Mindsharp Blogs

Branding Talk for the Cleveland SharePoint User Group

Paul Papanek Stork — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:02:00 GMT

I will be speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User Group on Wednesday, July 23rd. The meeting will start at 4:00pm. My topic will be "SharePoint Branding”. Here's a brief description of the talk:

• SharePoint Branding
SharePoint’s use of ASP.NET master pages makes it possible to completely change the branding of your SharePoint site. In this talk I will describe how SharePoint uses master pages. I'll also demonstrate building a new master page from scratch and converting an existing HTML page's look and feel to SharePoint. Join us to see how SharePoint’s use of master pages can make branding your SharePoint site possible

The location for the July 23^rd event has changed due to construction in the Cleveland Microsoft Office Conference Room. Instead of meeting at the Microsoft Office we will be at the Oxford & Associates office. Address information for the office is below:

Oxford & Associates

Commerce Park 4

23240 Chagrin Boulevard Suite 130

Beachwood, OH 44122

Wednesday, July 23^rd from 4pm – 6:30pm

Upcoming events

Paul Schaeflein — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:43:00 GMT

Listed below are upcoming events that I will be attending. If you're there, please say hi!

Sep 6 Codeapalooza 2008 (Chicago)

Sep 15-17 SharePoint Best Practices conference (Washington DC)

Oct 4 Indy TechFest (Indianapolis)

Dec 3 NYC SharePoint User Group

Governance Strategy for SharePoint Development

Phil Wicklund — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I'm a big fan of delegation and accountability when it comes to governance strategies, and the SharePoint development lifecycle stands for no exception. If any of you remember, I lead a large SharePoint team at a fortune 500 company for a few years, and I have some battle wounds to prove it. Fortunately for me, the IT department had great senior management, who valued environment isolation which saved us a lot of pain in the end, and I was able to glean some great wisdom from their experiences. However, looking back to those days I can't help but to wish I had done a few things differently. I can't help but to think that more accountability and even more environment isolation would've been a great asset to us, despite what could've been perceived as an inconvenience.

Many companies I see don't even have a development lifecycle governance plan, and those that do typically structure it so that Production servers are locked down, but everything else is fair game. Developers, testers, business analysts, and all their moms are all poking around in the various environments and before you know it, you have a mess to clean up and you're always crossing your fingers when you make a production change. I definitely know from experience that when I was working in a test environment, I would often get frustrated because my web front end's configurations are not consistent and didn't know why, or something was working a few days ago, but for some reason it is not now. The of the root problem always goes back to there are just "too many hens in the kitchen". You can spend a lot of wasted time fighting fires in environments, and a little more governance can save you a lot of money when you think of how much that time is costing you.

The figure below is my White Ivory Tower model of how I would structure the deployment process in a medium or large server farm. Much of this article isn't necessary SharePoint specific, but I am often surprised as how often people ask me how I would go about this, so it seemed like a relevant "brain dump" for a SharePoint blog nevertheless.

You'll notice the three recommended farms for any one production farm, as well as the different "gates" where I will later be describing the roles of the different gate keepers and how those individuals will fit into the proposed governance model.

[this post was cross posted from http://philwicklund.com]

Neat Calendar Rollup Webpart from KWizCom

Phil Wicklund — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:58:00 GMT

KWizCom has a neat calendar rollup webpart that I figured is worth showcasing. It can rollup multiple calendars across multiple sites, into one central calendar. Also, it can access exchange calendars as well, making it a pretty powerful tool. That and it is only $399 which makes it practically free!

Screen shot (notice color coding, signifying the different calendar sources):

[this post was cross-posted from http://philwicklund.com]

Application Pools and Memory Best Practices for SharePoint Front Ends

Phil Wicklund — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:57:00 GMT

Have you ever gotten an out of memory exception on your SharePoint web front ends and wondered why? Or how to prevent it? I started getting this error periodically, and through such experiences have drawn several conclusion on how to manage the memory on your SharePoint web front ends.

Best Practices:

1. Don't have too many Application Pools

2. Set Memory Capacities on Each App Pool

3. For serious traffic, plant a garden

Huntsville MOSSMOSIS Group with Jim Curry on August 20 - Web Content Management

Ben Curry — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:28:00 GMT

Come on down to the Huntsville MOSSMOSIS Group on August 20th as our own James Curry presents Web Content Management in SharePoint Server 2007. With SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft has rolled in the content management features of their standalone CM product, Microsoft Content Management Server, enhancing and adding functionality along the way. Come learn what MOSS 2007 has to offer in the arena of content management and, as always, enjoy a free lunch as well.

When/Where?
Wednesday, August 20 2008 - 9AM CST
Huntsville Botanical Gardens

Who Should Attend?
Developers, designers, power users, architects, and administrators.

What is the Agenda?
• 8:45AM: Coffee/Breakfast
• 9:00AM: Speaker
• 9:55AM: Break (5min)
• 11:00AM: Lunch

James Curry is a respected computer scientist and consultant with over 15 years of programming experience. In his role as a Mindsharp instructor, James uses his knowledge of Microsoft products to provide students with a dynamic, hands-on classroom experience. He was a contributing author on the SharePoint Admin Pocket Consultant and SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices books.

Ben Curry, CISSP, SharePoint Server MVP

Mindsharp

http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben

Come to the first ever SharePoint Best Practices Conference, Sept 15-17!

SharePoint community just got bigger and better

Paul Schaeflein — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:22:00 GMT

There is a new International SharePoint Professionals Association. Bob Fox has the information in his announcement post. I am a regional evangelist for this association, which means I will be working with user groups in the midwest to build their communities.

Also announced today is the online SharePoint Magazine, edited by Arno Nel.

IndyNDA is a great group

Paul Schaeflein — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:39:00 GMT

I want to thank Dave and Brad and everyone who attended the IndyNDA meeting last night.

You need to know that this is no ordinary user group. They average 100 attendees each month (130+ for my SharePoint talk); they host and sell-out an annual weekend conference (Indy Tech Fest - October 4th) and most importantly they give back. The housekeeping items before I started were:

Bring a friend giveaway -- a prize for the member who brings a friend for the first time. This month, the prize was a control suite worth >$1,000
IndyGiveCamp -- developers creating solutions for charities. Paul Hacker of Radio TFS is behind this effort.
Food Drive -- At the August meeting, bring $10 worth of canned or dried goods and get entered in a drawing for an MSDN Premium subscription. WOW!!!

Indianapolis is not a large market, so they don't get a lot of press. Show some love next time you're there. I guarantee you will be impressed.

Using Delegate Controls to Implement Minor Brand Variations in SharePoint

Phil Wicklund — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:19:00 GMT

The Problem

A problem that I have often seen in the SharePoint world is the common request to have a consistent brand across your entire farm, but therein it is required to have minor variations of that brand for various sites within the farm. A frequent use case for this is the banner image/logo. Maybe the main landing page for the intranet has a certain logo, but as you start drilling into the sub-sites, the logo should change (or other brand variations). Logos for different departments like IT, HR, Sales, etc. are often requested. Now, typically inside the master page would the HTML image tags for these logos be found, however, it can be extremely cumbersome to maintain multiple instances of a given master page, especially when the differences between these master pages is small. Also, you as the developer may not know when when/where these variations need to be implemented, thus you need something intuitive for end users to be able to customize the look and feel of these sites. So what other options are available to you when you need these small brand variations in your SharePoint sites?

The Solution

A good solution for this is the use of delegate controls. You can place these controls within your master page, and at design time (via activating/deactivating features), replace them with actual controls that live in the LAYOUTS directory. What will be demonstrated in this post is using a feature to toggle the banner image on the SharePoint Site.

Speaking tonight in Indianapolis

Paul Schaeflein — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:10:00 GMT

I will be presenting SharePoint for ASP.NET Developers tonight a the Indianapolis .Net Developers Association. If you're in the area, we're starting at 6:00pm.

Scripting SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 Bug

Ben Curry — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:50:00 GMT

This is an update to the original post http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben/archive/2008/03/08/4411.aspx. Unfortunately, the SP1 installation media hooks psconfigui.exe when the config.xml display level is set to “Basic”. This should only lay down the bits. arghhh.

The only workaround I currently know is to set the display level to “none”, and wait for the setup.exe process to stop (taskmgr.exe or sysinternals tools) - not perfect. I've notified Microsoft and will udpate you as soon as I get something back.

I also have new farm build scripts coming in the next couple of weeks that are 'parameter-ized' that I just built for a customer. (thanks, Jerry Chappell!) I'll try to get those out asap in my free time. Todd Klindt has also been doing some scripting, maybe we can talk him into sharing his new finds.

If you haven't checked out the new best practices book, it's bigger than I thought it would be :-)

Ben Curry, CISSP, SharePoint Server MVP

Mindsharp

http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben

Come to the first ever SharePoint Best Practices Conference, Sept 15-17!

I'm a New SharePoint MVP

Paul Papanek Stork — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:23:00 GMT

I just got the email a few minutes ago and had to share the news. I’ve been named a SharePoint Server MVP for as of today, July 1, 2008.

I owe a big thank you to Todd Bleeker who nominated me and to anyone else who added a good word or endorsement to the process along the way. I am incredibly EXCITED and hope to continue to live up to the honor that has been bestowed on me.

Phil’s Top 10 Best Practices for Branding SharePoint (parts 4 & 5 of 10)

Phil Wicklund — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:22:00 GMT

My next two best practices that are a part of my 10 part series, are going to be combined in one post because they are closely related. What's more is that I've already blogged about them, so it doesn't make sense to labor over something twice.

These two best practices are detailed out in my post titled:

How to Effectively Manage your "12 Hive" SharePoint Customizations and Deployments (Part 1 of 2): Keeping your Developers Honest and your Investment Secure with Source Safe

In that post, I discuss the prevalent bad practice of editing SharePoint's files directly within the 12 Hive. Bad! Bad! Bad! Don't do it! If you do, you'll run into all kinds of issues like your customizations don't get backed up regularly, your developer's are overwriting each other's changes, and inconsistency and incomplete deployments across your web front ends. These issues are especially significant if you have a large team.

If you read through that post, you're certain identify two best practices therein. One, never make changes directly to the 12 Hive on the file system, and two, make sure all 12 Hive customizations are in source control in a way that requires developers to use it.

Thanks! And stay tuned, we’re only half way through my top 10 list!

Phil

[cross posted from http://philwicklund.com]

SharePoint Best Practices Conference - September 15-18, 2008

Paul Papanek Stork — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:34:00 GMT

Ever wondered whether the way you've designed, implemented and continue to support your SharePoint installation is the best way possible? Or could there be easier, better, more efficient ways to get things done?

Almost every SharePoint practitioner I've met has wondered the same thing at one time or another. Well here is your chance to find out. Join some of the brightest SharePoint experts in the business to discuss just what are SharePoint's Best Practices.

The first, and to the best of my knowledge only, conference dedicated to discussing SharePoint Best Practices will be held in Washington, DC from September 15-17. As the conference Web site says, “The 2008 Best Practices Conference replaces confusion with Clarity, Direction and Confidence by establishing key principles to guide effective SharePoint decision-making in any situation.” Hope to see you there.

Win a free e-Book about ASP.NET

Paul Papanek Stork — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Manning Publishing is giving away ebooks on .NET....

Starting on June 19, 2008 Manning Publishing is launching the ".NET Daily Drawing.” This promotion will run until July 17,2008. Each day’s lucky winner can choose one free .NET ebook of their choice. On the last day of the drawing, Manning will award one lucky winner... the entire Manning .NET library! (That’s nearly a $3000 value...)

Click the banner below to enter your name for the daily drawing.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference - site is up

Paul Schaeflein — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:12:00 GMT

The website for the SharePoint Best Practices conference is now up. Visit the site to see the agenda and register.

Determine if MOSS is installed

Paul Schaeflein — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:53:00 GMT

Occasionally, I see a question about determining if a given installation is MOSS or simply WSS. I am unaware of any Object Model method or property that indicates this, but I did find a different way. The User Profile service is a web service that is included in MOSS and not WSS. So, if the asmx file exists, then MOSS is installed.

Here is a code snippet:

string isapiFolder = SPUtility.GetGenericSetupPath("ISAPI");
string userProfileServicePath = Path.Combine(isapiFolder, "UserProfileService.asmx");
bool SharePointServerInstalled = File.Exists(userProfileServicePath); 

Become Well Rounded in SharePoint Lists

AAron nAAs — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:19:00 GMT

General List management:

SharePoint lists are basically just Database Tables (or excel worksheets). You have control over how many columns exist, and what their types are.
SharePoint columns are generally set to these core types: 1 line of text, multiple lines of text (w/ or wo/ rich formatting), numerical, dates, choices, user/group assignment, lookup
SharePoint choice columns are flat choice lists, but a hierarchy can be simulated by having choices such as: Food, Food:Groceries, Food:Restaurant, Food:CoffeeShop. That would allow you to choose "Food" as the parent node OR "Food:CoffeeShop" if you wanted to choose the child node. Maintaining the values in a choice column requires hard-core list maintenance.
SharePoint choice columns may allow "Fill-in" choices if desired where the user is given a chance to choose a value from the drop down selector, OR type in their own value. The fill-in choice is NOT automatically added to the choice list for general use (the user would have to type the exact same value each time they wanted to use it).
SharePoint list attachments and folders can be enabled or disabled on any list. List attachments let you attach files to individual list items.
SharePoint list views can present vastly different presentations based on the same underlying items stored in the list. One view is the default for the list, others may be created as necessary. All views must be configured with: what columns to display; what order to display the columns; how to sort/group/filter the items; other presentation and content choices. This is a huge benefit as it typically allow designs utilizing one underlying list for many purposes rather than requiring the difficult management of many seperate lists.
SharePoint list web parts are used to put lists on a web part page. Each list web part could present a different view of the same underlying list. This is a huge benefit for presenting the user with many different views and rollups of one list on a single page.

Advanced List management:

SharePoint lookup columns are like choice columns, but refer to another SharePoint list for values instead. Maintaining the values in a lookup column merely requires adding an entry to the referenced list. The referenced list could be ANY type of list: Custom List, Tasks, Contacts, Calendar, Document Library, …
SharePoint Site Columns and Content Types allow list maintainers to define a set of fields that need to be entered and managed together in a list that supports several Content Types. For example, we could define 5 columns for a "design tool" Content Type and 8 columns for a "runtime tool" Content Type. When someone adds/edits/views a "design tool" item, the system will display the 5 columns defined for it. When manipulating a "runtime tool" item, it will use the associated 8 columns. This approach works best when there are overlapping sets of column definitions, otherwise if there were no commonality, they might as well just be separate lists.
SharePoint list permissions can be set to allow/restrict access to the list as a whole.
SharePoint list item permissions can be set to allow granular permissions per item. This must be maintained manually per item (high burdon).
SharePoint list item permissions can be set to allow: Read access to everyone, or just a user's own items; Edit access to all, none, or just a user's own items.
SharePoint list versioning and approval handling can be enabled or disabled on any list.
SharePoint workflows are possible, but are pretty advanced.

One small step toward SOX Compliance with SharePoint: Content Types, Features, and Event Receivers in action!

Phil Wicklund — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:38:00 GMT

Many hoped that version three (V3) of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) would help bring companies closer to compliance with Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and/or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). I know from personal experience that my hopes were quite high when WSS V3 released, because I had worked with several organizations on the version two (V2) platform, and these organizations were enduring through pain because of their need to be mindful of such ordinances that would have an impact on SharePoint intranets. In fact, just the idea of a companywide collaboration tool sent most security departments down a path of fear and much concern. As you all now know, the c# statement “if (SharePoint == Compliant)” seems not likely to return “true” at any near point in the future. However, I did come up with a solution that proved very successful for one organization. It’s no silver bullet, but it is a step in the right direction nevertheless.

[cross posted from http://philwicklund.com]

Phil’s Top Ten Best Practices for Branding SharePoint (Part 3 of 10)

Phil Wicklund — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:29:00 GMT

This next best practice in my top 10 list is definitely a matter of opinion on my part. The best practice revolves around SharePoint themes, and my inability to understand how they can be a benefit to someone. The reason why I struggle to see the value with themes is that every company that I have ever consulted for has always wanted to have their brand consistently applied throughout their entire farm. In their case, themes propose a problem because any end user that has full control anywhere can apply a theme on their site and in effect change mess with the company’s brand. Now I am fully aware that not all companies, especially small ones, are always terribly nit-picky about their brand. However, I do feel confident that from what I’ve seen, most are. Most companies desire a consistent and professional experience for their end users. I’m not a usability expert by any means, but my guess is that variation in the look and feel on an intranet cause more confusion that it does excitement and pleasure. Whenever I bring up the concept of themes to various organizations they all almost unanimously ask how to disable them even before I can tell them that it is even an option.

[cross posted from http://philwicklund.com]

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices Book

Ben Curry — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:01:00 GMT

Finally! It looks like our new best practices book should ship around the first of July. Bill English and myself wrote a big chunk of the book, but we had tons of help from rock stars like Kathy Hughes (MVP), Paul Schaeflein, Daniel Webster (SharePoint Guru), Mark Ferraz (IA and Security), Paul Stork, Jim Curry, and Mark Schneider (PMP).

We want to publicly thank all of the folks who gave technical feedback and wrote fabulous real world sidebards: Todd Klindt (MVP), Steve Smith (MVP), Andrew Woodward (MVP), Todd Bleeker (MVP), Keith Richie (MVP), Bob Fox (MVP), Robert Bogue (MVP), Matthew McDermott (MVP), Joel Oleson (well, give it time), Doron Bar-caspi (MSFT), Mike Watson (thanks, Mike!! - you rock), James Petrosky (wow, what doesn't he know?), Scott Edwards, Daniel Galant, Jack Dougher, Woodrow Windischman, Steve Mong, Eric Larson, Kuda Nhiwatiwa, Oleg Glubochansky, Satish Mathew (MSFT), Sean Livingston, and Frank Zakrajsek (MSFT).

Ross Brookshire, Don Scott, and John Moh are great MCS guys and tech reviewed much of the book - thanks a ton (and your free copy is on the way!)

This book was a ton of work, but we really think it is a great resource for the community. It isn't prescriptive best practices as much as design and architecture best practices. A prescriptive best practices guide for SharePoint Server 2007 would be 3000 pages, and outdated in 90 days. In the book, we tried to get people to 'think' about the way they were installing, more than giving guidance on a specific technology.We aren't saying there is only one way to do it, we are showing the reader the methodology to get the right answer. There is often more than one 'best practice', and only through proper planning, designing, and testing, will you know for sure. We DO give you a starting place, and whether you agree or disagree isn't the point - it is to start you in the right direction and challenge you to find the best practices for your specific implementation. 800 pages of SharePoint Server goodness...

Our book should be available for purchase in mid-June. You can pre-order your copy today at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other retail outlets. We'll also have a best practices web site (which is not up yet) at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com.

Ben Curry, CISSP, SharePoint Server MVP

Mindsharp

Upgrade Silverlight 2 beta 1 to beta 2

Phil Wicklund — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:21:00 GMT

As you may have heard, Silverlight 2 beta 2 came out. This post for me is necessary because I wrote a two part series on getting a Silverlight application to work in SharePoint, and since beta 2 came out, a few things need to be updated in that walkthrough of mine. Before I get started, MSDN has a nice article on all the main things that changed that could cause your applications to break – it's a laundry list so prepare for a heavy read.

Here's my laundry list of updates to my steps:

[this post was cross posted from http://philwicklund.com]

Phil’s Top 10 Best Practices for Branding SharePoint (Part 2 of 10)

Phil Wicklund — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:56:00 GMT

In the last post of mine, I discussed certain implications that come with using SharePoint Designer to brand your SharePoint sites. This post will discuss the prefered alternative to SharePoint Designer, building custom site definitions. However, I must start by saying that this philosphophy is by no means a SharePoint standard. Andrew Connell, who’s probably one of the most well known and respected SharePiont MVP’s ever, begs to differ. Check out this powerful comment on one of his blog posts:

“I still do everything I can to avoid creating site definitions. They are too big and cumbersome making it hard to debug when problems arise. Most importantly, they are very inflexible; once one a site has been created off a site definition, it should never be directly changed.” – Andrew Connell

[cross-posted from http://philwicklund.com]

Updates to feed URL – now being burnt at feedburner.com

Phil Wicklund — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:51:00 GMT

Hey all! This post is just an FYI letting you know I have changed the URL to my RSS feed, so make sure to update your RSS reader to stay up to date on my posts. The new URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/sharepointhappenings

I took the advice of Joel Oleson and went with feedburner, to keep my URL agnostic. However, the old feed URL should still work, for now, there’s just no guarantee that it will forever, hence the reason I switch to feedburner.

Also, my blog is now utilizing the Community Kit for SharePoint, Enhanced Blog Edition (EBE). My main drivers to move to the EBE is better UI consistency (fonts, sizes, colors, etc), as well as integration with community tools like Digg, del.icio.us, and to be able to receive trackbacks.

DeliverPoint 2007 offers FREE version with production license

Ben Curry — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:51:00 GMT

DeliverPoint 2007 is now available for FREE with a full production license for a limited number of features. In this free version you'll enjoy the following features in your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment:

Security Trimmed interface
Discover Object Permissions
Properties reporting
Discover Account Permissions

I would encourage you to use DeliverPoint 2007 in your environment. It is the permissions tool that will help you significantly understand who has permissions to objects and sites with reporting capabilities.

If you have any questions about DeliverPoint 2007, please visit the web site at www.deliverpoint.com.

-ben

RunWithElevatedPrivilege recommendation

Paul Schaeflein — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:26:00 GMT

Daniel Larson has been sending smoke signals for the last week about using the RunWithElevatedPrivilege (RWEP) method. He finally goes into further detail today with his cautionary tale and a recommended SPUserToken work-around.

I have seen several programs that use RWEP to accomplish updates on behalf of a user. (In fact, I use the method in the Image Upload Web Part.) In this circumstance Daniel is advocating using impersonation via the SPUserToken for the "System Account." I believe this to be sound advice and will be updating my code accordingly.

Phil's Top 10 Best Practices for Branding SharePoint (Part 1 of 10)

Phil Wicklund — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:48:00 GMT

This series of posts is border line ridiculously long, but I hope it is a fruitful endeavor nevertheless. In my vast journey’s around the great world of SharePoint, I have drawn many conclusions on what is good to do and what is not so good regarding SharePoint branding. I started documenting my thoughts in what will become a whitepaper on the subject, but it became clear to me early on that the whitepaper will be quite lengthy, and since I still have a day job, I figured it best to break it up into a series of posts with the paper serving as a supplemental and combined read when it is finished. My goal in this series is to outline the best practices and major concepts, the “what” when it comes to branding, and to outline the “how” and detailed steps in the whitepaper that will follow. Hopefully I will have the 10 posts done within the next 4 weeks (among posts on other subjects I plan on doing), with the whitepaper to follow 2 weeks thereafter.

Additionally, my desire is that these posts will generate feedback, enough so that the community can help shape the outcome and depth of the top 10 list. I will also use such feedback to help shape the contents of the whitepaper. Feel free to leave a comment if you want to contribute or raise concerns around my conclusions. Also – be sure to check out Bill & Ben’s new book on SharePoint best practices, that book is sure to be a hot seller.

[this post is cross-posted from http://philwicklund.com]

DeliverPoint :Permissions - Registered License for free

Paul Schaeflein — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:16:00 GMT

We released an update to our product today. DeliverPoint :Permissions v3 includes a limited-functionality license for free. All the details can be found on http://www.deliverpoint.com.

All of us at Barracuda are excited about this product. And we've hit our groove with quarterly releases, which means you can expect much more going forward!

First SharePoint Best Practices and Governance Conference!

Ben Curry — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Mindsharp will be hosting the first SharePoint Best Practices and Governance Conference in Washington, DC on September 15-17. We will be hosting this event in cooperation with Microsoft Press, who will be publishing the SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices Deployment book, co-authored by myself, Bill English, Kathy Hughes and others.

This should be a great conference, and we will be releasing the speaker roster in the next few weeks. As soon as we have the conference Web site up, I'll be sure to let you know. As a quick preview, we will be covering the 'why' of implementing portions of SharePoint, and then proving it with some real-world how to! Some areas to be covered are Governance, Branding, Customization, Web parts, Solutions, WCM, Taxonomies, Availability, Search, Document Management, and Capacity Planning.

Mark your calendars, and I hope to see you there.

Ben Curry, CISSP, SharePoint Server MVP

Mindsharp

http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben

SQL Server is invalid or is an Unsupported Version

Corro'll Driskell — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:03:00 GMT

There are a number of customers working to properly secure their SharePoint implementations. The Security Hardening documentation from Microsoft titled, "Plan and Design for Security (Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server combined".

In fact, the Security Hardening guide recommends restricting access to the SQL ports: TCP port 1433 and UDP port 1434. Also, there are a number of SharePoint Technology - Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 - related recommendations; for example, Block UDP port 1434, Configure SQL Server named instances to listen on a non-standard port; block TCP port 1433 and re-assign the port; Configure SQL client aliases on all Web Front End and Application layer servers - ES, Index, Query and others in the farm.

This approach provides a greater degree of protection for your SQL Server communications. It also ensures that all servers in the SharePoint Farm follows a more restricted communication model.

Let's say that after properly configuring your security strategy your organization decides to use the Microsoft Single Sign On (SSO) technologies. You navigate to the SharePoint Central Administration v3 web site. You locate the configuration link for the SSO. You configure all of the settings and click on OK button.

Your browser refreshes. You notice that there is an error message. The error message encourages you to verify your SQL Server name and other configuration on the page.

You begin to bang your head against the monitor gently. As you take a look at the event logs - on the WFE server and the SQL Servers - and troubleshoot the TCP/IP stack. You notice that there is not an indication of of a notable error.

What we found that was encouraging the return of the SQL Server error message was the organization's security hardening policies. If your organization plans to use the SSO, the 1434 port must remain open. Of course, it would have been great to receive an error message that would provide more - specific - information that would have saved quite a few man hours.

In order to get rid of this error message, you would need to unblock port 1434 on your SQL Servers.

That is just my $19.11 worth.

"OWS_" Property Mapping Tip

Bill English — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:23:00 GMT

http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/BillBlog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=80

Bill English
Mindsharp

Office 2007 IFilters Available for Indexing

Bill English — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:10:00 GMT

If you're like most, you don't install the Office client on your servers. In order for the Index server to have the Office 2007 IFilters, you'll need to download this filter pack and install it on your Index server.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=60C92A37-719C-4077-B5C6-CAC34F4227CC&displaylang=en

Bill English
Mindsharp

SUGDC Regional SharePoint Conference

Paul Schaeflein — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:49:00 GMT

I will be part of the developer roundtable at the Regional SharePoint Conference being held by the SharePoint User Group of DC (SUGDC). Hope to see you there!

SharePoint Best Practices and Governance Conference Announced

Bill English — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:43:00 GMT

This conference will focus on governance and best practices for a MOSS deployment. “How to” information will not be emphasized as much at this event as the “why” of making one decision over another for a deployment or customization. Learning how to “connect the dots” between the features of MOSS, your requirements and culture will be emphasized in this conference. If you're an architect, systems administrator, developer, web designer, librarian/taxonomist, project manager or CIO, this event will help you understand best practices and governance principles that will support a successful implementation in your environment.

We will have our conference web site up soon with all of the conference details and registration information you'll need to attend. But please mark your calendars for September 15-17 in Washington, DC. You won't want to miss it!

Bill English
Mindsharp

Understanding the Crawler Architecture

Bill English — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:19:00 GMT

I've just posted an article on understanding the crawler architecture. You can find it here: http://admincompanion.mindsharp.com/BillBlog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=83

Bill English
Mindsharp