June 2009 - Posts
Zoho.com has been provided the most comprehensive suite Productivity, Collaboration and Business online tools last 3 years. I started using Zoho from year 2007 and was impressed by the features they provided. I switched to Zoho to do all my publishing work there - articles, presentations, notes.
But that is not all. Zoho has really really killing feature - integration. You can integrate Zoho with Microsoft Office and other applications, that allows you to use Word, Excel locally, but collaborate via Zoho servers. Really great stuff.
Couple of weeks ago Zoho released "Zoho for SharePoint" feature, that allows you to use Zoho directly from SharePoint - you can edit document libraries in Zoho, or create new documents via Zoho that will be uploaded to libraries automatically and etc. This is really powerful feature when you don't have Offlice client application installed, or you have collaborative site, when uses work on document together.
Just check screencast on their site for quick overview of all functionality http://www.zoho.com/sharepoint/
Last 2 months I've been working on the site to host all my "SharePoint Tips and Tricks" and it has been released recently.
And now...welcome to http://SharePoint-SandBox.com, the new place for our tips series, where all tips have been organized in categories, and properly tagged. We provide RSS and Twitter (@sharepointbox) updates for our tips.
On the current blog I will continue blogging about SharePoint, and announce new SharePoint tips, but all tips will be published on SharePoint SandBox site
As you might already know, couple of weeks ago I published series of articles “SharePoint Farm Deployment and Configuration” in SharePoint Magazine (6 articles). Everything was fine with all articles except the “Part 2” that shacked the SharePoint community and caused uproar:)
In this post I’d like to say my sorry for that incident and explained in details what exactly happened.
There are 6 articles I started to write in the end of 2008 and they were queued in March 2009 for publishing. After that articles were reviewed by several guys, changed and published in June 2009. Unfortunately, the “part 2” was not updated since December 2008, and that very early draft version was published accidently :( That version was a bit messy – a lot of copy-pasting issues with the wrong section titles, wrong references, and some stuff were not elaborated properly. And it’s when discussion started :) Let’s say people where really surprised to read that bullshit.
Unfortunately, I had limited internet access at those days and everything I saw were comments that I got by email. I was a bit confused by people reaction, because I had no idea that wrong articles had been published. In a couple of days that “draft-version” mistake was noted and fixed by uploading the right version of article.
This is happened only to the Part 2, but not to others five articles in that series
The learned lesson is that you need to be double careful when publish articles, and be online in the next couple of days after articles been published.
Sometimes you have a already created site but wanted to know the site definition of that site, or gets the name of the site definition from which the site template that was used to create the site is derived. There are several steps to get that template
- Navigate to the “Central Administration –> Application Management –> Site Collection List” and choose the site you are trying to find the template for
- Write down site "Title” and “Database name” values
- Open SQL management studio and execute the following query for content database that you find from previous step
1: SELECT Title, WebTemplate,ProvisionConfig
2: FROM dbo.Webs
3: WHERE Title = '<title of your site>'
- Write down the number in “Web Template” column
- Navigate to this site http://blumenthalit.net/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=45 and find definition is associated with that ID
That’s all.
The second way to get it is via SharePoint API SPWeb.WebTemplate property. Sample is there
Tips & Tricks section moved to its own site. http://sharepoint.devs-sandbox.com/index.php?/Tips-and-Tricks/Development/tip-41-how-to-find-the-site-definition-being-used-for-a-site.html
Almost all changes that developers and administrators introduce to SharePoint are completed via “jobs” mechanism of SharePoint (Central Administration –> Operations --> Timer Job Definitions). Your changes are queued and SharePoint complete them when “job” time comes. It might be a bit frustrating, because all jobs have different timing and SharePoint doesn’t provide you UI to change when jobs start.
The only way to change when job starts is using STSADM – ether running all jobs immediately, or rescheduling number of jobs to start earlier. Unfortunately, you can’t start/stop specific job.
Start Job Immediately
STSADM provides you command to restart all jobs immediately. In can be useful when you script your actions and want some actions to be run in the specific order. Use the following command for this
stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs
Take into account that without this command you can’t guarantee that something is completed before you start another command, because all commands run asynchronously.
Jobs re-scheduling
You can change the interval when some job starts, using in the following format “[Time frame] [Interval] between [value] and [value]”, where internals samples are: "every 10 minutes between 0 and 59", "hourly between 0 and 59", "daily at 21:00:00"
Use stsadm |find “schedule” to get the list of the jobs to reschedule, and use the following command
stsadm -o <job> -schedule "<interval>"
Source
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Virtualizied environment is very common for SharePoint farm. One of the most important factor of such farms is optimization that differs slightly from optimization of the physical environment . But firstly, we need to know how good our farm operates, measuring different parameters, before trying optimized it.
Consider to use use the following performance counters to measure the most important parameters that affect performance:
- Processors utilization
[Host]: “\Processor(*)\% Processor Time”
[Host] [Guest]: “\Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor(_Total)\% Total Run Time”
Results: <60% healthy, 60%-89% warning, >90% – critical performance;
- Memory performance
[Host] [Guest]: “\Memory\Available MBytes” will show the amount of physical memory available to processes running on the computer, as a percentage of physical memory installed on the computer
Results: (free memory available): >50% healthy, 10% warning, <5% critical
[Host] [Guest]: “\Memory\Pages/sec” - the rate at which pages are read from or written to disk to resolve hard page faults. To resolve hard page faults, the operating system must swap the contents of memory to disk, which negatively impacts performance. A high number of pages per second in correlation with low available physical memory may indicate a lack of physical memory
Results: <500 healthy, 500-1000 warning, >1000 critical
- Disk Performance
[Host] “\Logical Disk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Read” or “\Logical Disk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Write” to measure disk latency
Results: < 15ms healthy, 15ms-25ms warning, >25ms critical.
Don’t forget to measure performance of logical disk versus physical
- Network Performance
[Host] “\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec” will provide the percentage of network utilization is calculated by multiplying Bytes Total/sec by 8 to convert it to bits, multiply the result by 100, then divide by the network adapter’s current bandwidth.
Results: <40% healthy. 40%-65% warning, >65% critical
[Guest] “\Network Interface(*)\Output Queue Length” measures the number of threads waiting on the network adapter.
Results: 0 is health, 1-2 is warning and >2 is critical
-
[Host] [Guest] Free disk spaces – have enough available space to avoid SharePoint move and delete temporary files, what could affect the performance. SharePoint uses additional space for for caching and other internal processes.
Result: >25% is healthy
Sources: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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SharePoint Site Template has one very handy feature – it can be registered inside a Site or you can restrict certain sites to use only certain templates.
It’s obvious how to do this for site collection, because UI provides you specific links, but it’s a bit tricky to assign templates for a Site, so do the following:
1) Upload an existing site template to the site template gallery (Site Settings –> Modify All Site Settings –> “Site Templates") link under the "Galleries" section. Alternatively, you may also use the “stsadm -o addtemplate” command.
The next step is registering uploaded template available to individual sites. (for example Site A can use template X, but Site http://A/B can use only template Y)
2) Open the following link in browser http://<yoursiteurl>/_Layouts/AreaTemplateSettings.aspx Take into account that there is no way to get to this link via UI. For site collection you are using Site Sections –>”Page layouts and site templates “ under “Look and Feel”, but for Site you need to use hardcoded URL
3) Pick the templates you want to be available for this site
Source
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SharePoint provides you a nice feature to save you site as template and install it easily on another instance of SharePoint. 
But have you noted that for Publishing sites you don’t have “Save site as template option” option?! (located before “Reset to site definition”)
Unfortunately, such functionality is unsupported for all Publishing SharePoint sites, because it quite potential can cause issues with some features and master pages - “instance of master pages and style sheets stored at site collection level won't be included in the template, but are expected by the publishing site when you would create it based on the template”
Actually, the direct link is not removed (/_layouts/settings.aspx">http://<site>/_layouts/settings.aspx) and can be used for simple publishing sites without any issues, but this is not recommended and officially unsupported solution.
Source
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Sometimes, you may find that you get “HTTP 400 Bad Request” error, or “HTTP 401.1 - Unauthorized: Logon Failed” error when navigate to local SharePoint sites and asked for credentials tree times.
This mostly happens for Web sites that use Integrated Authentication and have a name that is mapped to the local loopback address. More details in KB896861.
Such situation is “behavior-by-design” and caused by Windows security updates, when authentication fails if the FQDN (fully qualified SND name) or the custom host header does not match the local computer name.
Solution: run REGEDIT and create DWORD “DisableLoopbackCheck” equal “1” in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa.
PS: I actually had all my sites inaccessible after bunch of security updates on Windows 2008 before and after installing SharePoint SP2.
Source
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My 6 series of “SharePoint Farm configuring and deployment” article has been published in SharePoint Magazine.
SharePoint provides you several navigation providers to be used for you sites.
There are 5 WSS navigation providers:
- SPNavigationProvider
- SPSiteMapProvider
- SPContentMapProvider
- SPXmlContentMapProvider
- SPXmlAdminContentMapProvider (via Central Administration)
and 10 MOSS providers
- AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider
- SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider
- GlobalNavSiteMapProvider
- CombinedNavSiteMapProvider
- CurrentNavSiteMapProvider
- CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode
- MySiteMapProvider
- MySiteLeftNavProvider
- SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider
- UsagePagesSiteMapProvider
The full description and summary info about these providers can be found in this post