Leveraging Web 2.0 to Market Yourself

Thank you for those of you who attended the key note for the Women in Technology International (WITI) Smart Networking event. It was an honor and pleasure to be selected as the key note speaker. As promised here is the presentation from the event:

Web 2.0 Networking

A video of the session will be coming soon for WITI members.

SharePoint Beacon is the new home for my blog regarding SharePoint

I am excited to announce that my new blog home, which is called SharePoint Beacon, will now be at: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/SharePointBeacon/archive/2009/06/23/EBE%20on%20SharePoint.Microsoft.com.aspx. The new home is leveraging the SharePoint platform using the Enhanced Blog Edition which is part of the Community Kit for SharePoint. Over the next few weeks I will be migrating the blogs and comments to my new site and removing them from this site. Once the conversion is complete all the SharePoint post will be removed from this blog.

No fear, this blog is not going away!

Moving forward this blog will become…

Wait for it… MindMatters

This is where I will discuss various business topics along with a mixture of some fun topics that catch my interest.

Catch my first post, with the new material, in the next few weeks.

Testing EBE sent trackback to: http://www.hezser.de/blog/archive/2007/03/01/remove-server-from-farm-1.aspx

SharePoint Saturday in Charlotte – Presentation on the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) and Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS)

I want to thank everyone who came to see the presentation on the Community Kit for SharePoint and Podcasting Kit for SharePoint 

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/charlotte/meetings/22/CommunityKitforSharePointandPodcastingKitforSharePointThissessionwillcovertwopopulartoolsfoundonCodePlexwhichyoucanusetoextendtheSharePointoutoftheboxcapabilities.aspx

As promised I have attached to this post the slide deck which covers the details of what was discussed. Pictures of the event are also posted below.

Community Kit for SharePoint: Harnessing the Power of a Global Community to Solve Business Problems:

Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) Presentation

In addition to this there was also a presentation which followed mine covering the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint: A New Era in Internal Communications – Lessons from Microsoft on using the “Podcasting Kit for SharePoint” (PKS).

PKS-PodcastingKitforSharePoint-LukeHamiltonV2

A video was shown during this presentation but due to audio problems you could not hear it. To watch the video you can go to: http://yvonneharryman.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/podcasting-kit-for-sharepoint

Speaking on the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS)

Yvonne Harryman Speaking on Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS)

Information Architecture Best Practices

The following podcast will discuss some best practices and concepts around designing information architecture, technology agnostic. In a previous engagement Cathy McKnight and I worked together to implement an Intranet utilizing SharePoint. The company that Cathy works for is Prescient Digital Media, more information about the company can be found at: http://www.prescientdigital.com/

Propagation waiting for initialization

I recently ran into the following error and though this resolution might help others. In my scenario the error propagation status waiting for initialization was being shown for one of the query servers in a MOSS farm. You could see this by looking in the search administration in central admin. If you looked into the ULS logs it says it is unable to find the GUID that is associated with the folder for the query server index location. The GUID was associated with the folder for the query server index location and it did exist and appeared to have the correct permissions configured. In our configuration we have two query servers and only one is dedicated for crawling. We went to the index server and tried to access the query server index location. That was when we noticed we could get to one folder but not the other by typing \\<servername>. The host file on the index server was being updated with the incorrect IP address for the dedicated WFE for crawling and therefore the index server could not propagate the content to the query server. To resolve it I updated the index for web front end to use all web front ends for crawling and then reconverted it back to a dedicated WFE and this seemed to resolve any confusion SharePoint had about entering in the incorrect IP.

A few good links which cover similar topics/situations are:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261810.aspx

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=88

http://sharepointnotes.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/host-file-problems-when-using-dedicated-web-front-end-for-crawling/

Updated March 18th

Thought we fixed it but when I went in the next day the IP address reverted back! What we have done that is working was to switch the setting back to all WFEs for crawling and then manually updated the host file with the correct information by removing the reference for <IP for Query WFE 02> to <Server Name for Query WFE 01>. We left all of the references to the load balanced addresses of the web application pointing to the correct IP address and all seems to be working now with SharePoint using a dedicated WFE for crawling.

 

Community Involvement – What’s in it for me?

Microsoft is running a contest on the MSDN SharePoint Developer Forum where they will be awarding prizes to the top contributors in the forum for each month.

The MSDN SharePoint Developer forum is also a great place for customers to get their questions answered by the community.

Monthly prizes include Xbox 360 Arcade, a Zune 120Gb and 3x 7” Digital Photo Frames.

More details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2009/02/27/microsoft-sharepoint-developer-forum-challenge-march-april-and-may-2009.aspx

What are the benefits of getting involved in the community – “What’s in it for me?”

·         By putting your knowledge to the test in the community you learn develop from the experts themselves

·         Access to a network of other community leaders.

·         Recognition by peers as an expert in the technology you choose to evangelize.

·         Role model for others aspiring to learn in your field

·         Boost your career development

·         Community involvement is a step in the right direction for awards such as the Microsoft Valued Professional (MVP)

Podcasting Kit for SharePoint

Podcasting is taking over! Companies around the world are integrating Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS). This is a free add-in that can be downloaded from CodePlex and integrated with your environment. A few key features are:

·         Users can easily share content when they create a podcast

·         It will allow your users to download and watch podcast via their PC or mobile device.

·         Integrated Silverlight viewer that enables you to view the podcast without downloading

·         A subscription service utilizing RSS will notify your users when new material is available

·         Users will have the ability to rate, leave comments and search material

·         Integrated Zune software that helps users manage the content they want to consume

And many more features to come… thanks to the CodePlex and Academy Mobile community.

PKS has been integrated at Microsoft as Academy Mobile and has been very successful.  An image of how it looks can be found below:

 

During the TechReady event earlier this month I had the pleasure of starring in a podcast to promote Academy Mobile.

 

Additional links about PKS are:

·         http://www.codeplex.com/pks

·         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D3g1A5ocik

SPDisposeCheck Developer Tool

My very first blog was discussing best practices around disposing of SharePoint Services Objects: http://yvonneharryman.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/ . Memory leaks caused by objects not disposed can be very tricky to catch and require good code reviews. Now Microsoft is offering a tool to help you find objects that are not being disposed of. This tool can be found at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SPDisposeCheck.

 

The tool is not perfect but it will do most of the grunt work for you to figure out if memory leaks are in fact in your code. One situation you might run into is a potential false positive. An additional resource I have used to help me in that situation is the following blog:

http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/archive/2008/12/05/disposing-spweb-and-spsite-objects.aspx

 

This tool is meant to be used by developers and should not be installed on production machines as I understand it there is no formal support provided.

 

Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint 1.3

The Community Technology Preview release for Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint 1.3 is now publicly available on Microsoft Connect.

The CTP is available at: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=428

New Features in VSeWSS 1.3

• The extensions now install on x64 bit OS. Visual Studio 2008 and SharePoint must be already installed.
• Command Line Build option for TFS and MSBuild integration
• Separate WSP Package and Retract commands. You can now build the WSP without deploying it
• SPSolGen to Support Exporting from Content Management Publishing Sites
• New Item Template for RootFiles Deployment
• Automatically Remove conflicting existing features on development SharePoint server
• WSP View New Feature Dialog Improvements: scope, receiver checkbox, element checkbox
• WSP View can now be used to merge features and it blocks site features being merged into web features
• Allow adding separate binary files such as Workflow assemblies
• Some refactoring allowing for Web Part renaming and removing lines from feature.xml Item Removed
• Allow selection of GAC or BIN deployment for Web Part Project not including CAS generation
• Increase visibility of hidden features that VSeWSS creates
• Add fast update deploy for DLL only or file only changes to solutions
• Numerous Bug Fixes and improvements to error messages

More details can be found on the SharePoint blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

SharePoint 2007 Site Administrator’s Handbook by Yvonne M. Harryman

SharePoint Book

The early access edition of my upcoming SharePoint book is now available at http://www.manning.com/harryman/. If you have enjoyed reading my blog you are going to love this book. The focus is not on the “hardcore” developer type but more so the business user which is sometimes termed as a “power user”. It is essentially a no code approach to building powerful sites if you were a site owner.  Chapter 1 is available for free. Check it out and please post any feedback you have on the author forum at: http://www.manning-sandbox.com/forum.jspa?forumID=458 .

Thanks!