Live SharePoint Foundation Presentation series: Session 3, Users and Permissions, this Thursday!

I thought I'd get a jump start on letting you all know about the third session in my four part SharePoint Foundation for admins series. These sessions are completely free, live, and online. So if you're (or someone you know is) interested in free SharePoint Foundation training, the third of my sessions will be held on Thursday of this week (11/11), at 3 pm Eastern.

The session will be recorded (if the technology gods allow it), and it will be for 90 minutes (give or take). The contents essentially map to the Users and Permissions chapter of my upcoming Mastering SharePoint Foundation book, and will delve into Users, Permission, Permission Levels, Groups, Inheritance, and more. From Central Administration and Farm Administrators, to breaking inheritance, with a touch of PowerShell, this session will give you some simple, clear insights into what is often a muddy subject.

Because the sessions are live, participation is encourage (otherwise, why not just record it?). Come one, come all to the third of the four SharePoint Foundation sessions for admins I'm offering this year.

The link to the session is: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=M62SS5&role=attend

The facebook event page-- if you have a facebook account and would like to RSVP for the event (so I have some idea of how many people will be there), get extra info, see who else is attending, and follow up on the event-- http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=174037039280378

Live SharePoint Foundation Presentation series: Session 2 - Complete Installation & Configuration Today!

Howdy all!

For those of you interested in some free training, the second of my four LIVE, online sessions will be held today at 3pm Eastern. The session will be primarily live demonstration of how to prepare for a Complete, farm installation of SharePoint Foundation, from preparing for managed accounts, to how to set up outgoing/incoming email, Business Data Connectivity, etc. See how to set up a web application and the first site collection.

In addition, get an insight to the Mastering SharePoint Foundation 2010 book itself, as the virtual machines used for these presentations are the same ones used throughout the book.

Since the presentation will be live, you can ask questions and interact with the presenter (well, me). There could even be a few hilarious bloopers you can't get in a recorded webcast.

Come one, come all the the free session today. Link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=Z6662P&role=attend

For those interested, here's the facebook page for the event if you'd like to chat with other attendees, leave comments, and get extra information (requires a facebook account): http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=107804215952877

Callahan's SharePoint Foundation Live Presentation Series starts tomorrow!

Hi everyone!

I am currently editing the Mastering SharePoint Foundation book, and felt I needed to get out there and give you all a chance to see what is in the book, live, in the form of four 90 minute sessions loosely mapping to chapters in the book. (I could do more if there is interest, I've got a lot to talk about.) They are currently scheduled to occur every Thursday for four weeks starting with this week.

The first session will start tomorrow, Thursday 10/28/2010 at 3:00pm eastern time. The session will start with an introduction, of course. I'll want to make sure everyone can see and hear everything. I prefer to do pretty interactive sessions, so although all the audio will be me, I will be expecting Q&A comments, and status updates from my attendees so I can work with them during the session. Try that with a recording. ; )

Following the introduction will be a look at how to prepare and plan for implementing SharePoint Foundation. Once we've got that covered, we'll do a standalone installation of SharePoint Foundation, live, so you can see exactly what happens when SPF is installed, from prerequisites, to configuration. Then we'll take a look at the interface itself (time permitting).

Keep in mind that most of the session will be real, live demos of SharePoint, I don't really do a lot of slides (there will be some, for reference, but I'm more of a "show it to you rather than talk about it" kind of person).

The second session will cover how to do a Complete installation of SharePoint Foundation. Exploring more deeply how to create a web application and site collection, as well as manually configuring services that the Standalone installation did automatically.

The third session will cover users and permissions. This session addresses managing users, groups, permission levels, breaking inheritance, as well as quick glance at farm administration and the new delegated administrators group for Central Administration. See what has changed in terms of permissions and what hasn't.

The fourth session is actually still open to a certain degree. It will be an advanced session, mapping to chapter 16 of the book, but the attendees will decide (I'll be polling) the topics. The options are topics like Business Data Connectivity service, creating and using external content types, external lists and lookup fields using SharePoint Designer, introduction to Multi-Tenancy, Install, configure, administer Office Web Apps, and more.

If you have a facebook account, you can sign up to attend by visiting the event's facebook page at  http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=139913466056832&ref=nf

There is no obligation to sign up, it just makes it easier for me to get a ballpark idea of how many people are going to attend, it lets you know who else is attending, and it lets you make and receive comments and updated information about the session. Later, because the session will be recorded, I can post a link there for the recorded session (I don't control the file location).

The direct link to the event is: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/join?id=F3F92M&role=attend

The sessions will be live meeting events, so be prepared to install live meeting 2007 client in case you don't already have it. These sessions are hosted by Microsoft through my MVP account. I will gladly do as many as my attendees (you) would like until the end of December (unless I am renewed, then I can do more). At this point, I've only got four planned. There will be audio, so be prepared if that will bother your co-workers.

I would love to see you all there.

Do you have a Windows Live Spaces blog? They're going WordPress now...

Howdy everybody,

I saw a tweet about Live ID blogs going to go over to WordPress, and had to check it out. Here's a post on the Windows Live blog about it:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/09/27/wordpress-com-and-windows-live-partnering-together-and-providing-an-upgrade-for-30-million-windows-live-spaces-customers.aspx

I've got two Spaces blogs, one about Windows Server stuff and one about Windows 7 stuff.  The Windows Server blog is actually the resurfacing of my first blog. I've not been there much this year because all I've been doing is writing the Mastering SPF book.

I like my Spaces blogs (and liked my first blog there when it was msn spaces, remember when?), and will be sad to see them go WordPress (or go away entirely by next spring). I didn't really like wordpress, back in the day when I was checking out different blogging options online.

Keep in mind this "upgrade" will literally change the URL of the blog (but they'll keep the Spaces redirect so people's links, favorites, RSS feeds should still work). If you have stuff hard coded, be sure they still work after the change.

I thought if any of you have a Spaces blog (or two) you might want to be given some warning. Apparently a lot of people don't realize that Microsoft is making this change.

If you sign in to your spaces blog, you will immediately be taken to a page that leads with "Windows Live + WordPress."  They don't absolutely demand that you move your blog to WordPress right away, but they do state that the "clock is ticking" if you don't "upgrade" and that the deadline is March 2011.

(if you don't want to upgrade, you can temporarily continue to use the blog as is, download all your blog entries as html files, or just delete your site now...)

I am disappointed that Microsoft is basically pawning off 30 million people's blogs to WordPress (if they'd wanted to be there, they already would be). It would have been great if Microsoft had invested a little on the blogging capabilities of SharePoint and maybe moved those 30 million people to SharePoint online instead.

Some of the things you lose in the "upgrade" are your drafts, your theme, gadgets, guestbook, and lists (I spent a lot of time making and updating my lists...).

Nonetheless-- for those of you who haven't logged in for a while, I thought you should know-- It is not a ruse, you haven't been hacked-- your Spaces blog is going away next spring, the clock is ticking, unless you "upgrade" it to WordPress.

Now you know.

A bit of a worry-- ASP.NET vulnerability and SharePoint

A security advisory has been released concerning a known ASP.NET security issue and the danger it can pose for those of us who have SharePoint deployed (which uses ASP.NET, and therefore can be compromised).

The problem, in an oversimplified example, is that due to this vulnerability, an attacker can send information (cipher text) to the server, and see if it was decrypted correctly based on the error messages that are returned, until they know that they can get in and get private info.

Microsoft does not yet have a fix for this issue, and if you are worried (say, if your SharePoint implementation is internet facing), they offer some workarounds until they do have an official hotfix or patch you can download.

The workaround is detailed at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2010/09/21/security-advisory-2416728-vulnerability-in-asp-net-and-sharepoint.aspx

The official (and not super helpful) security advisory is at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2416728.mspx

A blog by someone named Scott Guthrie, who seems to be super knowledgeable about this security issue, has two entries concerning it:

The first, as of Sept. 19 is: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/18/important-asp-net-security-vulnerability.aspx

The follow up, Sept. 24, is: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/24/update-on-asp-net-vulnerability.aspx

My environment, right now, is completely isolated, so I am going to hold off messing with the settings until I finally finish creating new material for the book. But I wanted to let you all know about the issue now, in case it compromised your environment.

It started with not being able to activate wiki page home page feature (or issue with features if you load balance your site...)

I am currently super, super busy finishing up chapters in the SPF book, but I needed to write this down somewhere...

So I finished writing the first draft of chapter 16. It involved, among other things, installing a second server on the farm and enabling load balancing so the readers could see it in action.

That meant that, at this point, my virtual machine of my SharePoint Foundation installation has two SPF servers load balancing content.

I was reading over some edits of one of my chapters and needed to see the home page without it being a wiki page for a moment. Now, there are a couple of ways to do that, the easiest being deactivating the wiki page home page feature (yeah, funny name) , the next easiest being deleting the Home.aspx page from the Site Pages library real quick (restoring it from the recycle bin takes seconds).

I am really, really behind on my edits, so in my rush, I just deactivated the feature.

I checked the stuff I needed to check, then went back in to re-activate the feature-- and it failed. I went to the other server in the set, and it failed there. I did an IISRESET on both, still failed.

I dropped to the powershell console and tried a get-spfeature command (it brings up a long list of features available for the farm at the moment). Wiki page home page was listed.

So I marked the ID of the feature (okay, so I am an old skool admin, not a developer, and it's just easier for me to grab the ID than write a bunch of pipe stuff. I keep it easy)

I then tried to enable the feature for the site manually, using the enable-spfeature command:

(EDITED TO ADD: blogspot deleted the tag I wrote originally about the identity value.. sorry for those of you who thought you could just leave -identity could be empty. Darned blogger...)

enable-spfeature -identity (paste marked ID here) -url http://theurlofmyrootsite

And it failed, saying " Enable-SPFeature : The Web application at http://spf2 could not be found. Verify that you have typed the URL correctly. If the URL should be serving existing content, the system administrator may need to add a new request URL mapping to the intended application."


What?! I know that site exists, and that I typed it's URL correctly, I was just on it.


I tried an IISRESET, no luck, on both servers, still no luck...


So I tried the same command on the other server, thinking maybe it had something to do with it. Nope.


Then I realized something. I had changed the default zone of the site to be the load balanced address.


::head smack:: Doh!!


I then reran the command but with the load balanced address. (in my case that would be http://sharepoint)


enable-spfeature -identity (paste ID here) -url http://sharepoint


And it worked perfectly!

So what does that say?

It says that in the GUI, ie in the Manage Features for the Site page, when you hit the Activate feature button, it points to the site's original URL when the site was created-- so if you change the default zone for the web application of the site you are activating features on, and you don't include the old URL in AAM to point to the web application, the Activate button might not work.


Bottom line: Either plan to activate or deactivate features via PowerShell if you remove the original URL from AAM for the site, or always include the original URL in AAM for a site (even if you don't want users to use it).

You use TechNet/MSDN? Did you activate Office 2010 before May 1st? You need a new key...

I had to stop by and let any of my readers who are using TechNet or MSDN product keys for Office 2010 know: I just received an email from Microsoft (apologizing for the inconvenience of course) saying that if you got your product key for Office 2010 earlier than May 1st, 2010, you need to get another one.

It appears that if you activated Office 2010 with a PID key pre-dating May 1st, "certain product features may not be enabled."

For a list of the features that won't work with the pre-May 2010 key, see KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983473

So if you've got Office 2010 installed and activated using your MSDN or TechNet key, and you simply can't get features to work-- get a new key from your subscription, and try again.

Edited to add: BTW, to change the product key of an Office 2010 product, go to Programs and Features in the Control Panel. Select the Office 2010 product you have installed, and click Change. This should trigger an Office 2010 installer screen. One of the options listed is to Enter a product key. This will give you the opportunity to enter your new product key. Good luck.

I tell ya, if ain't one thing, it's another.