Archive for the Administration Category

SharePoint for DBA’s Part II at SALSSA

Last night I presented SharePoint for DBA’s Part II to the San Antonio League of SQL Server Administrators. Slides The slides from the presentation are available for download and viewing on SlideShare. Screencast of part of Demo 2 I recorded a screencast of one of the demos from the presentation. Video Note: I recorded the video above because during the presentation I ran into an error which prevented the creation of the External List from the External Content Type and

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SharePoint First Steps for Administrators and Developers

In late 2006, when I asked my mentor what I needed to do to get up to speed quickly on SharePoint for my first major SharePoint project, he had great advice that I only followed reluctantly. The mentor was Matthew McDermott. He told me to read more than 1000 pages of free documentation from Microsoft. And he told me to practice it and then re-read it and only then I would know the basics. At the time, it sounded crazy

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FBA Claims Super User Halloween Gotcha

I’ve been working with Claims Authentication a lot recently and I’m still tripped up by some of the basics, it would appear. Yesterday, on Halloween, I received an access denied error on my web application after configuring it for Forms Based Authentication. I had previously migrated it to windows claims, but this was my first try moving an existing web application from windows claims to FBA Claims. The error in the ULS was misleading: Cannot get Role Manager with name

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SharePoint for DBAs Part 1 at SALSSA

Last night I presented a session titled SharePoint for DBAs Part 1 at the San Antonio League of SQL Server Administrators (www.SALSSA.com). There was a great group of 10 Microsoft SQL Professionals attending who gave me great feedback and interaction during and after the presentation. I’ve agreed to do a follow up, Part 2, sometime in the future. Most of the presentation was demo which I may record seperately and upload to YouTube, but the slides are available from Slide

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SQL Master Data Services at SALSSA

I attended a San Antonio League of SQL Server Administrators (SALSSA) meeting last night. The presentation was on SQL Server Master Data Services which are a feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, but kind of hidden. The presenter, Garrett Edmondson, specializes in Business Intelligence using the Kimball Methodology and works for a small group doing R&D for Tribune in San Antonio. It was clear from his presentation that there is one book on MDS and it’s a must read

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User Profile Property and Property Mapping Troubleshooting

Working with a remote server today, I thought it would be helpful to see some information about the User Profile Properties without being able to see the server. Rather than ask the on site administrator for a bunch of screen shots, I decided to use PowerShell and the SharePoint API. The User Profile Store and a Deprecated Method The first sample code I came across used the deprecated method UserProfileConfigManager.GetProperties. Using this carry over from SharePoint 2007, you can still

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Test-spcontentdb plus get-spfeature plus Excel for upgrading help

If you’ve run the new PowerShell command test-SPContentDB as part of upgrade testing from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, you’ve probably seen something like this: Category : MissingFeature Error : True UpgradeBlocking : False Message : Database [_WSS_Content] has reference(s) to a missing fea ture: Id = [43cf51d0-d93e-46d7-9d67-07549c1f89e6]. Remedy : The feature with Id 43cf51d0-d93e-46d7-9d67-07549c1f89e6 is r eferenced in the database [_WSS_Content], but is not inst alled on the current farm. The missing feature may cause upgr ade to fail. Please

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SharePoint 2010 RTM Install Notes

Now that SharePoint 2010 has been released, who isn’t excited to get their hands dirty trying it out? Follow Joel Oleson’s download links to try it out like I did. After grabbing the bits from MSDN a little over 2 days ago, I have a fully functional 2010 RTM Farm to explore today! Central Admin Configuration Wizards? For me, the fun started with the Initial Farm Configuration Wizard. Sharepointdevwiki.com has screenshots of every step from the beta and not much

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URL Rewrite + SharePoint = No Support

Example Using ISA, IAG, TMG, custom code or the URL Rewrite Module to modify the path of your SharePoint 2007 URL’s? Word on the street, read twitter and from other new friends, is that you are running an unsupported SharePoint Deployment. You may be asked to remove the rewrite before Microsoft Product Support will help you. This is for 2007, the answer on 2010 may not be definite yet, but I would recommend thinking twice before implementing there, as well.

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My BDC Tool Recommendation: BDC Meta Man

For serious SharePoint 2007 Business Data Catalog application work, there is really only one competitive tool available, BDC Meta Man from Lightning Tools. If you’ve attended one of my user group or SharePoint Saturday presentations on the BDC, you’ve heard the same. However, I was reminded I hadn’t published this on my blog until I received the following question from a co-worker. See more details on my recommendation in the Answer and a link to a great BDC walkthrough with

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