SharePoint 2010 SP1 released and Office Sept CU available

SharePoint 2010 SP1 was released on 28th June 2011 and it is available for download. 


It is important to have your systems updated with the latest service packs and subsequently with the cumulative updates (CU) which MS typically releases each month.


Some important points to note before going ahead with the installation: 

1. Do read the known issues published on the TechNet: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2532126 
2. Be aware about the order to follow in case of these updates: 
• Update SharePoint Foundation first with SP1 and then install the CU 
• Then SharePoint Server with SP1 and then install June CU 
3. If you have a farm installation, then run “psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait” on every server in the farm following the final update installed else run the same command on your standalone box
4. To verify if the updates have been installed properly, check the Central Administration à System Settings à Manage Servers In Farm
   Or, in PowerShell, write (get-spfarm).buildversion

It should display 14.0.6029.1000 after SharePoint Server 2010 SP1. Hope this helps folks trying to keep their SP2010 boxes up-to-date.

For any other assistance, go through SharePoint 2010 Team Blog here

Fix Configuration of the Document ID feature

With SP2010, Microsoft has tried to provide an excellent and helpful feature for uniquely identifying a document within a site collection called DocumentID.
Well, you might ask the rationale behind this tiny change from MS side..right?

Basically, with the previous version of SharePoint product i.e. MOSS 2007, if the user moved a document within a site collection, lets say from one document library to another or the folder containing the file has been renamed or your site URL has been modified in someway, then you would typically face a situation which in IT is called a Broken Link or simply put a bad url :(.

Hence, in the site collection features, you would typically get an option to activate/deactivate the Document ID Service


Document ID Service

Once you have this activated, you would expect the Document ID column to show up when you try to add a new document to a library, unfortunately there is another catch here. You might see this message, "Configuration of the Document ID feature is scheduled to be completed by an automated process." as highlighted in the image below:

This message is shown because the timer job called Document ID enable/disable job has been activated. Once the job completes at the scheduled time, the message will go away or else you may run the timer job and put it to completion forcibly by clicking "Run Now". However, I can assure you that even after the previous step, there is no certain time when the Document ID would show up if you go for a new document upload.


Document ID enable/disable Job

One v.important note that if your doc lib was already having some documents, you would need to explicitly perform some action for this new column of Document ID to show up..for example Check-in/Check-out of docs.

Do try this out and explore this cool stuff from SharePoint 2010!

ASP.net WebParts Vs SharePoint WebParts - Which one to choose?

And we are back! Well, it has been a very busy time for me over the last 8 months, anyhow moving on.

Well, this might be a question which should have popped-up in the head of any beginner in SharePoint probably with some .net background.

Well, an interesting point is that SharePoint 2007 is based on top on ASP.net 2.0 framework. Hence, for folks who are well versed with ASP.Net 2.0 and plan to move on to MOSS/SPS should definitely start with "HelloWorld" kind of webparts using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart as a reference.

This enables:

• Usage on websites developed on ASP.net 2.0 and also on SharePoint based portals
• Getting familiarized with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 classes as a starting point

However, the hard truth remains that sooner or later, developers working on MOSS or SPS would need to move on to Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPart in their code.

It obviously has it's own advantages:

• Enables cross-page connections
• Enables connections between webparts placed in different webpart zones on the same SharePoint page
• Helps in migrating webpart code to WSS 3.0 based webparts
• Utilize the SharePoint offerred data caching mechanism

Signing off here..enjoy coding!

Bonjour!!

Yes exactly that is what has happened!!

A business trip in Paris has made me extremely busy these days, due to which I really wanted to but have not been able to spend time on the blog.

I assure y'all that I will be back, till then Au revoir

Increase SharePoint Upload Limit

Are you facing issues when trying to upload files of size above 50 MB to your SharePoint 2007 document library?

Well, I have tried to list down how you can fix those issues and ultimately increase the SharePoint Upload Limit:

First, increase the Maximum Upload Size for a specific web application.

• Go to the Central Administration > Application Management > Web Application General Settings
• Specify the new maximum upload size for your webapplication. For now, we are setting it to 256MB. It could be even set upto 2GB.

Your second step should be to try increasing your default chunk size of large files by trying this STSADM command:

Stsadm.exe –o setproperty –pn large–file–chunk–size –pv   

• This basically denotes the chunk of data that can be read from SQL Server at one time.
• The -pv which determines the property value stands for the upload size in bytes (B).
• It could be set to a maximum of 2GB i.e. (2,147,483,648 B).
• Do an IISRESET

Next, in web.config file of your particular web application, under the httpRuntime tag in system.web section, increase the upload limit to match the value that you set earlier in central administration. You also need to add the execution timeout to allow more time before the upload operation times out as shown in the example below:

httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" maxRequestLength="256000"

where

• 300 means 5 minutes as execution time out
• 256000 allows uploading 256 MB files.

After the above changes, MOSS would allow files of more than 50 MB to get uploaded easily. Incase you still face challenges, check if the file you are trying to upload, is it a blocked file type e.g. EXE, DLL, etc.

Hope this helps you.

Add PDF Icon to SharePoint Library

Quite obviously, we come across many occassions where PDF files are uploaded to SharePoint 2007 Libraries or Lists.

While we can easily see the images of our regular Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents, however the PDF documents look empty without the trademarked image.

Well, no problem, who says we can't have it. It is fairly simple, so let us see how:

• Get the appropriate Adobe PDF icon image (preferrably a gif) from here 
• Save that image confirming with SharePoint images standard such as icopdf.gif. Place the image where Office document icons exist by-default. Check out this 12 Hive path of your MOSS 2007 installation:
  Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Images
• Now that we have successfully placed the image, we need to inform SharePoint about our modification. For doing this, we need to add an entry to the DocIcon.xml file which sits in the Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Xml path
• Open the docicon.xml with any editor such as Visual Studio or even Notepad. Under ByExtension section, add a key/value pair as given below:
  Mapping Key="pdf" value="icopdf.gif"
  Note: Take a backup copy of the DocIcon.xml prior to the changes (to be on the safe side). Also, the XML start-end tags are removed as the post wouldnt allow it easily. Kindly take care in your case.
• Save changes to Docicon.xml file. Perform an IISRESET command to finalize the same.

Refresh & check the same list or library page to notice the changes take effect.
Briefly, what this does has done is, if SharePoint sees any file (new/old) with an extension .pdf, it would display the PDF icon against the file as it does for Office documents.

Hope y'all find this information helpful. Cyaaa..and..stay tuned!!

SharePoint Timer Job stuck at Deploying

Dealing with SharePoint solution packages and solution deployment stuck at "Deploying" status!!

Well don’t panic, here is just what the doctor ordered:

1. Check the Timer Job Status for the solution deployment in Central Administration. There could be entries with “Failed” as the job status.
2. Lets try to set things right by running stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs command.
   Note that in a farm environment, you need to run the above command on all the servers.
3. As a next step, try restarting the OWSTIMER Service on all boxes in the farm.
4. If the above steps do not help the solution deployment. You may try retracting the solution using Retract solution command or through the Central Admin's Solution Management.
   stsadm.exe -o retractsolution -name
   For your knowledge, retracting a solution creates another “deployment job”.
   
   Now if retracting the solution does not work, do not try to Force Delete the solution as that would throw an exception, "The solution cannot be removed when job is scheduled or running"
5. Get a list of all the pending & active deployments on your MOSS Farm using
   stsadm -o enumdeployments command.
   Make a note of the GUID of the various solutions on the command window as this would be required in next step.
6. As a last nail in the coffin, we now need to simply cancel the solution deployment by passing the GUID of the solution as shown below
   stsadm -o canceldeployment -id "job id string here"

After performing the above steps, you would be able to either put the SharePoint Timer Job into completion or atleast remove the solution package being stuck in deployment.

If the problem still persists (esp. in the MOSS 2007 Farm environment), you might need to remove/detach a defective WFE from the farm and then retry deployment.

I have tried to put together the steps which have worked for me, hope this post helps you all too.