I just passed 70-542 and it's a short one, just 32 questions to challenge your knowledge; subjects I remember:
- BDC
- Search customization
- Audiences
- Membership
- Excel Services
- Policies
I don't remember 70-631 details but it was not that difficult, I think experience is key for 631, I used pretty much the same time and strategy for 70-630.
Good luck!!!
I know, it’s nothing new, not that I’m going to win an award for this; just want to tell my story.
Happened that I was into testing yesterday, prepared my data, test case, environment… and after 2 hours of processing the SSIS package failed… what happened? I connected my phone to the USB port of my computer, it connected, laptop detected a new NIC and the SSIS package lost connection with the DB (it’s on the same machine, using localhost to connect, still…).
Of course, it took another couple hours to detect the error cause, ohh and the process is heavy enough to keep me away from other activities, including writing the findings in the test; besides that, it’s not uncommon for the test machine to hang or freeze.
Why don’t I have another computer/laptop?
Mmm… it’s a lame excuse but my standard title is consultant, not tester; that’s enough to not have another computer from the company and I’m always on the move so that’s also not comfortable.
But things have changed, a netbook could do the job for a reasonable price and weight… interesting, blogging gives me ideas. Bad (or good) thing is I will not be able to take the netbook idea out of my head.
Just a pair of hours ago a friend asked “how can I get rid of the ‘,’ (comma) in a list view for a numerical column?”.
After giving it a couple of minutes I fired up SharePoint Designer and…
- Right click the list that holds the data and select New –> List View Page; this will create a new view of your data, right click in the PlaceHolderMain (custom) section of the view and select “Convert to XSLT Data View”.
- Select the area in which the desired column data is displayed and click on the small handle to the right… click “Number formatting options”.
![clip_image001[4]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/ricalo/WindowsLiveWriter/HowtoformatthecolumnsinaListView_1011C/clip_image001%5B4%5D_thumb.jpg "clip_image001[4]")
And this was the feature that solved my friend’s problem.
Best regards
Sometimes I find this error when I’m creating Shared Service Provider (SSP).
Provisioning failed: User cannot be found.
Yes, it happens a lot and there are some places to look at, usually I find myself updating user accounts for:
- Search and SSPs: I use the following stsadm commands
- stsadm -o updateaccountpassword -userlogin domain\username -password Password –noadmin
- stsadm -o spsearch -farmserviceaccount domain\username -farmservicepassword Password
- stsadm -o spsearch -farmcontentaccessaccount domain\username -farmcontentaccesspassword Password
- stsadm -o osearch -farmserviceaccount domain\username -farmservicepassword Password
- stsadm -o editssp -title SSPName -ssplogin domain\username -ssppassword Password
- App Pools
- Central Administration > Operations > Service Accounts
- Site Collections: If there are just a few…
- Central Administration > Application Management > Site Collection List (or stsadm –o enumsites)
(You have to check the if “Primary Administrator” is correct; I’ve found that sometimes I doesn’t even exist!)
- And use stsadm –o siteowner –url http://yoursite –ownerlogin domain\username
The site collection owners tend to be the most hidden ones, good luck!
Well, there’s a lot of SharePoint information out there but how do I keep up with this ocean of information?
Of course there are several ways but one that has worked for me is to use this technologies together.
Ok, first you (and several other people) updates their twitter right? Yes, but there’s no way I can follow everyone who talks about SharePoint and even if I could they talk about other things that I don’t really care.
Yup, this can be a mess, but some guys came up with a convention, and that is to add a prefix (#) in my updates prior to the word that marks the subject of the update. Maybe I can write this:
Configuring the profile import in #SharePoint, we'll need that to extract user data, I'm most interested in the sip address. Let's get dirty
Alright now I can mark those tweets that are related to #SharePoint (or some other subject for that matter).
But where can I take a look at all those #SharePoint updates? You go to the hashtags.org site and you search for your tag, or for short you can just head to the following url:
http://www.hashtags.org/tag/sharepoint
As you can see there are a lot of #SharePoint updates from several people and you can subscribe to all these flow of information; It’s in the atom format so you can use it with most feed readers. And the url to subscribe to it would be:
http://www.hashtags.org/tag/sharepoint.atom
But how do hashtags know about my updates?
Well, they have to be “following” you… and how do I get in their following list? easy, you have to follow them, shortly after this they will follow you. For me it was like a couple hours later.
Update: Actually I was reviewing some friend's case and it turns out that she hadn't hashtags in her following list but she had a pair of tweets detected by the hashtags site. My guess is that it detects tweets from the public timeline. Do you have any comment?
I hope you find this useful, it’s been for me and it’ll be far more useful if more people start using it, right now Hashtags is following only 35,877 people
Of course you can just replace #SharePoint with another tag, for example #grammys is a very popular tag these days.
I was digging into my current reading material “Testing Computer Software” by Cem Kaner and I ran through this phrase:
“A test plan is a valuable tool to the extent that it helps you manage your testing project and find bugs. Beyond that, it is a diversion of resources.”
I’d like to extend this to every plan; of course planning is important to the success of projects, but too much planning and you never get things done, this is where intelligent project managers become useful, sometimes we/they have to put books, standards and methodologies aside and only take whichever is best for our project.
Book also says that sometimes our plan is part of our product, for example, if you develop a medical product, you will (likely) have to adhere to the FDA specification and to that objective you’ll end up creating a plan to meet that specification, thus, the plan becomes part of your product. But other times such detailed documents become that “diversion of resources” cited above.
So where or when to follow standards? Kaner says, when your plan is not part of your product the criterion should be the phrase above.
Recently a friend of mine asked if I could help him to setup a website with blogs, photos, calendar, and some other stuff.
He is part of a growing group of mountain bikes aficionados who live in Mexico City and organize themselves to go test their bikes (and bodies) against the mountain.
This friend asked for some help and we talked about requirements and features, I don’t have to say that SharePoint covered all reqs. Unfortunately he got some sponsorship hosting but only with Joomla, so he walked that road… I will definitely take a look and get to know a little more about competitors, sometimes I get lost in MS technology.
The site is looking pretty good with a fair amount of effort from my friend, here’s the url if you want to take a look:
http://www.xsur.com.mx
It’s in spanish BTW…
I just passed this exam and I have to say that it’s not that difficult, I studied with self-test software (I’m not going to say which one) and I have to say that the questions in this self-test suck… While I was studying I found some questions that I knew for sure “this can’t be the right answer”. Luckily the question also has some explanation and that’s valuable, but the questions themselves just suck.
If your memory is just not good (like mine) I recommend digesting small tests (I used to prepare tests with 10 questions), this fits my studying style, I just can’t setup more than 30 mins a day to this activities. Sometimes I managed to run only 1 test and other days 5 or more.
Usually the day before or two days before the exam I run tests with questions I have failed 2 or 3 times, but with this exam I have to say I didn’t do this cause the questions had no value to me (I think you may already know which software I used).
Quick post just to let you know that there's a new certification for SharePoint "Microsoft Certified Master" is a recognition given to those professionals in charge of large, complex implementations.
The "Microsoft Certified Architect" builds on top of the MCM, the applicant has to demonstrate her value as an expert in front of a panel of experts.
Further info, go to the MCM page.
It's important to note that you should have experience in SharePointv2 and SharePointv3 or CMS2002 and SharePointv3.
The patterns and practices group just released their latest installment; it helps architects and developers to design, build, test, deploy and upgrade SharePoint intranet applications.
Have I followed P&P's recommendations?
Check for yourself! http://www.microsoft.com/spg
Update: Luis Du Solier pointed me to this post from Blaine Wastell, which has further thoughts
http://blogs.msdn.com/blaine/archive/2008/11/05/sharepoint-guidance-is-live.aspx
First of all, I can't believe I'm still posting for SPS2003, but here we go...
Ok, this happened a while ago, I tried to see the settings for a Virtual Server in SharePoint v2 farm and it kept displaying the help window to upgrade a virtual server (it should display the Virtual Server settings because it's already upgraded, or extended).
After some minutes I realized that I could fabricate my url to enter the settings of a Virtual Server this way:
http://server:centraladminport/vssettings.aspx?VirtualServer=http://uriofmyvirtualserver.com
Wish me luck with this messed up farm.
I am supporting another consultant who is participating in a migration from SPS2003 to MOSS 2007 (yes, there are still many companies who have SPS2003, larger companies tend to move slower).
So, customer applied SP3 and my friend scanned with prescan.exe, orphans found (as usual) and when she tried to spsadm repairorphans url; the site was no longer online, it wasn't even listed in the portal sites.
We still don't know why in hell the SP3 didn't updated the Content DBs schema, but there was a lesson learned, run the following query against your Content DBs.
SELECT SchemaVersion,BuildVersion from PortalSchemaVersion
This will bring two columns
SchemaVersion (DB Version): If this is 2.0.40.1 you're still in SP2!!!
BuildVersion (SPS Version): If this is 11.0.8126.0 you're still in SP2!!!
Go check those numbers cause something may be in a dangerous state.
Recently I've had some discussions with some folks inside MS with this subject. So, I decided to write something around.
I have to say... if you run the W3 Validator (http://validator.w3.org/) against a known SharePoint site (I tried http://www.wssdemo.com/default.aspx) and here's the output.
The issue is that more and more customers (especially government) is trying to adhere to standards, if we weren't able to overcome this problem SharePoint would be put out of the business for these customers.
But... we are, the SharePoint team posted some info in their blog which talks about the Accesibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS) which in his 2nd release includes an example of an XHTML 1.0 Strict page hosted on SharePoint.
Regards
- Ricalo
You've heard about it, you've read about it... but exactly, what is this? how does this help/damage my business?
What is this?
To make long story short think of web social increase of the last 4-5 years. Think about Wikipedia, YouTube, Spaces...
Well put all of these inside the Enterprises and you'll have the point.
Where did this started?
The concept was first coined by (to the best of my knowledge) Andrew P. McAfee where he took the benefits and characteristics of Web 2.0 and positioned them in the corporations.
Benefits perceived through wikis, blogs and in general web social phenomena are being positioned in the enterprise environment.
How does this help/damage my business?
How many times you find useful information in blogs, in public wikis more and more the information is available earlier in these resources than in official web sites. The accuracy or "officialness" of the info may not be the best, but there's a good chance that it's ok to work with it, besides these days, if we wait for info to be made official it may be too late to take advantage of it.
The ideas, the knowledge already exist in your company, in your information workers minds; but without the proper management all this information just leaks out of control. The benefits are for others, there is stuff that you should keep for your business not for others.
Information on how to better manage a process should be a valuable part of your assets (Intellectual Property). And should be treated as that.
On the other hand there must be a "management" of this information cause there's the risk of ending up with thousands of useless blogs which suck company's resources.
We never heard about Enterprise 1.0, did I missed a whole release?
No, Enterprise 1.0 is just before 2.0 whatever that is. I can think of the traditional approach to manage information and offer services from the IT departments; 2.0 definitely has a "user-defined" direction and a more agile approach to publish ideas and share knowledge. Whereas 1.0 was IT directed and slower.
How does this helps me... IT Professional... developer... lawyer... [put your role]?
A study from McKinsey reveals that executives realize now the advantage of investing in IT and will be more aggressive in the future. This is not an opportunity that can be tackled by one specific science or art.
Several professionals with diverse skills are needed to successfully implement these solutions. The implementation should consider/be:
- Governance
- Visually Appealing
- Secure
- Scalable
- Compliant
- Among others...
In which industries are we observing this trend?
Everywhere... in education, oil and energy, healthcare, government... you name it.
I am currently working with SLK and setup a basic site with Learning Features. I also configured this webapp to be available from the outside so I configured both default and external zones for this webapp.
I could access the site from both the http://internal url and the http://external.domain.com url but when I clicked on one of the assignments in the assignments web part I noticed the url was trying to direct me to the internal url even if I'm accessing from the external url.
This obviously renders the solution unusable for webapps with alternate access mappings.
There's a discussion in the codeplex site for this issue:
http://www.codeplex.com/SLK/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=7835
