Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog - SharePoint, XBOX, .NET, Technology

3/22/2007 Customizing MOSS 2007 My Sites within the enterprise

Hi, this is Steve Peschka from the SharePoint Rangers team again, and in this blog entry I’ll discuss customizing My Sites across an organization. There’s a good deal of confusion out there about how best to achieve this, which is partly caused by functional differences between SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and SharePoint Server 2007.

Before I get started, here’s a quick primer. My Sites in SharePoint have two sites, so to speak – a public site and private site. The same dynamic web page is used to generate everyone’s public site. You can see this when you go to look at an individual’s My Site, and the page you navigate to is called person.aspx. SharePoint appends information about the user whose details you want to see onto the query string portion of the URL. By default, this information is in the form of “accountname=domain\user”. So, if you were going to view the details for a user with a login name of “speschka” in the “steve” domain, you would navigate to http://mySiteHost/person.aspx?accountname=steve\speschka. Since that page is shared by all users, if a site designer makes changes to that page, then public information about all users will reflect those changes. In this respect, MOSS 2007 works the same as SPS 2003.

Modifying the private My Site is where things begin to work differently. In SPS 2003, a site administrator could go into his or her private site, edit the home page in Shared mode, and save their changes. This would update the layout and web parts for all My Site users, so everyone’s private site would have the same layout and web parts. In MOSS 2007, this is no longer possible – there are a number of more powerful customization tools than what SPS 2003 had, but some tasks such as customizing all private sites have unfortunately become a bit more difficult. So, how can you customize the private My Sites in MOSS 2007?

First, let’s start with how NOT to customize My Sites. As with SPS 2003, some people might think “Hey, I can modify things pretty quickly if I just go to the file system and change the template for My Sites there.” This is absolutely the wrong approach, and it will leave your site in an unsupported state. This means modifying any of the .aspx pages or onet.xml or any of the other out of the box templates files is off limits.

Instead, we’re going to take advantage of several components of the core SharePoint platform to solve this problem – features, feature site template associations (also known as “feature stapling”), master pages, and our old friend the ASP.NET web control. Before getting into the details, here are a few definitions to make sure that we’re on the same page:

· Feature: A feature is a package of SharePoint elements that can be activated for a specific scope (such as a site or web) and that helps users accomplish a particular goal or task. For example, a feature may deploy a list definition, populate it with data, and add a custom web part to work with the list data. Individually, those elements may not be particularly interesting, but when combined into a cohesive group as a feature they provide a mini-application or solution. For more information, go to the Working with Features section of the WSS 3.0 SDK.

· Feature site template association: Allows you to associate new features and functionality to existing templates such that when those sites are provisioned, the associated features automatically get added as well. To understand feature stapling, you need to understand that there are two features involved in the process:

o "Staplee" feature: This feature contains the functionality that you want to add to an existing site template.

o "Stapler" feature: This feature contains the "FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation" XML tags which bind the staplee feature to a particular site template. Basically, it’s a feature that says “for all Personal Sites provisioned henceforth, they shall have the staplee feature.”

· Master pages: A master page is an ASP.NET page that has the file name extension of .master and allows you to create a consistent appearance and layout for the pages in your SharePoint site.

· ASP.NET web control: For this solution we are talking about an ASP.NET server control, which consists of a .NET assembly and a set of tags that are added to a page to instantiate an instance of our control. Note that it is not a user control (.ascx file).

So, those are the key components of the solution. How do you put them all together?

Customization Requirements

A common set of requirements for customizing My Sites across an enterprise includes a) using a custom master page and b) adding, removing, and/or moving web parts around the page. Those are the only items that I will address in this blog entry, but the approach taken is flexible enough that you can do virtually anything else needed by just plugging your code into the appropriate location.

Here’s how the components described above can help you achieve this. The first feature, called “MySiteStaplee” is really where most of the work occurs.

MySiteStaplee Feature

The MySiteStaplee feature includes the following functionality:

· File upload – the feature is configured to automatically upload a custom master page into the master page gallery in the new My Site. We include this section in the feature.xml file:

So, here the feature is saying that it wants to include a file called “steve.master”, which is the custom master page. It’s also saying that there is additional configuration information in a file called “element.xml”. Now let’s look at a section of element.xml:

</Module>

The Module and File elements are describing where the master page should be uploaded. In the Module element, the List attribute defines the type of list to which the item should be uploaded, and the Url attribute defines the list in which it will be placed. In the File element, the Url attribute defines where the file is that is going to be uploaded. GhostableinLibrary is a little more esoteric, but essentially when you are uploading a file that is going to land in a document library, you need to include this attribute in your File element because it tells SharePoint to create a list item to go with your file when it is added to the library. If you were instead provisioning a file outside a document library, you would specify Type=”Ghostable".

· Change the Master Page setting for the site – changing the master page setting for the site requires some code to be run. For this solution, you will use something often referred to as a “feature provisioning code callout.” All that really means is that when the feature gets activated, it will run some code. To do that, you’d have to write a new .NET assembly, using a class that inherits from SPFeatureReceiver. With that class, you get four events that you can override: FeatureActivated, FeatureDeactivating, FeatureInstalled, and FeatureUninstalling. For this solution, we will override the FeatureActivated event to change the master page.

Since we’re working with a fairly simplistic scenario here, you’re just going to look at the current master page and change it to use the one that will be uploaded in the feature. To do that, use the following code in the FeatureActivated event:

try

{

using (SPWeb curWeb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent)

{

//got the root web;now set the master Url to our

//master page that should have been uploaded as part

//of our feature

if (curWeb.MasterUrl.Contains("default.master"))

{

curWeb.MasterUrl = curWeb.MasterUrl.Replace(

"default.master", "steve.master");

curWeb.Update();

}

The FeatureActivated event has a signature that looks like this:

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

The properties parameter provides access to a lot of useful information; in this case, you’re able to get a reference to the SPWeb associated with the My Site, so you can change the master page.

In order to get this code callout to execute, you need to configure the feature so that it uses this assembly. You’d do that in the feature.xml file for the staplee feature, by defining the assembly and class that are associated with it:

ReceiverAssembly="MySiteCreate, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,

PublicKeyToken=c726fa831b98198d"

ReceiverClass="Microsoft.IW.MySiteCreate"

Some of you are now wondering why we didn’t make any changes to the home page for the site in the code callout, such as adding, deleting or moving web parts. The issue is that when you are provisioning a feature via the stapling mechanism, most of the document libraries and lists don’t exist at the time your provisioning code is executed. That includes the Pages library, where the default.aspx page lives that is used for the home page. Since it doesn’t exist yet, you can’t change it in the code callout, so you’ll need another way to do that.

It is also another important reason why you need to use a custom master page. This solution includes a custom ASP.NET server control that is going to be used to make changes to the home page. The way to get that control added and used in the site is to add it to the custom master page. When the custom master page is loaded, it contains an instance of the ASP.NET server control and that control can then finish off the customization work for us. You add one tag to the custom master page to register the control:

<%@ Register Tagprefix="IWPart" Namespace="Microsoft.IW" Assembly="MySiteCreatePart, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cb1bdc5f7817b18b" %>

You need to add a second tag to instantiate an instance of the control when the page is loaded:

<IWPart:PartCheck runat="server"/>

· Change web parts – the custom ASP.NET control is used to modify web parts and their layout on the page. Since you’d only want the provisioning code to run once, the first thing to do is check to see if the code has been run before by storing a value in the My Site’s SPWeb Property Bag and then checking it:

//get the current web; not using "using" because we don"t want to

//kill the web context for other controls that need it

SPWeb curWeb = SPContext.Current.Web;

//look to see if our code has already run

if (! curWeb.Properties.ContainsKey(KEY_CHK))

The next thing is to get a reference to the home page in the site:

//look for the default page so we can mess with the web parts

SPFile thePage = curWeb.RootFolder.Files["default.aspx"];

With the home page, you can get the web part manager for it:

//get the web part manager

SPLimitedWebPartManager theMan = thePage.GetLimitedWebPartManager

(System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope.Shared);

Once you have the web part manager, you can work with the web parts on the page. The SPLimitedWebPartManager has a collection of all the web parts on the page as well as methods to add, close, delete and move web parts. One important note is that in most cases trying to change individual web parts as you enumerate through the web part collection will not be successful. Anything that changes the nature of the collection during enumeration causes problems, but you can normally work around this by copying the web parts you want to change into an array, hashtable, or some other kind of collection.

For this example, we are going to do three things:

· Close the Welcome web part

· Move the RSS Feeder web part to the bottom zone

· Add the This Week in Pictures web part to the middle right zone

The code will enumerate through the web part collection, find the parts you want to work with, and capture the part and operation you want to do with it (delete or move) to a hashtable. I chose a hashtable in this case because of personal preference, but you can use some other collection type as well. To determine whether the current part is one you need to do something with, we check the System.Type of the part. That’s a simple language-agnostic way of finding them:

//create a hashtable to store our web parts

hshWp = new Hashtable();

foreach (WebPart wp in theMan.WebParts)

{

//close the welcome part; WebPartAction is a custom class

//I wrote to keep track of web parts and their properties

if (wp.GetType().Equals(typeof(PersonalWelcomeWebPart)))

hshWp.Add(wp.StorageKey.ToString(),

new WebPartAction(wp,

WebPartAction.ActionType.Delete));

//etc

}

You then create a new web part, set some properties, and also add it to the hashtable of web parts:

//add a new ThisWeekInPictures web part

ThisWeekInPicturesWebPart wpPix = new ThisWeekInPicturesWebPart();

wpPix.ImageLibrary = "Shared Pictures";

wpPix.Title = "My Pictures";

//add it to the hash so it gets put in the page

hshWp.Add(Guid.NewGuid().ToString(),

new WebPartAction(wpPix, WebPartAction.ActionType.Add,

"MiddleRightZone", 10));

Finally, the code enumerates through the hashtable and makes all of the web part changes:

foreach (string key in hshWp.Keys)

{

WebPartAction wpa = (WebPartAction)hshWp[key];

switch (wpa.Action)

{

case WebPartAction.ActionType.Delete:

theMan.DeleteWebPart(wpa.wp);

break;

case WebPartAction.ActionType.Move:

theMan.MoveWebPart(wpa.wp, wpa.zoneID, wpa.zoneIndex);

theMan.SaveChanges(wpa.wp);

break;

case WebPartAction.ActionType.Add:

theMan.AddWebPart(wpa.wp, wpa.zoneID, wpa.zoneIndex);

break;

}

All of the web part changes have been made now. Since you wouldn’t want to execute this code more than once, a flag is needed so we’ll know that this work has already been done. If you recall, the code checks this flag up above:

//look to see if our code has already run

if (! curWeb.Properties.ContainsKey(KEY_CHK))

Now, we’re going to update the property bag with the flag, so when the page is loaded from this point forward, your code branch will not execute:

//add our key to the property bag so we don"t run

//our provisioning code again

curWeb.Properties.Add(KEY_CHK, "true");

curWeb.Properties.Update();

curWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;

Note as well that since the code that modifies the site has now completed, the AllowUnsafeUpdates property is also changed back to its default value of false.

The code is just about complete now, and there’s only one other thing to do. If you were to go directly to the page, you might think that the code didn’t work; the page would render exactly as it came out of the box, with all of the default web parts intact and in place. You need to refresh the page to get the changes to show up – to do that, we simply issue a redirect back to our page:

//force a page refresh to show the page with the updated layout

Context.Response.Redirect(thePage.Url);

MySiteStapler Feature

The MySiteStaplee feature has all this great functionality, but how do you get it to execute? This is where the feature stapler comes in. It does only one thing – it establishes an association between a site template and a feature. That means that whenever a new site is created based on a specific template, the staplee feature will get activated. When it does, your code callout will execute the FeatureActivated code.

Here is the feature.xml file for the stapler feature:

<Feature

Id="4457E66E-6FCD-4352-AD4D-B870600B4696"

Title="My Site Creation Feature Stapler"

Scope="Farm"

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >

</ElementManifests>

</Feature>

There are a couple of things to note:

· Id – this is a GUID just for this stapler feature; it is not related to the Id for the staplee feature

· Scope – the scope is Farm because you’d want to execute it anytime a My Site is created in the farm

The feature.xml file also references a second file called elements.xml; here are the contents of that file:

<FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation

Id="4DEFA336-EDC4-43cb-9560-FE2E27E76DFB"

TemplateName="SPSPERS#0"/>

</Elements>

This one is pretty simple to understand. The Id attribute is the GUID of the staplee feature; the TemplateName attribute makes a connection between the staplee feature and a site template called SPSPERS#0. To get the site template name you should use, look in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML directory (assuming you installed to this path). In that directory, there are a number of xml files; when you install MOSS it adds one called webtempsps.xml. If you open that file up you will see an entry for a template with a name of SPSPERS; the default configuration for that template has an ID of 0. You combine the two and you get SPSPERS#0.

Installing

Now that you have all the code and features created, you’ll need to install and activate the features, then update the site’s configuration. Here are steps that need to be taken to get everything properly installed:

· Copy the MySiteStaplee and MySiteStapler folders to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES (assuming this is your installation directory); each feature folder contains the files that define that feature

· Add the two assemblies that were created (the feature activation assembly and the custom ASP.NET web part assembly) to the global assembly cache

· Install and activate the MySiteStaplee feature; when you activate it, do so to the web application that hosts My Sites. Use the installfeature and activatefeature switches with stsadm to do this

· Install the MySiteStapler feature; since its Scope is Farm it activates automatically. Use the installfeature switch with stsadm to do this

· Add the following SafeControl entry to the web.config for the web application that hosts My Sites:

This entry allows the custom ASP.NET control to be instantiated on the master page.

That’s it – you’re now ready to start creating My Sites with your customizations! One other thing worth noting – this ONLY applies to new My Sites. If you’ve already created My Sites then these features won’t be used.

In the next couple of months or so, I’m going to work on making the solution described here a little more generic. My goal is to make it more of an open framework for My Site customizations that can be reused without you having to rewrite code just for your implementation. This solution is now part of the larger Community Kit for SharePoint: Corporate Intranet Edition effort taking place on CodePlex, so the Visual Studio solution file containing all of the current source code is available for download there.

Although this is likely the longest entry ever posted on this blog, I do hope that you’ll find this to be a useful solution for customizing My Sites in your MOSS environment. If you have questions, ideas, or suggestions, please leave a comment.

Steve Peschka

3/19/2007 What every SharePoint administrator needs to know about Alternate Access Mappings (Part 2 of 3)

In Part 1 of my blog series on Alternate Access Mappings, I gave a brief introduction to the feature and an example of how it can be used. In this blog entry, I"d like to discuss some of the common AAM-related mistakes I"ve noticed people make when deploying SharePoint.

Mistake #1: "I"m not deploying SharePoint in an unusual way, so I don"t need to worry configuring Alternate Access Mappings."

Probably the most common cause of AAM-related issues is administrators not realizing that they need to configure it in the first place. It"s certainly understandable as this is a new requirement in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The reality is that every SharePoint administrator needs to make sure that AAM is configured correctly, even if you"re performing a simple deployment.

For SharePoint to provide a robust and stable API that can work on multiple machines, even machines where the SharePoint web application service is not running, our resolution of URLs to SharePoint sites cannot rely on hosts files, DNS, or IIS bindings. Instead, once SharePoint receives a request it will only use AAM to perform that URL resolution. So while it is necessary to make sure your hosts files, DNS, and IIS bindings are properly configured so that a web request can reach the SharePoint server, it is also necessary to configure the URLs in AAM to match.

Here are some specific examples:

Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) - If you"re using an FQDN URL to reach your SharePoint web application, you need to configure that domain name in DNS. You also need to configure a matching URL in AAM. If this is an URL that end users will use to reach your site, then make it a public URL. If this is an URL that a reverse proxy device will use to forward requests to your site, then make it an internal URL - just be sure that you"ve configured the end user"s URL as the public URL in the same zone.
Localhost - Localhost is the syntactic sugar of networking. It allows you to type in http://localhost in your browser and always reach the web site hosted on your local machine. However, since localhost is made possible through the machine"s hosts file, SharePoint can"t automatically take advantage of it. If you need http://localhost to be a valid URL for SharePoint, you"ll need to enter it into AAM.
IP addresses - If you"re in an environment where there is no DNS or hosts name resolution and you"re just using URLs with IP addresses, you still need to enter those URLs into AAM.

So, if you"re seeing broken images or are being redirected to http://machinename when browsing to your SharePoint site, then that URL probably hasn"t been entered into AAM.

Mistake #2: Your reverse proxy server"s "link translation" feature is sufficient.

Some administrators understand that AAM will fix up the links on pages so that end users are taken to the proper public URL, but they also know that their reverse proxy server has a "link translation" feature that does something similar. If they both do the same thing, then why not just turn it on in the reverse proxy publishing rule and not worry about setting it in AAM?

There are several reasons why this is not a good idea. First off, in our compatibility testing experience, no link translation feature from any reverse proxy server, including ISA Server 2006, is sufficient to fix up all SharePoint links to use the public URL. SharePoint embeds its URLs in many places and in a variety of encodings. Reverse proxy servers are currently not sophisticated enough to find and fix them all. Second, SharePoint has features that use URLs but do not go through reverse proxy server publishing rules. E-mail alerts are a good example. Only AAM will be able to make sure the links in your e-mail alerts are using the correct URL for the user.

So while you"re more than welcome to enable link translation in your SharePoint publishing rule, don"t forget to properly configure AAM as well. And by the way, if you"re exposing the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration site via a publishing rule, be sure to disable the link translation feature for that rule. It will likely interfere with your ability to configure AAM.

Mistake #3: Trying to reuse the same URL in AAM or not aligning the URLs to the same zone.

This is a mistake that often catches people when they configure SharePoint to expose a web application to both their internal network and the Internet. For example, suppose you"ve configured a SharePoint web application on your corporate network with http://sharepoint as your Default zone URL. Now you want to expose it to the Internet as http://www.contoso.com. When configuring your reverse proxy server, you tell it to forward the requests to http://sharepoint and then add http://www.contoso.com as a public URL to the Internet zone. Sounds good?

Not quite, unfortunately. While access to the site from your corporate network will continue to work as expected, you might find that access from the Internet isn"t working so well and that there are several links pointing to http://sharepoint This is because the two URLs have been entered into different AAM zones and therefore are not associated with each other.

An URL can be used only once in AAM, and the http://sharepoint URL was already in use on your corporate network. To forward your Internet-based requests to the same web application, you should use a different internal URL for your reverse proxy publishing rule such http://sharepoint.dmz.contoso.com. You can leave http://sharepoint alone in AAM and still add http://www.contoso.com as your public URL in the Internet zone. You just need to add http://sharepoint.dmz.contoso.com as an additional internal URL in the same zone as your http://www.contoso.com public URL - your Internet zone. With them both in the same zone, SharePoint can generate the proper links using the public URL for that zone.

Mistake #4: Updates made in AAM automatically update IIS bindings and vice versa.

Actually, once a web application has been extended to a zone, SharePoint will not attempt to modify its IIS bindings. If you go into IIS and modify those bindings yourself, say by adding a host header binding, changing a port number, or adding an SSL port, SharePoint won"t be aware of those changes and will not update the AAM URLs for you. Similarly, an update to the AAM URLs to add an SSL URL won"t automatically update your IIS bindings to match.

Instead, if you need to make a change in your IIS bindings, our recommendation is that you remove the SharePoint web application from that zone. Then you can re-extend the web application to that zone with your updated bindings. This includes if you want to add an SSL port - we don"t recommend reusing the same IIS Web site for your HTTP and SSL hosting. Instead, you should extend a dedicated HTTP and a dedicated SSL web site, each assigned to its own AAM zone and URLs.

Mistake #5: Forgetting to configure your environment so that search can crawl your sites.

You may have configured AAM and your network so that end users can reach your sites, but did you remember to do the same for SharePoint search? The SharePoint search service browses to your web applications to crawl their content and needs to be able to access your public URLs. Make sure that the machine running the search indexing service can reach those public URLs - particularly the one using NTLM authentication. If necessary, configure the proxy settings of your search service account to use your proxy servers. You can do this by logging into the machine as that account and editing its LAN connection settings in IE.

Mistake #6: Typos!

It happens more often than you might think - a quick series of keystrokes and you transpose 2 digits in the port number or two letters in the hostname. Now all of a sudden, SharePoint starts giving you "Cannot find server or DNS Error" messages. Be sure to double check those URLs in AAM. If you"re using a reverse proxy server, verify that they match the URLs in your publishing rule.

Hopefully these tips will save you a couple of hours of troubleshooting and perhaps even a few gray hairs. What are your most common mistakes when configuring AAM? Share them with everyone by adding a comment to this post. And of course, you"re welcome to ask any additional questions you have about these tips. Next time, I"ll dig a little deeper into AAM and how it integrates with other SharePoint features such as security.

Troy Starr

3/17/2007 Thank you, SharePoint MVPs!

The Microsoft MVP Global Summit concluded this past Thursday, and on behalf of the SharePoint product teams, I’d like to thank the 45 SharePoint MVPs, a bunch of Excel MVPs, a few InfoPath MVPs, and a couple of special guests for sitting through many hours of “deep dive” sessions and providing plenty of constructive feedback about the 2007 version of our products along with many creative ideas for the next version.

In his keynote on Monday to about 600 MVPs of the Office system set of products, Jeff Teper announced a new, friendlier URL for the SharePoint Community Portal at http://mysharepointcommunity.com and encouraged non-SharePoint MVPs to take a look. At least one other Office product group is already planning to implement their community portal on the same infrastructure, and I hope that a few more will follow.

Given SharePoint’s role as the “business productivity server” to which all of the Office (business productivity) clients connect to enable collaboration scenarios, the SharePoint community will undoubtedly play an ever increasingly important role in the broader Office community, and I look forward to establishing a stronger relationship between the SharePoint MVPs and the Office MVPs and to sustaining the spirit of community that’s evident in the picture below (taken at the inaugural SharePoint MVP Paintball Outing).

3/16/2007 Status update re: DoD 5015.2 certification for MOSS 2007

Based on the growing number of questions about DoD 5015.2 certification that I"ve seen in the SharePoint community and heard from customers over the past few weeks, it"s obvious that many people missed the announcement that had been posted on the Records Management Team Blog back in November. In summary:

Microsoft is working on a Records Center Add-on Pack for Office SharePoint Server which will provide the additional functionality to meet the DoD 5015.2 criteria. The add-on pack will be freely available to all customers with Office SharePoint Server 2007, so anyone can take advantage of the new features.

Microsoft is slotted to take the DoD 5015.2 certification test on May 14, 2007 and we plan to release the add-on pack shortly after the certification process is complete.

I"m very pleased to confirm that we are on track with our preparations to meet the May 14 testing date. While we are confident about achieving this important certification, we cannot commit to a final release date for the "Add-on Pack" until after the testing date. Rest assured that we will make an announcement and provide more details as soon as we can. We appreciate your support and thank you for your patience.

3/10/2007 TechEd 2007 is in sunny Orlando and we have some great SharePoint content lined up!

There is a ton of new SharePoint Products and Technologies session content this year including;

· .NET Development on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: The WSS Object Model

· Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Deploying, Managing, and Configuring

· Building Advanced Web Parts with ASP.NET 2.0

· Security Fundamentals in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007

· Designing and Creating Enterprise Portal Solutions on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

· Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and SharePoint

· SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Guidance

· Building a High Performance .com Site on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

· Full details can be found here https://www.msteched.com/public/sessions.aspx

Microsoft Product Group Speakers include; Thomas Rizzo, Arpan Shah, Mike Fitzmaurice and Joel Oleson along with a host of other seasoned presenters who are all experts in their field.

We also have 2 great pre-conference events;

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services v3: Overview, Deployment, Configuration, and Management

Andrew Connell and Bill English

Presented by Microsoft MVP’s and authors of several books on SharePoint Products and Technologies Bill English and Andrew Connell. The first half of the day covers an introduction to SharePoint Server 2007, including the newest features and functionality, installation guidance, farm configuration and site creation, administrative environment, plus a discussion on the communication and training needs you’ll encounter as you deploy SharePoint Server 2007. The second half focuses on how to deploy and configure two of the newest and most compelling features of SharePoint Server 2007—Enterprise Search and Web Content Management. Also in this half, take a deep dive into “Features” to learn how and why Feature management will become a core priority for you in the 2007 release.

Development Tools and Techniques for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System

Ted Pattison and Patrick Tisseghem

This all-day pre-conference session is split into four parts: Part 1: “WSS 3.0 – A Solutions Platform” covers the deep ASP.NET 2.0 integration, custom application pages Web parts, event handlers, and other extensibility options. Part 2: Offers a deep dive into packaging and deploying SharePoint solutions. Part 3: Learn how to customize and brand SharePoint Server 2007 sites—delving into the page model, publishing features, creating custom page layouts, and changing the look and feel with master pages and style sheets, along with configuring your site for anonymous access and forms based authentication. Part 4: Focus on Office Client integration and extensibility—learn about add-ins, ribbon extensibility, custom task panes, Outlook 2007 form regions, and the new file format. A companion set of hands-on labs is also provided for you to take away, covering all content delivered in this session in a hands-on virtual environment.

Registration info for TechEd and the pre-conferences is at http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2007/registration.mspx

We hope to see you in Orlando!

3/10/2007 Key US Daylight Savings Time Information

Just had got some great very complete information from product support about the upcoming Daylight Savings Time change and how it does or doesn"t impact you. I did a post on DST previously, but this has much, much more info. (Thanks Dan and Bruce!)

SHAREPOINT DST QUICK INFO:

======================

The prior DST dates were April 1^st @ 2:00 AM (Sunday of 4^th month, 1^st week) and October 28^th @ 2:00 AM (Sunday of 10^th month, 5^th week).

The new DST dates are March 11^th @ 2:00 AM (Sunday of 3^rd month, 2^nd week) and November 4^th @ 2:00 AM (Sunday of 11^th month, 1^st week).

As such, there are two time periods (deltas) this year where there is a discrepancy between prior DST time changes and new ones.
March 11, 2007 at 2:00 A.M. through April 1, 2007 at 2:00 A.M. (from the start of the new DST through the start of the old DST) is the first zone (3 weeks).

October 28, 2007 at 2:00 A.M. through November 4, 2007 at 2:00 A.M. (from the end of the old DST through the end of the new DST) is the second zone (1 week).

If left alone, many products will behave as though the prior DST dates are still in effect and be an hour off of the actual time until the prior DST date is reached.
To correct this, many patches have been created. Here is the information you need to know for SharePoint.

All SharePoint products require that OS patch 931836 is applied to the server.
If other environments that SharePoint interacts with are not patched and SharePoint is—this could lead to issues with new data creation. Manual adjustments may be necessary in this scenario.
The primary SharePoint patch is WSS update 933738. The KB is at:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=933738

It points to the download to the needed patch:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3e6ade34-06ee-4e69-88d1-a7e0461b71da&displaylang=en

The download page for the patch refers to both KB934000 and KB 933738. The actual patch is labeled: WSS2003-KB934000-GLB.exe
The KB934000 is what is known as a “Roll-up” KB. This will be automatically generated and will show all of the fixes that are included in this update.
In other words, there are not two separate updates and you can’t get to one—there is only one.

There has been a high demand to identify what data is/will be wrong. Many administrators are trying to evaluate if they want to run the rebase tool or not. Here are some SQL queries that will help to determine that information:

-- On each content database (SPS 2003"s default content database ends in _SITE) you

-- can run these commands to evaluate what state your data is in with respect to DST2007

-- Show webs that have not yet been rebased

SELECT FullUrl,Flags FROM Webs WHERE (Flags & 8192) = 0

-- Show webs that have been rebased

SELECT FullUrl,Flags FROM Webs WHERE (Flags & 8192) != 0

-- Find what timezones the Webs in this database are using

SELECT DISTINCT Webs.TimeZone from Webs

-- Run the below for each different TimeZone detected adjusting the query per the below note

-- Before rebasing, show data that needs to be adjusted (MARCH-APRIL)

-- NOTE: 08:00 UTC is 2AM CDT when DST starts (07:00 UTC is 2AM CDT the next day until the end of DST).

-- If the target webs are not set to CST, you will need to adjust this as appropriate for accuracy

-- NOTE: 11 is the TimeZone ID for CST. Choose the appropriate TimeZone ID from TIMEZONE.XML if you are not CST

-- NOTE: If the Web column is empty, that indicates it is the root of the site

SELECT Webs.FullUrl AS [Web], Lists.tp_Title AS [List Name], nvarchar1, datetime1, datetime2, datetime3, datetime4, datetime5, datetime6, datetime7, datetime8,

datetime9, datetime10, datetime11, datetime12, datetime13, datetime14, datetime15, datetime16

FROM Webs

INNER JOIN Lists

ON Webs.[Id] = Lists.tp_WebId

INNER JOIN UserData

ON Lists.tp_ID = UserData.tp_ListId

WHERE

(Webs.TimeZone = 11)

AND (((datetime1 IS NOT NULL) AND (datetime1 >= "2007-03-11 08:00" AND datetime1 < "2007-04-01 08:00"))

OR ((datetime2 IS NOT NULL) AND (datetime2 >= "2007-03-11 08:00" AND datetime2 < "2007-04-01 08:00"))

OR ((datetime3 IS NOT NULL) AND (datetime3 >= "2007-03-11 08:00" AND datetime3 < "2007-04-01 08:00"))

OR ((datetime4 IS NOT NULL) AND (datetime4 >= "2007-03-11 08:00" AND datetime4 < "2007-04-01 08:00"))