Define managed paths (SharePoint Server 2010)

Published: May 12, 2010

By defining managed paths, you can specify which paths in the URL namespace of a Web application are used for site collections. You can specify that one or more site collections exists at a specified path. This can be a convenient method of consolidating multiple site access for users in various departments.

An explicitly named path (for example, http://server/sites/team) is used for a single site collection. A wildcard path of "sites" (for example, http://server/sites/) indicates that child URLs of the path are site collections.

In this article:

• Define managed paths for a Web application by using Central Administration
  
• Define managed paths for a Web application by using Windows Powershell 

Lotus Notes Rich Text Migration to SharePoint Multiline RichText C#.Net DotNet

Currently I am working on the project where I need to migrate Lotus Notes data to sharepoint. I am able to find and migrate all the data using Domino API for .Net. I am facing problem when I am trying to migrate Lotus Notes RichText to SharePoint, It looses its formating and embedded images in the body.

Searching and investigating the approach to solve this problem.

I will keep you posted on this issue.

Developer Dashboard

The Developer Dashboard is an instrumentation framework introduced in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. Similar in concept to ASP.NET page tracing, it provides diagnostic information that can help a developer or system administrator troubleshoot problems with page components that would otherwise be very difficult to isolate. For example, a developer can easily introduce extra SPSite or SPWeb objects into his or her code unknowingly or add extraneous SQL Server queries.

In the past, the only way to debug performance problems caused by the extra overhead of these instances in code would be to attach a debugger to the code and monitor SQL Server Profiler traces. With the Developer Dashboard, a developer can identify this type of problem, either programmatically by using the object model or visually by looking at page output.

Although performance issues and resource usage information is available in the Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs, interpreting the raw data can be very time consuming. With the Developer Dashboard, all the related information is correlated, which makes identifying these types of issues much easier.

Read More at : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512745.aspx

Problem Steps Recorder? ~ Capture Problem on Screen with all Narration.

You can use Problem Steps Recorder to automatically capture the steps you take on a computer, including a text description of where you clicked and a picture of the screen during each click (called a screen shot). Once you capture these steps, you can save them to a file that can be used by a support professional or someone else helping you with a computer problem.

Notes

When you record steps on your computer, anything you type will not be recorded. If what you type is an important part of recreating the problem you're trying to solve, use the comment feature described below to highlight where the problem is occurring.

Some programs, like a full-screen game, might not be captured accurately or might not provide useful details to a support professional.

• To record and save steps on your computer Open Problem Steps Recorder - c:\Windows\System32\psr.exe. 
• Click Start Record. On your computer, go through the steps on your computer to reproduce the problem. You can pause the recording at any time, and then resume it later.
• Click Stop Record.
• In the Save As dialog box, type a name for the file, and then click Save (the file is saved with the .zip file name extension). 
• To view the record of the steps you recorded, open the .zip file you just saved, and then double-click the file. The document will open in your browser.

List Attachments over 50MB - increase in Maximum Upload Size

I came across problem during my migration project, where there were few mails in Lotus Notes which are having total size 99 MB and one of the attachment was of 65 MB training video.

Problem:

Default SharePoint settings not allow you to upload more than 50 MB file.

Goal:

Increase the maximum upload size for documents and attachments to 60MB for a web application.

Problem Solution:

1. Open Central Admin
2. Navigate to Central Admin > Application Management > Web Application General Settings
3. Select web application for which you want to increase attachment size limit.
4. Set the Maximum Upload Size value to 100 MB and hit OK.

Results:

• Upload a 55MB video to a discussion- success.
• Attach a 55MB file to a list item - receive the classic "An unknown error occurred" message, scratch head ~ that’s now pathetic.

There is a setting at the IIS level that will block list attachment uploads above 50MB. Below 50MB, works fine and is applied directly through web app settings. Above 50MB, you need to make at least one minor tweak to your web.config to allow larger uploads.

Complete solution for max upload sizes over 50MB:

1. Connect to Central Admin
2. Navigate to Central Admin > Application Management > Web Application General Settings
3. Select your web application
4. Set the Maximum Upload Size value to "X" (in our case its 100) MB and hit OK.
5. Repeat steps 6-7 for all zones for your web application on all servers hosting the web application role
6. Open the web.config
7. Replace the following line:
   <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="51200" />
   with
   <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="{X * 1024}" />
8. Still if this is not working then add executionTimeout="999999"

         <httpRuntime executionTimeout="999999" maxRequestLength="{X * 1024}" />

If you are using SQL storage for your SharePoint content, the maximum useful value for the maxRequestLength should be 2097152 (2GB in kilobytes = 2 * 1024 * 1024). Other limits may affect large uploads, most notably:

• Site Collection Quota
• Timeouts (you may need to adjust these in BOTH Web Application General Settings and the executionTimeout attribute of the <httpRuntime/> element)
  • Timeout settings will be influenced by network throughput limitations like latency and available bandwidth
• Custom Storage Solution
  • External Blob Storage solution (see WSS SDK v1.3 for this feature that's new to WSS SP1) - whatever max BLOB size applies
• Disk Space
  • If using SQL Storage, this is the disk containing your data files for your webapp's content DBs
  • If using an External Blob Storage solution, then this is wherever your blob store resides

For more on the httpRuntime web.config element, see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641(VS.80).aspx .

MOSS -You are not authorized to view this page.You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

MOSS -You are not authorized to view this page.You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

When I log onto my sharepoint site I was getting below message, This occurs when I try to log in to sharepoint site. As I was administrator I was able to access the site, but when I add user to sharepoint site:- Site Settings -> peoples and groups -> sitegroup -> add user (Domain User); After adding the users to the site group.

When newly added user tries to login to SharePoint site -> Site was giving following error.

You are not authorized to view this page

You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please try the following:

Contact the Web site administrator if you believe you should be able to view this directory or page.

Click the Refresh button to try again with different credentials.

HTTP Error 401.1 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.

Internet Information Services (IIS)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 401.

Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Authentication, Access Control, and About Custom Error Messages.

SOLUTION:

After struggling a lot for whole 3 days – finally I thought of changing Service Account settings from the central admin.

I have made the changes to “Web Application Pool” settings to allow the Network Service accounts, which has resolved my problem.

SharePoint Connections Session Follow Up: Create an Internet-Facing SharePoint Site

During the Create an Internet-Facing SharePoint Site session I covered the following topics.

1. Setting up forms based authentication.
2. Creating your own custom Master Pages and style sheets
3. Personalizing site content for users.
4. Leveraging the Business Data Catalog to surface and interact with back end systems.
5. Each of these topics is broken down more in depth in this blog post. All the code used during my demos can be found in the rar file linked at the end of this post.
6. Setting up forms based authentication
7. Because a brief survey revealed almost the entire audience had already attended a session that covered setting up forms based authentication for SharePoint sites, I moved quickly through the materials related to setting up forms based authentication for SharePoint sites and did not spend a lot of time on it.

At any rate, here are the step by step instructions that describe how to set up a SharePoint site to use forms based authentication.

*Note: There are also several GREAT blog posts that describe how to set up FBA with SharePoint sites available on the Internet as well

Click here for detailed information.

SharePoint 2007 Performance Optimization

Recommendation: use x64 hardware on all servers to optimize page downloads by minimizing number of round trips between client computers and server computers.

Reason: With x64 you are not limited to 2 GB of Memory.

Benefit: Reduces network traffic and latency due to FE servers hitting the memory limit and needing to recycle.

Recommendation: apply Windows Server 2003 SP2

Reason: A list of all of the reasons can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914962/en-us

Benefit: Optimizes the Front End server’s performance

Recommendation: Defragment the Front end Server’s drives

Reason: best practice for optimal disk performance

Benefit: Optimizes the Front End server’s performance

Recommendation: apply MOSS SP1 and post SP1 rollup fixes

Reason: The service packs addresses a lot of the known bugs that currently exist.

Benefit: Reduces network traffic and latency due to FE servers hitting the memory limit and needing to recycle.

Recommendation: Use a dedicated FE crawl target that is not in NLB (i.e. NLB is not installed)

Reason: By default, Office SharePoint Server 2007 uses all Web servers to crawl content in the server farm. When your server farm is configured to use all Web servers for crawling, the index server sends requests to each Web server in the farm.

Benefit: Crawling content in your farm places a heavy load on the Web servers. This tends to cause spikes and surges in network traffic, and is CPU-intensive and memory-intensive. By pointing to a dedicated FE server, users aren’t impacted negatively.

Recommendation: All server computers in the farm are on the same network segment. There is no switching in routers at the data layer. The network link between a Web server and the database server is less than 1 milliseconds (ms) latency and located 10 or fewer miles from the database server.

Reason: Routers and switches will increase latency even if the network connection between these is very fast. If the type of load the Web server is serving is some subset of user browse requests, we expect Office SharePoint Server 2007 to tolerate some latency between the Web server and the database server. On the other hand, pages with many or custom Web Parts, Stsadm commands, and search crawls are likely to fair less well.

Benefit: Reduces latency and provides a better experience for users in remote geographic locations

Recommendation: Do not use web gardens and BLOB cache at the same time

Reason: Because only one process can acquire the lock necessary to manage the cache, successful use the cache depends on which thread services a request. If a Web garden that does not have the BLOB cache lock services a request, the content it sends in response will not have caching directives associated with it.

Benefit: Reduces the amount of requests and data sent over the network by allowing BLOB Caching to work.

Recommendation: Optimize Blob Cache by including most used file extensions and increasing the cacheabilty value

Reason: The BLOB cache enables you to configure caching directives that are associated with items served from publishing site lists, for example, the Pages library and Site Collection Images. When the browser on the client computer encounters a caching directive, it detects that the item it is retrieving can be saved locally and does not need to be requested again until the caching directive expires. When the BLOB cache is turned on, a couple of different things happen. First, each time a cacheable item is requested, MOSS searches the hard disk drive of the Web server that received the request to see if a copy exists locally. If it does, the file is streamed directly from the local disk to the user. If it isn't on the local disk yet, a copy of the item is made from the SQL database where it is stored, and then the item is sent to the user making the request. From that point forward, all requests for the item can be served directly from the Web server until the item's cacheability value indicates that it has expired. The other thing it does is append a cacheability header to the item when the item is sent to the client. This header instructs the browser how long the item should be cached. For example, if a picture had a cacheability value of three days, the browser uses the copy of the image it has in its local cache if the picture is requested again within the next three days; it does not request it from the server again.

Benefit: That results in better performance in the server farm by reducing contention on the database server. In a geographically distributed environment, this is critically important because it reduces the number of items requested and sent over the network.

Please note that you need to ensure that the “Office Sharepoint Server Publishing” feature is activated on all Publishing sites. Also, you should update the location to the best performing drive, add in extra paths, and add in the max-age to expire based on your situation. For example:

Current setting: <BlobCache location="C:\blobcache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$ " maxSize="10" enabled="false"/>

Example Setting: <BlobCache location="E:\blobcache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js|htc|)$ " maxSize="10" max-age="86400" enabled="true"/>

Recommendation: Optimizing IIS Compression by changing the level of IIS compression from 0 to 9 and adding in certain dynamic files

Reason: When MOSS is installed, setup configures IIS to compress the static file types .htm, .html and .txt; it compresses the dynamic file types .asp and .exe. After a site has been hit by a few users, you can verify that compression is working by viewing the %WINDIR%\IIS Temporary Compressed Files directory on a Web server. It should contain multiple files, which indicates that static files have been requested and IIS has compressed a copy of them and stored them on the local drive. When that file is requested again, whether it's the same user or not, the compressed version of the file is served directly from this folder. Dynamic files can be compressed as well, but they are always compressed on the fly; copies are not kept on the local Web server. It may be advantageous to compress additional file types. For example, it probably makes sense to also compress the static file types .css and .js; it may also make sense to compress the dynamic file types .axd and .aspx.

Benefit: The IIS Compression can result in significant bandwidth savings. For example, the core.js file is included on every SharePoint page. When it's uncompressed, it is 257 KB; after compression, the file is only 54 KB without performing additional tuning to IIS compression.

Please note: Before applying IIS Compression, you will need to ensure that you only include files that are well-suited to being compressed. For example, .jpg files are not a good candidate for compression because the file format is inherently compressed already. Also, 2007 Microsoft Office system file types such as docx, xlsx and pptx are not a good choice for compression because the files are not served directly from the server; instead, they are routed through the different ISAPI filters that are used to manage the rich integrated end user experience for Microsoft Office content. In addition, in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, these file types are inherently compressed.

Ref: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263099(office.12).aspx

and

http://blogs.technet.com/b/waynemo/archive/2008/03/19/moss-server-performance-considerations.aspx

MOSS Architecture and SSP

MOSS adopts a typical 3-tier model with web servers at the front, application servers in the middle and a database server at the back where all the data and config is stored.

The front-end web servers are simple web servers that can be network load balanced to achieve additional performance and fault tolerance (like 2003). The backend database is a typical SQL 2005 database service and can be clustered as you’d expect.

So what is different?

The interesting bit is what goes on in the middle. With MOSS, it is mandatory to have a Shared Service Provider. This is a collection of application servers that provide shared services out to any portals or sites that need them. These services include:

• Search
• Index
• Audience compilation
• User profiles database
• My Sites
• Business Data Catalogue
• Excel Services

Any of the above services can exist on any number of servers within the SSP. For example, for a small-ish deployment you could have them all on one box, or you could scale them out onto different boxes as you see fit. There are no rules that govern where these services reside within the SSP or how many servers you have servicing them (with the exception of the Index server - only one per SSP). For example if you want 10 search servers – got for it ... “fill your boots” as we’d say here in England!

This model is very similar to the 2003 approach with one crucial difference,  the SSP has no portal affiliation. This means that you are not forced to have a specific parent/child style portal topology in order to use Shared Services which was one of the big sticking points with Sharepoint 2003 shared services.

So what does the ‘Portal’ actually do now?

For starters, it is now called ‘Collaboration Portal', not ‘portal’ and it is just another type of site collection that is hosted on an IIS site (called web applications in MOSS). Portals no longer contain any application services such as search, my site etc – all these services now have to come from an SSP. This means that all you need to host a portal is a web server and a place to put the content database.

Different portals can live on their own hardware which is completely isolated from any other hardware other than the fact that it consumes services from a centrally managed SSP. Alternatively, you can put some of your portals on shared hardware and some on dedicated.

I always hear requirements around different business units wanting their own portal which has its own visual style, custom webparts, different SLAs etc . With this model, there does not have to be any affiliation between any portals or sites if it is not required.

This diagram outlines the logic of how SSP provide services that are consumed by several site collections:

So does this mean that ‘Supported Farm configurations’ have gone?

In short, yes!

This model means that you can scale any element of the system out as you see fit. However, there are several recommended server layouts that will meet most scenarios. These broadly follow the small, medium and large models of Sharepoint 2003, but should be considered as starting points only. You can easily deviate to a different setup depending on your requirements.

So how does all this map to physical servers?

All three tiers (web, application, database) of the SharePoint model can be hosted on a single machine or scaled out to a huge collection of servers to meet the requirements.

Most organisations will want some level of fault tolerance and separation between server roles. Typically these kind of organisations will have at least 2 web servers running your portals and sites, at least one application server hosting all services (maybe a second for fault tolerance) and one database cluster. This diagram shows this model:

Larger organisations may want to have separate web servers for each of their portals, sites and my sites. They may also have multiple application servers as part of the SSP. This diagram describes this model:

I hope this was usefull.

Power of Excel, BI.

What is BI?

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of aggregating, storing, analyzing, and then reporting that data in order to make decisions and future forecasting, current business state, Risk involve, predict,manage business performance and take business decisions.

Tools Selection for BI.

In current market there are lots of BI tools available for analysis. While selecting BI tools it is advised that to select the tool which can interact with all the versions of Microsoft Excel effectively and also should be able to interact with other MS Office products. 

Why excel support is required in BI Tools?

Lots of BI vendors say that "Our Bi Product offer analysis". But if you check in the market there
are lots of BI vendors who have changed their tool to support Excel or use the power of Excel in analysis and reporting, like Cognos, which unveiled Go! Office; Business Objects, which introduced Live Office; and Information Builders, which recently introduced Quick Data for WebFocus. Excel is used widely because Excel has lots of in built spreadsheet functions, analytical features, and universal presence on desktop.

The current king of Business Intelligent (BI) tools is Microsoft Excel. Microsoft states that there
are over 150 million excel users, with many of them using Excel for BI-reporting and analysis of corporate data.

The spreadsheet program that some experts have called “KING OF BI”, “Number One BI
Tool” and I Say “Heart of BI” because without excel its very difficult to get BI reports and analysis. Excel is more widely used for planning purposes. To prepare plans, one should have to starts from actuals, and that actuals comes from BI Report. In the absence of a planning system, there is not better place to enter plan data than in excel.It's perfect for entering data, doing what-if-analysis or producing forecasts based on formulas, thanks to its analytical features and its universal presence on desktop.

Also in the perspective of the software development or IT professionals rarely prefer the Excel as BI Tool but BI reports are very dynamic and the tool which is developed for the BI should be very flexible which can adopt the change immediately and produce report.

Frequent changes in Business Logic and tracking Metrics require the power of the change
at end-user. Most of the time the changes require is very simple but critical from business perspective. In case of BI tools the end user/ management have to take help of the IT/ BI specialist developer for customization, this involves to go through whole SDLC, Find sponsor for project, request for requirement change then management will assign project to one development team, and then after some period of time the reports added to existing tool or new tool is developed on the basis of the requirement. The whole process for additional changes will
become very long for Business. However if Excel is used as BI, Excel is the Smart tool which allows users to change reports in a few minutes or hours and which is the most important feature for the BI Tool that enable users to rapidly develop and maintain dashboards, including dynamic, interactive data capabilities such as drill-down, filter, and sort. Second thing is that customization can be done by the User him self, it doesn’t required any programmer. If user is aware of some
coding (VBA) skills then he can do automation of the report and reduce manual input work.
With Excel BI User can analyze and report data from any number of sources on one page.

No other BI system provides such analytical power.
Excel 2007 is the new version of Excel with more analytical and reporting features. It provides
more spontaneous access to OLAP data, conditional formatting based on the KPI. Excel 2007 is more powerful because of the feature of integration with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to provide a rich end-user analysis, newly designed PivotTable reports, a new formula-based model for accessing Analysis Services data, improved sorting and filtering capabilities, and a completely redesigned visualization engine. Bi user can share Excel workbook to browser based environment using SharePoint Excel services. It can fully interactive, data-bound workbooks that include charts, tables, and PivotTable reports as parts of a portal, dashboard, or business scorecard, without requiring any help from IT or development team, and that present a "single version of the truth."

Alex Payne, group product manager, Microsoft office Business Applications, says “We have different approach when we say BI features are just part of Excel.” It is not separate add-on that you pay for. We are providing BI natively inside Excel.” 

Excel Services for BI 

It is great to use excel to create BI Reports and analysis, but if you give this copy of excel which
contains report to many people and in future if process or functionality needs to be changed,then its very difficult to redistribute the new version of Excel report to the whole user group. “One version of truth”…. Where excel based BI system fails.There is also a chance of exposing the business proprietary formulas to people or user group who are not meant to see it. The problem we all face is “HOW DO YOU GET THIS DATA PUBLISHED SO OTHERS CAN USE AND INTERACT WITH THE DATA WHILE KEEPING PROPRIETARY INFORMATION HIDDEN.” Answer is Excel services.

Excel Services is a new server technology that was designed from the ground up to be scalable and robust with web based interface which uses Excel Web Access which is created by using client application Excel 2007. Workbook authors no longer need to send them in e-mail messages. Sending workbooks in e-mail messages often results in multiple copies of a workbook, essentially creating conflicting the "single version of truth" and exposing proprietary formulas and logic.

Another advantage is in a multi user scenario, each user has own web session. The server loads the workbook in memory according to the user permission of access read-only, (or targeted
user group defined by author).If a user applies a filter to a workbook, other users are not affected by those changes, and their interactions do not modify the original file.

To create a PivotTable report, user can interact with Microsoft SQL server analysis services data, select the cubes, fields.The new cube functions added to the Excel 2007 and Excel Services which add on to the business intelligence. Using that You can convert PivotTables directly into cube functions which enables general users to rapidly model data when needed, to support business decisions.

With the Excel 2007 business user can ascertain how to respond change needs without the involvement of the IT or Programmer. Using cubes Users can pull in data from SQL server analysis services and various other data sources, which greatly increases the flexibility to combine external data points and create reports and analyse the data effectively.

In Excel 2007, a user has full control over the content, whereas in Excel Services, the workbook author can control the level of functionality that is available to the workbook consumer, in addition to controlling the visibility of formulas and the ability to edit data values.

Following snap of Excel 2007 shows the Pivot table with different types of the KPI presented in various ways from cube data.  

Bringing Data Together in Dashboards

You can use the new features in Excel 2007 and Excel Services to access, manipulate, and display data in new and different ways. When data is ready for publication, information workers can combine their data with other data in dashboards. Dashboards enable visualization and reporting on large amounts of data in an easily consumable format. Excel Services and SharePoint Server 2007 have the ability to create business dashboards is a key business intelligence capability. Below figure shows a dashboard that was created by using Excel Services, KPIs, and filtered Web Parts from Office SharePoint Server 2007. It focuses on identifying trends, anticipating challenges and opportunities, and supporting business decisions.

Dashboard-using Excel Services

No code is required to create dashboards. SharePoint Server 2007 includes a set of Web Parts that enable users to develop and maintain dashboards, including dynamic, interactive data capabilities such as drill-down, filter, and sort with familiarities with Excel by using PivotTables reports, Excel charts, and formulas. Dashboards can also take advantage of SharePoint Server 2007 KPI web parts which are external to Excel, which are highly visual representations of important business factors.

One big limitation with excel services is the inability to utilize the excel object model and a spreadsheet with the VBA code behind cannot be published to Excel Server.

SQL server reporting-services Integrated with Windows SharePoint Services v3 to enable publishing, viewing and management of reports.

In SharePoint, the data for KPIs can come from any SharePoint list, an excel workbook, SQL server analysis services or it can be manually entered.

The data is exposed using a KPI list and KPI appropriate data. The KPI web parts then expose that data in to SharePoint site.

Conclusion
Excel Services enables end users to create robust solutions without involving developers, and it  gives workbook authors, database administrators, and developer’s greater control over the environment. The combination of the Excel Web Access and the Excel Web Services API provides rich and versatile access to workbooks. At the same time, the security model is the same whether you access the workbook through Excel Web Access or programmatically through the Excel Web Services interface.

Workbook authors use Excel 2007 to create workbooks and accompanying business logic, including connecting directly to back-end data sources for live data. Those authors, including non-technical users, can create workbooks, reports, and dashboards with dynamic data, more securely sharing that information across the enterprise and making it available to other users and applications. Developers can take advantage of business logic created by those business users without needing to re-create it in application code. The physical infrastructure that underlies Excel Services is highly scalable and configurable. This enables you to support changing business needs as they arise and provide guaranteed availability for mission-critical calculations.

The combination of Excel Services and Excel 2007 enables both technical and non-technical users to securely share, manage, and reuse data and business logic, creating a true enterprise solution for workbooks.