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May 14
Embed PowerPoint in SharePoint Web Pages
by  clayton james  on 14/05/2012 12:44 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​Installing Office Web Apps provides functionality that allows users to create and modify office documents in the web browser. It also allows us to easily embed PowerPoint slides into web pages which provides another great communication channel in SharePoint.

  1. Upload your PowerPoint file to a document library

    OfficeWebApps1.png

  2. In the Edit Control Block menu select the View in Browser link
    OfficeWebApps2.png


  3. Copy the URL up to the &source
    OfficeWebApps3.png


  4. Create a new web page that has web part zones

  5. Add  a Page Viewer Web Part to the page
    OfficeWebApps4.png

  6. In the Link property paste the PowerPoint URL we copied earlier. Open the Text Editor Dialog by clicking on the ellipse button and add the word Frame  at the end of PowerPoint (this will embed the PowerPoint deck in an IFrame)
    OfficeWebApps5.png



  7. Change the Height property to suit your design and set the Chrome Type to None and click OK
    OfficeWebApps6.png



  8. The PowerPoint file is now embedded into a SharePoint web page

    OfficeWebApps7.png




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April 13
Office Web Applications and SharePoint 2010
by  clayton james  on 13/04/2012 3:56 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​

When you install Office Web Apps with SharePoint 2010 a site collection for each web application is automatically created called http://[webapplication]/sites/Office_Viewing_Service_Cache
 
That is correct...for each web application created a new site collection is automatically created.
 
This also means that the cache data for this site collection is stored inside the web applications content database. If you would like to create a dedicated database to store the cached files then you can follow this article.
 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2010/09/01/the-office-web-applications-cache.aspx

 

Creating a dedicated database for office web applications files seperate from you content database can be a better way to manage database size and storage as office web applications cache storage can be quite large.

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October 08
SharePoint Microblogging WebPart
by  clayton james  on 8/10/2011 10:42 AM

I recently developed a Microblogging webpart​ that works with SharePoint 2007/2010.

It has a very twitter like feel and functionality and allows you to group posts by conversations. You can also decide if you want all users to create new conversations or only a select few.

The nice feature is that it is reusable, so you can use it to display corporate wide information in your Intranet and also have one at team level for team communication. It uses SharePoint lists to store information so subscription through alerts all works nicely.

MicrobloggingwebpartTwitter.PNG

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September 04
How to add a webpart into a special group other than miscellaneous
by  clayton james  on 4/09/2011 3:45 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​By default, SharePoint web parts are always put into a web part group called “Miscellaneous”.

If you want to automate this process when deploying your web parts as a Feature you can do the following:
In your web parts element manifest file
<ElementManifests>
<ElementManifest Location=”MyWebPart\MyWebPart.xml” /> this is the file you edit
<ElementFile Location=”MyWebPart\MyWebPart.webpart” />
</ElementManifests>
 
Add the following elements

<Module Name=”WebParts” List=”113″ Url=”_catalogs/wp”>
<File Path=”FlarePoint.MyWebPart.webpart” Url=”FlarePoint.MyWebPart.webpart” Type=”GhostableInLibrary”>
<Property Name=”Group” Value=”FlarePoint Web Parts” />this is what you add for the Group
<Property Name=”Title” Value=”FlarePoint.MyWebPart” />this is what you add for the Title
<Property Name=”WebPartDescription” Value=”FlarePoints MyWebPart description” />this is what you add for the Description
</File>
</Module>

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September 04
SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Commands
by  clayton james  on 4/09/2011 3:36 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​PowerShell will become the favoured tool to use when administering SharePoint farms. While stsadm.exe will still be around in SP 2010 I don’t think it will progress to much further. I also don’t feel that it will be extended with custom commands as PowerShell will fill this role nicely.

So in short…learn PowerShell if you are a SharePoint Admin or Developer.

To get a list of all SharePoint 2010 PowerShell commands you can do the following.

In the SharePoint 2010 Management Console enter the following code:
Get-Command –PSSnapin “Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell” | format-table name > C:\SP2010_PowerShell_Commands.txt

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September 04
Formulas and Functions for SharePoint Foundation
by  clayton james  on 4/09/2011 3:35 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​Here is a list of currently supported formulas and functions for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/CH010372694.aspx

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September 04
Enum value with spaces c#
by  clayton james  on 4/09/2011 3:31 PM
Category: Visual Studio

​Have you ever wanted to display a friendly Enum name that included spaces.

C# doesn’t allow spaces in Enum’s, just like variables. However, thanks to c# extension methods we can create a new method that returns the Description Attribute.
Apply descriptions which may be different to the enum value. Notice the space.

public enum WorkType
{
  [Description("Service Delivery")]

  ServiceDelivery,
  Project,
  Unavailable
}

Create the extension method
//used to get the description from enum fields
public static string GetDescription(this Enum value)
{
  Type type = value.GetType();
  string name = Enum.GetName(type, value); if (name != null)
  {
    FieldInfo field = type.GetField(name);
    if (field != null)
  {
      DescriptionAttribute attr =
      Attribute.GetCustomAttribute(field,
      typeof(DescriptionAttribute)) as DescriptionAttribute;
      if (attr != null)
  {
      return attr.Description;
   }
  }
}
return null;
}

Use it in your code
string serivceDelivery = WorkType.ServiceDelivery.GetDescription();

 

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August 19
Configure object cache user accounts
by  clayton james  on 19/08/2011 8:26 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

I have found that this seems to be a forgotten part for some companies upgrading to SharePoint 2010. Looking at the servers windows logs always provides you with valuable information and I have been seeing a common problem.

The windows logs contain an entry like the following:

Object Cache: The super user account utilized by the cache is not configured. This can increase the number of cache misses, which causes the page requests to consume unneccesary system resources

This error relates to a couple of accounts that need to be created and configured namely the Portal Super User account and the Portal Super Reader account.

You can read about them in this technet article

  

Configure object cache user accounts
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758656.aspx
 
The Portal Super User and Portal Super Reader accounts must be separate accounts, and they must not be accounts that will ever be used to log in to the site.
 
So you need to create two new service accounts.
 
I have also found a great powershell script that performs the necessary configuration for each web application.
 
Powershell script
 
So, create the accounts, modify and run the powershell script, complete an IIS Reset and you good to go. No more pesky errors.

 

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July 20
SharePoint Audit Log
by  clayton james  on 20/07/2010 3:59 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​I noticed our SharePoint content database growing at a rate that didn’t match the content being added. I decided to look at some table storage and ran the SQL Server 2008 reports from Management Studio and ran the Disk Usage report. Fantastic report detailing table size, number of records, etc…

One table that stood out was the AuditData table which was 50Gb in size. SharePoint Auditing can take up so much database space especially if you are auditing an entire site collection. Auditing was capturing data since late 2007 and wasn’t being used at the company, so the decision to disable this functionality. Great…save space and system resources.
So I turned it off at the site collection in site settings.
So the next step moved to how do we remove these logs?
  • Truncate the table – fast but unsupported and I am not sure what state this will leave you in
  • Object Model – write code to remove entries
  • stsadm trimauditlog- only available after SP2 – This is the one I selected
I used the –url parameter instead of the -database parameter. I was receiving an object reference not set to an instance of an object error when using the -database parameter. I am not sure if it was because the site collection was migrated to a different database server and the audit logs was stored against a different database server.
I ran this command in 1 monthly intervals (which was painful) as there was a lot of data to clean up and the SQL database log file wouldn’t consume all the disk space. I would then manually shrink the log file DBCC ShrinkFile after every trim to free up space. I performed this action until the entire AuditData table was cleared.
So if your Content database is growing at an alarming rate then make sure you check your AuditData table and assess if you really need auditing enabled, especially for the entire site collection.

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February 09
SharePoint 2010 - Client Object Model
by  clayton james  on 9/02/2010 3:57 PM
Category: SharePoint 2010

​I have just been reading up on the SharePoint Client Object Model. This will really allow developers to deliver rich, interactive applications using a common API.

One of the nice developer features of SharePoint is that it does provide a rich Server Object Model which transcends into consistent code across projects and organisations.
Now we will also have a Client Object Model which will provide a consistent way to develop against SharePoint whether it be from a WPF application, Silverlight or Javascript application.
Here is a nice article explaining the mechanics of it all.

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