SharePoint 2010 Crossword puzzle

My colleague, Jackson, came up with a nicely done SharePoint 2010 crossword puzzle for an event we had at work.Really smart work on some of the clues :)

He blogs @ Confessions of a SharePoint Consultant

Wanted to share it with a larger audience

Web part versioning in SharePoint 2010

One of the new features added to SharePoint 2010 web part framework is versioning of web part instances.
The versioning comes into effect under the following scenario:

1. When the page is checked in.
2. Versioning is controlled by page level settings
3. Only shared instances of web parts will be versioned

Although, if there are edits when the page is not checked out, then the versioning will not occur.

The only issue would be the amount of storage space needed for the versions, as there is no delta storage of the versions, the entire instance will be stored in each version.

New site template for Content deployment in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 has introduced a new option while creating a Site Collection. It appears under the "Custom" tab of the Select a template section. It gives an option for users to Select the site template at a later stage.

This option mainly serves to create the destination site collection during a content deployment scenario. The feature will also be useful for the "Self Service Site Creation" feature.

Hiding Lists & Libraries from the WebPartAdder in SharePoint 2010

One of our clients had a requirement to hide the Lists & Libraries web parts from the selection of web parts that the use can add to a page.

Looking at the master page, the control which displays the list of web parts available is the WebPartAdder.

This control has a property called ShowListsAndLibraries.Setting this property to false hides the Lists & Libraries category from the list.

ShowListsAndLibraries="false" runat="server" />

SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit V1 released

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=718447d8-0814-427a-81c3-c9c3d84c456e&displaylang=en

The documentation for the tool kit can be found at

SharePoint Foundation 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508986.aspx

SharePoint Server 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508851.aspx 

Windows update KB938444 & "Cannot connect to the configuration database"

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/06/22/installing-kb938444.aspx?_sm_au_=iVV6RRM2W4q7rWZS

User Profile Synchronization & Standalone installation of Sharepoint 2010

If you want to configure User Profile Import from Active directory or any other secondary source please install SharePoint 2010 in “Farm Mode”.

The User Profile Synchronization service does not work with the Stand Alone installation mode of SharePoint.

Quoting a reference from technet :

“The farm is running either the Standard or Enterprise version of SharePoint Server 2010 and you have run the farm configuration wizard. Profile Synchronization does not work on a stand-alone installation for SharePoint Server 2010.”

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049(office.14).aspx

SharePoint 2010 Capacity boundry limits

Microsoft have released a white paper on SharePoint 2010 Capacity management: Software boundaries and limits.The white paper can be downloaded here

On a high level:

	Moss 2007	SharePoint 2010
Content DB Size	100 GB	200 GB
File Size	2 GB	2 GB
DB’s per webapp	100	300
Site collection size	100 GB	100 GB
List items per view	2000	5000

SharePoint Visio Stencils for solution packages and Features

Maxime Bombardier has posted some Visio stencils and templates for designing SharePoint solution packages and Features :). This would be a lot of help in documenting solution packages & features visually.

The stencils are available for download here

Deleting(Unextending) Extended web applications

When we extend a web application, the extended web application will not appear in the Web Application list. Hence we cannot delete the Extended site through the "Delete Web Application" section of Application Management.

Use this approach to delete the extended web apps:

1. Start Central Administration
2. Go to Application Management
3. Click Remove SharePoint from IIS Web Site
4. Select the web application that the extended web app was extended from
5. Select which extension/zone to delete
6. Keep or delete the IIS Web site
7. Finally click OK

If you look closely the page is named "unextendvs.aspx" :)

Bye Bye stsadm hello PowerShell

Stsadm was one of the primary tools available for deployment operations in MOSS 2007. However, We all have been through a lot of scenarios that stsadm simply did not cover.

The resolution to this was to write a piece of code or develop a custom stsadm extension and deploy it to accomplishing a simple task

SharePoint 2010 has moved to PowerShell which means that you know have full access to the SharePoint API from the command line.

For example : Suppose I want to get a list of features for a specific site collection, we can simply type the following from the PowerShell prompt

$s = Get-SPSite http://siteurl

S$.Features | out-gridview

We would get the list of features in a grid view with filtering & sorting options.

Find a list of all the SharePoint 2010 PowerShell cmdlets reference here

http://dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010-cmdlet-reference/

and the Help file for PowerShell here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=045F7AF5-B226-4A05-8ACE-4E17CFDEF856&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Microsoft claim to introduce around 1000 build in cmdlets :)

You can use PowerShell with the MOSS 2007 object model and its web services. More on that here

http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=9

Page Layouts & Site Templates

Probably all of you would have used this setting at some point in your projects, this is for those who haven’t.

As most of you would know in MOSS 2007 Publishing sites, each site supports only one Pages Library. As a direct consequence of this the content author/editor would have to navigate to the desired site(For example- if you have a Latest News functionality in your WCM site and as part of your information architecture you would decide to have a sub site called News, so to add a News article, the content author would have to navigate to the News site.) to create/edit a particular publishing page.

When he tries to create a page, he would be presented with a list of page layouts to choose from. If you want to restrict the list of page layouts you can:

Go into any Publishing site's Site Settings page and look under the Look & Feel column for the Page Layouts & Site Templates link. From this page you'll be able to do the following:

• Inherit the parent site's settings for site templates & page layouts.

• Turn off all filtering for the site templates & page layouts that are available to content

• Turn on filtering and customize the site templates & page layouts that are available to content owners and hierarchy managers.

This you allow you to limit the page layouts/site templates available.

This feature also allows you to enable the creation of other “types”(Blog, Wiki, Team Sites, etc.) of sites under a Publishing site which is not available as a default setting.

SharePoint 2010 provides a Content Organizer through which you can organize content based on a rules engine.

Debugging the "The Resource cannot be found" error

Working with sharepoint often involves a lots of digging into to get to the source of the problem i.e. read Event Viewer, Stack Traces, ULS logs, IIS logs, etc...

Once common error you might come across as a sharepoint developer is the "The Resource cannot be found" error.

Digging into the event viewer or uls logs does not give any clue on the actual error message.

While,breaking my head over this my team mate told me to have a look at the page source.

And there lies the actual error :)

Hats off to sharepoint again!!!!

Passing custom arguments to the content query web part

We had a requirement to access the parameters entered by a content author/administrator in the tool pane of the content query web part (CQWP) to in the item style xslt template.

For this we decided to extend the functionality of the CQWP by sub-classing it. We included additional input fields to the tool pane by creating a new tool part class and added out custom tool part class to the out of the box tool pane of the CQWP.

To make the parameters entered in the tool part to be accessible in the ItemStyle.xsl we have to override the ModifyXsltArgumentList method of the CQWP.

protected override void ModifyXsltArgumentList(ArgumentClassWrapper argList)

{

base.ModifyXsltArgumentList(argList);

argList.AddParameter("yourparametername", "namespace", value);

}

Now the parameter can be accessed in the contentquerymain.xsl as a parameter.

<xsl:param name="cbq_isgrouping" />

<xsl:param name="cbq_columnwidth" />

<xsl:param name="Group" />

<xsl:param name="GroupType" />

<xsl:param name="cbq_iseditmode" />

<xsl:param name="cbq_viewemptytext" />

<xsl:param name="SiteId" />

<xsl:param name="WebUrl" />

<xsl:param name="PageId" />

<xsl:param name="WebPartId" />

<xsl:param name="FeedPageUrl" />

<xsl:param name="FeedEnabled" />

<xsl:param name="SiteUrl" />

<xsl:param name="BlankTitle" />

<xsl:param name="BlankGroup" />

<xsl:param name="UseCopyUtil" />

<xsl:param name="DataColumnTypes" />

<xsl:param name="ClientId" />

<xsl:param name="yourparametername" />

You can access the parameter now in the ItemStyle.xsl as follows:

<xsl:value-of select="$yourparametername"/>

Content deployment retry configuration

Only a part of the Content Deployment configuration settings are configurable through the central administration user interface, some of the settings have to be done in the web.config of the central administration website while others can only be accessed through the API.

The settings that can be configured through the web.config are discussed here. These settings relate to the Export phase of the content deployment process.

Options that can be configured through the central administration web configuration:

RetryOption: When content deployment jobs are executed in parallel or if content authoring is in progress when the job is running you may encounter many random exceptions. This is an enumeration ExportRetryOption.

The possible values for RetryOption include:

None (0) - default

SkipFailedWebs (1)

SimpleRetry (2)

Note: The enumeration is marked as internal and hence is not exposed through the API.

ExportRetries: This is used in parallel with the RetryOption. This is a number indicating the number of times the content export will retry before throwing up an error. Possible values are 1-999.

A more detailed explanation is described in Part 3 of the series on content deployment by Stefan Gobner.

http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2009/11/02/content-deployment-the-complete-guide-part-3-configuration.aspx

Note: These settings are part of the build 12.0000.6315.5000 or later.