Monday, February 15, 2010
Ok, network guy reaching out to devs here.
I have a Data View Web part that displays List Items filtered based on a parameter value called "File ID". The File ID parameter is captured from the URL querystring ID. This works well for filtering list items.
I also want to give users the ability to Insert items into lists and have enabled insert on the Data View Properties (in SP Designer), by enabling the "Show Insert Item Link" in Data View Properties it allows me to add a record.
I want to prepopulate the "File ID" field with the value of the "File ID" parameter. Is there a way to do this? Ultimately, the FileID field will not be visible or editable by the user.
I have $50 CDN (paypal) for the answer that I can replicate. I can provide the code for page if someone wants to work on it.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
As many of us are aware, hosted exchange providers are popping up everywhere...and with good reason as there are tremendous benefits to this model.
There are two models of hosted exchange. The first one has been in existence for a long time and is also referred to as managed exchange server. Essentially this is a dedicated Exchange server or server farm that serves only one organization. Many large entities have been using this model for ages through providers like Ceryx (winner of Microsoft’s 2008 Impact Awards as the Hosting Solutions Partner).
The second model of Hosted Exchange services is a multi-tenant facility for Hosted Services. It would be like a mall instead of a single occupancy building, all occupants are separate entities that share one large facility. This allows providers to pool and consolidate resources and use them to reduce the delivery costs of Exchange Server. Consolidate resources like hardware, infrastructure, staffing, configurations, etc. Microsoft's introduction of Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) allows providers and clients to rent licenses on a monthly rental plan instead of outright purchasing all licensing.
The latter option is now also being offered directly by Microsoft; however SPLA Licensing is making it easier for providers to offer Hosted Exchange to their client base through their own implementations. This will help Microsoft maintain its market share against alternates like Google Apps.
The allure of Google Apps is gaining amongst many as a trendy alternative for business email; however there still exists a very large gap in functionality and more importantly the feature rich client capabilities of Outlook combined with MAPI. Google Apps might suit the techies well, however the business crowd might push back when they are forced to use Outlook (or something else) with the archaic IMAP protocol (which I thought was dead a long time ago), or a web interface. As they continue to find that they have lost functionality they might question the reasoning and commitment to providing proper tools.
One main reason for the adoption of Google Apps and Hosted Exchange is the ability to outsource business email while reducing email costs and gain stability. A traditional In house Exchange implementation requires a knowledgeable IT person, a maintenance cycle, upgrades, third party applications for antivirus, spam and backups, not to mention an expensive infrastructure. For this alone the multi-tenant hosted exchange providers can usually outperform and build at a higher tier of fault tolerance than most in house implementations while enjoying the benefits of specialized IT staffing to maintain a full proof Exchange infrastructure.
Not all Hosted Exchange providers are the same. There are a variety of providers out there, the features offered by each can vary slightly; however the most importance differentiator is quality and reliability.
When I set out to find a provider to partner with to complement my brand, I tested a few. My first experience was one that economically priced, however brought on some stability issues. After using this provider for one year for myself I decided that the experience is not one that I would want to offer my clients. With the first experience in mind I set out to find a provider that had more stability. I found a more experienced provider that boasted a Tier 4 datacenter, Microsoft Gold Certified staff, and geographical redundancy for their front end server and private links between data centers for fault tolerance. With these low tolerances for failure I set out to use this provider for one year and am very pleased to say that I have not experienced any downtime or failure of any kind. I am fairly confident that most Hosted Exchange providers do not have an infrastructure that could match or even come close to this one. This provider is Ceryx.
My brand of Hosted Exchange server is called ZoomOffice.com, I have partnered with Ceryx to provide the best Hosted Exchange solution. ZoomOffice.com allows you to capitalize on the benefits of Hosted Exchange without compromising on quality and performance. ZoomOffice.com is available globally. If you want to try it ask me for a 30 day free trial, email me at info@zoomoffice.com or +1-204-272-8938
Below is a chart that details our plans:
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Exchange 2007
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Full Exchange
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Exchange Lite
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Ultra Lite
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Storage
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2GB/1GB/500MB
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250 MB
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100 MB
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More Storage and Pooling Available
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BlackBerry Server Available
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ActiveSync Available
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Access
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MAPI (RPC over HTTPS)
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IMAP
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POP3
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OWA
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Outlook or Entourage included
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Global Address List
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Collaborative Calendar
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Email Firewall
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7 Factor Antivirus
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99.9 % Antispam
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Flexible Spam Management options
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End User Support
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SLA
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99.9%
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99.9%
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99.9%
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Backups and Offsite Storage
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Maintenance and monitoring 24x7
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Free Upgrades
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Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Don't be scared o thef Universal Print Driver!
Printing is the biggest pain for most XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) administrators. My friends, don’t be afraid of the Universal Print Driver (UPD).
Sure, there might be limitations to the UPD. However if you are running PS 4.0 or 4.5 there are few cases where you would need to install native drivers and 3rd party drivers.
CITRIX METAFRAME XP (Universal Print Driver)
· black and white printing
· no advanced functions
CITRIX METAFRAME PRESENTATION SERVER 3.0 (Universal Print Driver2)
· color printing
· high resolution printing
CITRIX PRESENTATION SERVER 4.0 and XENAPP 4.5 (Universal Print Driver3)
· Prints 4x faster
· Advanced functions like stapling and trays
· Proximity printing
Installing drivers will make a mess of your Citrix Server. Managing and supporting printers becomes a challenge. You may not have control of the printers in your environment, and there are some ugly drivers out there that you don’t want on your servers.
So you want to give this UPD a shot, but you don’t want to change everyone at once, phase it in by user or user group. You can do this with a policy; here are steps:
- Create a security group in active directory and call it something like “Universal Print Driver users” or “UPD Users”. Assign some test users to it.
- In the Presentation Server Console > right click on Policies > Create Policy…
o Call it “UPD Policy” or something like that.
o Leave the “Optimize initial policy settings for a connection type” check box blank.
o Click “OK” to close the window.
o If you have another policy that affects print, ensure that this one has a higher priority.
- Double click to open the “UPD Policy”, expand the folders Printing > Drivers
o Click on “Native printer driver auto-install”
§ Select “Enabled”
§ Select “Do not automatically install drivers”
o “Click on Universal driver”
§ Select “Enabled”
§ Select “Use universal driver only” from the drop down.
o Click “Apply”
- Right click on the “UPD Policy” and click “Apply this Policy to…”
o Click “Users”
o Enable the “Filter based on users” checkbox.
o Navigate to the “UPD Users” group that you created.
o Click “Add”.
o Click “OK”
- Log off test user, and log back on, test print.
With this policy you can add all your users, or just the problematic ones.
If you are going to do this, I would appreciate your feedback.
Cheers!
Sunday, August 26, 2007
One of my clients encountered this issue and kindly passed on the fix after resolving. Thanks Mike!
Scenario:
Migrating Datastore from Access to SQL
I stole this text from a forum with the same symptoms:
«I have read the relevant documentation on how to do this and these are the steps which I've followed so far :
1. Created a new SQL Server 2000 database for the datastore.
2. Created a SQL user account called citrix which the MF servers will use to connect to the SQL Datastore.
3. I have created a new file DSN which points to the new SQL Server database.
4. I have run the DSMAINT MIGRATE .... command with all of the relevant switches and options.
5. I see the migration taking place and it says that the ENTRY TABLE and INDEX TABLE are being migrated. Once this is finished, I get the message "the migration was successful".
6. I'm then asked whether I want to peform a "comparison check" of both the MS Access and the new SQL Server stores (it says that it is recommended to do so). I select YES and then it comes back with the following message :
The comparison finished successfully.
The entry table differs in the two data stores.
I'm a little concerned that I get the latter message. Does this indicate that there is a big problem and that not all of the data has been migrated ?
7. I did ignore this and then ran the DSMAINT CONFIG command to tell Server A to access the new SQL Datastore (using the new DSN I had created in step 3). This seemed to run okay.
8. When I then tried to stop and restart the IMA service on this server, I get an error message and this service can't restart. The event log error messages I get are similar to :
Failed to load plugin ImaRuntimeSS.dll with error IMA_RESULT_FAILURE
Failed to load initial plugins with error IMA_RESULT_FAILURE
The Independent Management Architecture service terminated with service-specific error 2147483649.»
The fix for this is not posted, in the forum where I took the text from.
Result:
There was some corruption in the datastore that requires fixing before migrating.
Lesson:
Before migrating, backup your datastore and run DSCheck to check and clean (if necessary) the datastore and then migrate the datastore using DSMaint.