SharePoint world of ECM and Information Management : SharePoint Tips and Tricks

First five SharePoint 2010 Tips and Tricks

Michael — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:07:00 GMT

Published first 5 SharePoint 2010 Tips and Tricks

Tip #65: How to install SharePoint 2010 using local account
Tip #64: How to restore Site Directory template in SharePoint 2010
Tip #63:How to print SharePoint 2010 page without header and navigation
Tip #62: SharePoint 2010 supports folders for KPI values
Tip #61: SharePoint 2010 keeps copy of modified theme

Have something interesting regarding SharePoint 2010 - submit your Trick here

SharePoint Tips #50-#60

Michael — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Finally reached the 60th SharePoint Tip. I wish I published 120th :) but quite busy in these days and publishin new SharePoint 2010 matherials takes a lot of time.

Tip #60: How to change the Spell Checker Language
Tip #59: How to set the default duration for the new Calendar event
Tip #58: How to open a list in Edit Mode
Tip #57: Don't use Farm Admin users for testing
Tip #56: Don't upload the same file multiple times for testing purposes
Tip #55: Disabled "Require Checkout" impacts on Content DB growth
Tip #54: Use Web Garden to add resilience and enhance performance
Tip #53: Don't rely on default settings to crawl a particular WFE
Tip #52: STSADM doesn't support import subsite as root site
Tip #51: Do you know that "read-only" Database feature is trimming UI edit functionality?!
Tip #50: FBA crawling doesn't support Wizard-based and Dynamic Pages with AJAX

SharePoint Tips and Tricks: from 40 to 50

Michael — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:52:00 GMT

Quick overview of the latest 10 SharePoint Tips and Tricks on our new portal http://www.SharePoint-SandBox.com

New place for "SharePoint Tips and Tricks"

Michael — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:46:00 GMT

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

SharePoint Tip #41. Do you know “how to find the site definition being used for a site”?!

Michael — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:15:00 GMT

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

SELECT Title, WebTemplate,ProvisionConfig
FROM dbo.Webs
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

SharePoint Tip #40. Do you know “how to change the timer settings of SharePoint Job”?

Michael — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 07:06:44 GMT

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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SharePoint Tip #39. Do you know “how to measure performance of virtualized environment”?

Michael — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:07:12 GMT

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 #Tip 38. Do you know “how to register a site template for a SITE”?!

Michael — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:27:00 GMT

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 Tip #37. Do you know “why you can’t save publishing site as template” ?

Michael — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:47:26 GMT

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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SharePoint Tip #36. Do you know “a cause of HTTP 400 Bad Request error when login to site” ?

Michael — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:15:07 GMT

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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SharePoint Tip #35. Do you know “how much navigation providers SharePoint uses”?

Michael — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:22:54 GMT

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

SharePoint Tip #34. Do you know “how to get the list of check-out files"?!

Michael — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:30:07 GMT

SharePoint provides OOTB support for document versioning, allowing user to check-in/check-out files, and keep history of changed documents. But unfortunately, versioning system doesn't provide inbuilt method to find these all check-out items made by users.

For some administrative task and farm maintenance it's recommended to have all files to be check-in before making changes. And this task became daunting task for administrators, because you need to check all site collection and list collections manually via SharePoint interface , to check-in user files.

The way to get the list of all check-out files across specific site is to use the following SQL script for SharePoint AdminContent DB

        1: SELECT     tp_DirName, 'http://SiteName/' + tp_DirName AS Expr1, tp_LeafName, 

       2:                       CASE WHEN AllUserData.tp_ContentType = 'Item' THEN 'http://SiteName/' + AllUserData.tp_DirName + '/DispForm.aspx?ID=' + AllUserData.tp_LeafName ELSE 'http://SiteName/'

       3:                        + AllUserData.tp_DirName + '/' + AllUserData.tp_LeafName END AS Link, tp_ContentType, nvarchar1, nvarchar2, tp_ModerationStatus, tp_DeleteTransactionId, 

       4:                       tp_IsCurrent

       5: FROM         AllUserData AS AllUserData

       6: WHERE     (tp_ModerationStatus = 2) AND (tp_DeleteTransactionId = 0x0) AND (tp_IsCurrent = 1)

       7: ORDER BY tp_DirName, tp_LeafName

Source

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SharePoint Tip #33. Do you know “why drag-and-drop might be disabled in Explorer View"?!

Michael — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:40:53 GMT

Historically, SharePoint 2007 provides a nice feature called Explorer View (came from 2003 version) that simplifies document management - like upload, delete, and copy items across different Document library, using drag-and-drop feature.

There is a document, called “Understanding and Troubleshooting the SharePoint Explorer View” that describes the most common issues of why Explorer View might not work correctly. Unfortunately, not all scenarios are covered there.

One of the issues is that you might find drag-and-drop disabled in Explorer View – you just can’t move files across. A bit nasty issue, because Ctrl-C/V still works :)

The solution is to check that you have sufficient permissions for the Temporary Internet Files folder for the BUILTIN\Network Service account. This account must have read and write access to this folder to successfully complete a drag-and-drop operation.

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SharePoint Tip #32. Do you know “which identity is used when you deploy WorkFlow from Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer”?

Michael — Sun, 03 May 2009 01:30:00 GMT

SharePoint provides you two approaches to design and deploy WorkFlows - via SharePoint Designer(SPD) and using Visual Studio. But you should be aware that deployment of WorkFlows has some differences in the security model that might cause you permissions issues.

SharePoint has its own security model to resolve the user's windows identity for all activities. It uses either IIS application pool user or the WSS Timer user for scheduled stimulations. Such behavior is the same for both Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer workflows, when actual windows identity doesn't matter.

There are two differences in the resolving SPUser name, when you deploy WF from Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer:

Visual Studio developed Workflows are deployed at the server level, run under the System Account. They do not require any permissions by the user/initiator of the workflow.Also these workflows are strong named and placed in the GAC. The actual SPUser user name come from SPWorkflowActivationProperties, which is System Account.
SharePoint Designer developed workflows (or usually called ‘Declarative’ workflows) have only the permissions that the initiator has. Any actions that the workflow needs to perform will inherit the permissions of the initiator and NOT the System account. The SPUser get from the WorkflowContext.Site object, that impersonated to the workflow's author, the user who started the workflow.

Sources: 1, 2

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SharePoint Tip #31. Do you know “the 12-hive folder structure details”?

Michael — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:30:00 GMT

SharePoint development relies on “12-hive” folder and each who writes code for SharePoint uses that folder intensively. SharePoint uses that folder to store features, log, content types are other stuff.

12 hive folder structure is not private and you can find full description all folders in google, the core folders you should know about are the following:

\ADMISAPI - The directory contain the web service used used by the SharePoint Central Administration and appears as a virtual directory.
\BIN - The directory contains all the core binary files, utilities that are used by Windows SharePoint Services. Your command line tools such as STSADM.EXE reside in this folder
\BIN\LCIDD - A directory will be created for each language will be created that contains language specific binary files.
\CONFIG - This directory contains a set of configuration, binary and resource files used by SharePoint. Some files are the default values which will be copied to web site instances.
\DATA - SharePoint uses this directory structure for the indexing services where content will be indexed.
\HCCab\LCID - This directory has a set of cab files containing manifest and content information used by the SharePoint help sytem
\HELP - The folder contains a compiled html help file (.chm) used by the configuration wizard.
\ISAPI - This directory contains all the standard Web Services for SharePoint and some additional DLL’s, resources and configuration files that the web services use. Every web application provisioned in SharePoint will have a virtual directory strong>/_vti/_bin that points to this directory, thus giving each web application it’s own set of web services.
\ISAPI\HELP - This directory contains all the help files used by SharePoint. The folder also contains LCID sub directories for each language installed thus globalising the help system.
\LOGS - This is the directory that you will visiting frequently whilst doing development and administration as it contains the log files of what SharePoint did and what errors occurred.
\RESOURCES - This directory contains the core.resx file used for creating language packs for SharePoint. If you are going to be localising your SharePoint sites with different languages and cultures, this is the folder to do it in.
\TEMPLATE - This directory structure contains the core web site functionality in SharePoint, that is the features, templates, configurations, resources of a web site. What is important to note about this directory structure is that the Virtual Path Provider hides and masks this directory structure, thus it appears under each web site, list in a completely different structure.

Source

Current "SharePoint Tips and Tricks" series has been moved to its own "SharePoint SandBox" site, to leave the place for others SharePoint posts on this blog

SharePoint Tip #29. Do you know “why to split large collaboration site between different site collections”?

Michael — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

SharePoint functionality is build on the top of SQL Server and has a tight cohesion with SQL Tables. Any user’s actions on the SharePoint site lead to the data entries manipulations across several tables.
Unfortunately, SharePoint implemented in the way to have few large tables rather then several small tables, and it stores a lot of contents in one single table. Such approach has a side-effect in table locks, which might hinder the performance of SharePoint sites if you are not aware about such table-centric design

With this in mind, consider splitting the content of large Collaboration site between different Site Collections. The reason for this that Site Collection is implemented as a huge single table.

Let’s imagine that you have site collection with 200 sub-sites, and some of user’s action force the transaction in SQL Server. Such action will lock Site Collection table, thus all 200 sites will be locked as well. In this case all users can’t interact with the SharePoint and will be waiting when that action competes.

There is no workaround for this, and the only way to track such issue is checking how your SharePoint sites performs – it case number of locks your will see noticeable performance degradation. Monitor SQL locks against SharePoint tables, to find such cases.

Update: consider splitting your site collection to be less then 100Gb-150Gb, otherwise you will have lots of locks in site collection table. The best tools to split site collection and move content across contentDB is "SharePoint Administration Toolkit"

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SharePoint Tip #28. Do you know “that Limited Access permission used to traverse access to items”?

Michael — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:04:00 GMT

SharePoint provides different levels of permissions, from the “Full Access” to “Limited Access”. Last one is not documented clearly and designed to cover some side-effects of item’s hierarchy.

Cite from “Permission levels and permissions” article:

“The Limited Access permission level is designed to be combined with fine-grained permissions to give users access to a specific list, document library, item, or document, without giving them access to the entire site. However, to access a list or library, for example, a user must have permission to open the parent Web site and read shared data such as the theme and navigation bars of the Web site. The Limited Access permission level cannot be customized or deleted”

"Limited Access" allows no direct access to site content at all, but is intended to allow users to traverse the site in order to access the items within it that they have explicit permissions to see.

For example, the user might have access only to one page of a site, but still need access to style sheets and other supporting site infrastructure in order to view it. In that case the user would need "Limited Access" permissions on the site and "Restricted Access" to the page.

Current "SharePoint Tips and Tricks" series has been moved to its own "SharePoint SandBox" site, to leave the place for others SharePoint posts on this blog

SharePoint Tip #27. Do you know “How to make Web Part zone WCAG compliant”?

Michael — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:07:49 GMT

SharePoint provides you a nice ASP.NET model of Web Parts functionality. But when we are building the internet faced public sites and trying to apply Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) on Web Part Zones it come back and bite us. The major problem is that Web Part zone is not WCAG compliant.

There are several ways to achieve desired behaviour

use “Accessibility Kit for SharePoint”. It seems to be very logical step to consider :) There are 25(!) different adapters, which have to address accessibility of Web Parts, but harsh reality is that none of them address Web Parts Zones compliance. Yep, it’s not a joke :) So, cross out this point
Use *custom* adapter on the top of WebPartZone to render content with <DIV> tag. Unfortunately SharePoint integrated a lot if JavaScripts to their web parts zones, that current approach breaks drag-n-drop functionality of Web Parts. (I reckon that’s why AKT didn’t address this issue)

In these days using custom adapters is the only way to achieve WCAG for Web Parts Zone. It won’t work for the intranet sites, due to broken drag-n-drop functionality, but for public sites it has not disadvantages, because you usually don’t allow users to change layout of public sites.

You can find custom adapter for the Web Parts zone there. Thanks to eigilm for this code.

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SharePoint Tip #26. Do you know “How to create Central Administration feature”?

Michael — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:33:39 GMT

Sometimes you are developing some serviced or administrative application for SharePoint and what to have feature on the level of Central Administration. Something like “SharePoint Administrative Toolkit”

To achieve such level activation you need to add additional attributes to your feauture definition

AutoActivateInCentralAdmin= “TRUE”
Hidden=”TRUE”

You can set the same settings programmatically, using SPFeatureDefinition.AutoActivateInCentralAdmin property

Consider using SPFeatureReceiver class to avoid feature being activated on other Web Applications, except the Central Administration (webApp.IsAdministrationWebApplication check in receiver)

Source

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SharePoint Tip #25. Do you know “How to calculate Content DB grow”?

Michael — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:57:35 GMT

SharePoint content databases grow very rapidly when used in document imaging system or in file share replacement scenarios. With this in mind it is important to consider growth and overhead factors when determining how much content will eventually be stored in a given content database.

Use the following formula to calculate Content DB size.

Low: 1.2 * [Raw Storage Size] = ContentDB Size
High: 1.5 * [Raw Storage Size] = ContentDB Size

If possible, separate each data file to exist on separate logical units consisting of unique physical disk spindles

Source

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