SharePoint

Chicago Microsoft Business Strategies Group Sept Meeting Wrap Up

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:31:46 GMT

It was long drive, Central Illinois to Chicago for the monthly Chicago Microsoft Sharepoint Strategies Group meeting and a longer drive home I might add thanks to the night-time construction traffic. After wandering around a few city blocks (felt lucky to find the car after it was all said and done) I finally made it to the meeting space. The Chicago Microsoft SharePoint Business Strategies Group is a fairly new group that focuses more on the business use of SharePoint and not the normal technical details of the product. Last night NewsGator presented a Social Computing demonstration to a room full of SharePoint business users. Next on the agenda was a basic presentation from eCopy which will scan and dump document images into a SharePoint library. Four of us adjourned to a nearby watering hole and continued the SharePoint discussion until I needed to start the hunt for my car. A four hour ride home thanks to the midnight construction and I am back to the daily SharePoint grind today.

If you are interested in SharePoint and live in the Chicago area you should meet up with this Chicago Microsoft Business Strategies Group. Their site is available at: http://web.meetup.com/69/

The Last Pint - Remembering a Friend

Darrin Bishop — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:53:07 GMT

I almost did not check my emails before I left the house today… One cannot explain the grief I felt when I checked the mail on the phone and realized the SharePoint community lost a dear friend. Wading though way too many eamils this morning to my disbelief I leaned that Patrick Tisseghem passed away.

Patrick was practically a SharePoint icon, not only in the European community but world-wide. Many of us have had the pleasure of meeting Patrick at one of his training sessions, SharePoint conference or by reading one of his many books, articles or posts.

For myself, I distinctly remember the first time I met Patrick. We were both speaking at an Advisor Summit in Phoenix, Az. As the speakers made their way across the hot pavement quiet and soft spoken Patrick and I introduced ourselves and made our way with the pack to dinner. It was during that time that Patrick made some SharePoint fame with his famous Beer database.

Over the years we connected primarily on the conference circuits, in and out of the speaker room and the after hour events. Patrick was always there, pint in hand, quiet and on the edge of the crowd. Always willing to talk and listen. Strange quality for an instructor, Patrick was more of a listener than a speaker after hours.

I can easily recount the events and parties that we happened to be together at, many now are all a blur over the years. I can say that my parting memory of Patrick will be TechEd 2008 in Orlando. Heading back to the speaker hotel from an event, my Matt and I happened upon Patrick taking a break on the bench outside the hotel. We sat an talked for a few minutes and as usual headed to the hotel bar. Over pints we discussed his current book, watched some sports and just kicked back. For me personally I will be left with a fond Patrick memory of TechEd, Pints, Books and Friends.

SharePoint Integrated Reporting Services - Manifest does not match

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:10:04 GMT

After a successful, long and painful installation and configuration of SQL Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode with Kerberos I finally forced SSRS to work very nicely with my R&D SharePoint lab this week.

Yesterday I installed SQL Reporting Services and SP2 on an existing MOSS box in our integrated development environment. Installation and configuration of SSRS went smooth an easy up until I logged into Central Admin to configure Reporting Services. I received the following error:

"The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference."

The fix for my situation was simple - rerun the SQL Server Reporting Service install effectively repairing the server.

AddSolution - Failed to extract the cab file

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:40:17 GMT

Seems like I have been building and deploying features and solution for weeks. I have run into this error while attempting to add a solution to the solution store: Failed to extract the cab file in the solution.

Seems like there is more than a few reasons why you might see this return from your STSADM addsolution command but for myself each time was this error was associated with a duplicate entry in my .ddf file. I spent some time trying to determine what was causing this error and then happened upon Rob's post on the topic: STSADM strikes again, Failed to extract the cab file in the solution...

You can check your DDF files for duplicates. If you can't seem to located the offending duplicate then try renaming your web solution file to .CAB extension and open it. The cab file will open sorted by name and you might be able to more easily find the duplicate file.

Social Computing In SharePoint, MS Resource

Darrin Bishop — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:50:34 GMT

I happen to be tracing down a specific Microsoft Press release and happened across Microsoft's "Learn more about Social Computing" a set of SharePoint Social Computing resources. This site contains many resources about social computing using SharePoint including case studies, white papers and news.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/collaboration/social.mspx

Infrastructure Update Issues

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:59:13 GMT

Microsoft's Infrastructure Updates have been out for about a week now. There does seem to be some potential big issues with the updates breaking third party products. Microsoft also has posted a KB article on Alternate Access Mappings issues associated with the Infrastructure updates.

Here are a few key posts you should be looking at if you have installed or are considering installing the Infrastructure Updates:

AAM issue with Infrastructure Update

Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: July 15, 2008

KB: When is the SPContext.Current available ? (SharePoint dev)

SharePoint Magazine Is Live

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:08:38 GMT

SharePoint Magazine is a new online resource for your SharePoint information. Arno Nel from South Africa is the Magazine's editor. Check it out at www.sharepointmagazine.net

Announcing the International SharePoint Professionals Association

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:05:43 GMT

SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.

ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly – support for one another.

ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists – existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance – the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.

Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.

If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepoint.net. Together, the community can achieve what was impossible as individuals – becomes a part of ISPA today!

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers Released

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:02:50 GMT

Last week Microsoft announced three new updates for the following products:

SharePoint Server 2007
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Project Server 2007
Search Server 2008
Search Server 2008 Express
Project Professional 2007.

These infrastructure updates are more than just hot fixes. The updates include hot fixes and platform improvements. There is a WSS and MOSS version of the updates and the WSS version should be applied prior to the MOSS version. Both x86 and x64 is available

The Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) applies to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) applies to the following server products:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office Project Server 2007
Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
Project Professional 2007 (client)

Key features in the Infrastructure Updates include new search features and functionality from Microsoft SharePoint Search Server 2008, Content Deployment fixes, improved performance for profile import, and improvements to updating and patching.

The SharePoint Team Blog post has some KEY information that you should read before you install these updates. You can find out more from the SharePoint Team blog at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

Here are the download links for the WSS/MOSS infrastructure updates:

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x64

The Project Professional 2007 client update is located at: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F385ADB8-0425-4BA4-BECE-7664B8F49D12&displaylang=en

I just happen to be building a brand new development server and I plan to apply these updates after the build is complete.

GetActiveFeatureDefinitions - A SharePoint PowerShell Function

Darrin Bishop — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:49:23 GMT

Here is one more feature-related PowerShell script to quickly display which features are active based on a given SharePoint url. This script takes a SharePoint end point (url) as the first parameter and optional exclude parameters for each of the possible feature scopes. This function will output SPFeatureDefinition objects that will display in the PowerShell host or can be used further in the pipeline as SPFeatureDefinitions.

I want to point out that this function returns SPFeatureDefinition objects as the function name suggests. Why do I return SPFeatureDefintion objects? Simple, the SPFarm object does not contain a collection of activated features while all the other scopes (WebApplication, Site, and Web) do. There is no SPFeature to retrieve from the SPFarm, all intstalled features scoped for the farm are active. Since I use this function as a simple and quick way to see what features are activated based on the url endpoint I really only need the feature definition which contains the interesting properties including displayname, scope and hidden.

Now one warning - this function simply determines which features are activated based on the url end point. This does not mean that the feature directly affect the particular web or site. Some features are scoped at the farm or web app for a particular end point but does not manifest itself in the site or web. For example, you might find publishing features listed as active when you are looking at a team site. Even though the team site is not using publishing features the feature is still activated for the farm or web application. For this reason I included parameters that allow you to exclude features scoped at a particular level.

To use this function you must load the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly into your PowerShell host. To load the SharePoint Assembly in a PowerShell session type and run the following command:

[Reflection.Assembly]::Load("Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c")

And now the function:

function GetActiveFeatureDefinitions
{
   param ([String] $webUrl,
             [Switch] $ExcludeFarm,
             [Switch] $ExcludeWebApp,
             [Switch] $ExcludeSite,
             [Switch] $ExcludeWeb )

   $site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite $webUrl
   $web = $site.OpenWeb()
   $webAPP = $site.WebApplication
   $Farm = $WebApp.Farm

   if(!$ExcludeWeb.IsPresent)
   { $featureDefs = $web.features | %{$_.Definition}}

   if(!$ExcludeSite.IsPresent)
   { $featureDefs += $site.features | %{$_.Definition}}

   if(!$ExcludeWebApp.IsPresent)
   { $featureDefs += $webApp.features | foreach-object{$_.Definition}}

   if(!$ExcludeFarm.IsPresent)
   { $featureDefs += $farm.FeatureDefinitions | Where-Object{$_.Scope -eq 'Farm'}}

   $web.Dispose
   $site.Dispose
   return $featureDefs
}

Here are some example uses of GetActiveFeatureDefintions:

GetActiveFeatureDefinitions http://localhost
GetActiveFeatureDefinitions http://localhost  -excludeFarm
GetActiveFeatureDefinitions http://localhost -excludeFarm -excludeWebApp

Remember the function exports SPFeatureDefinition objects and can be used in the pipeline. Here are a few examples to try:

$fds= GetActiveFeatureDefinitions http://localhost -excludeFarm
$fds.count

GetActiveFeatureDefinitions http://localhost -excludeFarm   | Sort-Object Scope | Format-Table DisplayName, Scope, Hidden, Id -auto

GetActiveFeatureDefinitions http://localhost | Where-Object{$_.Hidden -eq $true} |Sort-Object Scope | Format-Table DisplayName, Scope, Hidden, Id -auto