Social-Point

Announced today at MacWorld was some much needed upgrades coming to Entourage including:

• Use of Exchange WEB Services
• Enhanced support for SharePoint (and Windows Live)
• Check-in/Check-out
• Save to SharePoint

Beta should show up in the February timeframe with release later this year.

As someone who uses a MAC at both home and work – I am thrilled!

Have you ever had one of those – “I didn’t know you could configure that!” in SharePoint? So to set the stage, I am working on more scripting from SharePoint to help our deployment process when I come across a SharePoint property called “Days-to-show-new-icon”. Do you know what it lets you set? That’s right… the amount of days the “NEW” icon shows up when adding new content!

Next: My apologies

I am sorry to all those whom I told this was hard wired into the app at 1 day. Apparently this is a setting in MOSS. Here is the syntax:

To Set The Property

Stsadm –o setproperty –propertyname days-to-show-new-icon –pv 3

To view the current settings of the property:

Stsadm –o getproperty –propertyname days-to-show-new-icon

By the way: you can substitute “pn” for propertyname and “pv” for propertyvalue

Many people think that a SharePoint project is all about a successful installation and configuration of the product. Now, being in the infrastructure business, you would think I would be shouting Amen to that song being sung by the choir. In reality – the installation and configuration of SharePoint is no more the total project as a solid foundation is not the total of a house being built. That being said – a solid installation and configuration of SharePoint is a must - just as a solid foundation required for a stable house.

So what else needs to be considered? Taxonomy. Taxonomy can be defined as “the practice and science of classification” (there are other variations to this definition). A well thought out Taxonomy will help make sure that information placed in your SharePoint farm can be found and therefore, has value.

The good people over at ascentium have published a great article entitled, 10 Taxonomy Trends to Watch in 2009. In that article they spell out 10 very good, very real benfefits to taking the time to think and plan about taxonomy. Give it a read and let me k now what you think about. How will you impact Taxonomy in your organization in 2009?

Jakob Nielsen just release the results for “10 Best Intranets of 2009“. A very interesting factoid that shows up toward the end of the article is the fact that half of the winning Intranet’s use SharePoint. Other interesting points from the article are:

• Size of Intranet teams
• Size of Intranet budgets
• Increase in collaborative features in corporate Intranets
• Increase of CEO’s that blog
• Increase of personalization and customization

Take a few minutes and read the article and let me know what stands out to you!

Solution Preview:

Do not use the Network Service account in a farm that has been installed using Least Privilege access – you will receive strange errors when approval workflows are executed. To change the identity of a SharePoint application pool to a specific account, use Central Admin, Operations tab, Service Accounts. Don’t try to do it by hand.

Background:

I had configured a SharePoint farm for a customer about 30 days ago. This customer had a developer who was going to be dropping a custom application in place on the farm in the coming weeks so he didn’t want me to create the Application Pool or Site collection for the solution, so I did everything else that was required for the install. One other bit of information is that when I do my installations, I follow best practices and use least privilege access. The install went fine and I handed the farm off t the customer and the customer’s developer.

The Situation

Last night I received a call from a support tech that that customer called and was very angry that we had used “SharePoint Trial Access Keys” when installing SharePoint for them 30 days ago. The tech was told that when the customer attempted to create a new page they received the error “The Trial period has expired for this product.” I did the installation, I know the keys I used were not trial keys. I logged on to the server (from home at 8:30 in the evening) and navigated to the site. I created a new sub-site in their production environment (template: Team Site) as I didn’t want to mess with their custom application they were trying to get deployed in the root. I was able to create the site and numerous pages within the site.

After relaying this to the customer they gave me permission to create a page within their production site (template: Publishing Portal). I was able to create the site, but when I clicked Publish I did in fact receive the error: The trial period has expired for this product!

After some searching around it became apparent that when the developer created the application pool for the new site, he used the Network Service account as it’s identity. This was the cause of the error. Apparently when you mix authentication methodologies in a SharePoint install it gets upset.

Now this error is NOT associated with creating new pages. I was able to do that in the Team Site I had created and I was able to create the site in the Publishing Portal. The problem occurs when the content publishing workflow fired in the publishing portal. So something in the specific workflow was hitting an authentication error which, naturally, spewed the error: The trial period has expired.

The Solution

Change the identity of the Application Pool to be a specific SharePoint service account. To do this by hand is very tedious (and not recommended)

1. Change the identity of the Application Pool Identity
2. Add the new user to the IIS_WPG and WSS_WPG
3. Assign the user: Adjust memory quotas for process and Replace a process level token
4. Give the IIS_WPG group Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read permissions to the Web site directories
5. Create a new SQL login and grant appropriate rights
6. A bunch of other stuff

The SHAREPOINT WAY (and the right way) is to:

1. Create the new service account
2. Open Central Admin
3. Go to the Operations Tab
4. Under Security Configuration click Service Accounts
5. Click the radio button for web application pool and select the appropriate application pool
6. Click the Configurable radio button
7. Enter in the correct Username and Password
8. Click OK
9. Open a command prompt and enter: iisreset
10. Test the site

That’s it. Enjoy.

OK, so maybe the better question is: where have you been?  I’ve been laying low hanging out w/ the family over Christmas week.  I am back @ work the week of New Years.  I hope/ expect it to be quiet which will give me some tiime to generate some content for this site.

Until then - just scroll down to enjoy some re-runs!

Merry Christmas-

Jeff

Have I mentioned that the new (home) brewery has just come online?  Pictures to follow.

Hey, it can’t all be about SharePoint around here

I am going to start a thread of areas where the “Cross-Browser” experience breaks down in SharePoint. There are sever obvious areas like:

• No HTML Editor
• No drop-down on web parts
• No pop-up WEB window with WEB Parts

Here is a new one I found today: When you use FireFox to apply a SharePoint Audience to a WEB Part, FireFox shows you the GUID for the Audience and not the “friendly” name. Everything seems to work just fine – it just looks a little odd.

If you install the “Full” install of SharePoint – the embedded (or compact) version of SQL will automatically be installed and used. This is very helpful when you are either just trying the software out or working with a very small user base. The key here is that SharePoint and the DB have to be installed on the same server and the farm can never grow any larger without stepping up to a full (work group or standard) version of SQL.

Should you find yourself managing an environment like this and need to use SQL Management Studio to connect to the DB, the following string is required to connect to the server:

\\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query

Just enter that in the “Server Name” field. You do need to make sure that you are running SQL Management Studio from the same server as the embedded DB.

One last note, any STSADM commends that require the SQL Server name, use the same string in lieu of the physical server’s name.

I’ve begun the process of attempting to connect Rackspace’s “Cloud Files” product to SharePoint. Unfortunately – this isn’t a “How I Did It” post. I tried, I failed. This first attempt was just a quick shot at using SharePoint Designer to connect to an external XML web service. I’m going to call the developers over there to learn more of what’s going on and make another attempt. Keep in mind – this would only be a “read only” view into the “Cloud”.

Once this is complete – I will be working on a WEB Part to that will connect SharePoint in a read-write fashion into the Cloud thereby creating a storage location for SharePoint content in a repository that is dramatically cheaper than SQL storage but is also connected to the LimeLight Content Distribution Network. Very cool stuff – once it’s working

Stay tuned…