Ben There, Done That

This is an update to my previous blog post about a SilverLight based SlideShow that I’ve used in SharePoint and on other sites. I recently upgraded to the SilverLight 2.0 Beta 1 and found out the SlideShow no longer works. I’m currently looking for other options, both SilverLight and non SilverLight. Hopefully, the SlideShow will be upgrade to support SilverLight 2.0. I’ll keep you updated on what I find and if an updated SlideShow is released. Until then, I would suggest staying with SilverLight 1.0.

John Holiday posted this video of a demo of Windows 7

For those of you who have dealt with content deployment in SharePoint, you know it’s not one of the most bug free and robust features they have. They are working to improve it however, Andrew Connell just posted here about hot fixes that Microsoft released and are available if you open a support ticket with them.

You can read more details on Andrew’s blog.

SharePoint Joel just posted a list of 300 SharePoint blogs on his blog. It’s a great resource for seeing his top recommendations for blogs. You can find his list here.

Unfortunately my blog didn’t make it on the list…I guess I’ll just have to keep posting and work my way up.

I gave in to blogging about something everyone else blogs about … Visual Studio SP1 is here and available for download on MSDN. I downloaded the 440 KB installer, but this launches the download and installation of the actually Service Pack. I will give it a shot tonight once I get back to my hotel room and let you all know how it goes.

One of the best new features of SharePoint 2007 is search. I was at a client’s the other day, working on search and we were getting some results back to certain queries, that contained information in the summery (or the Hit highlight area) that we didn’t want people seeing. I spent considerable time going over all the metadata of the pages, removing everything I could think from the metadata being crawled on the content, resetting the content and re-crawling the data. The information just wouldn’t go away. Because the pages themselves were fine to show up in the search, just not the hit highlight information, I decided to customize the search experience.

I performed the search returning the content and started editing the search results page. I opened up the web part properties of the Search Result Core web part and started editing the XSL. There is a line in the XSL that is:

And goes on to say, display the high highlighted summery. I simply changed this line to read

Because the information is case sensitive, and the information was showing up both in upper and lower cases, I had to put both cases in. The allows the results of the certain search query to still appear, however, the hit highlight summery that contained the information is hidden from view.

Just another example of how the customizability of SharePoint can be used to enhance and secure a users experience.

I went camera shopping with my mom the other day and bought myself a new toy. I’ve always wanted a Canon Digital Rebel and with the new XSI having just come out, I figured maybe I would get that one. After spending about 2 hours talking to the “camera experts” I changed my mind and purchased the Nikon D60 kit with a couple lenses, one 18 – 55 and the other 55 – 200.

A couple things led to this decisions, one of them being the price. Being new to the digital SLR world, the lower entry point was a seller as I try out the camera and get more experienced. The Nikon has all the main features I need to get started in the digital SLR world and spend months, if not years learning about it. If at some point in time I find a feature I don’t want, and badly need, I’ll consider the upgrade.

One thing Canon is making a big deal about on the XSI, is the new LiveView feature. It’s a cool feature, but for the type of pictures I usually take, it was impractical for me. The focus speed is incredibly slow, and most of the “point-and-shoot” type modes, you can’t even use live view for. It only comes in handy when doing manual photography of still objects, portraits, landscapes, etc. The XSI does have 2 extra megapixels (12 instead of 10), but at this point in time, the 2 extra megapixels wasn’t worth the extra price.

Anyways, that was my choice and just a couple or reasons behind the choice I made, maybe I’ll continue to post more about the camera and what I’m learning, or maybe I’ll get back to writing more SharePoint stuff (like my next blog post). I’ve been rather delinquent in writing about SharePoint and need to start picking it up again. Anyways, if you want to see pictures, the best place to see them will probably be any one of the 4 locations, this website on the pictures page, my Picasa Web site, my Facebook page or my LiveSpace Page. Good pictures I try to post to all of them, sometimes pictures will just show up on one or two.

A Sunset in Houston, TX

I’m back at it again, moving SharePoint 2007 databases. I’m working with a client who has a SAN with only 100 GB of free space and will be upgrading to a band new SAN and servers in 4 – 5 weeks. However, they would like to get their production environment of MOSS up and running next week. So, this requires a database move.

As you know from my previous posts, I’ve attempted to move the databases from one server to another and change the name of the servers and the SQL instance. In the case of the client, this isn’t necessary. They will be decommissioning the old SAN when the new on arrives, so they can give the new server the same server name, IP address and SQL instance. It turns out this makes moving the SQL databases a whole lot easier.

This week in my test environment I created to SQL servers and a MOSS front end server. I installed MOSS and just did a very basic configuration on the first SQL Server. Then I backed up all the databases, saved them to my web front end, and shut down SQL Server 1. I booted up SQL Server 2 with the same name, IP and SQL Server instance and restore my databases into this server. I performed an IIS reset on my MOSS front end and tried to hit the websites. I received an error message that the server could not connect to the databases. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I thought SQL Security, MOSS automatically sets up security on the databases when you do configuration. The databases have security set up from the restore…but those users don’t have logins set up in SQL. I open up SQL Management studio and added the domain logins I used to set up MOSS, performed another IIS reset on my MOSS front end, just to be sure, and hit my Central Admin, Shared Services and a Web Application I created. All of them came right up and worked beautifully.

Moral of the story…if you think you want to move your SharePoint databases, the best way is to get a new server, set it up with identical network and SQL information to the old one, put your databases on the new server and get rid of the old one.