In SharePoint 2007 we had a problem when we wanted to create calculated columns using either the [Today] or [Me], respectively giving the current date and the current user. If you search on the web, a lot of pages are describing and talking about the workaround. The workaround is to create a "Today" or a "Me" column with the standard and default settings, writing the formula and then, finally, to delete the created columns.
I hoped that in SharePoint 2010, this was fixed. But when I created my first calculated column based on dates, here is what I got :
Exactly the same error we have in SharePoint 2007.
And.....exactly the same workaround. So, is it not considered as a bug or a problem for Microsoft ? Sure, there is a workaround, but it is quite annoying to create columns just to delete them right after. And, last but not least, when the formula has to be udpated, ensure that these columns are present otherwise, it will be impossible to save the new formula.
UPDATE
I got a correction from Ryan (see comment below) and indeed, the what-was-called-so-far-a-workaround in many pages on the web (and here also  ) is in fact not a viable solution. In fact, the column using this "trick" will only be updated and calculated when the item is updated. To see the confirmation of this, create a column with a formula like this : =IF([StartDate]>[Today],"Future","Started") with StartDate being a manually-set date and wait for that StartDate to be reached. If the item is not updated, the column will keep the "Future" label.
Anyway, the fact that it is not possible to have such functionality in SP2010 is a bit pity.
Thanks to Ryan for the correction
When you implement a solution, you test it in different situation and depending on the results, of course, you correct the little mistakes that may be present. What I found very interesting so far in software development is the way to reproduce a behaviour following a given set of steps. For the same steps, you get the same result. That is also a way to qualify a bug or a defect, most of the times.
So, what is more frustrating when the problem or the bug happens randomly ?
However, that is what happened recently on a SharePoint 2007 web site during a roll-out.
The symptoms ?
Having activated the anonymous access, pages prompted the users for credentials and when no credentials were entered, a simple message "401 Unauthorized" was displayed. Now, on that same page, simply pressing F5 to refresh was loading and displaying the page correctly.
Checks ?
Checked that all the resources were accessible by anonymous users, being CSS, images, documents, etc. Some images were referenced using absolute URLs, but apart from that, nothing special.
Checked in the Windows Event Log, absolutely nothing related to this problem.
Checked the ULS, crawled megs of text files, several "excessive number of SPRequest" messages were present, but they were here before the roll-out as well. The only clue was some "Access denied" messages, but, no reference to a resource or no stack trace.
Checked also the web.config, everything was ok. And anyway, this is normally handled by SharePoint.
Checked the IIS Directory Security permissions, verifying the identity of the user used by the application pool, but here again, everything was normal.
Custom code doing a forbidden action ? After a complete removal of the three custom controls, the problem persisted, so, it was not that.
After hours and hours of investigation, I found one thing. The Master Page and Page Layouts gallery was not accessible anonymously, so I fixed this first, but still, the 401 issue was still here. Being in the library I decided to check the content of the master pages and the page layouts and found couple of "__designer" tags referencing resources. We indeed used the SharePoint Designer to apply some changes, but never had this problem before. But, to be sure and to definitely clean these files, every "__designer" tags have been removed and pages provisionned again.
The result ?
Everything was fine. So, for some reasons, the tags added by SharePoint Designer seem to cause access issues, but not all the times.
In this particular case, what was really annoying is that nothing can lead you to the solution or where the problem is located. A lot of people wrote about 401 random issues, caused by either a hotfix applied here or load-balancer problems there, but mine was still another one.
So, before spending hours or days looking for useless (in that specific situation) logs, check your master page or your page layouts and remove "__designer" tags. Check also that they are accessible anonymously.
The first part of this article focused on how to create a taxonomy with SharePoint 2010. This one goes a bit beyond and describes how to use the defined taxonomy
The 8th of May, Microsoft released a set of two Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machines with the 2010 wave of Office products. It includes the following software :
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- SQL Server 2008 R2
- Office Communication Server 2007 R2
- Visual Studio 2010
- SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition
- Office Web Applications
- FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
- Project Server 2010
- Office Professional Plus 2010
- Visio 2010
- Project 2010
- Office Communicator 2007 R2
To download and for the instructions, it is here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=751fa0d1-356c-4002-9c60-d539896c66ce&displaylang=en
Designing a SharePoint 2010 workflow in Visio 2010 is just great. You can put the shapes on the design surface, draw the transitions, and it is really interesting for people that need visualization of their workflows. Unfortunately, this is where it stops. Because there is no direct link between Visio and SharePoint (meaning that no information from SharePoint comes to Visio), it is not possible to set the conditions or roles or users to the shapes. In other words, you can put a decision shape, but you cannot set the condition itself.
This is why the Visio file has to be exported into a .vwi (Visio Workflow Interchange) and then imported into SharePoint Designer 2010. After that, you have to set the conditions and all the parameters to the different shapes that are part of the workflow. Ok, so far, so good. But, how can I take my workflow and import it somewhere else ? How could I reuse the workflow with the parameters ?
When you export a workflow from SPD, you cannot import it, even if it is not in the same site. The message specifies that “This workflow cannot be imported because it was created in SharePoint Designer for a different site, or the original workflow has been moved or deleted. To move a workflow between sites, use Save as Template (.wsp file) instead of a Visio workflow drawing.
I tried to see what is inside a .vwi file to check what was different between the original .vwi file and the one exported by SPD. To do this, it is possible to rename the .vwi file into .zip and to look inside the compressed folder. The main difference is that an additional file has been generated, named “workflow.xoml.rules”. Deleting this file will make this file importable again and, surprisingly, all the settings that were set in the SPD are still there.
Ok, I did it several times, in the same environment (AD), but I can imagine that it is not a “supported” way to move workflows, knowing that exporting a .wsp and deploying it is the recommended way…
Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome on stage Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 !!!
Since today, both products are available for MSDN subscribers, earlier than I expected to say the truth. At the time I am writing this post, I already started the download
Friday last week, the SharePoint Team announced a major milestone in the SharePoint 2010 release process. One day after the TechDays in Geneva, Microsoft has frozen the code of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, meaning that it gives a go to release the software to the vendors.
Shortly, the bits should be available on MSDN (probably by the end of this week), but the official launch will take place the 12th of May.
Today, I had a problem I never had before with SharePoint 2010, being with the Beta or even the RC.
My Managed Metadata Server was running and a proxy created. To that proxy, I connected a site and everything seemed to work correctly. Until I created a site column of type Managed Metadata. In the place where normally you can select the term store to use for the column, there was a message saying "The required feature is not enabled for this column type", which was quite strange as I checked several times and all the needed features were activated.
As most of the times, my friend google helped me. I found this post, not that new so it means that it is a know problem, not only on the RC.
Basically, according to this post, you have to activate a feature that has the ID 73EF14B1-13A9-416B-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C. But this feature is not present in the feature list from the user interface, so you have to run the stsadm command for your site.
This solved the problem, but I really wonder why it happened only this time....
The 17th Swiss SharePoint Club meeting took place yesterday the 24th of March at the HEIG-Vd. 5 sessions were in the agenda :
Customer experience at Cotecna : Intranet Setup with SharePoint 2007
Product Overview by Ventek International : Enterprise Search with FAST ESP Sharepoint 2010
Technology Overview by McNext : Migration path(es) from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
Customer experience at HEIG-Vd : SharePoint Online, Master thesis initiatives – SharePoint Competency Center
Product Overview by SQLi : SharePoint workflows with Nintex
This first article of a series of 3 blog post demonstrates how to use the term store of SharePoint 2010. It will address the following points :
Administration of term store
Creating a term group
Creating a term set
Synonyms
Terms Management
The next Swiss SharePoint Club event will take place at the HEIG-Vd in Yverdon.
In the agenda, some customer experience at Cotecna, a presentation of the FAST ESP SharePoint 2010 and also a presentation on the migration from SP2007 to SP2010.
The complete agenda is available on the club sps web site.
After my Wifi access problem, earlier in the day, I faced another little problem when I wanted to save a document from Office Word 2010 into a SharePoint 2010 document library :
 (click for a larger view)
Apparently, this is not an error displayed only in this situation and it seems occuring independantly from the Office version or even the SharePoint version. In fact, it is also related to the way Windows Server 2008 R2 works locally. Remember, I am using my server as a workstation.
The only thing that has to be done is to add the "Desktop Experience" feature and it will work well.
Notice also that before installing this feature, I was also unable to create a "New Document" from a document library, the template was simply not downloaded to the Office client. This also has been fixed by the "Desktop Experience" feature
When I started, few days ago, to prepare a demo about SharePoint 2010 metadata management, I would not have thought it would be that difficult to setup just the machine.
To be able to take the demo with me, I installed a laptop with Windows Server 2008 R2 and the necessary stuff and problems occured when I came nomad with it, using the wireless. Something that is not really rocket science, after all. The problem was that it was completely unable to connect any wireless network
What has to be known, nevertheless, is that on a Windows Server 2008 server box freshly installed, almost nothing is installed. Therefore, to enable to discovery and then to connect on an available WiFi, you have to add the "Wireless LAN Service" feature as it is showed in the picture below :
 (Click the picture for a larger view)
So, after few minutes of installation, I was finally able to connect on the net.
4 new certifications about SharePoint 2010 will come in June this year, completing the Microsoft offer and to align the cursus and certification path with the release of SP 2010.
Two of them will be for IT Professionals and related to the configuration and administration of the solution :
TS - Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
PRO - SharePoint 2010, Administrator
The two others will be for the developers :
TS - Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development
PRO - Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications
For those people that want to evaluate and try Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, Microsoft released last week the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine.
It seems to be ready for Hyper-V and it encompasses in fact two virtual machines :
1.- A domain controller server with SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and the Office Suite 2010
2.- A joined Windows Server 2008
As everything has a price, the download weight 13.5GB
Title : Essential SharePoint 2007 - Delivering High-Impact Collaboration
Authors : Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, Susan Hanley
Summary :
Deploying SharePoint and leaving it to the users and not monitoring it is the best way for failure. This is known and true also for non-SharePoint projects. But what really lacks with SharePoint is how to demonstrate the management what could bring SharePoint in an organization and how to improve the SharePoint infrastructure during its life. In other words, when deploying SharePoint, governance is one of the important keys to success.
This books not only describes the SharePoint functionalities but also gives some guidance to better know your organization and how to solve its collaboration problems and is the first SharePoint book I read that is talking about "information architecture". It describes the different 2003 to 2007 migration options, what are the possible backup, restore and disaster recovery scenarios. Then it goes through Records Management, workflows, Search and finally Business Intelligence, providing plenty of step-by-step examples and screenshots
Onthe other side, I had the chance to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas session of Scott and Susan that was very interesting and a source of inspiration to make a SharePoint deployment a success not only from a provider point of view, but also a success for the users.
Review :
This book is not for developer or technical people, but more for people that need to sell SharePoint as a collaboration platform. For me, it is not for end-users as well. We can feel that the book is not relying only on the functional expertise of SharePoint but also on the way information workers are working with IT and their habits. Excellent examples can be taken to put in front the business value or the benefits of the platform. Finally, I think this book is a good starter for talking about SharePoint governance.
Title : SharePoint 2007 User's Guide: Learning Microsoft's Collaboration and Productivity Platform
Author : Seth Bates, Tony Smith
Summary :
This book described the different functionality of SharePoint 2007 from a users and power users point of view. Therefore, this book is not technical and is not showing any code.
First, the notion of sites, lists and document libraries are described with a lot of screenshots. Then, the book is going through workflows, policies and the different way of page personalization, finishing by two case studies or solutions solving document management and project collaboration in few steps.
Review :
Definitely, this book is not for techies or advanced users. Nevertheless, as the book is really user oriented, you can learn some functionalities that are less exposed or used but nevertheless very useful. It means that if people know already SharePoint or working with the product on a daily basis, it can be read quickly.
The two solutions presented at the end of the book are very good examples of how to address typical collaboration problems quickly and providing a high value without going into an expensive development project.
The next meeting of the Swiss SharePoint Club will take place in Basel. The topics will be around workflows and projects management.
For more information and registration, it is here : http://clubsps.wordpress.com/
If you encounter the "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport..." error when you want to display the properties of a SharePoint 2010 Application Service (like the "Managed Metadata Service"), it is likely that it is a known issue of the WCF framework.
Microsoft has just published few days ago the hotfix KB976462 available on the connect site that solves the issue and enables the edition of the Application Services properties.
After the PowerShell issue, the HotFix KB971831 available here has to be applied in order to enable the SharePoint 2010 setup to perform....
Next...
When installing SharePoint 2010 Beta, an error will occur during the pre-requisites install. Indeed, PowerShell V2 CTP3 will be unable to install because a previous version is already installed.
So, in the setup of SharePoint 2010 Beta setup check-list, add : remove PowerShell V1 (Server Manager => Features => Remove Features and click Next to start the wizard)
For its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club made it really well. According to the president, more than 150 people are attending the event, the achievement of 3 months of organization.
The keynote is done by Nicolette Du Toit, SharePoint Product Manager for Switzerland, who has a nice surprise for all the attendees : a pass to get access to all the presentations of the SharePoint Conference 2009. She also announces the setup of a community website around SharePoint : http://www.sharepointcommunity.ch/. It should be live around January 2010. Then, she gives the availability dates for the SharePoint 2010 public beta :
18th of November for everyone
16th of November for the MSDN and TechNet subscribers
The event has been split in 6 different presentation of about 20 minutes. As some of the information were already give during the SPC09 event, only the first three presentations are summarized with the occasion to precise or add other informatio.
Search :
With the acquisition of FAST 18 month ago, Microsoft stays now in the upper right of the Gartner magic quadrant. One of the things FAST adds to SharePoint is the ability to extract the keywords from the content and proposing them to the user in the search refinements bar on the left of the window. In a search result, as an example, PPTX preview will be available without having to download and open the file. On the other side, a user can specify keywords for which he wants to appear in the people search result.
Communities :
This presentation was explaining that people needed more than just wikis, blogs, people search and mysites. They now want to have access to pictures, videos, the person’s hobbies, interests or other job information. This is what offers SharePoint 2010 among a lot of other things.
A feature I missed in the previous post is that now, in a document library, it is possible to select more than one files and to do a multiple check-in / check-out
Composites :
Demo on creating lists with the new SharePoint Designer. By the way, SharePoint Designer 2007 will not be able to connect a SharePoint 2010 server and vice-and-versa. The demo also showed the creation of an InfoPath form with validation rules. The interesting thing is the possibility, with SharePoint workspace, to take these forms offline with the validation rules. Also, during the definition of a workflow, the designer supports the “Intellisense”, proposing activities starting with the characters already typed in the activity name field.
Tomorrow, for its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club will unveil the new SharePoint 2010 to people of the french part of Switzerland. This event is sponsored by Microsoft Suisse
Different talks about Search, Sites, Communities and the other functional areas described here will be presented.
See you there !
The SharePoint Conference 2009 was full of interesting information. This post give a high-level overview of the new features and what is coming in SharePoint 2010. More posts are coming with more precise information.
Just received the confirmation that I will be attending the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas :
In the meantime, for those who cannot attend, there are already some information from MS about the new version of SharePoint. Not a lot, but it is a start....
The link provided in this post may provide good starting points on how to build a development environment for SharePoint
From 4000 USD to 57000 USD for SharePoint Server 2007. More in this post
Posts were delayed because there was no wifi network at the conference place
Usually, when you attend to a techical or at least a Microsoft conference, you can expect there will be a possibility to have a wifi spot. But it was not the case !
I can not imagine that Microsoft did not put any wifi hub at the conference place....Oh yes, the Estrel Hotel provides a wifi connection but the price was incredibly expensive. Imagine that for 1 hour of connection, you would pay about 9 Euros. And for 24 hours, 24 Euros. It is almost the price I pay for my ADSL connection at home for a month !
I discussed with an attendees who said to me that it was simply not possible to connect because everyone at the conference tried to have the network at the same time. So, at the end, you pay for......nothing.
Please Microsoft, next time, for such a big events, could you provide a usable wifi network ?
The Microsoft European SharePoint 2007 will be held in Berlin from the 12th of February to the 14th. It is going to be a really huge event dedicated to only one product : SharePoint 2007
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