Archive for the 'Technical' Category

20 questions to ask yourself before upgrading to SharePoint 2010

Published July 17, 2010 Technical 1 Comment

We have been contacted regularly by people wanting to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. We all know there are many advantages of upgrading to SharePoint 2010 such as highly effective search solutions or enhanced user interface but there are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself before you can upgrade.

Based on our experience in upgrading various systems to SharePoint 2010 we have put together a short questionnaire of the most important questions that you need to ask yourself before upgrading to SharePoint 2010.

  1. Do you have Windows SharePoint Services v3, MOSS Standard, or MOSS Enterprise?
  2. Describe your current SharePoint 2007 environment in terms of servers and their roles, and version levels (eg Windows Server 2003 SP2, SQL Server 2005 SP2)?
  3. Are you currently running on x64 or x86 servers?
  4. How many users do you have on SharePoint?
  5. Will you be moving to new hardware or reusing your existing hardware?
  6. Does your hardware and software meet the minimum requirements for SharePoint 2010 (PointBeyond can advise if necessary)?
  7. How many web applications do you have?
  8. How many site collections do you have and what types of site are they (collaboration, publishing, My Sites, etc)?
  9. How many content databases do you have and how large is each one?
  10. Have you made customisations using SharePoint Designer (if so what)?
  11. Have you deployed any in-house developed or third party customisations (if so what)?
  12. Have you integrated any external systems with SharePoint and if so how?
  13. Have you made any other changes or deployed any other software to the servers?
  14. Do you wish to use the upgrade as an opportunity to reorganise and/or “spring clean” your content?
  15. Do you have any restrictions in terms of amount of acceptable downtime?
  16. Do you have a disaster recovery environment? If so please explain what it comprises.
  17. How is SharePoint accessed (as an intranet, extranet, internet) and are you using Windows authentication or another mechanism such as forms?
  18. What browser and Microsoft Office versions are in use by your client machines?
  19. Will you keep the 2007 UI initially or move straight to the 2010 UI?
  20. Is there anything else that you can think of that could have a bearing on the upgrade?

Hopefully by asking yourself these questions you will be well on your way to a trouble free upgrade. Please keep in mind that depending on how you are using SharePoint there may be other questions that you will need to ask. Feel free to leave your comments and even add additional questions to this list.

For more information about how PointBeyond can help you upgrade to SharePoint 2010 please click here.

Christopher Edgington

Document IDs and the Managed Metadata Service

Published June 21, 2010 Records Management , SharePoint , SharePoint 2010 , Technical Leave a Comment
Tags: ,

If you are publishing content types via the managed metadata service, you either have to have the Document ID feature turned on at both publisher and consumer sites, or you have to have it turned off at both.

So in reality, if you want to use document IDs anywhere, you’ll probably end up with them everywhere. If for example you have a records centre, and you want to send documents to the records centre from a team site that shares content types with the records centre, you will have to enable document IDs on your team site.

Not a major problem, but certainly something to be aware of, as some user education clearly will be needed.

Back to PointBeyond web site.

New Starter Chris at Work

Published May 22, 2010 Technical 1 Comment

Chris finds out what’s inside a computer, by building our new demo server, affectionately known as Tony…

Can’t Find “Content Type Publishing” Link or use Managed Metadata Columns

Published April 24, 2010 SharePoint 2010 , Technical Leave a Comment
Tags: , , ,

This is on the SharePoint 2010 beta, it may change on RTM. It certainly occurs when you create a new site collection using the “Blank Site” template, but does not occur if you use the “Team Site” template.

When attempting to add a managed metadata column, you receive the error message “The required feature is not enabled for this column type”, or when go to site settings you do not have the “Content type publishing” link in Site Collection Administration.

The solution is to run the following command

Stsadm –o activatefeature –id 73ef14b1-13a9-416b-a9b5-ececa2b0604c –url <site collection url>

Back to PointBeyond web site

Run PowerShell Script using Windows Server 2008 “Task Scheduler”

Published April 23, 2010 Technical 1 Comment
Tags: , , , ,

I needed to setup a scheduled task that ran some PowerShell script in Windows Server 2008. When searching the web I noticed that a lot of people had struggled with this and so I decided to write this post to explain how I managed it. The scheduled task will ‘run whether the user is logged on or not’. You can schedule a PowerShell script using task scheduler which will run automatically on a given time.

1.      The first thing you need to do is make sure that PowerShell is set to execute PowerShell scripts, instead of only allowing interactive commands to be run in the PowerShell environment. Type the following at the PowerShell command prompt:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

2.      I started with a simple PowerShell script file process.ps1 consisting of only one line

  Get-process | Out-File C:\test\ProcessOutput.txt

3.      You then need to create a .bat file which will invoke the PowerShell script file. Copy the below line into notepad and save as BatchProcess.bat

                powershell.exe C:\Test\process.ps1

4.      Now from the start  menu go to “Administrator Tools” and open Task Scheduler

a.      From The actions menu Click on “Create Task”

1

b.      Under the General Tab, enter task name ProcessTestTask. Ensure that the “Run when user is logged on or not” and “Run with highest privileges” checkboxes are selected.

c.       Ensure that the ‘Configure for’ drop down box is selected for the appropriate operating system.

2

5.   Under the “Trigger” tab, click on “New” and assign a schedule to run the task. Choose times 5 minutes  for testing purposes.

3

6.      Click “Ok”

7.      Under the “Actions” tab click on “New”. Browse to and select the path to the OutputProcesses.bat file, also add the path into the ‘Start in’ text box (it will be your OutputProcesses.bat file folder path).

 4

8.      Click “Ok”.

9.      Leave the other tab settings as default and click OK to save the task settings.

10.   Try to run it manually by right-clicking on the task and selecting run to check if this works.

5

11.    Then try to log off before the task is scheduled to run to confirm that it works when you are logged off.

12.   To find out if this has worked correctly you need to check that the file ProcessOutput.txt has been successfully created in your test directory (“C:\test\”). If this file is successfully created, it means your script works fine.

6

 

SharePoint 2010: “No content types have been subscribed” Message

Published March 13, 2010 SharePoint 2010 , Technical 4 Comments
Tags: , ,

This stumped me for a while, kept seeing “No content types have been subscribed” message even having set up content type publishing and subscription.

Click on “Content type publishing error log” to see the cause of the problem: The content type cannot be published to this site because this site has Document Id Service feature enabled but the content type hub site does not. Please contact the administrator.

Enable the Document Id service on the content type hub site, click “Refresh all published content types on next update”, then “OK”. Run “Content Type Hub” and “Content Type Subscriber” timer jobs. Sorted.

SharePoint 2010 Overview Videos

Published March 11, 2010 Functionality , Records Management , SharePoint , SharePoint 2010 , Technical Leave a Comment
Tags: ,

We have created some videos on collaboration in SharePoint 2010, Records Management in SharePoint 2010 and PerformancePoint in SharePoint 2010.

These can be found by following the links below:

Collaboration in SharePoint 2010

Records Management in SharePoint 2010

PerformancePoint in SharePoint 2010

Chris

Back to PointBeyond web site

Presenting Records Management in SharePoint 2010 at SharePoint Evolution Conference

Published February 4, 2010 SharePoint 2010 , Technical Leave a Comment
Tags:

Am looking forward to presenting on Records Management in SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Evolution Conference in April! http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com/Agenda.html

Ian

Back to PointBeyond web site

Bristol SharePoint User Group Meeting 27th Jan 2010

Published January 30, 2010 SharePoint , Technical , User Group 1 Comment
Tags: , ,

Some piccies of the event

Andy Ginn on HP white papers and sizing tool (not a great picture, blame the iPhone)

Below, Lee Fedder describes his SharePoint integrated web application for managing shipping insurance claims

Below, Mark Macrae on Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode

See you all at the next one, which will be in Southampton!

Ian

Back to PointBeyond web site

Next Page »

Our Contributors:

Ian Woodgate, MD; Sam Pike, Senior Consultant; Andrew Webster, Senior Consultant; Chris Edgington, Business Development; Ksenia Woodgate, Senior PM

 

September 2010
M T W T F S S
« Jul    
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930