Composite Applications, Events, MOSS 2007, WSS V3, PowerShell, SharePoint Designer 2007, Workflow, General, Stuff, Check This Out!, Dear Product Team..., Fun and Games, TweakSP, Silverlight, Me, Mobile, InfoPath 2007, Site Definitions, Windows 7, SharePoint 2010 |
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12/18/2009I ran into an interesting issue this morning that had me scratching my head. Users were reporting that they could not publish multiple files using Manage Content and Structure on a MOSS publishing site. I KNEW I had seen the publish option in the actions menu so I wasn’t sure what was going on. Here’s what I found out: Option 1 – NO PUBLISHING OPTION From Site Actions, choose “View Reports,” then select “All Draft Documents.” 
This takes you in to the Manage Content and Structure tool but as you can see, you do NOT get the option to publish pages from here: 
Option 2 – Publishing Option From Site Actions, choose “Manage Content and Structure:” 
Click on the library you want to manage (Pages in this case): 
From the Actions dropdown, notice that you have the publishing option (it is disabled in the screenshot because I have not selected any files yet): 
What is interesting is that from this view you still have the option to pull up the “All Draft Documents" view – but this time you have access to the Publish action: 
So – in summary, even though both commands use the Manage Content and Structure screen, you will get slightly different functionality based on how you got there. 11/11/2009We tried something a little different at this month’s #MNSPUG meeting. Normally we meet on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from 9am until 11ish. With all of the excitement around SharePoint 2010, we decided to (as my buddy Becky used to say) go big or go home :) So today we have been presenting sessions ALL DAY on SharePoint 2010. This morning, Wes and I presented a 3 hour tour of the new SharePoint 2010 wheel: 
We were able to get a handful of demos going and got lots of GREAT questions. People are definitely excited about SharePoint 2010! After that, Wes and Brian gave a quick overview of how to prep for 2010. Then we split the room and we have Phil and Veasnar presenting a development overview while Nick Stillings presented on Office 2010 Client integration with SharePoint 2010. Next we have a session scheduled for Access Services and another scheduled for a SharePoint 2010 Administration overview. Once we’re done with that we’ll be heading over to Majors in Bloomington for a SharePint! Thanks to all that joined us in person today and online! Wait – you didn’t know you could attend remotely? Today’s Event Announcement: http://www.sharepointmn.com/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=93 Main page for the MNSPUG: http://www.sharepointmn.com Resources from ALL of our previous 59 monthly user group sessions available here: http://www.sharepointmn.com/Pages/Presentations.aspx Recorded sessions should appear a few days after each session! See something you like? Something you don’t? Let us know! info at sharepointmn.com Hope to see you next month! 11/2/2009Windows 7 has a new option to boot from a .vhd. I played around with that a little last week and here’s what I learned: Why: First of all, why would you want to boot from a VHD? It is obviously only an option when you want to run a virtual environment locally so the only times it would make sense is if it gave you something that Microsoft’s Virtual PC doesn’t. The two scenarios I can up with were: - When you need 64-bit virtualization – Microsoft’s Virtual PC doesn’t support it today (and Hyper-V isn’t meant to run on laptops AND requires Windows Server 2008)
- When you need access to all of your machine’s RAM or hardware
How: Setting up a VHD doesn’t have to be that hard. The easiest option is to build a virtual machine in a Hyper-V environment and then copy the .vhd to your hard drive. You can also build your VHD on your system but it involves using the ImageX utility and extracting a WIM to your vhd. Check with Phil Jirsa for more on that. Once you have your .vhd, you need to modify the boot menu for Windows to support loading the .vhd. In the good old days (pre-Vista?) you could just modify a .ini file for this. Now days you have to use a tool called bcdedit. The commands aren’t too tough for creating a new boot option though: - C:\>bcdedit /copy {current} /d "My New VHD Description"
- C:\>bcdedit /set <guid> device vhd=[driveletter:]\<directory>\<vhd filename>
- C:\>bcdedit /set <guid> osdevice vhd=[driverletter:]\<directory>\<vhd filename>
- C:\>bcdedit /set <guid> detecthal on
From there you can reboot and see your new boot option allowing you to boot into your .vhd! Another great thing is that by getting access to your system’s hardware, you’re also able to see your hard drive from your bootable vhd. That allows you to share files between your “host” and your vhd (think email settings, documents, etc). More info: http://edge.technet.com/Media/Windows-7-Boot-from-VHD/ 7/10/2009No excuses. Here’s what I’ve been up to / looking at: - Minnesota SharePoint User Group – our most recent meeting was our first time broadcasting via Live Meeting (as well as having our normal live and participating audience). You can watch the video and view the resources from all of our 5+ years of MNSPUGs here: http://www.SharePointMN.com
- Battlefield 1943 just came out for the XBOX 360. Unfortunately, Electronic Arts believes that capacity planning is more of an art than a science so they were WOEFULLY unprepared for the launch of the online-only game. As such, I’ve spent time that was allocated for Battlefield playing Halo 3 instead. Thanks again, EA.... (btw, no link is provided because if you go buy the game I’ll NEVER get in!)
- SharePoint 2010. First I’d like it to be known that I know almost NOTHING about SharePoint 2010. That said, it sounds like we’ll be getting our first taste of information on the next version of our favorite collaboration tool in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the product page for updates: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com (a blog post with early links was available for a few hours yesterday but has been removed. On it were links to FAQs, Videos, etc only the links didn’t work. Hopefully they’ll be back up after they’ve been officially announced)
- SharePoint Conference 2009. Yes! I’ll be going! Sounds like this will still be THE place to see SharePoint 2010 in action. More here: http://www.mssharepointconference.com
- Twin Cities SharePoint Camp – coming this September 19th: www.twincitiessharepointcamp.com Be ye warned, the camp is happening on International talk like a pirate day.
4/15/2009While doing the initial R&D for blocking SharePoint Designer access, Brian and I discovered something else that is kind of fun. Since we now know that you can block SPD access by setting a value in an SPWeb’s PropertyBag, and we also know how to modify PropertyBag variables in SPD, the next logical step is to use SharePoint Designer to DISABLE access to a web using SharePoint Designer.
* Again, this is just for fun. Once you disable access via SPD you obviously can’t get in and undo your change. There also isn’t an out of the box way to modify PropertyBag values through SharePoint’s Web UI so you’d be stuck having to use PowerShell or some other method to undo this silly change. *
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Open your Web in SharePoint Designer
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Choose Site Settings from the Site menu:  -
On the Parameters tab, add a new parameter named “vti_disablewebdesignfeatures2” with a value of “wdfopensite”.  -
Close SharePoint Designer (you must close all the way out, the Open Service method’s response is cached by SPD and won’t change until you come restart SPD)
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Attempt to open the site again:  And there you have it! :-) 4/14/2009Late last week Brian Caauwe and I spent some time looking into how to lock down SharePoint Designer access. One of the first options that is available is to modify a Site Definition’s ONET.xml file. All of the instructions are available here (thanks to the SharePoint Designer Team!) so I’m not going to walk through each step – the main thing to note is that we’re updating the Project element to include a new attribute, “DisableWebDesignFeatures” which you can see here: 
Once the new attribute is in place (and IIS is reset), any attempt to open the site in SharePoint Designer gives you a very friendly error message: 
What is great is that if you update the Site Definition and remove the “DisableWebDesignFeatures” attribute (and reset IIS), the site will open in SharePoint Designer just fine. I did not think that was the case so I was pretty interested to see what exactly was going on behind the scenes. So how does SharePoint Designer know when it is ok to open? To find that answer we can turn to our best friend, Fiddler. By using Fiddler while we attempt to open a site with SharePoint Designer, we can see that a number of RPC calls are made: 
The third RPC call (the one to author.dll) is the one we’re most interested in: it calls the Open Service FPRPC method. The response we get is almost 3kb of ALMOST-html garble (thanks again, Vermeer). Hidden in the response is a familiar attribute with a new name – vti_disablewebdesignfeatures2 with a value of wdfopensite: 
If we were to remove the attribute from our ONET.xml file and then reset IIS, the attribute also goes away from our Open Service request. Here’s where Brian stepped in with the best idea ever – can we possibly set the same variable in an SPWeb’s PropertyBag? I thought he was crazy but, as is frequently the case when I question Caauwe, I was wrong! First I opened up PowerShell and looked at the properties stored in an SPWeb’s PropertyBag: 
From there I added a new property matching the existing “vti_” pattern, using the property name we found in the Open Service method’s response: 
and now, without an IIS reset, I get our friendly error message stating that access via SharePoint Designer has been disabled: 
Brian and I used this new found knowledge to create a new release for the NoSPD Codeplex project that wraps this functionality into a feature. Check it out here! 4/13/2009It has been a busy month but I’ve also changed where I spend my time lately... late last year, instead of focusing my attention on the blogosphere I changed my focus to Facebook. I was really enjoying the number of leads I got on breaking SharePoint news just from Facebook so I stopped reading (and then, writing blogs). Then... Facebook changed their interface and it made it easy for me to be coerced into trying Twitter (via TweetDeck). Since then, I’ve been hooked! If there is a blog I need to read, someone tweets it… otherwise, it must not be important, right? WRONG. I’ve learned a lot about twitter over the last month or so but the biggest thing is that not all blogs of value get mentioned on Twitter and there is a lot of required reading that I’ve been missing out on. That said, what if everyone else is doing the same thing and relying on Twitter for all the goods? The answer is that I have to start sharing my time between the blogosphere and the many social channels available to me again. I also need to start BLOGGING again! I have lots to say and I just can’t do it in 140 or less! Look for more blog posts soon and if you haven’t heard from me on here for a few days, please hop on Twitter and tell me to get back to work writing posts!! It has been a crazy month! Way back on the 2nd it was officially announced that SharePoint Designer was going to be free. Since then, things haven’t really slowed down! Last week I was able to speak after the Minnesota SharePoint User Group, giving a quick “what you need to know now that SPD is free” talk. Before that talk I really wanted to turn on a website for an idea I had: http://www.LearnSPD.com. I worked with my buddy Kris (of http://www.BrandingSharePoint.com fame) to get a design put together and some initial content out there. Now that the base is out there, we plan to do some FREE webcasts on SharePoint Designer and then make them available on the site later this month! Outside of my http://www.LearnSPD.com efforts, I also joined the NoSPD codeplex project at http://NoSPD.codeplex.com. The goal of the project is to provide easy ways for administrators to disable users’ access to SharePoint Designer until proper governance can be put into place. After a little R&D with my coworker Brian, we came up with an alternative solution to the SharePoint Designer dilemma (more details here). We added a new release to the solution (available here) and are in talks on how to take the project to the next level! Next on my list? MOSS Camp, St. Louis on the 18th! I’ll be presenting a session on the Data Form Web Part! I’m really looking forward to it – I have presented once at the St. Louis SharePoint User Group and I’m looking forward to another chance to meet up with the SharePoint St. Louis crowd :) Then it is back home for the Minneapolis Office Developer Interest Group (MODIG) on the 28th! I’ll be presenting on how to build custom actions and conditions for use with SharePoint Designer! Then, with only two days left, how busy could it possibly be, right? Well... :) I’ll actually be helping to host two nights of webcasts – SIX webcasts in all for http://www.LearnSPD.com! LOTS going on for sure, but I’m loving every bit of SharePoint Designer April. By the way, in case you’re wondering... May = Silverlight Month! :) |
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