Nintex Workflow 2010: User access control - set permissions for allowed actions

In Nintex Workflow 2010 it is pretty simple to set permission for allowed actions, a good way to personalize the actions a designer can use. OK, to restrict the access to workflow actions, you can uncheck the action in the "Manage allowed actions" menu at Central Administration or Site Collection level, too. Do this, and no one will publish or use a workflow with the unchecked action furthermore. And I mean really no one, uncheck a action is not mapped to specific users or groups. Further, Nintex is clever and detect this unchecked actions in User defined actions (UDA) and a workflow with a UDA containing a unchecked action can't be published. Now, if you want restrict the access for "Call a Webservice" or a "Execute SQL" actions for a specific workflow designer group, but also want all other workflow designers to use UDAs containing such actions preconfigured, you have to manage the permissions in the Central Administration. This settings you only can do in the Central Administration, not on the Site Collection or Site Level. OK, to set permissions, go to the Central Administration and clicking "Managed allowed actions" under the "Nintex Workflow Management" header.

 Select the action you want configure and click on "Edit permissions" at the Ribbon.  Now you have the possibility to uncheck the "Make this actions available for all users" check box and change the users or groups with rights on this action.

In my case, I only allow "sps_admin_ak" to configure the "Call a Webservice" action. The user "sps_admin_ak" configure a UDA ( View this post about UDAs ) with the "Call a Webservice" action, for example to set user permissions on a SharePoint list or web. In the next step, any other workflow designer use this UDA in a workflow.

At least, the workflow designer will be able to publish the workflow with the UDA containing the "Call a webservice". He wont be able to use the "Call a Webservice" directly, but can use it preconfigured in a UDA.

Makes sense, I like it :-)

CMIS Connector for SharePoint 2010 announced

No more rumors, it's official: Microsoft announced a CMIS connector for SharePoint 2010!!! More details about the announcement can be found here on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog.
SharePoint 2010 will contain a CMIS Consumer Webpart to display Contents from other Content Management Interoperabillity Services repositories. Maybe a big step to Composite Content Applications!

If you are more intrested in CMIS, check out this links:

• Microsoft ECM Team announcement in 2008
• The website of OASIS CMIS technical comittee

Regards,

Andreas

ShareCamp - Born2Share

A new ShareCamp in Germany is born! The german SharePoint- Community starts a ShareCamp under the slogan "Born2Share".
For more information visit sharecamp.de. On this wiki you find information about the event location and time, a member list and a session list!

Let's Share!!!

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 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

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

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