Archive for the Administration Category

The Power of 9 Characters

The Power of 9 Characters

format c: The MS DOS Manual taught me the true power of the PC. Typing those 9 characters and hitting Enter made a very large change in my computer. Before I ran that command, my computer booted. I turned on the power switch and I got a prompt to perform an action. After, it didn’t do anything. Something like this had never happened with my last “home computer,” the Atari 800 XL. No matter what I did with that device,

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SPTechCon San Francisco 2014 Highlights

SPTechCon San Francisco 2014 Highlights

SPTechCon San Francisco 2014 wrapped up last Friday. I was there from end to end, presenting in the first time slot Wednesday and the last time slot Friday. Here are some of my highlights from the show: Andrew Connell’s Keynote Andrew encouraged attendees to get used to the fact that Microsoft is moving to the cloud. As an example, he pointed out that Yammer has no executable install file. It is cloud only. And further, SharePoint Social will not be

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Upload a file to SharePoint by PowerShell

Upload a file to SharePoint by PowerShell

Question from a friend A friend of a friend asks: I know there’s stuff all over the web that tells developers how to programmatically store documents into a SharePoint 2013 document library, but what source would you recommend? One of the groups on one of my projects has an image capture application built in Visual Basic. They need to be able to create folders within a SharePoint 2013 document library and store reports in that folder. And my friend adds:

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Hyper-V Windows 8 Network Adapter Advanced Features

Hyper-V Windows 8 Network Adapter Advanced Features

One of my favorite Windows 8 features is the addition of Hyper-V. I’ve been using Hyper-V off and on as a VMWare replacement since attending the Microsoft Certified Master training in 2009. MCM certification includes a hands on lab test that required me to get intimately familiar with the software. I’d used VMWare again after finishing the Hands on Lab in 2010, but thought I’d give Hyper-V another chance when I installed Windows 8 RTM on my main work laptop.

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Retrieving Mapped SharePoint Custom Pages from PowerShell

Issue If you’re trying to debug a mapped custom page in SharePoint from PowerShell, but come across this issue: PS C:> $webapp = get-spwebapplication http://sp2010 $webapp.GetMappedPage([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.SPCustomPage]::Error) Unable to find type [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.SPCustomPage]: make sure that the assembly containing this type is loaded. At line:2 char:90 + $webapp.GetMappedPage([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.SPCustomPage] <<<< ::Error) + CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (Microsoft.Share…on.SPCustomPage:String) [], RuntimeException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : TypeNotFound Solution Try this instead: $webapp.GetMappedPage([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication+SPCustomPage]::Signout) The Clue I’m not sure why the syntax is different for this. I would have expected

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Use Nintex and Rackspace Cloud Servers Together

Have you ever thought creating a new SharePoint Server would be as easy as adding a new item to a list in SharePoint? Today, you can set that up in about 15 minutes with Nintex Workflow 2013. Rackspace Actions in Nintex Live Automating server creation in SharePoint starts with Nintex Live. Creating a new SharePoint server is only one of the new workflow actions available since May 1st on Nintex Live. Check out the full list below and in the

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How do you automate FBA web.config changes?

I was asked today by a friend, How do you modify the web.config through a WSP? My quick answer, I don’t! Not if I can avoid it other than the changes made through Visual Studio item properties like safe controls entries and others. However, showing my true consultant nature, I turned the question into the above. That’s a more specific question with a couple good possibilities I’d like to share, but still, it seems like there may be better answers

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Creating ADRMS service discovery keys in PowerShell

I’m trying to do more and more with PowerShell lately. I’ve found it’s a really quick way to make changes on Windows Server. Experimenting with Information Rights Management in SharePoint 2013, I needed to create 3 registry keys and set the value of 2. Here’s a script example for setting the Windows Registry keys for client-side ADRMS service discovery: New-Item -Path ‘HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoftMSIPCServiceLocation’ New-Item -Path ‘HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoftMSIPCServiceLocationEnterprisePublishing’` -value ‘http://adrms.adventureworks.com/_wmcs/licensing/license.asmx’ New-Item -Path ‘HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoftMSIPCServiceLocationEnterpriseCertification’` -value ‘http://adrms.adventureworks.com/_wmcs/certification’ If you need to delete a key it’s

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My first experience with New-SPConfigurationDatabase

Todd Klindt gets a lot of respect in the SharePoint Administration community. He should. He consults, writes, speaks, webcasts publicly weekly and leads a user group with a consistently great rating. Todd highly recommends a scripted configuration approach to SharePoint. And he’s not the only one, but mostly I’ve ignored that advice in the past. However, as a new co-worker of Todd’s, I’ve heard him recommend to clients more than once in the 7 weeks I’ve worked with him to

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Service Application Reading

Healthy service applications are very important to a SharePoint 2010 Farm. When SharePoint 2010 was new, there was a lot of attention paid to them. The shift from the Shared Service Providers of SharePoint 2007 and earlier to the new model for 2010 was significant, both understanding the underlying concepts and the effects the shift had on the platform. Whether you are just creating your first SharePoint 2010 Farm, maintaining an existing Farm or refreshing your server application chops, I

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