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Adding Filters to SharePoint 2010 Wiki Pages

February 16th, 2011 No comments

I just ran across this today for the first time and was honestly a little surprised by it.  I wanted to add a Choice Filter to my team site and couldn’t.  In SharePoint 2010, when creating a Team Site, wiki pages are used for the home page as well as any other pages you create.  If you edit the page and try to add a Choice Filter (as well as some of the other filters), nothing appears to be added to the page.  However, if you were to open the page in SharePoint Designer, you will see that the web part has in face been added to the page and is actually throwing and error.

So what is the solution?  There are actually two of them.

1.  Active the Publishing Feature for you site, create a Web Part Page, and use this page to add web parts to and utilize filters.

But..what if I don’t want to turn on publishing or I want to be able to use a wiki page?

2. Use SharePoint Designer to insert the filter web part.  That’s right, you can actually open a wiki page in SharePoint designer, insert your desired filter web part there and configure the connection and everything works fine.  Once the web part has been added, you can actually reconfigure it via the browser.  However, I would recommend against this as there is apparently some problem with filters, wiki pages and the browser.  The downside to this approach is you have to use SharePoint Designer which means if you want end users to be able to customize their own pages they either need to be allowed to use SharePoint Designer, or not able to use certain Filter Web Parts.

Hopefully this will be something that is added (or fixed as I’m not if this was intentional or not) in a later patch or update to SharePoint 2010.  If anyone else has additional information or a work around to adding these filter web parts to a wiki page, leave a comment and educate the rest of us.

First Jacksonville SharePoint Users Group Meeting!!

February 8th, 2011 No comments

That’s right, there is now a Jacksonville SharePoint Users Group (JaxSPUG).  We are still working out some of the final details of the group, but our first meeting has been scheduled.  We will be meeting on Feb. 17 from 4:30 – 6:00pm at the brand new ALoft Hotel.  Their address is 4812 Deer Lake Drive West.  There will be appetizers and refreshments provided.  To register for the event, you can visit our registration page – http://jaxspug-feb17.eventbrite.com/.

 

Various methods for staying apprised of future meetings as well as other happenings within JaxSPUG are:

Website – http://www.jaxspug.org

LinkedIn Group – http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3754625

Facebook Page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/JaxSPUG/170254249684166

Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jaxspug

Categories: JaxSPUG, SharePoint Tags: ,

Install and Configure SharePoint 2010 with no Database GUIDS (except PerformancePoint)

January 31st, 2011 2 comments

This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time and have been slowly revising the content and steps.  I also can’t take credit for all the steps below, I gathered them from various resources, blogs, etc.  At the end of the post I will list all of the places I gathered these steps from.  This is also not the only way to do this, it’s just the way I have documented and how I go about configuring a SharePoint farm.

Server Installation and Prep Work

1. Decide on your SQL Server you will use

2. Configure SharePoint Accounts in AD.  The minimum you will need is 6:

  • SPAdmin (admin)
  • SPService (services)
  • SPApp (Web Application App Pools)
  • SPSearch (search service)
  • SPCrawl (crawl service)
  • SP_UPS (user profile synchronization service)

3. Make sure the SPAdmin has the following rights:

  • Local Admin on the SharePoint Servers (just for the Installation)
  • SQL Rights: dbcreator, public, securityadmin

4. Log into your SharePoint Servers and Install the SharePoint 2010 Bits

5. If the latest Cumulative Updates haven’t been install, download those and install those right after installing the bits.

6. Disable the Loopback Check (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861)

7. Restart the server

Configure Central Administration

1. Right-click on “SharePoint 2010 Management Shell” and “Run As Administrator” – I just created a shortcut on my desktop

2. In Powershell Run:

New-SPConfigurationDatabase –DatabaseName “SP2010_Config” –DatabaseServer “[ServerName]” –AdministrationContentDatabaseName “SP2010_Admin_Content” –Passphrase (ConvertTo-SecureString “[YourPassPhrase]” –AsPlaintext –Force) –FarmCredentials (Get-Credential)

**Notes**

  • For [ServerName] localhost will NOT work if you are running SQL on your SharePoint box (usually only likely in a dev environment)
  • Since not everyone that install/configures SharePoint is always a DB Expert, when using a SQL Named Instance:
    • A common error you may get if using a named instance will be something like: “Connot connect to database master at SQL server at [SQLServer\Instance].  The database might not exist, or the current user does not have permission to connect to it.”
    • SQL Name Instances use Dynamic Ports, before running the command above, open up SQL Configuration Managers and assign a static port to your Named Instance – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177440.aspx
    • Modify the command above slightly…for the [ServerName] use: [ServerName]\[InstanceName],[PortNumber] as an example: “SQLServer2008\SP2010,1433”
    • Create an Incoming Rule on your SQL Server to allow connections through the port you specify for your instance.Install-SP

3. Enter domain\SPAdmin and the associated password in the resulting Credential Request box.

4. Close the PowerShell Window

5. Re-Open PowerShell again as administrator

6. Run the following PowerShell Commands

  • Install-SPHelpCollection –All
  • Initialize-SPResourceSecurity
  • Install-SPService (If you install a standalone server, something I never recommend, run ‘Install-SPService –Provision’ instead.
  • Install-SPFeature –AllExistingFeatures
  • New-SPCentralAdministration –Port 9999 –WindowsAuthProvider “NTLM” (you can pick any port here you want to)
  • Install-SPApplicationContent

7. Central Administration is now configured.  You can got to the shortcut in your start menu or run “start iexplore http://[servername]:9999” from PowerShell.

Configure the User Profile Service

I’m not even going to try to type out the steps or guide you in the right direction here.  Just follow Spence Harbar’s steps EXACTLY that he posted here – http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010ups.aspx

You may have a few minor tweaks to the steps based on user accounts, but the process for getting the profile synchronization service is solid!!

Once your done with this, you may have an error that starts showing up in your event log about the Taxonomy Picker, to eliminate this error do the following:

  1. Navigate to \14\Template\ControlTemplates
  2. Rename TaxonomyPicker.ascx to TaxonomyPicker.ascx.broken
  3. Remember you did this incase it is actually used in an update to SharePoint 2010 in the future.

***I used the same Application Pool for all my services (the same Application Pool Account I set up when configuring the User Profile Synchronization Service).  In my case it is SharePoint Web Services Default.  So I will use this Application Pool for all Service Applications going forward.  Wherever you see this application pool name used in the future, you can replace it with your own application pool name or a new one if you want separate application pools for every service.  Also, wherever you see –Name “[somename]” or –DatabaseName –“[somename]” going forward you can replace [somename] using your own naming conventions. ***

Configure Search Services

  1. Open up SharePoint 2010 Management Shell as an Administrator again.
  2. Enter the following commands in PowerShell:
  3. $searchapp = New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication –Name “Search Service Application” –ApplicationPool “SharePoint Web Services Default” –DatabaseName “SP2010_Search_Service”
  4. $proxy = New-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy –name “Search Service Application Proxy” –Uri $searchapp.uri.absoluteURI
  5. $proxy.status *It should return “Online”, if not enter $proxy.status = “online”*
  6. $changestatus.update
  7. $si = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance –local
  8. $si.status *If it’s disabled run Start-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance –identity $si*
  9. Set-SPEnterpriseSearchAdministrationComponent –SearchApplication $searchapp –SearchServiceInstance $si
  10. $ct = $searchapp | New-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlTopology
  11. $csid = $searchapp.CrawlStores | select id
  12. $CrawlStore = $searchapp.CrawlStores.item($csid.id)
  13. $hname = hostname **hostname is for a single server, this is the servername were you want the crawl component to reside**
  14. New-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlComponent –CrawlTopology $ct –CrawlDatabase $CrawlStore –SearchServiceInstance $hname
  15. $ct | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlTopology –active
  16. $qt = $searchapp | New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryTopology –partitions 1
  17. $p1 = ($qt | Get-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexPartition)
  18. New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryComponent –IndexPartition $p1 –QueryTopology $qt –SearchServiceInstance $si
  19. $PropDB = $searchapp | Get-SPEnterpriseSearchPropertyDatabase
  20. $p1 | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchIndexPartition –PropertyDatabase $PropDB
  21. $qt | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryTopology –Active

Usage Application and Usage Analysis Service

  1. Your Usage Application may have already been provisioned in one of the previous steps, if it was, go into “Manage Service Applications” and delete it.  Check the box to delete associated data as well.
  2. Once again in your SharePoint 2010 Management Shell enter the following:
  3. New-SPUsageApplication –Name “SharePoint Usage Application Service” –DatabaseName “SP2010_Usage”
  4. $App = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplication –ApplicationPool “SharePoint Web Services Default” –Name “Subscription Service Application” –DatabaseName “SP2010_Subscription”
  5. $proxy = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplicationProxy –ServiceApplication $App
  6. Get-SPServiceInstance | where {$_.TypeName –eq “Windows SharePoint Services Subscription Settings Service”} | Start-SPServiceInstance
  7. $StagingDB = “<StagingDatabases><StagingDatabase ServerName=’[SQLServerName]’ DatabaseName=’SP2010_Web_Analytics_Service_Staging’/></StagingDatabases>”
  8. $ReportingDB = “<ReportingDatabases><ReportingDatabase ServerName=’[SQLServerName]’ DatabaseName=’SP2010_Web_Analytics_Service_Reporting’/></ReportingDatabases>”
  9. $webanalytics = New-SPWebAnalyticsServiceApplication –ApplicationPool “SharePoint Web Services Default” –ListOfReportingDatabases $ReportingDB –ListOfStagingDatabases $StagingDB –Name “Web Analytics Service Application”
  10.   New-SPWebAnalyticsServiceApplicationProxy –Name “Web Analytics Service Application Proxy” –ServiceApplication $webanalytics
  11. . $Usage = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy | where {$_.TypeName
    -eq "Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy"}
  12.   $Usage.Provision()

At this point in time, navigate to “Services on Server” and start all the service you want running on their respective servers.

State Service Application

  1. While still in the SharePoint Management Console enter the following PowerShell Commands:
  • $serviceapp = New-SPStateServiceApplication –Name “State Service Application”
  • New-SPStateServiceDatabase –Name “SP2010_State_Service” –ServiceApplication $serviceapp
  • New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy –Name “State Service Application Proxy” –ServiceApplication $serviceapp –DefaultProxyGroup

Secure Store Service

At this point in time, navigate to “Services on Server” and make sure the Secure Store Service on the Server you wish it to run on.

The secure store service is implemented in SharePoint 2010 to replace SSO.  Rather than get into all the details of it here, there are several good resources on TechNet explain the Secure Store and how to configure it.  The Secure Store Service Application can be initially configured through Central Administration allowing you to create the custom named database (without any GUIDs).  However, once this has been created, there are some additional management/configuration tasks that have to take place within the Service Application.  I use these three TechNet articles as reference when performing the rest of the configuration tasks.

PerformancePoint Service Application

Again, make sure you the the PerformancePoint Service has been started before creating the PerformancPoint Service Application.

From everything I can find, right now this can either be done via PowerShell or Central Administration, but unfortunately, no matter which way you provision PerformancePoint, there is no way to set a custom name for that database.  If I discover a way I’ll update this post with the steps.

The Rest of It

That should take care of everything that needs to be done in your SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.  The rest of the services can be configured through Central Administration.  Once you’ve reached this point, open up Central Administration.  Go to "Services on Server” and start the rest of the services you need.  This includes the Foundation Search Service that can be set up through the GUI.Next go to “Manage Service Applications” and add the rest of the Service Applications here that you need.

**As you go through setting everything up the GUI make sure to pay attention to where you can name your databases so you can continue keeping your consistent naming without the GUIDs**

Now you should have something that looks a lot like these screen shots below:

imageimage

image

Once I got to this point, I ran the PowerShell script found here – http://www.sharepointconfig.com/2011/01/instant-sharepoint-health-analysis/ in order to instantly see any issues I still had with my farm configuration.  From this report I went in and took care of a few remaining issues.  Some of the issues I encountered were things that should have been done initially and thus resulted in some updates to this blog post.

If you get an error similar to: “WebPart class [8d6034c4-a416-e535-281a-6b714894e1aa] is referenced [6] times in the database” after running the SharePoint Health Analyzer, there is a simple “fix” to get rid of this error here – http://blogs.architectingconnectedsystems.com/blogs/cjg/archive/2009/12/09/Missing-Server-Side-Dependencies-_2D00_-8d6034c4_2D00_a416_2D00_e535_2D00_281a_2D00_6b714894e1aa.aspx.

If you want to skip the link, it is a simple process of:

  1. Go to “Manage Service Applications”
  2. Select “Search Service Application” and click Manage in the Ribbon
  3. Click on “Farm Search Administration” in the Quick Launch
  4. Rerun the SharePoint Health Analyzer and this error should be gone

 

If anyone runs across any typos or problems with the steps PLEASE let me know so I can correct the issues.  Also, I can’t take credit for all of the content above, as I gathered most of the info from several different locations, they all deserve credit for their work so here are the references used for this post, these links are posted in the order I used them for the steps above:

An Update from the Desk of Ben (or Me)

January 25th, 2011 No comments

Time for another blog post, nothing “SharePointy” or incredibly mind blowing, just an update about what’s going on.  First of all an apology to anyone who has left me a comment in the last month or so and I haven’t responded.  Life has been a little hectic.  I still have all your comments marked unread in my email as a reminder to address them all.  I hope sometime this week.

One of the biggest results of me getting behind was Christmas and New Years.  My wife and I did quite a bit of traveling, both up to Michigan to see my family and out to Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska to see my wife’s extend family.  Being gone for almost 2 weeks I got a little behind.

The second reason I’m behind is that after taking a 16 month sabbatical to pursue SharePoint work at Baptist Medical Center in Jacksonville, FL; I have returned to full time work as a Sr. SharePoint Architect for EPC Group.

While at the hospital I made a lot of good friends, many of whom I will keep in contact with and I learned a lot.  I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.  However, I also learned I really missed the consulting and working with different clients in implementing SharePoint and using this tool to improve their business process as well as use it to help resolve various pain points within their organizations.

So, it is with great excitement and anticipation of what the future has to hold that I once again delve into the world of SharePoint consulting.

Thirdly, as a little teaser, there are also some exciting things happening in the Jacksonville area as it relates to the SharePoint community…stay tuned for more updates as they develop.

~Ben

Categories: Misc Tags:

My Phone, the Pool, Rice and a New Battery

June 18th, 2010 2 comments

I’ve posted bits and pieces of this story on Facebook, but decided to make it into a blog posting as a friend of mine suggested.  First of all, this is a departure from my usual topic of SharePoint :) .

Last weekend my whole family was in town and we spent a fair amount of time at the pool.  Saturday afternoon we went over to the pool for a swim.  As we got out of the car, I threw my Palm Treo Pro into my swimsuit pocket to free up my hands to carry other stuff.  We got to the pool and all jumped in.

After swimming for about 10 – 15 minutes, I felt something in my swimsuit…you guessed it, it was my phone!!  To skip to the end of the story, it almost completely works today…touch screen and all.  The only known issue right now is the vibrate on the phone no longer works.  So how did I get it back working again?

1.  As soon as I realized it was in my pocket I pulled it out of the water, removed the batter and dried it off the best I could (you could see water inside the screen).  My wife shook the phone a little bit to get some of the water out.  After that, we continued to swim and I just left the phone, with the batter still removed, wrapped in a towel.

2. Once we got home I immediately put my phone and battery (with the batter still removed) in a zip loc back and filled the bag with rice to absorb all the moisture.  I left the phone in the rice all weekend, checking it sporadically to see how the screen was drying out.  My Monday morning I needed my phone for work and it looked to be completely dry.

3.  When I arrived at work, I stuck the battery back in the phone for the first time after it got wet…low and behold, it didn’t work :(   Talking to a few co-workers they mentioned similar experiences who said getting a new battery fixed their phone.

4. After work, I stopped in at the Sprint store to see if they had a batter around that I could try.  After sharing the story with them, they were unconvinced that a batter would fix it, but complied with my request anyways and got a new batter to try.  We stuck the brand new battery in and the phone started right up!!!

I’ve been using the phone with the new batter for almost a week now with the only problem being the vibrate no longer working that I mentioned before.  There is also some discoloration inside the screen, but that seems to be slowly going away and the touch screen functionality still works perfectly.

So, that is the story of my phone.  Moral of the story..if you phone gets wet, remove the battery, dry it off, place it in a bag of rice for at least a day, if it still doesn’t work, try a new battery.

Internet Explorer, SharePoint, init.js error

June 1st, 2010 1 comment

The other day I had an annoying problem accessing SharePoint sites.  I am running Windows 7, IE8 and Office 2007 and Office 2010 Beta.

Any internal SharePoint site continued to throw the error of element not found for init.js

It only happened on my desktop (my laptop worked just fine).  I tried clearing the temporary internet files, browser cache, even uninstalling and reinstalling IE8.

Nothing worked, I finally found the solution here – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/41e1874f-7825-4bfe-ba4c-37255d198df2

So, I opened up SharePoint Designer 2007, ran the diagnostic tool in the Help menu, restarted IE and everything was back to working as normal.

SharePoint 2010, Internet Explorer and FireFox

April 20th, 2010 No comments

Microsoft has been talking about how much better the user experience with SharePoint 2010 is when using browsers other than Internet Explorer, mainly, Mozilla Firefox.  They have been doing a lot of SharePoint demo’s with Firefox to demonstrate this ability and Firefox has been labels as being a level 1 browser for SharePoint 2010.

However, in my use of Firefox, I have found a couple of things so far that still work only when using Internet Explorer.

1. You can’t upload multiple files to a document library from within Firefox.  This is due to the fact that for some of these actions.  SharePoint 2010 does indeed still use ActiveX controls.  In fact, some people don’t even have this option in Internet Explorer according to this post – http://sharepoint4u.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/no-multiple-upload-no-connect-to-outlook/

2. There isn’t the ability to drag and drop to re-arrange web parts on a SharePoint site or to move them between zones.  You must move the web parts around by using the setting in the web part properties.

I am actually somewhat surprised by both of these limitations.  The first one probably more so than the second, especially considering that when using Microsoft SkyDrive you have the ability to upload multiple files using Firefox.  You would think this same type of functionality could exist in SharePoint 2010.

Based on the most recent posts by Microsoft, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526%28office.14%29.aspx, it doesn’t look like they have plans on changing any of these limitations.  This site contains additional details on these limitations as well as other limitations that exist for various browsers when accessing SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint and Office 2010 RTM!!!

April 17th, 2010 No comments

Read the RTM announcement from the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/04/16/sharepoint-2010-reaches-rtm.aspx

Great job guys!  Can’t wait to get my hands on it :)

SharePoint List – View Paged by First Letter

March 26th, 2010 No comments

Have you ever had a long SharePoint list that you wanted paged by the first letter of a column rather than by simply picking the number of items you wanted on each page?

That’s exactly what I ran into the other day.  I had a list just short of 3000 medications that medical staff at work needs to reference.  They needed the list to be sorted alphabetically and be able to quickly jump to the various medications based on the first letter of the medication name.

After doing some searching I found this post that solved the issues and performed exactly as I was hoping – http://mdasblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/alpha-selection-of-list-items/

Additionally, here is a tutorial video that was posted in the comments of the blog posting that was very helpful.

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Launch Date!

March 9th, 2010 No comments

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.