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Jack of all that is Microsoft, Master of None

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


The International SharePoint Professionals Association (’ISPA’) is Live!July 18 2008

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


WSS Navigation - Flyouts, Security Trimming & Custom Nav ItemsMay 9 2008

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:

  1. Must be security trimmed - so if you don’t have access to a site, you don’t see it in the nav
  2. Must allow for the addition of custom navigation items
  3. 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:

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

SharePoint Gradual Upgrade - Random Page Error ‘This Page is Redirecting…’November 16 2007

Earlier today, I was helping a client with a pretty straight-forward gradual upgrade from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on MSDE over to MOSS 2007 on SQL Server 2005 (no customizations performed and only 2GB of data). We got through the MSDE -> SQL side of things fine, ran prescan.exe (which reported absolutely nothing wrong - zero issues) and then installed MOSS 2007 and performed our upgrade.  Once the upgrade was completed, we tested the 2007 side, and everything but 13 links (lucky number, eh?) worked.  When we clicked on any of these thirteen links, we would get a message similiar to:

This page is redirecting to http://domain/Area/Name in 5 seconds.
To edit this URL click here.

And if you clicked on the ‘edit this URL click here’ you would get a Page Not Found error.  In addition, if you looked at your address bar, it would look something like:

http://domain/whatever/Pages/UpgLandingPgRedir.aspx

So it was obvious that for some reason, the links we were clicking on were trying to be redirected, but they really didn’t know where to go.  After doing some digging, there was a simple answer:

The area was upgraded and moved over to a new page, but for some reason during the upgrade, SharePoint kept the UpgLandingPgRedir.aspx as the Welcome Page.  So there was obviously a simple fix…

1.  On any page where this error was appearing, Site Actions -> Site



MOSS 2007 Licensing DecodedSeptember 13 2007

Lately, I’ve been working on a large number of MOSS 2007 consulting projects, and I am always asked the question as to how MOSS is licensed.  So I have decided to write this up and post it for everyone to use as a reference.  Please note that I always recommend that you speak with your local Microsoft Account Rep, as licensing can change very quickly…

If you are not going to use any of the following enterprise features (to name a few):

  • Business Data Catalog
  • InfoPath Forms Services
  • Excel Services
  • Key Performance Indicators
  • Reports Center 

Then you will need the following licenses to start:

  • SQL Server License for each SQL server (typically one server – but if you are running a cluster, obviously more).  If you are going to have more than a couple hundred users, I would recommend that you look into licensing SQL server on a per-processor basis, which allows an unlimited number of SQL users per processor.  You also need to decide if you are going to run Standard or Enterprise Edition…To determine which edition will suit you best, take a look at the following: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/features/compare-features.mspx.