Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates

New major update for SharePoint with federated search capabilities, Content Deployment Updates, usability and performance updates too...

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates

Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: May 20, 2008

Since I am looking at Content Deployment at the moment, I found this hotfix information which looks like it would be valuable...

Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package: May 20, 2008

White paper: End-to-End Content Deployment Walkthrough

I decided to try the Content Deployment in MOSS tonight, and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. It is only in my Virtual machine, but this walkthrough did a great job of explaining how to configure it.

Apart from one error where the Deployment job seemed to get corrupted, it went very smoothly. I tried scheduling content for future publishing, and it worked perfectly. Next thing to try is physically different farms....

If you have not tried it, check out the white paper...

White paper: End-to-End Content Deployment Walkthrough

Importing only a specific group into sharepoint profile database (via LDAP)

This is a great post describing how to use group membership to limit the import of user profiles from Active Directory.

Importing only a specific group into sharepoint profile database (via LDAP)

MailEnable - Standard Edition

I have been configuring a new Virtual Machine to demonstrate SharePoint and I'm using Windows Server 2008. All went well, until I tried to configure Outlook to receive email on the VM. Then I recalled that POP3 was no longer included in Windows 2008, which is a shame. So I proceeded to find an alternative. Exchange would have been a bit too much on my memory limited VM which already has SQL Server, SharePoint etc.

I came across MailEnable which is a free mail server. I installed it and it worked very nicely providing SMTP and POP. It has an easy to use admin interface and was pretty easy to setup (once I fixed some DNS issues on my VM)

MailEnable - Standard Edition

Faraz Khan's SharePoint blog: MOSS 2007 cannot login into SSP

I was getting Error: Access Denied to my SSP in a new installation even though I was logged in as administrator.

Faraz's blog post pointed me to the solution that I needed to create a different App Pool for the SSP that is not the same name as the SSP Admin Site.

Faraz Khan's SharePoint blog: MOSS 2007 cannot login into SSP

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Announcing the VSeWSS version 1.2!

Hooray! Support for VS2008 and it is available for download....

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog : Announcing the VSeWSS version 1.2!

What are the names of the MOSS templates?

I recently had to compile a list of the names of some of the MOSS site definitions for use when programmatically creating sites, so I thought I would share;

Publishing Portal="SPSPORTAL#0"
Team Site"="STS#0"
Blank Site="STS#1"
Wiki Site="WIKI#0"
Blog Site="BLOG#0"
Global Site="GLOBAL#0"
News Site="SPSNEWS#0"
Publishing Site="CMSPUBLISHING#0"
Search Site="SRCHCEN#0"
Site Directory="SPSSITES#0"

SharePoint Spy

I tried out SharePoint Spy the other day to help me find out the GUIDs for the features get enabled when you add the SharePoint publishing features to a blank site. I very handy tool for peering under the covers of SharePoint. Check it out. It is free.

http://www.echotechnology.com/products/spy/Pages/default.aspx

Mei Ying's Tech Blog: File or arguments not valid for site template

Great tip in this blog to find out the list of site templates available. I was writing code to get this list, but this is much simpler;

View the source behind this page; http://website/_layouts/templatepick.aspx

Mei Ying's Tech Blog: File or arguments not valid for site template

Paul Andrew : Announcing: Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint – Developer User Guide

The Visual Studio 2008 extensions apparently will be here in June. In the mean time, Microsoft have released new documentation for VseWSS 1.1

"The user guide is downloadable here and represents approx 200 pages of documentation applicable to both the 2005 and the 2008 release of the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint."
(excerpt from Paul's post)

Paul Andrew : Announcing: Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint – Developer User Guide

Serve's Sharepoint Blog: How to programmatically change the site quicklaunch, treeview, subsites and navigation settings (WSS v3 + MOSS 2007)

A handy entry describing how you need to use the PublishingWeb object to modify the navigation in a publishing site through the API .

Serve's Sharepoint Blog: How to programmatically change the site quicklaunch, treeview, subsites and navigation settings (WSS v3 + MOSS 2007)

Looks like I will have to create a site definition after all

I tried Michael Gannotti's trick of turning features off before saving the site template and on after creating the site collection, but still no joy. Looks like I will create a site definition instead.

Video: Publishing Features and Site Templates - Michael Gannotti on SharePoint +

I have been trying to work out how to create a SharePoint 2007 site template from a modified 'Collaboration Portal' which has the Publishing feature enabled. I noticed that the 'Save Site as Template' menu item is removed from the Look and Feel menu.

So I created a Site Template from SharePoint Designer, and this seemed to work. I used STSADM to add the template and then tried creating a new Site Collection from it.

Then I got this error when I tried to access the site I just created;

"This page is not using a valid page layout.  To correct the problem, edit page settings and select a valid page layout."

So after much searching, I discovered that you cannot create a site template from a site with the Publishing feature enabled. :(

I was about to embark on creating a site definition and then I came across this post from Michael Gannotti....

Check it out.

I'm going to try this and then decide if I need a Site Definition.

Video: Publishing Features and Site Templates - Michael Gannotti on SharePoint +

Roger Lamb's SharePoint Developer Blog : SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Dispose Patterns by Example

I have been doing a bit of development this week prototyping some software, so while dusting off the far corners of my coding memory, I came across a good blog post showing the right and wrong ways to use the SPSite and SPWeb objects with respect to Disposing.....

Roger Lamb's SharePoint Developer Blog : SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Dispose Patterns by Example

Using the BDC to sync profile data error

I wrote a web service to query LDAP so I can merge data from AD and another LDAP source. The web service seems to work fine. It has a finder and a specific finder method.

I used BDC Metaman to create the definition and imported to MOSS. So far so good.

Mapped the user profile properties to the BDC source.

Tried to sync the profile data and it wasn't working. I was getting the following exceptions;

03/15/2008 11:20:37.92     mssdmn.exe (0x1464)                         0x0090    SharePoint Portal Server          User Profiles                     90gy    Exception    (Watson Reporting Cancelled) System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access Denied! Only site admin can access Data Source object from user profile DB.     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.SRPSite.AdminCheck(String message)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource._LoadDataSourceDef(IDataRecord rec)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource._LoadDataSourceDef(String strDSName)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource..ctor(SRPSite site, Boolean fAllowEveryoneRead)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource..ctor(SRPSite site)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileConfigManager.GetDataSource()     at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.BDCConnector.RefreshConfiguration(String sspName)

I found an entry in a blog here which pointed me in the right direction.

I needed to give my search account and content access account these permissions in the Personalization services permissions of Shared Services;

So that was great.

Next problem; now I get the following exception on the users which have a linked record in the secondary import connection;

03/15/2008 11:45:02.48     mssdmn.exe (0x1464)                         0x0090    SharePoint Portal Server          User Profiles                     90gz    Exception    Profile Import: Exception occured when importing user: 'ai\jhancock'. Access Denied for User 'AI\spsearch'. Securable MethodInstancewith Name 'FindDirectoryUserInstance' has ACL that contains:      User 'AI\administrator' with Rights 'Execute, Edit, SetPermissions, UseInBusinessDataInLists, SelectableInClients'  Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.Office.Server.ApplicationRegistry.MetadataModel.DataClass.ExecuteInternal(LobSystemInstance lobSystemInstance, LobSystem lobSystem, MethodInstance methodInstanceToExecute, Method methodToExecute, ParameterCollection inputParameters, Object[]& overrideArgs)     at Microsoft.Office.Server.ApplicationRegistry.MetadataModel.Entity.ExecuteInternal(LobSystemInstance lobSystemInstance, LobSystem lobSystem, MethodInstance methodInstanceToExecute, Method methodT...

Then I realised that whilst I had set permissions for the BDC, I had not set permissions for the imported application definition.

And then... I realised that I needed to set permissions on the entity in the BDC

And HOORAY! It worked!

SharePoint User Management

Nice article on how SharePoint and WSS manages user information.

SharePoint User Management

Silverlight Hello fix

Thanks to a comment on Patrick's blog post, I tried recompiling the HelloSilverlight2 xap file and redeployed it and it started working. There is a 2KB difference in the size of the original and the recompiled version.

IE is still crashing, but not as often.

I actually think there might be something wrong with the webpart as IE only seems to crash after I 'Modify web part' and then 'cancel'.

How to configure your SharePoint extended IIS Web App for working with Silverlight 2 applications - Patrick Tisseghem's Blog [MVP SharePoint]

Crikey! There is a lot more to getting the Silverlight Blue Prints for Sharepoint working than I expected.

You need to copy a lot of configuration into the web.config for your SharePoint web application.

Thankfully Patrick detailed what was required and provided a screencast of what needs to be done.

What to copy between the silverlight project web.config and the SharePoint web application web.config;

<ConfigSections/>

From

To

<assemblies/>

From

To

<controls/>

From

To

<httpHandlers/>

From

To

 

<httpModules/>

From

To

<system.webserver/>

From

To

<assemblyBinding/>

From

To

I put System.web.silverlight.dll into the GAC.

The other item is to register the .xap mime type. This seems to already be registered in IIS 7 on Windows 2008.

I could then add the web part.

I went to update the MIME type (IIS7)

Hmm, still not displaying the Hello World in the web part, and IE is crashing....

Problem Event Name:    APPCRASH
  Application Name:    iexplore.exe
  Application Version:    7.0.6001.18000
  Application Timestamp:    47918f11
  Fault Module Name:    npctrl.dll
  Fault Module Version:    1.0.30226.2
  Fault Module Timestamp:    47c5c57b
  Exception Code:    c0000005
  Exception Offset:    00025670
  OS Version:    6.0.6001.2.1.0.272.7
  Locale ID:    3081
  Additional Information 1:    fd00
  Additional Information 2:    ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160
  Additional Information 3:    fd00
  Additional Information 4:    ea6f5fe8924aaa756324d57f87834160

At this point I decided to rollback my VM to the previous snapshot and try configuring it again.

I reconfigured the whole thing, but have exactly the same problem. The Silverlight app doesn't display and IE crashes as soon as I try to use it.

I will keep looking and post again when I find an answer.

How to configure your SharePoint extended IIS Web App for working with Silverlight 2 applications - Patrick Tisseghem's Blog [MVP SharePoint]

SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool

The SharePoint capacity planning tools are released.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988.aspx

I like using this as the first step in scoping infrastructure. You'll need to assess the results to see if you think they are sensible.

When you start SCCP you will see the following message;

System Center Capacity Planner is intended to assist the user in designing a deployment topology and selecting the appropriate hardware for the expected user loads. To model the performance characteristics of a given configuration, this software uses configuration and load information provided by the user, combined with hardware-specific capacity and performance information received from other organizations (which Microsoft does not separately verify). 

Users should both consult deployment documentation relevant for each technology, and follow standard practices of validating configurations prior to production deployments (such as those described in the Microsoft Operations Framework) because actual configuration performance may vary from predictions due to unanticipated factors such as additional server or network load, inaccuracies in user-provided usage profile characteristics, model errors or other reasons.

Microsoft does not endorse any particular hardware indicated by System Center Capacity Planner.