A long time ago I pulled together a bunch of my SharePoint Search XSL samples for SharePoint 2007. I spent the morning updating the samples so that they work in SharePoint 2010. I also added a new sample for rendering links directly from a links list (rather than landing on the DispForm.aspx page). Included in this release: Open Document Library Renders a link next to document result items that opens a new window to the containing library or folder. Read More →

I attended the Central Texas SharePoint User group the other night and one of my long time friends said “Where have you been? Why aren’t you blogging as much?” To which I could only reply “I have been BUSY!”. In the past month I have been to: Orlando for SharePoint Connections London for the Best Practices Conference Monterey, CA for my Dad’s 80th birthday Mountain View, CA to Teach for Critical Path Training Read More →

Following an installation, nothing gives me more joy (pertaining to SharePoint anyway) than having a clean Health Report days after my installation (AKA: Review Problems and Solutions). Recently though, I was doing an installation and I decided to try to “force run” the health rules rather than wait for them to run. I wrote this in PowerShell to run all the jobs on demand: $jobs = Get-SPTimerJob | Where-Object {$_.Title -like "Health Analysis Job*"} foreach ($job in $jobs) { $job. Read More →

Way back before the 2009 SharePoint Conference I was building a Silverlight and SharePoint demo and ran into an issue whenever I tried to use Silverlight and call certain methods of the SharePoint User Profile Service. If the web service returned a GUID type, which is part of the PropertyData type from methods like GetUserProfileByName, I would get the error: The formatter threw an exception while trying to deserialize the message: There was an error while trying to deserialize parameter http://microsoft. Read More →

Way back in SharePoint 2007 there was a great feature on the Search Settings for each User Profile property page called Alias. The field description states: “Alias properties are treated as equivalent to the user name and account name when searching for items authored by a user, targeting items to a user, or displaying items in the Documents Web Part of the personal site for a user. Alias properties must be public. Read More →

I am spiffing up my search demo for my talks at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in La Jolla and London (and Connections in Orlando) and wanted to add a few additional sort options to the FAST Search Center in my environment like Author and Size. When I set up the environment I was careful to follow the excellent installation and configuration guide on TechNet. Yet, when I tried to configure the Search Actions Links web part in the search center it only showed two properties. Read More →

I am a total convert. I have seen the light. The road is not always easy, but nobody promised that. Here I go. I LOVE Expression Blend 4. (I am learning to love MVVM, we’re still in the “getting to know each other” phase.) Sure, there is tons of help available, including some amazing assistance in the form of MVVM Light. Guys like Laurent Bugnion scare me just a little. They know SO much about the topic that mere mortals like me struggle to get ramped up. Read More →

Many of my clients are concerned about the loss of “link juice” when moving their public facing site to SharePoint. The issue is easy to understand. Even if you keep the structure of your site exactly the same as your current site, SharePoint forces the inclusion of the “pages” library in the URL. This means that moving http://www.mycompany.com/default.aspx to SharePoint will become http://www.mycompany.com/pages/default.aspx. In general this is not a problem because accessing http://www. Read More →

I had a great time yesterday speaking for folks who attended the 2011 Technology Expo at St. Edward’s University Technology Expo. My topics were: First Look: What’s new for Developers in MS SharePoint 2010 Business Productivity: What’s new for Developers in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 What’s new in Office 2010 for Developers Thanks again for the attendance and let me know if you have an questions about the content. Read More →

SharePoint 2010 Multi-Tenant: Why and How to Use it RSVP: January 12th Meeting Description: As organizations grow in their sophistication, multi-tenant scenarios become a superior alternative to more traditional single-tenant implementations. Speaker Javier Barrera will discuss how you should use a multi-tenant environment and why it might be right for you and your organization. We will also discuss the following: When it makes sense to use a multi-tenant farm for both internal and external situations. Read More →