There are numerous cool new features in SharePoint 2010, and I’ve found that integrating them into custom solutions are not always straightforward. I found this to be true with ratings as well. Ratings are one of the new social tagging features that gives users a 1–5 star graphic to rate content. You can find a high level overview of social tagging features here on TechNet.

Normally this isn’t a problem. For example, you have your normal Shared Documents library, and you want users to be able to rate content. No problem right? We go into the library settings, and then click on Rating Settings. We simple click Yes, and hit ok. Too easy:

There was no big fanfare on this and could have been easily missed, so I thought it was worth repeating.  Microsoft and the content publishing team have compiled their downloadable content and made available on Amazon in a nicely bound book!  It’s great for all those out there that would stay up late at night feeling guilty for killing so many trees printing it yourself. You can find the the download links here on TechNet. I will include the information here as I’m just nice like that. I also didn’t say they were the cheapest around, but price varies by book ($66 is a little steep in my opinion).

Every so often while working in SharePoint, you encounter a feature that has almost no documentation or you can’t find anyone with a similar issue. This happened to me when I was trying to configure a workflow to move a document set to a Records Center. After I got this to work, I wanted to try and save others the grief and frustration that I experienced. If “Unknownerror” means anything to you, this post is for you.

Who Would Use This?

This action might be useful in document management scenarios, where documents have a formal “approval” process, and management policies are defined to “expire” them to meet retention policies. Once expired, they would be removed from the current location and moved to another location, specifically a Records Center in this case where they sit waiting to be purged from the system.

Even if you’ve planned your SharePoint project properly, or it might be years later, you need to rename your SharePoint 2010 server. This quick tip covers this on SharePoint 2010 which is a much cleaner experience than it was in 2007. There is an STSADM switch that can handle it, but for 2010, there is a certain procedure to yield best results. I was able to do this on a single SharePoint server earlier and it worked great! This was a single SharePoint server with SQL on another server.

For 2010, there’s a new PowerShell cmdlet for this very thing, Rename-SPServer. This is this article on TechNet covering the procedure. It has you renaming the server itself first, then fixing up SharePoint. However I’ve heard of issues with that, and I had better results by doing it in reverse. That is, running the PowerShell to fix up SharePoint then renaming the server. Here is what I did:

1. Tell SharePoint about the new server name via PowerShell. This is done via the Rename-Server cmdlet. Of course get-help is your friend to get details and examples, however the context help of the cmd (and the technet article for that matter) IS WRONG! It’s funny, because the example is right, but the explanation isn’t. Go figure, nobody’s perfect. Anyway, you give the command the old and new server names. TechNet says the old server name is in the form of a URL. That throws an error. It should just be . So the whole command would be like:

      1: Rename-SPServer –identity “old_server_name” –name “new_server_name”

Well, today’s the last day of the conference. I know, it’s very sad, but a great time was had by all. This was my first big conference, and I really enjoyed the experience. There were 3 breakout sessions today back to back with the day closing out with lunch in the early afternoon. It’s hard to believe they crammed 240 sessions in 3 and a half days! I got to rub elbows with some of the greats in the industry, bloggers, authors, MVPs and lots of folks from Microsoft. If there’s one tip I can give, it’s to stay in a hotel close to the conference! It was awesome to be able to be in 1 minute walking distance. You have to be able to drop off all the freebies in your room.

Whew what a wild couple of days! I didn’t get to blog last night so I figured I would combine yesterday and today. The sessions have been really good.

Tuesday – Day 2

Tuesday started with the Todd Carter’s session about Extending SharePoint Health & Monitoring. He put on a good show, giving details on web analytics and diagnostic logging, and how to extend them using custom providers to get detailed reports. Very cool stuff! Then I attended one of the more popular sessions of the day by Microsoft Certified Master Scott Jamison, Best Practices Around SharePoint 2010 User Profiles. Now this topic is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, but I’ve come to a place where I accept the UPA for what it is, even with its shortcomings. He got a volunteer from the crowd (a fellow MCM and MCA Spence Harbar) to configure the UPA live. This was really more of a part 1 of 2, where Spence would take it deeper under the covers and show how to implement it via the UI and PowerShell.

The first day started with the big keynote with all of the about 7500 attendees! That’s a lot of people lovin’ some SharePoint in one place! Well, let me back up. On my way into the convention center for breakfast before the keynote, I noticed there was all this noise outside. Turns out a software vendor and SharePoint competitor called Huddle had hired a marching band to play a few tunes right outside the conference and march through. In my opinion, quite childish. Anyway, on the good stuff …

Walked into the keynote speech, and was entertained by the sweet sounds of DJ Keenan Kameleon. He’s a Senior Product Manager with the SharePoint Team at Microsoft. I’m told you can listen to his music mix from the keynote online here. Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Management was up first, and gave some updates on some numbers. Can you say 62 million licenses sold of SharePoint with 125 million users? The overall theme for the conference is Productivity Delivered, which celebrates all the excellent work and solutions that customers and partners have developed on the platform. I won’t bore you with all the details, but you can read more on the MS SharePoint Team blog.

Wow, the time is finally here for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011! What an exciting time this is for SharePoint. The product celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary recently, and it has come a long way! The latest release SharePoint 2010 is really a game changer and is continuously expanding it’s presence and impact in the industry. This conference celebrates the product in a way that is just amazing. There are so many people from all over the world coming together for a single purpose – to share knowledge.

This year’s conference takes place in sunny Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Convention Center. Every hotel in a 15 mile area is SOLD OUT! Ok some of that is probably Disneyland. After checking in to my hotel and getting settled, I walked across the street to the convention center to check things out. I got registered and checked out the venue. This place is huge, three floors of SharePoint goodness! There are lots of great-looking sessions, and I narrowed down the ones I want to attend.

SharePoint 2010 has many new and very useful features, one of them being new functionality with content types via the Managed Metadata service application. It allows you to specify a content type hub, a central location for managing content types. You can then publish those content types to subscribing site collections. This opens up a lot of flexibility to manage content consistently.

Recently I ran into a scenario where I had configured content types in the hub site, and set the column order and published the content types. After awhile I had made changes to the root content type column order and re-published those changes. I found that the settings for the columns were updated (hidden, required, etc.) but the changed order did NOT update. This is fairly significant to users of a document management system as you don’t want your optional “Enterprise Keywords” field showing first with a required important required column at the bottom. Oh the humanity!

It’s well documented that the What’s New web part can be very helpful in showing recent information about content in a list or document library. It’s also well documented that to be able to add this web part in SharePoint 2010, you have to activate the site feature “Group Work Lists”. But what happens when you go to Site Actions –> Site Settings, click Manage Site Features and activate the feature, but the web part is still missing from the available web parts list?

Everyone has meetings they have to attend on a frequent basis, and we all want to get through them as quickly as possible (so we can get back to our game of angry birds). We need to have a quick and easy way for team members to provide an update on their assigned duties, as well as a streamlined method of reviewing them during the meeting. Since we’re lucky that our company has invested in SharePoint, let’s use it! This method I believe provides a very quick and easy way to accomplish your goals for capturing the information without using complicated add-ons or any other heavy lifting.

This is the final result. Cool huh? Nothing fancy, but it does the job (sometimes simpler is better). This is driven by a wiki page library, where every team member gets their own wiki page. You could just have one wiki page and sections where everyone just updates their text, but then you would have multiple people trying to edit that one page 15 minutes before the meeting, and get frustrated with all the merge conflict warnings. If everyone gets their own page, no conflict warnings. Let’s see how it’s done so everyone is happy.

Some of you may have heard by now that service pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products has been released. There have been some blog posts out there that talk about the improvements in SP1 and major reasons why SP1 is actually a good thing! What I wanted to do here is look at some improvements that perhaps have been overlooked. First let’s get the basics out of the way so you can see the big picture like everyone else. Here’s a list of recent blogs on the subject:

• Stefan Gobner’s Post on SP1’s release
• Joel Olson’s 10 Reasons SP1 Rocks
• Joel Olson’s SharePoint 2010 SP1 10 Best Practices Post
• The MS Product Group Overview of SP1 Features
• The MS Product Group Release Notice of SP1
• SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Whitepaper
• Microsoft KB Known Issues with Office and SharePoint 2010 SP1
• Microsoft KB Description of Office Web Apps SP1
• Spence Harbar’s What’s the Fuss? Post

I use SharePoint’s ULS logs almost daily when supporting and administering SharePoint (2007 and 2010 for that matter).  Let’s look at what it is, and how it can help you troubleshoot issues in SharePoint 2010.

What is this “ULS Logging”?

Like most (but not all) features in SharePoint 2010, logging did get an upgrade from 3.0 / 2007.  First of all, what is ULS?  It stands for Unified Logging Service (ULS).  It is the engine that handles creating a detailed trace output of all of the events that occur in SharePoint.  It is dependent on the Windows service “SharePoint 2010 Tracing”.  By default, SharePoint creates these log files in the file system in the “14 hive”:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS

These log files are written by SharePoint in real-time and contain information regarding event logging per its configuration in Central Administration. 

I went to go run a manual sync of the User Profile Service in SharePoint, and was unable to get to the Service Application.  After reviewing the ULS logs, I found this error:

UserProfileConfigManager.StartSynchronizationForOneManagementAgent: Unexpected exception: System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotFoundException: Could not connect to http://<server:port>/ResourceManagementService/MEX. TCP error code 10061: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it IP address:port. ---> System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it IP address:port.

Luckily this error has an easy fix.  This error occurred because one of the two ForeFront Identity Manager services that the User Profile Service depends on wasn’t started.  Go into Services.msc and check to ensure both services are started:

You should be able to start the service without an issue and this should allow you to connect to the User Profile Service again. 

I was troubleshooting a recent issue with the User Profile Service, where I would make a change to a user account in Active Directory (like a spelling correction).  The Profile Sync would occur and I would verify that the correct spelling was in the profile.  However, the change did not replicate to the site collection like it was supposed to.  This normally happens via a SharePoint timer job named User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization.  It’s described function is:

“Synchronizes user information from the user profile application to SharePoint users and synchronizes site memberships from SharePoint to the user profile application”

Well for whatever reason, it wasn’t doing that.  To correct the issue, there can be a couple fixes:

1. Make a change to one of the fields via Central Administration like Title.  Save this change, then re-open the profile and set it back to what it’s supposed to be.  This will sometimes force the sync to run properly.
2. Remove the user from the site collection and re-add them

I had setup a test environment to test out and play with the new hosting functionality of SharePoint, also called multi-tenancy.  When you create your main web application that will be used to house the tenants, you have the option to have it use Claims Based or Classic Mode authentication. 

While configuring a SharePoint farm for a client the other day, I came across a simple but problematic error with search.  We had requested a full SSL certificate for the farm, but I was a self-signed certificate so I could work with the site.  After configuring search content sources and I kicked off a full crawl, I got this error in the crawl log:

“The secure socks layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled.”

Wells that’s a bummer.  Luckily there’s an easy fix.  What you need to do is configure search to “Ignore SSL certificate name warnings” via Central Administration.  TechNet has the documented steps.  After making this change and running a full crawl, voilà!

Success!  Of course you should get an official SSL certificate, but sometimes you get by with what you have. 

With the recent highly anticipated release of CRM 2011, you now have the ability to manage some parts of Dynamics CRM 2011 with PowerShell!  Ok not entirely, but it is a great start from Microsoft to providing the incredible flexibility of PowerShell to Dynamics CRM.  More specifically, you are able to script deployment management tasks only.  For the time being, you can only run PowerShell with CRM on-premise, NOT CRM Online.  Currently the functionality of PowerShell for CRM 2011 is limited, so this mostly would pertain to eithers with a large organization, or companies that do CRM hosting through SPLA agreements.  With these new PowerShell cmdlets, you are able to do things like:

• Create/Remove Deployment Administrators
• Create/Import CRM Organizations
• Review and configure CRM Organization settings

Recently while working on a client engagement, we needed to move users around to different business units in Dynamics CRM 4.0.  No problem right?  Well we very quickly determined things weren’t going to go smoothly.  When we attempted to change a user’s business unit, it would sit for 30 seconds and throw the lovely unhelpful generic message “An error has occurred”.  Gotta love Microsoft developer’s strong attention to error messages.  A lot of users have apparently run into this with no real good resolution.  We were able to find the true cause (at least in our case), so I wanted to share it to hopefully help others struggling with this.

For everyone starting to learn PowerShell, it’s hard to know where to start.  Thomas Lee (author of his blog Under the Stairs and a PowerShell MVP) worked with the great folks at PowerShell.com and Idera to put on a very useful and pertinent webcast on how to format PowerShell output.  It’s one in a series called PowerShell Power Hour.  Think about it, every command in PowerShell you run outputs data.  Wouldn’t you like to know how to get it to display like what you want? 

What’s the different in Format-List and Format-Table?  What’s a hash table?  Can we format currency?  He shows you!  This is not for someone who’s never used PowerShell before, but for those who are learning commands, getting some output, and need some tuning.  You can access the webcast at PowerShell.com’s site after registering for free.  It’s also available at Idera’s site as well.

If you need more of a getting started tutorial, check out the first webcast in the series “Getting Started with Windows PowerShell” by Tobias Welner (PowerShell MVP) here.  If you’re looking for more focused PowerShell information for SharePoint 2010, Joel Oleson wrote a great post on this topic.

While doing some testing and research with PowerShell the other day, I came across a great free 4-part Crash Course e-book from Don Jones on PowerShell v2.0.  You can find it at http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com/accwp.php.  You will need to create an account on the site, but it’s free.  Check it out!

Recently, one of my colleagues came to me with an issue he was having with SharePoint.  After making sure it wasn't friendly "user error", I determined this to actually be a bug in SharePoint 2010 RTM.  Here's the issue:

On your SharePoint 2010 RTM farm, go to your My Site Profile page, and edit it.  You are able to change the "Activities I am following" once, and save.  But when you do it again, save and double-check, the change was not saved.  What gives?! 

I recently came across this and wanted to be sure everyone is aware of this limitation.  With the new release of Office 2010 including 64-bit support, there has been some confusion about which version to install.  Microsoft has been clear in their recommendation:

1. Install the 32-bit version for most needs to maintain ActiveX control compatibility and other tools
2. Install the 64-bit version if you use Excel spreadsheets 2 GB in size 

For whatever reason, say you installed Office 2010 64-bit on your machine, and you happily go to your shiny SharePoint 2010 site (or WSS/MOSS), open up a list, and hit Datasheet View.  To your surprise, you see this:

You know who you are out there.  We've all done it, because it’s such an easy thing to fall into.  You're just happy as a clam with your shiny new SharePoint site, and you're all ready to create some content.  First up, a document library.  We love our shared documents, right?  Well, how many times after awhile do you find yourself emailing links to files like:

http://intranet/Shared%20Documents/June%20Assessment/Rev2%20Standard%20Quote%20for%20client.xls

So we’ve all been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to hear from Microsoft about the fate of the “fab 40” templates for SharePoint 2010.  Well, they finally have made a decision.  You’re not going to like it.  Read the full details. 

The bottom line from the article:

Microsoft is not releasing new versions of these templates for SharePoint 2010 Products.

SharePoint 2010 is great at many things, and one of the new integrations with Office 2010 is with uploading multiple pictures to a picture library using the Office Picture Manager. 

Say you you’ve got a bunch of logos you want to get into your new fancy 2010 picture library.  You would click Upload –> Upload Multiple Pictures right?

If you’ve been dabbling in SharePoint 2010's new hosting (multi-tenant) environment and been creating host-named site collections, you have may noticed that the default SharePoint security groups typically created by default are not there in the root web.  These include:

Members

Owners

Visitors

These are created by the SharePoint API, and apparently isn’t called properly when host-named site collections are created through PowerShell in a multi-tenant environment.  This ONLY happens in a multi-tenant environment.  Even if you create the host-named site collections through PowerShell in a non-hosted environment, the first time you visit the site, you might be prompted to choose the site template and to create the default security groups.

So how do we get them back without creating them manually?  Read on...

I wanted to take a minute and talk about a really cool new feature of SharePoint 2010 relating to backups – Granular Restores.  While doing some test migrations from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010, we needed to choose the best method to selectively move data from an old site to a new site. 

In SharePoint 2010, you have the ability to restore content (down to the list level) from an unattached SQL database.  How cool is that!  Here’s the new Backup and Restore options in Central Admin:

One of SharePoint’s popular features is Document Management, which leads many organizations to migrate their data from files shares or their Document Management System over to SharePoint.  Is this best practice?  Let’s not be hasty, and look at the various things to consider on both sides of the coin.

I was reminded today about the difference of removing vs. deleting a web part from a site page today.  There’s already a great blog on the subject and it can be found here. 

The quick and dirty is that when you either choose to “close” on a web part or click the “X” in edit view, this does NOT remove it from the page, it only hides it.  There is a Closed Web Parts gallery where this closed web part gets placed, and if there are enough closed web parts, it can significantly decrease your pages load time, as it still loads the closed web parts. 

When I was configuring a new installation of SharePoint Server 2010 the other day, I hit a snag when creating a Managed Service Account while creating a new Web Application.  My existing Application Pool account wasn’t listed and I couldn’t choose the “Configurable” option to manually type it in.  I attempted to make the existing application pool AD account a managed account, but got the error:

“The given key was not in the dictionary”

To correct this error, you need to go into Active Directory and make a security change:

Today is the day!  Microsoft officially has released SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 and related 2010 products like SharePoint Designer, Project 2010 and Visio 2010.  You can watch the event and get other information at the launch site:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx

Other Resources

If you would like more information on SharePoint Server 2010, you can check out the following resources:

Breakdown comparison of the editions of SharePoint Server 2010

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx

The time has finally arrived!  Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Microsoft Office Takeshi Numoto recently announced the final release milestone for the 2010 wave of Office products including SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.  Here are the critical dates...

During a recent migration, we ran into an issue when attempting to migrate users from one domain to another using stsadm migrateuser.  Hopefully this will help any others that are getting this strange error.  Our environment was a small MOSS 2007 64-bit farm installed with slipstreamed SP2, with the February 2010 cumulative update applied. 

 We were moving from an on-premise to Hosted solution, so this required a new domain and user accounts.  Since the new domain wouldn’t know anything about the old domain’s user accounts, we added the –ignoresidhistory switch.  We ran the following command: