Sydney SharePoint User Group July 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

1. Perform a search within your MOSS intranet so that you can get to the search results page
   
2. Within Search Results, select Site Actions – Edit Page. This will allow you to make changes to the web parts on the search results page
   
3. On the Search Core Results web part, select Edit – Modify Shared Web Part
   
4. 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:

<H3 style="margin-bottom:0px; font-size:100%;">

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

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

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

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

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

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

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