The SharePoint Content Information source Information Size Limit

With the discharge of SharePoint 2010 SP1 and some new assistance we are modifying the reinforced information dimension boundaries for SharePoint articles directories. Prior to SP1 the articles information source restrict was 200 GB for cooperation and 1 TB for papers store. The articles information source dimension contains both meta-data and BLOBs regardless of where the BLOBs are situated and use of RBS does not avoid or improve these boundaries.

Publish Several Documents with Internet explorer and SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 allows you to select multiple documents and upload them all at once. This approach saves you time; however, you can't batch-upload for properties. So even though you save time uploading the files, you still have to manually edit the properties on each file.

get localeid in SharePoint How?

reference(Shailen Sukul )

Objective: Get the locale id out of the current context.

public int HarvestCurrentLCID(System.Web.HttpContext context)
{
return (int)Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SPControl.GetContextWeb(context).Language;
}

Usage:

int localeID = HarvestCurrentLCID(System.Web.HttpContext.Current);

Keywords: Locale id Localization Termstore Term Termset Label

Different tips on how to recognize what design is used for the website for SharePoint sites

Hello all, Hope all are doing fine. I believe this is very rarely needed post that we need to know what site template [Publishing site, workspace, meeting workspace, team portal etc..] was used for a particular SharePoint site. From the UI [means by navigating to SharePoint site through browser] we can't identify this. So, we need to follow either of the steps given below to identify the template used for a specific site.

1. First option is, this is my recommended choice and very easy too. By using SharePoint Manager tool [available for both 2010 9http://spm.codeplex.com/and 2007.] Download ithttp://spm.codeplex.com/ for free from Codeplex and install it. Now, open the SharePoint Manager and connect to the SharePoint site collection. When you click on a specific SharePoint site, on the right side it will show you all the properties available in the SP object model for that site. In it find for TemplateID and check the value showing there. That's it. What is TemplateID and how to know template name from it? Navigate to end of this post for TemplateID to Name mapping.
   
2. Second option is, if there is no way to install SharePoint manager or if any other problems, then save the current site as site template[.STP extension]. Now, save it to disk somewhere. Now, navigate to that location and rename the file to .CAB extension. Extract the CAB file and find the manifest.xml file. Now, in the file check for the TemplateID string and get the value. Navigate to end of this post for the TemplateID to Name mapping.
3. From the SP Object Model: Through managed code we can identify this very easily with below code.
   
   view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

   1. using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb("/"))  
   2. {     
   3.    string templateID = web.WebTemplateId.ToString();  
   4. }   
4. Using STSADM.EXE: It needs high level permissions. Means the user should be an administrator on the server. Below is the command we need to use for knowing the site template.
   stsadm.exe -o enumallwebs -database [content database name]
5. From Sql Server: Sql server has all the information about SharePoint. So, if you have access to database then login to the sql server management studio and execute below query on the content database of the application.
   SELECT Title, WebTemplate FROM dbo.Webs WHERE Title='Test Publishing Site'

Choose one option which is useful or easy for you and identify the correct template.

Site template ID to Name mapping:
0 - GLOBAL (SetupPath=global) - "Global template"
1 - STS - "windows SharePoint Services Site", "Team Site", "Blank Site", "Document Workspace"
2 - MPS - "Basic Meeting Workspace", "Blank Meeting Workspace", "Decision Meeting Workspace", "Social Meeting Workspace", "Multipage Meeting Workspace"
3 - CENTRALADMIN - "Central Admin Site"
4 - WIKI - "Wiki Site"
7 - BDR - "Document Center"
9 - BLOG - "Blog"
20 - SPS (OBSOLETE) - "SharePoint Portal Server Site"
21 - SPSPERS - "SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space"
22 - SPSMSITE - "Personalization Site"
30 - SPSTOC (OBSOLETE) - "Contents area Template"
31 - SPSTOPIC (OBSOLETE) - "Topic area template"
32 - SPSNEWS (OBSOLETE) - "News area template"
33 - SPSNHOME (SubWebOnly) - "News Home template"
34 - SPSSITES - "Site Directory area template"
36 - SPSCOMMU (OBSOLETE) - "Community area template"
38 - SPSREPORTCENTER - "Report Center Site"
39 - CMSPUBLISHING (SetupPath=SiteTemplates\PUBLISHING) - "Publishing and Team Collaboration Site"
40 - OSRV (SetupPath=SiteTemplates\OSRV) - "Shared Services Administration Site"
47 - SPSPORTAL - "Corporate Intranet Site"
50 - SRCHCEN - "Search Center"
51 - PROFILES - "Profiles"
52 - BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER - "Internet Presence Web Site"
53 - BLANKINTERNET - "Publishing Site", "Press Releases Site", "Publishing Site"
54 - SPSMSITEHOST - "My Site Host"
90 - SRCHCENTERLITE (SetupPath=SiteTemplates\SRCHCENTERLITE) - "Search Center Lite"
6221 - PWA (SetupPath=SiteTemplates\PWA) - "Project Web Access Site"
6215 - PWS (SetupPath=SiteTemplates\PWS) - "Project Workspace"
14483 - OFFILE - "Records Repository", "Records Repository"

SharePoint Lists Vs. Database Tables

I got a question from a developer whether they should use SharePoint lists or database tables to hold the data for his application.  This is a fair question and as a consultant I will start with the standard answer:  It depends.
I will follow up that answer with the standard consultant question: what are you trying to do?  There generally isn’t one answer for any technology choice.  We need to take as many factors into account as possible.  Who will be maintaining the data?  Will the data only be used in your SharePoint application or does it need to be available across the enterprise and used by a multitude of systems?  What standards are already in place for application data?  Are there security concerns for this data?  All of these questions and more need to be answered in order to decide where you should store your data.

Move and Copy Operations SharePoint Lists

I do not know how many of you know about these important issues.

View User's Profile Photos Next To the Name Welcome

Here is a simple way to add the photo current user profile, just before or after the user name in SharePoint 2010 the band.

Sharepoint 2010: View/Update Profile Status on Any Page

If you want to allow your users to view/update their personal Status on any page in SharePoint 2010 follow these simple steps.

Show additional columns from lookup field in Sharepoint 2010

In SharePoint 2007, using the lookup column to link to another list, we can only see this column. We have not had the opportunity to see other columns in the list of parents in the child list.

Multiple Line Text Field Combine Enclose the Text with Versions for Use in SharePoint Workflow

When playing around with "Multiple Lines of text" fields that were configured to append changes to the previous versions. I found that when trying to use the value in the field in a workflow created using SharePoint Designer, it will 

SharePoint Consulting And Content Management Systems

One of the vital importances for the content management systems is Sharepoint Consulting. The sharepoint consultants utilizes this content management for various purposes that comprises of any portal content 

SharePoint Dual Feature Bonanza

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has more social and search features, which are intertwined to create an enticing platform for users. This and more is revealed in the Able Blue blog post “The MOSS Show Interview”, which takes you to The MOSS show site’s interview “Enterprise Social (and Search) in SharePoint 2010”.

The two part podcast interview of Matthew McDermott, who is a Microsoft SharePoint expert and MVP, talks about the new improved social features like improved My Sites, Activity Feed, tagging, rating, managed metadata, taxonomies, and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010. Matthew talks about the importance of having a search strategy, and leverage the search applications by making the search actionable and refined.

SharePoint 2010 can help create a knowledge base that benefit over a long period, and can be shared amongst users. Matthew points out, “What makes SharePoint 2010 special is its ability to gather feedback from people participating in the content consumption,” which enhances the value of the content, making it more important to the enterprise. This is enterprise social, which gains more relevance if “made more findable by tagging and using proper metadata.”

Matthew explains that SharePoint 2010 adds great enterprise social capabilities, and facilitates to integrate third party external applications like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter outside the firewall from SharePoint 2010. These social tools can be used to create a business value. The new SharePoint 2010 allows the internal as well as external URLs in the browser to be tagged, and enables the list of all the tagged URLs to collect on a tag profile page.

The managed metadata store of SharePoint 2010, allows people to create a central repository of data through service applications. There is also a feature to make the data translatable into multi-lingual forms, and even deny the use of tags for various reasons. “Activity feed is a feature through which you get your news or tips of the day by just following the tags,” Matthew reports, “and you get the ability to consume content around the organization.” He believes that this helps the employees to connect with each other, nurture cooperation, and makes them productive by improving the culture of the workplace.

The beauty of SharePoint 2010, as per Matthew McDermott is that users can themselves decide upon the governance of the data, and thus get complete control of this powerful enterprise social platform, with highly developed search techniques.

Now, how expensive is it to maintain a proprietary system that requires hands on fiddling to make work as advertised? The answer to this question is not in the movie. Maybe the sequel?

How good is SharePoint as a Document Management System? - response

This is in response to “How good is SharePoint as Document Management System?” by Toni Frankola. In the post, Toni scored SharePoint’s Document Management (DM) capabilities on a 5-star scale using the following criteria:

·                     Metadata – 5 stars

·                     Integration - 3stars

·                     Capture – 1 star

·                     Indexing – 5 stars

·                     Storage – 3 stars

·                     Retrieval – 3.5 stars

·                     Security – 3 stars

·                     Workflow – 4 stars

·                     Collaboration – 4 stars

·                     Versioning – 4.5 stars

SharePoint Document Management Needs Multi-file Documents

I liked the post overall and agreed with most of the ratings. However, I would lower SharePoint's marks for versioning, workflow, and security. The reason is that SharePoint supports only single-file documents. I.e. a logical document is stored as a single file in SharePoint. In order for SharePoint to truly excel as a DM system, SharePoint needs to support multi-file documents. When I say "multi-file" document, I mean something like a compound document or virtual document. Yes, SharePoint Server 2010 has document sets, but they are more like the SharePoint version of Office Briefcase rather than true multi-file documents.

SharePoint’s Single-file Document Limitation

SharePoint’s single-file document limitation manifests itself in these ways:

Versioning: The version information is not very granular. You can only tell when the entire document has changed, but you can not tell which part of the document has changed. For example, your 3-person team is creating a proposal with introduction, technical approach, and pricing sections. The entire proposal has 100 versions over its lifespan. How can you tell when the pricing section was changed without going through each version? The difficulty clearly stems from the fact that SharePoint stores the entire proposal document as a single file. If the proposal were stored as a compound or virtual document with the pricing section as a separate file, it would be very easy to see exactly when the section were changed and by whom independently of the entire proposal's version history. Let me reiterate that the proposal document is logically a single document not a set of documents grouped together, so it is not quite right to represent the proposal document as a document set.

Workflow: To extend the example of the proposal document, the 3-person team has grown to a 6-person team, with different members focusing on different aspects of the proposal. The proposal is about 400 pages now, and the team has just published a major version. The approval workflow takes a long time, because the approval workflow can only be run at the granularity of the entire proposal document. That means that there are lots of reviewers for each workflow, even when the section in which a particular reviewer is interested has not changed since the last time the approval workflow was run (see above comment on versioning). This means that the reviewer is wasting his/her time needlessly looking over a 400-page document. Additionally since the workflow is running at the scope of the entire 400-page proposal, it is difficult to focus the reviewers' comments on particular sections or even to make it clear to the reviewers which sections have actually changed since the last review. If each section were a separate file, you could easily run smaller, focused workflows on just the sections that have significant changes, before running one final workflow on the completed proposal.

Security: Extending the example of the proposal even further, let's say you now have two sub contractors helping to create the proposal. You want the subs to help create portions of the technical approach. However, you do not want either of the subs to see the other’s work as it contains competitive information. Further, you don't want either of the subs to see the pricing section, since that contains your markup over their rates. There is no way to give each sub contractor access to their proper proposal sections without also granting them access to the entire proposal, as all of the sections are stored in the same file. A content manager couldeasily secure each section of the proposal individually if the proposal were stored in a multi-file format.

What else can Multi-file Documents Do?

These are just some quick notes. We have a white paper that talks about many usage scenarios made possible with multi-file documents here:

http://www.blackbladeinc.com/en-us/products/docBlock/Pages/UsageScenarios.aspx

VSeWSS:CTP of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint v1.3

Finaly! A version 64-bit of  VS 2008 Extensions for SharePoint is out, in a form of a CTP. Yes, that means we can now develop on x64 servers as well :)

CTP 1.3 brings some new features as well:

It can be installed on computers running SharePoint Server x64 x64 OS. Previously, only single x86 server could be used.

building separate commands for the package, deploy and retract is added

The command line build together and take control is continuous integration and build servers. Old command line build SharePoint projects have been very difficult

refactoring support to rename Web Parts. Earlier rename a web part changes needed in several files in the project

See WSP improvements in the consistency of the delete function, functions merge and add event sinks for the characteristics

Solution Generator to create solutions to publish the sites now. Previously, only sites on a regular basis can be achieved

BIN allow partial trust deployment of Web Parts. CAS settings must still be provided by the developer.

new product design project SharePoint Root File itemsr.

The deployment now delete any existing functions in the contradictory development server before redistribution. Previously, the function name conflicts occur error

Auxiliary gatherings such as business logic can now be added to the solution SharePoint WSP

Hidden Features in the proposed definition of site is now shown in WSP View. They are no longer hidden

For advanced users a quick insert is included to update the compiled assembly on SharePoint Development Setup

The User Guide is now installed with the extensions instead of being a separate download

The final release of VSeWSS 1.3 is planned for the North American Spring of 2009.

You can download CTP from Microsoft Connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/Downloads.aspx?SiteID=428

SharePoint 2010 Meeting Workspaces and Blogs are not MUI enabled

A while ago I wrote about the new multilingual capabilities of SharePoint 2010 based on the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) – see Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part Iand Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part II. But beware – apparently not all site definitions support the MUI.

SharePoint development environments, my guidance

At most conferences or events I get cornered by at least two or three people wanting my opinion on how to best set up their development environments.  Questions like:

• Should I have all my developers on one shared SharePoint server?
• Should I virtualize?
• What spec PCs should I buy our developers?

Here is my guidance in its simplest form, in order of preference:

1. Locally virtualized instance of SharePoint developer environment for each developer. (either Hyper-V or other, not a debate for this post).
2. Centrally virtualized instances of dev environment.  Still one per developer.
3. Locally installed SharePoint developer environment “on the metal” with Windows Server 2008 R2.
4. Locally installed SharePoint developer environment (on the metal” with Windows 7.

“Why virtualize?”   That way you can snapshot, rollback, have different projects in different VMs etc…  There is nothing less productive than having to spend a morning re-building your development environment if you break it.

“Why Windows 7 last?”  We enabled installation on Windows 7 primary for people who were not allowed or didn’t have access to virtualization technology & secondly people who couldn’t install a server OS on their developer workstation for whatever reason.  I prefer to develop on bits that are as close to production as possible and therefore I would try and develop on Windows Server 2008 R2 first.  Dev on Windows 7 is a great experience, don’t get me wrong, its just I would prefer to use a server OS first. YMMV.

“Why not have everyone on one server?”  Productivity.  Having everyone on one server is nasty for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to:  stomping on each others toes with changes by mistake, limited debugging or only one person at a time, versioning issues and dependency management.  It is just so much more productive to have each dev on their own instance of SharePoint and share code and assets around using a source control and build system like TFS.

“What spec machine should I use?”  My guidance is to buy a quad core proc or greater with 8GB of RAM.  Hard drives are VERY critical you should get the fastest you can buy, 7200 RPM min. SSDs in my experience are the single best way to improved your SharePoint development experience.  I would rather have a fast SSD over 16GB of RAM any day.  We use them in our demo laptops and it makes them scream.   Tip: Run the host OS off your slower spinning disk and run your VMs of the SSD. 

Vesa did a good write up on this topic a while back.  It has much more in depth commentary on the subject: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2010/02/01/sharepoint-2010-team-development-environment.aspx

Information on setting up SharePoint on Windows 7 is available here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

Our Patterns and Practices team recently released an updated set of guidance for SharePoint.  In there is a ton on building apps for SharePoint.  Check it out.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff770300.aspx

Thanks,