Great tips on finding commands in STSADM and piping them. Very cool.
SharePoint
Spence Harbar's App Pool Recycling tool
Note to self: I keep needing/using this tool to avoid IISRESETs during SharePoint development. Much faster…
Feature Stapling by Ted Pattison
An instructive Post by Ted Pattison. I’ve got to confess, I’m still getting used to the breadth of things you can do with features. I could spend weeks looking into this…
Georeplication in SharePoint
More for my benefit than anyone else, but there is blog post on Joris Poelman’s (JOPX) blog about georeplication in SharePoint. The crux of it is, SharePoint 2007 doesn’t really do it. But you could implement your own using the Content Migration APIs – which Stefan Gossner goes into in parts 1,2,3,4.
However, if you are considering a system using georeplication, please remember you must have enough bandwidth. If your network can’t handle the traffic needed over it already, before adding georeplication, then you are buggered. Georeplication might reduce cross site traffic, but you still need the bandwidth to actually do the replication. And you’ll have to be able to live with slow replication. And, as mentioned above (and by Joris), it is a significant development exercise.
I’m sure someone will do it though. And I’m confident that Microsoft will do it for a future version of SharePoint. It’s too powerful a feature to not have in an enterprise app.
Using a different Master Page on Application Pages
Previously I found (in ‘David’s Blog’) a way of using an HTTP Module in SharePoint to change the master page used by ‘application’ pages. I fiddled with it a bit and made it work properly.
Unfortunately, I’ve lost my code (HD crash) and David’s blog is defunct (I think it died when the SharePoint Blogs site died).
So, some links to similar relevant pages:
Deploying Enterprise Search at Microsoft
Interesting – Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search – interesting. Gives you an idea of the hardware necessary for a big system, and the sort of on-going administration required.
SharePoint Workflow and when to use it…
When building SharePoint workflow solutions you need to be very careful in only using it for small, single document-centric processes, and you need to try to avoid the ‘pain points’. For processes that push the boundaries of what workflow can do, you should consider redesign of the solution to reduce the workflow element or alternative products.
In a collaboration and publishing system like SharePoint, some sort of support for standard business process is essential. SharePoint workflow supports that for simple processes, but it is not enterprise grade workflow (yet). Indeed, out of the box it doesn’t work (at least, not fully). I’ll explain some of the issues with SharePoint Workflow later, but first I want to describe what SharePoint workflow is. Continue reading “SharePoint Workflow and when to use it…”
SharePoint UK User Group last week
Twospeakers at the user group meeting last night. The first session was an eye opener for me, one of those ‘thoughts crystalising’ moments. Continue reading “SharePoint UK User Group last week”
Internet Explorer can't open a new document in Library
Curious problem – I kept getting an error message “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” whenever I tried to open a document from our internal MOSS system. Strange.
Eventually figured it out from Geekette’s Blogette, and kbAlertz 833714.
We use Project 2003 still. This means two version of the owssupp.dll, apparently, under c:program filesMicrosoft Officeoffice11 and office12
I followed the advice from the MS Knowledgebase article, but got the same error as all the folks at kbAlertz. In the end I tried just uninstalling MS Project Professional 2003 support – and low, Internet Explorer started letting me open documents from MOSS again. And, much to my surprise, Project 2003 web access works just fine – I guess it doesn’t use that dll.
The registry and "Word could not create work file"
I had an interesting problem earlier this week. I had a MOSS VM that seemed to work okay, except whenever I tried to create a document using the template on a Document Library. Then I would get the error:
Word could not create work file. Check the temp environment variable.
Okay. So I did – and the temp variable was just fine. Odd, I thought. Eventually, after digging through news groups and so on, I found a suggestion to check parts of the registry. Well, actually, one of my colleagues found it. The value in the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folderscache
was wrong – it pointed to an invalid directory. Not sure why, but I’d been monkeying around with some stuff which could’ve mucked it up. Anyway, fixed up the filepath in that key, and it was fine – I could create documents from Document Library templates.
Andy Burns' Blog 