Say NO to SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T19:56:00.002Z

Explanation of SOPA in cartoon | Wikipedia entry for SOPA

Unreadable content was found in this item - PerformancePoint 2007 to 2010 Migration

2011-07-19T10:22:00.000Z

This little chestnut caused me no end of fun, and there is not a whole lot out there about it. The Problem:When you run the Import PerformancePoint 2007 Content wizard, using a valid account to connect to SQL server, and a valid BI Center as the target locations (which the wizard very kindly automatically identies and selects for you), you still receive the following message in each section. "

SharePoint 2010 Capacity Guidelines updated for SP1

2011-07-11T15:12:00.000Z

Major changes seem to be more qualification on IOPS for large content databases, plus some more detailed understanding of the real limits of DB sizes in particular scenarios. Of particular interest is the idea that individual DBs could be up to 4TB in size (though why you would plan for one 4TB database rather than a number of more manageable ones is a different question) http://

Membership & BDC import status hangs with infinite items (SharePoint 2007)

2011-07-11T14:04:00.000Z

This was a bit of an odd one I came across, caused by a transaction log filling up. Take the following scenario The log file for SharePoint_SSP_Search (the SSP Search database) becomes full, and cannot grow further. The database stops responding The Office Search Service , then the SharePoint timer service throws an error as it cannot contact the database. This causes an error when the crawler

What you can do with HTML 5

2011-06-06T13:09:00.001Z

Quite a nice collaboration using jquery and HTML 5. really good showing off of new features like multiple background images and opacity...http://disneydigitalbooks.go.com/tron/

Cookies Law and how it affects you

2011-05-31T08:36:00.006Z

Taken from a Waterstons press release:----Cookies Law and how it affects youThe laws governing privacy and the use of cookies are changing. So what's changing and how do you ensure your website is compliant with the changes? In 2003, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations required that websites using cookies for storing information, informed people of how the website uses cookies

Lookups in InfoPath when you don't want the dropdown value

2011-02-15T15:17:00.003Z

Sometimes you want to get a value based on a dropdown, but not actually the value in the ID column. For example, I have a list of project roles as belowRoleIdNameValue1Consultant152Senior Consultant20Here I want a dropdown listing "Consultant" and "Senior Consultant". I need the. I then want to retrieve the corresponding value for use in a calculation. If you try this straight off, you will find

Visual Studio Achievements

2011-01-26T09:34:00.003Z

Visual Studio Achievements....I think I'm going to have to implement this one...http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-achievements/

Using Trusted Connections in Web Applications under SharePoint Server

2009-09-01T08:34:00.006Z

Microsoft really try to hammer home the concept of using trusted connections in web.config files, such as

SSRS 2008 SharePoint Integrated Mode Issues -

2009-05-01T09:22:00.004Z

I've finally found time to look at SSRS 2008 and how it improves the integration mode for SharePoint. As usual, I had a new pain setting it up.My setup:MOSS 2007 and SSRS 2008 installed on vmsp-01SQL Server 2008 installed on vmsql-01There are several reasons for getting the following message:An unexpected error occurred while connecting to the report server. Verifythat the report server is

Deploying multiple SSIS Packages from Development to Live Environments

2008-12-31T16:09:00.004Z

This is as much a reminder for myself as a reference for others ;)There are several ways of deploying SSIS dtsx packages under SQL 2005, but I like this one the best. It allows almost "one touch" style deployment of an entire project of packages. It makes use of package configurations. You may find you need to make several changes to every package in your solution, but you'll only need to do it

BDC - I just wanna connect!

2008-05-16T18:37:00.004Z

Using the Business Data Catalogue (BDC to the cool) is still quite painful, and all the articles I've seen cut straight to clever "best practice" methods such as Single Sign On and Passthrough authentication. Sometimes though you just want to connect to the BDC using standard SQL Server credentials. The key is the ridiculously named "RevertToSelf" authentication mode. Below is a snippet you can

Wrong content type when selecting "New Item" using content types: Continued

2008-03-31T16:11:00.006Z

Aha! more progress on this one. I've narrowed it down now - this issue only occurs when you use Office 2007 documents that have already been stored in SharePoint 2007 as your template for a content type. This includes documents that were in SharePoint and now are not, or documents currently stored in a library.If you create your templates from files using good ol' fashioned pre-SharePoint storage

Code Signing for Click Once - The Free Way

2008-03-31T08:48:00.005Z

When writing click once applications deployed over the web you are going to need to sign your manifest files with a certificate. In development you can quite happily test this by using the "create test certificate" option and use a certificate signed by yourself.It's not ideal though - particularly if more than one person is developing and deploying the product - as each person ends up with their

Selecting Content Types from the "New" menu gets the wrong content type

2008-03-22T15:22:00.003Z

The scenario Create 2 breand new content types/ Provide each one with a word 2007 document as the template (each with some different text to test success). Attach both content types to a document library. From the "new" dropdown on the doc library select the last content type on the list. Add some text add save back. The content type attributed to the document will be the first one in the list (

The B2B upgrader timer job failed

2008-03-21T18:39:00.004Z

I found a great article on getting WSS 3.0 SP1 working after receiving the worrying "The B2B upgrader timer job failed" error message. I'm only linking it here in order to try and bump it up good so others can benefit.

SQL Server 2005 Partition Problems

2008-02-21T12:34:00.004Z

We have a replication scenario where have SQL Server 2005 replication publications on development, test and live servers. Recently we had an issue where test server publication, having not been touched for about 3 months (between releases) suddenly stopped synchronising correctly with the following message:The merge process failed because it detected a mismatch between the replication metadata of

OWSTimer Hogging Processor Part 2

2008-01-08T11:45:00.000Z

It seems there was more...The fundamental issue on this VM environment turned out not to be the time synch issue in all probablity, but a lack of resources in the environment.3 Server pools had been set up, dev, test and live. VMWare allocated the resources 33% to each. There were 3 live servers, and one of the servers had been given an exact memory allocation equating to most of the resources

OWSTimer Hogging Max Processor Time in VMWare

2007-12-31T09:58:00.000Z

This issue isn't exclusive to VMWare, but is much easier to come across. You may notice your MOSS server being completely unresponsive for serveral minutes at a time. On investigation you find that OWSTimer is taking up 80%-100% processor utilisation. I have particularly found this occuring on VMWare MOSS installations, and often occurs straight after you restart a VM that has been off for a

Search Server 2008 Express RC

2007-11-06T17:05:00.001Z

Today Microsoft released a bombshell: Search Server 2008 ExpressIn summary:It's freeStandalone productAll the features of MOSS searchLimited to one query server – so not scalable for the very large enterprise look at the other variations if you're after thisThis is going to really change the game for the low end users.It's in RC now, so I'd think the end of Q1 will be the target launch. I'll post

MOSS - Targeting content to Sites not Audiences

2007-09-28T14:12:00.000Z

Audience targeting is a great way to push information to individual users from a central source - but what about when you want to push information to particular sites? My example is a series of department sites. Sounds easy - content query web part (CQWP) filtered on a choice column on your list of announcements/documents/links etc to say which department the item is relevant to. Job done? well

MOSS 2007 - The Great Hard Disk Consumer

2007-06-13T12:22:00.000Z

Recently I've been performing a bit of a review on som MOSS servers that are a little "under-specified" on the hard disk front. While you probably shouldn't have anything with as little as 10GB as your only drive on a SharePoint server, it has got me looking at some of the places that SharePoint just eats needless space if you let it.The DatabasesWatch out for the SharePoint_Config database

Configuring MySites under your main portal

2007-06-08T16:15:00.000Z

If, like the rest of the work, you'd prefer people to access their MOSS 2007 Mysites ashttps://portal.enterprise.com/personal/usernamerather thanhttps://mysites.enterprise.com(which requires a different url, possibly new certificates, and probably mass confusion), then you can do no better than look to this blog entry from Chris Johnson.http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2006/09/15/754902.aspx

Site Collection Administrators and Adding Workflows to Sites with Broken Inheritance

2007-05-24T10:46:00.000Z

Another gotcha in the SharePoint world. You would think that Site Collection Administrators could do anything on any site inside the collection. Being an administrator and all. Not so. If you've broken inheritance you will find that you no longer have the correct options in SharePoint Designer to add a new workflow. For the meantime I have solved this by explicitly adding the "Site Collection

Fear and Surprise and Permissions in MOSS Central Admin

2007-05-19T11:22:00.000Z

Access denied when selecting "User profiles and properties"? Can't access your shared services provider? Can't get to the "Import Application Definition" page of the BDC?No one expects the MOSS administration, and certainly - if you are looking at the Central Administration tool for the first time, you would certainly be forgiven for suffering from fear and surprise, the 2 weapons of the

"fun" adding Webparts to SharePoint 2003

2007-04-25T10:52:00.000Z

We're doing a bit of "retro" SP 2003 work for a client, and having written several webparts for 2003 I thought 1 more couldn't cause a problem. ha! how wrong could I be. We'll I created my webpart (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms948909.aspx if you want a starting guide), and checked that everything was all named correctly. Then I tried to deploy the webpart (see http://

Access 2007 is useful! Stop Press!!!

2007-02-13T11:26:00.000Z

Access has generally been the whipping boy of database products, mostly scorned by "real database developers" due to the fact that it allows users to think they can create databases. However, for the first time, I think I have seen a glimpse of something truely useful for Access 2007.Where else might Access be useful but in MOSS 2007! Tired of your old views? bored with datasheets? Management

Word 2007 Content Placeholders and the Word 2003 plugin for Office 2007

2007-01-24T18:39:00.000Z

It's to Microsofts credit that they have provided a plugin for Word 2003 that will allow the reading of a Word 2007 .docx file. And it (mostly) works. If however you need to use some of the new features office 2007 - such as the content placeholders you'll find that the content inside them won't render. I'm hoping they'll fix this soon.If you haven't checked out content placeholders you can file

Forms Authentication in MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0 - Not all that...

2007-01-24T17:56:00.000Z

One of the great heralded features of the latest SharePoint release has been the integration of forms authentication Membership/role providers from ASP.NET 2.0, essentially allowing seamless integration of any list of users from any datasource to Authenticate to SharePoint/MOSS - the default one being through aspnetdb. I don't want to cover that, as it's been more than detailed elsewhere. I just

Errors Switching to Edit Site Mode in CMS 2002

2007-01-12T12:38:00.000Z

Apologies for using images to display code snippets. Blogger is not quite there yet, and strangely it conplains when you add a script tag in your blog post ;)Up until now whenever a colleague or client tells me that they can't switch to "edit site mode" in CMS 2002 I've always immediately answered it with - "you've forgotten to and the CMS sub directory to your web application. And until now I've

A Simple Enforced Source Control for SQL using Team Foundation

2007-01-11T12:00:00.000Z

One of the major issues in rolling product development is ensuring that you can reproduce a client version of software at the office. With a mature source control system such as Team Foundation this is not too much of an issue with code - at worst you go back through the changesets until you find the one that matches. But what about the database that this code relies on? How best to ensure that

InfoPath 2007, SQL05 and ZQuery

2006-09-12T21:09:00.000Z

As part of the latest project we're looking at an uber Sharepoint 2007 solution. One area we are looking at are storing completed forms data directly to SQL05, and what querying we can do directly.So, to try this out I created a table with 2 columns as below.CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tblInfoPathForms]([FormGuid][uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_tblInfoPathForms_FormGuid] DEFAULT(newid()),[

Regex - The Website Accessibility Saviour

2006-07-11T21:22:00.000Z

While trying to make Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) based websites I've had to employ several funky tricks, including Http Modules, overriding page rendering, inherited pages/master pages and the work horse of the entire system - the regular expressionMost of making CMS accessible has been catching the resulting html before it gets to the user, finding x and replacing it with y. This

Deployment Techniques - The Indiana Jones Method

2006-06-30T22:05:00.000Z

We all have our favourite ways of deploying things, some better than others. One technique often used in more informal environments is the "Indiana Jones" technique. Remember the scene at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indie weighs up the bag of sand carefully before swapping it with the idol? I'm not suggesting that anyone would ever dream of renaming the "active" .NET dll on a

CSS - You can stylesheet just about anything

2006-06-30T18:06:00.000Z

I've come across several recent instances of tools that allow you to override/add your own styles, this blogger included. Other service providers often provide websites that you can style to look like the service provided is coming from your own corporate site.Often these companies will tell you that you can just do the basics, and that, for example, you will have to send them logos etc, which

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