Tuesday 15 September 2009

Perth SharePoint User Group - September Presentation

I presented at the Perth SharePoint User Group September meeting.

The PowerPoint for the presentation can be downloaded here.

It was a blast! thanks to everyone who attended and the questions about SPDocGen, Database Management, Creating Explicit Managed Paths, Database Autogrowth settings and SharePoint Object Model Disposal.

Thursday 3 September 2009

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator - Full Source Code Uploaded

I've done some minor tweaks to SPDocGen, added some console output and a little error handling.

I've also uploaded the full source code for the solution, so feel free to modify it as you need.

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator

Here's some ideas I have for further improving and building on the solution:

1. Implement command line parameters to let users specify what is output.
2. Create a winforms UI to allow users to specify what is output, and specify the XML, XSLT and DOC filenames.
3. Document even more Farm level information...
4. SPDocGen currently produces Farm Level documentation, the next step is to produce detailed Site Collection level documentation with detailed reporting of Site Collection specific info such as Content Types, Site Columns, Lists etc. etc.

Post a comment here if you're interested in being involved and collaborating on this further.

Tuesday 1 September 2009

SPDocGen - SharePoint Documentation Generator

I've just created this project on CodePlex http://spdocgen.codeplex.com/


SPDocGen aka. SharePoint Documentation Generator is a console app that generates WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 farm documentation or reports using the SharePoint object model api. It produces an XML file, which is then transformed into a .doc file using XSLT and WordML.

I started this project to save myself time, because I've been tasked with documenting SharePoint Deployments quite a few times, and its usually a time consuming process of clicking through Central Admin, running batch commands of STSADM or using SharePoint Manager then copy and pasting the info into a word document. Service Pack 2 also has a preupgradecheck command that can produce some documentation for you. It might also be worth having a look at the SharePoint Admin Toolkit, SPSReport, SPDiag or MOSSRAP

Hope it saves everyone some documentation time so you can get back to spending your time on more worthwhile tasks like SharePoint dev or SharePoint admin.

Get SPDocGen

Tuesday 14 July 2009

SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek

Microsoft have released some sneak peek info on SharePoint 2010!

Go check out the movies and info here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek

Microsoft plan to release a lot of info at the SharePoint conference in Vegas in October, http://www.mssharepointconference.com it's nice to get this sneak peek info while we wait for the conference.

Thursday 30 April 2009

Can't Crawl Sites, Can't Access Sites on Server 401.1 Access Denied

I hit this nasty problem recently.

I could access central admin fine on http://servername:port but when trying to crawl sites locally, the crawler failed on sites with a custom host header, returning access denied messages. That's strange I thought, so launched up IE on the server and tried to access the sites, get prompted to login 3 times then boom access denied 401.1. These same sites work just fine when accessed on other client machines in the network.

Something definetly aint right here!!!

Luckily Todd Klindt saved the day for me, he blogs this issue nicely here. Further to that Ishai Sagi also has a blog post on it. So have a read of those awesome blog posts and then check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 for a resolution, the cause is stated in the hotfix as:

"A loopback check security feature that is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer. Therefore, authentication fails if the FQDN or the custom host header that you use does not match the local computer name."

The resolution involes a little bit of regedit.

Phew disaster averted!

Perth SharePoint User Group Lead

I am the new Lead of the Perth SharePoint User Group !

http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/Perth/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=23

Rick Rosato of Connected Systems resurrected the Perth SharePoint User Group in early 2007 and has done a great job of running the user group since then, we’ve had some great sessions in the last two years and many people have benefitted from the user group. Rick has decided to hand over the presidency to me so he can focus on other things, and I gladly accept the position and all the responsibility that it entails – cheers Rick !

Recent Meetings & Presentations

Late last month, on the 25th March Jeremy Thake of Readify presented an excellent talk on unit testing in SharePoint, check out the webcast here.

For this months meeting, on the 21st April, the infamous Paul Culmsee of Seven Sigma Business Solutions graced the Perth SharePoint User Group as a speaker for the very first time, to present a talk on "Wicked Problems and SharePoint - Rethinking the Approach" you can view the presentation slides on Paul's blog.


If you are based in Perth and working with SharePoint, you've got to come along to our meetings!

Check out the user group website regularly for up and coming events. If you are keen on sharing your SharePoint adventures with others, get in contact with me, as we need speakers! We'll slot you in as a presenter so you can share your experiences with the community.

Friday 20 March 2009

10 New Themes for SharePoint!

Noticed this post on Randy Drisgills blog regarding 10 new awesome themes recently released by Microsoft
http://blog.drisgill.com/2009/03/microsoft-released-10-new-sharepoint.html

They look great - best themes for SharePoint I have ever laid my eyes on. I also agree with Randy that these should have been released in Solution package(s). Still the format they are released in are better than those extra Master pages released by Microsoft a year or two ago.

Download the 10 new themes here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a

Update
Daniel Brown - SharePoint MVP based out of Adelaide, South Australia has "solutionised" the themes. Check them out here - http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=256

Saturday 31 January 2009

Go and download SPDisposeCheck !

If you are into WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 custom development go and download the SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool (aka SPDisposeCheck) -
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck

Announced by Paul Andrew at Microsoft -
http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2009/01/29/spdisposecheck-v1-3-1-is-released.aspx

Proper disposal of SharePoint objects in custom code is very important. If you are causing memory leaks you will create memory pressure problems in production Farms, which can result in serious side affects and system downtime.