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Blog entries related to Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 solutions such as Power BI, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps and Microsoft Teams
I wanted to take a minute and talk about a really cool new feature of SharePoint 2010 relating to backups – Granular Restores. While doing some test migrations from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010, we needed to choose the best method to selectively move data from an old site to a new site.
In SharePoint 2010, you have the ability to restore content (down to the list level) from an unattached SQL database. How cool is that! Here’s the new Backup and Restore options in Central Admin:
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One of SharePoint’s popular features is Document Management, which leads many organizations to migrate their data from files shares or their Document Management System over to SharePoint. Is this best practice? Let’s not be hasty, and look at the various things to consider on both sides of the coin.
Although the idea of user adoption is not a new idea, we consistently find our clients asking for more ways or better ways to get users to “use the system.” Depending on the scope of the project, we always recommend some level of governance and training for our clients to get the most from their implementation. These are critical pieces of the overall solution that we feel play a significant role in whether or not the product is accepted or rejected by the users.
In addition, with the recent release of SharePoint 2010, this topic has once again become a priority for many of our clients looking to implement this new version. While superior to the previous version in far too many ways to mention here, the user interface has been completely enhanced with the “Ribbon” interface first seen Office 2007. For users of SharePoint 2007, this will be a slight learning curve to use the new interface, but as with Office 2007, once learned the productivity and efficiency will increase exponentially.
I was reminded today about the difference of removing vs. deleting a web part from a site page today. There’s already a great blog on the subject and it can be found here.
The quick and dirty is that when you either choose to “close” on a web part or click the “X” in edit view, this does NOT remove it from the page, it only hides it. There is a Closed Web Parts gallery where this closed web part gets placed, and if there are enough closed web parts, it can significantly decrease your pages load time, as it still loads the closed web parts.
Like SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 comes in three different versions. However, the version names have changed and what is available in each version is different. So if you’re moving from the SharePoint 2007 world to the SharePoint 2010 world, it can be a bit confusing (it has been for me). The versions are:
When I was configuring a new installation of SharePoint Server 2010 the other day, I hit a snag when creating a Managed Service Account while creating a new Web Application. My existing Application Pool account wasn’t listed and I couldn’t choose the “Configurable” option to manually type it in. I attempted to make the existing application pool AD account a managed account, but got the error:
“The given key was not in the dictionary”
To correct this error, you need to go into Active Directory and make a security change:
Today is the day! Microsoft officially has released SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 and related 2010 products like SharePoint Designer, Project 2010 and Visio 2010. You can watch the event and get other information at the launch site:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx
Other Resources
If you would like more information on SharePoint Server 2010, you can check out the following resources:
Breakdown comparison of the editions of SharePoint Server 2010
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx
The time has finally arrived! Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Microsoft Office Takeshi Numoto recently announced the final release milestone for the 2010 wave of Office products including SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. Here are the critical dates...
During a recent migration, we ran into an issue when attempting to migrate users from one domain to another using stsadm migrateuser. Hopefully this will help any others that are getting this strange error. Our environment was a small MOSS 2007 64-bit farm installed with slipstreamed SP2, with the February 2010 cumulative update applied.
We were moving from an on-premise to Hosted solution, so this required a new domain and user accounts. Since the new domain wouldn’t know anything about the old domain’s user accounts, we added the –ignoresidhistory switch. We ran the following command:
I wanted to pass-along a special promotion that Bamboo Solutions has going on…
For a limited time, when you purchase the SharePoint Video Library from Bamboo Solutions, you'll receive a free FLIP Video UltraHD Camera valued at $260.00 (see details below).
There’s no catch, no tricks; just a simple, great offer. Purchase the SharePoint Video Library for $500, and Bamboo Solutions will ship you the Flip Video UltraHD so you can start filling your video library with fun and useful video content.
I wanted to let all of our readers know about a cloud computing event that will be held in 4 cities along the East coast. I admit, it is my company that is hosting the “4-City Tour” but this really is a going to be a good way to see many cloud platforms at work.
Highlights:
Parallel sessions on Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Unified Communications Integration luncheon showing a live demo of integration between CRM, SharePoint, and UC Exclusive research on the top cloud challenges from CFOs and CIOs Exclusive demos of SharePoint 2010 Exclusive session showing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com in a live side-by-side comparison
Cities:
May 4 – Charlotte, NC May 6 – Washington, DC May 11 – Raleigh, NC May 13 – Atlanta, GA
Many of you may be familiar with the Business Data Catalog (BDC) feature of MOSS 2007 that allowed for the integration of SharePoint with various line-of-business (LOB) systems on a read-only basis. In SharePoint 2010, the BDC has become the BCS – Business Connectivity Services. The BCS has it’s own dedicated database and runs as it’s own service application (as do many of the other services in SharePoint 2010) that can be enabled at the Web Application level.
With Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 capabilities, people are now empowered with read and write access to LOB applications and external data sources (such as SQL, Oracle, SAP, CRM, Siebel, Web services, and custom applications), whether they are online or offline. An entire site can be taken offline by using Microsoft Office Workspace and then users can resynchronize when they’re reconnected to the network.
There are many new improvements to Search within SharePoint 2010 including the new FAST Search application which further extends the out-of-box SharePoint search capability. One exciting new FAST feature is “Visual Best Bets” within your search results. Visual best bets show you a thumbnail image of each document found in the search results. For certain file types such as PowerPoint, it even goes as far as allowing you to scroll through a PowerPoint presentation all while staying within your search results page. Very impressive!
WOW! That is my first impression of seeing SharePoint Designer 2010 demonstrated in today’s ignite training. It is absolutely revolutionary!
The instructor basically called the product a complete re-write over the previous 2007 version and you will easily see why.
You can now connect to SharePoint Designer through the ribbon directly from your SharePoint 2010 site, or you can open the site directly in the client.
During today’s SharePoint 2010 Ignite training, it was apparent that Microsoft is now turning to Windows PowerShell as the primary command line tool for interaction with SharePoint.
I learned about many of the advantages that are obtained by utilizing the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell to script administrative tasks in SharePoint Server 2010. Windows PowerShell cmdlets go far beyond the capabilities of previous command-line tools such as STSADM. Windows PowerShell is not a replacement for STSADM, but it certainly seems to be more flexible and powerful.
The Hands-On labs gave me a test drive into the following areas:
How to use Windows PowerShell scripting techniques, such as pipes, filters, wildcards, and enumerations, for SharePoint Server 2010 administration.
How to assign variables and use the SharePoint object model from Windows PowerShell.
This week I have the privilege of attending Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 Ignite Virtual training course. SharePoint 2010 Ignite is deep technical training for SharePoint 2007 professionals who are looking to upgrade their skills to the new version of SharePoint. I am excited to learn more about the new features and functionalities of SharePoint Server 2010.
The first day included an overview of the following:
Looking for a fast way to get a demonstration of Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint or Salesforce.com? A new site: demos.c5insight.com has been setup for just this purpose. You'll find a variety of demos on the site for different types of users including:
During a recent information architecture project for a client who was migrating data from a single site collection to thirteen site collections, I realized that I would need to delete one of the subsites contained within the original site collection. It would have been nice and simple if I just needed to delete the site collection, but unfortunately this was not the case. The problem was the overwhelming number of sites that needed to be deleted. We all love using the stsadm command line tool, but one shortfall is that you cannot delete a site that contains a subsite. In the past I have bit the bullet and deleted sites, one at at time, using the stsadm –o deleteweb command, but I did not have the time or patience for that in this situation.
After doing some online research I found the answer I was looking for; there “IS” a better way to delete sites in SharePoint
Our team recently finished a significant enterprise MOSS farm migration from a single-server installation to a multi-server farm topology. Once the new farm was architected and constructed, the migration went as smoothly as it could have, with no major obstacles. However, as a day or two passed, a few of the end users began to notice a strange occurrence.
This particular client is a heavy user of the My Sites and My Links functionality. During the migration, we used the User Profile Replication Engine, which is just one component of the SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This allowed us to migrate user profiles, and more importantly, specific user profile properties. The primary reason for this was to avoid an SSP migration, which is where the actual “My Links” are stored.
Recently, we deployed a large project for a multinational corporation and an interesting situation arose during the process. The SharePoint portal for this particular client was accessible externally (outside of their corporate network). This allowed users to access the sites worldwide without having to use a VPN to connect to the corporate network. This is not uncommon in the SharePoint world, and we have implemented and configured a fair number of Extranet portals over the years.
This particular project was very document-centric (as are many in SharePoint), with multiple workflows for approval, updating, publishing, etc. Because of this, the Microsoft Word client was heavily used in the application, and seamless client integration was a critical important requirement.
During beta testing, we discovered two strange occurrences:
1) Emails generated by the automated task creation (for document approval) had a mixture of URLs with http and https.
2) When opening a document for editing/approval, the user sometimes received an error that he/she could not approve or edit the task associated with the document.
Have you ever spent hours tweaking your site footer in the SharePoint master page so that it stays at the bottom of your site, only to find out that when you view it in another browser or screen resolution it jumps back up the page? That’s frustrating to say the least!
In order to fulfill a client requirement on their SharePoint site, I needed to figure out how to accomplish this on a tight deadline. I found a site that provided the perfect solution to my issue. Ryan Fait shows how simple it is to make a “sticky footer”. It works with just a few simple CSS classes and simple HTML markup.
The solution has been tested in IE 5 and up, Firefox, Safari and Opera. It basically counts a negative value from the bottom of your page and sets the footer on top of it. The solution was easy to implement, worked perfectly, and satisfied the client! Thanks Ryan Fait!
The October Cumulative Update (CU) for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 was released on October 27th.
Every two months, Microsoft tries to release updates to the Office product line, including WSS and MOSS. The latest release addresses various issues across the board. Microsoft and the SharePoint product team does a good job with communicating the changes, so I have included the links to “what has been fixed” as well as a post by Joerg Sinemus detailing the installation procedure for the October CU.
I was recently tasked with quickly customizing a SharePoint site to fit the needs of a client. In other words, making a SharePoint site not look like SharePoint. Where do you start? It did not sound like an easy task, but rather a matter that would require a lot of research, trial and error. I was ecstatic to stumble upon a fantastic piece of work from Heather Solomon, a web designer specializing in SharePoint branding, layout and usability. Heather’s Base Master Page Templates strip down master pages for your use with SharePoint 2007 sites, so you don’t have to dig through tedious lines of code and formatting; Heather has done this for you!
I wanted to write a quick note to let everyone know that StreamLogic will be partnering with Customer Connect to present a FREE, live event this Thursday, October 29, 2009, at the Microsoft campus in Charlotte, North Carolina.
When? Thursday, October 29th, 8:45 AM - 1:30 PM Attend all day, or just choose the sessions that apply to you Where? Microsoft Campus - Charlotte, NC
Today was the fourth and final day for the exceptional 2009 SharePoint Conference. Today was a deviation from the norm, in that we did not spend the day in the typical SharePoint 2010 sessions. We actually spent the day with the Microsoft Partner Team, attending back-to-back sessions learning how we, as partners, can leverage the SharePoint 2010 platform to create even more value for our clients.
Anyone that knows me knows that our clients are more than just “customers.” I firmly believe in aligning with our clients, understanding their business, understanding what pains they are feeling, and creating long-lasting, trust-based relationships with them – they are my friends. So, when I have the opportunity to learn ways that we can add even more value than we already do, I am definitely on-board...
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