SharePoint Management Console aka PowerShell: All cmds

Judging by what I’m seeing on the internet PowerShell is simply the best thing since sliced bread.  In the recent boot camp that I attended it was also evident that the power derived from using the cmd line utility is simply something that any administrator worth their salt should get to know.

I recently came across a bug in beta 2 whereby the CSS stylesheet assignment does not work for non-publishing site collections.  Sadly, I have not had the time to resolve it, but what I did come across during my research was a command that will output all the PowerShell commands to a *.txt for your review.  Having all the commands on hand will allow you to review what you need to execute etc.  It is unfortunately not a help file, but once I find something similar I will for sure post that also.

Here is the command:

Get-Command –PSSnapin “Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell” | format-table name > C:\SP2010_PowerShell_Commands.txt

Thanks to sptwentyten for the very informative command post.

SharePoint 2010: Cannot find link to Master Page / Page Layouts?

This may be trivial to some people, but I just wanted to post this quickly as I’m sure many people starting out with the SharePoint branding will need to know this.

Where can you set the master page / page layouts if you create a Team Site / non publishing site collection?  Well, Microsoft obviously knew that people would want to use the publishing features with the non publishing enabled site collections, so this is an example of where the feature framework really works well.  To resolve the “problem” simply complete the following steps:

- Navigate to the landing page of your newly created site collection

- Click on “Site Actions”

- Click on “Site Collection Features”

- Enable “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure”

Enable on site collection level

 - Click on “Site Actions”

- Click on “Manage site features”

- Enable “SharePoint Server Publishing”

Enable on a site level

Once this has been completed, you can again access the master pages and page layouts via site settings as you would normally do for  a publishing portal.

SharePoint 2010: Error opening Central Administration

So you’ve installed SharePoint 2010, everything seems to be working fine, site is configured and you are about to notify the client that they can start playing on that development environment.  After sending our all your notifications, the client requests a minor change and you quickly navigate to central administration only to find that it is not rendering and the “very scary” error message (with correlation id) is displayed.

Don’t Panic!

Let’s take a step back.  While I was installing SharePoint, I had to download a hot fix. To get it downloaded via the server I had to play with the script settings in IE.  I couldn’t get IE to download the hot fox and I had to install Firefox to get the hot fix downloaded.  (Gotta luv enhanced security settings).  In any event, I then completed the SharePoint installation and configured the server via Firefox.

The next time I tried to access Central Administration (now using IE8) it failed and gave me this monster error.  My heart did skip a beat, but then I realised that I had played with the script and security settings on Internet Explorer.  I quickly reverted to all the defaults and to my delight the site was once again accessible.

So what is the moral of this little story?  Firstly, plan VERY well before starting any SharePoint deployment.  Secondly, when you play with security and script settings, expect funny behaviour from SharePoint and don’t panic too much when IE does not render your site.  It is more often than not simply a client application issue.

SharePoint Updates and Boot Camp

On Friday the 29th of January, Microsoft announced their December cumulative update for SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.  The update package has a number of critical fixes to the following parts of SharePoint:

• Profile Import
• Excel Services when publishing sites
• Audiences (performance when searching)
• Search indexing (.xslm + .dotx)
• Project Server (various)
• and more…

The update is part of the cumulative update so it must be scheduled into your environments as soon as possible.  For those still installing SharePoint 2007 environments at their clients, I’m sure you are wondering when a slipstream version of SharePoint 2007 + (all updates to date) will be available.  I’m one of those waiting with bated breath.

Enough of the SharePoint 2007 update; I’m happy to note that I will be attending a SharePoint 2010 Boot Camp Tuesday and Wednesday this week (15 / 16).  Approximately 70 professionals will be attending the event set in the beautiful Intundla Game Lodge.  I’m really looking forward to the learnings it will offer.  We will discuss the following items:

• Session 1: SharePoint 2010; Overview and what’s new
• Session 2: Architecture and Administration
• Session 2: Session 2 Continued – Architecture and Administration
• Session 4: Social Networking driven by My Sites, User Profiles and more
• Session 5: Building Composite Solutions using Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and SharePoint Designer
• Session 6: Office Web Applications and Multi-user authoring
• Session 7: Search Options in SharePoint 2010
• Session 8: Upgrading from SharePoint 2007

I’ll be sure to grab tones of notes and post whatever I can post the boot camp right here on my blog.

Technical Diagrams: SharePoint 2010

So you are busy writing a solution specification or you are simply doing some research.  I stumbled across the following diagrams while doing both of those and I must say I find the VERY informative.

Off course these diagrams cater for the “uber” utopian implementation and we all know that not all clients are going to shelve out thousands for redundancy, disaster recovery et al.  However, the great value that these diagrams do add is that it keeps these kind of considerations top of mind when speaking to customers.

As mentioned before, not all customers are going to have the $$$ for the ALL OUT architecture, but discussing the options, pro’s and con’s of going with the different configurations will show your customer that you understand the lay of the land.

The diagrams are downloadable from here and have been made available in PDF, XPS and Visio format.  Thanks Technet!