Shared Points for SharePoint

SharePoint isn’t just for Servers anymore

Stian Kirkeberg — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:24:12 GMT

On SPC, Matthew Burnet, Application Developer for the SharePoint team, had a session on how you can use Windows 7 as a development platform for SharePoint 2010. Here are some key points from the session. If you are doing any development, testing or deployment of SharePoint, I think you will find this most useful!

Windows 7 SharePoint 2010 Developer

Just for SharePoint 2010 Developers
- Enables VS2010, TFS, Office 2010 Client, Desktop experience
Applies to SharePoint Foundation (WSSv4) and SharePoint Server 2010
- x64 Windows 7 and install xml configuration file changes
- Standalone installation is NOT supported in Production
- SDK: Windows 7 SharePoint Developer Install Guide (this is what you should look for in the Beta 2 SDK)

You will need to manual install the prerequisites on win7. But the main thing is that you now can develop on a platform with all the tools and business applications you need. There is no question many business have custom applications that are not target for running as client on servers OS. That was a problem in some scenarios with SP2007 development. Now, you can run the full set on your client win7 machine.

Another nice feature is that “Sleep“ is now supported. You can press the sleep button on your computer with SharePoint running. When you wake your computer up again, SharePoint is up and running; alive and well! And fast!

SharePoint 2010 Performance on Windows 7

A question I have been asked again and again is “How much resources does SP2010 and VS2010 require?” The screen shot show the performance monitor on the demoed system, not going over 4 GB for the entire demo. The system had 8 GB, but a 4 GB system will be OK with Win7 and SP2010. Matthew run full installation of SP2010, Office 2010, VS2010 and more. He demoed running several programs at the same time, still with keeping the RAM usage below 4 GB. :) That is impressive. However, I would advice installing 8 GB on your machine, with at least 80 GB hdd and a dual proc x64 cpu.

Consider using two hard drives, even on a laptop. When you start creating VHD’s you’ll need a lot of space. You probably would keep more than one vhd at you developer machine at all times. I like to keep one syspreped vhd and two dev disks. The recommendation is to use fixed sized vhd disks for best performance (if booting to vhd).

Developer Platform

Windows 7 SharePoint Server
- Install, start up, WSS or SharePoint
- Minimum configurations
Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools
- Installed as part of VS2010, TFS, PowerShell
Office 2010 Client Applications
- Are putting it all together.

This is really all you need. As I said before, remember to run the prerequisites installation manually. And do not run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard right away. I won’t go into the details about the installation process here, they are well documented already and I guess the process will be further streamlined as we approach RTM.

installation steps

Install Windows 7 x64 – Standalone installs
- Manually configure roles (IIS, setup file)
- Install SP2010 Prerequisites (WSS Vs. SP)
- Install SP2010, VS2010, Office 2010
Performance - IIS, SQL Express
- x64 dual-proc 2Ghz, 8Gb Ram, 80Gb HD
Single Server Farm Install /w SQL Server
- PS: New-SPConfigurationDatabase
  (Do not run the configuration wizard, follow the script instead)
SharePoint 2010 PowerShell

I recommend you install only the services you need to do your development. Running a lot of processes you never are going to use on your machine is really just a waste or resources.

SharePoint 2010 PowerShell

PowerShell will replace stsadm commands in SP2010. As a developer, buildmaster or IT Pro, you must master this subject. Her are some starters and you could also take a look at my blog post “SharePoint and PowerShell – Practical tips”.

First add the SharePoint pssnapin:

add-pssnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"

Then use “get-help … “ to find the command you need:

get-help get-SP* / get-help *Add* / get-help *Remove*

get-help new-SPSite

get-help New-SPSite –examples

get-help get-SP*

PowerShell Editor for VS2010

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell_ise

New Web Application

New-SPWebApplication – start from scratch

Creating Site Collection or Web.

New-SPSite – Prompting for Parameters or use -URL

New-SPWeb -url http://localhost/sites/SCLocalhost/test1

Developer Dashboard (also take a look at the blog post about the developer dashboard here)

# OnDemand / Off / On

$ddsetting.DisplayLevel=

[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::OnDemand

$ddsetting.Update()

Remove SharePoint items

Remove-SPSite –Identity http://localhost

Remove-SPSolution // Remove-SPWebApplication

IIS 7 PowerShell “import-module WebAdministration”

Example: Get-Website

For destruction

Use either CA or PowerShell(preferable) to drop and recreate the site collection, web application, Content dB. Alternatively, you can run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard. Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1 deletes the specified Web application; this command does not remove the content databases or the IIS Web site.
C:\PS>Get-SPWebApplication http://sitename | Remove-SPWebApplication -Zone "Internet" -Confirm

Example 2 permanently removes the Web application, all content databases, and the IIS Web site.
C:\PS>Remove-SPWebApplication http://sitename -Confirm -DeleteIISSite –RemoveContentDatabases

Tune your SP2010 installation

You should try this for tuning performance with SP2010 on Win7. Again, if you do not use a service consider turning it of.

Configure Usage Data Collection (Off) – CA / Reporting
Configure Health Data Collection (off) – CA / Reporting
Configure Diagnostic Logging (Off) – CA / Reporting
IIS – Default Web Site - Off
SP Tracing Service v4 – Automatic Start (delayed)
SP User Code Service v4 – Automatic Start (delayed)
SP Timer Service v4 – Automatic Start (delayed)
Web Analytics Service – Automatic Start (delayed)
Document Conversion – Automatic Start (delayed)
Document Conversion Load Balancer – Automatic Start (delayed)
SQL Express
1. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'show advanced options', N'1' RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
2. EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max server memory (MB)', N'512'
3. RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

TIP! Create a PowerShell script for starting and stopping ALL SharePoint services and related services, in order to save resources on your machine when you are not doing development work. Really useful if you are using a laptop and travel a lot…

Windows 7 Enterprise Developer – SharePoint Considerations

Development and application platform do not mean the same thing in two different firm. Every company has their own corporate policies, group policies, custom applications, infrastructure etc. You will need to take them into consideration:

Some Customers do not allow Server OS on Developer Workstations (Then just work with win7)
SharePoint Developer is the same as any other developer
Integration with Customer Tools on Developer Platform for Productivity
Custom Global Policy to Disable install... HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\SharePoint\ DWORD DisableInstall=00000001
Creating re-usable images Vs. physical HW development
Using Win 7 Virtual Hard Disks for productivity (use fixed disks for best performance).

Create syspreped vhd’s to give the each developer. Sysprep the image before running the configuration wizard. If you would like to automate the configuration wizard and creation of initial site etc. remember this is easily done with PowerShell scripts.

Windows 7 “Boot from VHD”

Creating WIN7 boot VHD
- 3, 4 or 5 bootable VHDs
- Performance, recovery, setup, simple
- Windows 7 Desktop Experience - HAL
R2 Hyper-V Management
- Windows 7 / R2 VHDs (sysprep, Disk2vhd)
- Setup, recover, copy, compact …

Windows 7 Boot Menu Options

Screenshot of the boot menu options in Win7. It no longer reads it configuration from a file on the boot partition. To add or change entries you must use a console tool called “bcdedit”. So how do you set up your machine to boot from a vhd?

C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Windows 7 SPS2010 Developer -x64 from VHD"
C:\>bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd="[locate]\Virtual Machines\SharePoint.vhd"
C:\>bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd="[locate]\Virtual Machines\SharePoint.vhd"
C:\>bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on

Replace [locate] with the drive letter but keep the enclosure, ie. “[C:]\stiank\vpc\sp2010\devmachine1.vhd”

Confirm setup:

C:\>bcdedit /v

Change boot name:

C:\>bcdedit /set {guid} Description “new description”

The different installation and development scenarios

1. Windows 7 on the Metal

Install Windows 7 to physical drive

Install SharePoint

Easy, smallest disk space requirement

2. Win 7 + Boot to Win 7 VHD

Create a Windows 7 bootable VHD

Install SharePoint, versatile, recoverable

3. Win 2008 R2 + Hyper – V

Create VHDs (S2008, RS, WIN7, Vista)

Run multiple VMs for Farm Installations

Manage VM\VHDs

In conclusion: Win7 is now a full development platform for SP2010. Or in other words; SP2010 development can be done as any other development. Also, there are no longer any reason for you to have all of the developers go to the installations. Just give them a syspreped vhd!

References

SharePoint PowerShell
- http://sharepointpsscripts.codeplex.com/
Windows PowerShell Reference
- http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook /
Boot to VHD with Windows 7
- http://blogs.technet.com/aviraj/archive/2009/01/28/windows-7-boot-from-vhd-first-impression-part-3-booting-vhd-from-vista-sp1-or-later.aspx
Native VHD Support for Windows 7
- http ://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx
Native VHD Performance
- http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/14/native-vhd-support-in-windows-7.aspx
Hyper-V
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979539(WS.10).aspx
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440865(WS.10).aspx
Here’s a walkthrough for creating bootable VHDs using Hyper-V:
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979534(WS.10).aspx#BKMK_4
Create a Windows 7 bootable VHD
- http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2953-virtual-hard-drive-vhd-file-create-start-boot.html
Boot Manager Commands
- http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/5110-dual-boot-change-os-name-windows-boot-manager.html
Disk2vhd
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
Sysprep
- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744512(WS.10).aspx
IIS 7 Powershell
- http ://www.iis.net/extensions/PowerShell
Single Server Install with SQL Server
- Single Server Complete Install of SharePoint 2010 using local accounts

The DeveloperDashboardSettings console application

Stian Kirkeberg — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:45:37 GMT

After the latest update to SP2010 the code for turning the developer dashboard on and off does not seem to work any more. Here are updated code for you.

If you have not heard about it; The developer dashboard is a new feature in SP2010. It gives you a view on the bottom of each page. The view gives you the http request details, the time each took, web server details, database queries and more…

There are three settings for the dashboard; on, off and on-demand. The latest gives you an small button on the top right of the page, to toggle the setting yourself.

Since I will need this on a lot of different machines I made a small console app, with a parameter for the settings, making it easy to switch on and off.

Here are the complete code. Remember to add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, set compilation to “any cpu” and .Net target framework to 3.5. Enjoy!

using System;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;

namespace SPDeveloperDashboard
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Enables or disables developer dashboard
    /// </summary>
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                string arg;
                if (args.Length == 0)
                {
                    Usage();
                    Environment.Exit(0);
                }
                for (int i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
                {
                    arg = args[i];
                    arg = arg.ToLower();

                    if (arg == "-help" || arg == "-h" || arg == "/?" || arg == "/h")
                    {
                        Usage();
                        Environment.Exit(0);
                    }
                    if (arg == "-on")
                    {
                        SPWebService cs = SPWebService.ContentService;
                        cs.DeveloperDashboardSettings.DisplayLevel = SPDeveloperDashboardLevel.On;
                        cs.DeveloperDashboardSettings.Update();
                        Console.WriteLine("Setting is turned on");
                    }
                    if (arg == "-off")
                    {
                        SPWebService cs = SPWebService.ContentService;
                        cs.DeveloperDashboardSettings.DisplayLevel = SPDeveloperDashboardLevel.Off;
                        cs.DeveloperDashboardSettings.Update();
                        Console.WriteLine("Setting is turned off");
                    }
                    if (arg == "-ondemand")
                    {
                        SPWebService cs = SPWebService.ContentService;
                        cs.DeveloperDashboardSettings.DisplayLevel = SPDeveloperDashboardLevel.OnDemand;
                        cs.DeveloperDashboardSettings.Update();
                        Console.WriteLine("Setting is on demand");
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
            }
        }
        static void Usage()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Usage: SPDeveloperDashboard <-param> ");
            Console.WriteLine(" e.g. SPDeveloperDashboard -On");
            Console.WriteLine(" The -On Turns the SPDeveloperDashboard on");
            Console.WriteLine(" The -Off Turns the SPDeveloperDashboard off");
            Console.WriteLine(" The -OnDemand Sets the SPDeveloperDashBoard to OnDemand");
        }
    }
}

This code replaces ie:

SPPerformanceMonitor performanceMonitor = SPFarm.Local.PerformanceMonitor;
performanceMonitor.DeveloperDashboardLevel = SPPerformanceMonitoringLevel.On;

Document Management in SharePoint 2010

Thomas Læhren — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:45:58 GMT

SharePoint 2010 has extended its Document Management (and Records Management) capabilities considerably. I have looked into the new capabilities and will give you a quick overview about some of them. This post explains the following functionality:

Document ID
Rating, Tag/Notes
Rule Based Submission

The functionality described in this blog post may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of SharePoint 2010.

Document ID

At the Site Collection level you can enable use of Document ID’s:

Each document in the Site Collection will get their unique document number (see next screenshot). A document is addressable using the unique document id via a document redirector page (/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=uniquedocid), and the unique document id can also be used as a property when searching.

Rating, Tag/Notes

I have enabled both versioning and forced check-out on my document library. Rating and adding Tag/Notes does not require a check-out, and users are able to easily rate and add notes to the document.

Just hover over the stars to add rating:

To add Notes, select the document and then click on the Ribbon:

Save the notes by clicking “Post”.

Rule Based Submission

SharePoint 2010 let you define rules on a folder for further routing of the document. Documents uploaded to the folder will be moved to the correct library/folder based on the rules you apply. The rules are depended on the metadata you have available on the document.

The Content Organizer feature must first be enabled on the Site:

The feature creates a document library named “Drop off Library”:

After enabling the feature, go to Site Administration and click on “Content Organizer Rules”. A form pop’s up and this is where you add the routing criteria. I made a rule called “Contracts” and it will move all documents with the Content Type “Dublin Core” to my Contracts document library.

Page 1:

Page 2:

Additional settings are available under Site Administration / Content Organizer Settings:

(Note: the screenshot above doesn’t list all settings)

When users add a document to the “Drop Off Library”, the routing rules kicks in and move the document to the correct location.

I have uploaded a document into the Drop Off Library and the metadata form is presented. I select Dublin Core and fill in necessary metadata:

Then I select “Check In”, and the following pop-up is presented:

The routing rule then moves the document into the correct folder.

Other DMS capabilities

I will blog about the following capabilities later:

Document Sets
In Place Records Management
Hold and eDiscovery
Library and Folder Based Retention
Validate meta data upon submission of documents
Column default value settings
Office Web Apps
Term Store and Managed Metadata

SharePoint 2010 – Records Management

Thomas Læhren — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:41:01 GMT

SharePoint 2010 introduces new capabilities regarding Records Management. The most interesting feature, I think, is In-Place Records management (info at the end of this post) which makes it possible to declare documents as records without moving them to a Records Center. Records and documents live side by side in the site they were created in, and SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to apply different policies (i.e. retention schedules) depending if the item is a record or a document.

The Record Center site template is still available. It utilizes some new functionality like the Content Organizer to route incoming documents to the libraries of your preference. A new “dashboard” gives a record manager faster access to common tasks and to-do actions.

Holds (with discovery), audit and file-plan reports are also new or improved functionality to better control your records.

Other items than documents can also be declared as records in SharePoint 2010; wiki pages, blog posts, article pages among others.

This post gives an overview of two capabilities; Records Center and In-place Record Management. Functionality like Holds, File-plan and other Records management features will be covered in later posts.

The functionality described in this blog post may be changed substantially prior to final commercial release of SharePoint 2010.

Create a Records Center site

Simply create a Records Center by selecting the correct site template:

When creating a Records Center in SharePoint 2010, the following features are enabled:

Content Organizer
E-mail Integration with Content Organizer
Hold and eDiscovery
Metadata Navigation and Filtering
Offline Synchronization for External Lists
SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features
SharePoint Server Standard Site features
Team Collaboration Lists

The new look of the SharePoint 2010 Records Center:

The “Submit a Record” button let users upload (and add metadata to) documents. The documents will be added to the “Drop Off Library” and then moved to the correct library/folder according to the rules added by the records manager.

Note: Activate the “In Place Records Management” feature on the Site Collection level to fully take advantage of the Records Center. The feature has to be activated to mark incoming documents as records:

Create / enable Content Types

The Content Organizer uses Content Types (and related metadata) as criteria for where to move incoming documents. Content Types must therefore be created (or enabled) before routing functionality are enabled.

Create libraries for storing Records

I created a document library; “Contracts 2009” and added a rule “Contract” to the Content Organizer. When documents are submitted, the Content Organizer will move any documents related to the Content Type “Document” into the “Contracts 2009” library. You can create as many libraries/folders and content organizer rules you need to best control your records.

In my “Contracts 2009” document library, I went to Library Settings and enabled “Automatically Declaration”. Now, all documents added to the library are automatically flagged as records.:

Create Content Organizer rules

I added rules by selecting: Site Settings / Site Settings / Site Administration / Content Organizer Rules:

What happens if my target library doesn’t have the necessary Content Type enabled? I tried to create a rule which is using the Content Type “Dublin Core” as a criteria. I wanted all documents related to “Dublin Core” to be moved to the “Contracts 2009” library. As you can see from the message below, all target libraries also need necessary Content Types enabled for the Content Organizer to be able to move documents into the library.

Retention Schedule

Retention Schedule is, per default, enforced on the Content Types, but it is possible to define retention schedules on library/folder level too.

Retention schedule using Content Types

I went to Site Action / Site Settings / Galleries / Site content types (on Site Collection level), then I clicked on the content type “Document”.

Then i clicked on “Information management policy settings”, checked the “Enable Retention” and was given the choice of running different retention schedules on Non-Records and Records:

I chose to use a different retention schedule, and clicked “Add a retention stage for records…”. I was given the choice of setting different actions when the event fires.

It’s possible to add multiple actions, and each stage will occur one after the other in the order they appear on the page:

Retention schedule using Library/folder

Retention schedules are possible to configure directly on a document library. I went to my “Contracts 2009” library and selected “Document Library Settings. Under “Permission and Management” I clicked “Information management policy settings”. Here, I changed the source of retention by clicking on the “Change source”.

When choosing a different source a message will pop up, that basically says that you’re overriding the retention schedule at the Content Type level:

Then a form was presented, where I added my retention events and actions.

In-Place Records Management

A new capability in SharePoint 2010 is In-Place Records management. Instead of moving a document to a specific Records Center, you declare the document as a record and it will be handled as a record in the site it was created in. After the the document is declared as a record, it can have policies and restrictions different than when it was a document. The policies are added to either the Content Types or directly on the document libraries (see the Retention Schedule paragraph above).

Documents can be declared as records either manually or automatically.

Manual record declaration can be configures on Site Collection level and overridden in each document library. In Site Collection settings you have the following options on how declarations of records should be done:

When Record Declaration Availability is set to “Available in all location by default”, a new icon appears on the Ribbon:

A document will get a padlock added to its icon when declared as a record:

Again, you can override the record declaration availability on the document library level:

Automatically declarations of records is possible by checking the “Automatic Declaration” option in the document library settings.

Office & Sharepoint Development at PDC

Stian Kirkeberg — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:02:00 GMT

“The Professional Developer Conference (PDC) is quickly approaching, and if you have not registered yet I would encourage you to do so. PDC is about what’s here today in terms of technology, but mostly tries to cover what’s coming. The ‘what’s coming’ part can range from months to in some cases 2 year visions, but in the case of Office and SharePoint it’s a matter of months. Here’s a taste of what’s coming to PDC for business productivity for the developer….”

Continued at Steve Fox’s blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/steve_fox/archive/2009/10/25/office-sharepoint-development-at-pdc.aspx

SharePoint Conference Las Vegas Day 4

Jan Tore Lamøy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:59:00 GMT

Last day of SharePoint Conference 2009, and the only thing missing from this great event is a SharePoint 2010 Beta. Guess we have to wait until November to try out most of the stuff.

After giving some thought to the content of the conference, one thing is forcing its way to the front of my head, and thats the fact that Steve Ballmer mentioned "Online" more than 25 times in his keynote. This is surely a clear sign that a paradigm shift is on its way, and we all have to prepare for the cloud. By that I mean our design and implementations on the platform should as much as possible be able to run in the cloud just as on premise. SharePoint 2010 seems to be well prepared for this shift with important features like Sandboxed solutions, BCS, PowerShell support and more.

The last day's sessions for me were:

Load Testing SharePoint 2010 with VSTS: Good and practical information on loadtesting, and made me go "of-course, thats a good point!" several times.
Architecture guidance for building applications in SharePoint 2010: Also here the speaker had a whole bunch of practical architectural guidelines, and the deck is good for later reference
Building Rich, Dynamic Websites with SharePoint 2010: This session were a little off from its title, but it anyway pointed out vital improvements in the next release for WCM. That includes branding of sites with both style and RIA such as SilverLight and Rich media web parts, REST and Client Object Model and last but not least all the WCAG and XHTML support.

SharePoint Conference Las Vegas Day 3

Jan Tore Lamøy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:24:00 GMT

At day 3 we definitely see how much great content the product group has put together for the conference. I find myself struggeling in choosing which of the sessions at the same timeslot to attend. Great that the sessions recordings will be available later!

My sessions for day three was:

Using Enterprise Content Types and managed Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010: This session got almost full, so it seemed to me anyway, and that confirms these are probably some of, if not the most wanted features in the next release. And it is looks really good! Content Type Syndication, Term store with multilanguage support and Managed metadata columns are some of the most important of the new features here.
Developing with the New User Interface Features in SharePoint 2010: A good overview showing the new Theming engine with support for importing Office themes, dynamic masterpage for aspx's in the lyouts folder, ribbon customizations and more.
SharePoint Workspace 2010: the Microsoft Office Client for Team Sites: Finally a usable SharePoint offline client is arriving in the Office package. The successor to Groove looks promising and have features like co-authoring support, efficient synchronizing mechanisms only sending changes over the wire and automatic conflict resolving functions.
Building Business Applications using Business Connectivity Services and SharePoint Designer (No-Code): A demo of an end-to-end business application with impressive functionality, "written" in only a few hours. Demoing External content types, workflow, Office client integration and business data offline capabilities in SharePoint Workspace.
Creating Data-Centric Composite Applications using SharePoint Designer 2010: A great anf fun walkthrough of some of the new features in the dataview web part (which has replaced the listview web part btw). Rich conditional formatting and integration with JQuery was some of the topics covered.

The last session for the day was the "Ask the experts", with a lot off sme's in approx 35 different categories, ready to answer any question. In the same room, but in a different area, the conference Rock Band tournament loudly and energetic played on with many creative "bands" giving everything to win.

SharePoint Conference Las Vegas Day 2

Jan Tore Lamøy — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Today there were breakout sessions from the start, and there will be no more keynotes for the rest of the week either. Thats actually fine, leaving time for the breath of topics covered by the various breakouts.

One impression I got from almost all the sessions is that the speakers are bursting with pride over the message they deliver up on stage, so it is obvious that the set of features has evolved from 2007 to 2010 in a manner the product group wanted.

Sessions for day two for my part was:

SharePoint 2010 Search-Capabilities deep dive: Search in SharePoint has really taken a giant step forward with the 2010 release, both topology-wise and in the feature set. In addition to an enhanced user experience with built-in refiners there is now a Componetized architecture allowing for multiple indexers, partitioned indexes which is great news for all. Inheritable Web parts is another wanted feature for many.
Scaling SharePoint 2010 Topologies for your organization: An ok overview of the scalability and upgrade possibilities in the next release
Claims based identity in SharePoint 2010: The new security architecture seems more than promising with claims in the next release with regards to security over distributed topologies and integration with other products.
Deep dive into SharePoint 2010 MySites and Social Networking Architecture: Here the presenter gave us a good insight into the different social aspects, including Tagging of internal and external content, Activity feeds, People Search with incredible name matching and much more.
Records Management Strategies in SharePoint 2010: This is an area where there perhaps has been the most impressive increase in functionality with Content Type synch between sitecollections and farms, Multistage disposition, In-place declaration of records, increased eDiscovery and folder based retention to mention a few.

Also the big attendee party on the Mandalay Bay Beach was the main event in the evening. There are 7400+ attendees, and the party was the biggest one the Mandalay Bay had organized!
The theme was a 80's party with Huey Lewis and the News, games from the 80's and a lot of other entertainment as well.

SharePoint Conference Las Vegas Day 1

Jan Tore Lamøy — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:22:00 GMT

So day 1 of the SharePoint conference is over, and here are some highlights from the day.

The day started off with some good keynote sessions (2.5 hrs!) with a lot of demos. Included one of Business Connectivity Services where Tom Rizzo in notime created an External Content Type in SharePoint Designer by connecting to a database and a Customer table, stepped through a wizard to create CRUD methods and published it. That allowed for offline caching in Outlook of a list based on the type, acting like a Outlook Contact list with Save funcionallity. Impressive stuff!

I attended the overview sessions for the rest of the day:

Overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer platform: lots of demos and a lot of content showing the long awaited VS integration, which looks fantastic by the way.
ECM for the masses: Good session with a lot of new stuff, document sets, new records center capabilities and more
Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010: Basically a introductory session on the Social Computing capabilities in SharePoiint 2010, but not so many demoes

In the evening there were a lot of community gatherings around in the hotels, including us from Norway who had a great "Norwegian night" at the Aureole Restaurant hosted by the Micorsoft Norway dudes and dudette.

SharePoint 2010

karlmk — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:35:00 GMT

The SharePoint conference has just started and the curtain has fallen :) It's time to start talking about SharePoint 2010.

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer and Corporate Vice President SharePoint Server, Jeff Teper, kicked off the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas yesterday and unveiled a good bunch of information about the upcoming product.

Something to look forward to: Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will be available as public Beta in November.

Start looking into the new product:

See and learn the capabilities: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com
SharePoint 2010 Q&A's : http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/threads
SharePoint 2010 (Beta) Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee514561.aspx

Also see Jeff Teper's blog article from yesterday as part of the SharePoint 2010 disclosure : http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

SharePoint HTTP 500 Internal Server Error

Stian Kirkeberg — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:43:00 GMT

This error (HTTP 500 Internal Server Error) means that the website you are visiting had a server problem which prevented the webpage from displaying.

This error can occur on all web sites, even on central admin. The root page default.aspx does not display at all, instead this error is shown. The virtual folders below the top site, like /_adm works fine.

If you experience this, make sure you don’t have changed any of the OOB files like /_layout/1033/init.js. Intentionally or not these files should not be customized.

Please note that there can be other reasons for this error message displaying.

Undocumented stsadm command “stsadm –o uninstall”

Stian Kirkeberg — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:11:52 GMT

Unfortunately I discovered an undocumented stsadm command today; having gotten into the habit of typing in “stsadm –o commandname” to get the list of parameters needed, I got stung by entering the wrong command name.

I was looking for the parameters to “UninstallFeature”, but I typed only in “uninstall”:

“stsadm –o uninstall”

You should think that this is not a command so it doesn’t matter, even if you type in “stsadm –help” this command will not be listed. OK, I’ll admit my approach to typing in these commands is probably not the best way around, but that is not really the point.

The point is that this command is undocumented, it doesn’t take any arguments, and it will start uninstalling SharePoint without even a warning. So will have to do some manual cleanup and then run the configuration wizard again…

Hope this can warn you before you try this out and thanks to Roy for asking me about uninstalling features, before the coffee had time to kick in.

Links to related content:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms442691.aspx

http://nerdtastictips.blogspot.com/2009/04/never-ever-type-stsadm-o-uninstall-yes.html

Error OnPreRender: Ambiguous match found

Stian Kirkeberg — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:51:33 GMT

MOSS April Update [968850] is causing compatibility issues. (http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=971538)

This error is caused by an update on the SPUtility.GetPermissions() method when you try to access the method through use of System.Reflection;

MethodInfo getPermissions =
typeof(SPUtility).GetMethod("GetPermissions",
BindingFlags.NonPublic |
BindingFlags.Public |
BindingFlags.Instance |
BindingFlags.InvokeMethod |
BindingFlags.Static);

The method is now overloaded, so you will need to specify which one you want. You can do this by using an overloaded method of GetMethod(). (Ironic? :)

Try updating your code with something like this, if you just want to fix the error and not worry about the update/new overloads:

MethodInfo getPermissions =
typeof(SPUtility).GetMethod("GetPermissions",
BindingFlags.NonPublic |
BindingFlags.Public |
BindingFlags.Instance |
BindingFlags.InvokeMethod |
BindingFlags.Static,
null,
new Type[] {typeof(SPUserToken), typeof( ISecurableObject)},
null);

Type.GetMethod at MSDN explain the usage of the parameters if you are interested in looking further into it.

To access the overloaded methods you will need to use a Reflector.

A couple of places that have used this method and run into the problem are:

SharePoint Access Checker Web Part at http://accesschecker.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=4465

STSADM Extenstions at http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/10/enumerate-effective-base-permissions.html

Note: The GetPermissions() is marked with internal if you are not sure what this means you should take a look at Access Modifiers…

Aggregating content with the Content Query Web Part (CQWP)

Jon Løken — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:44:10 GMT

In most web content management projects based on SharePoint the Content Query Web Part is used for aggregating content. Out of the box it have a few styles, but seems a little limited. With a little tweaking you can display the information you want in the way you want it.

There are mainly three parts involved here:

The web part itself
The ItemStyle.xsl
The ContentQueryMain.xsl

The xsl files is defining how the content is displayed for the end users. The ItemStyle define the style for each item (like a row in a table), while the ContentQueryMain.xsl defines the surrounding (like the table around the rows). By exporting the web part you will find that there are plenty of properties not available in the user interface. The ones I change the most are:

CommonViewFields add columns that you can use in the web part.

<property name="CommonViewFields" type="string">Priority,Choice;PublishingStartDate,DateTime;Ingressbilde,Image;Ingress,HTML</property>

The Image field can be a little tricky

DataColumnRenames changes the name of the input column name to another name. Makes it easier to build the xsl when there are several fields that should be treated as they were the same. Here I rename Ingress to Description

<property name="DataColumnRenames" type="string">Ingress,Description</property>

ItemXslLink and MainXslLink can be pointed to your own XSL-stylesheet for how you want to display the items and what styles you want to make available for the users.

<property name="ItemXslLink" type="string" >/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/MyItemStyle.xsl</property>

<property name="MainXslLink" type="string">/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/MyContentQueryMain.xsl</property>

Update: Remember that both ItemXslLink and MainXslLink is server relative. So if your site collection is in the managed path /Sites/ then the xsl-links must reflect that. So for a Site Collection http://example.com/sites/department you will have this property

<property name="ItemXslLink" type="string" >/sites/department/Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/MyItemStyle.xsl</property>

Update end

To set the default style you set the ItemStyle property:

<property name="ItemStyle" type="string">MyNewsArchive</property>

Inside the ItemStyle.xsl you can add several styles. I like to add one that displays all data (columns) that is available to use. This view is developer friendly, but very user unfriendly.

<xsl:template name="ShowXML" match="Row[@Style='ShowXML']" mode="itemstyle">
    <xsl:for-each select="@*">
        <br />
        Name: <xsl:value-of select="name()" />
        <br />
        Value:<xsl:value-of select="." />
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

Search

You can also use the core search results web part to aggregate content, but then based on a search. The customizing of the results is much of the same as with CQWP, but handled a little different. See more about customizing search here

Resources

How to: customize the Content Query Web Part by using Custom Properties (MSDN)

Configuring and Customizing the Content Query Web Part (MS ECM team blog)

Customizing the Content Query Web Part and Custom Item Styles (Heather Solomon blog)

The Enhanced Content Query Web Part (CodePlex)

Review: Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies

Jon Løken — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:30:49 GMT

Interested in Social Computing and how to work with that? Then I can recommend the book Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. The book is about the trend and how businesses can use and benefit from it. This is not about the underlying technology, but rather from a business viewpoint. Real life examples (case studies with ROI), also including the ones that failed, makes it easier to understand and to apply this in your company.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Groundswell is defined as “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations” in the book. What I found most useful in the book in addition to the real life examples, was the Social Technographics ladder and the POST framework

The Social Technographics ladder

The audience is segmented in 6 areas based on their activities in the groundswell. The higher in the ladder, then the more involved a person are in the groundswell. When you now how your customers (or employees) are distributed in the ladder then you know better what kind of tools (blogs, wikis, forums, etc) will work with your audience. You can profile your customers here

Click the image for more details

The POST framework

A four-step planning process is the POST framework. Briefly this is:

People. Who are your customers (use the profiler tool)
Objectives. What do you want to achieve. Many seems to forget this in their urge to have some social computing stuff.
In the groundswell these can be Listening, Talking, Energizing, Supporting and Embracing
Strategy. What do you want to change, how will you measure it, who’s support do you need, and so on.
Technology. After you have decided the above; what applications should you build.

What about usage inside the company (enterprise usage)?

The book is primary about the groundswell for your customers, but there are a chapter at the end covering how this can be used inside a company.

Groundswell is written by two analysts in Forrester Research: Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Join the conversation on http://groundswell.forrester.com/, where you also find social profile data for 2008.