Stories from a SharePoint Engineer who isn't afraid of Visual Studio.
… and Google Reader damnation is what I should be calling my blog. Once upon a time, not too long ago I was able to keep up with my blogging and feed reading quite well. But after nearly a month of non-stop 12-hour SharePoint days I think I am finally on information overload. *sigh….
That’s my Google Reader feed aggregator in case you didn’t recognize the UI. I’ve been contemplating all week whether or not I should just wipe everything out and start over. But I couldn’t do thaaaaat! I’m subscribed to too many awesome sites. So here’s my catch up plan (yet to be implemented):
1. Use the expanded folder view
2. Click on a desired feed & use theList view
Let’s take SharePointKicks.com for example… 73 new items… hmmm…
3. Scroll through List view and only read interesting titles
Unfortunately for SharePointKicks I don’t really see any interesting SharePoint blogs…
4. Hit the Mark all as read Button
Et voila! 73 down, 200+ more blogs and 3000+ posts more to go… I must admit, I first got this tip from Robert Scoble. I still can’t comprehend how he keeps up with his bazillion blogs everyday.
How do you keep control of your feed reading?
Haven’t been able to find much information about this anomaly, so I thought I’d post it..
Scenario: Team site with document libraries. They all use custom content types with required fields including the document’s ‘Title’ property.
Cause: Saving and working with encrypted (password protected) office documents.
Problem: When users initially save documents to the document library, encrypted or not, they are forced to fill out required properties in the Document Information Panel defined by the default content type. Since these fields are required, the document is automatically checked out by default. So far, so good. But when the user tries to check the document in via the client, an error is produced. Only saves will work.
This forces the user to manually check the file in via the browser/document library interface. Only problem is that none of the document properties are saved and users have to manually edit the properties from the browser and then go back again to the item’s property menu to check in the file. This happens again everytime the same file is opened in Edit mode. Very tedious! Unencrypted documents are not affected.
Hopefully this will help others along the way and save you some gray hairs. Anyone know of a fix or workaround for this?
WordPress rocks by the way, typed this post up on my mobile while waiting at the doctor’s office. 🙂
Before I rant, has anyone encountered a Vista machine looping on boot up endlessly? Here’s the backstory:
I upgraded XP SP2 to Vista Ultimate a few weeks ago and just realized today that my secondary hard drive wasn’t being recognized by Vista. Disk management was useless and gave me no options to remove or mount. So I went to the BIOS to look for something to change, didn’t really see anything interesting… may have changed some boot up options, but changed it back to default BIOS settings.
Everytime I try to boot, it goes to the Vista logo and then automatically restarts… incessantly.
So far I’ve tried the Startup repair option from the Vista disk, deleted/rebuilt master boot records, and just about everything else I could find on Microsoft’s Knowledgebase and newsgroups.
Any suggestions anyone?
** Begin Rant **
Spent all weekend moving and I’m still unpacking.
Damn you Cox Cable, 2 weeks after signing up for service and still no cable + internet.
Launched 2 MOSS 2007 portals in a hurry.
Barely able to keep up with emails.
Falling asleep at my desk…
Need sleep…
** End Rant **
Well, only in certain situations. I was pruning a couple of Document Libraries of empty folders today and noticed either an anomaly or feature that should make you cringe. I opened the Document Library in Explorer View so I could select multiple folders to check the size of them via right-click > properties. It showed 0kb so I thought cool, there’s nothing in here, I can delete it, so I did. But wait!
Not so fast if you’re using Content Types with required/forced metadata. This forces documents to be checked-out by default until the user manually adds in the metadata and checks the file back in. The best part is if they don’t feel like filling out these fields and they leave the files checked-out as a result, the world will never know it exists. Not even the super-SharePoint-admin!
So after I deleted a bunch of supposedly 0kb folders, I went to check the Recycle Bin just for kicks and lo and behold… one of the folders I had just deleted shows to be containing 50MB+ worth of stuff. All invisible because the end-user never bothered to check the file in. Bollocks!
If you guys haven’t seen this already, check out ajaxWindows. I’ve always thought this would be the future of desktops but not this soon! It’s basically a hosted OS with just about any application you can think of albeit not the usual MS stuff. Heck, it can even sync up with the contents of your local computer and uses your Gmail account as the storage space.
I think we’re entering an age where applications are seeing accelerated growth just like the CPU wars of the late 90’/early 00’s. The advancements in AJAX, WPF, Silverlight and other development frameworks are just amazing in that they are enabling developers and designers to create extremely intuitive and appealing applications. With increased work and research going into all this usability like with multi-touch/virtual desktop devices, it’ll be very interesting to see what becomes of this cloud computing paradigm in the next few years.
Oh yeah, how’s this related to SharePoint? Imagine if we could have a BumpTop or an ajaxWindows that multiple people could log-on to and collaborate on stuff together. Maybe enable some web cam streaming on each corner of the page and Document in the middle? Maybe MOSS 2012? :p
Just got this email as a TED subscriber and man, I love this kind of stuff. I always get this warm feeling when I see people joining together for a common cause to improve our world. If SharePoint didn’t exist I’d probably be working in a third world country somewhere. 🙂
“In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.”
Here’s an often forgotten feature that any SharePoint Designer person should be aware of. It’s the ability to edit and customize the default form fields for any list. This is made possible by using SharePoint Designer to navigate and open the form page that you want to edit. When you open the page you’ll see something like this:
You’ve probably tried right clicking around, trying to convert the web part to a dataview web part, and then you threw up your hands and said this is impossible!
But wait! Check this out… First select the ListFormWebPart and *EDIT: DO NOT hit the delete key. Instead hide the webpart. If you delete it, this will happen: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935504
Ta da! Now you can go about your daily business of form customizations.
Here’s another quirk for SharePoint Admins & Designers out there. If you ever come across something like “soap:ServerServer was unable to process request” while trying to work with pages in SharePoint Designer, congratulations! Now you can also be a part time DBA. Here’s a description of the problem:
While working with custom SharePoint pages in SharePoint Designer, I would occasionally get an error preventing me from opening the page to edit. The error would say “soap:ServerServer was unable to process request” along with some other not very helpful messages like you need FrontPage Extensions installed and to contact your Administrator. I thought this was just a glitch so I kept opening the file until it actually opened. And this worked for quite a while. But then the last couple of days I couldn’t get the custom page opened no matter how many times I tried. Off to the SharePoint Community I go…
Luckily someone else was having the same exact issue recently and was able to help out with some clues. I’m nowhere near a DBA, and still don’t understand how transaction log files work fully but I was at my wits end so I tried the suggested solutions. My log file was over 50GB’s by the way. So first I tried to shrink the SharePoint_Config Log file using the following SQL Query:
USE SharePoint_Config
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE (SharePoint_Config_Log, EMPTYFILE)
GO
No good, I get another wonderful error saying that I can not shrink the log file because it’s still in use. Off to the SQL Groups …… Sweet! So now I get to try a different SQL script (In addition to and before the one above):
BACKUP LOG SharePoint_Config WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
*Checking the Log file size*
Awesome! Now it’s only 500kb.
*Opening the custom page in SharePoint Designer*
Gnarly! Opens no problem. And now I get to go back to doing UI stuff. 🙂
So in summary, here are the SQL scripts you need to do to reduce the size of your transaction log files:
BACKUP LOG SharePoint_Config WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY
USE SharePoint_Config
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE (SharePoint_Config_Log, EMPTYFILE)
GO
If you know of any pitfalls of doing this feel free to leave us some comments!
Scenario: I have a MOSS 2007 server setup for intra/extranet collaboration using Alternate Access Mapping + 2 Site Collections. One Site Collection for the portal, one for the My Sites. Both set to Basic Authentication only in IIS so extranet users wouldn’t have to type their login as ‘domain\username’.
Problem: The Search Service Crawler Account can only crawl sites that are set to Integrated Windows Authentication. Therefore, crawling won’t occur on the Site Collections using Basic Authentication.
Error Message: Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)
Solution: Extend your Site Collections with Integrated Windows Authentication and set the extended Site Collections to be the default websites in Alternate Access Mapping.
References:
http://www.kevincornwell.com/blog/index.php/windows-sharepoint-services-wss-30-search-setup-notes/
The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife 
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