Ben There, Done That

I had a client ping me yesterday with this problem.  I popped open my test environment and it worked fine…so what would cause the Link button to disappear at the top of my Issues and Risk lists in my Project Server 2007 Project Workspace within SharePoint?

I figured it had to be a column since it’s a SharePoint list, and everything is a column.  So I opened up my Issues list settings settings in the environment I’m troubleshooting, no column.  I looked at my test environment…there is the column.  Where did it go?  I know the client didn’t just got in and delete on column.  Its not in my site columns anywhere, it’s just gone.  So, I went to my Project Server resource database…Google.  After a short time searching I found this excellent post by Brian Smith.  Sure enough, that was the problem, we had installed all 40 of Microsoft Fabulous 40 site templates and our Project Server 2007 project workspace had been overwritten, therefore removing the Links column.  We went through the steps document by Brian, and presto! We can now link our Issues and Risk in our Project Workspace to tasks in Project Server 2007.

So, for those of you who have this problem, read Brian’s post on how to fix it.  For those of you that are looking to install Project Server 2007 and the Fabulous 40 Templates, don’t install the Project Tracking Workspace solution!

This is going to be a little different blog post for me.  It’s not about SharePoint, doesn’t have any “how to do this” or “how to solve that”.  It’s just my ponderings about 64 bit computing as I have a problem I run into regularly and I’m not sure what to do about it.

The problem? for me it is VPN clients and how they work on 64 bit operating systems.  I have two computers that I use regularly right now, both have 64 bit dual core processors with 4 GB of RAM.  Yes, I love a speedy computer and to be able to get as much RAM as I can.  With this said, all of my machines are 64 bit.  Up until today, all of my VM’s were 64 bit as well.  As I look to upgrade my desktop to more RAM, I want to be able to use more than 3.25 GB of RAM in my VM’s as well.

I also have lots of clients I connect to via VPN.  But have you ever noticed how seldom VPN clients support 64 bit?  The two I run across regularly are, Cisco VPN client and Juniper VPN client.  Both are in use on multiple clients environments.  However, as many people are painfully aware of, Cisco hasn’t, and has no plans to release a 64 bit client and Juniper has, but you need to be on the latest version of their VPN package to be able to use this client.  Cisco, you need to upgrade your firewall to enable use of VPN Anywhere to be able to use a 64 bit client.  Now granted, I understand they want people to upgrade, but this can be an expensive and time intensive task for any organization, and not one that is often done quickly.

Having previously worked at a large company, we were just starting to upgrade to XP as Vista was shipping.  For many organizations they aren’t even thinking Vista, let alone 64 bit computing.  They don’t have the need to upgrade their Cisco firewall to the ASA series, or the Juniper firewall to the latest version.  They are running 32 bit and are perfection content to do that…they have nothing forcing them to do otherwise.  Then they hire a consultant, who tends to have the newest of everything.  One, because we are geeks who love our toys, and two because we need to stay ahead of everyone else.  But low and behold, we can’t connect remotely because we are running 64 bit operating systems.

So…how do we get around it?  What came first the chicken or the egg?  For now I have a 32 bit OS installed in a VM just for when I need to access a clients environment.  Sure I could run a native 32 bit OS, but then I can’t utilize all of my ram.  Of clients could start upgrading their environment even though there is no specific need to do it.  So, the move to 64 bit computing is much like the chicken or the egg.  Why upgrade to 64 bit if everything you have still runs on 32 bit?  Or, why upgrade to the 64 bit version of VPN (and other packages) which causes all these other upgrades and hastles for companies, when there is a 32 bit version of everything and it is 100% compatible with what you run (ussually 32 bit Windows XP).  In the meantime, you have all kinds of people, like me, trying to move to a 64 bit platform, but unable to do a ful move because it isn’t supported in the environments I need to work in.  Until someone stands up and forces the use of 64 bit (much like MS and Exchange Server 2007), I think we are going to continue to live with this problem when running a 64 bit operating system.

VPN is just one example of this, but I have run into multiple others that have run into a similar problem with other software packages and incomptiblities between applications when companies have attempted to start migrating over to a 64 bit computing environment.  Hopefully the trend will start shifting soon and the support for a 64 bit client OS will improve soon.

A new SharePoint site has popped up on the grid, www.sharepointreviews.com.  It is an “independent product directory that provides SharePoint power users, developers and administrators with objective expert review and options on SharePoint Web parts, applications and development platforms.” 

It is open to submit new products and review products that have already been submitted as well as rank the various tools on the site.  With the proliferation of 3rd party “add-ons” in the SharePoint world, a site like this has been greatly need and hopefully will be utilized to it’s full potential in helping those using SharePoint to find quality products that will further enhance and improve their SharePoint experience.

Today Microsoft release the first pass of it’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering with SharePoint and Exchange.  The prices seem fairly reasonable starting as low as $7.50/user for SharePoint.  I signed up for my 30-day free trial today, so I will post more as I get the chance to play with it and experiment with it.  If it is good enough, and has the features necessary, maybe I’ll even move my blog over there, we’ll see.  You can check it all out for yourself here: http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx

My favorite Slide Show for SharePoint has been updated.  There is now a slide.show 2 that was released on October 24th.  The updated slide show can be found here.  To use it in SharePoint, the instructions will be slightly different than slide.show 1.  The first thing you will notice is that the release download only contains a single file, Vertigo.SlideShow.xap.  This actually make configuring this one quite a bit simpler.  You still need a data source, either a Data.xml file, a Flickr site, or some other custom data provider.  However, the html file is much simpler.  The only code necessary is:

This will use the Data.xml file.  If you wish to use Flickr, see the documentation on the download site to configure Flickr.  Everything else is the same as slide.show 1 in terms of getting it to work in SharePoint.  Just place your .html, .xml and .xap file in a document library, point Data.xml to you image, and place a Page View web part on the page you want your slide show on and point it to your .html file containing the code above.  I’ve already implemented this update on my blog here.  I’ll try to get an actually SharePoint example up somewhere soon.

Microsoft announced their newest SharePoint Certification today, a Microsoft Certified Master.  It is designed to set apart the experts in the SharePoint field as there have been quite a few comments about only needing to pass one SharePoint test to become a MCTS in SharePoint.  The unfortunate aspect about all of this from my perspective is some of the prerequisites for the certification.

The require you to have passed all 4 SharePoint certifications.  This is certain understandable and attainable by anyone proficient in SharePoint as I have passed both exams for MOSS and have yet to take the WSS test with time being the primary reason.  I wouldn’t have any problems going in to take the two WSS test before becoming a MCM.

However, the one that gets me is at least 2 years of either SPS 2003 or CMS 2002 experience.  Being relatively new to SharePoint (I started about the time beta 1 for 2007 came on the scene).  I haven’t had a chance to get much experience in 2003 as I have focused on SharePoint 2007.  I have a little bit of experience doing some migrations, teaching a few SPS 2003 classes and just little SPS 2003 admin tasks here and there, but nothing close to 3 years.  This is due 100% to my age and the beginning of my career in SharePoint…there just weren’t the opportunities to even allow me to get 2 years of SPS 2003 experience.  You can read more about the prerequisites as well as apply for the program here (the link to Apply/Register is at the bottom).

For now I guess I’ll have to be content with my MCTS until 1. the prerequisites change to allow younger SharePoint professionals to apply or 2. I can revert back to SPS 2003 for two years just so I can get the experience in that is required for the MCM.  Something tells me the first is more likely…maybe after the next version of SharePoint comes out and 2 years of experience is required in SharePoint 2007 instead of 2003.

Ok, so I’m giving in and joining everyone else who is posting about the exciting new feature of Visual Studio 2010 that were recently released on the SharePoint Team Blog.  This is an early list of what has been mentioned so far.  I’m sure there is much more to come, but this should wet your apatite and build your excitement for the next version.

• Server Explorer for SharePoint viewing Lists and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio

• Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP file) Import to create a new solution

• Added a new web part project item and showed the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint

• Showed adding an event receiver for SharePoint and using the wizard to choose the event receiver and to just create a source file with that event receiver.

• Added an ASPX workflow initiation form to a workflow project and showed how this workflow initiation form has designer capability

• Showed the packaging explorer and the packaging editor which lets you structure the SharePoint features and WSP file that is created

I’ll continue to post about upcoming features as I learn more!

I just reformatted and reconfigured my laptop the other day.  I have a 15.4” MacBook Pro with a Intel 2.6 GHz Dual Core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 200 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive.  I’ve been running Mac OS with a Vista and Windows 2K8 VM running in VMWare Fusion for about 2 months now.  Being a SharePoint consultant, I just wasn’t happy with the speed of the VMs as well as with the fact that to do any work I had to boot up Mac OS as well as a VM and diminishing my battery life significantly.  However, there are still aspects of the Mac OS that I enjoy and want to investigate further.  So…I decided to set up a multi-boot system.  Being the SharePoint guy I am, I follow quite a few blogs and remember seeing a few posts by various consultants that have also set up multi-boot MacBook Pros…so I went back to my blogs and found the post by Andrew Connell that pointed me to Spence’s blog with the step-by-step on setting up a triple boot system with Mac OX, Vista and Windows Server.  It worked great and so far I’m really enjoying the setup.  Thanks Spence!

Sorry it took a couple of days, but here is the solution and some of the trouble shooting steps we took to solve the search results error I blogged about in Part 1.

First, some of things we tried.  Our very first step was to reset the crawl log, once the crawl log was reset, we checked the content sources and scheduling to point all the URLs that were being crawled to the domain names we wanted to return, just to make sure this wasn’t the problem.  We also added the URLs into their respective places in “Server Name Mappings"” under the search settings in Central Administration, hoping this would replace the bad section of the URL.  Unfortunately, none of these steps worked.  We next created a search center with custom scopes.  We set the rules on these scopes to include only content with the correct URL.  Items were listed as being in the scopes and, upon searching using our custom scopes, the correct results were being returned.  So, why does the custom scope work but not the “This Site:” and “This List:” search?  Honestly, I’m still not sure.

I’m not really sure what made us try this, but the next step was to switch the URL in the AAM…instead of the port number being default and the correct URL being intranet.  We swapped them so we now the correct URL as being default and the port number being intranet…still no luck.  The last thing we tried was to start the IIS sites using the various port numbers, low and behold, search started working…great, we figure out the problem…both IIS sites need to be running even though we are only going to ever use one of them as the port numbered sites were just for migration purposes.

So, we found the problem but were still stuck as we didn’t want all the extra IIS sites running.  So, this fix we discovered that actually worked.  We went into Central Administration, delete SharePoint from IIS, and deleted the intranet zone site.  Next we went into the content databases to make sure we had the correct name of the content database and the name of the SQL server it is on, if you have more then when.  Finally we went back to Application Management and clicked on “Delete Web Application”.  Next, MAKE SURE YOU UNCHECK “DELETE CONTENT DATABSE”.  Go ahead and delete your web application.  Your web application is complete gone, however the content database is still on your SQL Server.

Click to create a new web application, when we created our new web application, we entered the production URL we wanted (rather than the alternate port number URL), and entered the name of our already existing databases.  We then filled in the rest of the information as usual and click “Create”.  Once the web application was successfully created, we navigated to the site, everything was there and we could still access it all as normal, and most importantly every aspect of search still worked!!  So, that is how we fixed our problem.

As I dig more into this issue into my free time to see what is really going on, I’ll hopefully have some future posts about what the problem actually is.  If anyone knows or has any additional insight into the problem or any other questions about it feel free to leave a comment.