Back in June I kind of re-launched this blog and had promised to giveaway a book back then! Duh! Never happened… no excuses…. I just could not do it….

So here I am again

I am going to be giving away a book by way of draw on September 15 2010. This will be a SharePoint 2010 book for sure! All I ask of you to make it easier for me to draw your name is sign up for the newsletter here – that’s it!

Leaving your name in comments will not suffice or qualify you. If it fancies you, you can join us on the facebook  as well . That’s optional and again does not qualify you for the draw

So sign up and don’t worry about spam. I hate spam and won’t let you down.

Look forward to seeing your name in there At present 150 subscribers are already in… so you do have competition since these post will be emailed to the already loyal subscribers who don’t have to do anything for now…

Important Clause: If Amazon cannot deliver the book to your country, you will automatically not qualify, since I will be shipping this book direct from Amazon. Sorry!

Good luck and let the games begin…

I am super excited since both my sessions have been accepted and super super excited as I will be sharing the podium with Michael Noel (Authored Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed with Colin Spence) for one of the sessions.

By the way – this is the same book where I have contributed a chapter!  

Ok, coming back to the Southeast Asia Conference…

I will be presenting the following sessions

1. Backup and Restore for SharePoint 2010: Protecting Mission Critical SharePoint Data with new tools and technologies
   Michael Noel; Alpesh Nakar
2. Why code when you can click and build SharePoint 2010 applications using InfoPath 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visio 2010!

Both topics are my personal favorite.

Check out the line up of speakers and the agenda on the http://sharepointconference.asia website, connect with the community and the speakers and if you are coming to the conference, come and say hello! You can’t miss me.

Oh and if you are coming to the conference, don’t miss out either of the sessions, because I am going to be giving out 1 copy (each session) of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed. So be there!

Issue

How to hide the checkbox that is available for each Web Part in SharePoint 2010.

Resolution using CSS

Add the following CSS to your Master Page

.ms-WPHeaderTdSelection

{

display: none;

}

Resolution using OOTB available options

• Display the Web Part without a title
• Add a Content Editor Web Part right before the list Web Part, adding the title of the List Web Part to the Content Editor Web Part.

Source

“Congratulations on Your Microsoft Certification!”

I was like… WOW! That is awesome! Thrilled! No words can describe my feeling at that stage. You may be wondering what is the big deal about Microsoft Certifications! Well, I am personally elated for the reason that these were beta exams for SharePoint 2010 and to get a free slot for these exams was one challenge by itself!

Secondly there were no books, or courseware for this exam!

Third, although these exams were free, I really wanted to give my best shot at these! I don’t know the final score, but I know for sure that the beta exam was too too long! 70 Questions and very exhaustive at the end.

However, I did finish the 70 questions in 35 minutes and 25 plus some minutes to review. In the end, great outcomes.

My only comment for Microsoft – well designed beta exams. For you – planning to take the exam – don’t sweat! If you have been working with Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and know your stuff well + have been working hands on SharePoint 2010, then you will be right! Good luck.

I have been working with SharePoint 2010 since Tech Preview days, and still a long way to go, but beta certification was an experience that I will never forget – just like my experience of getting into SharePoint 2010 Tech Preview Program, SharePoint Conference 2009, MVP Party at SPC09….

Again this is one of the FAQ on the MSDN Forums and today I saw the solution posted on the thread, so comes this post for my reference and in case you experience this, then you know what is the solution to the issue.

Error Message: The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet View for one or more of the following reasons:

• A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed.
• Your web browser does not support ActiveX controls.
• Support for ActiveX controls is disabled.

The workaround to this issue is to install 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components post Office 2010×64 installation.

Very important to note ( information that you may not want to ignore)

The 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components install a 32-bit version of the Datasheet component that will work with the 64-bit version of Office 2010 as long as you are using a 32-bit version of an Internet browser.
If you are using a 64-bit version of an Internet browser, for example the 64-bit version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0, there is no support for the Edit in Datasheet component.
Also, you must install all 64-bit versions of Office products before you install the 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components. Therefore, if you have to have Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010, or Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 (These components are not installed as part of an Office 2010 suite), please install the 64-bit versions of these products before you install the Data Connectivity Components.

Recommended reading Microsoft KB article here & this the thread that inspired this post.

That’s very generous of Joel and I would like to thank him for this!

I have just signed up online and now have access to this book.

Use Coupon Code BMFJAZG at https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/safarienabled or if you want a hard copy you can order it from here or from where ever you prefer to purchase your books

In addition to Joel’s awesome book, Microsoft has released heaps of resources to get you going. Some of the upgrade specific resources are listed under, quotes from relevant site pages:

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

Guide for administrators and IT professionals for upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. (Download Word document)

Download Models (pdf, vsd, xps)

• Upgrade planning
• Upgrade approaches
• Test your upgrade process

Upgrade Guide From TechNet (SharePoint Foundation 2010) Link

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Download Models (pdf, vsd, xps)

• Upgrade planning
• Upgrade approaches
• Upgrade services
• Test your upgrade process

Upgrade Guide From TechNet (SharePoint Server 2010) Link

Any alert generated by the Health Analyzer should be not be ignored and if it’s a false alarm – as in this case, then you can disable the rule from being executed by the timer service.

Caution: You must assess the consequences of disabling a rule and disable only if you come to a conclusion that this is a false alarm or a situation that does not need to be remedied. For e.g. I have few a Virtual Hard Drives attached to the SharePoint Server and they are 90% full. This triggers of the rules and the Health Analyzer generates alerts warning me about the drives being near capacity. I ignore those alerts, but have not disabled the rule for obvious reasons.

So coming back to the FAQ  in the forums, this is for “Trial period for this product is about to expire” alert on an instance of Search Server Express 2010. Whoa! Isn’t Search Server Express 2010 a free product? Yes it is. So why this alert! I have seen this question pop-up couple of times in the forums and have experienced this in my test lab as well when trying to emulate this scenario to help answer this question.

One of the work around that I found, suitable only for test environment, was to add the service account of the application pool of the SharePoint web application to the local administrators group on your server. Source

However, I would never do this in a production environment – adding service account the local administrators group. So the waiting game commenced to get the official word from Microsoft on this issue. Finally, Ashley from Microsoft answered this question in this thread, which I will quote here for reference

This is a false alarm. It is not time bombed and your farm will continue to work. If you click on the health analyzer warning you will see

"Explanation : The licensing information not available". The MSSx SKU does not have licensing module since its a free product. By default the rule "Trial period for this product is about to expire." is enabled in the health analyzer. The bug here is that we didn’t disable this rule. The rule kicks in and its unable to find the licensing module and throws an exception (you can find it in the LOGS folder).

So, if you see this alert on your Search Server Express 2010, you can safely ignore and as has been suggested by Ashley, disable the rule! Duh! didn’t check the Health Analyzer…. should make this a habit to review the alerts and their rules…

Steps

1. Navigate to your Central Admin
2. Click on Monitoring
3. Click on Review Rule Definitions
4. Click on "Trial period for this product is about to expire" rule under configuration
5. Edit it.
6. Uncheck the "Enabled" checkbox.

As can be seen from the comparison table, you can get away with Search Server 2010 Express in a situation where people and expertise search, integration with My Site is not on your shopping list.

In fact if either of the two were on your shopping list, then you would have made a decision to go for SharePoint Server 2010.

Source http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/searchserverexpress/en/us/compare.aspx

So if you have made the decision to go with Search Server 2010 Express, then download Search Server 2010 Express and get started.

You may find these instructions to install Search Server 2010 Express useful, just in case.

The client had uploaded an Excel spreadsheet and when trying to update the properties of the document, SharePoint displayed this error “Unable to update the information in the Microsoft Office document”.

On further probing, I got the following information

• Document library consists of similar Excel spreadsheets.
• Updating (editing) properties of these without any issues.

As always it was very urgent and client could not wait for me to get to their office or remote in (was on a different client site)!

It always helps to ask some basic questions and this is what materialised

1. File size was 19 MB.
2. Creating a new spreadsheet and editing properties worked.

So I suggested the following

1. Backup the Excel spreadsheet
2. Reduced the size of the file to 5MB by deleting content.
3. Upload the revised file and edit properties.

That worked. Client could edit the properties of the revised file. Hmm ..

So, I asked the client what version of Excel was this spreadsheet saved as. Answer Excel 2003!

Duh! I know the clients had Office 2007, so I asked her to save the 19MB file as Excel 2007 file and then upload the file.

Yay! It worked. Client was able to edit the properties of the spreadsheet. I didn’t get to know what was the size of the spreadsheet that was saved in Excel 2007 format, but it helped resolve the error!

Although you can use the Central Administration to back up your site collection as a once off task, you get additional options using Windows PowerShell, such as using SQL Snapshots for backing up SharePoint 2010 Site Collections.

Backup-SPSite http://server_name/sites/site_name -Path C:\Backup\site_name.bak

Get-SPSiteAdministration http://server_name/sites/site_name | Backup-SPSite -Path C:\Backup\site_name.bak

Backup-SPSite http://server_name/sites/site_name -Path C:\Backup\site_name.bak –UseSqlSnapshot

Note: You can use the UseSqlSnapshot parameter only if you are hosting your content database on SQL Server Enterprise Edition / SQL Server Developer Edition.

Windows PowerShell also gives you the flexibility of backing up several site collections using the thread parameter.