Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I was awarded as an SharePoint MVP by Microsoft in July 2010. I currently live in New York and am an Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc.. I co founded www.NothingButSharePoint.com with Mark Miller in 2010.

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Whitepapers

NBSP

Check out my articles on NothingButSharePoint.com

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...


Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

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Archives

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Tag Cloud

Ajax, Apple, DotNetNuke, Enterprise Content Management, Error Resolution, Gadgets, General, Governance, Microsoft .Net Development, Mobile, SharePoint, Sharepoint Business Forms, Sharepoint Business Intelligence, Sharepoint Collaboration, SharePoint Development, Sharepoint Enterprise Content Management, Sharepoint Enterprise Search, Sharepoint Portal, US Migration, Web 2.0, Workflow
Jan 282010

Quest Site Administrator Reports for SharePoint OnDemand - Quick thoughts

I saw a tweet from the Quest guys promoting their new cloud based app called 'Site Administrator Reports for SharePoint | OnDemand'. A bit of a mouthful, but a pretty compelling little tool!

Essentially you download an app to your local machine and then it opens up the cloud based app in a browser again (not sure what client app is for, maybe a requirement for some security bits the app does).

You log into the application giving your SharePoint Site Collection url, user name and password…again no mention of whether this is stored or not or what it's doing with those credentials. Can see some people not trusting this for that reason, I mean it's my blog so wasn't a big deal as the information is public anyway.

Then it starts pulling data to report on the Site for you I'm guessing via the Web Services.

It returns things such as total size of the content of the Site Collection, number of sub sites etc.

Straight away from the screen shot you can see the add in the bottom left corner…not necessarily for Quest either… I wonder what the source of that is.

I can see this tool being useful for quick health checks on Content Database sizing for Site Collection. But to be honest a quick PowerShell script will give you that anyway.

The reports are a bit large and really need to be on a high resolution monitor e.g. on my laptop screen there was a lot of scrolling. Most administrators who'd run the downloaded version of this tool will run it on a server and RDP in and usually these are restricted to low resolution too. Be interesting to see others thoughts on this.

I think this is a great start in the right direction. Imagine the Best Practice Analyser being able to be run from the cloud. With remote administration like this that could later even poll regularly and raise alerts on certain thresholds.

This is obviously the gateway drug to their main product which you download and install as pictured above that clearly has a lot more information about the site. I'm guessing a lot of this information requires more than just access via web services and this is what has limited the OnDemand reporting.

I would strongly advise Administrators to check this out, especially in a SharePoint 2007 environment where the reporting on these things is below par. SharePoint 2010 will give you a lot of this fruit, but obviously Quest have differentiated their product by adding more on top! Great work guys.

Published: 1/28/2010  4:11 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jan 112010

SharePoint Saturday Perth Event!

I have organised a SharePoint Saturday Event with the help of a few other guys in Perth for 6th February, if you happen to be in the area…please come along!

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007/2010 for 'SharePoint Saturday' event.

SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. 

SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

There's even a chance of winning one of the raffle prizes, to be given away in the wrap up at the end of the day including: a Readify training voucher for the SharePoint 2007 Solutions course (valued at $3120), a Office 2007 Ultimate license from Clayko Group, a digital camcorder valued at $450 from Diversus, and a netbook valued at $300 from Velrada.

A big thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the venue, AvePoint for sponsoring the free lunch and Synergy for sponsoring the free breakfast!
A big thanks also goes to Clayko Group, Diversus and Seven Sigma for helping funding the stationary and other printing expenses for the event.

There are 3 tracks: Information Worker, IT Pro and Developer with six one hour sessions throughout the day.

Out of WA speakers include:

  • Michael Noel, of 'SharePoint 2007 Unleashed' author fame, is flying in from the US to present to IT Pro's on Virtualisation in SharePoint
  • William Cornwill from Microsoft is flying in from Melbourne to present on Information Worker (End User) info for SharePoint 2010
  • Milan Gross from Synergy is flying in from Sydney to present to IT Pro's on Disaster Recovery
  • Joshua Haebets from Evolve Information Services is flying in from Brisbane to present to Information Workers on working offline with SharePoint Workspace 2010
  • Neil Haddley from Mad Blue Duck, is flying in from Adelaide to present to Information Workers on Document Imaging
  • Garth Luke from AvePoint, is flying in from Sydney to present on SharePoint Architecture Best Practices

Local speakers include:

  • Adam Bell from ZettaServe will be presenting to IT Pros on PowerShell
  • Ian Loughton from Alcoa will be presenting to Information Workers on using Views instead of Meeting Workspaces in SharePoint 2007
  • Peter Chow from Seven Sigma will be presenting to Information Workers on integrating SharePoint with Real-Time data case study in SharePoint 2007
  • Phil Duffy from Clayko Group will be presenting to Information Workers on Document Imaging
  • Michael Hanes from Diversus will be presenting on Best Practices with developing against SharePoint Lists
  • Sezai Komur from Ignia will be presenting to Developers on Workflows in Visual Studio 2008 for SharePoint 2007
  • Stephen Roche from Velrada will be presenting to Developers about Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010
  • Tommy Segoro from L7 will be presenting on the differences for Developers between Visual Studio 2007 and Visual Studio 2010 with SharePoint
  • Garry Stewart from Aijilon will be presenting to Developers on Access Services in SharePoint 2010
  • Frik Stuart from CSG will be presenting to IT Pros on FAST Search in SharePoint 2010
  • Chris Tomich from Seven Sigma will be talking about Accessibility with the ARF Framework in SharePoint 2007
  • Jonathen Wade from Citrix will be talking to IT Pros on Load Balancing and Web Optimisation within SharePoint


For more information on the schedule and speakers please visit the SharePoint Saturday Perth web site.

Published: 1/11/2010  5:29 AM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post

Jan 042010

SharePoint Dependent Assemblies in Event Receivers

I got bitten today by having an EventReceiver in a separate assembly to my actual WSP Visual Studio Project. The EventReceiver was using the Unity and OpenXML framework and I had not referenced these in my WSP Visual Studio Project. When I deployed my WSP and ran a FeatureReceiver that was adding this EventReceiver programmatically to a List I was getting the below error:

Feature receiver assembly 'PerformanceAppraisalPackage, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6f9f3c9091e369cc', class 'PerformanceAppraisalPackage.PerformanceAppraisalWebFeature', method 'FeatureActivated' for feature 'c5278558-662f-4fec-a5f9-61b109d8e1db' threw an exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPEventReceiverDefinition.ValidAssembly()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPEventReceiverDefinition.ValidReceiverFields()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPEventReceiverDefinition.UpdateInternal(Boolean isMigration)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPEventReceiverDefinition.Update()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPEventReceiverDefinitionCollection.Add(SPEventReceiverType receiverType, String assembly, String className)

at Readify.SharePoint.Provisioning.PerformanceAppraisalWebProvisioning.CreatePerformanceAppraisalList(SPWeb web, SPContentType pcCT, SPContentType scCT, SPContentType sdCT)

at Readify.SharePoint.Provisioning.PerformanceAppraisalWebProvisioning.ProvisionWeb(SPSite site, SPWeb web)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeature.DoActivationCallout(Boolean fActivate, Boolean fForce)

 

The error message wasn't all that clear and nor was the stack trace. On investigating the ULS Logs further I found another entry there:

Event manager error: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

This error message highlighted that is was definitely something to do with adding the EventReceiver. The problem was the code I was deploying's FeatureReceiver had lots going on so I started chasing all sorts of possibilities.

To resolve this issue, basically I added the dlls in the other project to my WSP Visual Studio Project and ensured that Copy Local was set to true. This ensured that these would be packaged with my WSP and deployed to my farm. Then when I activate the FeatureReceiver I no longer get this error. I figured I'd blog this as Google wasn't much help on the subject…so when someone else searches for this error they'll get this ;-) Hope it helps!

Published: 1/4/2010  11:37 PM | 0  Comments | 0  Links to this post