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

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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Ben SharePoint

That’s right, it is time for me to move on to a new job.  Today was my last day with EPC Group.  It has been a wonderful year and a half with them, consulting with companies I never imagined I would be working with.  I have learned and grown a lot in my SharePoint knowledge while working with them as well as made some great friends that hopefully I will continue to stay in touch with.

About 7 weeks ago I was contacted by a friend of our Pastor about a job, working locally to Jacksonville, FL performing SharePoint Design and Administration for Baptist Health.  After a couple of interviews, a job offer, and discussing it with my wife, we decided the best option for me and our family going forward was to accept the position with Baptist Health.  So, it is with excitement, that I will be starting in my new position with them on Monday.

I hope to continue this blog and updating it regularly with my experiences, tricks and tips about SharePoint.  We’ll have to see which direction this blog takes.  But with my new position being in the health care field, hopefully I can write some post about SharePoint and how it relates to and can be utilized within the Health Care Industry.

Tags: SharePoint, Health Care, Jobs, EPC Group, Baptist Health

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Ben Misc, SharePoint