SharePoint Advent Calendar

"An Advent calendar is a special calendar which is used to count or celebrate the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas"

This definition will be rember by some guys from germany. And what will be better than celebrate the days of Advent with the new SharePoint 2010 beta, they've thought? So http://www.sharepointadvent.com/ was born! This SharePoint 2010 Blog about SharePoint 2010 from guys how love SharePoint 2010 - the full power of the Beta! The blog is written in German and this will be the guys:

•Andreas Kanuer {http://www.letssharepoint.com} mailto:%7B@aknauer} (oh, ugly, thats me!!!)
•Christian Glessner {http://www.iLoveSharePoint.com} mailto:%7B@cglessner}
•Jens Augustin mailto:%7B@jensaugustin}
•Markus Alt {http://blog.markus-alt.de​} mailto:%7B@markusalt}
•Michael Greth {http://www.sharepointcommunity.de​} mailto:%7B@mysharepoint}
•Steven Schmitt mailto:%7B@schmittsteven}
•Thorsten Hans {http://www.dotnet-rocks.de} mailto:%7B@thorstenhans}

Enjoy the days until xmas!

Regards,

Andreas

SharePoint and Nintex Workflow 2007: New database server

What's to do if you have to change the a database server in an existing SharePoint Farm for a new one? And what's happening with existing Nintex Workflow 2007 installations?
To exchange the database server used by SharePoint, you habe to do the following steps:

1. Make a full backup via SharePoint Central Administration.
2. Use the "SharePoint Products and Technologie Configuration Wizard" to disjoin every single SharePoint Server from the SharePoint farm.
3. Use the "SharePoint Products and Technologie Configuration Wizard" to create a NEW farm (wich means you create a new SharePoint Configuration database) and take the new database server for configuration settings.Join every single Server to the SharePoint farm.
4. Restore the full backup via CentralAdministration in the SharePoint Farm.

After this steps, your SharePoint farm use a new database server and should contain the old content and functionality. But what's with the Nintex Workflow databases? Contains the full backup the databases? Can you turn off the old database server? NO!!! You can't! Nintex Databases aren't include in a SharePoint backup, you have to transfer them to the new Database Server manuallly, p.e. with a database backup and restore.

After this, you have to update the internal reference of the Content DBs to the new server. This you can do with the nwadmin tool. You find this tool under the path C:\Program Files\Nintex\Nintex Workflow 2007\ in standard installations.
You have to run the following command line:

NWAdmin.exe -o UpdateContentDatabase -serverName serverName [-databaseName databaseName] [-newServerName newServerName] [-newDatabaseName newDatabaseName] [-integrated

-username username -password password]
 
Run this command line in the cmd and replace the parameters with you own values. After runing this command line, the references of your Nintex Databases will be updated.
Further information about UpdateContentDatabase operation with all parameters or and other nwadmin operations you can find in this pdf.
 
Regards,
 
Andreas
 

SharePoint 2010: Take control!! Resource Throttling

Many admins, same dream: Control the performance of the SharePoint Portal!!! Control and/ or eliminate the big performance killers for your System ( Beware – I don’t mean the biggest performance killer for every System: the end user! It’s a game, without them you can’t play it! ;-) ) is the first and best steps against phone calls like “Ohhhhh, MY Portal is soooo sloooooow!!”.
One of this performance killers in MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 are large lists and libraries. This means not only many items, but big items with many columns also.
Many Columns = Many rows in AllUserData Database per Item = bigger query = lower performance for every user using the same Content DB. Remember: all content from a Website Collection, maybe from one Web Application, is stored in the AllUserData Content. Right there the bottleneck for your Portal is hidden!! One large list locks your AllUserData table and every other request from other user from other subsites. And to make your Admionistrator's horror scenario complete: You can not prevent a user for executing a big request in 2007!

Take control with SharePoint 2010's Resource throttling settings! You can find the setting in the Central Administration under the Genral Setting of a Web Application.

You can see, in SharePoint 2010 you can configure the maximum number of items a query can include, for normal users and for administrators. You can configure a "Happy Hour" time window for large queries.

Take control! Configure Resource Throttling in SharePoint 2010!

Regards,

Andreas

SharePoint 2010: Advantages of service applications

The Shared Service Providers are disappears, now SharePoint use "Service Applications". Service applications, as the name let you suppose, provides several services for your Sharepoint envriroment. One web application is not constrained to use a dedicated Shared Service Provider furthermore. Web Applications now can consume several service applications from the same SharePoint farm or another Sharepoint farm. Therefore, service applications can be a endpoint provider. This makes many new topology scenarios availible for SharePoint 2010 scenarios ( TechNet ). Per example, you can build a "Service Farm", shown in the figure below.

The arrows should show you, that the "Staging Farm" and the "Productiv Farm" consume from service applications of the "Service Farm". This allows to use the same taxonomies in every farm, per example. Or (and this is my favorite at the moment :-) ) to push central stored Content Typs to every Farm in your envriroment.

Chak Corner described the configuration for "Content Typ Hubs" in a blog post in detail.

Have fun by playing with service applications by yourself for the first time!

Regards,

Andreas

Early look: Site Quotas in SharePoint 2010

omething is happend with the quotas in SharePoint 2010!! And it seems to be good! You can configure your quotas in the Central Administration (Mange Web Applications), nothing new so far. But with the firt look at the screen, your responsible administrators heart jumps up and down in pleasure:

Take one piece more control about the developers!!! SharePoint 2010 has a points system for solutions running on a site. Each solution deployed for a site has certain points in this rating system and you as administrator can get the control about this rating! So you can prevent your farm to going down or has low performance because of to many and to hungry solutions. Visual solutions like special WebParts shows only a warning message if the per day limit is reached. Find out more about solutions in the blog entries from Paul Stubbs and Thorsten Hans.

The second cool new thing about quotas in SharePoint 2010 is: See it visual in "Storage Space Allocation" settings! With this settings in the Site Collection Administration settings, you can check the storage usage and storage allocation of a website collection.

Ok, it's not a special "Pimp Quotas" feature, but if you set restrictions, you mostly want to check the status, want not?! This is the point why this setting makes the life of admins better, which have worked with quotas before: Now, they easily can see, where the disk space is used for, before it is to late! Did you see the views for the storage usage list at the left? Cool stuff...!

Regards,

Andreas

Nintex Best Practice: Task Delegation

In my opinion, one of the most valued features of Nintex Workflow 2007 is the "Task delegation". With task delegation, a user can delegate task wich will be automatically created from Nintex Workflow 2007 (by Actions like "Request Approval") between specific dates to a specific user. Cool feature for your next holiday preparations. If you have activated Nintex Workflow in the site collection features, users can set up delegation:

As you see in the picture above, a user can delegate task for the whole site collection in one step as well as for the current site. You can turn of the task delegation in the SharePoint Central Administration (Central Administration - Web Application - Nintex Workflow 2007 - Global settings). At the same section, you can turn on the administrative task delegation.

 

If you turn on the administrativ delegation, site administrators can delegate tasks for other users, wich will be necessary for many scenarios. By default, this setting is turned off.

If now the following question comes up: "Hey, can I build endless loops with task delegation?". No! You can't build delegations like "user A" to "user B" and back to "user A". Ok, users CAN build this, but it don't works endless. Nintex delegate a task only one time automatically.

Greetings,

Andreas

SharePoint 2010: Early look on Validation Settings

In SharePoint 2010, a new setting point in List and Library settings is available. This point is called "Validation settings". Validation settings will be very missed in SharePoint 2007, because there wasn't a way to avoid such easy and daily business related things like dates in the past etc. It seems that this will be worked with SharePoint 2010, but how the feature looks like? In the pre-beta version of SP2010 I work with, you can buil expresions like in calculated columns. I tried the following expression:

Now I tried to created a new task in my task list with validation settings. The due day I set was in the past.

And, there's the trick, I wasn't able to save the task! Ok, in this version I don't get the message that was set up in the validation settings, but seems it works! Validation isn't the newest feature at all, but hey, it's reeeeaaly usefull!

Greetings,

Andreas

SharePoint 2010: Early look at List settings

Today, while playing with SharePoint 2010, I click on the list settings from the Shared Documents Lib out of habit. And, out of habit, too, I staring on the screen without realy reading it. At this early version of SharePoint 2010, the list settings aren't much diffrent from the 2007 settings, at the first look at least. But than I found several new setting points, wich seems to be intresting.

As you can find out on the picture above, this points are:

1. 
   
   Validation settings
   
2. Column default value settings
   
3. Rating settings
   
4. Metadata navigation settings
   
5. Per-location view settings
   
6. Generate file plan report
   

Enhanced Validation settings, Ratings, Per-location view settings and hierachies with Metadata navigation settings???? Wow, sounds like realy cool stuff! I would like to check these new seeting in the next days and make more reports.

Regards,

Andreas

Nintex and 2010: Early preview

Beside all the new SharePoint 2010 stuff, let's talk a round about Nintex and what they will do 2010. At first: All the happy Nintex Workflow 2007 users can continuing be happy in 2010!!! Nintex will offer

As new innovation and features for Nintex Workflow 2010 is listed

• 
  
  Full support for new workflow capabilities in the SharePoint Server 2010 platform, including reusable workflows, site workflows, content type workflows, and a number of new custom actions.
  
• 
  
   A revamped browser-based user interface that takes full advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 Fluent UI user experience.
  
• 
  
   Investments in workflow forms design, including expanded support for both ASP.NET forms and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2010.
  
• 
  
   More options for managing and securing the workflow design, communication, approval, testing, and deployment process.
  
• 
  
   Compatibility with Microsoft-published workflow tools, including the ability to import and extend workflows authored using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 and/or Microsoft Office Visio 2010, plus the ability to export workflows to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as workflow code projects.
  
• 
  
   The ability to analyze, report on, and monitor alerts on workflow metadata across multiple lists, sites, site collections, web applications, and entire farms.
  

Ok, sounds nice, but don't forget Nintex Reporting 2008? What will happend with this? It will survied, but with a new name and logo: Nintex Analytics 2010!!!

But that isn't enough!!! A third new products for compliance and records management join the arsenal of Nintex 2010 suites! Nintex Compilance Suite!!

• Inventory and analyze all document, page, and list data for growth, usage, and creation/edit patterns
• Identify social networking patterns and power users
• Monitor service application usage (Business Connectivity Services, Search, etc.)
• View, design, and manage rich reports, all within the familiar SharePoint site interface
• Collect, manage, and query information from multiple sources using data warehousing technology

• Easily classify, group, navigate, maintain, and analyze content based on taxonomy rules
• SharePoint-based management of both electronic and physical records
• Support for multiple input, output, and storage methods
• Standards-specific editions to meet different sets of requirements
  

All Nintex fans will have an exciting future, I think. More details will be available in the next weeks and months. If you can't wait for the final release you can subscribe to a Beta program.

Have fun,

Andreas

SharePoint 2010: First look on Moblie View

Ok, the moblie view in SharePoint 2007 not creates much pleasure by moblie phone users. But my first experiments with my phone and SharePoint 2010 promise more comfortale work with pictures and colours and all this cute stuff how makes me use a site for a second time.

SharePoint 2010: Powershell 2.0 - the new stsadm

Goodbye stsadm - Welcome Power Shell 2.0!!! In the new SharePoint version Power Shell 2.0 replace the stsadm tool. Christian Glessner gives a early look on the new Cmdlets for SharePoint 2010 on his blog ILoveSharePoint, check out here.
Find a good example on the blog of Markus Alt.


Greeting,

Andreas

SharePoint 2010: get ready!

At monday this week the NDA for SharePoint 2010 is annul with the beginning of the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. Me and a lot of other bloggers in the world will write down many new features and stuff about SharePoint 2010. If you think about using SharePoint 2010 in your company, you have to check some prerequisite to be ready!
All necessary prerequisites will be found here . I think the importantly prerequisits are that SharePoint 2010 only is availible for 64bit Systems and that you have to upgrade your WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 sytsem to SP2. With SP2 the pre-upgrade scan tool will be integrated in stsadm.
If you consider this prerequisits, you take all steps to get your own SharePoint 2010 and have a look on this screen:

:-)

Andreas

Nintex Workflow 2007 Best Practice: Use the Task Reminder action

Because it isn't clearly for the first time someone use the Nintex Workflow 2007 Task Reminder action, here the trick:
Use the "Run parallel actions" action for the correct setup. If you put the Task Reminder action behind your Request Approval or Flexi Task action, it wan't work.

Regards,

Andreas

Nintex Workflow 2007 Best Practice: Notifications by Workflow Error

This is the firts post in the "Nintex Workflow 2007 Best Practice" series I would like write down. Create an deploy workflows with Nintex Workflow would be very easy and quickliy to do, but there are some points you better have to consider before you let your users playing with a productiv workflow. One of these points ist the notification setting by Workflow error. By default, the workflow initiator will get a email if a workflow crashs. The initiator as an unmindfull enduser often will be courios and scared by automatically sent Error Emails from a system. As an administrator, you can prefend your needy users from this situation with a simple setting.
Switch to the "Message Template" settings on SharePoint site levels. Here you will find the following options:

I don't think I've to explain the settings for this. Pherhaps this settings will be overlooked so often because there are only to find on site level, not in Central Administration...

Regards,

Andreas

Error by BizTalk 2009 UDDI configuration

This days I got an error by configure the UDDI components on a BTS 2009 machine. The Event Log says the following:

Event Type: Error


Event Source: BizTalk DW Reporting

Event Category: None

Event ID: 1000

Date: 13.10.2009

Time: 14:04:24

User: N/A

Computer: +++Biz+++
Description:

Faulting application configuration.exe, version 3.8.368.0, stamp 49b1da6c, faulting module configframeworkhelper.dll, version 3.8.368.0, stamp 49b1da6b, debug? 0, fault address 0x000823ba.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Data:

0000: 41 00 70 00 70 00 6c 00 A.p.p.l.

.....

BizTalk is installed in a Farm scenario with a BizTalk Server and a several SQL 2005 machine. On the SQL the UDDI database components will be installed and configured. To configure the Web Application component on the BizTalk machine, I have to put the "Run As"- user for the UDDI Configuration Wizard into the local Administrator group on the SQL server. It wasn't enough to make the user to a Server Admin on the SQL server instance.

Greetings,

Andreas

My new blog

Hi and welcome to my new blog!

I love SharePoint! And this is my diary with all my historys and expiriences about my this love :-) Enjoy it!

Greetings,

Andreas