SharePoint Thoughts

This evening I got to a point where I thought it would be wise to get my test environment ready for the SharePoint Saturday Ozarks. I got my SharePoint w/SP1 Installation disk on for my Win2k8 environment. When the installation started for some reason all the options apart from Stand-Alone server type(s) were disabled. It frustrated me because I’ve done this for so long and it couldn’t click why Complete Installation was disabled. After an hour and half of banging my head and thinking of Plan-B I decide to do a complete uninstall and re-install that’s when I found out that there was WSS 3.0 already installed in my to-be test environment.

Lesson learned, if you have WSS 3.0 already installed and you are try to install MOSS on top of if you’ll not be able to configure your environment as a farm environment. SharePoint assumes the environment will be a Stand-Alone environment hence disabling all the other Installation types including a WFE install.

To move forward you’ll be required to uninstall WSS 3.0, make sure you have a complete backup of the contents that you want to retain then uninstall WSS and re-install MOSS.

I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday - Ozarks in Harrison, AR on July 18th on SharePoint Architecture: SharePoint Capacity planning and performance (the labs). http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ozarks/default.aspx.

We will take a deep dive on how you can stress test your SharePoint environment with the already available Visual Studio Tools. We will also look SharePoint Capacity planning tools. See you there!

One of my clients wanted to have the user profile on SharePoint to be redirected to a custom page that they have created showing the user's picture and other detailed information that would not basically appear on the out of the box user details page.

With this task in hand I have to explain the mechanism behind user profiles details page. When a user is clicked on SharePoint, userdisp.aspx page is called which determines the destination of the page. This page can ge found at 12hive\Templates\Layouts.

To allow the details page to be directed somewhere else, add the following code to your userdisp.aspx

<%@ Assembly Name="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

Then just before the closer of your content tag </asp:content> add the following code

<%
// Changes to redirect User Display to Details pageas per the requirements
try
{ 
Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext cntx =   Microsoft.Office.Server.ServerContext.GetContext(HttpContext.Current);
Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager profileManager = new Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager(cntx);
bool userExists = profileManager.UserExists(this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());

if (userExists)
{

// to redirect to a custom page
Response.Redirect("/<your custom page url>.aspx?=accountname:" + this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString

// to redirect to my site page
Response.Redirect(profileManager.MySiteHostUrl + "/Person.aspx?accountname=" + this.UserListForm.Item["Account"].ToString());

());
}  

}    

catch

{
// do nothing, will use the original userdisp.aspx
}

%>

Hopefully this helps someone!

For those of us who were unable to attend Mix here are some of the presentations though not all. http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09