Ben There, Done That

I’m definitely not the first to blog this, nor will I probably be the last; and, chances are that you have already read this elsewhere, but just in case you haven’t, I figured I would post it anyways.

So, here it is, the launch date for Office and SharePoint 2010 has been set!  It will be May 12, 2010 at 11:00 am EST.  You can view all the details and sign up to watch the even live online here – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=N7_NqK7briG.

Ben SharePoint 2010 Launch, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010

So this weekend I decided to install SharePoint 2010 on my desktop at home.  My desktop is running Windows 7, and due to requirements of other software I need, I’m unable to run Windows Server 2008 on it.

Running a stand alone installation of SharePoint 2010 is great, however, I wanted to see if I could get a complete install on Windows 7 and user SQL Server 2008.  Fortunately, I found this blog post by Neil Hodgkinson that explained how to do it.  Everything appeared to be working great and the configuration wizard finished without any problems.  Unfortunately, that appearance didn’t last too long.

My problem arose when I went into Central Administration and, despite being a farm administrator, the first thing I noticed was I couldn’t create new web applications.  There were some other security issues as well, however, those are beside the point.  The purpose of this post is how to go about fixing this issue if you encounter the same thing.

After mulling over the issues for a few minutes, I remember are beloved User Access Control (UAC) and other issues I’ve seen when it is enabled on Windows Server.  So, I went into my UAC settings, disabled them complete, restarted my computer, logged into Central Administration and what do you know, it worked!  I can now create new web applications and have full control over my SharePoint 2010 installation.

Ben SharePoint 2010 SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, UAC, Windows 7

As discovered by Todd Carter there is a memory leak in SharePoint 2007.  He has outlined the details as well as a work around to the fix the memory leak.

I decided to do some testing with it, however, when I compiled the dll, placed it into the GAC, and changed my global.asax file, I started getting this error: “Could not load file or assembly ‘[Assembly Name]’ or one of its dependencies.  The system cannot find the file specified.”

After digging into this error for a while I discovered my problem.  This may be fairly obvious to developers out there , but coming at this from more of a SharePoint administrator type roll, I missed this one step that isn’t outlined in the steps provided by Todd.

After deploying your dll to the GAC, you need to open up your web.config and place

<add assembly="[Assembly Name], Version=[Version Number], Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=[Public Key Token]" />

in the web.config file of the web application you wish to apply your fix to.  This line should be added between <assemblies> and </assemblies> in the web.config file.

All of the information: Assembly Name, Version Number and the Public Key Token can be found by right clicking on your dll in the GAC and viewing the properties of the dll.

Once I added the assembly to my web.config for the web applications I was trying to apply the fix to, everything worked as expected.

Ben Customizations, Development, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 Development, Errors, Memory Leak, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007

A while a go a write a short post on how to hide web part headers in SharePoint 2007.  Recently I had some inquire how to do the same thing for SharePoint 2010.  So, here is what to do in order to hide a web part header in SharePoint 2010.

1.  Add a content editor web part to your page.

2. Edit the Web Part

3. Click in the content area of the web part, click HTML and select “Edit HTML Source”

4. Put the following code in the web part:

5. Click “OK”

6. Expand “Appearance” (on the right side of the page)

7. Set the chrome type to “None”

8. Click “OK” and then save and check in your page.

The headers of your web part should now be hidden.  This can be extremely helpful when your page contains a web part using “boxed” for your style when creating a list view.  The only downside to this approach is if you have multiple web parts on a single page, it will hide the headers for all the web parts on your site.

How to do the same thing in SharePoint 2007

Ben Customizations, Development, SharePoint 2010 Content Editor, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010

I saw this feature pop up on twitter a couple days ago and I had to check it out.  If you want to see (and access) all the Windows 7 settings you have to check this out.

Here is a blog post showing how to Enable/Access GodMode in Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2010/01/03/enable-godmode-on-windows-7.aspx

There was another post highlighting the other GUIDs you can use for other various “GodMode” type folders here – http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-379690.html

Enjoy!

Ben Misc GodMode, Windows 7, Windows Settings

I was working with SharePoint surveys the other day and discovered an old issue working with surveys and Microsoft Office that appears to have resurfaced.

We were trying to see what other reports we could generate from a SharePoint survey.  Naturally with the option to export to Excel, we figured why not just export all the survey data into Excel and play with it there.  To test it out I tried to get a variety of questions in the survey, one of these questions being the rating (matrix) survey question.

I created a few responses to the survey and attempted to export the list data to Excel (I’m running 2010 Beta).  Everything came over well with the exception of the matrix type questions.  I did some searching and this was also an issue with Excel 2003.  However, people said it was resolved with Excel 2007.  I installed Excel 2007 and sure enough the matrix questions imported into Excel 2007 just fine.  I tried Excel 2010 once more and the values still failed to come over.

So, it appears that the problem with importing matrix type of questions from SharePoint 2007 to Excel 2003 has returned in Excel 2010.  Granted, this is the beta, so maybe it will be fixed by the release.

I also want to do some testing with SharePoint 2010 surveys, Excel 2010 and possibly PowerPivot.  I’ve been reading some great things about PowerPivot but haven’t had much of a chance to play with it for myself.  Once I get a chance to do some testing with these tools I’ll write a new post.  Hopefully there will be some good news about doing more in depth analysis of SharePoint Survey results using these new tools.

Ben Office 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 Excel 2010, Office 2010, PowerPivot, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Surveys

For those of you with a TechNet subscription and an itching desire to download the Office 2010 Suite of products, they are now here!! I’m sure every other blogger is writing this same post so I won’t make it long.  The RSS feed for the released products is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscription-downloads.rss if you want direct links to the downloads, here they are:

Office Search Server Express 2010 Beta (x64)

Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x86)

FAST Search Server SharePoint 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Project Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x86)

Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x86)

Office SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (x86 and x64)

Office SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Business Contact Manager 2010 Beta (x64)

Office Web Applications 2010 Beta (x64)

That is everything I currently see on TechNet.  They are all English versions and please, no one comment and tell me I have the wrong names.  I realize the names above don’t all match up to the new names that Microsoft announced when it comes to SharePoint.  I just copied the names directly from the TechNet site.

Ben "Office 14", Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Office, Office 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Beta Downloads, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server

SharePoint is designed to security trim your search results based on your user ID, a great feature to have in SharePoint as you don’t want search to return results of pages and content a user doesn’t have access too.  However, this requires one extra “step” at times when moving a site from development to testing or even to production.

I’m sure this topic has been blogged about before as this isn’t the first time I’ve run into it, but I figured I would write a short post about it for anyone that encounters what would appear to be an issue with their Search in SharePoint.

The scenario: You have been building out a SharePoint site and you are ready to release it to the rest of your users. You have tested everything using your own credentials.  You add a new user to the site with credentials equivalent to your end users and start testing with those credentials before going live.  Everything is working as expected…until

The problem: Your perform a search…You go to your search page, search for some well known content that you know should be returned, but you get no results in SharePoint search.  Your navigate to the page and you have access to it and can view the content you are searching for.  To further test, you run a few more searches, but everything comes back with no search results.

The resolution: When SharePoint performs a crawl (incremental or full) it looks at all your content AS WELL AS who has permission to access the content.  If you add users to your site, and immediately try a search before running a search crawl, the search index still has that the newly added user doesn’t have access to the content.  So, if you are going to add new users to the site that need access to search, or you are going to be testing search, immediately after adding those new users, run an incremental crawl so your SharePoint search index can pick up that these new users actually have access to the content you are searching for.

Ben Search, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 SharePoint Security Search

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the SharePoint conference this year. However, I have been trying to follow it all day via twitter and the #SPC2009 hash tag. There have been a ton of tweets and with the tweets and the amount of people a lot of duplicates. As tweets have been going out all day I’ve tried to capture new blog posts about the 2010 stack and am attempting to put together a good list of blog posts that I’ve have noticed today (and continue to notice throughout the week). Feel free to send me any blog posts I have missed or you would like me to add to my site. So, here they are:

SharePoint

SharePoint Overview from the Microsoft SharePoint Team – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Home Page - http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference 2010 Home Page (Keynote video soon) – http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/default.aspx

SharePoint Conference Video Highlights – http://www.mssharepointconference.com/Pages/videohighlights.aspx

SharePoint 2010 MSDN Site – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256.aspx

SharePoint 2010 TechNet Site – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

Pre-Register for SharePoint 2010 Beta – http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

Arpan Shah, Welcome to SharePoint 2010 – http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans/archive/2009/10/19/welcome-to-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Andrew Connell’s Blog (Several SharePoint 2010 posts already) – http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/

SharePoint Sharpener, Rundown of New Features – http://sharepointsharpener.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/spc09-sharepoint-2010-unveiled-rundown-of-new-features/

SharePoint 2010 Installation (not in English, but has screen shots of the install) – http://sharepointsisters.de/2009/10/installation-sharepoint-server-2010/

SharePoint 2010 Preview by Knowledge Management Associates – http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge/2009/10/sharepooint-2010-preview.html

A listing of SharePoint 2010 Documentation and Posters published by Microsoft – http://bink.nu/news/sharepoint-2010-documentation.aspx

Document Management in SharePoint 2010 – http://dotneteers.net/blogs/aghy/archive/2009/10/19/document-management-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

ZDNet SharePoint 2010 Announcement – http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4278

Corey’s SharePoint 2010 Observations – http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2009/10/19/corey-s-big-post-of-sharepoint-2010-observations.aspx

Ballmer, SharePoint and the Economy – http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/microsofts-ballmer-shows-sharepoint-and-cites-its-link-economic-prosperity-587

Another index of some SharePoint 2010 postings online – http://webpartner.com/PNPT#7fc51a6079d86e3841db

Mike Gotta Notes from SPC09 Day 1 – http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2009/10/sharepoint-2009-conference-morning-keynotes.html

SharePoint 2010 Public Beta to be released next month – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10377483-56.html

StoragePoint for SharePoint 2010 – http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS164545+19-Oct-2009+PRN20091019

SharePoint 2010 Central Admin – http://planetmoss.blogspot.com/2009/10/central-administration-in-sharepoint.html

Eli Robillard, Sandbox Solutions and Security in WSS 4.0 (SharePoint Foundation) – http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/

SharePoint Conference 2009, Morning Keynote from The Burton Group – http://ccsblog.burtongroup.com/collaboration_and_content/2009/10/sharepoint-2009-conference-morning-keynotes.html

SharePoint 2010 Links from S.S. Ahmed, SharePoint MVP – http://vspug.com/ssa/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010-links/

Lookup Columns in SharePoint 2010 – http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2009/10/19/sp2010-what-s-new-lookup-columns-spc09.aspx

Overview of SharePoint Conference 2009, Day 1 – http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2009/10/19/the-kimono-is-open-the-veil-is-lifted-the-gags-are-removed-spc09.aspx

BI

BI in SharePoint 2010 – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=8d9e2a99-f288-47c2-916b-2f32864f7b82&ID=268

Office 2010

PivotPoint for Excel 2010 – http://www.powerpivot.com/

Office 2010 Public Beta to be released next month – http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10377483-56.html

Visual Studio 2010

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 – http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/10/19/announcing-visual-studio-2010-and-net-fx-4-beta-2.aspx

Again, this is just a list of what I could capture while keeping an eye on twitter all day.  Feel free to email me addition blog posts or add them as a comment as I will try to continue updating this list throughout the week.

admin Conferences, Office 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, Twitter BI, Office 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Foundation, Visual Studio 2010

After four days at Baptist Health, the team launched the new Wolfson Children’s Hospital site today on SharePoint.  Being there for the short time I have, I didn’t have a lot to contribute to the site, nonetheless it is still very exciting for the whole team.  Feel free to head over to the site, check it out and let us know what you think!

Tags: SharePoint, Baptist Health, Wolfson Children’s Hospital, Health Care

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