We've Moved!

Get your index fingers all limbered up and click on over to our new digs at The SharePoint Coffee House! Grab a cup, pull up a chair, and let's talk all things SharePoint (and some stuff not!).

The posts here are duplicated over in the Coffee House so nothing's missed, and, best of all, we've got code!!

Enjoy folks! - M

Present(ed)ing at the Philly.NET Code Camp on October 11th!

As the munged title kinda states, this posting relates to an event that has already happened. So much fer real-time, eh?

I was able to present a more "code heavy" presentation of my talk on Features and Solutions at the Philly.NET Code Camp on Saturday, October 11th. I gotta say, what a cool event. Hundreds of folks showed up, early on a Saturday, and stayed til the evening, listening to tracks from 51 speakers that ranged all across the .NET space. It was one of the coolest things I ever did, meeting with peers, speaking on topics we all are interested in.

I'm tidying up the source code that I used for my talk and will upload in the very near future.

Oh and to any and all that showed up for my talk...thanks! - M

Presenting at the Philly Office Geeks User Group Meeting on September 9th!

As luck would have it I'm giving a small presentation on Microsoft's SharePoint Features and Solutions Framework to the Philly Office Geeks User Group during their monthly meeting on the evening of September 9th. When complete I'll see if I can post the contents of the slide deck here as well as on the Group's site.

How To SSL-Enable a Web Application

I've seen many posts around the topic of SSL-enabling a Web Application and how many go through the process of Extending the Web Application to do so. While this does work, it is not necessary. Extending a Web Application should really be used when you want to offer a different authentication mechanism than the default one. To SSL-enable a Web Application all you need to do is (1) add an Alternate Access Mapping entry and (2) install the SSL certificate on the web site. To add a new AAM entry perform the following steps:

1. From the Central Administration home page navigate through Operations --> Alternate Access Mappings (under the Global Configuration section)


2. In the Alternate Access Mapping Collection dropdown (near upper-right) select Change Alternate Access Mapping Collection


3. In the Select An Alternate Access Mapping Collection page select the relevant Web Application Name you want to create a new entry for


4. In the Alternate Access Mappings page click the Edit Public URLs button near the upper-left.


5. Enter the desired URL in one of the 4 Zones available then click the button


6. Install the SSL certificate to the relevant IIS website

At this point you should be good to go!

- M

SharePoint Development on Vista!

Check this out...I found this while wandering around the Bamboo Solutions site...

For those that are looking to do some development w/o virtuals, with the information found at the following blog entry you can now set up your Vista box for SharePoint development. Cool stuff!

How to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86

- M

Bamboo Chart Plus Bug: Dates as Y-Axis Don't Show

I found this while doing some diligence around the possibility of using this part as a way to display some project (think MS Project) information based on tasks and their dates. In my work I was looking to display a Task's information and it's Due Date and Actual Finish Date as a bar chart, to show the differences of planned vs. actual.

It seems that when you set up the Chart Plus part to have its Y-Axis be Long/Short Date based, the scale shows information in the form of 12/30/1899 for each place on the scale, and not the dates in the source data.

This was duplicated by the Bamboo support team. Incidentally, kudos to them for responding so quickly (2 days) for an issue that came up for an individual (me) using a trial version of their software. Excellent in my book.

- M

MOSS 2007 Best Practices Book Out Now!

3 words: Go get it!

This is a fantastic book written by Ben Curry and Bill English of Mindsharp. It basically speaks to the best practices around designing and deploying a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 implementation (and all of the ins and outs).

Find it at Amazon here.

- M

MCTS: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - Configuration

Achieved! :)

Security Information Pop-up Between Web Applications (Sites and My Sites)

This was an issue that I came across and took the longest time to figure out. Because of the solution to this I thought that it would be beneficial for others to know, and hopefully would help you folks out there. Let's set the stage...


You've a publishing site and social networking site that you are setting up as your intranet. You set up the web applications for each to be accessed via http when inside the network (Default zone). You then add an Alternate Access Mapping to use the Extranet zone to access this site via https. So the internally accessible (Default Zones) URLs are http://portal-internal/ and http://mysites-internal/, while the externally available (Extranet Zones) are https://portal-external/ and https://mysites-external/.


With the above setup, go into the http://mysites-internal/ and create a My Site for yourself. Add a picture, text, etc. Make it look nice and pretty.

Now, after the information is cycled through the system (via timer jobs), go into the portal site via the Extranet Zone link - https://portal-external/ as a user that has access to setting up security. In my testing I'm actually going in as a Site Collection Administrator. When you go into People and Groups and find your name in the list, this actually pulls additional information from your My Sites profile. Here's where the issue hits: the picture's URL source is actually pointing to the Default Zone address. In our example, that's via http. Since we're on the portal side via https, this causes the Security Information window to pop up (cause you're trying to view a mixed secure and non-secure page). This is totally annoying! Now, for what seems to be the cause...

Head over the the Web Application's Shared Service Provider Web Administration Site. From the displayed Shared Services Administration Home Page click the My Site Settings link under the User Profiles and My Sites section. Note the Preferred Search Center and Personal Site Provider fields. These are valued with the Default Zone URLs. Changing these to anything else, no matter what other Alternate Access Mappings you have, results in these fields still retaining the Default Zone URLs.

So, what does this mean? It means that if you have AAMs, and there's https and http between the Zones, you'll get this pop-up dialog when looking in the People and Groups area. Oddly enough, I didn't get it when doing a People Search.

The resolution for me, at least in this case's implementation, I made the Default Zone https, and removed the http so the sites could only be accessed via the Default Zone URL.

Now, YMMV, but I was able to duplicate this a bit.

If anyone's come across something different that resolves this issue I'd love to hear.

Thanks! - M

Programmatically Creating Lookup Fields

In my wanderings across the net I've found many different ways to accomplish this but for whatever reason they weren't working consistently for me. After further delving I came across the following snippet of code from the Tech MOSS Team. Again, for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work consistently. Upon further looking at the SPWeb.Fields.AddLookup method, I saw that this returned a string representing the internal field name. This is where the light went on for me. Using this returned value in combination with SPWeb.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName always resulted in success for me.
Hope this helps for anyone else trying this out. The method below is part of a Feature Receiver class used in a Feature.

public static SPFieldLookup CreateLookupField(string fieldName, string group, string fieldDescription, bool required, bool allowMultipleValues, SPWeb w, SPList lookupList, string lookupField)
{

string internalFieldName = "";

// add a Lookup field with the passed in information
// Note: This method returns a string with the interna field name. This is REQUIRED for the next line to successfully
// retrieve the lookup field
internalFieldName = w.Fields.AddLookup(fieldName, lookupList.ID, lookupList.ParentWeb.ID, required);
// cast created field to a SPLookup
SPFieldLookup lookup = (SPFieldLookup)w.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(internalFieldName);
// value additional attributes based on passed parameters
lookup.AllowMultipleValues = allowMultipleValues;
lookup.Description = fieldDescription;
lookup.Group = group;
lookup.LookupField = lookupField;
// update the lookup field...this is required whenever modifying properties of the SPLookup lookup.Update(true);
// return/pass back the lookup field
return lookup;
}

Hidey Ho!

First post here. This space will be various entries related to MOSS 2007 "stuff" that I've come across. Some may be pingbacks to existing info and others will be stuff that I've figured out on my own. Anything and everything MOSS 2007 related. Thanks! - M