Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I was awarded as an SharePoint MVP by Microsoft in July 2010. I currently live in New York and am an Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc.. I co founded www.NothingButSharePoint.com with Mark Miller in 2010.

MVP AwardJeremy Thake Profile Photo

Whitepapers

NBSP

Check out my articles on NothingButSharePoint.com

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...


Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

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Archives

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Tag Cloud

Ajax, Apple, DotNetNuke, Enterprise Content Management, Error Resolution, Gadgets, General, Governance, Microsoft .Net Development, Mobile, SharePoint, Sharepoint Business Forms, Sharepoint Business Intelligence, Sharepoint Collaboration, SharePoint Development, Sharepoint Enterprise Content Management, Sharepoint Enterprise Search, Sharepoint Portal, US Migration, Web 2.0, Workflow
Jul 292009

SharePoint Application/Content Lifecyle Management anonymous survey

So I’ve repeatedly been questioned by various clients, user group members, SPDevWiki consumers and Twitter followers about this area and figured I’d gauge the landscape by doing a survey much like I did with the SharePoint Implementation one.

If you are a Microsoft Partner/Integrator please fill in this case study in the context of one of your clients. Some of the questions relate to size of the organisation for example.

The survey will take about 10 mins of your time.

image

The results will be published on the SharePointDevWIki just like last time with all of the questions graphs published. I will then do a more detailed analysis of this shortly afterwards.

I would appreciate any RT’ing on Twitter, blog posts on this to spread the word as this is important for the SharePoint community and will gauge your clients and own maturity in this space.

“Content management, or CM, is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. This digital information is often referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content. Digital content may take the form of text, such as documents, multimedia files, such as audio or video files, or any other file type which follows a content lifecycle which requires management.” WikiPedia

The SharePoint Platform is the next step forward in Content Management because it allows Organisations to reuse common framework patterns developed by Microsoft rather than developing their own. Never before have the boundaries of the ownership of elements been so hard to define and manage within an Organisation.

Applications have often been built on a bespoke basis, using ASP.NET and SQL technology stack, where the separation between the content and the system are easily defined by architectural layers and the roles that create them. SharePoint has blurred this separation by allowing the architecture of systems and management of content by Information Workers within the same interface without the need for Solution Architects and Developers. This can often be compared to the same issues raised by Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access solutions designed by Information Workers in the past.

“Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.” WikiPedia

Traditional Applications typically followed a more structured software engineering process called Application Lifecycle Management. With the power being given to the Information Worker by default with SharePoint, control of the Systems has left the hands of the IT team and moved into a more uncontrollable state of typically untrained individuals.

The main challenge of using the SharePoint Platform is often how an Organisation governs both Content Management and Application Lifecycle Management. The Microsoft MSDN web site has many disperse articles on this this topic and this survey will hope to identify common issues across implementations.

Published: 7/29/2009  2:31 AM | 0  Comments | 1  Links to this post

Jul 282009

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (28Jul)

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com]

Top This Week

#SP2010

Very quiet this week after people being shut down from talking about it in lead up to Las Vegas Conference ;-(

Tools

Solution Packages (WSP)

Development

WCM

Silverlight

Other

Published: 7/28/2009  2:42 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jul 212009

SharePoint 3.0/2007 PSconfig error: IIS not installed

So I’ve been using psconfig to build SharePoint Farms rather than using the SharePoint Configuration Wizard as I can automate it with scripts with environment variables. One thing I came across was that the Wizard does more validation for me. I was getting an error on step 2 in creating the Configuration Database:

07/22/2009 13:22:18  7  ERR          Task configdb has failed with an unknown exception

07/22/2009 13:22:18  7  ERR          Exception: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80005000): Unknown error (0x80005000)

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)

   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Exists(String path)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPIisWebSite.GetUnusedInstanceId(Int32 preferredInstanceId)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.CreateIisSettingsObject(String iisServerComment, Boolean secureSocketsLayer, String iisHostHeader, Int32 iisPort, Boolean iisAllowAnonymous, Boolean iisEnsureNTLM, DirectoryInfo iisRootDirectory, SPFarm farm)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.CreateDefaultInstance(SPWebService service, Guid id, String applicationPoolId, IdentityType identityType, String applicationPoolUsername, SecureString applicationPoolPassword, String iisServerComment, Boolean secureSocketsLayer, String iisHostHeader, Int32 iisPort, Boolean iisAllowAnonymous, DirectoryInfo iisRootDirectory, Uri defaultZoneUri, Boolean iisEnsureNTLM, Boolean createDatabase, String databaseServer, String databaseName, String databaseUsername, String databasePassword, SPSearchServiceInstance searchServiceInstance, Boolean isPaired, Boolean autoActivateFeatures)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAdministrationWebApplication.CreateDefaultInstance(SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, SPWebService adminService, IdentityType identityType, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.CreateAdministrationWebService(SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, IdentityType identityType, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.CreateBasicServices(SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, IdentityType identityType, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Create(SqlConnectionStringBuilder configurationDatabase, SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, IdentityType identityType, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Create(SqlConnectionStringBuilder configurationDatabase, SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword)

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.CreateOrConnectConfigDb()

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.Run()

   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()

07/22/2009 13:22:18  7  INF          Entering function Common.BuildExceptionMessage

But when I look at this, it looks like an IIS error as it’s calling 'GetUnusedInstanceId’ within ‘SPIisWebSite’ class.

The command line error displayed:

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2005. All rights reserved.ion 12.0.6413.1000

Performing configuration task 1 of 3
Initializing SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration...

Successfully initialized the SharePoint Products and Technologies configuration.

Performing configuration task 2 of 3
Creating the configuration database...

Failed to create the configuration database.

An exception of type System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Unknown
error (0x80005000)

Total number of configuration settings run: 2
Total number of successful configuration settings: 1
Total number of unsuccessful configuration settings: 1
Successfully stopped the configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies.
Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed.  Configuration must be performed before you use SharePoint
Products and Technologies.  For further details, see the diagnostic log located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Micros
oft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\PSCDiagnostics_7_22_2009_13_22_0_726_1487912888.log and the application event l
og.

When I run this via the SharePoint Configuration Wizard I get the same ‘Unknown Error’ in the logs

07/22/2009 13:25:21  1  INF                              Leaving function Common.BuildExceptionInformation
07/22/2009 13:25:21  1  ERR                              An exception of type System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Unknown error (0x80005000)
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80005000): Unknown error (0x80005000)
   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)
   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()
   at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.get_SchemaClassName()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PreRequisiteChecks.IsRightVersionOfIis(Int32& current, Int32& minimumAllowed)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.PreRequisiteChecks.IsIisInstalled()
07/22/2009 13:25:21  1  INF                            Leaving function PreRequisiteChecks.IsIisInstalled

Basically telling me that it is an Unknown error in logs too…but in Wizard UI I get:

image

It turns out that the IIS install didn’t work correctly (I’ve got the Admin Console up and all seems fine) and the Wizard happily told me so. Rather than just throwing a “Unknown error” in psconfig command line. Just thought I’d blog this if this trips anyone else up. Now time to go uninstall IIS7 and reinstall it…nope actually…it’s a component called ‘IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility’ of IIS7 that needs ticking (which can’t be ticked on initial ‘Add Feature’). Thanks to William Powell for this!

Published: 7/21/2009  8:41 PM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jul 212009

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (21Jul)

[Cross posted on SharePointDevWiki.com]

No surprises that #SP2010 is the big hitter again this week. Also seems everyone is quiet…no doubt a lot of the MVPs are quietly off playing with SharePoint 2010 and it’ll be nuts once it goes public after conference…I’m sure they are all drafting lots of posts to pull traffic to their blogs ;-)

Important

#SP2010

Development

Architecture

WCM

Presentations

This area just highligts some of the great presentations I’ve found this week

Others

 

Published: 7/21/2009  3:40 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jul 152009

Is VSeWSS 1.3 CTP ever coming out of CTP?

So with the message from Paul Andrew on the Sneak Peek webcast to start using VSeWSS now so that you will be familiar with Visual Studio 2010 tools, I started to take a look at VSeWSS 1.3 CTP (March not Feb). It is truly painful to work with compared to WSPBuilder and STSDev. The community has been maintaining this page on the comparison between the tools and I’ve been adding a few extra bits today on simple things like creating features and feature receivers using it.

Don’t write off 2007 guys

I suspect with VS2010 supporting SharePoint 2010 we may have to wait for that to be released. If Visual Studio 2010 is anything like SharePoint Designer 2010 with it not being backward compatible with SharePoint 2007, then we will still require stronger tools for 2007.

One other thing I'd like to point out is that there are still SharePoint 2003 servers around, and there will be SharePoint 2007 servers around for a long time before they move up to SharePoint 2010! Mainly because the developer toolset has never been that great and people have hacked and slashed at servers and at Web UI customisations instead. This has lead to fear in updating to a service pack…let alone a full release to SharePoint 2010!

Thank you Community

All I can say is thank you to the awesome SharePoint community…and especially thanks to Carsten Keutmann for WSPBuilder! And the surveys don’t lie in terms of the percentage of people using WSPBuilder (55%) over VSeWSS (10%).
image

Voice your concerns!

The question has been posed on the forum…please add your support to this!

Published: 7/15/2009  9:15 PM | 1  Comment | 0  Links to this post

Jul 142009

SharePoint Development Weekly Roundup (14Jul)

[Cross Posted on: SharePointDevWiki.com]

Ok, so I’ve managed to start breathing again over the excitement of the Sneak Peak of SharePoint 2010…but also of being on the Office 2010 Technical Preview too (more to come!).

SharePoint 2010

Technical Preview

SharePoint 2007

Environment

Deployment Governance

Data

Object Model

Client Side

Security

Webcasts

Interop

Other

Published: 7/14/2009  2:53 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jul 132009

Oh good they got rid of the SharePoint 2007 Pie…oh crap they replaced it with a SharePoint 2010 Pizza

This is not just a “SharePoint Designer free” blog spam post…so please read on ;-)

First impressions of the new SharePoint 2010 sneak peak…and the new Overview Video by Tom Rizzo.

“Value Pillars”

  • Connect and Empower People
    Heavily pushing on multiple devices: multiple Browers (IE, Safari, Firefox); mobile
  • Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure
    One platform with multiple solutions
  • Rapidly Respond to Business Needs
    Quickly skin SharePoint and “mash it up”…see my latest post on ASP.NET devs leveraging SharePoint

I agree with these messages as the last two are what I push daily for compelling reasons for SharePoint. The first one around multiple devices will obviously come in 2010 with more support.

Pie

image image

  I think these are even less intuitive than the last 6, see my run down of existing Pie here:

  • Sites
    Share information seamlessly and securely with employees, partners & customers
  • Communities
    Empower people to work together in new ways
  • Content
    Manage content from creation to disposal
  • Search
    Find people and information anywhere
  • Insights
    Make informed business decisions
  • Composites
    Rapidly create dynamic business solutions

At least the SharePoint Pizza is directed at functionality rather than trying to make it applicable to technical features like the Pie.

Editions

At least you could talk to the editions WSS, Standard and Enterprise with the Pie, but you can’t with the Pizza. Although I think I read somewhere they’ll just be WSS and MOSS. So we’ll see.

Bite off what you can chew

I also think it is harder now to encourage people to bite off a little bit at a time…this just highlights how huge the platform is. Before I used to say, well have a project to deploy the base platform, then: “attack Search first”, or “create a portal” or “create a document management system (ECM)”. You could do these a lot easier without much overlap from other pieces of the pie. It certainly had it’s flaws though as WCM wasn’t mentioned and that was seen as a separate component. WIth the pizza, they’ve come at it with a completely different approach and it’ll be interesting to see how this changes pitching SharePoint.

Nicest new features in my opinion

  • Live Editing of text on page like Office 2007
  • Upload images as content is seamless
  • Browser Support for Firefox and Safari
  • Visio web integration
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 look and feel
  • Nicer BDC integration
Published: 7/13/2009  7:25 PM | 1  Comment | 0  Links to this post

Jul 132009

Developer Changes in SharePoint 2010

image Paul Andrew talks about the new Developer functionality in SharePoint 2010 in a webcast on the new SharePoint 2010 site. The is also a download of 2010  (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation too.

The webcast goes through and shows the new SharePoint integration with Visual Studio 2010 which I’m hoping will be available in the next public beta as it got missed out of the first. Paul also seems to concentrate along time on the BDC stuff which I believe is because it’s not heavily been used as it’s always been too hard.

They push a few things:

  • Only use WSPs! yes really!
  • Use VSeWSS…”to get used to VS2010 integration”…sorry boys WSPBuilder is a gonna in their eyes
  • Go 64bit!…just use Hyper-V or VMWare as Virtual PC won’t play

It looks like the developer product team have listened hard to the community (see the Ultimate SharePoint Developer Tool), here are the things mentioned in the webcast:

  • Developer Dashboard
     image
  • New SharePoint User Interface
    image 

  • New SharePoint Ribbon

    image imageimage
  • List Edit screens

image 

  • List View screens
    image
  • Editing page more AJAX’y
    image
  • Use of AJAX MOdal Dialogs
    image 
  • LINQ2SharePoint
    image
  • Deployment Configurations – more configurable deployment steps within Visual Studio
    image
  • Nicer way to customise manifest that are autogened
    image image 
  • Lots more support in Visual Studio
    image
  • image
  • Visual Design of Web Parts – hooo rah!
    image
  • Rich Platform Services
    • Silverlight Web Parts
      Paul demos the Silverlight Web Parts and says “I won’t do much with design”…it does annoy me to be honest…he could have shown off some designer supplying the design up front and him just doing development…if it is that easy…they should promote it. I’m sure there’s Silverlight guys hanging around in the coffee rooms all the time!
      image
    • Drag and drop deployment
      Paul also demoed dragging and dropping which looked nice…hope it is cross browser compatible.
    • CAML
      So he demos using CAML to data…looks like no clever bits around CamlQuery sighimage
    • Use of Generics
      image
    • Better support for Business Connectivity Services Entities(formally called BDC) with a new a BDC Explorer and includes supported Updates now! Be interested to see what Lightning Tools BDC MetaMan goes, suspect that’s why they’ve gone with web version to differentiate themselves
      imageimage

Some possible bad things:

  • Paul’s demos were on a server machine – so looks like no client side development still
  • Still following VSeWSS paradigm where it doesn’t represent the 12 hive…so dumbs it down for developers. This will make it hard for new devs to debug stuff as it’s hiding too much that’s happening under the hood. Be interesting to see how many continue to use WSPBuilder…
    image
Published: 7/13/2009  6:28 PM | 2  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jul 132009

#SharePoint 2007 SP2 Preupgradecheck rocks the earth – use it now for health check!

At @JoelOleson’s presentation on Friday, he highlighted the features available in preupgradecheck. For a developer/administrator this is awesome as it’ll highlight lots of issues that are good to know now, regardless of SharePoint 2010 next year!

Feature References

One of the big ones is highlighting the Features that are not installed in a farm but referenced somewhere! The below log highlights four features in a farm I picked at random that are missing from the farm! The htm report below highlights this:

Information Only : Feature Information

The following features are either installed or referenced by the content

  • Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [75a0fea7-12fe-4cad-a1b2-525fa776c07e], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]
  • Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [61dbd1f5-45bc-497b-878c-79d0ac6bf12a], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]
  • Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [d60b36f1-e8c5-40ed-884b-68f73a2709ce], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]
  • Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [5e12b147-0098-4975-835e-46ce01bf44e3], Reference count = [2], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

    • You can see that they are all scoped at SPWeb and it’ll even tell you what Guids they are.

    You can also look at the xml report and get more details:

    [FeatureInfo] [DEBUG] [13/07/2009 8:30:57 PM]: Found 1 webs using missing feature definition d60b36f1-e8c5-40ed-884b-68f73a2709ce in content database server01_SPSiteContent_Intranet.

    This targets the exact Content Database where it has been referenced giving you more detail.

    Server Farm differences

    Another great thing is that you can run this with the ‘-localonly’ attribute in stsadm on each server in your farm. Then simply do a beyond compare to see if there are any differences between the reports. This should give you a bit more confidence on the health of your server.

    Published: 7/13/2009  4:14 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

    Jul 102009

    Joel Oleson visits Perth

    It was great to finally meet @JoelOleson again and I really appreciate he making the effort to fly to Perth to present at the SharePoint User Group.

    It was really surreal actually, much like meeting the Brisbane crew a few weeks ago. You speak to these guys on Twitter, read their blogs, add them as a friend on Facebook and yet you still are not sure what to expect when you meet them in person! It’s another joy of being part of such a great community and I look forward to meeting more of the community in coming years!

    After the event, myself @PaulCulmsee and @MoSSums took Joel to Fremantle to sample the food at Little Creatures and then onto the Fremantle markets (below).

    IMG_3827

    Then, on the way back to the city we took him to Cottesloe beach. Not the warmest place to be in our winter here in Western Australia, but it didn’t seem to matter to Joel in his SharePoint Best Practices polo shirt whilst the rest of us Aussies froze to death wrapped up in our winter gear! Something to do with coming from Idaho apparently ;-) Not quite sure what he found down there…but he seemed pretty excited by it all and dipping his hands in the freezing cold Indian Ocean!

    IMG_3841

    I didn’t have the time to write an IBIS map to get round this “Wicked Problem” of @PaulCulmsee’s radically untidy car, but figured I’d post the photo anyway just for laughs ;-)

    IMG_3825

    Published: 7/10/2009  9:26 PM | 2  Comments | 0  Links to this post

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