SharePoint Implementation Environment Survey – Please complete it

Thought I’d post this so that those of you not in the Twitterverse don’t miss out ;-)

I have created a survey quickly in my lunch break yesterday…and was quite impressed with the flow of it and beta tested it with a few guys: Andrew Cox (Readify) and Kristian Kalsing. I put it live pretty soon after that and am humbled by how many people have re-tweeted and given positive feedback.

The survey tries to focus on what tools you have in your toolbox as well as how you configure your SharePoint instance etc. Andrew Connell has pointed out that it has a bias towards using Virtual Machines for the environment. I do agree with those comments and I have now added an option for this.

I would really appreciate if you could promote this survey to anyone you know that build implementations on SharePoint. I will be publishing ALL of the results on the SharePointDevWiki.com page that is already up with some snippets of trends already.

The Building a SharePoint Environment page is one of the most popular and I wanted to get more details on how people approach this to suggest with more confidence the best approach for people starting out with SharePoint implementations.

The survey takes around 5 minutes to complete and I’m sure you can fit it in over a cup of coffee or caffeine hit of your choice ;-)

Click Here to take survey

Published: 4/22/2009 7:59 PM | 1 Comment | 0 Links to this post

‘The password specified for the username account is invalid’ on Install of SharePoint

I had an issue today when specifying the details for the specific content access account e.g. the Farm Account as specified in the MSDN guidance. Now according to the documentation SharePoint should provision all the necessary privileges for the Farm Account, but it didn’t!

Having a look at the event viewer showed the error below:

After looking around on the web, basically the client had some Group Policy for server machines that took off some default things. One of these was affecting the install which was ‘Access this computer from the network’. The service account wasn’t in there…adding this into this setting in ‘Local Security Settings’ fixed this. You get to Local Security Settings via ‘Administrative Tools|Local Security Policy’.

Following from that, the SQL server also had these settings incorrect and the user needed to be added there. Most servers will have AUTHENTICATED USERS added into this right. I would recommend having a group for all service accounts and simply add that group to that setting.

What really bugs me is the error that SharePoint gave me was completely wrong! Why catch the error and report it to the user when it’s completely incorrect…it should just provide guidance to check the Event Logs!

Event Type: Failure Audit

Event Source: Security

Event Category: Logon/Logoff

Event ID: 534

Date: 23/04/2009

Time: 9:03:33 AM

User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM

Computer: TST-PTH-WEB01

Description:

Logon Failure:

Reason: The user has not been granted the requested

logon type at this machine

User Name: SP.Farm.TST

Domain: HEAD_OFFICE

Logon Type: 3

Logon Process: Advapi

Authentication Package: Negotiate

Workstation Name: TST-PTH-WEB01

Caller User Name: SharePointSrv_TST

Caller Domain: HEAD_OFFICE

Caller Logon ID: (0x0,0x11AB84)

Caller Process ID: 2428

Transited Services: -

Source Network Address: -

Source Port: -

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Published: 4/22/2009 6:40 PM | 0 Comments | 4 Links to this post

SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more

Rich Finn released SPSource on CodePlex a while ago…something very similar to what I had on my mind to do, because of seeing how poorly VSeWSS Solution Generator reverse engineered Lists to ListTemplates (another post to explain this).

You could use other tools to reverse engineer Content Types and Site Columns, but it meant a lot of cut and pasting. SPSource takes all that away and even updates your feature.xml files and creates you element manifest files too! It supports WSPBuilder and STSDev too!

The first release of SPSource actually reverse engineered Content Types, Site Columns and Module files. I have added the functionality to reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates.

The web cast demonstrates how this is done and the concept of a dev site and a design site when working in this manner. I will be releasing a series of web casts to show how SPSource can be used to leverage development as an individual but also as a team!

Click here to view it in Screencast.com.

Rich Finn has also got some web casts and walkthroughs too from first release:

view file provision walkthrough
view content type walkthrough
view screencast demo

Published: 4/14/2009 7:42 AM | 3 Comments | 0 Links to this post

The Essential SharePoint RSS Feeds to follow and how I manage my reading

So I’ve been reading over 450+ feeds for the best part of 2 years now and have come up with a system to ensure that I always get round to the essential ones.

When I discover a feed it goes in the ‘SharePoint X’ bucket. I have 3 other buckets ‘SharePoint Priority 1’, ‘SharePoint Priority 2’ and ‘SharePoint Priority 3’. I ensure that I always every day keep up to date with the 1’s and without fail by the end of the week clear 2’s and 3’s.

Then X’s I read whenever I get a spare 30 mins etc as I can often have a backlog of 300 posts…and to be honest a lot of guff e.g.“SharePoint Designer is now Free'” or “Get your SharePoint Skins” or “cut and paste jobs from other blogs”.

How I rank them

As I keep finding myself bookmarking posts from a particular blog, I move it from the X bucket up to the 3, and then up to 2 etc. Now obviously this part is my own personal preference and interests.

Although the list of 1’s, 2’s and 3’s maybe personal to me, I think that the overall list of SharePoint Feeds is essential and guarantees now “guff”.

Tweet Tweet Tweet

You will notice if you follow me on Twitter that I tweet about my favourite blog posts! These posts obviously will mean that the blog will get into 3’s straight away. You can follow my favourite posts on Diigo by subscribing to this RSS feed or following them on Twitter.

The SharePoint Z Bucket!

I also have a ‘SharePoint Z’ bucket where feeds that continually reset themselves and go from all posts read to like 150 due to them all being updated due to migration. Believe it or not there are some that seem to constantly do this! Please be aware of how your RSS feeds react to changing old posts!

PostRank

I tweeted about PostRank today and also have had it on my blog as I find it useful to indicate what posts are popular for my readers. I mentioned that this should be an essential before for all blogs. Recently they have given the ability to import your OPML files (XML list of RSS Feeds) to share them with others. What this does is also produce stats on who subscribes to what feeds to match you with people that are similar. Post Rank has a very sophisticated way of measuring the posts, to be honest a lot more than Technorati does.

What tool do I use

Well I was an avid Google Reader guy for a long time, but then when I got my tablet just found it a little slow and travelling a lot meant that I was offline a lot in the air. So NewsGator FeedDemon is the tool of choice for me. To be honest though, after seeing the integration PostRank has with Google Reader, I may be changing back soon! ;-)

Conclusion

So, all in all, I think if you want to get into keeping up to date you can use these SharePoint Feeds as a starting block…be interested to hear what others do to manage their feeds!

Published: 4/10/2009 1:34 AM | 0 Comments | 0 Links to this post

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