Dom Cosgrove Blog

The very first SharePoint eMagazine!

The Global SharePoint User Group is having it’s first meeting on the 1st December 2009 @ 7pm ET. This will be the first virtualised SharePoint User Group, and will be presented via LiveMeeting.

If you can’t actually attend the user group meeting then they will be recorded so that you can watch them at your leisure.

They also have a survey to establish what topics / subject areas people want discussed. Make sure you take the time to complete this as this will be key to getting the right content out there.

http://www.gspug.org/

If you need to browse your SharePoint site or for that matter any site, hosted on your VPC while you are not connected to a network, read on. If you are not connected to a network the VPC does not get an IP address issued hence why you cannot browse hosted sites. The solution to this is the MS Loopback Adapter. The following shows you how to set up your loopback adapter.

Add Loopback adapter

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel. Then click Add Hardware:
   
2. Select Yes, I have already connected the hardware:
   
3. From the list of devices select Add a new hardware device:
   
4. Select Install the hardware that I manually select from list (Advanced):
   
5. From the list of hardware types select Network Adapter:
   
6. From the list of Manufactures select Microsoft and from the list of Network Adapters select Microsoft Loopback Adapter:
   
7. Click Finish once the adapter is installed.
8. The Loopback Adapter will now appear in you list of Network Connections:
   

Configure Loopback Adapter

1. In the Network Connections right mouse click on the newly created Loopback Adapter and select Properties;
2. From the Properties select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties:
   
3. In the Properties add the IP address as follows:
    
4. Click OK to commit the changes.

Configure VPC Network Adapter

1. On Virtual PC (VPC) Console click Settings;
   
2. On the settings dialog box select Networking and then select Microsoft Loopback Adapter as the 1st Adapter. Click OK;
   
3. On the VPC click the Network icon in the task bar or navigate to the Network Connections through the control panel. The network icon may display a warning message “Limited or no connectivity”. Don’t worry about this at the moment;
   
4. On the Network Connections window, right mouse click on the Local Area Connection and click Properties;
   
5. On the TCP/IP settings for the Network adapter enter the following details. Click OK;
6. You will notice that the network icon on the desktop task bar no-longer displays the warning message;
7. On the VPC, launch the Command Prompt and type IPConfig you should see that the VPC now has the IP address, subnet and gateway that you just entered;
   
8. From the VPC Command prompt ping 192.168.5.10 to confirm connectivity to the host;
    
9. Ensure that you don’t have any network connectivity on your host computer, then from the Command Prompt ping the VPC 192.168.5.11 to confirm connectivity to the VPC;

Configure Host File

If your SharePoint (or website) uses Host Headers then you’ll need to edit your Host file:

1.   Open your Host file C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\host;
   
2. In the host file put the IP address of your VPC 192.168.5.11 and set the host in my case that is scratch;
    
3. You should now be able to browse your SharePoint (Web Site) hosted on a VPC even if you do not have connection to a network;
    

Today Microsoft TechNet has launched the Update Centre for Microsoft Office, Office Server and Related Products. This site will will consolidate all Service Packs, Public Updates and Cumulative updates for the Office Product suite in one location. Please note that this is not just for the Office Desktop products but also includes the server products i.e. SharePoint.

The site includes:

• Latest Updates;
• Updates in the last year;
• Update Resources;
• An RSS feed of the updates;

This will be a valuable resource for all system administrators and is something that has been long over due.

Office and SharePoint 2010 Betas are available for MSDN Subscribers:

• Office 2010 Beta 
• SharePoint 2010

Make sure you download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 that was released a couple of weeks ago, this will be the Developer Tool of choice.

  Channel 9 have a series of Webcasts on SharePoint 2010 Development:

  Channel 9 – SharePoint 2010 Developer Series

• Getting Started with SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2010 Developer Roadmap
• Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010
• UI Enhancements
• Lists and Schemas
• LINQ to SharePoint
• Client Object Model
• Workflow
• Services Architecture
• Accessing External Data
• Enterprise Content Management
• Extending Search
• PerformancePoint Services
• Sandboxed Solutions
• SharePoint 2010 Security

While working at an large utility organisation that has an Enterprise deployment of MOSS; they had their MySite Functionality turned off for all users. Now while I agree that there is a considerable amount of resource required to implement and manage the MySite functionality in SharePoint, it does have it’s benefits:

• Aids SharePoint adoption as uses have Site Owner rights to their MySite, which means they can create Lists, Add Web Parts, Upload Documents e.t.c. giving them a full flavour of what SharePoint can do, in an isolated environment;
• It can replace the user drive (U:\ drive or equivalent);
• It can promote Sharing of information with colleges, rather than having silos of information on Shared Drives;
• It can allow you to target information to particular sets of users;
• It helps finding people by skills, roles, department, corporate structure e.t.c.

One approach I find useful is to phase / incrementally deployment of MySites across the Enterprise. The following will show how you can achieve this:

1. Within the Active Directory (AD) create a new group called “SharePoint MySite Users” or something similar, this should be created as per your corporate policy;

2. Add the users that you plan to initially grant access to MySites to the newly created Group. You can also add existing AD Groups to this groups; for instance if you wanted to add the IT department you could add a AD Group that contains all members of that Department;

3. Launch your Central Administration console and select the Shared Services associated the SharePoint Site. From the Shared Services Home page select Personalization services permissions;

4. This will launch the a permissions page where you can grant rights to various personalisation services. You will notice that by default the NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users have been granted Personal Features and Personal Site rights. We are interested in the Personal Site rights. We need to remove these rights from the Authenticated Users groups. To do this select the Authenticated Users, and click Modify Permissions of Selected Users;

5. On the Modify Permissions page deselect Create Personal Site and click Save;

6. From the Manage Permissions page select Add Users / Groups. On the Add Users / Groups page enter the group that you created in steps 1 & 2. You can use the people picker functionality to help find the group. Check the box next to Create Personal Site and click Save;

7. You will now see that the SharePoint MySite Users group has the rights to create personal sites;

8. To verify this log in to the Portal with an account that is a member of the SharePoint MySite Users group. You will see the link to the My Site in the top right corner of the standard SharePoint site template;

9. Now log in with a user who is not a member and you will notice that the My Site link no longer appears;

Using this approach you can safely deploy My Sites functionality across and enterprise in a controlled fashion. This will allow you to ensure quota’s, content database, site deletion e.t.c are provisioned as per the requirements (governance) of your organisation.

SkyDrive Explorer is a free, easy-to-use, but very powerful extension for Windows Explorer. With SkyDrive Explorer you can make any every-day operations with your documents from Microsoft Live SkyDrive™ service using Windows Explorer, as if they were on your computer.

Check it out at http://skydriveexplorer.com/

Stephen Cummins the founder of the SharePoint User Group Ireland (SUGI) will be giving a introduction to SharePoint 2010. This will be a great forum to ask questions about the forth coming SharePoint release.

Date / Time: 11th November 2009 @ 7pm

Venue: Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane Dublin

If like me you’ve recently updated to Windows 7 (which generally I find a real improvement over Vista) you may have difficulties downloading products from the MSDN site using the Microsoft MSDN File Transfer Manager (TFM). Now I have to be honest I’m not sure if this is an issue with Windows 7 or Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). My gut feeling is it is a issue with IE8. Either way if you are having issues downloading files from the MSDN download site, then you need to manually download and install it from:

Microsoft MSDN File Transfer Manager

Also if your Corporate Group Policy requires you to have Administrative privileges to install ActiveX controls then you can use the above link to download and install.

There is an alternative download manager from Akamai, for those not using Internet Explorer or FireFox on Windows:

Akamai Download Manager.

Note: FTM is implemented as an ActiveX control and is a 32-bit application, so you may need to run your 64-bit browser in 32-bit mode.

More information can be found on the File Transfer Manager Help pages.