SharePoint
I will be speaking at SharePoint Cincy 2013 on Friday Apr 19th. This will be my 2nd time speaking at SharePoint Cincy. I always enjoy getting to speak at local conferences as it is a great chance to connect with customers, meet new and old friends, and give back in a more intimate venue. I’ll be presenting one topic which I have delivered a similar presentation internally to Microsoft but this is slightly altered and for public consumption. Registration is still open. If you attend feel free to stop ......
Recently I posted a script to find where SharePoint 2010 Features Are Activated. I built the original version to use SharePoint 2010 PowerShell commandlets as that saved me a number of steps for filtering and gathering features at each level. If there was ever demand for a 2007 version I could modify the script to handle that by using the object model instead of commandlets. Just the other week a fellow SharePoint PFE Jason Gallicchio had a customer asking about a version for SharePoint 2007. With ......
Once again myself and a great group of individuals (Jennifer Mason, Sean McDonough, Nicola Young, and Michelle Caldwell) are organizing a SharePoint Saturday in Columbus, OH. The event will be on August 20, 2011 at the OCLC Conference Center, a fantastic venue that attendees (including speakers and sponsors) gave high praises on for last year’s event. Today we announced the opening of call for speakers and sponsors. If you are interested in speaking please fill out the speaker submission form (click ......
In this post I present a script that will display all of the site collection administrators for a given web application. This script will work for SharePoint 2007 or 2010 as it uses the object model rather than the new SharePoint 2010 commandlets. Special thanks to Tasha Scott (Twitter) for posting a request for this script. It took less than 15 minutes to come up with and formalize. Solution The solution is fairly straight forward. First you grab a reference to a site collection. Get the web application ......
In this post, guest author Lucas Eduardo Silva will walk you through the steps of instantiating a workflow using an item event receiver from a custom list. The ItemDeleting event will require approval via the workflow. Foreword As you may have read recently, I injured my right hand and have had it in a cast for the past 3 weeks. Due to this I planned to reduce my blogging while my hand heals. As luck would have it, I was actually approached by someone who asked if they could be a guest author on ......
Are your SharePoint pages loading slowly because you have numerous closed web parts eating up valuable resources? Are you an admin tasked with tracking down those closed web parts? Recently my friend Brian Gough asked me a fairly simple question: “Is it possible to use PowerShell to find all ‘closed’ webparts in a site collection?” In this post I’ll show you a short PowerShell script that will identify all closed web parts on a site and it’s sub-sites. Solution The script below uses an advanced function ......
This week I ran into an interesting error with a customer. The customer has defined a SharePoint 2007 content deployment path to push content from one SharePoint 2007 farm to another SharePoint 2007 farm. They can complete 1 full deploy and 1 incremental deploy, but then all incremental deploys error with the following message: “Specified argument was out of the range of valid values”. Cause In order to get more insight into the error I used ULSViewer to inspect the ULS logs on the server (ULSViewer ......
<Update> Posting code didn’t format as well as hoped. Download the below script here. </Update> For those of you who are SharePoint admins or developers but have never dug into the SharePoint API or PowerShell, I would recommend first checking out some tutorials on both and referencing the SharePoint Developer Center. At a later date I hope to be able to provide some quick demo scripts that highlight the power, time savings, and overall usefulness that can be gained by combining PowerShell ......
I have a few conferences I’ll be speaking at in the next few weeks. The first is SharePoint Cincy in Cincinnati, OH on Friday March 16th. The other is SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities in Minneapolis, MN on April 14th. Below are the details for each. Assuming copies of my book arrive in time for either conference I’ll be giving away a book or two and signing them. Stop by and see me if you’ll be attending either conference. Sessions Where: SharePoint Cincy 2012 Title: PowerShell for the SharePoint ......
On Saturday Oct 29th, 2011 I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Cincinnati. My presentation is “PowerShell for the SharePoint 2010 Developer” which covers an introduction to PowerShell while focusing on integration with SharePoint and the .Net framework. This presentation has a fair amount of demonstrations and sample code. I’m excited to be attending SPSCincinnati as it is a short drive from Columbus and I also know a number of the other speakers and organizers. It’s looking to be a great conference. ......
Over the past few years I’ve written a number of blog posts on performing various actions against a site collection or web application (display site collection admins, find all SPShell admins with database, find closed web parts). Invariably with every post I get some comments along the lines of “this is great, how can I run this against every site in the farm”. Well today you get your wish (sort of). Below you will find a template script that traverses all sites within your local farm. Isn’t that ......
A big thank you to everyone who attended my “Real-World Deployment of SharePoint 2010 Solutions” at SPTechCon Boston 2010 this week. I hope you learned some things and can take them back to improve your farms. This was my first time speaking at SPTechCon and second one attended. It was great to catch up with countless old friends I haven’t seen in awhile as well as meet new friends. I’m looking forward to speaking at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011 in Feb, so if you’re attending feel free to stop by ......
In this post I will talk about a new script I wrote to save PowerShell ISE files to a versioned SharePoint document library as well as a side project I created on CodePlex to host this code and future releases. Background Recently I began listening to the PowerScripting Podcast and I’m slowly catching up on old podcasts. On episodes 121 and 122 (most recent ones I’ve listened to as of this writing) Hal and Jonathan talked about an idea that piqued my interest immediately: using SharePoint as a script ......
This month I had the pleasure of presenting at the BuckeyeSPUG (formerly Central Ohio SPUG) meeting here in Columbus, OH. This is the first time I was the main presenter at our user group, having done small presentations along with other presenters in past meetings. The attendees had some great questions and hopefully learned some new tricks to use on their SharePoint 2007 farms. Thanks to everyone who came out. Below are the slides and demo scripts for those interested. Slides and Scripts: click ......
This coming Saturday Aug 14th I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Columbus 2010 and next Thursday Aug 19th I will be speaking at the local Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (COSPUG) monthly meeting. If you’ve been following me lately you may have overheard that I’m the lead event coordinator for SharePoint Saturday Columbus. That alone has consumed almost all of my time for the past 3 months, even more so the last month. It has truly been a wild ride so far but the event is coming together ......
This is a quick blog post for a fun PowerShell script I got to write today. My client asked me to make a listing of all instances of a particular workflow currently running on one of our SharePoint farms. Since we have dozens of SharePoint lists spread out across numerous sub-sites on this farm I decided to tackle the request with PowerShell. Here is a quick overview of what the scrip accomplishes. First I get a reference to the site collection in question. Next I get the workflow template from the ......
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at SPTechCon Boston 2010 this upcoming October 20-22. The presentation I will be giving is titled “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” and below is the session abstract. I’m very excited to be speaking at SPTechCon Boston as I attended and live blogged the recent SPTechCon San Francisco this past Feb (link here to recap of that event) and was impressed with all of the people and content I was exposed to. If you have a chance to attend SPTechCon ......
This weekend I presented my “The Power of PowerShell + SharePoint 2007” session at the Central Ohio Day of .Net conference in Wilmington, OH. This is the second year I’ve attended this conference, first time as a presenter. For those unfamiliar Day of .Net conferences are a one-day conference on all things .NET organized by developers for developers. These events are usually offered at no cost to anyone interested in .NET development. The attendees of my session had some great questions and I hope ......
The title of this post is pretty self explanatory, but I thought it worth mentioning since I had never run across this rule until just recently. A few weeks ago I was testing out a new workflow attached to a SharePoint 2007 document library. I uploaded various file types to ensure all were handled properly. One of the files I happened to test with was an empty .txt file to which I got the following error. As you can see from the error message you aren’t allowed to upload a file that is empty. Fast ......
Next time you fire up PowerShell to work with the SharePoint API make sure you launch the proper bit version of PowerShell. Last week I had an interesting error that led to this blog post. Travel back in time a little bit with me to see where this 32 vs. 64 bit debate started. History Ever since the first pre-beta bits of Office 2010 landed in my lap I have been questioning whether it’s better to run 32 or 64 bit applications on a 64 bit host operating system. In relation to Office 2010 I heard a ......
Wow! This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Washington DC (SPSDC) which was quite an event to say the least. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This made my fifth SharePoint Saturday attended and fourth I’ve spoken at. SPSDC was a bit different than most SharePoint Saturdays mostly due to the scale of it. We had almost 950 attendees, over 80 speakers presenting ......
As part of my automated deployment post last week, one step of my deployment script called for creating a SharePoint site collection using the “STSADM –o createsite” command with the –sitetemplate option used for a specific site template. If you have never had to create a site collection from a template at the command line you may not know what to put (or know what is available to you) for the –sitetemplate option. To remedy this I created a very simple PowerShell script that opens a site collection ......
Now this is a topic that really excites me. It combines two things I love: automation and SharePoint. At my current client we are in the process of moving our custom SharePoint applications to the production environment. As we are moving to production, that means that we develops have less handle on the implementations be they databases, code migration, etc. To ease the load on the infrastructure team who is implementing our custom application I took the liberty of automating as much of the process ......
Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API. I’ll say it again. Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API. Ok, now that you get the point that this will be a “learn from my mistakes and don’t do unsmart things like I did” post, let’s dig into what it was that I did poorly. Scenario For the past year I’ve been building custom .Net applications that are hosted through SharePoint. These application involve a number of ......
This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (SPSCLT) in Charlotte, North Carolina. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This made my fourth SharePoint Saturday attended and third I’ve spoken at. The event was very well organized, attended, and a pleasure to be a part of along with many other great speakers. At SharePoint Saturday Charlotte I had the opportunity ......
The SPSiteDataQuery class in SharePoint 2007 is very powerful, but it has a few limitations. One of these limitations that I ran into this morning (and caused hours of frustration) is that you can only return results from one list type at a time. For example, if you are trying to query items from an out of the box custom list (list type = 100) and document library (list type = 101) you will only get items from the custom list (SPSiteDataQuery defaults to list type = 100.) In my situation I was attempting ......
This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at. I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event. I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees. Typically ......
Next Saturday March 13th Ann Arbor, MI will be hosting SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI). For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various regional and national speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This will be my third SharePoint Saturday and second one I’ve had the honor of presenting at. My presentation is titled “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions“ (click here for the SpeakerRate link.) After ......
As mentioned in a recent post, I attended SPTechCon in San Francisco, CA on Feb 10-12, 2010. This was the first time I had attended this conference (now in it’s second year,) but I can easily say it was one of the best conferences (both personally and professionally) that I have attended since I started actively attending in the past 3 years. Here’s a quick recap of the conference with links at the bottom to the many pictures and videos that I took. Arriving Heading out to CA was a bit of a struggle. ......
Uploading files to a SharePoint document library through the web UI is a fairly simple process, but did you know it’s also possible to programmatically upload a file (or string) to a document library? Over the past two weeks I’ve had the latter scenario come up with friends and coworkers in several separate instances so I thought I’d post some simple code snippets on how to accomplish this. I can’t take all credit as I borrowed the base code for uploading from a project my coworker Kelly Jones and ......
This past Saturday I spent the better part of my day at SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis (or SPSIndy for the “cool” geeks.) For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This amazing community event marked my second SharePoint Saturday attended (read my recap of SPSCleveland) and my first SharePoint Saturday as a regular attendee (not presenting.) From the stats side I heard ......
How many times have you been filling out an online form and halfway through filling in your responses you accidentally press the Enter key which then attempts to submit the form? This can be a common problem when the online form is wired up to have a "submit” button be the default form button on a page. The most complete solution to this issue is having your submit process be able to handle all scenarios of submission (incomplete, invalid, etc). If you are looking for a quick (partial) fix though, ......
In a previous post, I mentioned having an issue deploying SharePoint solution files to a non-12 Hive locations on all web front ends (WFEs). The problem I faced was that WSPBuilder doesn’t allow me to edit the manifest.xml file (reference, near bottom) and my custom code to copy the files was successful, but only executing on the WFE from which the feature activation command was being called. Once we moved to a multiple WFE environment all of the other WFEs were missing files. The always helpful ......
Excusing the long post title referencing Dr. Strangelove, I’d like to point out a small bug with the SharePoint DateTimeControl. If you have ever implemented this control, you may find that you can set the MinDate property which is supposed to limit the range of dates allowed. However, doing so only limits the calendar popup associated with this control, but the user can still enter a date below the MinDate into the textbox (see comments in reference.) I did a little searching on the interwebs and ......
As noted in my previous post I attended and spoke at the SharePoint Saturday Cleveland 2009 conference. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This was my first SharePoint Saturday and it was a great community event to attend. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been following various Twitter users talking about SharePoint Saturdays in their region so I was excited to see ......
I ran across a feature of SharePoint a few weeks ago that I wanted to share: the SPWebApplication.Properties and SPWeb.Properties property bags. These property bags can be used for many different needs, but I see a great application for them with feature activation/deactivation. At my current client we have almost a dozen features that make direct modifications to the web.config files of our web applications (see below for excellent link on making changes to the web.config files.) Some of these modifications ......
As most of the technology world knows (and even the general public thanks to commercials like the one below… who doesn’t love unicorns, kittens and rainbows) Windows 7 is releasing to the public on Oct 22, 2009. Normally this would get me very excited except that I’ve been running Windows 7 RTM as the primary boot on my home desktop and as the secondary boot on my work laptop for a few months now. I didn’t get much chance to use Vista over the past few years (client workstations with XP, working ......
Determining all of the SharePoint features installed on a farm CAN be a very labor intensive process, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’ve ever used the STSADM command line tool you may be aware that there is an “stsadm –o enumsolutions” command to determine all solutions on the farm, but there is no “stsadm –o enumfeatures” command. At a client of mine I was doing wrap up documentation and detailing all of our custom WSP solutions (over 20 now) and the associated features (over 70 it turns out.) ......
The error message “Requested registry access is not allowed” coming from a .Net / SharePoint application can be slightly misleading as I will explain in this post. Today I ran into this error message while trying to log into a Forms Based Authentication (FBA) SharePoint site at my client. The hosting web front end (WFE) server was recently rebuilt from scratch (re: fresh OS) so first thoughts pointed towards a permissions error relating to IIS and the registry. Sadly that started to take me down ......
KISS = “Keep it Simple, Stupid.” Remember that acronym as you continue reading. Today I received StackOverflowException errors when deploying custom solutions to a new SharePoint environment at my client. Previously I was under the impression that all of our environments were configured as identical to each other as possible, but as I will explain later that was not the case. Technically speaking this error could happen to any .Net web application, not just a SharePoint one. Little back story, we ......
Recently I was honored to hear that I had been nominated and selected for the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (COSPUG) Member Spotlight of the Month. I’ve been attending COSPUG regularly for over a year and a half now and recently been getting more involved with the steering committee. Earlier this summer I gave a presentation on “The Power of PowerShell and SharePoint” during a Show-N-Tell event. As an aside, I’m tentatively giving an updated version of that presentation at the SharePoint Saturday ......
Part 1 – The Tools Part 2 - Exporting the Site Part 3 – Exporting the Lists Part 4 – Exporting the Site Columns and Content Types Part 5 – Wrap Up Before I begin with the wrap up portion of this post, I want to make a correction to this series. I was doing a bit of research today (quick comparisons, Joel Oleson’s take, deeper look at site definitions) on site templates, features, and site definitions and it struck me that the title of this series (Exporting a SharePoint Site into a Feature) isn’t ......
Part 1 – The Tools Part 2 - Exporting the Site Part 3 – Exporting the Lists Part 4 – Exporting the Site Columns and Content Types Part 5 – Wrap Up If nothing else, this blog post will win the award for longest title that I’ve written yet. Joking aside, It’s time to put one of the finishing stones in place for this series. So far we’ve exported the site and lists, now it’s time for the site columns and content types. The tool we’ll be using this go around is the Imtech Fields Explorer. The process ......
Part 1 – The Tools Part 2 - Exporting the Site Part 3 – Exporting the Lists Part 4 – Exporting the Site Columns and Content Types Part 5 – Wrap Up So let’s recap where we’re at with this series. Part 1 was about the tools I’ve been using to export a SharePoint site to a feature, part 2 exported the base (pages, web part settings on pages, etc) of the site template, and now part 3 will be exporting SharePoint lists into our feature. The tool we’ll be using time around is the MOSS Feature Generator ......
Part 1 – The Tools Part 2 - Exporting the Site Part 3 – Exporting the Lists Part 4 – Exporting the Site Columns and Content Types Part 5 - Wrap Up Took a little longer to get to part 2 than expected with being gone last week on vacation and client work this week. Quick recap for everyone on what we’re trying to do here. Scenario would be that you’ve already built and customized a SharePoint site using the web UI (edit page, add web part, create list, create site columns, etc.) Now we want to be able ......
Part 1 – The Tools Part 2 - Exporting the Site Part 3 – Exporting the Lists Part 4 – Exporting the Site Columns and Content Types Part 5 – Wrap Up <Update>Please read the intro paragraph of part 5 for a correction relating to the title of this series. It should more appropriately be called something along the lines of “Exporting A SharePoint Site Definition and Features” but I’ll keep the original titling for now</Update> As I promised a blog post or two ago, I’ve been wanting to write ......
<Foreword>For those looking for help integrating the AJAXControlToolkit with SharePoint check out this post: Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint</Foreword> I’ve never been one to use JavaScript that much in my web development, partially because I haven’t had much training with it and partially because I usually work on heavy server side web applications. My current work project was well suited for some of the AJAXControlToolkit controls so I’ve been trying out other controls in the ......
Generic error messages… SharePoint can sometimes be full of them. This morning I ran into the “Web Part Error:: Cannot import this Web Part” error (below) that I’ve seen many times before, but none of the usual fixes corrected it. The background story is that I’m developing a number of site templates that are pre-populated with security groups, lists, content types, and web parts for easy deployment of a custom application hosted on a SharePoint site. [As an aside, in the next week or so I’ll be ......
This week I got to play with some of the controls in the AJAX Control Toolkit, specifically the Modal Popup Extender. I hadn’t gotten a chance to sink my teeth into anything AJAX so I was pretty excited to see what it offers. On my current project I’m building custom web parts for a SharePoint application being used on limited size screens (think 800x600). As such we need to be very resourceful with screen real estate and limit the number of page changes. The Modal Popup Extender sounded like a great ......
On Friday, May 22nd the Central Ohio SharePoint User Group (COSPUG) is hosting a Show and Tell Event at the Microsoft office in Columbus. I’ll be presenting on combining PowerShell and SharePoint. This will be an introductory style presentation for those who have limited to medium experience with PowerShell and a few “laser show” type finale scripts to hopefully wow the crowd. With the current schedule I’ll be presenting during the last technical track session of the day. Shane Young from SharePoint911 ......
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