Toluu : Jack of all that is Microsoft, Master of None

Jack of all that is Microsoft, Master of None

Trials & tribulations in the life of a consultant / business owner

Got Long MOSS Service Account Names?July 24

Are you planning on creating and using some long-named MOSS service accounts? Maybe something like TestMOSSMySiteAdmin01 or TestMOSSSSPAppPool01? Well if you do, then take note – I’ve had two separate occasions where I have an AD account with more than 20 characters as the username, and MOSS isn’t happy about it. I ran across this a while ago at a client site and thought it was something wrong with their environment, and let it slide… but my buddy and fellow B&R colleague Mr. Bob Fox ran into this yesterday, and was quite surprised that this happens.

So here’s the deal…

You’ve got your account, ‘TestMOSSMySiteAdmin01’ – you go and create it in Active Directory, typically by just specifying the Full Name & User Logon Name, and your screen looks something like this:

Notice a couple of things here:

§ The user logon name is exactly what I want �

The International SharePoint Professionals Association (’ISPA’) is Live!July 17

I am really proud to announce that the International SharePoint Professionals Association, aka ‘ISPA’, has officially gone live at http://www.sharepointpros.org. This has been a work in progress for the past few months by Bob Fox, Natalya Voskresenskaya, Darrin Bishop, and myself. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work, but it’s come a long way. We look forward to working with entire SharePoint community on many exciting initiatives in the near future!

Below is our official press release…

The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.

ISPA’s first

Some Happenings, New CodePlex Project and MoreJune 8

I’ve been swamped with a few big projects lately, but I wanted to alert everyone to a couple of happenings:

I’m down at TechEd 2008 IT Pro this week in Orlando until Thursday afternoon with a few other members of the B&R Team - Jason Medero, Michael Lotter, Bob Fox & Josh Carlisle. If you’d like to get together with any of us and talk SharePoint, feel free to ping me on the blog or via email - chrisr (at) bandrsolutions (dot) com.
Monday night is the famous ‘SharePoint by day, SharePint by Night’ event… more information on it can be found here on Bob’s blog and here on AC’s. I’ll be there with the guys mentioned above.
Jay will be running the SharePoint 2003 -> 2007 Migrations Birds of a Feather session on Wednesday, June 11 at 6:30PM… it will run about an hour, and Jay will be more than happy to stay after and answer all of your questions (as long as you take him out for a drink). Jay has done more migrations then I can count at this point, and all of different sizes. He is a great resource t

WSS Navigation - Flyouts, Security Trimming & Custom Nav ItemsMay 9

I’ve been working with a client on a WSS site deployment, and one of our big sticking points has been with the out-of-the-box WSS navigation. The client set the following requirements for the navigation:

Must be security trimmed - so if you don’t have access to a site, you don’t see it in the nav
Must allow for the addition of custom navigation items
Must have flyouts (drop-downs) that go at least 2 or 3 levels deep

Out of the box, we get #1 & #2, but since we’re not using MOSS, we can’t just modify the master page to get #3 to work. That’s where my buddy the SharePoint Cowboy, Eric Shupps, found a nice way to add the drop-down menus to WSS. The problem is that this approach switches the data source, and you lose the ability to specify what appears in the navigation. So while you gain #3, you lose #2. Talk about one step ahead, one step back.

So after some trial and error, some searching and enlisting the help of Josh Carlisle for a few lines of code, I have a solution…

The solution involves the following:

Creating a WSS list that will manage you navigation.
Implementing the

Web Content Management - Allow reviewers to see drafts and nothing elseApril 16

Scenario:

You have a public-facing site with WCM/Publishing enabled. Active Directory authentication is used for your content creators, editors & approvers. Your anonymous users can browse most portions of the site without logging in, however, there are some areas where they login using forms-based authentication.

Your pages are constantly undegoing changes, and you need to create an account that has access to review the draft version of pages, however, you do not want them to see the Site Actions button or the Page Editing Toolbar, or have the ability to create any new content. Essentially, they are the most basic of content reviewers - the only ‘elevated permissions’ they have over an FBA user is that when they browse the site, they see the latest draft of every page, instead of the latest published version.

The Typical Solution

So in most situations, you would turn content approval on within your page libraries, and then add this user to the <SITE> Members SharePoint group, where they would be granted contributor rights, and could review the page drafts. They would be able to edit the drafts, but since content approval is turned on, anything they modify won’t go anywhere without approval. But they are contributors, and can create new content (that they cannot publish), and they still have access to the Site Actions menu, even if the functionality available to them is significantly limi