Rez's spot

SharePoint 2007 Governance Survey for IT

Noorez Khamis — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:54:00 GMT

When enterprises first adopt SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) in their organization, the immediate benefit is not realized right away.

Once they bring in a consultancy like ours who are SharePoint experts to successfully create a line of business application that:

1) Fills a business need

2) Has an obvious return on investment

3) Has been branded according to company style guides

4) Gives the user an amazing user experience

5) Looks fantastic! (as all of our applications do because of our fabulous user experience team)

6) And most importantly, makes the user WANT to use the system

The word starts to spread like hot-fire across the organization and we see other groups/upper management in the organization say:

“That is SharePoint???”
“I can see endless opportunities on how I can use this now”
“Will it also do this?”
“Can I get my own developers to do this?”
“Can IT set my division up to use the system?”
“What else can it do?”
“Are there any legal ramifications to using this system?”
“What corporate security restrictions should there be on the system?”
“I don’t think everyone should have access to do this”
“What are the SharePoint licensing restrictions?”
“Can I implement my own farm environment?”
And most commonly..... “Wow, I want to get this for my group”

Time and time again, I have worked with enterprise scale IT groups who are just overwhelmed on what is happening and they don’t know what to do. They are receiving so much pressure from everyone and just don’t have the resources or the time or the knowhow on how to run the system.

I think the first obvious things to do, is to take a step back and go through a true governance assessment for implementing SharePoint across your organization. I usually find that this process takes 3 to 4 weeks to complete (of course by a SharePoint subject matter expert). There is a good blog by Joel Oleson that talks about how to put this type of assessment together [1].

The problem is that many organizations just don’t have time to do this. With the help of a colleague, I have put together a sample set of SharePoint Governance Survey questions which IT can put out to the divisions who are asking to use their system or implement a system on their own. Feel free to make any suggestions or additions.

Note: When I get a little bit more time, I will categorize these questions.

What support would you need on an on-going basis?
Do you have a SharePoint environment you are testing on?
What is the load you expect on the site?
Do we need to backup your site?
What is the time-zone of the users?
Does the site require intranet, extranet or internet access?
Are you using Forms Authentication?
Who will be training your users?
The following information must be provided in order to request a new site:
- Site Name
- Site Description
Will you need to use services from the SSP?
How many hits do you predict?
Is the application database intensive?
Are there any external applications being served out of SharePoint? (i.e. web parts that connect to other databases)
Detailed description about what purpose of the site is (what is the business problem?)
How it will be used to meet their business needs
What are the primary Site Owner’s details?
- Full Name
- Email Address
- Phone #
- NTID
What are the secondary Site Owner details?
What are the User audiences/groups that will use the site?
How many users?
Who are they? (list NTID’s or describe audience – i.e., all people under VP xxx)
Site Owner and Back-up Owner both provide sign-off to acknowledge that they:
- have already evaluated other existing enterprise WSS/SharePoint platforms for the purpose of solving this specific business problem and have verified that it will not meet the needs of the business
- understand they are responsible for supporting their own sites and assume full responsibility for it and will provide support to their user base
- have had some SharePoint training (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007)
- have read and will adhere to the IT’s Sites Recommendations and Guidelines
Are you requesting a new site or a new site collection? (default answer should be site unless explanation can be provided)
Does your solution include other sub-sites? (if yes, provide remaining info for all sub-sites also)
What site template should be used?
What are the different roles/groups your solution includes? For each group provide:
- Name of group
- Permission level assigned to group
- Site permissions for this group (include details about what permissions the Site Owners require)
What lists (or libraries) does your solution include? For each list provide the following info:
- Name of list
- List type (Document Library, Tasks List, Custom List); if Custom List, for each column please specify:
Custom columns?
- Column Name
- Column Data Type (Single line of text, Choice, Multiple lines of text, etc.)
- Default value
- Other pertinent info (like list of items for Choice type)
  - List permissions (which users/groups have permissions to the list)
What site (or site collection) features does your solution require to be enabled?
What Shared Services does your solution require? (Search, Excel Services, InfoPath Form Services, etc.)
If Search is required (see previous question), answer the following:
- Do you require custom search scopes?
- Do you require custom managed properties?
- Do you have any other custom search requirements? (i.e., specific indexing schedule)
Does your solution require any other adjustments in the SharePoint Central Administration?
Does your solution include the use of any Workflow features? If yes, answer the following:
- Is it an out-of-the-box workflow? If yes, which one?
- Is it a custom workflow built with SharePoint Designer?
- Is it a custom coded Windows Workflow?
Will SharePoint Designer be used to construct your solution?
Does your solution include any custom code?

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/23/key-governance-considerations-in-a-sharepoint-deployment.aspx).

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Changing the InfoPath 2007 file attachment control size limit in SharePoint 2007

Noorez Khamis — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:49:00 GMT

In my InfoPath page, I have placed a file attachment control on it for users to attach files with the InfoPath page they are filling out.

The file attachment control seemed to have a built-in limit of 4MB as to the maximum file size the users can upload. I want to increase it to 25 MB.

I found this post (http://www.k2underground.com/blogs/fromthebench/archive/2008/03/10/infopath-file-attachment-size-limit.aspx) which told me that I had to just increase the httpRuntime maxRequestLength to achieve this, but my Web.Config had this already set for 50 MB. That article is probably for an older version of SharePoint.

To achieve it, I performed the following actions:

Go to Start à Admin tools à Central Admin à Application Management à Under Info-path forms services go to configure info-path forms services à Change the Form Session State to have a maximum size of 25000 KB.

Modifying the default date-time format for a SharePoint 2007 Site Collection

Noorez Khamis — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:29:00 GMT

By default, all my site-collections were using the en-US locale. This can be seen in site actions --> site settings --> regional settings. The short date-time format for this locale is "M/d/yyyy" (i.e. 10/24/2008).

I was given the task of trying to figure out how to change the short date-time format for all my site collections to "yyyy-MM-dd" (i.e. 2008-10-24).

My first instinct was to see if there was any settings within SharePoint itself in the Central Admin or Site Settings which allowed me to do this. No luck.

Next, I figured that SharePoint must get the regional & locale settings from the Regional and Language Options on the server (start --> control panel --> Regional and Language Options), so I went and changed the Short date format here. FYI, this just sets the values in the registry under HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\International. Again, no luck.

At this point, I figured I would turn to code and use the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class which is new for .NET 2.0. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureandregioninfobuilder(VS.80).aspx). Here is the code I tried to run on my server (as an administrator):

            try
            {
                CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("en-US");
            }
            catch (System.ArgumentException)
            {
                //The specified custom culture 'en-US' was not found.
                //ignore
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                throw;
            }

CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder carib = new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("en-US", CultureAndRegionModifiers.Replacement);

carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "yyyy-M-d";

carib.Register();

Again, this didn't seem to work.

Turns out that SharePoint for some reason uses the default short date for the locale it is set at. So even though I was changing the ShortDatePattern, it wasn't looking at it.

After a bit of research I found this post http://sharepointex.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-modify-date-format-in-sharepoint.html which gave me the information I needed.

From the help given in this post, what I decided to do was to try to find a locale/regional setting that had the short date I wanted (fr-CA seems to work) and then use the CultrueAndRegionInfoBuilder to copy all the locale settings from en-US to it. After this, I changed the locale for all the site collections and their sub-sites to use this customized fr-CA culture which is basically en-US using fr-CA's short date format. I deployed it as a feature, the main functiona for my code is below:

public void ChangeLocale(SPSite site)

{

try

{

CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("fr-CA");

}

catch (System.ArgumentException)

{

//The specified custom culture 'fr-CA' was not found.

//ignore

}

catch (Exception)

{

throw;

}

CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder carib = new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("fr-CA", CultureAndRegionModifiers.Replacement);

carib.LoadDataFromCultureInfo(new CultureInfo("en-US"));

carib.LoadDataFromRegionInfo(new RegionInfo("US"));

carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "yyyy-M-d";

carib.GregorianDateTimeFormat.DateSeparator = "-";

carib.Register();

CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("fr-CA");

using (site)

{

for (int i = 0; i < site.AllWebs.Count; i++)

{

using (SPWeb web = site.AllWebs[i])

{

web.Locale = ci;

web.Update();

}

public void RemoveLocale(SPSite site)

{

try

{

CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("fr-CA");

}

catch (System.ArgumentException)

{

//The specified custom culture 'fr-CA' was not found.

//ignore

}

catch (Exception)

{

throw;

}

CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("en-US");

using (site)

{

for (int i = 0; i < site.AllWebs.Count; i++)

{

using (SPWeb web = site.AllWebs[i])

{

web.Locale = ci;

web.Update();

}

Note: if you are in a farm environment, this feature needs to be locally activated on all servers so that the custom carib culture can take effect server wide.

How to use output cache to cache WSS Site Web Part Pages

Noorez Khamis — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:35:00 GMT

I recently was given the task of creating an entire Internet facing site using WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) 3.0. I created web part pages everywhere so that the content manager could login and customize the content on each page. The problem that I was having was that this site had very high web traffic so I needed to ensure that the pages loaded up very quickly. I also needed to ensure that the pages in design mode and unpublished pages were not cached. Unlike MOSS, WSS didn't have the ability to turn on output caching on directly for different versions of the page. With a little fiddling around and some relection of the assemblies, I was able to get caching working on my web part pages. Enjoy!

Step 1:

Modify the Page attribute of

a) default.aspx in the root of your web site and
b) all of the web part page layouts (Local_drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\1033\STS\DOCTEMP\SMARTPGS\) to inherit from a custom assembly:

<%@ Page language="C#" MasterPageFile="~masterurl/custom.master" Inherits="MyAssembly.MyCustomWebPartPage,MyAssembly,Version=1.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=ec04d212dae41cff" %>

Step 2:

Ensure that this assembly is listed as a safe-control in your web.config and is signed with a strong-key:

Web.Config:

Step 3:

Inherit from (Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPage) and use the following code in the class:

public class MyCustomWebPartPage : Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPage

{

protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)

{

bool cacheEnabled = bool.Parse(GetAppSetting("WebPageCacheEnabled", "False"));

//this needs to be set in order to prevent WSS from setting cache headers

if (cacheEnabled)

SPContext.Current.UseDefaultCachePolicy = false;

base.OnInit(e);

if (cacheEnabled)

SetContextProperties();

}

private static string GetAppSetting(string key, string defaultValue)

{

string setting = defaultValue;

if (System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key] != null)

{

setting = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key].ToString();

}

return setting;

}

internal static void SetContextProperties()

{

SPControlMode display;

if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(HttpContext.Current.Items["ContextPropertiesSet"] as string))

{

HttpContext.Current.Items["ContextPropertiesSet"] = "true";

display = SPControlMode.Display;

if (HttpContext.Current.Request.Form["MSOLayout_InDesignMode"] != "1")

{

string str = HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString["DisplayMode"];

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(str) && (string.Compare(str, "DESIGN", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) == 0))

display = SPControlMode.Edit;

}

else

display = SPControlMode.Edit;

//Only cache if the file is published (i.e. not in draft or checked out mode) and the page is not in edit mode (determined above)

if (((SPContext.Current.FileLevel == SPFileLevel.Published)) && (display == SPControlMode.Display))

{

//Default cache timeout to 5 min if not set

double cacheTimeOutSeconds = double.Parse(GetAppSetting("WebPageCacheTimeoutSeconds", "300"));

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(cacheTimeOutSeconds));

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Server);

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(true);

}

There you have it! A speedy loading web page completely coming out of cache!