Setup Guide: Creating SharePoint 2010 Development VM

Critical Path Training has created a complete setup guide that helps us get our own environment setup. It includes the following:
• Setting up a Windows Server 2008 R2 OS*
• Setting up Active Directory & DNS
• Setting up SQL Server 2008*
• Setting up & configuring SharePoint Server 2010 Beta 2

Their guide walks us though each step in a ton of detail complete with screenshots along the way. Like I said, there’s tons of detail… over 40pgs worth of helpful instructions! You don’t even need licenses for things like Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server… They show us where to get the trial / evaluation editions of these products.

This guide is provided for free from the members only section of our site. Login (or first create your free account) at www.CriticalPathTraining.com & click on the Members link in the primary navigation (it isn’t there when you aren’t logged in). From there you can access all our members-only content including this document (located under the articles section titled SharePoint Server Beta 2 Virtual Machine Setup Guide).

You can download it from here

Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010

MSDN has published an article about Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server. This article describes how to install a development environment with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. These instructions will enable us to get started with an environment that is specifically suited to developing SharePoint custom solutions.

Hope this helps!

SharePoint 2010 Beta Release Known Issues

SharePoint 2010 Beta Release Known Issues

Demo Video of Business Connectivity Services

Please take a look these videos to know more about business connectivity services

http://blogs.msdn.com/bcs/archive/2009/11/06/bcs-overview-demo-video.aspx

Here are the awesome features which you can see from this demo video.
• Full read/write capability of BCS
• Create an external content type which connects to a SQL backend
• Bring external data into SharePoint through an external list
• See how the external list provides the same functionality of a normal SharePoint list
• Take the external data into Outlook and SharePoint Workspace
• Auto-generated forms and customized InfoPath forms for external lists
• External Data Columns and using Word templates to fill in information using external data

Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft releases a document which describes common ways to build and scale farm topologies, including planning which servers to start services on.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fd686cbb-8401-4f25-b65e-3ce7aa7dbeab

Sysinternals Suite Released!!

It is an exciting news that Sysinternal has released the trouble shooting utilities. This suite contains following:

The Suite is a bundling of the following selected Sysinternals Utilities:

AccessChk AccessEnum AdExplorer AdRestore Autologon Autoruns BgInfo CacheSet ClockRes Contig Coreinfo Ctrl2Cap DebugView Desktops DiskExt DiskMon DiskView Disk Usage (DU) EFSDump FileMon Handle Hex2dec

Junction LDMDump ListDLLs LiveKd LoadOrder LogonSessions NewSid NTFSInfo PageDefrag PendMoves PipeList PortMon ProcDump ProcessExplorer Process Monitor ProcFeatures PsExec PsFile PsGetSid PsInfo PsKill PsList PsLoggedOn

PsLogList PsPasswd PsService PsShutdown PsSuspend RegDelNull RegJump RegMon RootkitRevealer SDelete ShareEnum ShellRunas SigCheck Streams Strings Sync TCPView VMMap VolumeID WhoIs WinObj ZoomIt

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009

As most of you aware, Microsoft is conducting a contest to re-design their Conference Site. I wanted to participate on this contest and have designed the following Look&Feel Template. Please feel free to provide comments re.below. Would be appreciate your input.

Backup Exec – MOSS 2007

Last week, I have been working with fixing the search issue. Actually,  the crawler was failed to crawl the large team site which has heavy weight document libraries with lot of folder structures – Some other people were try to fix this issue by deleting the large document libary, but no luck. So these guys were planning to restore them back, but unfortunately they could not find that huge document library in both site collection & site Recycle Bin(sounds weird)- Please take a look at Chris Blog, he mentioned this same problem in his blog http://www.sharepointblogs.com/cwogle/archive/2009/06/18/large-items-in-sharepoint-recycle-bin-fixed-er-worked-around.aspx. It was very important libray though, so we were planning to restore it from Tape Backup using Symantec Backup Exec. As you may aware, Backup Exec is used to resore the specified file or document library. Using this tool, they were trying to restore the document library(which has 9720 items, and total size would 29GB) from Tape Backup to SharePoint site. But, they could not able to restore it(i.e., 29GB) back using backup exec for various reasons. So, the network administrators have decided to restore it to UNC path. Instead of restoring to C:\, they could restore it to the document library.

Symptom:

Not able to restore huge document libary(i.e., 29GB) to sharepoint site

Resolution:

Create a document library and select action->open with windows explorer(please make sure that webclient services have enabled, if not this option wont work). It will open a document library within the windows explorer. Use this UNC path to restore by using symantech back exec.

Power of CMIS – Interoperable Content Management

As you may aware, CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) uses web services to provide greater interoperability across multiple Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repositories. Here is a small introduction about CMIS who doesn’t aware of it: CMIS  is a standards proposal consisting of a set of Web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories that seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories. Alfresco, Day Software, Dennis Hamilton, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle and SAP have joined forces to propose CMIS, the first Web services technical specification for exchanging content with and between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Here is the conceptual CMIS architecture

and here is the Service Oriented Content Management architecture from Optaros

When you think about Interoperable Content Management(CMIS), first thing you could have ask: Is (CMIS) the perfect solution? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact that something has been developed that ECMs and other application developers can work with to provide an integrated view of an organization’s content is a step in the direction we need to go. We all know the days of a single, in-house ECM system are pretty much over. SharePoint has already taken care of that. We need something to give us hope that our content is manageable — regardless of where it’s located. CMIS does that. Kyle McNabb has answered the lehman question on his prespectives and here is the DRAFT specification which will be submitted to OASIS – and AIIM has shown an excellent CMIS Demo (i.e., “Federator”)

[Update]:

Attached: CMIS Federated Search Code from AIIM iECM Demo – You can download it from here https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-3771

BDC as a Dataconnection for InfoPath Development

One of my customer wanted to create a BDC application definition file for Oracle 11g database Entity. Also, they wanted to use an InfoPath to leverage or pre-populate the dropdown list from Oracle database entity. Due to the budget cut, they are not willing to spend money/hours to create a seperate webservice wrapper for an oracle entity to pre-populate the dropdowns(in InfoPath) and they would like to use BDC application definition file as a datasource for an InfoPath(sounds crazy  here? [:)] ). They had raised a valid question to me that “Why don’t to use BDC as a Data Connection for Infopath? – BDC application definition file has connection string and method instance, blah, blah… so why we can not re-use this application definition file as a datasource for InfoPath Developement?”- Pretty good question, isit? [;)] – Conceptual Design diagram attaced. 

But unfortunately, InfoPath data connection wizard doesn’t support BDC application definition file as a Datas ource and it does supports the following options.

We can not use BDC application definition file as an XML form or anyother options. So, I suggested to them to create a simple webmethod(i.e, 4 hours effort) to pre-populate the lookup values from LOB Instances, and make use of this webservice as a datasource in infopath form. So that you can re-use the same application definition file for both BDC application & InfoPath form.

They were really happy to use this technology to satisfy their technical issue as well as save cost [:)] – Using this approach we can able to use Business Data Catalog as a DataConnection for an InfoPath development.

Hope this helps!