Friday, September 05, 2008
I almost did not check my emails before I left the house today… One cannot explain the grief I felt when I checked the mail on the phone and realized the SharePoint community lost a dear friend. Wading though way too many eamils this morning to my disbelief I leaned that Patrick Tisseghem passed away.
Patrick was practically a SharePoint icon, not only in the European community but world-wide. Many of us have had the pleasure of meeting Patrick at one of his training sessions, SharePoint conference or by reading one of his many books, articles or posts.
For myself, I distinctly remember the first time I met Patrick. We were both speaking at an Advisor Summit in Phoenix, Az. As the speakers made their way across the hot pavement quiet and soft spoken Patrick and I introduced ourselves and made our way with the pack to dinner. It was during that time that Patrick made some SharePoint fame with his famous Beer database.
Over the years we connected primarily on the conference circuits, in and out of the speaker room and the after hour events. Patrick was always there, pint in hand, quiet and on the edge of the crowd. Always willing to talk and listen. Strange quality for an instructor, Patrick was more of a listener than a speaker after hours.
I can easily recount the events and parties that we happened to be together at, many now are all a blur over the years. I can say that my parting memory of Patrick will be TechEd 2008 in Orlando. Heading back to the speaker hotel from an event, my Matt and I happened upon Patrick taking a break on the bench outside the hotel. We sat an talked for a few minutes and as usual headed to the hotel bar. Over pints we discussed his current book, watched some sports and just kicked back. For me personally I will be left with a fond Patrick memory of TechEd, Pints, Books and Friends.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
After a successful, long and painful installation and configuration of SQL Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode with Kerberos I finally forced SSRS to work very nicely with my R&D SharePoint lab this week.
Yesterday I installed SQL Reporting Services and SP2 on an existing MOSS box in our integrated development environment. Installation and configuration of SSRS went smooth an easy up until I logged into Central Admin to configure Reporting Services. I received the following error:
"The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference."
The fix for my situation was simple - rerun the SQL Server Reporting Service install effectively repairing the server.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Seems like I have been building and deploying features and solution for weeks. I have run into this error while attempting to add a solution to the solution store: Failed to extract the cab file in the solution.
Seems like there is more than a few reasons why you might see this return from your STSADM addsolution command but for myself each time was this error was associated with a duplicate entry in my .ddf file. I spent some time trying to determine what was causing this error and then happened upon Rob's post on the topic: STSADM strikes again, Failed to extract the cab file in the solution...
You can check your DDF files for duplicates. If you can't seem to located the offending duplicate then try renaming your web solution file to .CAB extension and open it. The cab file will open sorted by name and you might be able to more easily find the duplicate file.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
I happen to be tracing down a specific Microsoft Press release and happened across Microsoft's "Learn more about Social Computing" a set of SharePoint Social Computing resources. This site contains many resources about social computing using SharePoint including case studies, white papers and news.
Link: http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/capabilities/collaboration/social.mspx
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Microsoft's Infrastructure Updates have been out for about a week now. There does seem to be some potential big issues with the updates breaking third party products. Microsoft also has posted a KB article on Alternate Access Mappings issues associated with the Infrastructure updates.
Here are a few key posts you should be looking at if you have installed or are considering installing the Infrastructure Updates:
AAM issue with Infrastructure Update
Description of the Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: July 15, 2008
KB: When is the SPContext.Current available ? (SharePoint dev)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Microsoft has announced free, unlimited installation and compatibility support for Vista SP1 starting right now until March 18, 2009. Don't you love that word Free!
The deal is Telephone support available world wide, chat and email support US and Canada only.
Information and details are available at:
http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=1&prid=11274&gprid=500921
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.
ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly – support for one another.
ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists – existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance – the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.
Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.
If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepoint.net. Together, the community can achieve what was impossible as individuals – becomes a part of ISPA today!
SharePoint Magazine is a new online resource for your SharePoint information. Arno Nel from South Africa is the Magazine's editor. Check it out at www.sharepointmagazine.net
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
I caught this little gem (Update-Gac.ps1) on the PowerShell Team blog while I was catching up on posts. This script will Ngen the PowerShell assemblies for a quicker start up. Ngen is a .NET utility that will create a native images that are stored in a cache which can be then used by the framework alleviating some of the JIT-ing at startup. I ran this script and noticed a big difference in the start up times. I will run this on all my machines.
Last week Microsoft announced three new updates for the following products:
- SharePoint Server 2007
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- Project Server 2007
- Search Server 2008
- Search Server 2008 Express
- Project Professional 2007.
These infrastructure updates are more than just hot fixes. The updates include hot fixes and platform improvements. There is a WSS and MOSS version of the updates and the WSS version should be applied prior to the MOSS version. Both x86 and x64 is available
The Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) applies to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
The Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) applies to the following server products:
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- Microsoft Office Project Server 2007
- Microsoft Search Server 2008
- Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
- Project Professional 2007 (client)
Key features in the Infrastructure Updates include new search features and functionality from Microsoft SharePoint Search Server 2008, Content Deployment fixes, improved performance for profile import, and improvements to updating and patching.
The SharePoint Team Blog post has some KEY information that you should read before you install these updates. You can find out more from the SharePoint Team blog at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint
Here are the download links for the WSS/MOSS infrastructure updates:
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695) - x64
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x86
Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297) - x64
The Project Professional 2007 client update is located at: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F385ADB8-0425-4BA4-BECE-7664B8F49D12&displaylang=en
I just happen to be building a brand new development server and I plan to apply these updates after the build is complete.