Brian Caauwe

SharePoint 2010 launch date set

2010-03-09T16:23:06Z

This past week on the SharePoint Team Blog Microsoft announced a launch date of May 12th 2010 for SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010. In addition, Microsoft is intending to RTM (Release to Manufacturing) SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 in April 2010. View the related blog post here.

["Brian"]

MNSPUG - Migrating to SharePoint 2010 Presentation

2010-02-13T03:58:00Z

This last week I was able to re-present my Migrating to SharePoint 2010 presentation that I did at Benchmark Learning at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG).

During the demo section of the presentation I was using some PowerShell scripts to assist with testing databases, adding them to the farm as well as working with the Visual Upgrade parameters on each web. To find all of the scripts I used during the demo you can find them here.

The presentation has been posed on the Minnesota SharePoint User Group site here.

We are hoping to have the video recording up on the site in a few days. As a reminder all presentations given at MNSPUG can be found at sharepointmn.com.

["Brian"]

Pre-creating SharePoint 2010 farm databases using PowerShell

2010-01-29T18:24:00Z

For those of you that have been used to running PSConfig when creating a new SharePoint farm to get rid of those pesky GUID’s, let me introduce a new tool for you… PowerShell. In the next version of SharePoint (2010) there are some new steps that are needed when configuring a new farm. First off, if you are installing SharePoint 2010 on a single server you can’t even run PSConfig successfully, it basically claims that using local accounts isn’t valid for PSConfig, so instead if you wish to pre-create your farm databases, open up the SharePoint Management Shell and type:

Get-Help New-SPConfigurationDatabase

You should notice that the majority of the parameters listed here are many of the same parameters that PSConfig uses, but unlike some of the other posts out there, make sure to use the –AdministrationContentDatabaseName property to specify the name of your Central Admin Content Database.

The other thing you will notice, is that for these new cmdlets, if there are required properties that the command needs, it will prompt you. For the New-SPConfigurationDatabase you will notice it prompts you for the farm credentials (what you would normally through in PSConfig) and a new property called Passphrase. The new Passphrase property removes the requirement on the farm account to exist when adding or removing servers from the farm. It just means that you need to keep that property on hand, otherwise you will not be able to manage your farm later. Here is a sample running New-SPConfigurationDatabase in my test environment:

After running New-SPConfigurationDatabase you may proceed with the SharePoint Technology and Configuration Wizard which will look very much like in 2007 to configure the Central Administration port and start the creation of your farm.

["Brian"]

Migrating to SharePoint 2010 Presentation

2010-01-21T13:57:00Z

It’s been a while since posting anything on my blog, but since I had just completed a presentation at Benchmark Learning about Migrating to SharePoint 2010.

The presentation has been posed on the Minnesota SharePoint User Group site here.

Thanks for all that attended, and we may be re-visiting this soon at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group.

["Brian"]

MOSS Index performance settings - the numbers behind the magic

2009-06-29T12:36:00Z

Was just reading the new downloadable book: Administering Enterprise Search for Office SharePoint Server and ran across some metrics that I was unaware of before today. When you setup your SSP SharePoint asks you about the indexer performance settings, which are Reduced, Partially Reduced and Maximum. Up until now, I didn’t understand the “magic” behind these settings, but the following table explains it in fine detail:

Indexer Performance setting	Total threads available for crawling	Maximum threads available for crawling any particular host
Reduced	Number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server
Partially reduced	4 times the number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server plus 4
Maximum	16 times the number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server plus 4

The maximum setting did shock me a bit when throwing real numbers at it. Say you have 8 processors in your box and you have search set to maximum (because you just want to get to get it over with as soon as possible) that means that you would think you could have 128 threads available for crawling. It however looks like the number of threads are capped at 64 regardless of your crawler impact rules or number of processors (good to know when ordering hardware if you are going to have a dedicated index box). With actual numbers like that, just remember what that could do to the load on your servers and to your network.

["Brian"]

Run a workflow as a specific user using code

2009-06-16T16:27:00Z

After Service Pack 1 and the inherent security improvements that had been implemented you may find yourself having issues with SharePoint Designer workflows kicking off automatically. One way that we have found around that issue is setting workflows in a list / library that you know will have that issue to manual start only and register a custom event handler on that list for ItemAdded or ItemUpdated to manually kick off the workflow through code.

That in itself is a nice workaround, but what if you wanted to kick off a workflow using another users context, but you don’t want to store credentials or any other pesky security information in your code?

In this specific scenario we created a workflow service account that we wanted to use to kick the workflow off on a form library where items were being submitted through InfoPath Forms Services (and because these workflows were creating, updating, and looking inside other lists that we needed to set security we only needed to do it for this one service account). Here is a bunch of code:

// Set variables from web.config

string _workflowUser = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["WorkflowUser"]; // Example: DOMAIN\SPWorkflowSvcAcct

string _workflowName = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["WorkflowName"]; // Example: Master Workflow

string _formsLibrary = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["FormsLibrary"]; // Example: Request Library

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()

{

// Setting variables to use under workflow service account

string userName = properties.UserLoginName;

int itemID = properties.ListItemId;

SPWeb parentWeb = properties.OpenWeb();

SPList parentList = parentWeb.Lists[_formsLibrary];

string targetUrl = parentWeb.Url;

SPUser workflowUser = parentWeb.AllUsers[_workflowUser];

// Open site as workflow service account

SPSite site = new SPSite(targetUrl, workflowUser.UserToken);

site.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

// Open web as workflow service account

SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb();

web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

// Get Item object as workflow service account

SPList formsLibrary = web.Lists[_formsLibrary];

SPListItem item = formsLibrary.GetItemById(itemID);

// Getting workflow information

SPWorkflowAssociation workflowTemplate = formsLibrary.WorkflowAssociations.GetAssociationByName(_workflowName, System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);

// Getting workflow Manager to start workflow

SPWorkflowManager mgr = site.WorkflowManager;

// Starting workflow as service account

mgr.StartWorkflow(item, workflowTemplate, workflowTemplate.AssociationData);

web.Dispose();

site.Dispose();

parentWeb.Dispose();

});

First off I’m getting my variables from my web.config appSettings, you could just as easily set these in a property bag on an SPSite or SPWeb object. After that, I start running the next few lines in the context of the application pool so that I know I have access for everything I need to populate other variables I will need down the road. The fun part comes when I open the SPSite site object using the workflowUser.UserToken object. After that all items that I use the parent site object to obtain is opened up as that workflowUser

["Brian"]

Official 64-bit IFilter from Adobe

2008-12-09T21:37:00Z

Finally, Adobe has released an official IFilter to support a 64-bit platform which can be found here:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025

I have yet to implement this in a production environment, but it’s got to be better than the hack to make the 32-bit install work in a 64-bit environment. Most likely you will need to recycle the OSearch service on your index server and then perform a full crawl in order to start seeing full text information of PDF’s.

["Brian"]

Large Files + Server 2008 = 404 error

2008-12-04T14:02:00Z

Just the other day I was looking into an interesting SharePoint issue where the user was experiencing a generic 404 error when trying to upload a document that was over 30MB, but their SharePoint settings on the web application was set to over 100MB. Also, if they were trying to upload documents (over 30MB) through the Multiple Document Upload procedure, it would look like the document upload process was running normally until the page refreshed and no new documents were showing in the library.

After looking around for a while I came across this knowledge base article that explained everything:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944981

It looks like in Server 2008 (or more importantly IIS 7.0), Microsoft mysteriously put a cap on the Max Content Length for a web request, so in order to circumvent the issue you are able to put an extra entry in your web.config like this:

<system.webServer>

</requestFiltering>

</security>

</system.webServer>

The value for the maxAllowedContentLength property is setting the maximum file size of an uploaded file in bytes. You should make sure to set this value LARGER than your maximum document upload file size in SharePoint otherwise you will see those friendly 404 errors.

["Brian"]

Content Query Web Part - Field Types

2008-12-01T19:36:00Z

Over the last few months I have had to configure various Content Query Web Parts (CQWP) to provide portal rollups that can be pre-packaged and re-configured in the SharePoint UI instead of having to use SharePoint Designer when using Data View Web Parts.

I could go into the basics of setting up a CQWP, but since others have done it for us I’ll just provide some link love here. Even though this post if fairly old it provides a TON of value for those getting started with the CQWP, but the main thing I find missing is how to identify the items needed in the CommonViewFields property. You can find the internal field name pretty easy by going to your list settings, and then look at the URL when you hover over the column you want to identify. The Field Query String parameter gives you the internal name you need.

Now that you have the internal name for the columns you need, now you need the column type. I haven’t been able to find a decent resource for all of the column types, so I figured this is where I needed to list them all out:

Display Column Type	Internal Column Type
Single line of text	Text
Multiple lines of text	Note
Choice	Choice
Number	Number
Currency	Currency
Date and Time	DateTime
Lookup	Lookup
Yes/No	Boolean
Person or Group	User
Hyperlink or Picture	URL
Calculated	Calculated

Of course these are all the default column types you can create, however there are some others, like the Publishing columns such as:

Display Column Type	Internal Column Type
Publishing Image	Image
Publishing HTML	HTML

Another nice way to see what these values are would be to use PowerShell. I will often drop into PowerShell and look at the fields in a specific list to view the internal name, along with other variables, the following lines will output a table of all fields associated with a list and the Display Name, Internal Name, Display Column Type, and the Internal Column Type:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")

$site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://moss150")

$web = $site.OpenWeb()

$list = $web.Lists["CQWP"]

$list.Fields | Format-Table Title, InternalName, TypeDisplayName, TypeAsString

Having these items should now set you up to have all the information you need to customize your Content Query Web Part. Just create a customized template in the ItemStyle.xsl (or create your own custom XSL file and link to it using the ItemXslLink property in your .webpart file) to render the information you need and you should be ready to start utilizing the infamous Content Query Web Part.

["Brian"]

NOTE: If you are going to use any of the ddwrt commands that you might be used to using SharePoint Designer to format dates and such, make sure to include the appropriate stylesheet in the header of your XSL file:

xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime"

Presenting at MNSPUG in October

2008-09-25T14:45:00Z

Ok, so it's been forever since I was able to throw a post out here, but I figured this was important enough to write while getting ready for the day. On October 8th I'll be presenting at the Minnesota SharePoint Users Group on SharePoint Administration topics. Here is the official release:

At this event we will dig into components of SharePoint Administration. We’ll start by reviewing terminology for SharePoint Administration. Next we’ll dig into Backup and Recovery in SharePoint. Finally we’ll look at ways to move SharePoint content around using various tools and techniques.

Discussion points include

STSADM
Catastrophic vs. more granular backup/restore methods
The Content Migration Wizard

While this topic focuses on SharePoint Administration topics it will be valuable for non-administrators to understand the capabilities of SharePoint as well as for Developers who will learn new ways to automate administrative tasks in SharePoint.

So, if you are interested in some high level conversations about SharePoint Administration from an IT Pro level (with a sprinkle of developer stuff thrown in there too), please come and add to the discussions. Hope to see you there.

["Brian"]

OMG where did my "Title" go?

2008-07-25T14:00:00Z

If you have ever needed to deal with Site Columns and Content Types you probably have come across the dreaded "Title" column and maybe felt creative and changed it to a different name, and figured if I need to change it back, I can change it back... right?

I've come across many clients that have changed the column name, then tried to change it back to "Title" only to come across this taunting dialog box

"The column name that you entered is already in use or reserved. Choose another name." You may be thinking, you let me change it, why can't I change it back?

The good news is, with the magic that is PowerShell you can. If you open PowerShell and get your $site and $web objects you can retrieve your "broken" field by calling $web.Fields["fieldName"] or in my case $web.Fields["PowerShell"]. Looking at the properties of that field you will notice the "Title" property is what you had previously set, along with a LOT of different properties for that field.

In order to change it back to, simply modify $field.Title = "Title" and process a $field.Update(). Below is a sample set of calls to reset the field back to "Title".

After the you have updated the field in PowerShell you will want to make sure to push that change to all content types based on Item. Go to your top level site and locate the Item content type where you will see the column back to "Title".

Go ahead and open up the site column from the "Edit site column in new window" link

If you had also changed the group away from the OOTB group and want it "hidden" again, change the group back to _Hidden and click OK.

NOTE: If you have a large site collection with many subwebs this process can take some time to complete. Also if you have any workflows or any custom event that is targetted to that old name the possibility that it is now reset to Title is good, make sure to check your processes.

["Brian"]

Site Definition visibility property

2008-07-17T19:46:00Z

I was helping a co-worker of mine today determine why the Site Directory site definition was not showing up as an option underneath a Publishing Portal and found a nice property for site definitions I never knew existed. By the way, it turns out that in order for the Site Directory to show up as an option you need to have the PortalLayouts feature enabled, which of course is a hidden feature but is also enabled as a dependency from the Office SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection feature or...(read more)

Content Deployment Wizard

2008-07-17T12:21:00Z

Even though this news is a little more than a month old, the SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard, created by Chris O'Brien has finally reached Release 1.0 and can be found on CodePlex . I have recommended, and used, this tool for various migrations where we have needed to re-organize content within new sites. The best part about this tool is it's fully used through a GUI so all types of people can use it. To see how to use the tool visit Chris' blog here . Since webs are always bound...(read more)

Tech Ed 2008 - IT Professionals 06/12/08 Recap

2008-06-13T17:18:00Z

Another day, a whole lot of additional information gained from being here at Tech Ed. I stared out the day with an interactive session with some individuals from Microsoft IT who showed us all the various uses of the Content Query Web Part. An extremely useful tool, once you get passed some of the configuration hurdles. The most exicting session of the day was the PACKED Interactive Theatre with the "Ask the experts" SharePoint panel. The moderators of the session where Shane Young [MVP...(read more)

Tech Ed 2008 - IT Professionals 06/11/08 Recap

2008-06-12T03:41:00Z

Another extremely productive day at Tech Ed. This day I primarily focused on the technology that is true and dear to my heart... SharePoint The first session of the day highlighted the Solution Accelerators built for SharePoint. This session included a ton of information about the new Asset Inventory Tool (currently in beta through Microsoft Connect ... can't wait to try this one), SharePoint Capacity Planning tool , SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit , and the Cross-Site Configurator . The next session...(read more)