Dirk Van den Berghe SharePoint Blog

New SharePoint Documents - July 2010

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit v1.0 released

Found this toolkit while scanvenging the new downloads on th MS Download site.

Beware of the final line on the download page:  This tool is not supported for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit v1.0

Brief Description:

The Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Administration Toolkit contains functionality to help administer and manage Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation 2010 and Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010.

Overview:

The Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit contains the following tools to help manage SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010:

• Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) manifests, which add roles for SharePoint 2010 Products to Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2 or to Windows Server 2008 R2.
  
  
  SCW is an attack surface reduction tool introduced with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. SCW uses a roles-based metaphor to solicit the functionality required for a server and disables the functionality that is not required. By automating this security best practice, SCW helps to create Windows environments that are less susceptible, on the whole, to security vulnerabilities that have been exploited. For more information about SCW in Windows Server 2008, see Security Configuration Wizard (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=185511).
• Load Testing Toolkit (LTK), which generates a Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) load test based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 IIS logs. The VSTS load test can be used to generate synthetic load against SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 as part of a capacity planning exercise or a pre-upgrade stress test.
  
  
  To install the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), see Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=101641). To install Service Pack 1, see Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=116488).
• User Profile Replication Engine 2010 (UPRE2010), which provides a shared services administrator the ability to replicate user profiles and social data between shared services providers (SSP) in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and User Profile service applications in SharePoint Server 2010. This Windows PowerShell-based tool is not supported for SharePoint Foundation 2010.
• Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) connector for SharePoint Server 2010
  
  
  The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) connector for SharePoint Server 2010 enables SharePoint users to interact with content stored in any repository that has implemented the CMIS standard, as well as making SharePoint 2010 content available to any application that has implemented the CMIS standard.
  
  The CMIS connector for SharePoint Server 2010 includes two features:
  • The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Consumer Web Part, which can be added to any SharePoint page. This Web Part displays and lets users interact with the contents of any CMIS repository.
  • The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Producer, which allows applications to interact with SharePoint lists and document libraries programmatically by means of the interfaces defined in the CMIS standard.

For more information about the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard, see OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196694).

This tool is not supported for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Some more newly published SP2010 material on Microsoft Downloads

Some more interesting downloads I happened to stumble upon while reviewing the latest downloads on the Microsoft Downloads site

Newly published SharePoint 2010 documents

Newly published SharePoint 2010 documents. I came across these through some of the tweets that I am following.

Thanks to Andreas Glaser for tweeting about these documents

interesting new blog --> Pascal Benois

for those of us that are always interesting in SharePoint blogs from Microsoft engineers with a lot of experience in the field, I am glad to be able to tell you that Pascal Benois, a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Belgium has (finally ) found the time to start blogging

Find his blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/pabenois/

Have fun blogging Pascal !  

Document your SP2010 Farm configuration

I was passed a link today by Thomas Vochten, that leads to a Technet Article containing a pretty neat Powershell script for documenting a SharePoint 2010 farm configuration.

The script will output several XML files containing specifi farm configuration settings. Ideally you could have a single XML file created on a daily basis and windiff the files to check for any changes in the farm.

Find the original article on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff645391(office.14).aspx

SharePoint 2010 Knowledgde articles

So you took the step of installing your first SharePoint 2010 server or farm. You install the server, but not everything goes smoothly or doesn't work as expected. What's next? Well, a good place to start is to use the knowledge base that Microsoft tools use, such as the System Center Operations Center (SCOM) Knowledge articles. These are the articles that typically show up in SCOM, provided that you have installed the SharePoint 2010 Management pack,  if it has encountered an error on your SharePoint installation or farm.

The knowledge articles can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee513133(office.14).aspx

Thanks to Neil Hodgkinson (@Nellymo) for providing this tip and link on Twitter

SP2010 Create site without template

I often let my users decide which site template they want to use for their new site collection. In SharePoint 2007 i did this by creating a site collection using stsadm without specifying a site template. this caused the first user to have to select the site template to use. There was no possibility to create a site collection without specifying a site template through central admin.

Now in SP2010, the possibilty to not specify a site template has been built in to Central Admin. When creating a new site through Central Admin, notice that there is now an entry in the Custom tab, called ' < Select Template Later ... >'

Now when your user hits his/her new site collection, he/she will get redirected to the templatepick.aspx page and has to pick a site template.

SharePoint 2010 Multi Tenancy

SharePoint 2010 allows you to host multiple tenants or customers in a Hosting Mode. This is exremely interesting if you are thinking of your SharePoint environment as an infrastructure hosting platform for all your customers. Customers being either external customers or even internal divisions, departments for which you would like to define separate services. Multi Tenancy also provides more information with regards to chargeback to your customers. Furthermore you get a tenant administration website that you can delegate to your customer for allowing him/her to create new site collections assigned to him/her s a tenant.

I have seen a demo yesterday by Spencer Harbar at #spevo for enabling multi tenancy. It requiores a lot of Powershell scripting, but while researching this topic on the web, I stumbled upon a series of blog posts by Steve Pechka that nicely describe the steps for setting this up:

Find them here:

• Part 1: http://blogs.technet.com/speschka/archive/2009/11/30/enabling-multi-tenant-support-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx
• Part 2: http://blogs.technet.com/speschka/archive/2009/12/30/multi-tenancy-in-sharepoint-2010-part-2.aspx
• Part 3: http://blogs.technet.com/speschka/archive/2010/01/16/multi-tenancy-in-sharepoint-2010-part-3.aspx

SharePoint 2010 RTM bits available on Monday April 26th?

I just heard Mike Watson say in his SharePoint IronMan session at #spevo that the RTM bits for SharePoint 2010 will most probably be available on MSDN and Technet as of Monday April 26th.

Let's hope he is right so we can start downloading, installing, upgrading, ... (Hmm, can we upgrade from Beta to RTM? Will need to check this ). Anyway sounds like next week is going to be a busy week....

SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: software boundaries and limits

in a Mike Watson session yesterday at the SharePoint Evolution Conference (#spevo at Twitter), Mike mentionned this new document published by Microsoft recently, specifying the software boundaries and limits to take into account when plaaning your SharePoint 2010 infrastructure.

His slides included the following interesting table showing the capacity guidance differences between 2007 and 2010:

Higher capacity guidance

Get the full document at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=66438e41-5733-448a-bd76-a8052b394fe2

An interesting figure I was wondereing about was the maximum number of web applications per WFE for which the guidance document now specifies a maximum of 10 Application Pools per WFE. For 2007, I have always been told to not exceed 8 web applications / application pools, which makes the new guidance for 2010 not much better. If you are hosting a lot of web applications on a single farm, then planning the application pools will be a major step in the planning process.

SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Cheat Sheet by Dmitry Sotnikov

Dmitry recently posted an interesting 3 page reference card describing how to get started with PowerShell for SharePoint. Not having taken the blue pill yet, I reealy need to get this information drilled down very soon.

Go find the document at http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/sharepoint-2010-powershell-cheat-sheet/

Thanks Dmitry !

On my way to #SPEVO

While waiting for the Eurostar to start heading for London to the SharePoint Evolution Conference 2010, I could not stop thinking about the hundreds or thousands of people trying to get to London as well to attend. I must say that now that planes have been cancelled and the only available transports left are trains, cars and boats, planning your travels is becoming quita a challenge.

Well, I hope you all get there and we can meet up at the SharePint (http://twitter.com/SharePint).

I am certainly ready to learn a lot more about SharePoint 2010 and London Partying :)

SharePoint Timeout error: thread was being aborted. Think about executionTimeout!

This error kept our team occupied for some time before finding a solution.

Error description:

A custom application on SharePoint copies some documents form one library to another after a button is pushed on a form button. When the button is pushed the application behaves as expected and the files are copied. For some reason now, the operation fails if the number of files being copied is quite a lot.

We were originally thinking about a timeout issue, an upload limit issue or the antivirus software interfering. After investigating all of these cases, we were unable to find a solution. A lot of research and some days later, we went back in to the problem before calling PSS and I found the solution on a blog post

Solution:

You need to define the executionTimeout parameter in the web.config file of the web application where the custom application is running. This parameter is not there by default. From what I have read out there, it seems that if this parameter is not defined, then a default value is assumed of 110 seconds

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="200" maxRequestLength="51200"/>

Source for execution timeout:

http://blogs.msdn.com/pedram/archive/2007/10/02/how-the-execution-timeout-is-managed-in-asp-net.aspx

Unable to edit Document Library Column: Unknown Error

It has been a while since my last post and since then, I encountered some interesting issues, worth writing about. This one amazed me.
One of our users complained that he was unable to edit a standard choice field that he just created in a document library. Whenever he tried to edit the filed he got the dreadfull "Unknown Error" from SharePoint.
A little research and some adjusting of diagnostics logging when reproducing the error, showed the following error in the ULS logs:

Application error when access /_layouts/FldEdit.aspx, Error=Object reference not set to an instance of an object.  
at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.BasicFieldEditPage.get_ContentTypeId()    
at ASP._layouts_fldedit_aspx.__Render__control433(HtmlTextWriter __w, Control parameterContainer)    
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)    
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)    
at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlContainerControl.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)    
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)    
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)    
at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)    
at System.Web.UI.Page.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)    
at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)    
at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)
Exception Type: System.NullReferenceException  Exception Message: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Now this error does not say much, so I started to look for it in blogs. Now it turns out that someone had faced the exact same issue with oddly enough the exact same name of the column causing the issue. My user had called the column 'doctype' . According to the blog post, the name doctype is a reserved word in SharePoint and strangely enough SharePoint does allow you to create a column with that name, but then you will no longer be able to edit it again.

As suggested in that post, I was also able to delete the column using SharePoint Manager 2007 (http://spm.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=22762)

My source: http://www.ureader.com/msg/123210106.aspx.