Wictor Wilen

This Wednesday the SharePoint User Group Sweden (#SSUG) had an awesome meeting sponsored by Sogeti at Hotel Anglais in Stockholm. The event was sold out when announced in a few hours and we had to change conference room a few times at the hotel to fit everyone. More than 80 people showed up - our new record that we have to beat the next time. On the agenda for the day was first Christoffer von Sabsay (Sogeti) presenting about the Handelshögskolan SharePoint 2007 WCM case. A great presentation with a good deal of tips and tricks. MVP Göran Husman (Humandata) was up next presenting about the offline capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, also an interesting session with good insight how to combine Office, SharePoint Workspace and SharePoint for optimal flexibility. Last, but not least, I (Wictor Wilén, Connecta) did a session about SharePoint 2010 licensing and the related products. For me it was a good exercise to dig in to the gazillion options of SharePoint licensing.

The 2nd edition of the Dutch Information Worker User Group SharePoint eMagazine is out! It’s a free SharePoint magazine, focusing on SharePoint 2010. The first edition released a couple of months ago was a fantastic opening issue with awesome content and It looks like this edition is keeping up the high standard. Looking forward to the series continuing… This issue contains some really interesting content ranging from an article about WCM in SharePoint 2010 from Waldek Mastykarz, CKS:DEV from Wes Hackett and feature/solution life-cycle/versioning by Anders Rask. And also an article about SharePoint 2010 Themes by yours truly.

This is just a friendly reminder for you who tries to build a Sandboxed Web Part for SharePoint 2010 and trying to use the FileUpload or HtmlInputFile controls - it will not work. The uploaded files are not transferred to the sandboxed processes and cannot be used in the sandbox. The SharePoint 2010 sandbox runs in a separate process and all requests from the IIS to SharePoint are marshaled over to the User Code process. It is during this process the files that are uploaded during the request are lost - you will always see that HttpContext.Current.Request.Files.Count is equal to 0, or similar properties on the upload controls are set to null.

The Sandbox in SharePoint 2010 allows Site Collection administrators to upload solutions in their Site Collections without access to the physical server. This is a great way to open up for creativity and for each Site Collection owner to expand the functionality of their Site Collection without adventuring the stability of the SharePoint farm. Sandbox Solutions do have some limitations, for instance we cannot add new Application Pages. Application pages are normally pages added to the _layouts folder, which are located in the {SharePoint Root}\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS physical folder on each server.

The Office Web Apps, OWA, in SharePoint 2010 is a great way to enhance the SharePoint experience. It allows users without a decent OS or a locally installed Office client to view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents. When you install and correctly configures Office Web Apps (yea, can be a bit of a hazzle if you like me avoid the Farm Configuration wizard) and then enable the required Site Collections feature a cache will be created. This cache is used by Word and PowerPoint Web Apps to store the renditions (XAML) of the documents to speed up the process. Office Web Apps will create one cache per Web Application and the cache is stored in one of the Content Databases attached to the Web Application.

I am currently setting up SharePoint 2010 farms back and forth testing out the most optimal ways using least privileges and different configurations. The by far most complex part in the configuration is the User Profile Service Application and the User Profile Sync. Spencer Harbar have fortunately documented how to do it properly in his Rational Guide to implementing SharePoint Server 2010 User Profile Synchronization article. Following that you will likely not fail…

Timer jobs is a great feature of SharePoint to use when you need to perform background execution at regular or specific times or when you need to execute code on all or selected servers in the farm. A timer job is a persistable object deriving from the SPJobDefinition class. SharePoint 2010 has updated this class in many ways, to the better. Not only can the timer jobs be configured and monitored better through Central Administration they can also be invoked on demand.

It’s Friday and thought that I should share some small tips on how to make your SharePoint demonstration experience better. I assume that you have a quite powerful laptop with virtual machines running SharePoint. I used to do my demos directly in the virtual machine, in full screen mode. This requires that I have all the necessary client components installed such as Office, SharePoint Designer, the Windows Server Desktop Experience feature enabled etc. All this of course take resources such as memory and CPU from the virtual machine. Also Internet Explorer consumes CPU cycles and if you’re using Firefox in the demo you get another memory hog in your virtual machine.

Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location.