable this level.

There are two approaches that you can use to enable Full Trust – deploying the form to desktops using an installation package or digitally signing a form. To me, the first approach is cumbersome, as it requires you to redeploy the form any time there are changes. That’s fine if your forms are very stable, but most of the forms we work on go through multiple updates. Perhaps there are easy ways to redeploy forms using products like SCCM, but I haven’t any experience with them.

The second approach – digitally signing - allows you to deploy the form to a SharePoint forms library or network share. For me, this makes life easier if you need to update the template.

So what is involved in digitally signing an InfoPath template? In this post, I’ll walk you through my recent experiences. Digital signatures is just one of the many areas I’m no expert in, so please forgive any incorrect assumptions I have made. I was inspired to write this post due to the lack of information I found when researching this topic myself.

To state the obvious, before you can digitally sign a form template, you are going to need a digital certificate. This certificate needs to be issued by a “Certificate Authority” (commonly called a CA) that is trusted. My understanding is that our operating systems maintain a list of Trusted Root Certification Authorities. In Vista and Windows 7, this list of root certificates is updated any time your computer encounters a certificate signed by a Certificate Authority that it doesn’t already know about. You can read more about this on TechNet.

If you want to have a look at the list of Root Certificates on your computer, open Internet Explorer 9, then go to Internet Options – Content – Certificates – Trusted Root Certification Authorities. Have a look at the Untrusted Publishers while you are there. It just goes to show that you can’t trust everyone.

I believe that it is possible for an organisation to set up their own certificate server and register themselves as a Trusted Root Certification Authority on computers within their own network, but that is not something I have played with. Instead, we decided to purchase a certificate from Thawte, one of the main commercial Certificate Authorities.

My first challenge was trying to figure out exactly what I needed to buy. I couldn’t find any reference to InfoPath code signing on any of the Certificate Authority web sites. They all seem to offer a bunch of certificate types and it was unclear to me which one I needed. For example, Thawte offer a Microsoft Authenticode certificate and a Microsoft Office VBA certificate. Well, InfoPath is an Office product, but I’m not signing VBA code. I decided to go with the Authenticode option.

When I first started looking into digital signing, I wasn’t sure what exactly I needed to purchase a certificate for. Did I need a certificate for each InfoPath form template, for each computer that needed to sign forms or for each person? It turns out I was purchasing a certificate for my company. We could then sign any number of InfoPath forms with this certificate. We could deploy the code-signing certificate to as many computers as we wanted and it could be used by as many staff members as we wanted. It makes sense though to keep a tight control over who has access to the certificate, otherwise you run the risk of your certificate being used to sign code that you really don’t want to be associated with.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through the steps for purchasing a cert, installing it on a computer and then signing your InfoPath form template.

SharePoint Licensing information–where to look

2011-08-23T10:38:00.001+10:00

Every so often I need to delve into the murky waters of SharePoint licensing. I always find this challenging. Mainly because there is a lot of contradictory information out there. I can understand why – there are many different scenarios, its complicated, people interpret the rules in lots of different ways, the rules have changed over time.

Where possible, I try to reference information directly from Microsoft, as this obviously has a lot more credibility than some blog post that you read (present blogger excepted). Imagine my surprise when I recently had to research information for a SharePoint 2007 engagement I’m working on – Microsoft seems to have removed all of the SharePoint 2007 licensing information from their site. Well, they aren’t selling it any more, so I guess that makes sense. But what if you need to answer a licensing question from an existing SharePoint 2007 client?

Of course the correct answer here is to refer your client to a mythical licensing expert, then wash your hands of the whole incident. After all, you are responsible for zeros and ones, not licensing compliance.

But what if you did actually want to understand what is allowed and even provide “evidence” to back up any readings you have taken of the licensing tea-leaves?

Here are two links that I have recently come across that I think are worth sharing. These are correct at the time of writing.

http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/DocumentSearch.aspx – Search for licensing documents. I’d recommend selecting PUR (Product Use Rights) in the first column and then your preferred language, region and sector. The real magic for me is the “Show Archived” checkbox. This allows you to access older documents that contain details on products that are no longer sold (e.g. SharePoint 2007). I’ve found I get more archived results if I set Region to “WW (World Wide)”. Note that the archived results are displayed in a separate box below the current results.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-4a6d-aed9-f2c1f8f23e14/Assessing_SharePoint_Server_Licensing.docx – “A Guide to Assessing SharePoint Server Licensing” – December 2010. Here is the summary, straight from the document:

“This document gives Microsoft® Volume Licensing customers an overview of licensing for Microsoft SharePoint® Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2007, and SharePoint Server 2003, as well as guidance on how to assess the licenses needed. Please refer to the Product Use Rights (PUR) document for detailed guidance”

SharePoint Saturday Sydney - InfoPath Tips and Tricks

2011-08-07T16:23:00.002+10:00

SharePoint Saturday in Sydney was held yesterday, Aug 6, 2011. It was a great event, with about 120 attendees. Kudos to Brian Farnhill and Alexandre Bacchin for organizing it.

I gave a presentation entitled "InfoPath Tricks of the Trade" which included my "Planet of the APIs" sample form. This session was showing off some ways to accomplish specific tasks with InfoPath. I focused on two tasks - getting information about the current person and creating a unique name for your form (without using a timestamp).

I certainly enjoyed delivering the session and there were interesting questions from the audience. And as soon as I retrieve my laptop's power supply that I left at the venue, I'm going to put the presentation and demo template online for people to download.

Update: As promised, here is the PowerPoint presentation and InfoPath template

Getting Access Denied, even when you are a Site Collection Administrator

2011-03-18T17:47:00.001+11:00

Here’s a solution I found to a weird issue I recently encountered. It was for a SharePoint 2007 site that had been upgraded to 2010 while also moved to a new domain. For some reason, a few of the user accounts were not getting authenticated properly. They would get the “Access Denied” page. This happened even if the person was set up as a Site Collection Administrator.

I found that this problem disappeared if I ran the following command:

stsadm –o migrateuser olddomain\username newdomain\username –ignoresidhistory

This command would return an error “Value cannot be null. Parameter Name: UserProfileApplicationProxy”. Regardless, the account could then log into the site.

Why? Don’t know.

How to make 100 friends in SharePoint

2011-03-07T15:52:00.001+11:00

Do you have SharePoint installed on a development or test environment somewhere? Does it have it’s own Active Directory installation? So, how do you explore all the wonderful features of the SharePoint User Profile service? You know, like the Silverlight organisation chart, or Audiences, or Colleagues, or…

Well, not to fear, after much procrastination, I’m finally able to provide a solution to your problem. I’ve made up names, job titles and managers for 100 people. Any similarity to real people is purely coincidental. Not only that, but I’ve created a PowerShell script to create these accounts in Active Directory.

This means your User Profiles in your virtual environment can go from a bland handful of test accounts, to a dazzling collection of fictitious employees in different departments, physical offices and job titles. Just imagine the Audiences you can create!

Feel free to edit the CSV file (using Excel) to modify personal details and add more people. You can even add additional user properties, but you will also need to make some changes to the PowerShell script to get these into Active Directory, not hard if you are familiar with PowerShell.

I’ve tested the PowerShell script on a Windows 2008 R2 domain, however I executed it from a Windows 7 desktop. The script does not require Microsoft Exchange or third party script add-ons. I execute the script using the domain admin account. You may run into issues if you try using accounts with less privileges.

The script contains a path to an Active Directory Organisation Unit (OU) where all the accounts will be created (OU=Staff,DC=lab,DC=laptop,DC=iw). You will want to change this before running it in your environment. This OU needs to exist before you run the script.

I have configured the script to create the accounts but not to enable them. This is for security purposes. However, if you want to enable them, you just need to uncomment two lines and seek legal advice.

You can download the zip file containing the people details and PowerShell script from here. Any feedback greatly appreciated.

Getting help with Kerberos and SharePoint

2011-03-04T08:09:00.001+11:00

Ever tried configuring a SharePoint environment to use Kerberos authentication? It is never a lot of fun. There aren’t that many people that know Kerberos to any great depth – I know I don’t. So any kind of help you can get with setting this up should be taken advantage of.

So pop over to SharePointSecurity.com and read about your new best friend – SharePoint Kerberos Buddy. I don’t think its an over-exaggeration to say that Adam Buenz is a genius in this area. Now he has released a FREE tool to help you get your Kerberos configuration right. Check it out.

Configuring BackConnectionHostNames for the Loopback Check

2011-03-01T16:16:00.002+11:00

Its not always easy doing the right thing. At this stage, we all probably know about the issue with trying to access a site with a host name on Windows Servers (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861).

You probably know that there are two ways of dealing with this issue - disabling the check or providing a safe list of sites.

The easiest thing to do is disable the check. But that doesn't make it right. The check is there to protect your system against nasties that want to do bad things to your server.

So that leaves us with the option of defining a safe list of addresses that the server can access locally. Sounds easy, but I've had problems every now and again with getting this to work and the temptation is to just revert to disabling the check. So I thought I'd share some rules that I follow when setting the BackConnectionHostNames entry:

1. Don't include the protocol - e.g. "mywebsite" rather than "http://mywebsite"
2. Put each entry on it's own line
3. Use lowercase - e.g. "mywebsite" rather than "MyWebSite"
4. If it is an internal site, include the short name as well as the fully qualified domain name (e.g. "mywebsite" and "mywebsite.domain.somewhere.local")
5. Reboot after you have created the BackConnectionHostNames registry entry. I believe that you don't need to reboot for subsequent changes to this key, but I probably would - call me superstitious.

Australian SharePoint Conference – only days away

2011-03-01T16:15:00.001+11:00

The Australian SharePoint Conference is back in Sydney on March 8th and 9th. This is a great event to learn more about the SharePoint products and see how other companies in Australia are using it. There are four tracks, so there should be something for everyone:

Business
Voice of the Customer
IT Professional
Developer

Also check out the half-day workshops held on the 7th and 10th. For full details and to purchase tickets, visit www.sharepointconference.com.au

Sydney SharePoint User Group tonight (18 Jan 2011)

2011-01-18T11:49:00.001+11:00

The Sydney SharePoint User Group is kicking off the year with a session on InfoPath 2010 on SharePoint 2010. The meeting is tonight – Tuesday 18 Jan, in the city – 280 Pitt Street.

For more details, check out http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney

Geeks without Borders

2011-01-15T10:08:00.001+11:00

Check out http://www.qlditrelief.org/ – see how you can provide assistance to the people affected by flooding in Queensland

Solved: Cannot upload a file to SharePoint 2010

2011-01-11T14:47:00.001+11:00

A client was having a problem uploading documents to a SharePoint 2010 library last week. After filling out the Upload Document pop-up dialog box they got a basic browser “An error has occurred” message.

On closer inspection we saw a JavaScript error message in the lower left corner of the browser window. The details were:

Message: Unexpected call to method or property access.
Line: 264
Char: 5
Code: 0
URI: res://ieframe.dll/httpErrorPagesScripts.js

I found a KB article (979887) that mentions this error message and indicates that the problem is fixed in the latest security updates for Internet Explorer 8 (MS10-018 at the time of writing).

The client used the Microsoft Windows Update site (http://www.update.microsoft.com) to apply the updates and the problem vanished.

Not taking action is not always the best strategy

2010-12-18T14:35:00.001+11:00

As part of my work, I often review how clients are managing their SharePoint farm. I've started to recognize a trend that I find a little disconcerting. It relates to applying operating system updates to Windows Servers. I find that the majority of my clients do not apply these automatically. The reason is that they feel that these updates may cause issues on the server. Let's be honest, there are plenty of examples of this happening, so this is not a unfounded concern.

But what is the downside of this approach? It means that their server is exposed to the issues that these patches apply to. To me, this is a significantly greater risk than a system becoming unavailable. Users may be unhappy if a server is offline, but what are the consequences of a hacker gaining access to your network?

I think there are two basic approaches you can take - turn on automatic updates or review and test each update that is released. These are the two extreme cases, but I know which end of the spectrum I would much rather be on. The number of companies with the skills and time to evaluate each update is small. Enabling monitoring of servers and services is relatively cost effective and has benefits above and beyond patch management.

Keeping the window of opportunity as small as possible for hackers is something every administrator should be trying to do. Hackers aren't after your servers specifically, they are just after the softest targets. Try not to be at the back of the herd when they attack.

Using the System.Diagnostics EventLog.WriteEntry

2010-11-21T22:53:00.001+11:00

Disclaimer – I’m a part-time developer. Do not assume that any coding advice that you read here is “best practice”.

I’ve been working on a SharePoint timer job in SharePoint 2007. To make it easier to find out what is going on within the job, I want to write to a log. From my perspective, the best log to use is the Windows Application log. This is a location that server administrators are familiar with accessing and there are many monitoring products out there that can keep an eye on it for you.

The Microsoft Dot Net Framework includes a System.Diagnostics namespace to help you interact with the Windows Logs. Initially I thought it would be a straightforward job to just call the Eventlog.WriteEntry() method. That’s when I disappeared down the rabbit hole of MSDN articles and blog posts.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in my journey:

When writing to the event log you need to specify a Source. This identifies the process that generated the error. This column is shown in the Windows Application Log and it can be used for filtering. It may be possible to use pre-existing ones, but I wanted to use my own.

When you use the EventLog.WriteEntry() method with a Source that doesn’t already exist, Windows will try to create the source for you. Behind the scenes, that involves updating the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\Application (assuming you are writing to the Application log). The problem is that your code may not have permissions to update that location, which causes your code to throw an exception. Trust me, it can take a while to realise that your error handling code is the component that is causing the problems.

You’ll find a number of blog posts and forum responses out there about granting ASPNet accounts permissions to registry keys. I really don’t like including steps like that as part of a deployment, so I continued to look for another approach. As an aside, since my code is a timer job, it will be running under the credentials of the account configured for the OWSTimer service. Even when I granted this account permissions to the Application and Security registry keys AND ran the code using the SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges, I still couldn’t get it to create the Event Log source for me.

If your read this KB article you might decide to create the source manually by adding a registry key under the KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\Application key and giving it the same name as the Source parameter in your call to eventLog.WriteEntry(). This will stop your call to EventLog.WriteEntry() crashing, however – you’ll probably start seeing longwinded error messages in your eventlogs such as:

The description for Event ID 0 from source YourSourceName cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

The actual text from you event will be appended. Not ideal, is it?

It turns out that event log messages are usually generated by passing an ID along with some parameters. This gets cross-referenced with a “message log file” and translated into the text seen in the event log. This makes translating errors into multiple languages easy. So what Windows is trying to tell us in the previous message is that it cannot find this message log file, which isn’t surprising, because I didn’t create one.

Now if I were a real developer, I’d probably go off and create a message log file, bundle it up and register it using all the proper ways and means. But I’m not. I just want to write a message to the Windows Event Logs.

So here’s the approach I worked out. I created a simple Dot Net console app. I included a reference to the System.Diagnostics namespace, and I added one line of code to the main() method -

EventLog.CreateEventSource("MySourceName", "Application");

I then run this application directly on the server (Windows 2008 Standard in this case) while I’m logged on as a local administrator. I checked the registry and confirmed that a new key had been added to the KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\Application location. This key includes a value that references EventLogMessages.dll

This is a reference to one of those message log files I mentioned earlier. It basically contains a simple mapping rule that outputs whatever text you pass EventLog.WriteEntry(). I rebooted the server at this stage. This may not be necessary, perhaps I could have just restarted the timer job service. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Once the machine came back online, my timer job started writing to the event log without all the extra “the description of the event not found”. Now if I’m working on a multi-server SharePoint farm, I’d run my little console app on each of the servers to ensure that they all get the registry settings. I could even get trickier and make the console app use a command line parameter for my Source name, but I don’t want to stretch my luck.

One of Microsoft’s support articles mentions using an EventLogInstaller class to register the source. That worked too, but I found the console app easier to create and easier to implement in a production environment. I’m not sure what the advantages are with the EventLogInstallter, perhaps it makes sense if you are creating more complicated setup applications.

Here’s a link to an MSDN magazine article that explained a lot of the process to me:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163446.aspx#S3

Sydney SharePoint User Group - The Reluctant Database Administrator

2010-10-18T16:33:00.001+11:00

Don’t forget that the October SharePoint User Group in Sydney is tomorrow, Tuesday 19th. Victor Isakov will be discussing what a SharePoint Administrator should know if they become responsible for the SQL Server. More details available at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney. If you do want to come along, just e-mail sydney@sharepointusers.org.au so that we know you are coming.

SharePoint 2010 and the iPad

2010-10-09T16:35:00.002+11:00

I have always loved gadgets. If it were true that these gadgets are productivity enhancing devices then I should be one of the most productive people alive. Sadly, this is not the case. It just seems that I can be unproductive in a lot more places than before.

Recently I caved in to temptation and got myself an iPad. Many people have sneered at this device, but I have always considered it a brave move by Apple. It is an untested format in the marketplace. I think that only time will tell whether they carve out a place in peoples work and personal life or whether it goes the way of the Internet connected fridge. I also hope that other vendors innovate around this format, more choice is always better.

The main reason I gave myself for getting an iPad is so that I can become familiar with how it integrates with SharePoint. I know deep down that I really got one coz they are shiny and new, but the lie is easier to live with. In truth though, many of the clients that I work with have expressed interest in using iPads or have actually started to trial them. So I thought I might share some of my experiences here on the blog.

Firstly, I have come across two iPad applications in the App Store - SharePlus and Filamente. Both of these allow you to access a Sharepoint site, lists libraries and sub sites. Both provide the ability to sync content so that you can access it offline, and both have their own little quirks. These are version 1 products, hopefully reliability will get better as they mature. Neither of these applications gives the user the same experience as if they were using a web browser, they focus on letting you see content in your SharePoint lists and libraries.

Another option is to use the iPad Safari browser. This proves to be a nice option for online access. If I am in my office I can access the site by entering a fully qualified domain name (e.g. http://somewhere.officenetwork.local). Even though the site is also available on a shorter name of http://somewhere, the iPad doesn't seem to be able to use that. Of course you will need to ensure that your Alternate Access Mapping and IIS host headers are correctly set up for this to work.

Outside my office I have been able to connect to my intranet through the iPads VPN functionality. We also publish our intranet externally using Microsoft Threat Management Gateway over SSL, the iPad browser has no issue with this either, however the two iPad apps didn't accept this method of connecting.

Not everything works perfectly through the safari browser when accessing a SharePoint 2010 site. Vertical and horizontal scrolling can be troublesome, rotating the display between portrait and landscape seems to fix this some times, two-finger scrolling is another trick that has mixed results. Pinching to zoom in and out of the page has rarely worked for me. I've also noticed that the people picker field only lets you search for a name, not type one in directly. You can create, edit and delete list items but don't expect to use any of the more advanced rich text editing functionality.

One area that I think holds a lot of promise on the iPad is the Office Web Applications and InfoPath Forms Services. I haven't had a chance to check these out myself yet (see earlier comments on productivity) but Dux Raymond Sy has an interesting video that shows some of these in action.

So I shall continue to explore the capabilities of the device and share what I learn here. Stay tuned.

Don’t Do What Johnny Don’t Does

2010-09-18T14:46:00.001+10:00

You know that sense of relief that you get when you stop banging your head against a brick wall? Well, I experienced that this week and I thought I’d share, just in case there are others out there that are going through the same.

I was setting up a SharePoint 2010 environment and configuring it to index PDF documents. This is still a manual task in SharePoint 2010 as the components are not built in to the platform. However, it’s not that hard. If you go about it the right way that is.

You should already know that SharePoint 2010 will only run on a 64-bit operating system. Therefore you are going to need a 64-bit PDF iFilter to allow SharePoint to index the PDF content. There are a few on the market, some free, some you pay for. In this case the client decided to use the free Adobe PDF iFilter. Not a problem. I installed Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 (which has an iFilter built in) on the SharePoint server, I made a bunch of changes to the registry, I updated Central Admin, I rebooted a half dozen times, I lit incense sticks, performed full indexes another half dozen times yet could still not get PDFs indexed.

Blog post comments indicated that others were experiencing similar issues. The blog article would explain how easy it all was, then a few of the commenters would say that they just could not get it working.

The moment of enlightenment came when I realized that there is a difference between the iFilter built in to the Adobe Reader 9 application and the separate download that Adobe have for the 64-bit PDF iFilter. THAT is what I needed. I was wondering why the installation directory for the Reader was pointing to c:\program files (x86). Sure, this would all work fine on a 32-bit platform, but when you are on 64-bit, then the Reader app won’t cut it no more.

So I uninstalled the Reader app, installed Adobe’s 64-bit iFilter, and Microsoft Bob became my uncle. There is one registry setting that I needed to make (only one)

Launch RegEdit on the SharePoint index server

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension

Create a new key called “pdf”

Set the (Default) value for the key to {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

If you look at the other registry keys in this section, the (Default) value type should be REG_MULTI_SZ. However, I couldn’t figure out how to change the type for the (Default) value in my new “pdf” key. I got round this by exporting one of the other keys, editing it in Notepad and then importing it. I’m tricky.

Don’t forget that you also need to add the PDF extension to the list of File Types that SharePoint should index. You’ll find this under the management page of the Search Service Application.

I may have restarted the SharePoint Server Search Service (net stop osearch14, net start osearch14), I can’t recall.

After that, just run a full index of your SharePoint 2010 content and you should be good to go. As a side note, I’ve heard that you can’t configure PDF indexing on SharePoint Foundation Server (what you might call WSS 4.0). I haven’t tried, so can’t confirm or deny that.

What Content Types are published from the Content Type Hub?

2010-09-14T11:05:00.001+10:00

In SharePoint 2010 there is this great new functionality to define a Site Collection as a Content Type Hub. Once you do this, SharePoint will copy any Content Types you declare in this Site Collection out to any other Site Collections that subscribe to the same Managed Metadata Service as the Content Type Hub.

Today a client asked if they can define Content Types at sub-site levels in the Content Type Hub site collection and have them published out. Interesting idea, and there was nothing that confirmed or denied it in the TechNet documentation. So after some testing I can now confirm…that you can’t. Only Content Types defined at the root of the Content Type Hub Site Collection are published out.

Interactive Pivot of Australia Tech-Ed 2010 Sessions

2010-08-19T11:05:00.001+10:00

Going to Tech-Ed in Australia next week? Check out this Microsoft Pivot of the session data, created by MVP Rob Farley:

http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au/TechEdAU2010/

I’ve been able to quickly filter down to the SharePoint sessions and see who is presenting on what day (fyi – there are 20 Office/SharePoint breakout sessions).

It would be nice if it was easier to get something like the session names for the set of data you are looking at, rather than having to click on each item individually. Still – it’s a nice fast way of browsing a large amount of data.

Right Click on a SharePoint 2010 list item

2010-08-16T13:49:00.001+10:00

One thing I liked in SharePoint 2007 was the ability to click anywhere along an item’s drop-down field to get at the menu. I was disappointed to see this removed in SharePoint 2010 – now you have to click on the dropdown list’s down arrow to see the menu.

Sure, it makes sense from a user interface perspective – consistency with standard UI controls and all that. However it was a pain to have to move my mouse those extra few pixels to the right, particularly if the dropdown field is very wide.

Well, I just discovered that you can now right-click anywhere on a list item’s drop down field (except on the text) and you’ll get the drop down menu for the item. This is going to save me so much time!

Opening a Word document from SharePoint hangs the browser

2010-08-05T11:59:00.001+10:00

Here’s an issue that I ran into on a recent project – when I tried to open a document (for editing) from the SharePoint web site, the browser would hang, Word wouldn’t launch and I would have to end up killing the Word and Internet Explorer processes using the Task Manager.

To keep a long, tedious story short, I eventually discovered that the document’s metadata in SharePoint had trailing spaces. Once I removed these, the document opened up just fine. One or two trailing spaces seemed to be fine, but if there was a lot of them, then it caused issues when trying to open the document in Word.

It’s not particularly easy to get trailing spaces into a document’s metadata. If you try to insert them via the browser user interface, SharePoint automatically removes them for you. However, in this project, I was populating the metadata using code. So now I know to use a Trim statement in my code to remove any trailing spaces when updating a SharePoint document’s metadata.

Shared Service Provider – Access Denied message

2010-06-24T13:33:00.001+10:00

Interesting issue I just had with a Shared Service Provider setup that I thought I’d share. After creating the Shared Service Provider, I tried accessing it, but I got the SharePoint “Access Denied” message. I made sure that the account that I was using was a Site Collection Administrator. I also tried giving the account full control via a Web Application Policy. Setting up another account as a site collection admin didn’t work either. No errors or warnings in the Windows Event Logs.

When I created the Web Application for the SSP, I provided an AD account to use for the Application Pool. When I set up the SSP, I specified a different account for the Shared Services Timer Jobs. This is a “best practice” – having different accounts for different jobs.

Looking at IIS, I noticed that the App Pool for my SSP web app was using the SSP Timer Service account. Odd.

I went back and modified the SSP configuration (Central Admin – Application Management – Manage this farm’s Shared Services – Edit Properties) and changed the SSP Service Credentials to the account that I originally specified for the SSP App Pool. I flicked back over to the IIS Management screen to confirm that the Application Pool was now using the account I expected.

I was then able to browse to the SSP admin site. I can’t say I understand why this issue has occurred, but there you have it. I did see a comment about not using the same name for the App Pool and the SSP name which might be the reason for my problem. I’m too lazy to retest right now.

Other related info – my environment is running on Windows 2008 SP2 x64, MOSS 2007 Enterprise with SP 2, using separate servers for AD, SQL and MOSS.

Photos from the Sydney SharePoint User Group Launch

2010-05-28T16:18:00.001+10:00

Here are some photos that we took during the Sydney SharePoint User Group 2010 Launch event. We had a packed room, great speakers and cool prizes to give away. Thanks again to Microsoft for letting us use their venue and to AvePoint for the prizes and catering.

Got your tickets to Australia’s largest SharePoint Conference?

2010-05-19T17:09:00.001+10:00

Only a few weeks to go before the SharePoint Conference kicks off in Sydney. The two day event is on June 16th and 17th at the Hilton Hotel in the city. There are three separate tracks, depending on your interest – Business, Technical and Case Studies.

The Keynote speaker for the event is Arpan Shah, the Director of the SharePoint Technical Product Management team at Microsoft HQ in Redmond. With the recent release of SharePoint 2010, this conference is an ideal place to get up to speed on the new platform and hear real-world stories from companies that use SharePoint on a day-to-day basis

For more details and to register for tickets go to http://www.sharepointconference.com.au/

SharePoint 2010 Community Launch Event

2010-05-11T13:32:00.001+10:00

The official launch date for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in Australia is Thursday 13th May 2010. In addition to the Microsoft-run events, the SharePoint community is putting on it’s own event in the evening.

There’s going to be prizes (an X-Box 360!), food, drink and some great presentations on the new products. We will also have an Ask The Experts session for you to bring up questions on topics we haven’t covered during the presentations.

This event is going to be held at Microsoft’s offices at 1 Epping Road, North Ryde. You’ll need to register for this no-cost event at the User Group site (http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney).

If you are not based in Sydney, chances are your local SharePoint User Group is planning something Similar. Australian based SharePoint user groups can be found at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au. A special site has been set up for the Australian community launch events at http://www.aunz2010launch.net/ (the site is built on SharePoint 2010!)

You can also check the Twitter feed and hash-tags for this event at http://www.aunz2010launch.net/twitter/

Moving a Site Collection from Release Candidate to RTM versions

2010-05-02T13:04:00.001+10:00

I wasn’t sure if this would be possible, but I can now confirm that you can do a site collection backup on the Release Candidate build (14.0.4730.1010) of SharePoint and restore that it to the RTM (Release to Manufacture) build (14.0.4762.1000).

I used Central Admin to do the site collection backup (a new capability). Then I used the Restore-SPSite powershell command to restore the backup to the new server.

Windows Firewall configuration for SharePoint 2010 install

2010-04-30T15:59:00.001+10:00

I’ve just done an installation of the newly released version of SharePoint 2010 and noticed a nice little feature – it configures the Windows Firewall for you automatically, so that you can access your Central Administration site when you are not directly logged on to the server.

In previous versions you had to remember to do this manually. Just a nice little time saver.

InfoPath 2010 Developer Reference

2010-04-27T16:35:00.001+10:00

Now that Office 2010 has been released, some of the development resources are starting to come out. Here’s one you might have missed – the InfoPath 2010 developer resource. This is a downloadable help file with lots of useful information for people creating more complex forms.

Here is the table of contents:

Doing SharePoint 2007 Development in Visual Studio 2010

2010-03-23T09:22:00.001+11:00

I was recently asked if you could build SharePoint 2007 solutions in Visual Studio 2010. At the time of writing, Visual Studio 2010 is a Release Candidate and will launch in April. I’ve just installed the Release Candidate and I can tell you that there are two SharePoint 2007 project templates included:

Sequential Workflow
State Machine Workflow

There are no other out of the box 2007 project templates. Of course, there is a rich selection of SharePoint 2010 templates.

While it’s possible that Microsoft may add more SharePoint 2007 templates to the final product, I haven’t been able to find any mention of this in my searches. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use Visual Studio 2010 to create SharePoint 2007 solutions, just that right now you’d have to do a lot of leg work to make it happen.

Fingers crossed that we will see some community extensions (like WSPBuilder and STSDev on Visual Studio 2008) make it easier to use Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint 2007 targets.

Update: after installing the released version of Visual Studio 2010 Premium, here are the templates that are available to me:

Students get cheap Office

2010-03-21T14:54:00.001+11:00

If you are a TAFE or Uni student in Australia, you can now grab a copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for only $75 – bargain! For more details go to http://itsnotcheating.com.au

March Sydney SharePoint User Group

2010-03-11T23:44:00.001+11:00

This month’s Sydney SharePoint User Group will be held on Tuesday, 16 March at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street.

Since this is the night before Saint Patrick’s Day, we have Miss Ireland coming to present on Lists, Libraries and Content Types – Miss Debbie Ireland that is, New Zealand based SharePoint MVP.

For more details on the session and to subscribe to our mailing list, visit www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney

Australian SharePoint Conference

2010-02-02T15:32:00.001+11:00

Here is something for your diaries – the Australian SharePoint Conference will be held at the Hilton hotel in Sydney between June 16 and 17 2010.

This event is being organised by the SharePoint community in Australia and New Zealand. There will be local and international speakers and aims to include a lot of “real world” stories from companies using SharePoint.

You can find out more information at www.sharepointconference.com.au.

Jobs @ SharePoint Gurus

2010-01-30T17:34:00.001+11:00

About two and a half years ago I set up a SharePoint consulting business in Sydney with a colleague of mine. It was a very new experience for me, learning how to run a business in addition to dealing with the technology aspects.

2.5 years down the road and we are still around. In fact, we are now ready to take on the challenge of permanent staff. So if you know someone interested in graduate/junior role in a SharePoint consulting business, ask them to get in touch with us at jobs@sharepointgurus.net.

No SharePoint experience required, but it is an obvious advantage. We are really looking for someone with an aptitude for technology, who enjoys working in an environment where they are constantly learning (and challenged) and has strong written and verbal communication skills. An IT degree won’t hurt, but its not essential.

You can never have enough reading material

2010-01-25T22:04:00.001+11:00

I just discovered this handy page that lists all of the SharePoint articles published on the MSDN Magazine site. As of today, there were 29 different articles, spanning SharePoint 2001 through to SharePoint 2010. That should keep you off the streets for a while:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee532094.aspx?sdmr=sharepoint&sdmi=topics

Microsoft .Net Stories

2009-11-25T10:49:00.002+11:00

Microsoft has just launched a new site called Dot Net Stories. This has a collection of videos on how people have used the Dot Net Framework to build their applications.

You can filter the stories based on technologies such as SharePoint, Windows Server, Windows 7, Windows Azure and SQL Server.

The SharePoint section is a bit light on content right now. The good thing is that you can submit your own story and be in with a chance to win some great prizes, including a Galapogos Islands Adventure. Just promise me that you won't use a cheesey profile story in your submission. You'll know what I mean when you have a read of some of the current entries.

Remote Management of Hyper-V (and others) on Windows 7 and Vista

2009-11-18T10:42:00.002+11:00

I've recently rebuilt my laptop to run Windows 7. For the last year or so I have been using Windows 2008, so that I could run SharePoint natively and use Hyper-V. I gotta say that I'm pretty happy with the Windows 7 build. Getting things like Hibernate back has been nice and I have definitely noticed a performance increase. It's hard to know how much that is down to just having a fresh start. Either way, happy with the move.

So now I'm using a separate Hyper-V server that we have set up in our office. Managing this was a little tedious. I was using Remote Desktop to connect to the host, then launching the Hyper-V management console to create and change VMs. The Hyper-V Windows gadget simplified some of this work - http://mindre.net/post/Hyper-V-Monitor-Gadget-for-Windows-Sidebar.aspx.

Then I discovered that there is a download to allow you to manage Hyper-V directly from Windows 7, along with a bunch of other Windows Server management tasks such as AD users, SMTP and remote desktop services. My life has just got that little bit nicer:

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en

Windows Vista 64-bit Hyper-V Remote Management:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=88208468-0ad6-47de-8580-085cba42c0c2&displayLang=en

Windows Vista 32-bit Hyper-V Remote Management:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BF909242-2125-4D06-A968-C8A3D75FF2AA&displaylang=en

“Create or Extend Web Application" link missing in Central Admin

2009-10-29T21:39:00.001+11:00

Here is a strange one for you – I was setting up a new virtual machine today. I went with 64-bit Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2008 and MOSS 2007 patched up to the April 2009 cumulative updates (12.0.0.6318)

Everything had gone pretty smooth until I went in to create a new Web Application in Central Admin. Lo-and-behold, the link was missing. Hmm, seen this one before, so I got out my favourite search engine and found a recommendation to run Internet Explorer with admin permissions. This seems to have fixed most peoples problems, but not mine.

After a number of futile attempts I noticed that the computer date format was mm-dd-yy. I’m in Australia, so I prefer dd-mm-yy. I updated the Format and Current Location regional settings via the control panel and I kid you not, this fixed it!

Trust me, I understand if you are sceptical, I still don’t understand how this would affect the visibility of certain links in Central Admin. I would be curious to hear if anyone else experiences the same problem and resolution.

SQL Service not starting – error codes 17182, 17826, 17120

2009-10-26T20:43:00.002+11:00

I had a very frustrating issue with a WSS environment recently. This was a single server deployment, using WSS, the Windows Internal Database (a special edition of SQL Express 2005). Things had been going well until one day the Windows Internal Database service stopped working. Browsing to the web site would result in a "Cannot connect to the configuration database" message.

Trying to restart the Windows Internal Database service failed. The event logs on the server had error codes 17182, 17826 and 17120. The details of these errors were missing from the logs, but I was able to track them down by going to the Windows Internal Database logs at C:\Windows\SYSMSI\SSEE\MSSQL.2005\MSSQL\log:

2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server Error: 17182, Severity: 16, State: 1.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x5, status code 0x90.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server Error: 17182, Severity: 16, State: 1.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x5, status code 0x1.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server Error: 17826, Severity: 18, State: 3.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server Could not start the network library because of an internal error in the network library. To determine the cause, review the errors immediately preceding this one in the error log.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server Error: 17120, Severity: 16, State: 1.
2009-10-21 10:54:21.10 Server SQL Server could not spawn FRunCM thread. Check the SQL Server error log and the Windows event logs for information about possible related problems.

Doing searches on the interweb suggested that I re-install SQL Server, as there may be corruption in the registry. Since I was dealing with the Windows Internal database, I didn't really have the option to re-install just that component. Some newsgroup posts suggested looking at what registry entries the database server was trying to access.

My Windows Internal Database was running as the Network Service account. As a quick test, I added this account to the Local Administrators group. I was then able to restart the Windows Internal Database service. This confirmed that my issue was related to permissions. It is definitely not a good idea to give Network Service this level of permissions, so I took it out of the Local Administrators group and moved on to the next stage.

I downloaded Process Monitor from Microsoft. This tool replaces the old RegMon and FileMon utilities. I configured it to filter for Registry events with a Result of ACCESS DENIED. I then tried to restart the Windows Internal Database Service via the Service Manager console. Sure enough, I found that the Network Service account was being denied access to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MICROSOFT##SSEE\MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib. Why did it no longer have access to this? I have no idea. My suspicion is a Windows Update modified permissions, but I can never prove that in a court of law.

I dropped into RegEdit and granted my Network Service account full control to this registry location. I then restarted my Windows Internal Database service and everything worked perfectly.

SharePoint 2010 Extravaganza

2009-10-17T09:48:00.002+11:00

The SharePoint 2010 parties are starting already. Here is an announcement from the Sydney Business and Technology Users Group:

A huge night covering Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010.

Prepare for 2 hours of in-depth SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 goodness.

Presented by Kathy Hughes (SharePoint MVP), Aaron Saikovski (Senior Consultant with Microsoft Services Australia) and Alistair Speirs (Microsoft Technical Specialist), with a panel question session at the end to ask your questions.

If you can’t make the SharePoint Conference in Vegas (USA) this October, then all is not lost! We are pleased to announce this SharePoint Server 2010 Extravaganza evening.

Whether you’re a seasoned SharePoint Server 2007 user or new to SharePoint, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about some of the new features in 2010 and also to ask questions.

We plan on making the evening a ‘demo intensive’ and interactive one. We’ll cover several functional aspects, including operational, some developer and design/user interface.

We’ll publish further details and agenda, closer to the event. Look forward to collaborating with you on the night!

Time flies when you have daylight savings issues

2009-10-15T15:14:00.002+11:00

If you are not keeping up-to-date with your SharePoint patches, chances are you are behind the times in more ways than one. Have you checked the timestamp on a recently created item? Is it out by an hour?

Well, there is no time like the present (plus or minus 1 hour) to start patching. If you need information on daylight savings patches for WSS you can find them at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist#WSS3

Sydney SharePoint User Group session for October 2009

2009-10-12T20:37:00.000+11:00

This month, the Sydney SharePoint User Group is going to be hosting something special for those not making their way to Vegas for the SharePoint Conference. We are going to run a joint event with the NSW Knowledge Management Forum at the Price Waterhouse Coopers building on 201 Sussex Street, Darling Park.

Normally we have a main presenter tell us about some aspect of SharePoint. This time, we are taking a leaf from the Open Spaces/World Cafe events and providing the option for you to talk to other people about topics of mutual interest. Who is going to decide these topics? Well, you are. We would like you to e-mail us your top three topic areas. We will tally the votes and kick off the night with a number of discussions on the most popular topics. You decide which one to sit in on. The topics will change based on the attendee’s preferences to make sure that no dead horses get flogged.

How do you sign up? I’m glad you asked. Because this meeting will be held at the Price Waterhouse Coopers building, any attendee must be on our door list. Simply e-mail Sydney@sharepointusers.org.au with your favourite topics and we will add you to the door list.
The meeting is on Tuesday 20 October 2009. Doors open at 5:30pm for a 6:00pm kickoff.
For more details and a list of suggested topics check out the SharePoint User Group website

Hope to see you there

August Sydney SharePoint User Group - Tuesday 17th

2009-08-17T19:53:00.002+10:00

Don't forget, the SharePoint User Group in Sydney is meeting at 280 Pitt Street this Tuesday. This month's presentation is all about organising your company's information. Michael Moore will guide you through such scary buzz words as Taxonomy and MetaData.

I hate it when we have a "Not to be missed" session and I can't make it. This is one of those topics that you won't see covered off in Microsoft online content but is at the core of what SharePoint is aiming to achieve for businesses.

Exclude Hidden Mailboxes from User Profile Import

2009-08-03T22:00:00.001+10:00

I never knew this before, but seemingly Exchange allows you to mark certain mailboxes as hidden. This prevents them showing up within the Global Address List when someone is doing a name lookup, for example using Outlook "Check Names" functionality.

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server you can populate your User Profiles by importing account details from Active Directory. I always use a custom LDAP query as the source for the connection. This allows me to be more specific about which Active Directory entries to bring across to SharePoint. There is a great KB article on the Microsoft Support site on how to set this up - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827754. This article also describes how to filters out Active Directory accounts that have been disabled.

What if you want to also exclude accounts that have been marked as Hidden within Exchange? Well, the LDAP property that you want to look at is called msExchHideFromAddressLists. This is a Boolean property, so in theory we would just include entries where this property = FALSE. It is not quite that simple though. Since this is an optional property, I suspect that it may not exist for every user object. Therefore, testing that it is FALSE will not always work. Not to worry, just test that it is not TRUE. Logically this is equivalent and it turned out to work in my environment.

This means that the User Filter value from the KB article gets updated to:

(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)( !(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2))(!(msExchHideFromAddressLists:=TRUE)))

But the fun doesn't end there! Both Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server have a People-Picker field. This is the field that you use any time you want to assign an Active Directory user to a field, such as in a Task list. Updating your User Profile query has no affect to what the People Picker returns when you perform a search. There is an STSADM command line query that does help though. Gavin Adams has a good blog post that describes this command. Here is the syntax that you can use to exclude the hidden Exchange mailbox accounts:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter -pv "(|(!(msExchHideFromAddressLists=TRUE))" -url <intranet site address>

Change the text <intranet site address> to the address of the web site. Do not include the angle brackets.

Sydney SharePoint User Group July 2009

2009-07-20T14:55:00.003+10:00

The next SharePoint User Group in Sydney is on Tuesday 21 July 2009. John Liu will talk about his experiences developing SharePoint Websites. Learn about how John deploys solutions from development to production, living with CAML, what 3rd party tools he uses and what you will need when SharePoint 2010 comes along.

The user group meets at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts at 280 Pitt Street. Doors open at 5:30pm and all are welcome. For more details see http://www.sharepointusers.org.au

A SQL Server at every port

2009-07-15T11:40:00.002+10:00

I'm no firewall expert, or a SQL expert, but I'm not going to let those things stop me handing out advice on how you should configure your firewall or SQL configuration! I recently ran into a problem with getting a SharePoint Server to communicate with the SQL Server on a brand new installation. I turned off the Windows Firewall on the SQL Server and everything worked fine. Now, while I did mention that I'm no expert on firewalls, I know enough to realize that keeping the firewall turned off is not the best approach.

Usually SQL Server communicates through port 1433. Looking at the server's firewall configuration I could tell that port was opened. So how come I still couldn't access the database from a remote machine? The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security management console allows you to turn on logging of dropped packets. By using this I figured out that my SharePoint server was trying to access port 61683. Well, OK, I opened up that port by creating a new Inbound Port rule for TCP traffic.

That did it, my SharePoint Server was able to chat away to my SQL Server and off I went on my merry way. But I couldn't rest easy at night. Why port 61683? My searches on the internet brought back no real references to that port number. So I searched the registry on the SQL Server for "61683" and lo-and-behold, there it was – TCPDynamicPorts buried deep under the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server hive. This led me to the MS Support article How to configure an instance of SQL Server to listen on a specific TCP port or a dynamic port.

Yes indeed, the SQL Server was using a Named Instance. It seems that the default configuration for this means that SQL searches for a free port number to make the named instance available on. This dynamic allocation of a port number is not great from a firewall configuration perspective. Luckily you can change the configuration to use a static IP address. Look up the topic How to: Configure a Server to Listen on a Specific TCP Port (SQL Server Configuration Manager) in SQL Books Online (here's the SQL 2008 link). You can then set the firewall on the SQL Server without fear that the port will change randomly the next time your SQL instance restarts.

One final note – from what I have read, your SQL firewall should also have a rule to allow access to the SQL Browser application. This is how remote computers can find out what port your named instance is on. Checking the SQL Server in my environment, there is a rule called SQL Browser that allows the application C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Shared\sqlbrowser.exe.

SharePoint 2010 Now Showing

2009-07-14T10:30:00.002+10:00

Want to get a peek at what the new version of SharePoint 2010 looks like? Well then pop over to http://sharepoint.microsoft.com and view the videos.

There are three different videos - an overview, IT Pro (i.e. administrator) and Developer. All up, it is about an hour of footage.

As they stress several times in the video, this is beta so there is a good possibility that some of the details will change between now and the release. Also, Microsoft aren't saying what features will be available in the different versions of the product (WSS, SharePoint Standard, SharePoint Enterprise). They generally don't make this information available until just before the release.

Here are some of the highlights I picked up from watching the footage:

Ability to perform an action on multiple documents at the one time (like check-out or delete)

Many UI operations are now asynchronous, so you can get on with the next task without waiting for your last command to complete

SharePoint gets the Ribbon - if you haven't been using Office 2007 then you are missing out on how beneficial this really is. It makes it much easier to see what you can do with whatever you are working on, such as a list item, document, text or picture. You can also turn off the Ribbon if you want to maintain the same UI as the current product

The text formatting toolbar no longer floats AND it stays visible at the top of the page. In the current version this toolbar disappears as you scroll down through your text

Unattached Content Database Recovery. I can't wait to try this. It should make disaster recovery a lot less of a disaster

SharePoint Workspace - could this make Groove relevant again? It gives you the ability to take part of your site offline and sync back up when you are next connected

Central Admin - logging to SQL AND can be extended to include your own log entries. I must admit I never did like those text files that 07 writes to. Give me SQL tables over that any day.

There's lots more of interesting content in the videos, I think the next year will be a fascinating time in the SharePoint world

WSS Service Pack 2 - installed without any problems

2009-04-29T13:41:00.002+10:00

I have just applied Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to my test environment (x64 Windows 2003 running in HyperV). The installation took just over 10 minutes and didn't require a reboot. Everything ran smoothly and my Windows Event logs are not reporting any problems.

You can download the service packs for WSS and MOSS from the links on this blog post

Click here to see a spreadsheet of the 34 issues fixed in WSS SP2

Some of my favourites are:
SharePoint does not allow some field names to be changed to their original values.
Users are not warned when their files exceed the maximum path.
List views fail when they are grouped by calculated fields or by lookups to calculated fields.

Storage Space Allocation Reports

2009-04-21T15:17:00.002+10:00

Did you know that you can access a report on how much space your Site Collection is using and see a list of your largest (and smallest) document libraries, documents and lists? All of this from the comfort of your web browser. The option is available from the top level site collection settings menu. It's called Storage Space Allocation. Here's a sample of what it looks like (with all the drop-down options visible):

But what if you don't see the Storage Space Allocation item in your site settings menu? Well, firstly this is only available to Site Collection administrators. You should ask the owner of the Site Collection whether you have that level of permissions or not. But more importantly, you need to have assigned a Quota to your Site Collection. This restricts the amount of disk space that your site collection can consume. Even if you don't need a quota, you will need to assign one to get access to this report.

Site Collection quotas are maintained within the SharePoint Central Administration web site. Generally this will be maintained by the IT department. Here are the steps that you need to go through to assign a quota to an existing site collection:

Go to the Central Administration SharePoint site
Click on Application Management in the left panel
Select the Site Collection Quotas and Locks link under the SharePoint Site Management heading
Make sure that the correct site collection is selected
Select the checkbox beside Limit site storage to a maximum of
Enter an appropriate number of megabytes for your site collection to grow
Click OK

You will now have the Storage Space Allocation item in your site collection settings page.

April SharePoint User Group Meeting

2009-04-16T22:20:00.001+10:00

This month's user group meeting will be held on Tuesday April 21. The venue is our usual spot at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street. Doors open at 5:30pm, pizzas and soft drinks available until they run out, so get in early.

This is going to be the first month of the Sound Bytes session, a concept suggested by Brad Saide. This is a 20 minute slot for someone to discuss a SharePoint related concept or product that they love. Tim Kremer is kicking us off with a talk on using the iPhone to access SharePoint. This is based on his experience with developing iShare

Then Peter Chapman will be discussing how to integrate SharePoint with SAP. Peter's company Sower have done quite a bit of work in this area. Come along and hear what options you have using both out of the box and third party features.

If you intend coming please send an e-mail to Sydney@sharepointusers.org.au so that we have an idea of numbers.

If you would like to get e-mail notifications about upcoming events, visit our site at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney and sign up to our e-mail list.

James Milne – Australia’s newest SharePoint MVP

2009-04-16T12:31:00.001+10:00

I just heard from James Milne that he has been awarded an MVP (Most Valued Professional) by Microsoft! Congratulations James, well deserved.

If you haven't done so already, you can check out his blog at http://www.myriadtech.com.au/blog/James. In particular, have a look at the Content Type Toolbar web part that he has built. This is very neat.

It’s SharePoint all the way down

2009-04-16T10:32:00.001+10:00

Big announcement from Microsoft today on the next release of SharePoint. We get our first indication of timelines – "will enter a technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and will release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010"!

We also find out what the marketing team have been up to. The acronym "MOSS" is gone, the next release of the server product will be called SharePoint Server 2010. No word yet on what the next release of WSS will be called.

You can read more about this and the Exchange 2010 announcement in the interview with Chris Capossela here

SharePoint Designer now free

2009-04-02T19:13:00.002+11:00

You may have heard about this already, but now it is official. SharePoint Designer is now free. You can download it directly from Microsoft by going to www.Microsoft.com/SPD.

In case you don't know, this is THE tool for hacking the SharePoint interface. It is not just for creative designers. You can configure the Data View web part in SharePoint Designer to do all sorts of groovey things that are not possible just through the web interface.

Of course, you can also shoot yourself in the foot with this one, so do be careful. Also, avoid the SharePoint Designer site (one of the nodes in a site collection) backup option if your site is larger than 25 MB.

Apart from those caveats, download and have fun! If you have previously licensed SharePoint Designer under a Software Assurance (SA) agreement, then you are now entitled to install Expression Web.

If you want to read more about this, see the open letter published on the Microsoft site

SharePoint Podshow interview

2009-03-26T11:19:00.003+11:00

I was in Seattle at the start of March, where I got a chance to catch up with two of the SharePoint Podshow hosts - Rob Foster and Nick Swan. One thing led to another, and the next thing you know we are recording an interview for the Podcast!

If you don't already subscribe to the podcast, I can highly recommend it. As far as I know, it is currently the only podcast dedicated to SharePoint. For more information, check out http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/

To listen to the interview I did with the guys, click here. It covers a range of topics including the role of a SharePoint architect, using WSS for document management and the challenges of change management.

Gulf 2 Gulf

2009-03-22T21:14:00.003+11:00

As you may have guessed from the title, this post is not about SharePoint. It's about a couple of guys - Dave Turner and Tim. They are just starting a crazy adventure, attempting to cycle 2,520 kilometres off-road from Spencer Gulf in the south of Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north.

Dave is no stranger to crazy adventures. He has already managed to do some epic rides in New Zealand, Tibet and Mongolia. This one may be the craziest though. Especially considering that they will be travelling through areas that are still flooded today.

The whole journey is unassisted, which means they won't have anyone carrying supplies for them. Any food and water that they need they will need to pick up along the way or haul it with them. Not easy when you will be travelling through some of the driest parts of the continent. To make sure that they will have enough water, they have trailers attached to the back of their mountain bikes. As I said, crazy people.

So why? Well, the usual reasons - because it's there, because it's hard. But also they will use this epic journey to raise funds and awareness for World Vision Australia. I am going to be doing my little bit for the guys by posting daily updates to their blog at http://mushypea.net/blog. Add the feed to your RSS reader or follow along on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Gulf2Gulf. Don't forget to donate at the EVERYDAY HERO site

Search Server Express installation error

2009-02-26T09:22:00.002+11:00

I discovered an error with the Search Server Express 2008 installation process that I thought I would share.

I was installing this on an existing WSS 3.0 server. I had previously modified the server's web.config to include a defaultProxy element in the system.net section.

Once the Search Server Express installation process had completed, my main WSS site stopped working. Trying to access any page on the site would bring up an ASP.net error page.

It looks like the Search Server Express installation made an incorrect update to the web.config. I guess it wasn't expecting there to already be a defaultProxy entry. Once I removed the invalid elements the site started working again.

If you come across this error, I hope this post helps you get back up and running quickly. If you are running WSS and haven't installed Search Server Express yet - do it! Of course, you will get more out of it if you do some up-front planning.

Sydney SharePoint User Group, Jan 2009

2009-01-19T19:39:00.003+11:00

If you are in Sydney this Tuesday (20 Jan 2009) then drop into the SharePoint User Group session being held in the city at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts on Pitt Street.

This month, K2 will be showing off their blackpearl workflow solution. Unfortunatly I won't be able to make it, as I am stuck on a beach in south Sri Lanka. Not to worry, Brad Saide will be hosting the night's proceedings

Improving MOSS Search Accessibility

2008-11-15T17:53:00.001+11:00

At one of my clients, we were looking at improving the accessibility of their intranet for sight impaired users. This was my first opportunity to work with someone that uses a text-to-speech and Braille reader as their only way of browsing a site. If you pardon the pun, this was eye-opening. It's fine to think about accessibility based on reading whitepapers or blog posts, it's quite another matter to watch a sight impaired user navigate through an intranet and try to make sense of it. One thing that we quickly learnt is that any content that describes the location of an item purely based on visual indicators is not enough (e.g. "just click on the blue button")

One area that we were able to improve quickly was in the search results. Our accessibility reviewer mentioned that it would be easier to jump between each search result if they were wrapped up in H3 tags. No problem – we had this implemented that afternoon. This required modifying a property in the Search Results web part:

Perform a search within your MOSS intranet so that you can get to the search results page
Within Search Results, select Site Actions – Edit Page. This will allow you to make changes to the web parts on the search results page
On the Search Core Results web part, select Edit – Modify Shared Web Part
Within the web part properties click on the XSL Editor... button under the Data View Properties section

This is the XML transformation code that is applied to our search results. It allows us to control exactly how they are formatted.

The section that you want to change begins with <xsl:template match="Result">. This controls the HTML written out for each search result. You need to put a <H3> tag immediately before the <span class="srch-Icon"> element and the closing </H3> tag immediately after the closing </span> tag for <span class="srch-Title">

You probably will also want to adjust the formatting of these H3 elements, as by default, they are rather large, and there is too much spacing between the search result title and the other details. The easiest way to do this is to apply an inline style to your H3 element. This is what mine looks like:

Once you have completed your changes, don't forget to publish the updated page.

You can download a copy of my modified Data View XSL Property from here

Sydney User Group meeting – November 18th

2008-11-11T21:59:00.001+11:00

If you have been working with SharePoint for some time, there is a good chance that you have one of Michael Noel's books on your shelf. He's the author of SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, SharePoint 2003 Unleashed as well as a number of Microsoft whitepapers. You might have caught one of his presentations at this year's Tech-Ed in Australia. Well, he's back – and for one day only. He's going to be presenting at the Sydney SharePoint User Group this month on one of his favourite topics – virtualisation and how it applies to your SharePoint environment.

The session will be held on Tuesday, November 18^th. Normally the User Group meetings are held in the evening, but this one is going to be a lunch-time session. We will be commencing the presentation at 12:30 and expect to wrap up the Q&A session by 2pm. The venue remains the same – Sydney Mechanics School of Arts at 280 Pitt Street in the CBD (close to Town Hall or Museum stations).

To read more and register your interest in attending, go to www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney

MVP Again

2008-10-11T13:44:00.001+11:00

OK – this news is a bit stale now, but heck I thought I'd post anyway. I have been awarded SharePoint MVP status for another year! Well done to me. This will be my third year as a SharePoint MVP. This is particularly exciting with the next release of SharePoint on its way. I just need to find some spare time to devote to learning about the latest gizmos and widgets in vNext once those betas come out. Considering there is still so much in the current release that I'd like to know more about, I'm getting a bit worried about brain overload.

Remember the movie "The Matrix" – that cable they had that you could plug into the back of your head to download new info? I need to get me one of them.

MOSS Solution Day – Advanced Portals and Collaboration

2008-09-24T11:56:00.001+10:00

I'm back in the classroom again next month delivering a one day training session for Microsoft called "MOSS Solution Day – Advanced Portals and Collaboration". This is going to be in Melbourne on Tuesday October 14^th and in Sydney on (updated) November 10th

These sessions are targeted at Solution Architects that already have experience with SharePoint but want to deepen their knowledge in the Portals and Collaboration components. If you'd like to register for either of these sessions, pop along to the Microsoft site at https://www.microsoft.com.au/events/register/home.aspx?levent=523428&linvitation.

Tech-Ed 2008 Workflow Presentation

2008-09-09T23:29:00.001+10:00

Whew, Tech-Ed Australia is finally over for another year. Boy, that was a hectic week. I came that close to winning a HP tablet pc in the Ask the Experts competition, did three presentations, and met up with a whole bunch of people.

I promised to post a link to my presentation on my blog. So firstly, here is the Form Processes in Minutes not Months session that I co-presented with Ben Walters of SDM.

This session looked at building an InfoPath 2007 browser based form, and creating a SharePoint Designer workflow to process the request.

For a useful series of videos on how to build SharePoint Designer workflows, check out:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102564171033.aspx

For additional custom workflow actions that you can add to your SharePoint Designer workflows check out:
http://www.codeplex.com/SPDActivities

Tech-Ed Australia 2008 – I’ll be presenting

2008-09-01T22:42:00.001+10:00

If you are going to Tech-Ed in Sydney this week, you can catch me presenting at one of three different sessions:

OFC315 - Why Findability Should Be an Organising Principle for Your SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment. Presenting with Ben Curry from MindSharp
OFC301 - Form Processes in Minutes, not Months. Presenting with Ben Walters from SDM.
MVP307 – SharePoint Monitoring – How to measure the success of your SharePoint implementation. This one is all by myself

I'm looking forward to the event and getting to meet some people I haven't seen in a while.

Converting Word docs to the Sony eBook format

2008-08-08T12:32:00.001+10:00

Hi, my name is Ivan and I'm a gadgetholic. It's been 15 days since my last gadget purchase. Of course, I'll argue that each one of those purchases represents an enhanced quality of life, a way to streamline my day-to-day activities, thus freeing me up to...well, go out and buy more gadgets I guess.

Take this one time earlier this year when I was in the United States. I happened to be passing the Fry's electronics store in Seattle, so I popped in for a browse. I left with the Sony electronic book reader. It's beautiful – it uses one of those special e-ink screens that looks almost like paper. It only uses power when changing the page, so battery life is very good (7,500 page turns in theory). My reasoning was that I have so much reading to catch up on, and this is a lot faster to "boot up" compared to my laptop.

The reader is capable of displaying PDF documents, the only problem is that scales them to fit it's screen size. So a document laid out for A4 doesn't look so good on the reader. I really wanted to catch up on all those SharePoint white papers and articles that I haven't had time to read, so I needed to figure out an easy solution for putting them on the Sony.

So I've put together a Word macro. This reformats a document to match the Sony screen size, adjusting both page dimensions and margins. I also adjust the dimensions of any images in the document so that they fit the page, its crude, but seems to work. Once it has been resized, I can save it as a PDF document and download it to the Sony reader. This also works for web articles – copy/paste to Word and run the macro.

I'm currently reading "The 01100 step programme to reducing technological dependencies".

You can download the macro code here

Filtering Calendar List Web Part Entries

2008-08-05T14:17:00.001+10:00

Not sure if this is a well known fact, but thought I'd post about it anyway. When you add a web part for a WSS 3.0 Calendar list onto a web part page, the default view automatically filters items to only show those with an end date great than or equal to today, and a start date that is less than 2 years from the current date. The time value is not used for filtering these items.

This means that all current and future events that start within 2 years will be shown.

Also, the description will be truncated after approximately the first 255 characters. Truncation will happen at the end of a word, not half way through one.

If you don't want to show 2 years worth of future events, you can use the following technique to reduce the time span:

Add a new calculated column to your calendar list called Start Advertising.
Set the formula to "=[Start Time] – 60". Change the number of days to whatever you want to use. In this case I'm saying that I want see events that are starting in less than 60 days from now.
Set the data type for the formula result to Date and Time
Update the Calendar web part – Edit the current view
Add a filter for the Start Advertising field "is less than" [today]

Central Administration Regional Settings

2008-08-01T13:01:00.001+10:00

Ever noticed that the timestamps within Central Administration are in US Date format? If you think in months, days and years, that's OK. But for the rest of us it can be a little confusing. Has it really been 4 months since the Usage Analysis timer job ran? Why would the last backup have occurred on the 13^th month of the year? And unless you live around GMT -08:00, you may also scratch your head at the times that SharePoint displays.

To banish this confusion, just change the Regional Settings within Central Administration. This is normally a piece of cake: Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Regional Settings. The problem is, the Regional Settings link doesn't appear in Central Administration. If you are feeling adventurous, you can access the settings page by going to /_layouts/regionalsetng.aspx on your Central Administration site.

Maybe there are a number of people taking care of the Central Administration site, and you are scattered across multiple time zones. Not to worry, to change just your own regional settings, go to /_layouts/regionalsetng.aspx?Type=User in Central Administration.

ISPA – Doing it for the community

2008-07-20T22:41:00.001+10:00

The SharePoint Community around the world is made up of a lot of passionate, hard-working people. I've been lucky enough to meet my fair share of these people over the years. One of the most visible signs of this community are the various User Groups focussed on the SharePoint platform. Here in Australia you can find one in most State capitals at http://www.sharepointusers.org.au.

Well, now there is a world-wide group set up to support and share experiences between these User Groups – the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA). This will help strengthen and grow the existing groups here in Australia, and help any new SharePoint User Groups get up and running.

If you'd like to read more about this organisation, drop by their website at http://www.sharepointpros.org. As a User Group leader, I'm looking forward to sharing experiences with others and learning what else we can do for our members. I've also signed up as an ISPA Regional Evangelist. This means that I'm making myself available to anyone out there interested in setting up a new SharePoint focused user group within Australia. Thankfully, I'm not the only one – Ed Richards in Melbourne and Ivan Brebner in Brisbane are also ISPA Regional Evangelists – it is a rather large country after all. I have yet to find out whether we get any badges or hats.

Moving Site Collections between Databases

2008-07-19T00:21:00.001+10:00

Microsoft has recently released an update to the Central Administration site that makes it easy to move a Site Collection between different Content Databases. The Batch Site Manager can be very handy if you need to break up your content across multiple Content Databases – possibly sitting on different SQL Servers. The same tool also allows you to lock and delete site collections:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508852(TechNet.10).aspx

An RSS feed for a View

2008-07-18T21:13:00.001+10:00

One of my clients came across this neat trick while we were figuring out the easiest way to extract an XML representation of some list data. The default URL for the RSS feed on a list is in the format:

http://<ServerName>/<SitePath>/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=<guid>

Where <guid> is a unique identifier for the list or library that you are interested in. How do you find this value? Easy – if you access the site settings page for the list, you will see the appropriate value in the web address in your web browser.

Our issue was that this didn't return the set of records that we wanted. The client noticed some other URLs that I was using (based on using the owssvr.dll url protocol) had a View parameter, so he added it to the ListFeed.aspx link – and it worked!

So you can target a specific view in the list to get your RSS feed from. This makes your URL format:

http://<ServerName>/<SitePath>/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=<guid>&View=<guid>

Now, to get the unique identifier for the View, just go to the Settings page for the list and click on the name of the View. The web address displayed in your browser will include the View property. Copy and paste the whole address line into Notepad to extract the appropriate value – it's messy trying to do this directly on the browser address line.

Breaking Point

2008-07-16T10:34:00.001+10:00

I'm just back from the Sydney SharePoint User Group session where I presented on how our company uses WSS to run the business. I showed how we do everything from invoicing, timesheeting, expense tracking and project management from within WSS. Particularly when it came to the financial tracking aspects, a common refrain was "Why Bother"? There are so many off-the-shelf packages that do this for you, why would you try building it yourself within WSS?

The answer is that we wanted to see if WSS could handle this. We wanted to know what the pain points are in trying to do this in a real-world scenario, using ourselves as the lab rats. Most of the time we are advising clients how they should be using SharePoint, but we never have to use those systems day-in-day-out. We felt that the experience we would gain from immersing ourselves in the product would stand to us when working with clients.

So what has it been like using WSS as a financial accounting system? Well, we like it, but we are biased. There are some elements that are clunky, but we hope to automate these in the near future. Granted, right now our requirements are relatively simple. This was another point that came up during the session – what happens when we reach "breaking point"?

I find this question particularly interesting. Quite a few people felt that as our business (hopefully) grows, we will reach a point where our WSS financial system will fall apart. I don't disagree. I'm not sure what that breaking-point is, but I think finding it will be a very valuable lesson. I think the biggest danger is that we won't recognize when we have reached that point and will continue this "experiment" beyond its best-before date.

Right now this lab-rat needs to get back into the maze and find out if anyone has moved my cheese.

Inside the Russian Dolls

2008-07-12T08:12:00.001+10:00

The Sydney SharePoint User Group is having its July meeting on Tuesday the 15^th. In addition to a Heroes Demo contest (details here), I'm going to be presenting on how our company has used Windows SharePoint Services.

When we set up SharePoint Gurus last year, we decided to try to run the whole business on WSS. This is a bit extreme, but we wanted to see what worked, what didn't – how far could we push the platform. So at the July User Group session I'll be demonstrating how we use SharePoint and discussing the benefits and pains.

If you are in town, come along to the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts at 280 Pitt Street. Doors open at 5:30pm and presentations begin at 17:45. For more information see www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney.

CodePlex Project to create Sub Folders

2008-07-03T23:43:00.001+10:00

I've just published a new CodePlex project. This is a utility application to create sub folders each month in a document library. You can schedule this to run each month against a particular document library. It will create a top-level folder with a name like YYYY-MM where YYYY is the current year and MM is the month (e.g. 2008-07). The year and month are based on the current date.

The application then reads an XML file to determine what subfolder structure to create underneath the Year-Month folder. This can include any number of folders and subfolders. You can also specify custom security for a particular folder. Here is an example of the contents within the XML file

I'm interested to hear if others find this useful and whether people have suggestions on how the application can be improved. The project is available at http://www.codeplex.com/WSSCreateFolders. Check out the other SharePoint related CodePlex projects – there is some fantastic stuff available here

New Microsoft White Paper – Data Protection and Recovery for MOSS

2008-06-13T18:37:00.001+10:00

Microsoft has just released a new White Paper on data protection and recovery for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It's available here. This is a great guide on the various options for recovering content within your environment.

I was lucky enough to be able to review this during its final draft stages, which has earned me a mention on the acknowledgements section. Fame at last! Any errors or omissions in the white paper are the fault of the other reviewers.

June 08 Sydney User Group

2008-06-13T18:06:00.005+10:00

The Sydney SharePoint User Group is on the move. We are now located at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (SMSA) at 280 Pitt Street. Map and details available from the User Group site.

The SMSA recently turned 175, which is pretty old for an Australian instituation. The SharePoint User Group is a young whipper-snapper in comparision, at almost 3 years old (our third birthday is on July 15th).

Still, I bet the SMSA doesn't have their whole back-catalogue of powerpoint presentations available online, now do they?

The SMSA's slogan is "Making a Difference through Learning". So I think we will feel right at home there.

Our first presenter at our Pitt Street location will be Alistair Speirs from Microsoft. His topic -

The Collaboration Spectrum: when should you use SharePoint, Groove, email or just pick up the phone?

Want to hear more? Come along to 280 Pitt Street at 5:30pm on Tuesday June 17th. Looking forward to seeing you.

For an e-mail update on the user group is meeting, sign up here, or subscribe to our RSS feed

While you are there - have a look at the new home page for the SharePoint Australian User Groups - what do you think?

Now available on video

2008-05-21T07:26:00.003+10:00

The Sydney SharePoint Forum was held in Sydney on May 6^th. You can now watch videos of some of the presentations from the event site. Go to the Resources page and click the View link for the relevant presentation. My session with Allyson Skene is here – Find it faster with MOSS 2007 Search. It's true what they say about the camera adding ten pounds – I'm much slimmer in real life.

Tag – you’re it!

2008-05-15T21:18:00.001+10:00

I was putting together an ASP.net page that was retrieving information from a database. This page is going to be indexed by SharePoint. So to make sure that the search experience could be as good as possible, I wanted to make sure that the page includes useful metadata tags.

While trying to figure out the best way of setting the metadata, I came across the HtmlMeta class. This allows you to programmatically add your meta tags to your content:

HtmlMeta metaTag = new
HtmlMeta();

HtmlHead head = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;

metaTag.Name = "DC.Title";

metaTag.Content = "Tag – you're it";

head.Controls.Add(metaTag);

Neat, huh?

'Open Mike' session for SharePoint User Group

2008-04-22T21:59:00.003+10:00

Would you like to find out;

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

Well we’ve got just the man to answer those burning questions... Microsoft’s Mike Fitzmaurice, Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS, has kindly agreed to hold a lunch time ‘Open Mike’ session on May 5th during his Sydney visit.

We look forward to seeing you there! Please click here to register for this event.

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

Food & Refreshments will be provided.

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

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

Problem with using a Calculated Field in a Lookup property

2008-04-16T17:05:00.003+10:00

I've been playing around with using a calculated field as the source for a lookup column in a document library. I've run into a few annoying issues that I thought I'd share. Try this:

Create a custom list
Add some rows to your list. In my case I added values like "Quick Pick 1", "Quick Pick 2"…
Add a calculated column with the formula of [Title]. Leave the calculated type as single line of text
In your Shared Documents library, add a lookup column and point it to the calculated field you created in the previous step

I agree – not the most productive piece of SharePoint work you will do, but bear with me.

When you edit the properties for a document via the browser, the Lookup field values display as expected:
Now, edit a Word 2007 document in the library
View the Word 2007 Document Information Panel

If your environment is anything like mine, this is what you will get:

I don't know why the "string;#" text is visible in the Document Information Panel view. I know that the Lookup column does store an ID along with the displayed value, but I definitely do not want this displayed in Word 2007.

It's a shame that this doesn't work. My search through the newsgroups and blogs didn't bring back any details about this specific issue, but there were some related questions about not being able to reference certain column types as lookup fields. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found a fix for this. I can work around this issue by developing a simple event handler on my list to set the value of a text box to what I need. That way I can just use an out-of-the-box lookup column on a text field.

There was also another issue that I saw mentioned in relation to calculated lookup fields. If you try to use one of these in a collapsed Group By view, you will see a "Render Failed" message for each column when you expand the group:

My event-handler work-around will also avoid this issue. However, another alternative is to select the "Show groupings expanded" option for the view. You can then expand/collapse the views as you need.

MS Partner Training – On the road again

2008-03-19T22:15:00.001+11:00

After appearing to sell-out crowds in 2007, the new and improved "Instructor-lead Chalk-talk to Presales and Business Analyst on the MOSS 2007 Platform" is about to hit the road again. And like all good shows, this time we have a special guest. Mick Badran of Breeze Training is going to attempt the daring feat of stepping into my shoes (spot the pun). I'm going to tackle Brisbane and Melbourne, while Mick will be wowing the crowds in Sydney.

Dates are:

Brisbane – April 3 & 4
Melbourne – April 7 & 8
Sydney – April 10 & 11

This two day session is an instructor lead "chalk-and-talk" training designed for Pre-Sales Technical Consultants, Technical Project Managers, Architects and Business Analysts. The content is level-200. You can find out more information and register for this event here

Building a Windows 2008 x64 Laptop

2008-02-23T17:06:00.003+11:00

My primary machine is a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. This has 4GB of memory and a dual core Intel T7300 2 GHz processor. Up until recently I have been running 32-bit Windows Vista as the main operating system. To be honest, I was disappointed with the performance. Considering the specifications, I was expecting the machine to be a bit quicker round the block. I found that I was waiting to switch between applications. Outlook was tediously slow some times.

Now this could be for a number of reasons – Dell pre-loads the application with many "performance enhancing utilities". Anyway, I decided it was time for a rebuild. Daniel Larson has been harping on how good Windows 2008 is, so I grabbed my installation disk and dived right in.

I wanted to take advantage of the whole 4 GB of memory I have, so I went with the 64-bit version (under 32-bit Windows only sees about 3.4 GB). I reckon that going 64-bit should also give me a performance boost too. The challenge is that I would have to make sure all the various software and hardware that I use would still run under 64-bit. There was only one way to find out for real.

I was also keen to see what Hyper-V was all about. This is Microsoft's new version of Virtual Server. The idea is that it takes advantage of features in your processor to run more efficiently. I wasn't 100% sure if my processor supported these capabilities, but I was willing to give it a shot.

I was getting tired of doing development work within a VPC and transferring files between the guest and host operating systems. I liked the idea of running SharePoint 2007 directly on my main operating system. No more booting up a VPC to check exactly where a configuration option was. I would be able to code directly on the host. Now VPCs aren't that much of a pain, and they have their own advantages, but I was keen to see what it would be like to run MOSS natively.

Finally, by going Windows 2008, I can run 64-bit virtual machines. Yes – I could also do this with VMWare on Vista, but since I was going to get all the other benefits with Windows 2008, this was an extra bonus. This may become more important later this year. I suspect that Microsoft will start to release early betas of SharePoint vNext before the year is out. If this is only going to run on 64-bit (just like Exchange), I want to be set up so that I can install them.

Right – so now that I convinced myself, it was time to begin. My first mistake was to back up all my content using Vista backups. I had been running these for a while, so it seemed like a safe bet. The problem came later when I attempted to restore these from Windows 2008. The backup software is not the same between these platforms and I couldn't find any software that would read the Visa backups. I ended up restoring these to another Vista computer and then copying the files across. So I'd recommend just copying your Vista data files onto a separate hard drive.

Another hassle with the Vista backups is that it does not include executable files or help files by default. So even after the restore I had to download the MOSS and WSS SDK packages again. Not a big hassle, but something to be aware of.

As a belt-and-braces measure, I used Acronis TrueImage to take a snapshot of my entire computer. This was in case the exercise turned into an unmitigated disaster and I needed to roll back. My 130 GB of content got compressed down to a 85 GB file. Thankfully I haven't had to use this, so I can't say what the restore process is like.

Now for the risky part. I downloaded the Windows 2008 RTM from my MSDN subscription and created a DVD. I rebooted and walked through the process of deleting my existing partitions (eek!) and creating one new partition for the new install.

WARNING: If you are planning to use Hyper-V then make sure to leave the regional settings at US English during installation. I'm in Australia, so I thought I would change these during the installation process. It turns out that the current (beta) release of Hyper-V does not like this, and I ended up having to re-install from scratch. Note that you can't just revert to the US English regional settings if you experience this problem. You can only change to your correct locale AFTER Hyper-V has been enabled. I'm sure this will get fixed soon.

Apart from that hiccup, the process was straightforward. My Bluetooth mouse worked from the moment the installation commenced. I think the installation process took about 30 minutes before I was booting into my new desktop.

After getting the bare bones installation up and running, here are the configuration changes that I've made:

1. Configured my BIOS to enable Virtualisation support

2. Enabled the following server roles:

File Server (including the Windows Search Service)
Hyper-V
Web Server (including ASP.net, and IIS 6 Management)

3. Enabled the following server features:

.Net Framework 3.0
Desktop Experience – includes Media Player
Wireless LAN Service – you need this to connect to your WiFi LAN

4. Disabled the shutdown prompt by updating my local group policy

Start->Run->"gpedit.msc" -> Administrative Template ->System-> Display Shutdown event tracked -> Disable

5. Configured my Hyper-V network so that I can easily share files between my host and client machines (Bryant Likes's blog)

6. Installed the Synaptic x64 Fingerprint reader driver

7. Installed the Dell x64 sound card drivers

Now I'm very content with my setup. Response time is much faster than my old build. Hyper-V is very slick. VPCs seem to run more efficiently. There are a few hassles though:

Sleep mode is gone – I think this is due to Hyper-V
Battery life seems to be worse, probably because the power management seems less sophisticated than Vista.
Even though my Bluetooth mouse worked, I couldn't connect to my Bluetooth mobile phone (a Nokia N73). I did try to install the Dell x64 Bluetooth drivers, but that didn't help. In fact, now my Bluetooth mouse no longer works :(
Picasa won't install (photo management software)
Microsoft Shared View beta installs, but won't log in

On balance though, I'm happy. The performance boost is great and I'll now get some experience poking around the new OS. I've just gotten MOSS 2007 up and running, so I can see what it's like to develop straight on the laptop.

Here are some of the links I found useful when doing my installation:

A SharePoint site by any other name...

2008-01-28T17:38:00.001+11:00

There are quite a few situations where you want your SharePoint Web Application available to different sets of users, using different web addresses. For example, our internal users may use http://XYZ to access our web application, but our external clients may have to enter https://secure.xyz.com

SharePoint allows you to assign up to five different "end-user addresses" for each of your Web Applications. These "end-user addresses" are ones that people will type into their browser to access your site. SharePoint uses a feature called Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) to make sure that the web application is available through different addresses while still ensuring that the links in the page sent back to the user are formatted correctly.

For a standard, non-SharePoint web site, this is relatively easy. Microsoft's IIS web server allows an administrator to specify as many addresses as they want for a single web site. These are called "host headers". If you are careful and make sure that all the internal links in your standard web site are written without a domain (e.g. /contactus.aspx), then the end user will always get the correct links based on the address they have used to access the website.

So why doesn't SharePoint work the same way? Well, part of the reason is that there are some scenarios where SharePoint will receive requests using one address, but it needs to translate these to another address before sending the final page to the end user. More on this later.

The end result is that IIS is responsible for accepting the page requests and passing them to SharePoint. It is then SharePoint's job to figure out which Web Application on the server farm the user is trying to access, and what "end user address" it should use when creating the output page.

So this is where Alternate Access Mapping comes into play. However, I got to say, it must be one of the most confusing user interfaces in the whole Central Administration. Even the Search Managed Properties is easier to figure out than this one. Here is my attempt to explain its workings. There is also a great set of MSDN blog articles from Troy Starr, and some screen webcasts from Bob Fox

What I have been referring to as "end user addresses" SharePoint calls Public Zone URLs. We have five different zones:

Default
Intranet
Extranet
Custom
Internet

They all work the same way, the names just reflect common uses, feel free to use each one as you please. The Default zone is set up for you when you create the Web Application. This zone is given the address that you specified during the "Create Web Application" process. It's up to you to set up the remaining four if you need them.

The easiest way to set these up is to use Edit Public Zone URLs from the Central Administration - Operations - Alternate Access Mapping page:

You need to make sure that you have the correct Alternate Access Mapping Collection specified at the top of the page. This is the Web Application that we want to configure "end user addresses" for. You might find the term "Public URLs" confusing. This does not mean that these are URLs that will be available outside your firewall. It refers to the URLs that your end-users will use to access your site. Some of these may be available outside your firewall, others will only be available internally.

In my example above, I am going to make my Web Application available on all five possible zones. The default name may reflect the machine that my web application is running on. My internal users will go to http://Intranet, but when they are out of the office they will use https://secure.xyz.com. Finally, I will allow clients to access certain information on the same web application at http://extranet.xyz.com

Once we click Save, SharePoint creates one entry in the AAM for each of our Public URLs. I would also update my IIS configuration at this stage to include host headers in my web site for each of these addresses.

But what does the Internal URL section of the table refer to? And how come it is identical to the Public URL? For me, it would have been better if Internal URLs were called Incoming URLs and Public URL was called Out-Going. Basically what happens is that SharePoint looks at the request for a page that it receives from IIS to determine which Public URL to use when creating the final page for the user.

For our example above, this is very straight-forward. If one of our road-warrior salespeople accesses https://secure.xyz.com from their browser, SharePoint will know that they are in the Custom zone, so any URLs on the page that refer to the web application should use the prefix of https://secure.xyz.com on the page it sends to the user. So simple, it almost sounds useless.

However, there are situations when the request that SharePoint receives does not match the address that the user entered. For example, we may have a Reverse Proxy server (such as Microsoft ISA 2006) that receives all the page requests from our external users and then forwards them to our server farm using the SharePoint server name. In this case, we want our our Internal URL to be something like http://AppServer01 but we still want the page sent to the user to use https://secure.xyz.com for any links to other content on the Web Application.

To configure this we use the Add Internal URLs button. This will allow us to specify another address that SharePoint should listen on for requests for our Web Application. By setting the zone to Custom we let SharePoint know what format we want the Web Application links written as.

This will create a 6th entry on our Alternate Access Mapping Collection. Note that we now have two entries for the Custom zone, both with different Internal URLs. We can add as many Internal URLs as we need for each of the zones. However, each Internal URL must be unique across the collection - otherwise SharePoint would not know which Public URL to use to generate the page for the end user.

In our example above, we might think of getting rid of the Custom Zone entry that defines http://secure.xyz.com as a valid Internal URL. After all, SharePoint will never receive requests directly with this URL (only our Proxy Server will). However, this is one of the quirks of the AAM interface - you must have an entry where the Internal and Public URL match. If you do delete this entry, then SharePoint will assign the Default Zone URL to the remaining Custom entry. Just accept that they need to be there.

If you haven't defined a Public URL for one of the zones, you can either use the Edit Public URLs or the Add Internal URLs button to configure it. Confusing, but the end result is the same - a new entry set up in your Web Application's AAM Collection that uses the same URL for both the internal and Public URL.

Similarly, when you use the Edit Public URLs screen to clear one of the Zones, SharePoint will remove the entry from the Collection that uses the same Internal and External URL. If there are any other entries in the collection for that Zone, SharePoint will reconfigure it to use the the Default Public URL.

Finally, here's a graphic to illustrate what is happening. Each zone can have many Internal URLs. SharePoint translates these to the appropriate Public URL based on the Web Application's AAM settings.

Free Wifi from Sydney and Melbourne Cafes

2008-01-27T17:58:00.003+11:00

A while back, I was grumbling to myself about the lack of free wireless internet access from cafes in Sydney. OK - you could pay the equivalent of 4 cups of coffee for an hour's access from the national telco, but who wants to do that?

These days I use my mobile phone as a bluetooth modem to access the 3G network from my laptop. Coverage and speeds are sufficient, and my mobile carrier offers 500 MB per month for the price of 8 coffees.

However, I'm please to see that Unwired are setting up free wireless hotspots in a number of cafes in Sydney and Melbourne. I tried out one of these from a cafe near St Peters station in Sydney. Setup was simple and the access was reasonable. The service is branded as uConnect. Keep an eye out for it. The map on the UnWired website shows a number of locations, but not all (map).

Update: McDonalds now offer free WiFi in many of their "restaurants". I took the time to read through their terms and conditions and didn't find anything offensive. At the time of writing, they had 439 stores with free Wifi in Australia. Go to http://www.maccasfreewifi.com/ to find out if your local spot is wified yet.

MOSS Jumpstart Presentation

2007-11-22T08:49:00.001+11:00

Here are the slides from the MOSS Jumpstart training that I have been running in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Thanks to all those that attended, I enjoyed it. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment

MOSS Jumpstart training resources

2007-11-18T21:23:00.001+11:00

This is for the benefit of those who have attended the training sessions that I have been running recently. These are links to resources that you will find useful for finding more information about SharePoint:

MOSS 2007 Administrators Companion (Bill English)

Microsoft Forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN)

User Groups – http://www.sharepointusers.org.au

SharePoint Blogs – (OPML)

SharePointPedia - http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia

CodePlex (link)

TechNet SharePoint site (link)

Ontolica wildcard search http://www.ontolica.com/

MOSS SDK (link)

SharePoint Jumpstart Resources

2007-11-14T01:08:00.001+11:00

I mentioned the following resources as part of the SharePoint Jumpstart training I ran today in Perth. I promised to post these links, so here you go:

SharePoint End User Learning Kit

Excel Spreadsheet comparing different versions of SharePoint

Coming to a city near you

2007-11-14T00:52:00.001+11:00

I am on the road at the moment delivering SharePoint training on behalf of Microsoft. It's part of their Jumpstart programme to help Microsoft partners and customers get up to speed on the platform. I have just delivered the first session in Perth and the feedback has been positive. Next up is Adelaide, then Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

There is more information available on these events on Microsoft's site

SharePoint Gurus on track

2007-11-07T09:59:00.001+11:00

When not obsessing over SharePoint, I like to get out on my mountain bike. Recently my mates and I took part in a 24 hour mountain bike race in Canberra. We had a team of six riders doing a relay, which meant we each did a circuit every 4 hours.

We made up our own team shirts, so I got the SharePoint Gurus logo put front and centre. We even used a public SharePoint subsite for organizing ourselves for the weekend. Talk about collaboration.

This was Dave Turner's going away ride - he has left us and moved to New Zealand. However, as official photographer he has now uploaded some photos of the event here

Needles in Haystack Presentation

2007-11-04T09:49:00.001+11:00

Here is a link to the presentation that I delivered at the Sydney Office Dev Con. The session was about the SharePoint Search engine and how you can make use of it outside of SharePoint.

Here are the resources that I mention at the end of the presentation

Sydney SharePoint User Group (link)
MOSS SDK and Technical Articles (link)
Mike Taghizadeh's Blog(link)
Mick Badran’s Query Ranking command (link)
Evaluation guide for Search in MOSS 2007 (link)
Customizing and Extending the Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Search (link)
Wildcard search from Ontolica (link)
CodePlex – MOSS 2007 Search Manager (link)
CodePlex – Test WSS and MOSS Search Web Service (link)

Office DevCon this weekend

2007-11-01T22:52:00.001+11:00

Office DevCon is kicking off this weekend at the Microsoft offices in North Ryde. Graham Seach has put a huge effort into setting up this free Office developer event, and there are some great presentations scheduled.

I'll also be presenting - my session is about making use of the search engine in MOSS 2007. I'm scheduled for around mid-day on Sunday. Unfortunately my session didn't make it onto the registration page, so no one had the opportunity to select it as one of their preferred events.

So while all the other presenters are comparing crowd size numbers, I'm preparing to present to myself. Oh well, it won't be the first time.

If you are attending the event and would like to have a one-on-one about the SharePoint search engine, do drop by. I believe they are currently scheduling my session for the broom cupboard on level 1.

Difference between SharePoint and AD Groups

2007-10-31T10:01:00.001+11:00

Someone on the SharePoint forums asked about the difference between these two types of security groups. Here are the ones I could think of:

Domain Groups

Normally created and maintained by the IT department
Can be used across different SharePoint sites and site collections
Organisations may already have good AD group structures that map well to your SharePoint implementation
Groups can be nested - e.g. you can add another AD Group as a member to an existing AD group
No features for users to submit a request to join a group

SharePoint Groups

The creation of groups can be done by business users
When a group is being created, you can define who "owns" the group
Can allow users to submit a request to join a group
Can determine who has permissions to see the users within groups
Groups are created within a particular Site Collection - cannot be used in other site collections
You cannot add a SharePoint Group as a member of another SharePoint group (no nesting)
SharePoint Groups cannot be used in other systems (e.g. network Shares)
The SharePoint Groups are separate from Active Directory - so you can go wild with the SharePoint Groups without upsetting your AD administrator

October Sydney User Group

2007-10-12T16:26:00.001+10:00

"You are the Silverlight of my life" - come on down to participate in our discussion on whether Silverlight is going to rock your SharePoint world, or are we just chasing moon beams.

The October event is at Level 14, Roden Cutler House, 24 Campbell Street, Haymarket on Tuesday October 16th 2007. Kick-off from 5:30pm. Click here to register. For more information visit http://www.SharePointUsers.org.au/sydney

New User Group website

2007-10-12T16:17:00.001+10:00

FINALLY! We have moved the SharePoint User Group site off version 2.0 of WSS and set up a version 3.0 site. I no longer have to hang my head in shame at the User Group meetings any more - well, at least not because of the website.

The new site has been implemented using the SharePoint Community Kit User Group Edition. We also have a new address so don't forget to update your favourites and/or default home page to http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney. You can even sign up for the new Events RSS Feed so that you can get the details of our next meeting delivered right to your computer without having to lift a finger.

Do drop by and let us know what you think, the Discussion Board is open. You'll also find an archive of all the presentations given at the User Group.

Central Administration site - Service Unavailable

2007-10-09T13:59:00.000+10:00

I was working on a client's environment this week when all of a sudden the Central Admin and Shared Service Provider sites stopped working. Requesting any URL from these sites returned a "Service Unavailable" message. The main content web site kept responding though.

When I checked IIS I noticed that the Application Pools for these web apps were stopping as soon as I put through a page request. I'd restart them and they would stop again straight away.

IISReset didn't do anything for me. Two Event Log errors entries being written each time the app pool was shut down. Details are below.

We executed our "Base Cotingency Plan" (i.e. we rebooted the server) and everything went back to working as expected.

I've no real insight on this one, but I thought I'd post it in case others come across it.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1009
Date: 9/10/2007
Time: 12:33:13 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SHAREPOINT1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '11380'. The process exit code was '0x80'.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
==============================================

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1002
Date: 9/10/2007
Time: 12:33:13 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SHAREPOINT1
Description:
Application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
===========================================

MVP for another year

2007-10-02T23:44:00.001+10:00

I just got word from Above that I have been recognized as an MVP for MOSS for a second year. My acceptance speech contains the usual thanks to all involved in making me look good (you know who you are).

I have a feeling that this is going to be an exciting year, I'm glad I don't have to hand back my MVP t-shirt just yet.

Anonymous Users – Access Denied

2007-09-28T18:37:00.001+10:00

At a client recently we tried to enable Anonymous Access to a WSS site, but unauthenticated users were still being prompted for a username and password. If you cancelled the log-in prompt, you would get an IIS "Access Denied" page. So I ran through the default tests:

Web Application created with the "Allow Anonymous" setting enabled – Check
(by the way, after the Web Application has been created this setting is managed from the Application Management – Authentication Providers section)
Site Collection has anonymous access enabled for the entire site – Check
(Site Settings – Go to top level site settings – Advanced Permissions – Settings – Anonymous Access)

That should have been it. After some tinkering around I discovered the problem was a web part on the home page. This was trying to filter the list of tasks based on the current user. Taking the web part off the page resolved the problem.

If you really need this functionality you will need to develop your own custom web part that will first check if the current user is authenticated before retrieving and filtering the items.

WSS 3.0 Search Capabilities

2007-09-19T09:58:00.001+10:00

Greetings from Singapore! I'm here attending a training course on MOSS Administration, but more on that some other time. Right now what I've brought you here to talk about is WSS Search. So it is common knowledge that the search technology has changed between version 2 and version 3. In version 2, WSS used SQL Server full text indexes. Now WSS uses the same underlying engine for indexing content as MOSS.

However, what I feel isn't common knowledge is how this affects the end user experience. When you performed a search in WSS 2.0 you could only get results back from the document libraries and lists in your current sub-site. You don't see results from any sites underneath it. In WSS 3.0 it's a very different story. Not only will you see results from any child subsites, you will also see results from any site collections located underneath the sub-site you are searching! Surprised? I was.

So this means that you can run a search from the very top of your website and it will search the document libraries and lists in all your site collections. The results are still security trimmed. Nice.

User Presence in WSS

2007-09-04T23:42:00.001+10:00

You might have noticed the User Presence icons in SharePoint. They have been there since version 2. You will see them appearing beside a user name, like "Modified By" or "Assigned To".

This will work with your instant messaging software to display your availability status to others. For organisations that have Microsoft Office Communicator installed, this works with little or no configuration. You can see when your colleagues are online, and even look up their other contact details, such as their extension.

The User Presence information also works with MSN Messenger. The only hassle with this in WSS v2.0 was that you had to use your MSN Messenger e-mail address in the SharePoint environment. Well, now in WSS 3.0 you get to specify a separate field for your User Presence details. So you can now get your SharePoint alerts submitted to your work account, but have your User Presence information based on your MSN account.

To update your details just go to the top right corner of any page on your SharePoint site and drop down the Welcome ... menu and select My Settings.

You can then edit the SIP Address to be the e-mail address of your MSN Messenger account. Voila – your user presence details should now be available for others to see. Change your status in MSN Messenger and the user presence information updates almost straight away on the SharePoint site.

No? Still can't see your user presence details? You might want to add your WSS site to the Trusted Sites zone in Internet Explorer (Tools – Internet Options – Security)

One final thing – the SIP Address information is stored at the Site Collection level. If your environment has many site collections, then you will have to update each one individually

WSS 3.0 Content Indexing: The update cannot be started

2007-08-25T22:14:00.001+10:00

I noticed recently that I was getting an error in my Application Event log every time the WSS Search Service ran. That means an error every five minutes, which is a little disheartening. One option is to change the WSS index schedule so that the error only occurs once per day – but some might say that is avoiding the issue. Which I suppose is a fair point.

The error that was showing up in my Application Event Log was:

Event ID 2424
The update cannot be started because the content sources cannot be accessed. Fix the errors and try the update again.

Context: Application 'Search', Catalog 'index file on the search server Search'

I fixed this by going to Central Administration – Operations – Services on Server. I selected the Windows SharePoint Services Search entry. I then changed the Service Account username and password to match the Content Access Account details. Click OK on the bottom of the page and wait five minutes.

Once I saw that the error was no longer being logged I went back and set the Service Account back to its original username and password. Still no sign of the error. I also verified that WSS was indexing content again.

So a bit of a strange issue. It looks like some settings got messed up along the way and just need to be reset. I did notice that the error started to happen after some scheduled maintenance on the SQL Server. I'll have a word with the SQL Admin and see what he's been up to.

August 2007 User Group meeting

2007-08-20T19:12:00.001+10:00

We have a jam-packed session this month. Brad Saide will be presenting on the Business Data Catalogue. Then Han Duong will cover customizing SharePoint themes. To top it off Jey Srikantha from K2 is returning to show us the K2 Blackpearl capabilities. This extends the out of the box workflows in ASP.net and integrates directly with MOSS 2007.

This month's session is on Tuesday 21^st at the Unique World offices in Haymarket. So come along, grab some beer & pizza and mingle with the local SharePointers. For more information go to http://sps.uniqueworld.net/sydney.

Bluetooth Mouse on Windows Vista Macbook Pro

2007-07-01T03:26:00.001+10:00

This post has nothing to do with SharePoint but I thought I'd blog it anyway in case someone else is trying to do the same. I'll admit it probably isn't a common scenario, but you never know.

I'm currently using a 17" MacBook Pro as my laptop. I've used Apple Bootcamp to create a Windows partition and I installed Windows Vista. It's a great setup and I love using the machine. It's got 2 GB of memory and dual 2.33 GHz intel processors. However, one thing was bugging me – I couldn't get the internal Bluetooth device working. This meant I couldn't use my groovy Microsoft Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000.

From the blog posts I could find I seemed to be in the minority. A few people wrote that Bluetooth was working fine for them right after install. Some people had steps for manually enabling Bluetooth, but this seemed to be for earlier releases of Bootcamp because I couldn't find the files they were referring to.

So here are the steps that I used to get it working. Some of these may be redundant – feel free to experiment and leave comments:

Downloaded and installed the Bootcamp 1.3 beta software from the Apple site to my Mac partition
Created a Mac Driver disk using the Bootcamp Assistant
Booted into Windows Vista and ran the Setup.exe on the Mac Driver disk
Launched the Device Manager. Expanded out the Universal Serial Bus controllers section. I was looking for the device with a Hardware ID of USB\VID_05AC&PID_1000 (I found these details here). To view an entry's Hardware ID:
1. Double click on the entry under the Universal Serial Bus Controllers
2. Click the Details tab
3. Change the Property drop down to Hardware IDs
Once you have found the right device select the Driver tab
Select the Update Driver... button
Select Browse my computer for driver software
Select the C:\Mac Drivers\program files\Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP 1.1.2\BthKicker location

Once I completed these steps Windows Vista identified a new device and tried to install a driver for it. It couldn't find an appropriate driver. At this stage most people would get dejected, but I'm used to this kind of thing. The next thing to do is run the\Drivers\Apple\AppleBluetoothInstaller.exe file on the Bootcamp Assistant CD that you created earlier.

And that was it, my Bluetooth mouse now works with my Vista install running on a MacBook Pro. I love it.

MySite Hotfix

2007-06-22T21:30:00.001+10:00

I ran into a problem at a client site recently. We already had the ability to create MySites, but they were being created under the Shared Service Provider website. We wanted these under the main portal instead. Not a problem – we set up a managed path on the portal and created a new site collection underneath it to host the My Sites. We made sure to select the My Site Host template when creating our new site collection. From the home page of the site collection we specified that we wanted to use this as the location for new My Sites. This worked just fine in our development environment. A user without an existing MySite could click the MySite link at the top of the page and their site would be created for them within the main portal.

Not so good in the production environment though. When you tried to create a new MySite you would see an error along the lines of:

There has been an error creating the personal site. Contact your site administrator for more information

Looking in the SharePoint logs revealed the following error:

The site /personal/demo could not be created. The following exception occured: Value does not fall within the expected range

I certainly wasn't expecting that. Luckily I found that Microsoft has released a hotfix specifically for this issue. The details are at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937207. You will need to contact Microsoft to get them to e-mail you the patch. Once we ran this in our environment all was well again. One thing though – the documentation for the hotfix says that it does not require a reboot, however we were prompted to perform a reboot after installing it.

...In with the New

2007-05-30T09:53:00.001+10:00

Microsoft have just announced that they have received Department of Defence 5051.2 certification (DoD 5051.2) for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Great huh? But what does it mean? DoD 5051.2 is a US Government standard for records management. Any records management solution used in the US Government must have this. It's also becoming a de facto standard in other industries too.

Microsoft have developed an add-on pack to provide the additional features required by the DoD 5051.2. If you want to comply with this standard you will need to run this (soon to be released) add-on pack as well. If you don't need to comply, then kick back and relax.