Microknowledge

Some thoughts on the BUILD conference

Today I’d like to look away from my traditional SharePoint, Project and SQL focus.  I've been watching the blog - tweet - web stream of news from last week’s Microsoft BUILD Conference with interest.  There's been a lot of interest in Windows 8 - both for tablet and traditional form factors.  Microsoft has even distributed 5000 Samsung tablets (these guys are everywhere!) reloaded with an early version of Windows 8.  Wow.  (And how do I get one!)

So Microsoft has been trying to get the rest of you to use Windows Phones.  They're easy, powerful, functional.  And they have tens of thousands of apps.   Not the 450 billion, of whatever, in the Android Marketplace, but pretty good.

(At some level, all the debates about the numbers of apps available in the Android, Apple or Windows AppStores remind me of the 1960s-1980s debates about the Soviet "missile gap".  If the USSR had enough strike power to cover the earth's surface 30 times over, the US needed 40X.  And so forth.)

At some level, if you were to download and use ten new apps daily from the Android store, it would take you over 120 years to try them all.  120 years!  Don't we have enough?

And that's the clever thing about Microsft's strategy.  Over the past two years, the clear message has been to develop mobile apps in Silverlight, and you can reuse them on a PC.   That seems ok, but the Windows mobile ecosystem isn't yet as vibrant and diverse as the PC world.

Windows 8 promises to change the paradigm.  In addition to support for HTML5, Javascript with Live Tile and mutitouch support, etc.  the really interesting changes are outside.  Microsoft is creating delivery “plumbing” by opening an app store that supplies not just mobile, not just phones, but also Windows PCs.  So there's even more incentive for developers to build mobile apps.  Because now, rather than targeting “only” ten million Windows Phone users for your app, you now have the vast universe of all Windows PCs available to you – by far, single largest potential user base in the technical world.

Nothing is guaranteed, but I can’t wait to see where this market is by the end of next year.

 

Using SSRS Reports as a PowerPivot Data Source – Kerberos Free Edition

When developing SharePoint business intelligence solutions, most of the time the data connections are fairly routine.  However, I was recently building a PowerPivot solution where some of the data modelers, working in PowerPivot, live in a different domain from the source database and SharePoint farm. 

Also, this environment doesn’t use Kerberos.  Kerberos, as you may recall, is a security protocol that allows users to request and receive authorization “tickets” across multiple server hops – from machine to machine, and across domains.  Because of its occasional complexity, the protocol was named after Cerberus, the three-headed beast of ancient Greek mythology. 

  
Hercules captures Cerberus. (Hans) Sebald Beham, 1545. Public Domain

OK, let’s not slay any monsters today.  Let’s suppose we want to enable Excel users to develop PowerPivot models against a remote, cross-domain SQL data source for publication to a remote domain’s SharePoint farm.   How best to proceed?

Well, PowerPivot does have the ability to connect directly to a SQL Server Reporting Services report as its data source, in addition to remotely addressing the SQL Server.  So, here’s our successful workaround.

Add the data to a SQL Server Reporting Services report.

This is pretty simple.  In this case, we’re already running SSRS in SharePoint integrated mode.   And let’s assume we already have a library that supports Report Server Reports and Report Data Source files, and that our data source was built and published to SharePoint as an .rsds file.  When we set up the report, we’re going to grab all the data we think we want in the report.  We can filter later in Excel.

1.       Create a new report in SharePoint library by selecting New Documents | Report Builder Reports from the library Ribbon

2.       Select the Table or Matrix Wizard.

3.       On the next screen, choose ‘Create a dataset’.

4.       Select the data connection, and, if re-prompted, login.

5.       On the Design a query screen, select the source table or view and choose Next.

6.       On the Arrange fields screen, select all the fields and drag them into the Values section at lower right.  Choose next.

7.       Choose Next on the Layout screen (if you’re getting all the data and adding it to the Values section, there should be no options for grouping or subtotaling.)

8.       Pick any color scheme – it doesn’t matter to PowerPivot.

Your report is built!  Now save it back to the SharePoint report-document library, and remember what you named it and where it was saved for the next steps.  Again, we don’t really intended to run or print this report, so the formatting etc., doesn’t matter.

Create a PowerPivot model in Excel 2010

Click the PowerPivot menu item, and select the PowerPivot button in the Ribbon.  From there, select the From Report option in the Get External Data section of the PowerPivot window.

In the Table Import Wizard, click the browse button and find the SSRS report we saved in the first half of this exercise.  The report will render in preview mode – click Next.  The next step will show the table – the “Tablix” – we built in the report.  You may choose to eliminate columns from the Preview and Filter button, or click Next to open up the source data in PowerPivot.

And that’s it!  You can slice and dice your PowerPivot model as you like now, and publisn the finished models back to a PowerPivot library on SharePoint if needed.  Just don’t wake up the sleeping three headed dog on your way back to the SharePoint document library…

Quick Update With Slides - SharePoint Saturday the Conference 2011

I'm just back from last weekend's SharePoint Saturday the Conference in Washington DC.  It was huge event, and I'll have a fuller recap shortly.  I'll briefly note my gratitude to organizers, sponsors, attendees, and fellow speakers for so much great content - and for letting me present five SharePoint sessions (plus one "non-technical" performance...)

It was a sprawling event - I won't forget the attached ground level map of destinations.

Anyway, as promised, here's a quick link to my slides from last week:

Together Forever - Project Server and SharePoint 2010
http://www.slideshare.net/kmallc/spstcdc-project-server-and-sharepoint-2010-together-forever

See Beyond the Numbers - Data Visualization and Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010
http://www.slideshare.net/kmallc/spstcdc-sharepoint-2010-business-intelligence-and-data-visualization-see-beyond-the-numbers

A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Best Practices
http://www.slideshare.net/kmallc/spstc2011-adoption

SharePoint SpeedMetal - From Power User to Administrator in 75 Minutes or Less (Admin 101)
http://www.slideshare.net/kmallc/spstc2011-admin101

Playing Tag - Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010
http://www.slideshare.net/kmallc/spstcdc [MMS]

SharePoint Business Intelligence - FCSPUG August 2011

Just back from SharePoint Saturday the Conference (more to come!) - but I wanted to extend my thanks again to Bill Nagle, Mel Dower, Bigelow Tea, K2, and the whole group at the Fairfield County SharePoint User Group for hosting me on August 10. 

It was a great trip down to Fairfield, and always fun to check out the local scene.  I can't resist a quick snapshot of my kids on campus at Fairfield University (Bellarmine Hall).  Everyone at FCSPUG were great hosts - my kids really enjoyed helping to select winning tickets for the door prizes.

 

As promised, last week's slides are live on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/kmallc/fcspug-sharepoint-business-intelligence-and-data-visualization-see-beyond-the-numbers

SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Webinar with BA Insight - Thursday 14 July 2011

Looking for more information about Managed Metadata and taxonomies in SharePoint 2010?  Join me for a free, BA Insight/KMA webinar this Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 2pm ET.   (Thankss to the team at BA Insight for inviting me!)  Register now at http://www.kma-llc.net/insights/Pages/KMAWebinarManagedMetadataServicesandTaxonomiesinSharePoint2010.aspx

In addition, you can catch me:

• 30 July 2011 - SharePoint Saturday NY - SharePoint/Project Server 2010 (www.sharepointsaturday.org)
• 10 August 2011 - Fairfield Connecticut SharePoint User Group - Data Visualization and Buiness Intelligence in SharePoint 2010  [Go Stags!](http://sharepointusergroup.corasworks.net/FCSPUG/default.aspx)
• 11-13 August 2011 - SharePoint Saturday The Conference DC - Speaking on Business Intelligence, Project Server, IT Admin, Adoption, and other topics (www.sharepointsaturday.org)
• 14 September 2011 - Princeton NJ Sharepoint User Group (http://www.princetonsug.com/SitePages/Home.aspx) - Business Intelligence
• 24 September 2011 - SharePOint Saturday New Hanpshire (www.sharepointsaturday.org)

Other future events are listed below - there are a few events still being finalized!

• SharePoint Conference 2011 (Anaheim CA, October 2011)
• KMWorld (Washington DC, November 2011)
• Puget Sound SharePoint User Group (Bellevue WA, December 2011)

Hope to see you soon!

SharePoint Social Tips - There’s Two of Me! And Where Is Everyone Else?

Hi from SPTechCon Boston!  Today, two quick tips about tweaking your SharePoint 2010 My Sites.

First, if you’ve ever run a SharePoint 2010 people search and found two listings for each name, it’s an easy fix!  (More of me isn’t such a good thing!)   You probably have duplicate entries in the definitions for the Content Source in the Search Service Application. 

 

In Central Admin, open up the Shared Services Application for Search.

• Under the left hand Quick Launch, click on Content Sources
• By default, click on the Local SharePoint sites source
• Under the list of target sites, you will probably find a duplicate URL that beings with the prefix “sps://”.  Remove the duplicate – just leave one that points to the host name of your principal internal site.  Save this change (you need to make sure all crawls are stopped first!)
• Rerun at least an incremental crawl to remove the duplicate entries.

Second, some of you may remember I posted last year on how to add a link back to your main portal page from the home page of My Sites (http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge/2010/07/sharepoint-2007-mysites-global-portal-site-connection.html ).  That setting no longer exists in 2010 – but there is a similar way to accomplish the same results.  Again, in Central Admin, open up the User Profile Service SSA.  Under the link for Personalization Site Links, add a link back to the home page of your portal site.  By default, this will add a fourth menu option next to the My Newsfeed | My Content | My Profile menu bar.

Good luck!

Don’t Forget About Me, If, By 'Me', You Mean the Page File on a SharePoint Server

Recently I was asked to help troubleshoot performance issues on an older, seasoned SharePoint 2007 installation.  (No Developer Dashboards here!).  We ran through a lot of performance counters, checked the SQL performance, and made sure that indexing and backups weren’t coinciding with business hours.  All good.  So why were the pages so sluggish?

Looking at counters on the web front end server showed the server was swapping memory.  A lot.  The server originally began life with only 2-4GB of RAM and a single 60GB hard disk.  Over time, it had grown to 16GB of RAM with an extra 500GB disk for index files (so, a lot of free space there!)  However, we found that the page file (previously known as the swap file!) was still locked at 2GB.  Expanding this to about 24GB, spread across multiple local disks, really improved not only system performance but also perceptions of system responsiveness.

To sum up -- do NOT assume you don’t need page files, even on virtualized servers.  The general rule of thumb – Microsoft recommends the total page file size should be 1-3X the size of total physical RAM.  (If you allow Windows to automatically regulate this, the size is usually OK.  Further details can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2021748 (see below for summary tables).

Default Page File Sizes for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

System Memory Size (RAM)	Minimum Page File Size	Maximum Page File Size
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 <1GB	1.5 x RAM	3 x RAM
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 >= 1GB	1 x RAM	3 x RAM

Default Page File Sizes for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

System Memory Size (RAM)	Minimum Page File Size	Maximum Page File Size
<1GB	Large enough to hold a kernel-memory crash dump and is RAM plus 300MB or 1GB, whichever is larger	3 x RAM or 4GB, whichever is larger
>= 1GB	Large enough to hold a kernel-memory crash dump and is RAM plus 300MB or 1GB, whichever is larger	3 x RAM or 4GB, whichever is larger

I’m at SPTechCon on Boston all week – will share more shortly!

Save $200 at SPTechCon Boston 2011 – Managed Metadata and PowerPivot

 
One week to go to the big SharePoint TechCon 2011 here in Boston at the Back Bay Sheraton!   It’s going to be great to see so many local users here, as well as checking in with some of the best known developers, consultants and advocates for SharePoint around the country.  More details at www.sptechcon.com!  And a special thanks to David, Whitney, Katie, Ted and the rest of the BZMedia crew for gathering what should be another impressive conference.

 
 
It’s still not too late to register at http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=910731 -- and if you enter the code MCNULTY at registration you get $200 off.

I’m going to be covering Managed Metadata Services next week.  I’ll be speaking and then signing copies of SharePoint 2010 MMS book throughout the conference.  (Free copies to the first 50 people!)  Here’s the schedule:

• Presentation: “Playing Tag – Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2011 – Thursday June 2, 2011 – 11am
• Book Signing: Thursday June 2, 2011 -- 6:45pm (BZMedia Booth)
• Book Signing: Friday June 3, 2011 9:30am (KMA Booth 1202)

If you miss me, I’ll be around the KMA booth (1202) throughout the conference.  Please stop by to register to win our free clambake from Woodman’s!   You can also still find a copy of “SharePoint 2010 Consultant’s Handbook –Managed Metadata Services” online at Amazon.com.

I won’t be speaking about Business Intelligence, or PowerPivot next week – but thanks to Christian Buckley and Axceler’ s One Thing video series, you can get a quick introduction on YouTube.  Plus, I’ll be blogging and tweeting from the conference next week.  See you there!

SharePoint 2010 SP1 Coming in June 2011 – Why We Care

Microsoft has officially announced the June 2011 release of Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010.  SP1 will incorporate all the interim patches and bug fixes released since the original May 2010 release of SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010.

Microsoft Service Packs receive full regression testing, and are generally recommended for wide deployment.  However, we still recommend testing them on non-production environments in advance of any production releases.  Its may be advisable to wait a few weeks to see if any public bug reports surface.  And, please, don’t install them like this:

 

(The wrong way to fix a SharePoint 2010 server…no content types were harmed during the making of this photo!)

There’s more than patches – there are some essential new functions here.  Let’s take a look!

IE9 Native Support Call me silly, but having Microsoft’s primary web client natively support their primary web server seems obvious.

Chrome Support in OWA   I’ve gotten used to telling first year adopters, well, Google Chrome isn’t officially supported, but it seems to work.  Of course it should work – it shares the Firefox/Mozilla rendering engine – but it’s nice to see it become official.

Site Recycle Bin   Just like you can use a Recycle Bin to recover deleted items and files, you will now be able to recover site collections and sites quickly, without resorting to backup files or databases.  This is a big tine saver for administrators.

StorMan.aspx  Prior versions of SharePoint included the capability to drill down into sites, libraries or documents to discover the largest consumers of storage space.  This function is being restored and enhanced in SP1.  Admins and users will have a simple way to drill down and find out why sites are nearing or exceeding quotas, so you can remove inadvertently large files if warranted.

Project Sync Project Professional 2010 will now be able to synchronize schedules tasks with SharePoint task lists, instead of just publishing a copy.

Other new functions to be released include:

• Word Web App offers print support in Edit Mode
• Excel Web App allows charts to be inserted
• Outlook Web App offers attachment previewing in Exchange Online
• Improved browser support for Project Server
• Search Server adds support for PPSX files
• Optimized copy speed for content  in RBS-enabled databases (Shallow Copy)

Look for SP1 in late June – and, as always, I’ll have the announcement and version numbers here for you on Microknowledge…after some testing, of course!

Fixing XSLT Context Menu Errors in the SharePoint 2007 Data View Web Part (DVWP)

Today we have a very simple note about fixing context menus in SharePoint 2007.  Here’s the situation – you have a custom data view web part used to provide a refined view of a document library.  But you find that the context menus are wrong – they are missing custom elements, check out is missing, etc. 

The basic problem is that the initial conversion to the Data View Web Part (DVWP) introduced some incorrect values into some of the auto-generated XSLT.  Itay Shakury has posted some related fixes on his blog at:

• http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/itaysk/archive/2008/07/11/sharepoint-designer-data-form-web-part-context-menu-bug-part-2.aspx
• http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/itaysk/archive/2008/11/18/sharepoint-designer-data-form-web-part-context-menu-bug-part-3.aspx

These posts describe a method for fixing the auto-generated CurrentRights()  Property:

1. Open SharePoint Designer 2007 and navigate to the page containing the Data Form Web Part. (follow the "Steps to Reproduce" above)
2. In Code view, search for the following peace of code:
   Perm="{ddwrt:CurrentRights()}"
3. Replace it with the following peace of code:
   Perm="{@PermMask}"
4. Save the page.

They also introduce a hotfix to prevent this error on future auto-generated DVWP XSLT (that’s a lot of acronyms!)

However, we’re using a much more current patch level at one of our clients, and we still saw similar behavior.   Specifically, we found transient errors in the logical values used for testing if versioning or checkout are shown on the context menu.  (So those elements weren’t shown on the list)

The problem is the auto generated XSLT uses “1”, instead of a Boolean “true” value, as part of the test.

• Change
  • <xsl:when test="boolean(ddwrt:ListProperty('VersioningEnabled'))=’1’">
  • to
  • <xsl:when test="boolean(ddwrt:ListProperty('VersioningEnabled'))=boolean(true)"

• Change

  • <xsl:when test="boolean(ddwrt:ListProperty('ForceCheckout'))=’1’">
  • to
  • <xsl:when test="boolean(ddwrt:ListProperty('ForceCheckout'))=boolean(true)">

Hope this helps!  Many thanks to KMA’s own Yang Song for helping out on this issue.  Good luck!