Using MSDN (and other) Forums for SharePoint Support

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I could write on at great length about MSDN forums, etiquette, naming conventions, search, etc.  I may do that, in fact.  I wanted to point out a small thing which may help people have a better overall experience.

I’ve lately been telling people that if you run into some kind of problem with your SharePoint environment, development project or other SharePoint related activity, post a question to the forums earlier in your action chain rather than later.  I know for myself that when I have a problem, a number of potential solutions present themselves right away.  I order these potential solutions in terms of likelihood, applicability and how easy they are to investigate.  I go through that list and by the time I’ve gotten to #10, I’m making registry changes to a key “/foo/bar/almostThere/isThisIt/noThisIsNotIt/iCantBelieveIAmDoingThis/finallyThere!” on the advice of a blog found on page 8 of a Google search.  When that doesn’t work, I finally post a question to MSDN (e.g. here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/threads).

I suggest that you reverse that approach.  Post the forums much earlier in your investigation because:

  • It’s free to you anyway.
  • There’s no guaranteed SLA (of which I’m aware, at least).
  • Therefore, it can take a long time for people to respond.
  • People often do respond eventually.
  • If you wait until 2 or 3 days after the problem first surfaced, you’re frantic for a response and forums are not a good place for emergency help (unless you’re lucky).

So, basically, it’s easy and free and you have a good shot at getting some kind of answer, but it will take a while to get that answer (again, unless you’re lucky).

I used to think that I should hold off on looking for community help because I don’t want to waste someone’s time asking for help when I could find it out myself.  Some forum moderators and active participants may feel that way, but I don’t (at least, I don’t feel that way any more).  I don’t see any downside.  The worst case is that you post a question and then answer it yourself some time later, possibly “wasting” some one’s time.  I don’t see a big risk in that and there’s value in the researching of questions like that in any event.

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Small Note About Microsoft Online Services Passwords and Administration

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I started to work with Microsoft’s Small Business Productivity Online Suite several months ago, but now I have some better reason to be using it. 

I’m still working my way around it, so I may be getting some of the terminology wrong, but basically there are two major interfaces: the administration center and the services themselves.

The system was telling me that I had to change my password, so I went ahead and did that.  That allowed me to proceed and work with the services part (SharePoint, email, and live meeting).  However, when I went to the administration screen, it wouldn’t let me in by telling me that it didn’t believe my password was correct.

The behavior was a little odd.  If I entered the password I *thought* it should be, it would blank out the userid and the password and tell me the password or userid was incorrect.  If I entered a blatantly wrong password, it would tell me the same, but keep the user ID field intact.

I’ve been playing around with this for a little while and finally called (yes, on a Sunday morning).  Incredibly, a fellow, Ben, answered the phone right away.  And, I didn’t have to enter a credit card.

Long story short, the administration center password uses different password rules than the services password.  Admin password must contain alpha, numeric and special characters.  When I changed my admin password the first time, I didn’t follow that rule (nor did it warn me!).  I was able to change it to a valid administration password and got back in.

If you experience that kind of problem in future, you know what worked for me and hopefully it will work for you.

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SharePoint as a Business Operating System

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Ever since I heard a quote, reportedly during a Q&A session with Steve Ballmer in March 2007, I’ve sort of been holding my breath for something to happen.  The quote was basically this: “SharePoint is an operating system for business applications.”  Knowing a fair bit about SharePoint and a middling bit about operating systems, I thought it was really apt.  I’m holding my breath, waiting for companies to really buy into that concept and start to build applications within the SharePoint “operating system.” 

I’ve devoted a lot of thought to this subject this year (going back to my 2009 predictions) and I’m going to speak on this at the May 2nd SharePoint Saturday event in Washington.

This is my presentation’s abstract, entitled “Using the SharePoint Platform to Build Vertical Business Applications”:

“Horizontal?” “Vertical?” What do these words mean in a SharePoint context?  SharePoint, as we often hear, is a “platform” for building applications. This fact is often lost on us since the so-called horizontal platform features, such as document management and search, are so easy and useful in and of themselves.  However, SharePoint is even more powerful and will return greater value when used to create vertical applications tailored to meet your business’ day to day requirements. This session describes how to assemble platform features into a verticalized solution using a real world business example – a sales quote management process and customer gateway. The speaker’s goal is to open your eyes to the possibilities of the SharePoint platform and to leverage its horizontal platform features to create specialized business solutions for your vertical organization.

If that subject doesn’t float your boat, there are a bunch of other good topics.  And DC is a great venue in and of itself to visit.

Registration opens this Thursday, 04/16.  Keep on top of the site and grab a seat before it’s too late 🙂

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Canadian Minutes

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This time last week, I was in Montreal, attending the highly recommended SharePoint Summit 2009.  I gave a 3.5 hour tutorial on installing and customizing SharePoint.  It was a scary subject on many levels.  I’m not really a SharePoint admin, but I know enough to give a tutorial on the subject. (Thankfully, Geoff Schaller from Software Objectives in Australia, among a few others, was in the crowd to answer some of the deeper questions [I don’t know what they put in the water down there, but we need some of it here in the U.S.]). 

But, back to many levels of scariness…  It had a lot of potential to be very boring.  I actually installed WSS and then upgraded it to MOSS.  In front of a room full of people.  Canadian poeple.  There were long 5 and 7 minute gaps where we were watching the installation process chug along.  I needed to fill that time with something useful and interesting.  I’m not sure I succeeded.

Finally, it was loooong.   Three and one half hours.  That’s a long presentation.   I made a little joke of it, saying “We have a long presentation ahead of us.  Three and one half hours.  That’s 210 minutes.  And I don’t even know how many minutes that is in Canadian.”

Everyone laughed and as a result, Montreal is officially on my Good Places list 🙂

Even if they hadn’t laughed at my joke, I would love Montreal.  I try very hard to be open minded and not take my cues from South Park, but I admit, to my chagrin, that I had no idea how great is the metropolis of Montreal.  I can’t wait to go back in a few months, when it’s a little warmer, to visit again.

On a sort of related note, I also sat through Erik Swenson’s first public presentation entitled “IA and Branding Process: Sketches to Wireframes to Hi-Fidelity Designs.” (Erik is my EMC colleague).  Check out the abstract here: http://www.sharepointsummit2009.com/conference_day2.htm.  I even recorded it for for him.  I tried several times for some “action shots” and zoomed in on him when he paused to drink some water.  I didn’t always succeed, but I tried 🙂

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Fun SharePoint SSO Fact of the Day

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I’ve been working with SharePoint SSO and learning as I go.  One way in which this works is that you tell SharePoint about external applications.  Users log into that application via some SharePoint function (e.g. iView web part).  The first time the user performs this action, it prompts them for the correct user id and password to use for that system.  It’s setting up a mapping between your SharePoint credentials and your credentials for that backend system.  Thereafter, the user won’t have to enter their ID when they hit up that system.

That part worked well for me.  However, it begs the question, “how does the user change that user id or password?”  The user might have made a mistake, or maybe you’re doing some testing in a dev environment and need to quickly switch between accounts.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that you can go into Central Administration and manage the user’s credentials:

Central Administration –> Operations –> Manage Single Sign-On –> Manage Account Information for an Enterprise Application Definition

From there, you can specify the external application (e.g. SAP) and the account you want to delete.  You can also change the mapping.

If you know how to allow end users to directly change their credentials, kindly post a comment 🙂

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Adventures With iView Web Parts

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I needed to do some minimal proving today that iView web parts can work in my client’s environment.  I’ve never worked with this slice of SharePoint before.

Microsoft has created a very high quality white paper on this subject.

The first obstacle I had to overcome was – where is the iView web part?  For some reason, my first thought was that I’d have to download it from a site somewhere, perhaps SAP’s site.  I had 1/2 convinced myself that iView web parts might even cost extra.  Of course, they are included with MOSS (I think Enterprise; that’s what I’m using here in any event).  I’ve seen the standard “add a web part” dialog box hundreds or more times and always glossed over it.  No more!

The next obstacle is that I can’t read instructions. 

I was using the web part and kept getting this annoying message:

No SAP servers are configured for this site.  Contact your administrator to configure trusted SAP servers.

The white paper clearly says to edit a configuration file located at file “<Drive Letter:>\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Config\TrustedSAPHosts.config”.  The first dozen times I looked at that, all I saw was “Program Files\…\Config” and I went straight away to the 12 hive.  Once I finally slowed down to read it, I realized my mistake and it was easy to fix. 

I continued on my merry way with SSO configuration.  It’s not all at clear to me if that worked, but that’s another story for another day.

Bottom line:

1. iView web parts are included out of the box with SharePoint (probably Enterprise).

2. The magic configuration file, “TrustedSAPHosts.config”, does not live in the 12 hive.

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MOSS User Profile as the Authority for User Language Preference

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On my current project, some of the users will travel around the world and when they arrive at different destinations, use whatever machine is handy at the time.   Those guest machines will be running Windows and installed and configured for the local locale.  (I’ve just realized that the guest machines may not have the right language packs… probably won’t, in fact… I’m parking that one for now).

SharePoint needs to provide a mechanism whereby the user can pick their preferred language and then have MOSS honor that language regardless of how the user accesses MOSS.  In other words, disregard whatever the browser tells IIS/MOSS and instead look up that preferred language and use it. 

We’re going to investigate two approaches:

  1. HTTP Handler: A custom HTTP handler installed on IIS will look up the user’s MOSS profile, figure out the preferred language and then switch the HTTP header around as needed before passing control to MOSS.
  2. global.asax: Modify global.asax to do the same thing.  We may modify something else, but the idea is that we find some place where we can insert our locale-switching logic. 

The other complicating factor is that we need to support 60k users, about 1,000 of which may be simultaneously accessing MOSS at peak load.

The HTTP handler seems pretty drastic, but possibly the best place to put the code since it’s at the IIS level and all-knowing.  It’s a good single point of work.

We’re leaning toward a global.asax type approach, mainly because we believe we’ll have more options for caching data at that point.

I’ll be blogging more on this subject as I learn more.

If you have know anything about this, please post a comment 🙂

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Capturing “mailto:” Metrics

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I’m on a project where we need to collect metrics around a function named "Share a Story."  The idea is very simple — if you’re looking at an interesting article on the intranet and want to share it with someone, click a link labeled "Share this story" email it to your buddy.

We played around with a custom form for this purpose, but in the end, common sense won the day and we just use the familiar <a href=mailto:…> technique.  (<a href mailto:…> is a surprisingly robust little bit of HTML; as a bonus, that link brings me back to my old UNIX man pages days; those were the days!).

This technique provides a great interface for end users since they get to use their familiar MS Outlook client (or whatever email client they have installed).

It makes things harder on us poor developer types since they client *also* wants to run a report in the future that shows how often users share stories and even which stories are shared most often.

We whiteboarded a few potential solutions.  My favorite is to carbon copy (CC) a SharePoint list.  That way, the end user still gets the outlook client while we get to capture the event because we’ll get a copy of the email ourselves.  There are some obvious drawbacks.  The main problem is that the user could simply blank out or otherwise mangle the CC address.  And, we need to manage that event library of emails.  We have a scheduled job on the white board responsible for that cleanup.

If you have some clever approach to solving this problem, please do tell.

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Great Tutorial and Walk-through using InfoPath and Workflow to Solve a Scheduling Problem

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These days, I’m perpetually playing catch-up with my blog reading and I just came across this post: http://sharepointsolutions.blogspot.com/2009/02/give-blood-to-your-workflow.html

It’s as solid and detailed a SharePoint Designer workflow tutorial (plus more!) that you’ll see anywhere on the interwebs.  I’d check it out, even if you’re a scarred SPD veteran. 

It’s a great SharePoint tutorial for both InfoPath and workflow.

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NYC SharePoint Developers Group – Deep Tech Talk

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A few weeks ago, I presented at the New York City SharePoint Developers Group meeting at the Microsoft office in Manhattan.  They meet every last Tuesday of the month.

I’ve been spending most of my time lately in my beloved New Jersey so I don’t get to go into the city as much as I like.  As a result, I think I made it to the first or second of this group’s meetings and then again at January’s meeting.  I missed all of the meetings in between (four or five of them probably).  It’s a new group.

I was really struck by the truly technical focus and high quality of the discussion, before, during and after my presentation.  We talked about a wide range of subjects relating to SharePoint and other Microsoft technology.

If you’re looking for a friendly place to get real techy, I highly recommend this group.

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