Document Sets and Records Center

Document Set Sent to Records Center Issue

It has been very easy for me to connect a Document Library to a Records Center by going to the Document Library settings. In SharePoint 2007 there was a limitation that you could only set up one of these. Now in SharePoint 2010 you can set up multiple through Central Admin >> General Application Settings >> Configure Sent to Connections.

With a Document Set when I select the Action Menu for the item the new and convenient Send To sub menu does not appear like it does for regular documents. The only option I have is to “Sent to Other Locations” which is configured through Central Admin.

Resolution

Seems the only want to configure Send To configurations for a Document Library is through Central Administration. No big deal in grand scheme.

Document Set Drop Off Library at Records Center Issue

I recently ran into something weird when messing around with Document Sets and Records Center. I wanted to route a Document Set to a Records Center but when the Document Set arrived, it was a zip file in the Drop Off Library.

I had expected a Document Set to be there. Then I download the zip file, opened it up and all the files within the Document Set were there. I had followed all the right steps to create a connection between my document library and the records center so I was confused. Plus the zip file was not being picked up by the rules that I had set up in the Content Organizer in the Records Center.

Resolution

The resolution was pretty simple, I had to go into Center Admin >> Monitoring >> Review Job Definitions >> Content Organizer Processing job.

When I run the job immediately the zip file will be picked up, turned into back into a Document Set and then routed correctly based on the Content Organizer.

I also modified the interval to run more often.

Reference - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/thread/8245b2fd-6465-43ad-b117-320405cbb967

Start Workflow on Item Change Issue

Issue

I recently ran into a rather weird issue with creating workflows with Visio and SharePoint Designer 2010. I basically wanted to create a workflow that would be initiated when the item was modified. So in the workflow configuration I checked “Start this workflow when an item is changed”. However the workflow would NEVER start and was driving me a little nuts.

Resolution

I do not have a good reason why however the reason apparently because I was logged in as a System Account. Once I logged in with as a normal user everything started to magically work. I was on a development machine and was doing work as a system admin. Needless to say I lost lots of time for no good reason.

Reference - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010customization/thread/d29447aa-9509-42a8-b3ff-94288656d440

FAST QRProxyService Dead

Issue

I was recently installing FAST for SharePoint 2010 and when I went to check the status after the initial configuration it was saying the QRProxyServices was dead.

Module Name Process Name PID Status

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

Browser Engine browserengine Running

Config Server configserver 4048 Running

Content Distributor contentdistributor 2464 Running

Enterprise Crawler crawler 5516 Running

FDMWorker fdmworker 5084 Running

RTS Indexer indexer 3792 Running

Indexing Dispatcher indexingdispatcher 3048 Running

Name Service nameservice 2652 Running

Document Processor procserver_1 5584 Running

Document Processor procserver_2 5604 Running

Document Processor procserver_3 5640 Running

Document Processor procserver_4 5664 Running

QRProxy Service qrproxy Dead

QRServer qrserver 4928 Running

SAM Admin samadmin Running

SAM Worker samworker Running

RTS Search search-1 3672 Running

Automatic spellcheck tuning spelltuner 5452 Running

SPRel sprel 5384 Running

RTS Top Dispatcher topfdispatch 4460 Running

WALinkStorerReceiver walinkstorerreceiver 5140 Running

WALookupDB walookupdb0 5076 Running

WebAnalyzer webanalyzer 5232 Running

Error

I then went to the event logs and say the following error.

Service cannot be started. System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified

Solution

The resolution was pretty simple, I had to re-install WIF.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=eb9c345f-e830-40b8-a5fe-ae7a864c4d76&displaylang=en

SharePoint 2010 Gov to Gov Event

Over the past several years US Federal Agencies have highly adopted SharePoint as a platform to address numerous enterprise needs.  SharePoint 2010 has significant features and capabilities that are tightly integrated in areas of Collaboration, Enterprise Content Management, Enterprise Search, Business Intelligence, Social Computing, Enterprise Applications and Systems Integration to name a few. 

You are invited to come listen to presentations by Treasury.gov and USDA present how they are using SharePoint 2010 today to meet their business needs.  Come join the community of Federal Agencies for engaging discussions about SharePoint Internet and Records Management implementations.  Microsoft will also provide a demonstration on TeleWork; enabling you to change where you work and not how you work.

These sessions will provide insight for your SharePoint initiatives.  The intended audience is US Federal IT Professionals (both business and technical).   We encourage insightful and meaningful conversation during these presentations with your peers.

When:

Thursday April 14, 2011

· Event Registration - 8:30 to 9:00 AM

· Sessions - 9:00 AM to 2:30 PM

· Lunch - Due to Federal Gift Giving policies lunch will not be provided.  Lunch purchase options will be available onsite or short walk away.

Registration:

Please go to register for the event - https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480489&Culture=en-US

Where:

Microsoft Chevy Chase Office

5404 Wisconsin Ave, Suite 700

Chevy Chase, Maryland 20815

Phone: (301) 771-8000

Microsoft Chevy Chase Office Web Site

Metro Train – Red Line Friendship Heights

United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) – Agriculture Marketing Service (AMS)

AMS has developed an electronic records center built on SharePoint 2010 technology.  The records center allows AMS employees to use Office applications to store official electronic records in an Enterprise Content Repository.  The repository allows end users to search for records they have created or to which they have viewing permission.  A custom built records management ribbon for the Office suite allows users to designate a records category, document title, audience and keywords before filing the document in the repository.

Fariba Tacoukjou

Senior Developer – USDA – AMS - Information Technology Services

Department of Treasury Public Internet

Treasury.gov is built utilizing SharePoint 2010 and FAST search on the Amazon Cloud environment with an Akamai content delivery network cloaking the infrastructure.  This platform is a fully managed cloud hosting solution that is built to scale and accommodate many IIS and SharePoint websites. Currently this environment hosts Treasury.gov, FinancialStability.gov, MakingHomeAffordable.gov, MyMoney.gov, SigTarp.gov, Tigta.gov and IRSOversightBoard.gov.  Come learn how Treasury.gov was able to meet aggressive timelines and successfully deliver a highly scalable solution.

Greg Galipeau

Enterprise Architect - Department of Treasury, Office of Chief Information Officer, HRConnect Program Office and Web Team

Microsoft TeleWork Solution for US Federal

Under the 2010 TeleWork Enhancement Act (H.R. 1722), Federal Agencies aggressive timelines to establish a policy on working outside the office, identify eligible employees and inform them of the option.  Come see how Microsoft provides secure business productivity solutions for TeleWork.  Microsoft will demonstrate how to change Where You Work, not How You Work.

Bob Straker and Jason Apergis

Microsoft SharePoint Technical Solution Professionals

Registration:

Please go to register for the event - https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480489&Culture=en-US

Customize SPMetal Generated Code for SharePoint to LINQ

A common question that has come up with SharePoint 2010 developers. If they are using the SPMetal tool to generate entities (or class definitions) for objects in SharePoint, can they modify the generated code? The first response someone may say is no; that is not possible. The reason being is when you rerun the SPMetal command and then replace the new generated code overtop your existing code, you will lose your changes.

Well there is a solution and is it extremely simple. I actually got the idea from all the coding experiences I had with building customizations into RIA Services with Silverlight. All the SPMetal tool is doing is generating Proxy code and notice that all of the code is generated as partial classes!!! Now the sky is the limit.

So in the example below, here is a custom content type I created called Anonymous Comment. Below is the generated code and you can see it is a partial class. Now all you need to do is add another partial class to your project called, AnonymousComment and add in custom methods. When you use the AnonymousComment class in some other custom code it will be treated as one class definition.

Another neat thing you can is see there are partial methods for OnLoaded, OnValidate and OnCreated. You can extend those methods if you want and they will be called by the framework. One unfortunate thing you cannot do is modify the behavior of the getter and setter properties, but you can handle that in your custom partial class.

/// <summary>
/// The item that will capture an anonymous comment.
/// </summary>
[Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ContentTypeAttribute(Name="Anonymous Comment", Id="0x0100E3A8FCEBECB140D2812D4F3DE177EFEC")]
public partial class AnonymousComment : Item {
    
    private string _comment;
    
    private System.Nullable<System.DateTime> _created;
    
    private string _response;
    
    private System.Nullable<System.DateTime> _responseDate;
    
    private System.Nullable<Category0> _category;
    
    private System.Nullable<Status> _status;
    
    #region Extensibility Method Definitions
    partial void OnLoaded();
    partial void OnValidate();
    partial void OnCreated();
    #endregion
    
    public AnonymousComment() {
        this.OnCreated();
    }
    
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ColumnAttribute(Name="AnonymousComment", Storage="_comment", FieldType="Note")]
    public string Comment {
        get {
            return this._comment;
        }
        set {
            if ((value != this._comment)) {
                this.OnPropertyChanging("Comment", this._comment);
                this._comment = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged("Comment");
            }
        }
    }
    
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ColumnAttribute(Name="Created", Storage="_created", ReadOnly=true, FieldType="DateTime")]
    public System.Nullable<System.DateTime> Created {
        get {
            return this._created;
        }
        set {
            if ((value != this._created)) {
                this.OnPropertyChanging("Created", this._created);
                this._created = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged("Created");
            }
        }
    }
    
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ColumnAttribute(Name="AnonymousCommentResponse", Storage="_response", FieldType="Note")]
    public string Response {
        get {
            return this._response;
        }
        set {
            if ((value != this._response)) {
                this.OnPropertyChanging("Response", this._response);
                this._response = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged("Response");
            }
        }
    }
    
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ColumnAttribute(Name="AnonymousCommentResponseDate", Storage="_responseDate", FieldType="DateTime")]
    public System.Nullable<System.DateTime> ResponseDate {
        get {
            return this._responseDate;
        }
        set {
            if ((value != this._responseDate)) {
                this.OnPropertyChanging("ResponseDate", this._responseDate);
                this._responseDate = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged("ResponseDate");
            }
        }
    }
    
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ColumnAttribute(Name="AnonymousCommentCategory", Storage="_category", FieldType="Choice")]
    public System.Nullable<Category0> Category {
        get {
            return this._category;
        }
        set {
            if ((value != this._category)) {
                this.OnPropertyChanging("Category", this._category);
                this._category = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged("Category");
            }
        }
    }
    
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ColumnAttribute(Name="AnonymousCommentStatus", Storage="_status", FieldType="Choice")]
    public System.Nullable<Status> Status {
        get {
            return this._status;
        }
        set {
            if ((value != this._status)) {
                this.OnPropertyChanging("Status", this._status);
                this._status = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged("Status");
            }
        }
    }
}

SharePoint 2010 Server Topology Examples

I figured I write a short blog about SharePoint, logical / physical architecture, YET AGAIN!!!

Well I actually received some advice that made me want to tweak my message a little. If you read my earlier blog series on SharePoint 2010 Service architecture you will know how much SharePoint 2010 has changed. Then you may have also read my series on the new SharePoint 2010 Search architecture and found out there have been tons of interesting changes here too.

I had a great presentation from Shane Young (SharePoint MVP) which drove me to write this blog. What I realized is I have to stop thinking about architecting in SharePoint 2007 and take advantage of SharePoint 2010. Heck I should know them given all the new architecture features I have been writing about all this time.

In many SharePoint 2007 implementations, the one service we had much of our planning around was SharePoint Search and the SSP. Now all of those limitations are gone.

I am commonly asked how many servers I need to get started with SharePoint 2010. Now that is a LOADED question because such things as SQL high availability, network, service utilization, enterprise features, etc. which all play into an optimum configuration of SharePoint 2010. There really is no one size fit all. However there is always a good place to start the discussion. Shane Young provided two recommendations which I liked the best.

The Three Server Farm

This one is pretty fun one when you think about. There are a ton of SharePoint 2007 environments out there where there are 3 SharePoint servers and with dedicated SQL Servers. In those cases there are two web front ends and one application server. The one application server runs the index service, maybe something like Excel and the search query services are running on the web front ends. In the SharePoint 2007 days, this gave some good redundancy but with SharePoint 2010 we can do better.

Now one approach you can consider in SharePoint 2010 is just making all three servers the same. Rather novel idea right?

Observations:

• You now have web traffic distributed across three web front ends.
• All three servers can support SharePoint 2010 services traffic such as Excel, Visio, Access, etc.
• Search crawler service should be pretty spiffy because you can configure all three servers to perform full crawling during off hours, and partial crawls depending on how fresh you need to keep search.
• All three servers can be made redundant from a search perspective by having index mirrors.
• Search results will actually be quicker because you will have three index partitions that can be searched across simultaneously.

Now I had a colleague point out that this does not fly well because “this does not maximize the separation of services architecture from the web front ends”. I get and completely understand that standpoint but I really do not think that should be a consideration for disqualifying this option. Even though everything is running on each machine, the SharePoint roles / services will continue to run independently in different IIS websites, in separate application pools and with different accounts. There is no reason why you cannot continue to configure it as it if they are running on different machines. This is probably a good thing too because someday you will have to scale SharePoint up to meet demand. Remember you can always scale up by adding boxes or separating services onto their own dedicated machines. All I can say is configure SharePoint 2010 based on your requirements, adhere to best practices, plan as much as you can and do the right configuration for your company.

The Four Server Farm

Now let’s look at a four server SharePoint farm. There will be cases where the three server farm recommendation will not make sense for whatever the valid reason. In this configuration we go a little more “traditional”. In this case, Shane recommend two web front ends and then two application servers.

Observations:

• We have two dedicated web front ends. Add more if you need to.
• Application services will run on the same application servers with search. Hopefully they will not interfere with full crawls unless you require dedicated resources for the application services. If you need; just add more application servers.
• The two application servers give us the needed redundancy we need for search. You will have two crawlers and two index partitions with mirrors to start with.
• One little trick I was told for this configuration is you should also configure the application servers where the Search crawling component is running to also be web front ends (WFE). Do not load balance them with the other WFEs. Then add the SharePoint site URLs to be searched as entries into the hosts file on the application servers to point back to itself and not to the load balanced URL. What this effectively does is trick the crawler into crawling the WFE on the application server. This will give performance improvements twofold. First the load balanced WFEs where users access content will have no performance issues associated to the crawler crawling content. Second, the load of the network will be reduced because nothing will go across the wire when indexing is occurring.

Additional Notes:

• High Availability – SQL is a big player in this discussion and you need to read this blog.
• FAST for SharePoint 2010 - Now if you are going to consider using FAST for SharePoint, I would probably vote for the three server architecture recommendation as a starting off point. Here is a blog series on FAST for SharePoint 2010 if you are interested.

Closing

As I have said, there is no one size fits all. This is just a place to start and based on your plans you will scale up the SharePoint 2010 architecture as needed.

SharePoint 2010 Health Analyzer and RSS Feeds

In Central Admin of SharePoint 2010 you are probably familiar with the Health Analyzer. It was around in SharePoint 2007. Now in SharePoint 2010 – you see a ribbon right on the central admin homepage.

So a colleague and I were joking around that why not put an RSS feed in Outlook against the list that stores health errors so you can get automatic notification of when there is a Health Issue.

Guess what, not that bad of an idea. Now I will get notification if one of my rules fail in production. This is not a replacement for SCOM, but just something simple you can do to monitor your SharePoint Health Analyzer rules. Now I know many folks could debate some of the rules but at the end of the day most of them are good best practices you may want to adhere to in a production environment.

Health Analyzer Rules

If you are not familiar with the Health Analyzer rules, they can be managed in Central Admin. Below is screenshot of some of the actual rule definitions.

Here is an actual rule definition. You can see there is a schedule to when the rule is evaluated. Also notice there is a Run Now button which will execute rule manually. You even have the ability to disable rules which do not apply to your governance rules so that they will not continually appear in your RSS feed.