One of the great headaches I have found with SharePoint is viewing and sorting the log files located in the 12\LOGS folder on the SharePoint server file system. Today I ran across a solution that put my headache to rest. It is a solution you can deploy to your SharePoint farm that lets you view the log files in Central Administration. You can select which log file you are interested in and then filter them based on various criteria, allowing you to only view log entries you are useful in. The solution has actually been out for quite some time, this just happens to be first time I’ve stumbled across it. You can download the solution off CodePlex here. There are also lots of other great solutions available on this site as well. So far the Log Viewer is the only one I’ve had any time to play with.
I promised a post once I get the infrastructure update installed, so here it is. I actually built a brand new environment to get it all up and going. My current test/development environment is now running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (x64), SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition (x64) and MOSS SP1 with Infrastructure Update (x64). I also have SQL 2008 RC0 installed, although I’m not using it for anything right now.
The Infrastructure update was nice and simple. I downloaded the x64 MOSS Infrastructure update, ran the installer and reran the SharePoint configuration wizard. Everything went off without a hitch. So far I haven’t discovered any bugs, although I haven’t played with the update too much yet. I had seen some posts about problems with AAM, however, I have yet to find them. I have one web application running with an internal URL and that is extended to an external URL. So far no problems accessing either one. Any bugs or problems I discover with the infrastructure update I’ll post as soon as I find them.
Currently I’m using my external URL simply so I can get to my server when I’m not in the office, however, I may expand it to contain other materials. I will keep you all updated if I decided to take it further.
I was tagged by Mark Gilbert for an “inspiration” meme started by Josh Holmes:
Who has inspired you?
What have they inspired you to do?
Who else have they inspired?
Like many people, it is touch to pick just one person who has inspired you as there have been many through my life time.
Although it may be considered a bit of a “Sunday School Answer”, the first person that comes to mind is my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The way He lived His life here on earth is a way I can only dream about living. Yet, His example is something I strive for every day. His love for everyone, the way he sees everyone as an individual and a person. His example and knowing He is always there to give me strength when I need it. His encouragement in I Corinthians 10:31, “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. What better inspiration can you have than to live your life to give glory to God, the only perfect person, in everything you do. His example and His Word inspires me every day to live a life honoring and glorifying to Him. As to who else He has inspired, He has inspired the millions of other Christians throughout the world over last few thousand years.
Another inspiration of mine has been my parents. They are the ones that introduced me to Christ. They have done an amazing job in raising me and helping me to figure out who I am. Their encouragement and support throughout my life has always been an inspiration and support to me. When I think about becoming a parent myself sometime down the road, I hope and pray that I can be to my own kids what they have been to me. I continue to look to them as an example and inspiration for the way I should live my life.
A professional inspiration of mine, like Mark, was Jeff a co-worker and my boss at BlueGranite. He trained me and taught me as I transitioned from being a system and network administrator at BlueGranite into a SharePoint consultant. He taught me the importance of research and documentation as well as many of the ins and outs of consulting. He has been a great inspiration when it comes to consulting and the world of Microsoft technologies.
To continue this meme I’d like to tag Marissa Mendrygal
Two days ago Microsoft release the long awaited Infrastructure Update for SharePoint. The full details of the release (as well as links to the downloads) can be found on the SharePoint Team Blog.
In a nut shell this release includes:
1. The Search Server 2008 updates for MOSS so that anyone with MOSS now has all the functionality of Search Server 2008.
2. Several updates for Content Deployment.
3. Several signification platform performance updates.
I haven’t installed a copy of it yet, but hope to next week. I have several items I plan to work on next week including this as well as some test with SQL 2008 and SharePoint. I’ve been incredible busy with client work lately and just haven’t gotten to some of these things. Hopefully I’ll have some good updates on everything very soon!
I just received this list of “Office 14” tidbits from my boss at EPC Group that he got from Peter Seale’s blog. I haven’t seen anything official yet with respects to the new version of SharePoint outside of what you can find on Google. Hopefully I’ll have more information soon.
Random Office 14 tidbits
SharePoint is the fourth bullet point: "they doubled the development teams on ECM and social software."
SharePoint Lists may be stored as SQL Server tables. Question now is: what List functionality will still work on "SQL Server Lists"?
Microsoft FAQ includes the phrase "SharePoint 2009"…TWICE. Scandal!
Full transcript. This is where he announces "SQL Lists," (not the official term) among other things.
This writer indicates that Microsoft will be adapting community projects: "the best examples of these customizations will be included in future versions."
"On Tuesday, the SharePoint MVPs had nearly 9 hours of sessions…another 9 hours of sessions on Wednesday…" Make sure to ask your MVP awkward questions like "Hey, isn’t this information under NDA?" Give them tiny heart attacks, it’s fun.
Personally I’d prefer they not extend Access to the web…again…maybe instead write a SharePoint query + reporting tool and call it "Access"? Maybe (hopefully) that’s what they’re doing.
Embedded video—Access Web Access is discussed ~6 minutes in.
Vaguely claims Microsoft will "upgrade its support"—maybe we’re already seeing this with the recent release for Office 2007?
Tailored primarily to the typical Office user, though it does offer a discussion of "6 focus points for Office 14" and links directly to an MS PPT on the subject.
Not surprising; 64-bit is the (short-term) future
Ray Ozzie hints that there will be increasing association between Groove and SharePoint.
Rampant speculation
…their guess is as good as mine. Specific mentions of "Enterprise 2.0."
Edin speculates on SharePoint vNext features.
Opinion piece; his guess is as good as mine
Here is a great RSS feed I ran across today for keeping track of all the SharePoint related information that is posted on MSDN and TechNet.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointmsteamblogs
In addition, here are a couple great feeds for keeping up with all the KB articles posted.
WSS – http://kbalertz.com/rss/WindowsSharePointServices30.xml
MOSS – http://kbalertz.com/rss/SharePointServer2007.xml
Working on several projects over the last few weeks, a common problem has arisen. How do we build site navigation to move across several site collections? The easy answer is, use the site directory and set it up to create a site collection every time you create a new site. But what if you’re using WSS or you don’t want every site you create in the site collection to be a new site? This post will go over a couple ways I’ve set about to accomplish this and hopefully I’ll have even a better solution soon.
Option 1:
User a custom site map provider. This is actually a pretty easy solution. I’ve done this in a couple instances following the steps outline here. The disadvantage to this solution is that the top navigation isn’t dynamically built. Every time you want to add a new link to your navigation, you need to manually go in and edit your sitemap file. One way this could be fixed is to write a custom feature to add into SharePoint that will automatically update your sitemap file as you add sites. This may be a future project…
Option 2:
Use a custom link list with a list roll up web part. This is another option to build a site directory of sorts, especially if you are using WSS. Again, it is a manually created list, but it gives you a little more flexibility. I create a link list and add a few columns to the list based on how I may want to sort and filter the list. Then I use the cseg RollUp 3.5 webpart to display and format how I want the links to look. I can filter, sort and group the links that I pull from my custom link list. There is also an upgrade version of the web part that you can buy at SPSProfessional. A feature that we are working on right now, is a site provisioning process that will automatically add a link to this list when the site is created.
As I continue to run into this and work on cross site collection navigation, I’ll post updates and solutions I have found to the problem. Who knows, maybe this will even be taken care of for us in SharePoint 2009.