Michael Blumenthal Blog

RTM, Launch, and GA dates announced for SharePoint 2010!

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:35:41 GMT

Body: SharePoint 2010 will RTM next month – April 2010! The launch event will be May 12 th . http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=387xf5ImGXJ It will be generally available to everyone in June. Source: http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/archive/2010/03/04/get-office-today-or-tomorrow.aspx Michael Category: SharePoint 2010 Published: 3/5/2010 12:35 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

Why the silence?

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:07:15 GMT

Body: I haven’t blogged in a while, though I have tweeted a lot. Here’s why: End of November, my wife and I were blessed with our second child. Now my web hosting company is migrating my site to a “new platform” (which I think means new hardware). It’s apparently a slow process, and I don’t want to add significant new content until it is done. So between those two things, it may be a bit quiet here for a few more weeks. What I haven’t blogged about is what I have been doing on SP2010. More about that after the site migration is complete. --Michael Published: 2/19/2010 4:07 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

Modifying a web part’s unnamed view with POSH

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:52:24 GMT

Body: Here’s a little POSH script I wrote today, generalized a bit. The web part in question shows a list that has a column named “Title”, and one named “Percentage”, where it grouped them by a column called MarketType. It started out sorting ascending by title, and afterwards sorts descending by percentage. function global:Sort-WPBiggestPercentOnTop($SPViewUsedByWP) { $oldqu = $SPViewUsedByWP.Query if $oldqu -ne "<GroupBy Collapse=""FALSE"" GroupLimit=""100""><FieldRef Name=""Market_x0020_Type"" Ascending=""FALSE"" /></GroupBy><OrderBy><FieldRef Name=""Title"" /></OrderBy>" { write-error "View not as expected"} $newqu = $oldqu.Replace("<FieldRef Name=""Title"" />","<FieldRef Name=""Percentage"" Ascending=""FALSE"" />" $SPViewUsedByWP.Query = $newqu $SPViewUsedByWP.Update() write-host "Need to reset the state of the web part toolbar, it gets changed when the view gets edited." } Category: PowerShell and SharePoint Published: 11/6/2009 3:52 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati ...(read more)

Lots of 2010 Info now available

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:51:28 GMT

Body: With the opening of the 2009 SharePoint Conference yesterday, the NDA was removed from 2010 information and Microsoft and 3rd parties have been publishing content as fast as they can. Twitter has been a good way to find out about a number of these. My favorites so far are: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/results.aspx?displaylang=en&nr=50&sortCriteria=Date&sortOrder=Descending&stype=s_adv&freetext=sharepoint%202010 – A ton of downloads on Microsoft.com all about 2010 including 10 posters. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee513147.aspx - SharePoint 2010 development training. See Module 2 in particular. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd441784.aspx#Sharepoint – Visual Studio 2010 developer walkthroughs for SharePoint development http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/videoplayer.aspx?vhid=1 Tom Rizzo’s news of the day from Day 1 of the SharePoint conference. Also, things I couldn’t say before: Central Admin 2010 is sweet! Managed accounts that change their own strong passwords for you – awesome! 492+ PowerShell cmdlets for managing SharePoint! Cool! --Michael Category: SharePoint 2010 Published: 10/20/2009 10:51 AM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

November 2009 CSPUG Meeting: Speakers Chosen

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:07:03 GMT

Body: We’ve just finalized our speakers for the Nov 5 and Nov 19 meetings of the Chicago SharePoint User Group. We have Rick Seeman, a SharePoint Technical Specialist from Microsoft, MVP Asif Rehmani, and MVP Rob Bogue speaking. We can’t tell you the specific topics yet, because it’s all 2010 and under NDA. Save the dates! The Nov 5 meeting is an evening meeting in the Loop, and the Nov 19 meeting is an afternoon meeting in Downers Grove. Rick and Asif speak at both, Rob speaks at the afternoon meeting as a special bonus. Sign up for our mailing list at www.cspug.org , and as soon as we open Registration, you will know about it! --Michael Category: Chicago SharePoint User Group Published: 10/6/2009 8:07 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

Twitterstream Snapshot

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:46:06 GMT

Body: Here’s a snapshot of all my tweets to date. This is for the benefit of anyone who reads my blog but doesn’t follow me on Twitter, and also so that a search of my blog includes my tweets. #SharePoint : "An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host" when email enable a list? Ensure Cntrl Adm default AAM url ok. 3:33 PM Sep 30th from TwInbox RT @ TopSharepoint : How we did it: Speeding up #SharePoint for SharePoint.Microsoft.com: http://tinyurl.com/yfr7coa - 10:28 PM Sep 29th from TwInbox Gartner puts #SharePoint in Leader's Quadrant - http://bit.ly/zB1Cm 3:17 PM Sep 28th from web Your Content Type Gallery empty after you do a site collection restore with stsadm? Recycle the App Pool for that #SharePoint web app! 4:47 PM Sep 24th from TwInbox Added 2 to our list of possible speakers for future Chicago #SharePoint User Group (#CSPUG) meetings. Topics: Rec Mgmt and Notes Migration. 10:34 PM Sep 23rd from TwInbox #CSPUG Chicago #SharePoint User Group - Oct Meeting moved to Dec. Nov will have 2 mtgs on 2010 - one in Loop, one in DG. http://cspug.org 8:46 AM Sep 20th from web Had a planning call for #CSPUG , the Chicago #SharePoint User Group on Friday. Updating site and writing meeting notes. 8:43 AM Sep...(read more)

End User Training Product Vendors

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:17:29 GMT

Body: Here’s a short list of companies that provide end user training products or information. Rob Bogue’s Shepherd’s Guide – book and licensable content that you can build into your website. http://www.sharepointshepherd.com/default.aspx BrainStorm Inc’s Quick Reference Cards and Computer Based Training http://www.combined-knowledge.com/EUA/index.html (Also see episode 25 of the http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/ ) http://Office.Microsoft.com of course. http://www.endusersharepoint.com/ - @EUSP on twitter. If there are others, let me know about them. Category: SharePoint – WSS and MOSS Published: 9/10/2009 9:17 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

Reminder: September 2009 CSPUG meeting next week!

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:37:19 GMT

Body: Building Public Facing SharePoint Sites George Durzi Consultant Clarity Consulting Interested in seeing what it takes to build a public facing site using SharePoint? George will cover areas such as publishing workflow, server and network topology of the solution, organizing your SharePoint solutions, publishing site definitions, branding, packaging the site’s publishing assets, configuring and running content deployment, and setting up anonymous access. We’ll also discuss some special considerations for public facing SharePoint sites, such as page payload size, accessibility and search engine optimization. George is a consultant at Clarity Consulting in Chicago. He helps organize the annual MOSSCamp SharePoint developer event and actively blogs about SharePoint, TFS and Office Communications Server. George has presented at DevCares, MOSSCamp, Office Developer Conference 2008, TechReady 2008, TechEd North America 2008, and SharePoint Saturday Chicago 2009. SharePoint - Externalize Content BLOBs in the Clouds Tom Miller Senior Technical Consultant BlueThread Technologies Tom will present an overview of StoragePoint. StoragePoint is a product for MOSS and WSS that externalizes the content BLOBS from the content database to an external...(read more)

SharePoint Solution Architecture – One Example

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:53:13 GMT

Body: Problem: Organization X needs a way to track a variety of information about events going on in a large number of geographic locations. There is one event per location, but many locations. Examples of the information that needs to be tracked per event are location name, event dates, details about the people competing, and the organization’s notes and tasks for the event. There are many ways to solve this problem. One that leverages the goodness of SharePoint and involves no work in Visual Studio is this: Create a site collection. In the root site, create a list that stores the list of events. For each event, create a subsite for that event. Turn on the publishing features to give you better control over the navigation and let you more easily have multiple web part pages per site. To create a subsite for each event, create one “event site” that serves as a template for all of the event sites. Use PowerShell to handle anything repetitious, such as turning off Publishing, saving the site as a template, and turning publishing on again, or such as looping through the list of events and creating a subsite for each event. I’ve got a Data View Web Part that sits in the event site, and pulls data for its event from the parent site’s list...(read more)

SharePoint Training: Videos on Demand!

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:31:43 GMT

Body: Penton Media, the company that brings you the SharePoint Connections Conferences in March and November, and at which I have had the honor and pleasure of presenting, will be launching Connections Online, their online video store of conference sessions, next week. The site is already online, so you can check it out: http://videos.devconnections.com . I have one of my sessions up there: PowerShell for SharePoint Developers and Administrators. It’s at http://videos.devconnections.com/product/PowerShell-for-MOSS-Developers-and-Administrators,5824,398.aspx --Michael Category: SharePoint Events Published: 8/26/2009 4:31 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

New website for SharePoint Governance; Thoughts on Governance Plans

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:39:25 GMT

Body: I just found out about this new website for SharePoint Governance: http://SharePointGovernance.org . I like the idea, and have already submitted 4 comments on how to improve what’s there. The biggest gap I see is that it needs text or a link on the home page that explains what SharePoint Governance is. Here’s my attempt: SharePoint Governance is the policies and procedures an organization puts in place in order to maintain an appropriate level of control over the organization's SharePoint deployment. Every organization that deploys SharePoint should have some sort of governance plan. Such a plan, what we at Magenic call a SharePoint Roadmap, can cover a wide variety of management issues. This isn’t about server monitoring, though a governance plan would say that IT must put a server monitoring plan and process in place. This is about how the organization plans to use SharePoint in the short and long term, and what policies they need to create to support that. This can include how the organization plans to deploy, use, and control the wide variety of SharePoint functionality. This can also include defining where the division of control is: collaboration sites for example may have their adoption stunted if IT chooses to exert...(read more)

PowerShell to set Registry Entries needed to install Live Mesh on Win2008

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:03:57 GMT

Body: I am going to use Mesh to sync files between my host OS and the VM where I am using Office 2010 Tech Preview (which includes InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010). In order to install Mesh on Win2008, you need the registry entry described in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368304(VS.85).aspx . The PowerShell commands you need are: cd hklm:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ md Installer cd Installer New-ItemProperty . -name "DisableMSI" -value "0" -PropertyType dword --Michael Published: 7/18/2009 4:04 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

PowerShell script to report SharePoint version number – Improved!

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:25:19 GMT

Body: I was recently recording a webcast for Connections Online about using PowerShell with SharePoint, and I put together what I think it a pretty cool four lines of code: $farm = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm]::Local $bv = $farm.BuildVersion.ToString() $vertable = Import-Csv versions.csv $vertable | where-object {$_.Version -eq $bv} A sample versions.csv file is here: http://blumenthalit.net/Files/PowerShell%20Scripts/versions.csv What the last line of the script returns is a description of the version (e.g. “April CU”) plus the corresponding WSS and MOSS KB articles IDs. Part of the beauty of this is that I didn’t have to do anything complex to store my data – it took me just a few minutes to create my csv file by hand, and I didn’t have to deal with parsing it, or with picking a collection datatype (List, HashTable, etc) to store it in. Import-CSV, which is a cmdlet that ships with PowerShell v1.0 did all that for me. You can download the script file here: Get-sharepointversion.ps1 (put it in the same folder as the CSV file). One of these days, I should move that into CodePlex.com/PSBB, but not today. Michael Published: 7/17/2009 2:25 PM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

Video Posted: InfoPath form to create a WSS Installer Configuration File

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:10:24 GMT

Body: I’m in the Office 2010 Technical Preview program, so I have started playing with the Office 2010 client applications. I’m using Outlook 2010 Tech Preview as my email client, and I like the Quick Steps. I wish I could share a QuickStep with my colleagues though – would be nice if there was a way to export & import Quick Step Definitions. Meanwhile, I saw this blog post from the InfoPath 2010 team:( http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2009/07/13/install-the-office-2010-technical-preview-and-win-an-xbox-360-elite.aspx ) and put together an entry for the contest. It’s an InfoPath form that creates the xml file needed if you want to do an unattended install of WSS 3.0. Here’s the video: http://communityclips.officelabs.com/Video.aspx?videoId=e37ddba5-448c-402f-b06e-bd87ed0f5bd5 In the video, I also feature a PowerShell script that removes the namespaces from the xml file that the InfoPath form generates. The PowerShell function that I created is very simple. The one possibly unusual thing it contains is a string intentionally split across lines. I did this because it was the easiest way I could think of to specify a carriage return (“\n” isn’t valid here). function global:Clean-WSSConfig($filename) { get-content $filename ...(read more)

FAQ and Prep list from the SharePoint Prod Team Blog Post

Blogging about SharePoint: Posts — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:57:38 GMT

Body: The same day that the Office 2010 sneak peak website became available, the product team posted this: Announcing SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview Here’s the blue (blueberry? :) ) pie: Key links: Getting Ready for 2010: both for Developers and Admins: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Get_Ready.aspx A FAQ: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/FAQ.aspx --Michael Published: 7/17/2009 6:57 AM Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)