Dave and Chris welcome Cognitive as a sponsor to the blog

10 05 2010

Dave and Chris are very pleased to welcome Cognitive as their first sponsor to the blog. We hope that you will find this partnership useful as we continue to blog about the world of SharePoint and technology. With SharePoint 2010 really beginning to take off we know that there are plenty of SharePoint experts around and also people in desperate need of these people, we hope that this is where you will benefit from Cognitive!

“Cognitive are delighted to sponsor the http://sharepointedutech.com/ blog; it was an easy choice really given how Dave managed to defeat the “Ash Cloud No Fly Period” to get back in time for Spevo via Twitter and the supportive SharePoint community!

Following Spevo and the imminent launch of SharePoint 2010 everyone is asking the burning question “When do I get to use it commercially?”  That’s where Cognitive can assist….

We work with a select number of end users, who are either planning an upgrade to 2010 or a product re-write to the latest version, and Microsoft Enterprise Gold level Partners adept at convincing Client’s to implement 2010. As  a key player in the expansion of Microsoft’s Enterprise Gold partners, and the exclusive staffing partner to several Microsoft president’s club members and end user clients, Cognitive offer you a variety of opportunities that will enable you to attain your desired career goals.

Our SharePoint search & selection practice has over 22 years Microsoft centric recruitment experience and, as such, you will be working with individuals who understand the Microsoft channel, take an active interest in your  existing circumstances and genuinely care about your career goals.

We look to ensure that your next move is the right one.

So if you want to ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee then please get in touch.”

ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee


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Opening PDFs in SharePoint 2010

5 05 2010

If you have your nice SP2010 setup you may notice that when you go to open a PDF file it prompts you to save it rather than opening.

This is really annoying and would send everyone here at the school completely bananas! Not to mention the fact that we try to get everything on SharePoint only to force people to save it to their own area!

Never fear there is a solution. It’s in central admin.

Go there and click ‘Manage Web Applications’

Click on the web app you want to change, and go to ‘General Settings’

Scroll down the list until you reach ‘Browser File Handling’

Change the radio box from Strict to Permissive.

Click ok.

Go back to your PDF document and click on it – and it will open up without forcing you to save it somewhere first.

You may have noticed in the first screen shot there was no PDF icon. Well, follow this guide to right that wrong!


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010

Reasons to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010: Pt3

30 03 2010

Continuing on from my posts listing reasons to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 I will now look at Multimedia (Assets) and announcements.

The 6 points I’m looking at regarding upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 are:

Multimedia (Assets) and Announcements

There is now an asset library in SharePoint giving you a really great place to store images and videos. The main advantage over 2007 is just the way in which images are displayed on the page. No longer do you have to suffer with a list if thumbnails, they now go across the page and happily move around to fit different browser sizes.

If you store videos in the asset library then you can play them from the browser (remember that SharePoint 2010 plays nicely with Firefox too) using the nice Silverlight viewer.

For those of you who have gone through the pain of adding pictures into announcements in SharePoint 2007 will absolutely love this feature. In my opinion this is how announcements should always have worked. Click New, insert, image from computer, browse, OK. The picture is then in and can be resized, text layout changed and announcement written!

You can see in the screen snip that there is an insert Video/Audio button. Unfortunately this is greyed out :-( sorry as far as I’ve seen no ability to add YouTube clips OOTB…yet.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010

Reasons to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010: Pt2

29 03 2010

Continuing on from my post listing reasons to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 where I looked at pages based on a Wiki, I will now look at Tags, Notes and Rating.

The 6 points I’m looking at regarding upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 are:

Tagging / Notes / Rating

It’s much easier to add meta data to your SharePoint pages with the ‘I Like It’ tag. Also you can add notes to pages or individual documents. This will enable staff members to tag documents specifically to class groups or subject areas. All theses tags are then exposed through the search!

To set up ratings go into the document library settings and click ‘Rating Settings’ and click the ‘yes’ radio button. Rating is now available on the document library. This will enable great content to surface above everything else!

Look out for part 3 soon!

Chris.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010

Reasons to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

26 03 2010

I’ve talked to quite a few people now about the benefits of SharePoint 2010 over 2007. I will share these benefits with you over a couple of blog posts and hopefully persuade you that 2010 is the way forward and to start planning your migration strategies now!

I will focus on these 6 points:

Pages based on Wiki:

The page wiki layouts means that you can easily edit text, insert images and change the page layout within the browser (remember that SP2010 works equally well in Firefox and IE)

You can add webparts anywhere on the page and even edit text between them!

Adding images can be done easily by simply browsing to an image on your hard drive or another location. This will be really useful in schools allowing heads of departments to enhance the look of the page very simply. The use of the wiki syntax [[link]] easily allows pages to be linked to other content on the site.

Look out for the next part where I will look at Tagging, Notes and Rating.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Document Library open Office Documents in browser

24 03 2010

If you have web apps set up on SharePoint 2010 (a nifty feature I think!) you will notice that office documents in a  library will not always open in the browser but will open up the full fat office programme.

To make sure that your documents open using the browser app then go into the doc lib settings, click advanced settings then check the radio button to open in browser!

The defaut behaviour will now be set to open in Web Apps in the browser!


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010, WebApps

Remote Program Delivery through SharePoint; the Front End.

16 03 2010

In Dave’s previous post he talked about the back-end for our delivery of remote programs. I’m going to explain how we then surfaced this through SharePoint.

For those of you that have set up remote programs you will probably be aware of the web part for it, we found that using this didn’t give us very much flexibility in which programs are surfaced. So we came up with a couple of other methods.

The first is by far the simplest; the good old content editor web part! Just put your .rdp files in an accessable location along with some icons. Add the content editor part to the page and add the images, hyperlinked to the rdp file. Simple.

The way we now deliver remote programs is to store the rdp file, the icon and any description or meta data in a sharepoint list. We give them categories to enable us to group them and just render the list with xslt. Again very simple but very effective.

Of course all this transfers to SharePoint 2010 without issue.


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Categories : SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, Sharepoint 2010, WebApps

SharePoint 2010 with a virtual SQL 2008 database. Will it perform?

10 03 2010

Many people have many different opinions on this subject. Is it wise to virtualise SQL? I think it is fine. I was once not so sure but visiting SharePoint best practices conference last year as well as a data management event I now feel pretty confident. Also with our beast of a hyper-v setup I can have more RAM in a virtual SQL box than I could ever dream of in a physical server!

So on to SharePoint 2010.  I wrote a couple of simle SQL scripts just to make the database server do some work and then I used SharePoint to see how it was afected. (I’m a Firefox user so all the SharePoint stuff was done using that) The SQL server was SQL 2008 with 10Gb RAM, with the data going to a normal vhd (our production environment will be virtual failover cluster with data over iSCSI). SharePoint is sitting on a virtual machine with 8GB of RAM.

I did the following actions and timed how long each step took. Then I did them twice more; once with the SQL CPU running at 100% and then again with the disk being very busy writing rows to a database and also sharepoint performing a full crawl.

The tasks were:

Create a Team Site

Upload a docx (this was a sample made using the great “=rand(10,10)” feature of Word)

Open the document using Web Apps

Save the document after editing it within the browser

And finally deleting the site

I selected these actions as they are the kind of things people will be doing everyday with sharepoint. I didnt inclide page loading times as there was no noticble difference between browsing the site when SQL was under load and when it was not.

And the results are in:

  Control (No Load) [seconds] 100% CPU [seconds] Disk load /full crawl [seconds]
Create Site 2.3 39.0 15.2
Upload Docx < 1 3.3 1.5
Open with Web App 1.5 6 6.8
Save Docx 2.3 13.0 1.8
Delete Site < 1 2.3 1.2

Pretty good really. Even with the SQL server sweating away at the backend your dear SharePoint end users will be uploading and viewing documents with minimal fustration!

If anyone else has any numbers or tests they have performed (or want to question mine) then please leave a comment!

Chris


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Categories : HyperV, Sharepoint 2010, SQL

XSLT get email address from person field

4 03 2010

In this brief post I will show you how to use xslt to get someone’s email address from the people picker in a SharePoint list. Before I begin I must give credit to David Botschinsky who I met at the BETT show in January. He came to me and asked about getting the email address of a person from the person lookup field in a list – He wanted to achieve this purely through the browser if possible with no code. I had a quick think and couldn’t find a way. I then received an email from David saying he did it through SharePoint designer in the end and it’s this I will share with you:

In SPD create a XSLT view of the list with the person field in. The usual <xsl:value-of select=’@person’ disable-output-escaping=”yes” /> code will return the familiar link that goes to the user information page. By changing the  ‘disable-output-escaping’ to ‘no’ you will return all the code behind this link- including the email address! Then with some xslt sub-string magic you can strip out all but the email address.

<xsl:value-of select= 'substring-before(substring-after(@person, concat("sip=",$dvt_apos)), $dvt_apos)' disable-output-escaping="no"/>

That is all there is to it!


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Categories : SharePoint, XSLT

PowerShell ISE in Server 2008 R2 With SharePoint Modules

16 02 2010

Some of you may have noticed that the ISE environment is not there as a default for Server 2008 R2. This post will go through adding it and also loading the SharePoint modules to enable you to script all your sharepoint bit’s and pieces in a nice environment.

The ISE is just a windows feature. So  click server manager:

Features, Add features:

Tick The Windows Powershell ISE Feature, Click next then install.

It will say that the server may require a restart. The server does not require a restart to add the ISE.

That’s it! It’ll now be on your start menu. If you want to do it all via script then I found this blog from Shay Levy

One thing I found with the ISE was that the Modules and Snapins for SharePoint are not loaded. This means that you can’t run the good old New-SPWeb command! If anyone finds a better way of doing this please let me know but this is how I work so far:

Load PS with modules (As Admin):

Then in the console type “ise” (no quotes) and the ISE will load up – the magic of an Alias!

Run this command from the ISE:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell

And you are good to go with all the SharePoint cmdlets.

Like I said, please let me know if you know a better way of loading the Powershell ISE with all the modules and snapins ready to go!


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Categories : Powershell, Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint 2010

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