imason – IT Consultants | SharePoint Consultants | Microsoft Consultants

SharePoint Search Options

Jeff Dunmall — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:46:59 GMT

With all of the versions of Microsoft’s search engine available, it is very confusing to know how they are related, and what each version provides. I’ve prepared the following graphic to help pull all of the information together into one place (c lick to expand) I’ve noted the major functional differences between the versions, but the list isn’t exhaustive. Notice that the majority of the core SharePoint search engine functionality is available in the free Search Server 2010 Express download. We...(read more)

Hiding the ribbon in SharePoint 2010 based on permissions

Boyan Tsolov — Thu, 19 May 2011 17:48:00 GMT

Have you ever noticed how in SharePoint 2010 Owners see the ribbon and can click Site Actions, and Readers see the ribbon too but there is no Site Actions to click. In some cases there is nothing else going on up there for Readers. It is wasted real estate!

Owner:

Reader:

The Reader can use all the extra space for some website goodness!

This is easy to solve.

- Open the master page, find the div tag: <div id="s4-ribbonrow"
- Put the following around it:
<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" Permissions="ManageWeb">
<div id="s4-ribbonrow" …</div>
</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

Et voila!

More info here:

- http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010customization/thread/9e52de43-7941-4e61-976b-d6bf2f8d926c
- http://fusionovation.com/blogs/mbell/archive/2008/09/18/security-trimmed-controls-in-sharepoint.aspx
- http://sharepoint.smayes.com/2011/02/hiding-the-sharepoint-2010-ribbon-for-readers-a-proof-of-concept/

Load testing across different domains

Boyan Tsolov — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:28:00 GMT

If you are having problems collecting counters from the server when running load tests, you might want to try the following:

The domain account that you are using to run the load tests must also be added to the groups “Performance Log Users” and “Performance Monitor Users” on the server the you are testing against
If the server is on another domain you need to do a little bit more work. Try this out:
1. Create a local account on the load testing server, e.g. TestUser1 / P@ssword
2. Add this user to the groups “Performance Log Users” and “Performance Monitor Users”
3. Create the exact same local account on the load testing client, i.e. TestUser1 / P@ssword
4. Log in as TestUser1 on the load testing client and run the tests as that user
In the worst case, you will have to run perfmon on the server and create Data Collector Set that you will start/stop with your load tests

Thoughts on Launching Enterprise Applications

Stephen Kearns — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:45:04 GMT

There are many important questions that get asked before, during and after the launch of any major enterprise software system. Many of them will focus around performance of the system at a technical level. These are important questions, but sometimes they overshadow another set of questions that are essential for a successful launch.

Launch Readiness Considerations

It’s common to ask if the project team has resolved all serious issues. The difficulty is that for any complex system, the team often doesn’t know the answer to that question with 100% certainty. No system is perfect - expect issues to appear after launch - the question then shifts: Does your organization have the people, process and tools/technology in place to rapidly move through the issue lifecycle: capture user input, diagnose, fix, test, deploy and respond back to end user to close the loop.

People

Do you have the right # of people and skills in these areas:

Leadership – who is overseeing your team, responsible for launch and the support of the application after launch
Infrastructure – who is managing your servers? who is managing your databases? If you are deploying into the cloud, how will infrastructure support work? In our experience, having a relationship with your cloud/hosting partner can still be important
Customer Service (CS) – who will be responding to your end users and what strategies will be in place for listening and responding to their input? Is your CS team large enough to handle the possible volume of input through the various channels your users will be communicating to you with?
Development Support – how many people are needed post-launch to rapidly address issues coming through CS?
Quality Assurance – do you have enough people to adequately achieve coverage of the system in a short enough time frame if you are needing to do a rapid release

Tools and Technology

Ticketing system for CS to manage input from your user population
Defect Management Tool for Dev and QA – key question: is there a linkage between the Defect Management System and the Ticketing system to ensure that CS stays in synch with the rest of the team?
Application Diagnosis: for large, complex systems a distributed application logging mechanism is essential. For one of our large external .com customers, we extended an existing solution in the Microsoft Enterprise Library with MSMQ and SQL Server to provide a query-able database that consolidated logging information across the system
System Telemetry and Health Monitoring – we’ve seen Cactii used effectively but also consider Microsoft System Center which is a very powerful tool

Process

Documentation to support troubleshooting
Rapid deployment process – how automated is your deployment process – can it be repeated reliably or is each release a major undertaking?
Mechanism for following up with end users to communicate resolution and give them a sense of involvement with the improvement of the system

All of these things are easy to say, and hard to do when there are a million other things competing for a project team’s attending as it nears launch. But without wanting to sound ominous, keep in mind these things are 10 times easier and faster to address and implement prior to a launch, then after the launch when you discover you really need them. Use that to help weigh out the priorities leading up to a launch.

Don’t make a mega mess of your new Mega Menu

Nicole Pullin — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:09:00 GMT

Mega Menus are quickly becoming ubiquitous. So I thought I would share some design considerations as people build these into their website designs, but first I want to distinguish between Mega Menus and traditional dropdown menus. The main difference between the two type of menus is that Mega Menus allow you to surface up sub content and provide the user with structured choices by grouping the content. Mega Menus also give you the opportunity to illustrate choices by including images within the menu itself. Here are some examples of both types of menus:

Traditional Drop Down Menu Example:
www.imdb.com

Mega Menus Examples
www.nike.com

www.goodmans.ca

Mega Menu Benefits

Helpful to quickly scan through the sub sections of an area
Visually compare all choices and if content is grouped together meaningfully
Easier to locate desired content quickly.

Caveats

Like most interesting things on the web, Mega Menus can be easy to abuse, making them less meaningful and confusing for visitors. Here are some of the things to consider:

Avoid complex interaction by the user. E.g. search boxes or input fields. Mega Menus are meant to have a quick screen presence, not replace complex pages.
Aim for medium level of granularity with depth of the Mega Menu. It is a fine line: large or long groups require too much time to scan the options; multiple, small groups forces users to try and understand the differences between the various groupings
Avoid putting additional text in the Mega Menu (see Goodman example above). Rarely does this type of content offer value to your visitor, and may distract more than help.
For grouped content, make sure the labels are descriptive and concise.
- Links below headers should be alphabetically ordered by columns, not rows, for easy scanning.
- Make use of colour and typography to distinguish your headings from content
Timing/speed is important to consider. Mega Menus that flash in and out too quickly can annoy, but users may think there’s a freeze if menus remain open too long after the mouse has left the menu area. The menu must be smart enough to know that the visitor is scanning the content based on the mouse position and should not close too soon.
Duplicating links or labels should also be avoided in Mega Menus. It creates a guessing game causing users to wonder if the two options link to the same content or if it is different content.

"401 unauthorized access" when server-side code or browser tries to call itself with URL

Boyan Tsolov — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:28:00 GMT

It all started out as a problem I got in a load-balanced environment. However, this error can occur whenever you try to browse to a server's URL from that same server, but using a different host header.

In my case, I wrote server-side code that browsed to my server through the load balancer URL, instead of the server's URL. The code would run and return "401 unauthorized access", even though I was using the admin to run this code.

I have the following load balanced setup with 2 SharePoint servers in a farm:
1. Server1: url1.imason.com
2. Server2: url2.imason.com
3. Load balancer: loadURL.imason.com

The application has server-side code that tries to get a specific file from the inetpub directory: http://loadURL.imason.com/somefile.js
using
            var WebRequestObject = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(Url);
            WebRequestObject.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
            var Response = WebRequestObject.GetResponse();

As explained before, opening the browser on one of the two servers and browsing to the same url (http://loadURL.imason.com/somefile.js) gives the same error. However, if I open the browser on any of the two servers and I browse to http://url1.imason.com/somefile.js or http://url2.imason.com/somefile.js, then I can get the file. The problem "401 unauthorized access" occurs when the server in the load balanced environment tries to call itself using a different header (loadURL.imason.com).

This actually fails on purpose. It is a security mechanism created by Microsoft and implemented in Windows XP SP2, Server 2003 SP1 onwards to prevent reflection attacks on your computer.

To fix this, I had to (basically) disable this security mechanism (called a loopback) by disabling the loopback check on both servers in the farm.
See the Method 2 solution here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

Forms and WSP solution deployment stuck at "Installing" or "Deploying"

Boyan Tsolov — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:27:00 GMT

I had been tearing my hair out with his problem, and I cannot take any credit whatsoever for the solution. I fully thank Prasanjit Mandal for his excellent blog post here http://prasanjitmandal.blogspot.com/2010/06/sharepoint-timer-job-stuck-at-deploying.html on how to solve the following problem. (Please excuse the lack of pictures, I am not able to get screenshots of the problem at this point.)

I have a load balanced, two-server SharePoint farm environment. I manually deploy InfopPath forms through central admin on this farm environment. The problem that I get is that, probably due to a mis-configuration of the farm environment, the installation/deletion of forms (i.e. WSP files) stays stuck in the "Installing" or "Deleting" stage. This problem is the same as the WSP package getting stuck in the "Deploying" stage, which the blog post by Prasanjit is about.

The reason for this is that the a timer job runs at a given interval which deploys the WSP package on server 1 and then on server 2. Each server has a timer service running which runs this timer job. The blog post by Prasanjit has very good steps on how to solve such problems (stopping the service on each server, starting it, running a command line prompt command), however I found the shortest-path to solve my problem (using Prasanjit's steps).

1. In Central Admin, delete the form or install the form (do the process which gets stuck)
2. On both servers, manually run all the timer jobs, i.e. do not wait for the timer service to run the job
3. Do this by going to your SharePoint BIN directory in command prompt, most probably it is: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN
4. Run the command stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs

The command will run all the timer jobs that are scheduled for that server, which for some reason are not running and which cause "Installing" or "Deleting" or "Deploying" to be displayed perpetually in Central Admin. In my scenario, server 2 was not running its jobs, so I had to run this command only on server 2

A drawback of this "manual force" approach is that if you open the timer jobs window in Central Admin, you will see the deployment timer job for your WSP still there...waiting to be executed; even though it never will be. I manually delete that timer job since I know I have already run it.

Thanks Prasanjit!

w3wp process is greyed out in "Attach to Process" dialog

Boyan Tsolov — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:04:00 GMT

If you have tried to attach to the w3wp process from Visual Studio (2008 in my case) and the w3wp process is greyed out, then I might have a solution for you.

The first link that you might want to read is this one: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/csharpide/thread/10A03A88-91D2-456F-8237-66AF5410495E
The user gleason78 complains of a very similar problem - w3wp is greyed out as soon as you start the process, or as soon as you do iisreset and the process starts up again. The solution in very general terms given to him is "another IDE had already attached itself". At first you might think... but what else could have attached itself to my process on this dev machine that only I ever use? The person that originally asked the question in that forum eventually found out that there was a "debugging service" that was running.

And that is exactly where your problem might lie (maybe someone else HAS used your machine in the past?). A debugging service running in the background will immediately attach itself to the w3wp process as soon as the process starts up.

In my case, a co-worker had been debugging something on the machine I was using. He used the Debug Diagnostic Tool http://blogs.iis.net/sukesh/archive/2006/06/02/ddintro.aspx. This tool had a service running in the background at all times, which kept attaching itself to the w3wp process, preventing me from attaching another debugger (from Visual Studio). The service was "Debug Diagnostic Service (dbgsvc.exe)".

There are no instructions here for me to show - simply make sure you go to your Services console (Start > Run > "services.msc") and stop any debugging services that may be attaching themselves to w3wp.

Beginner’s Guide to Developing on Windows Phone 7

Boyan Tsolov — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:58:00 GMT

The official release date for Windows Phone 7 is October 11th (in the US). Word around the internet is that it will be released in Canada around the end of October / beginning of November. LG, Samsung, HTC, and Dell have all developed handsets that will be available in Canada. One of the services we offer at imason is mobile development and since we are a Microsoft Gold Partner, developing on Windows Phone 7 is our forte (actually it’s the only mobile development we do). I assume as this platform gets bigger more people will jump to learn how to program on it, so this is a quick-and-dirty list of resources that will help you to learn about programming on Windows Phone 7.

http://developer.windowsphone.com/
- If you are a developer, the first thing you need to do is visit the developer’s home page. You can download tools from here, read about the SDK, look at sample code, and get questions answered in the forums.
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/releases
- You must download the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7. It has a lot of great Silverlight controls that will make your app much cooler. For example, the version of the SDK and Silverlight that you get from the first link does not have a calendar control. The Toolkit from this link has a DatePicker and a TimePicker control that you can just plop on your page and use.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/WP7TrainingKit
- The best place I have found for guides, best practices, code samples, etc was Channel9. This is the home page.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/WP7TrainingKit/WP7Silverlight
- I particularly like the home page for Silverlight on WP7. There are a ton of tutorials here, the ones I found most useful are listed below.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/WP7TrainingKit/WP7Silverlight/WindowsPhoneNavigationAndControlsLab
- How to handle navigation, going back and forth between pages, the best practices for setting up your pages.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/WP7TrainingKit/WP7Silverlight/ApplicationLifetimeWP7Lab
- Very important read on the application life cycle of a WP7 app.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/WP7TrainingKit/WP7Silverlight/LaunchersAndChoosersWP7Lab
- Working with launchers and choosers. Launchers and choosers are parts of the API that allow you interact with the Windows Phone 7 first-party apps, such as the email client, calendar/agenda, contact list, messaging app, etc.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/WP7TrainingKit/WP7Silverlight/UsingPivotAndPanoramaControls
- This tutorial shows you how to make your apps have the cool Windows Phone 7 feel with the sliding between screens (called pivot and panorama controls).
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/windows-phone-application-bar/
- Great tutorial video on how to set up the application bar at the bottom of your app. The video also shows the different customizations that you can do to the application bar.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/SlickThought/Simplify-Page-Transitions-in-Windows-Phone-7-Silverlight-Applications
- Getting the cool fade-in, fade-out page transitions to work. This effect is done by using the TransitioningContentControl that comes with the Silverlight toolkit (an extra install from link #2). Note: this tutorial was done on the April release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK, the latest SDK is slightly different.
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/slickthought/custom-per-page-transitions-for-windows-phone-7
- Similar to the previous link, this shows a little bit more about fancy, animated page transitions.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/avip/archive/2010/04/03/windows-phone-frame-page-navigation-and-transitions-using-the-transitioningcontentcontrol.aspx
- This is another link on page transitions by using the TransitioningContentControl. However, it also uses the April release.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/pagebrooks/videos/10/
- This video tutorial describes how to create a splash screen for you Windows Phone 7 application. It’s quite simple actually.
http://mobileworld.appamundi.com/blogs/andywigley/archive/2010/07/12/migrating-wp7-april-ctp-projects-to-wp7-beta.aspx
- There are differences between the April CTP release and the July release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK. This blog post describes a couple of steps to convert older projects to the new version. Obviously if you are just starting out you do not need this, but if you find sample code on the internet, you might need these steps to get the code working on your machine.

If you are just starting out, then these links (and probably a couple of days of your time) will be sufficient to introduce you into the structure, framework, best practices, and common utilities for Windows Phone 7. And now I’m off to try and get my own TransitioningContentControl to work.

Adobe PDF iFilter not working after installing June 2010 Cumulative Update for SharePoint

Peter Bojanczyk — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:52:39 GMT

Recently I installed the June 2010 CU for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 on one of our farms and noticed that after the installation, the Adobe PDF iFilter stopped working; more specifically, it wouldn’t crawl the content within the PDF documents. Quick look in the crawl log shows the following:

Upon further analysis I decided to uninstall the PDF iFilter and reinstall it again. The problem I’ve noticed is that uninstalling the iFilter doesn’t clean up the registry entries.

As you may have guessed, reinstalling the iFilter did not solve the problem. I reset my crawled content and tried to full crawl again only to find the same message in the crawl log. I’ve decided to look a bit deeper. The Adobe’s documentation for installing and configuring the 64bit iFilter shows the registry entries that the iFilter needs. One of the entries in the documentation was different that what I had on my machine.

The documentation specified that the registry entry \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf should have the value set to {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} but my registry had a different value {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02}.

I decided to change that value to the one that the documentation recommends, recrawled my content and voila it started working again. The crawl logs no longer have that message and when I tried search for some content within the PDF document it found it whereas previously it didn’t.

Hope this saves someone from a major headache!

PS: The better question is, why would a Cumulative Update for SharePoint change registry entries for Adobe’s PDF iFilter but I’ll leave that alone for now ;)

Visual Studio Test Suite 2008: Unit Tests Pass but Load Tests Fail

Boyan Tsolov — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:53:00 GMT

This is a problem I recently ran into:

- I am using Visual Studio Test Suite 2008 to create load tests that run multiple unit tests

- I created unit tests that run by getting configuration settings from an app.config file

- If I run the unit test by itself, they pass

- I placed the unit tests in a load test and ran that: the load test fails at the line of code that tries to access the app.config:

if (System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["xxx"].Equals("xxx"))

Fixing this is extremely simple. In fact, this blog post describes it perfectly: http://www.apexa.net/Blog/web_design_Blog_20080602.aspx.

View the properties of the load test's Run Settings and set the property: "Run unit tests in application domain" to TRUE.

Done!

Styling SharePoint 2010 - Refrencing Your Custom CSS

Nicole Pullin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:36:00 GMT

As I delve deeper into styling a SharePoint 2010 site, I am discovering a few quirks here and there. Normally as each new challenge arises and I find a fix for it I just move on, rarely documenting what I did to fix the problem. This made it a bit of a challenge for me when on the next project, the same quirk arises and I'm left pouring through MasterPages and CSS files trying to remember how I fixed it last time. So, I have decided to start documenting these little things as they happen as a reference for both myself and other developers out there.

Now what prompted this particular post was something tha thad a very simple solution. You see when I started this particular project I decided to use Randy Drisgill's 2010 Starter MasterPages. I thought this would be an easy way to strip out all of the the extra coding that came with Microsofts v4.master. Everything worked great, until I tried to apply the MasterPage on another team site and for some reason I was getting a 404 error when it referenced my custom stylesheet. I had uploaded my custom css and images to the appropriate folder in the team site but the MasterPage was looking for the files in the root site and not the current site collection.

After a bit of research I discovered that I needed to update how I referenced my custom css. In Randy's Masterpage he references his Custom CSS like so:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="custom.css" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

Using the format above it will always look for custom.css in the root directory, not the current site collection. By updating it to the following it will reference the current site collection:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~SiteCollection/custom.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

Hopefully this will help someone else out there.

Cheers!

Print Stylesheets affecting the Rich Text Editor

Nicole Pullin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:04:00 GMT

Every now and then a client will have some very specific requirements when it comes to the print view of their website. For those clients we will create a custom print only stylesheet that is referenced when the page is printed. I will not go into detail here about what you should include in your print stylesheet but if you are interested in learning some best practices I would highly recommend Eric Meyer's article on A List Apart titled Going to Print.

What I do want to talk about is the fact that this week I came across a strange bug with SharePoint Moss 2007 and how it referenced my print stylesheet. Specifically it was affecting the Rich Text Editor dialog that opens when the user edits a Content Editor Web Part. For some reason, the print stylesheet was overiding the default stylesheet but only within the Rich Text Editor dialog box. Once you clicked OK and the content appeared within the site, the styling was fine.

I admit I was stumped for a while and could not find anything online that talked about this specific issue. Everything looked OK from my end, the media for the stylesheet was set to print and by all accounts it should not be referenced at all but of course there it was every time I opened up the Rich Text Editor. After hours of searching for a solution, I decided to open up my print stylesheet and wrapped all of my print styles within the @media rule. I figured it was worth a shot and 'lo and behold it worked! The print styles now behave as expected and they no longer affect the Content Editor Web Part's Rich Text Editor dialog box. Instead my beautifully crafted print styles only appear when the page is printed. At that moment I did a little chair dance and decided I had to share this little fix with other developers out there.

So, to help someone else that may come across this issue, below is how I implemented my print stylesheet in a SharePoint Moss 2007 project. The important elements are in red.

In my MasterPage I have added the following link after my main CSS has already been referenced. Please note that the media must be set to print for it to work properly:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Style%20Library/project/css/print.css" media="print" />

In my print.css file I have surrounded all of my styles within the @media print rule:

@media print {
/* ----- Add Your Print Styles Here ---- */
BODY, form {text-align: left;}
}

If you found this helpful, please let me know! I would love to hear from you.

Cheers from your helpful Interaction Designer

Building a User Experience Team

Kerri McKenna — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:34:00 GMT

A while back I was asked to answer some questions on how to build a User Experience team. I'm always interested how other teams work, so I'm sharing this in hopes that people will share their experiences with what works and what doesn't. This is how we're working now...

What is the typical workflow for interactive design? Who provides the project requirements and how are those requirements typically communicated? Wireframes? Functional requirement document? Back of a napkin?

Our workflow has evolved over the years to best meet the needs of the client, designers and developers. What's been working well for us for quite a while now is:

Business Analyst meets with client stakeholders to understand the short-term goals (1-3 years) of the business, and how they map to the goals of various groups in the business. Then we discuss how the proposed solution is expected to help achieve the primary goals. Having all of this context helps us guide the client towards making informed decisions and trade-offs throughout the rest of the project.
Business Analyst works with Interaction Designer to create annotated wireframes, which serve as the detailed requirements. We've gotten away from using use case documentation on many projects. Clients and developers continue to positively respond to the more visual representation of requirements that the wireframes provide.
Wireframes are used to achieve consensus on the features, information architecture, and screen layouts. Once an agreement is reached, developers can use the wireframes to start coding.

How to coordinate workflow between designers and developers? Currently the architect provides wireframes to designers, designers provide comps to developers, developers create websites. This breaks a lot.

Our Interaction Designers are graphic designers who can code great HTML/CSS. So after they work out the comps and get approval from the client, they're also the ones who do the front-end coding which gets handed off to the developers. This is our ideal mode of working and the developers respond well to it. However, the ratio of Interaction Designer ("ID") to Developers on a project is usually 1:many, so the ID doesn't always get to do everything at the start of the project. But they're usually assigned to the project at approximately half-time during the Implementation period so that they can continue to help with the HTML/CSS coding and tweaks that need to be made again once the developers are done with their portion. The collaboration between the two groups continues to go very well — there's a mutual respect for each other's roles on the project.

What types of hires should I be looking for? How should I configure my team and what roles should be in place? Currently I have graphic designers, developers, and an information architect. Am I missing anything? Should I replace graphic design with "interactive designers"?

Tough question. The title "Information Architect" tends to mean different things at different places. Most commonly, I find that this person is a jack-of-all-trades (usability, interaction design, information architecture, front-end coding – maybe even copywriter). It sounds like you've been using them in the role of what we call Interaction Designer to create wireframes based on the requirements. I find that by having the person who does the graphic design also do the front-end coding we're always producing designs that can be implemented.

How to manage creatives? General management philosophy about how to manage and inspire designers.

I think the most important thing is to foster respect between your creative team and development teams. This takes a lot of teaching and the job is never really complete. Create dialogues that help both sides understand each other's perspectives and frustrations. Let them figure out how they can best work together. What's worked for us is to encourage everyone to look beyond the design of our web applications to the design of everyday things. We have an email alias, comprised of creative people and developers who often discuss the user experience of many aspects of the world and it's a great alias that exposes people to new ideas (good and bad). Your designers probably all have their favourite places/things (websites, books, blogs, art) for gathering inspiration but they'll also gain inspiration from the ideas of others. So making your design process more collaborative and iterative, when possible, will only benefit the final product. This blog post I wrote was inspired by working with developers for years, and hints at how we try to work together at imason.

So how do you work?

Turning on Basic Web Parts such as the Content Editor Web Part

Peter Grigoriou — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:20:00 GMT

I have been working on a SharePoint 2010 MySite implementation and wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple which was adding a Content Editor Web Part to the page. When I went to add the web part I noticed it did not show up in the gallery. I figured it must be because of the template being used for MySite and that a particular feature was not activated so I started activating a bunch of Features until it became available. The feature that made this and a few other web parts such as the Image Viewer and Page Viewer web parts available was the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrustructure however this makes a bunch of other stuff available and so I wanted to know if there was something else I could do. A person from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) helped me with this and mentioned that you can turn on a hidden feature called "BasicWebParts" that enables this feature. I activate this as part of a Feature Receiver on the site and voila I now have access to those web parts.

Enterprise Search: Ask for help after you have a starting point

Jeff Dunmall — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:28:14 GMT

Your employees can't remember all of the information sources inside your company, much less keep track of the search interfaces that exist. Each of the following system likely has its own search interface: SAP for customer data, Ariba for expense data, Siebel for contracts, the E: drive for sales related information, http://www.yourintranet.com to look up product info, unless it is related to the US division, in which case you should visit http://www.us-yourintranet.com. Information about Project...(read more)

Options for a SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

Peter Grigoriou — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:41:00 GMT

One of the first things you will probably ask yourself when you start embarking on SharePoint 2010 development is where do you set up your development environment. As I started investigating this, I realized there are a number of various options each with their own implications. Below is listing of each option I found and some of my personal thoughts on each of them:

Option	Pros	Cons
Install SharePoint 2010 directly on our Windows 7 / Vista workstation/laptop	It's nice to have SharePoint available to you at any time.	I don't like the "clutter" it adds to my laptop as I like to keep it fairly clean in terms of what's installed. Pretty manual install
Create a bootable Hyper-V image	Keeps your development environment clean and partitioned from your business applications	If I have to boot to that image, I don't have access to my other application such as Office unless I decide to install all of that on the image which I don't think is very practical.
Create a Hyper-V image on a centrally located Hyper-V Server	Similar to bootable option except you can usually take advantage of better hardware which usually mean better image performance	If you are offline and can't connect to the image there's not much you can do.
Run VMWare Workstation	It supports 64-bit OS's which means you can run it on your Windows 7 or Vista environments without having to install SharePoint 2010 directly on your box. Allows you to keep your image portable	Not a great solution if you want to standardize on Hyper-V which can result in a little pain when you want to share an image.
Run Windows Server 2008 as your workstation/ laptop OS with Hyper-V	Works great if you have the right hardware.	Performance can be horrible if you don't have the right hardware. (Details on this here)

You may have noticed in the list above that there isn't a Microsoft Virtual PC option. That's because it doesn't support 64-bit OS's which is a requirement for SharePoint 2010. I have tried to find out if there is a plan for Microsoft to update Virtual PC to support 64-bit OS's however I have yet to hear anything that indicates this.

For my purposes, I decided to run a VMWare image because I just felt it worked well for me given the hardware I have, the desire to keep my laptop clean, and the fact that I want to remain portable with respect to the image. One other thing to note, if you want to take advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 you'll need to have SharePoint 2010 installed on the same environment as Visual Studio 2010 which, in my opinion, makes the choice of the environment you choose all the more important.

I'd be really interested to hear other's thoughts on this topic.

Some noteworthy new features of SharePoint 2010

Peter Grigoriou — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:57:00 GMT

In my last post I mentioned I had the privilege of attending the SharePoint 2010 conference. In this post I'd like to review the things I think were quite notable based on the sessions I attended:

Sandboxed Solutions: I have run into a lot of clients who want to use SharePoint as their application development platform and have various groups within their organization building their own applications. However the question that is always asked is how do we make sure that they can’t do something that brings down the entire farm. Sandboxed solutions provide the ability to limit access to resources and isolate worker processes from the rest of the platform reducing the risk that a particular application will bring down the farm.
Configurable Deployment: Deployment has always been big challenge and resulted in a lot of effort with SharePoint applications. With Visual Studio 2010 there is now a series of out of the box deployment steps as well as the ability to create your own custom deployment package. From what I have seen so far I think this is going to greatly improve SharePoint deployments.
Branch Caching with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 and the Office Document Cache in Office 2010: These are features to improve the performance of global SharePoint deployments (ex. A centralized SharePoint Intranet being accessed from around the world.) Office 2010 provides an Office Document Cache which basically stores documents requested for SharePoint locally on the persons computer. Subsequent requests to the same document in SharePoint will result in a check to the server if the document as changed and if not, will serve the document from the local cache and if it has changed will send just the differences over (this is limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote). Branch caching provides the ability to cache documents at particular locations via either a Windows Server 2008 R2 server or on local Windows 7 workstations. Once cached subsequent requests will either go to the local Branch cache server (Windows Server 2008 R2 Box) or request the document from a local peer workstation thus reducing the need to transfer the document over long distances.
Multilingual User Interface: This is the ability to install multiple language packs and toggle between languages on the same site. Prior to this you would need a third party or completely custom solution to make this work and usually involved a lot of development effort. I am not sure of all the limitations but it’s a step in the right direction.
Social Computing: There are a lot of features that pull in Social Computing concepts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc that should add a bunch of excitement to what is possible from a development perspective.
Phonetic People Search: This was pretty impressive. The demo showed the presenter misspelling a person’s name (ex. Cowfman) and it finding the person named Kauffman. It also does the same for common nicknames.

Other notable items:

All Search Web Parts will be open source.
Vastly improved SharePoint Designer Workflows (particularly being able to package them into a WSP so that you can deploy the workflow to other lists and SharePoint sites).
Very scalable farm architecture with a new concept of the Application Services Server. You can view the architecture here.
Integrated SharePoint support in Visual Studio IDE
Improved Search and FAST integration

I'll dive into this in more detail in future posts as I work with some of these items.

Another version of SharePoint? Actually SharePoint 2010 is pretty impressive.

Peter Grigoriou — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:47:00 GMT

So this is my first blog post...ever! Yeah, I'm pretty excited that I have finally taken the plunge and decided to write about something, so here goes...

I have been working at imason for over 6 years now and in that time my main technology focus has been around SharePoint. I was lucky enough to attend the SharePoint 2010 conference in Las Vegas and have to say I came away being thoroughly impressed at what I had seen over the 4 days. If you had asked me prior to attending the conference what I thought about SharePoint 2010 I would have replied "Oh great, another version of SharePoint that I need to get up-to-speed on". Today, however, I am pretty excited about the new features and improvements in 2010 and I think it will make for some great potential solutions once it is released.

The SharePoint conference itself was fantastic. The sheer size (around 7500 attendants) and number of sessions (over 250) was very impressive and the sessions I did attend were very informative and went smoothly considering it is a beta product. I think the thing that stuck out to me the most was that for 2010 Microsoft focused on fixing the issues that developers and business users routinely complained about in MOSS 2007, providing a wealth of additional features that really solidifies SharePoint as a great development platform, and building in a lot of the social computing concepts we see in the public domain. Microsoft did a great job of focusing on what was new and improved which helped me understand the key differences between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010. One of the things that can be overwhelming with a product the size of SharePoint is having the knowledge that something exists so that you can leverage it when needed and the conference was great at providing those details. At some point, you will probably be asked the question, "Why should we move to 2010?" and my hope is that over the next few weeks and months my posts will help provide some insight into helping you answer that question.

Performance Testing: The Performance Test Plan

Boyan Tsolov — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:57:00 GMT

I have always had a problem doing performance testing (aka load testing). I am quite adept at recording web tests and collecting counters, but I still find it troublesome interpreting the counters that I gather from load tests. The problem is that I need a plan that will produce relevant results with which I can conclude with confidence: "This system is a juggernaught! It can withstand more hits than Google.com." If you are like me and you have trouble planning your load tests, then maybe this post will help you. The following post describes how I like to run my own plan and what conclusions I can make with this plan.

Special thanks goes out to Jeff Dunmall, our co-CEO, whose article "Real-World Load Testing Tips to Avoid Bottlenecks When Your Web App Goes Live" got me to write something more about load testing here, and Randar Puust who uses this plan (and thus now I use it too).

There are a number of facets to load testing:

- setting up a load testing rig and setting up your environment in Visual Studio

- recording the web tests

- planning the load tests

- collecting performance counters and figuring out what the recorded result mean

Unless you have a plan, planning the load tests and reading the results will be meaningless. A performance test plan will keep you on track throughout the last two phases mentioned above. The results from a test plan will allow you to determine:

- maximum number of users that can hit the site before it becomes unresponsive

- can the system recover from overload

- are there memory leaks in the code

A performance test plan consists of four types of tests that need to be run in the following order:

1. Performance Tests

2. Load Tests

3. Stress Tests

4. Endurance Tests

1. Performance Tests

These are the benchmark tests. By this point you should have recorded web tests which cover the most-used parts of your web application. Now, you will create a load test that gathers and runs all of the web tests that you have recorded. Run the load test with settings similar to these:

- load: low end of the expected number of users for the system. I like to start with 5 or 10.

- time: 10 minutes

- think time: 5 seconds

- warmup: 30 seconds to 1 minute is more than enough

A load test like this should not stress the web server, it should be low-impact. The goal of this test is for it to be run later on in this plan and be used to compare against (i.e. a benchmark). Collect and save the result counters from the web server and from the client. Web Server counters to collect are: "CPU %", "Used Memory". Client counters to collect are: "Respose time per page", "Number of Requests per second". Other counters you might like to save are "pages that take the longest time to load", "number of errors", "network usage" - these are useful for neat reports that you might want to compile.

2. Load Tests

The load tests are going to stress the web application and try and find its breaking point. The goal of these test will be to find the lucky number X. This number is the number of users that are concurrently hitting the system and that cause the system to be unresponsive or response times to be unacceptable. For this part of the plan you will need to run a number of load tests. In each case, increase the number of users and collect the counters:

- load: 10 users, 15 users, 20 users, 50 users.... until the response times get too large, or server CPU % gets dangerously high.

- time, think time, warmup: same as for the performance test. Basically we are running the performance test from step 1but with more and more users.

By the end of this step you will know what is the maximum number of users that can hit the system.

3. Stress Tests

Stress tests check that the web application can recover from errors induced by overload.

- load: X + 20% (where X is the magic number from step 2 which causes the system to be unstable)

- time: 1 minute

- think time: 5 seconds

After this test is run the system should become unresponsive. If it is not unresponsive, then increase the 20%. One way to check if it is unresponsive is to check that response times are suddenly exponentially far worse than the results in step 2 and CPU % usage on the server is close to 100%.

Immediately after this test runs run the performance test from step 1. If the performance test runs fine and the results are comparable to the test that was run at step 1, then your system passes! It can safely recover from overload issues.

4. Endurance Tests

The endurance tests are unrelated to the other 3 tests. These tests are run over a long period of time, which causes many users to hit the site. If there are memory leaks, then over the course of this endurance test the free memory on the web server should decrease dramatically.

- load: X - 20% (where X is the magic number from step 2 which causes the system to be unstable). We'll use -(minus) 20% because we don't want to overload the system

- time: 12 hours

- think time: 5 seconds

Remember to record the "Free" or "Used Memory" on the web server. The goal at the end of this step is to make sure that the memory usage on the web server has not decreased dramatically and thus there are no memory leaks in your code. If that is the case with your results then tip of the hat to you!

At the end of these four types of tests you should have a better idea of where your system stands in terms of load that it can handle. You will know:

- what is the maximum number of users it can handle before performance is unacceptable

- can it recover after an overload

- are there any memory leaks

Happy testing!

Create TFS Work Items directly from Outlook Emails

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:36:50 GMT

This is a great little productivity tool for teams actively using Work Items to track dev activities in TFS. Used it at a recent customer (thx Dilip!) and found it helpful.

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2007/03/04/Team-System-Outlook-2007-Addin-_2D00_-v1.0.aspx

technical; TFS; work items

Don’t Tell Me You’re Not a Designer

Kerri McKenna — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:03:00 GMT

Often, when I’m working on a project with someone who isn’t an Interaction Designer I’ll inevitably hear the phrase, “I’m not a designer, but...” followed by an idea or suggestion for changing the user experience. This is frustrating to hear.

Designers are facilitators of ideas. We assemble requirements, best practices and ideas into visual representations for consideration. But we’re not omniscient divas who will storm off at the first hint of a non-designer’s opinion.

Good designers analyze the big picture and the minute details of a design problem. We should be able to tell you why our concepts work well, and where there’s room for flexibility. Rather than telling you that our design is perfect, we need to hear your feedback. We want to collaborate with you to improve our design – it will probably never be perfect, but it can always get better.

So if you’ve got an idea for changing a design or interaction, throw it out there. Sure, designers may have more experience and knowledge about the rules of engagement for design and usability principles – but a good designer won’t shoot you down. Just like we hope that you won’t immediately dismiss our first take on a design solution. Let’s work together here – no ideas are bad, they just might not be the best ones. But we can filter out the good ones together.

Think of a designer’s concepts as sparks for a fire of ideas. I don’t care that you’re not a designer. I do care about your sparks.

Enterprise Search: Why Search Scoping Doesn’t Work

Jeff Dunmall — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:57:00 GMT

My previous post outlined the problem with the ‘traditional’ approach to search scoping. To explore the problem and a solution that leverages Microsoft FAST search, I’ve invented a fictitious company called Canadian Financial . That gives us some context – it is a bank with multiple geographies, lines of business, languages, and products. There are dozens of internal sites up that provide a massive amount of information required to do your job more effectively, if you can...(read more)

Office 2010 Technical Preview Announced Today

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:14:10 GMT

Hi All – I was at the Microsoft Technical Preview Press Event this morning to participate in a panel discussion with members of the press. Session was hosted by Jason Brommet and the good folks at High Road communications.

ITWorld Canada picked up the event and some of the partner discussion:

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/f83346b9-5007-43c5-b3f0-cd10ccd5b45d.html

Here were a few quick hits on stuff that jumped out at me that I’m going to really enjoy in the new version.

Outlook
1. Convert voicemail to text (when hooked up to exchange)
2. You can mark a given conversation thread to ignore further updates
3. When you receive invites, body of message includes a calendar preview
4. Mouse-over emails/presence jelly-beans pops up a little contact-preview
5. New pane listing recent contacts you’ve interacted with (quick click to IM or email)
6. Quick-steps – kind of like a section on the ribbon where you can stick in some canned/customized macros – e.g. Reply with Invite – takes an email you’re on and creates invite with all the people on the email as invitees. Nice!
PowerPoint
- video as “first class citizen” – basic video editing and effects tools built right in
- more powerful image editing
- Record your PowerPoint presentation without having to go out to a 3rd party tool like Camtasia
- You can broadcast your presentation (pops up a provider list, including Windows Live for individual consumer audience)
Excel
1. Sparklines looks interesting – visualization/charting right inside a spreadsheet cell – may seem small, but when you’re pouring over volumes of data, the ability to visually highlight key points so person consuming the information can spot it quickly is really valuable
2. Slicers – ability to surface up your data filters on table or pivot tables as a little persistent dialog/window and see what filters have been applied, apply new ones, deselect.
Word
1. Backstage (across all apps) – surfaces lots of great doc properties/tools – e.g. integrates print dialog with print-preview
2. Ability to minimize the ribbon

You can see more screenshot info here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2010office/imageGallery.aspx

Looking forward to seeing many of the other good stuff coming down the pipe including the web versions - “Office Anywhere” later this summer and the SharePoint side of Office 14 in the fall.

Graphic Design Guidelines for SharePoint 2007

Kerri McKenna — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:31:00 GMT

Problem: You've been asked to create a graphic design that can be applied to a SharePoint 2007 site - but you've never seen one before. Or, you've seen one but don't have access to the CSS to see how things are set up.

Here are some basic guidelines for creating a graphic design that can easily be applied to out-of-box Microsoft SharePoint 2007 sites. The guidelines apply to designs that will be implemented using SharePoint “themes”, which means that only CSS and graphics can be altered but the HTML on pages cannot. This is by no means an exhaustive list of SharePoint elements - but if you're trying to work on a mock-up of new graphic design, hopefully this will help clarify some of the terminology and limitations you might hear about when discussing the feasibility of implementing the design with a technical team.

Disclaimer: When I say that something "cannot" be done - I don't mean it's impossible, but rather that it's not easily done by modifying a theme file alone. And I won't claim to be a CSS guru either. I have no doubt that people have figured out ways to overcome some of the points below with more crafty CSS than I am capable of.

PAGE WIDTH

Pages have a fluid width and are designed to occupy 100% of the width and height of the browser window.
Pages are optimized for a 1024x768 browser resolution.

Tip
If designing with a “grid layout”, commonly used in print design, percentages will have to be used to define the column and gutter widths.

NAVIGATION

Tabs

Unselected tabs all look the same.
The selected tab can have a distinct look from unselected tabs.
You cannot single out a tab and change its style (e.g. adding a “New!” icon or unique colouring that draws attention to it).
The width of each tab defaults the width of the name of each tab, plus padding of XX pixels on either side of the text.
The widths of the tabs can be made consistent through styles, but longer tab names should be considered when defining the width.
The small arrow icon is a graphic, and shows up when a tab has menu items underneath it.

Left Navigation

In Sharepoint terminology, the left navigation bar is referred to as the “Quick Launch” bar. The links in this area are generated dynamically as users add lists and libraries to their Sharepoint site.

The width of the left navigation area is static and set in pixels. The width is the same on all pages.
Headings all share the same styles.
Links under headings all share the same styles.
The “View All Site Content” link can have its own style.
The Recycle Bin area can have its own style.

Breadcrumb

The breadcrumb uses plain text, hyperlinks, and the “>” character to let users know where they are in the site hierarchy.

Links can be styled.
Plain text can be styled.
The “>” character cannot be changed.

Global Links

Global links appear at the top of each page.

TITLES

Area / Site Title

The area/site title appears at the top of every page and is a hyperlink which can be styled.
The height of the white background seen in the screen shots can be modified as required.
The white background behind the area/site title, logo icon/graphic, and search bar can be styled.
The position of the title within the white background can be controlled with styles.

Logo / Icon

The default icon can be replaced with a JPEG, GIF, or PNG file.

The white background around the logo will increase or decrease in height depending on the size of the replacement graphic.
The icon can also be hidden and replaced with a background image that contains logos or graphics.

Page Title

The page title is plain text that can be styled.

Page Description

The page description is plain text that can be styled.

Consider a link colour for the page title, because on some pages the title may be a hyperlink.

WEB PARTS

“Web part” is a SharePoint term that in other platforms means “widget”. A “web part page” could be considered as a dashboard view of various lists consolidated on a single page. The condensed view of each list is referred to as a “web part”.

Web Part Title Bars

Web part title bars all use the same styles.
Sometimes the text is a hyperlink to the full view of a list; other times it’s just plain text.
The arrow icon on the right side of the title bar cannot be changed. When hovered over a drop-down menu appears.

LIST VIEWS

Toolbar

The toolbar options change depending on the type of list you are using, but the same styles are used everywhere.
The “View” option on the right side of the tool bar can have its own unique style.

SEARCH RESULTS

There may be more than one search scope available, in which case tabs are used to indicate the available options.
The title of the result is a hyperlink.
The URL for the result is a hyperlink.
The paging options are hyperlinks.

CONTENT PAGES

Article Page

The article title is a mandatory fields and shares the same style as all page titles.
The article date is an optional field that can be styled.
The article byline is an optional field that can be styled.
Content is entered through a rich text editor (RTE). Default styles for RTE text can be modified, and custom styles can be added.