Wes Preston

Wes's Blog has moved

wpreston — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:32:00 GMT

My blog has moved to a new location!

http://www.idubbs.com/blog

Come and visit - all are welcome. :)

I have moved all my 'historical' blog posts over and will no longer post to this location. At some point, the content from this location will be archived and removed.

SharePoint Conference 2008

wpreston — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:40:00 GMT

The SharePoint Conference 2008 event is underway. Things started up tonight with registration and an opening night reception in the exhibition hall with all the vendors. Many of the usual suspects were already in attendance, speaking at booths or mingling. The Sheraton Hotel across the street seems like it will be a center of activity being so close - especially the lounge downstairs that everyone seems to pass through on their way in or out.

Lawrence just posted some tidbits to be released tomorrow in the Bill Gates keynote - details about catching the webcast and some of the announcements can be found HERE. Lots of exciting news and at least one that will be timely for this month's MNSPUG meeting topic.

Now lets see how the sessions look for tomorrow...

Minnesota SharePoint User Group Announcements

wpreston — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:35:00 GMT

A few annoucements posted on the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG) site today (yes, I'm cross-posting myself):

February MNSPUG Meeting: SharePoint Development Overview
Neil Iversen will be presenting.

Lunch and Learn (post MNSPUG): KnowledgeLake - Content Management Business Solutions

February MODIG Meeting: Feature Development
The first meeting of the new Minneapolis Office Developer Interest Group (MODIG)
Neil Iversen will be presenting.

We hope to see you there!

January MNSPUG Recap

wpreston — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:05:00 GMT

We had over 70 attendees at this morning's Minnesota SharePoint Users Group meeting and had vendor presentations from CommVault and Barracuda Tools (DeliverPoint 2007).

Special thanks to Jim Holthaus from CommVault and Bill Kuhn from Barracuda for their time and information.

The 'basic' slide deck is available here if you'd like links to any of the sessions, conferences, blog postings, etc that were mentioned during the meeting.

SharePoint 2007 SP1 Released

wpreston — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:37:00 GMT

Service Pack 1 for the following 2007 SharePoint Products and Technologies has been released:

WSS 3.0
MOSS
SharePoint Designer

More information can be found HERE. This is NOT a double-click install - which is why I'm not going to link directly to the file. Be sure to read the SharePoint Team Blog posting as well as the TechNet article before installing SP1.

SharePoint 2007 SP1: Coming soon!

wpreston — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:09:00 GMT

News and details for WSS and MOSS SP1 are heating up. More details recently from the SharePoint Team: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/11/29/preview-into-wss-3-0-sp1-and-sharepoint-server-2007-sp1.aspx

Thanks Joel!

MOSS: Deleting webs with sub webs

wpreston — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:03:00 GMT

Another interesting little trivia point: When attempting to delete a web from its own Site Settings page, the delete action will fail if the web has sub webs. If the same web is deleted from the Site Content and Structure page (MOSS only), the site and all of its sub webs will be deleted in one step - possibly saving you a lot of time.

FYI - If the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 tool is being used, both the web and its child webs ARE backed up prior to deletion - very nice.

MOSS 2007 Site Navigation Settings: Tips and Tricks

wpreston — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:36:00 GMT

Having the ability to manage the Quick Links (left navigation) and top tabbed navigation in MOSS is a fine step forward from v2. However, in some circumstances when trying to manage these items, the list can get long (especially when showing subsites and/or pages). The longer the list, the more cumbersome it is to manage because you have to select an item from the treeview and then scroll up to the editing toolbar to make your changes.

Conveniently, the links in the toolbar are just javascript calls. You can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by adding the toolbar links directly to your browser's Links/Favorites toolbar. This way you can scroll to the part of the navigation tree that you are editing and stay there - using the browser links instead of the editing toolbar.

Navigate to the Site Navigation Settings Page: Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Modify Navigation
Highlight an item in the treeview that enables all of the toolbar options
For each toolbar option, right-click on the toolbar option and either Copy Shortcut or Add to Favorites...
Depending on your browser, build a favorites menu with the toolbar links in it.
Edit navigation without having to scroll around!
Don't forget to select OK when you're done...

MNSPUG November Meeting Recap

wpreston — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:57:00 GMT

We had a nice turn out at this morning's Minnesota SharePoint User's Group meeting on SharePoint Collaboration and Unified Communications with over 120 people attending. We did a quick review of the latest news and blog posts from the last month or so, went over a VERY high level review of what SharePoint offers in the collaboration workspace and led into Steve's presentation and demos of Unified Communication and how it fits into the SharePoint context.

The meeting slide decks from Wes and Steve have been posted in the presentations area:

Intro deck

Unified Communications deck

WSS v3: Important Security Hotfix MS07-059

wpreston — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:53:00 GMT

Be sure to check out this hotfix for WSS v3 as posted on the SharePoint Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/10/09/important-security-hotfix-ms07-059.aspx

KB Article also available here (coming soon if not working): http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms07-059.mspx

Details available at the links above...

0k SharePoint Logs

wpreston — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:59:00 GMT

So here's a new one to me. I've seen SharePoint logging creating 0k log files in the past - due to a variety of reasons like service account permissions being out of wack and the timer job somehow getting 'stuck'. Usually when I come across these 0k files, it's when I'm trying to debug something on a site only to find out that nothing I've been doing is getting logged - irritating. Anyhow, the other common circumstance I run into is that by the time I notice that 0k files are being created (hey, maybe 0k log files should be a monitorable event that gets reported by MOM, etc... someone get on that...) its long after any useful logs have been purged from the system - so there's a directory full of 0k files. Go put your troubleshooting hat on.

This week while working on a client site, I actually got to catch the log files 'going 0k', so there were still a few logs with content in them. So, I checked out the most recent log with any data in it and found an interesting entry - the last one in fact:

10/01/2007 15:41:43.65 wsstracing.exe (0x0664) 0x07AC ULS Logging Unified Logging Service uls2 Monitorable Not enough free disk space available. The tracing service has temporary stopped outputting trace messages to the log file. Tracing will resume when more than 220 MB of disk space becomes available

Wow, that's hilarious. Not only is SharePoint intelligent enough to know when to hold off on logging so it doesn't contribute any further to the obvious issue, but it’s polite enough to tell us about it. I had a good laugh about this, but it gets better.

I go ahead and clean up what few files I can to get above the 220 MB limit. (yes, there were a few other issues here that should be dealt with - this particular environment was very constrained for space and the log files should be moved off of the C: drive, etc...) Then I go back and check the log files. True to its word, not only has SharePoint restarted its logging it’s given us the following message:

10/02/2007 15:29:12.92 wsstracing.exe (0x0664) 0x1030 ULS Logging Unified Logging Service 7055 Information The tracing service has resumed outputting trace messages to the log file.

Fun stuff. It made me smile. J

Daylight Savings and SharePoint - again...

wpreston — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:10:00 GMT

As was mentioned this past spring, with the 'recent' changes to Daylight Savings time, updates need to be made to both 2003 and 2007 SharePoint systems. The SharePoint Team blog has a posting covering these changes and can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/09/19/important-hotfixes-for-upcoming-daylight-savings-time-dst-change.aspx

The important links are:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist#WSS3
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist#WSS2
For the overall listing of Microsoft product updates related to DST changes, go to: http://support.microsoft.com/dst2007.

Thanks Lawrence!

Be sure to get your fixes in place before the time change.

SharePoint User Group updates

wpreston — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:04:00 GMT

Uff-da. Its been far too long since my last post.

Last month's MNSPUG meeting on SharePoint Branding finally overflowed the room. We've been close before, but this was definitely over the edge. This coming month (Ocbober) Raymond is going to be touring the IASPUG, NESPUG and MNSPUG groups doing a presentation on Composite Applications in SharePoint - highlighting SharePoint Designer's capabilities. It's sure to be a great topic, so make sure you get there early.

Also be sure to check out some of the other presentations in the Mpls area that we've posted on the www.sharepointmn.com site. There are two coming up this week so check in soon!

TIPS - SSP Profile Properties

wpreston — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 05:53:00 GMT

Spending some time working with Profile Properties (MOSS SSP) lately, I came across a few tips that might save time for others:

When reordering profile properties on the View Profile Properties page, you are only able to move fields up or down one position at a time (one position per click). If you need to do multiple moves, you can save some time by clicking on an arrow (up or down) to move the field - after the page refreshes, the same arrow control retains focus and can be repeated by using 'Enter'. Its still slow going if you need to do a lot of reordering fields, but it can certainly save some effort.
(Thanks Erik!)
There are some reserved words that can't be used for profile property names. I haven't seen a comprehensive list, but know for sure that 'Region' is one of them. The interface will allow the addition of the field, but it won't work properly. My experience was that adding the field worked just fine, but mapping to an AD field and attempting to import showed some inconsistencies. The import appeared to work just fine, but no data was imported and any existing data was blanked out. Deleting the property and creating one with a non-reserved name allowed the field and import to work perfectly.

Hopefully these are helpful to someone. Enjoy!