This past Saturday the Boston folk ran their SharePoint Saturday in the Waltham, MA area and it was a rousing success, it was a sellout.  There were awesome talks galore, a great lineup of vendors, speakers, the organizers really outdid themselves, and best of all, it was great to mingle with the attendees there.  I wanted to say a special "thank you" to those folks that attended my talk (An Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Lists and Libraries), and donated an hour of their free time to spend an hour+ in a small conference room, which turned into a small, packed conference room.  Everyone was engaging, the questions and dialogue was fantastic, it was overall an awesome time.

Given that my session didn't have slides, stay tuned here for updates.  I'm tossing around either doing short, small, blog entries, or, I might dip my toe in the video side, and record a few walkthroughs.  Stay tuned...

And again, thanks to all that made this past weekend's SharePoint Saturday Boston an awesome one!

- M

It's that time of year again here in the Philly area.  Time for SharePoint Saturday: Philly!

Join SharePoint architects, administrators, developers, and other professionals who work with SharePoint for this SharePoint Saturday event on February 4, 2012.  The day will be filled with educational and informative SharePoint 2010 sessions and provide you with an excellent opportunity to network with Microsoft MVPs and other SharePoint professionals in Philly area.

SharePoint Saturday is FREE and is open to the public.

We're at the same venue as previous years, DeVry Universtity in Fort Washington, PA, and we've a kick @$$ lineup of speakers that span the range of audiences and focus areas.

Registration is still open but it's filling fast!  You won't want to miss this!

Click the link above to get to the homepage and register, it'll be well worth it!

- M

I was lucky enough to be selected to speak at SharePoint Saturday: Austin, TX, and I'll be doing my talk on Creating Custom Actions for SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010.  The lineup is great and should be another awesome SharePoint Saturday that goes in the books.  Be sure to follow the #SPSAusTX Twitter hashtag for all the updates!

Hope to see folks there! - M

*** Update (12/5): Had a call w/the MS support rep and it looks like this is going to be an issue that'll be resolved in an upcoming CU.  So keep an eye out! - M ***

*** Update (11/29): Got off of a call w/MS support and we were able to duplicate this issue/behavior in their environments.  They will be addressing this and getting back to me in the near future.  When I receive an update I'll put it out here.  Thanks! - M ***

Ok, this issue was busting my you-know-whats for a couple weeks now, but I now can duplicate the issue.  So, that's half the battle.  What I need to figure out now is the specific cause, but what I wanted to do was get out to the community the actual "how it happens" blurb.  So, here we go.

When you have Office Web Apps installed, SharePoint exposes an option to view the relevant piece of content in the browser (see Figures 1 & 2 below).

(Figure 1)

(Figure 2)

One of the additional Site Collection Features installed with OWA is the Open Documents in Client Applications by Default Feature. This feature, per the actual description says "Configures links to documents so they open in client applications instead of Web applications, by default". Basically, click an Office document (.DOCX, .XLSX, .PPTX, etc.) and it'll open up in its respective client app (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Deactivating this feature means that SharePoint will then open up the item in the browser itself (TechNet Office Web Apps Overview).

The issue under discussion here is exposed when you perform a search, and the result includes Excel documents.  When you perform a search, and the results have an Excel (.XLSX) document, and you click the View In Browser link for that Excel item (as in the above Figure 2), the behavior isn't always what is expected.  If you perform these steps, and the Open Documents in Client Applications by Default Feature is activated, the Excel spreadsheet opens up in the Excel client.  When this feature is not active, clicking the View In Browser link opens it up in the browser.  So basically, the View in Browser link in the Search Results page seems to "look at" the status of this feature, and then render it accordingly.

For the other types, Word documents and PowerPoint decks, if you click the View In Browser link in the results of a search, it functions as you'd expect, independent of that feature being activated or not.

To me, this is not expected behavior...when you click View In Browser, all things being equal, that's what you expect.  The fact that when you do so, for Excel document in a search results page, and it tries to open up in the client application, seems to me an...inconsistency.

I've tested this on a number of environments, pre and post SP1, and it's consistently showing the above behavior.

I'm still in the process of researching a more detailed reason as to the above, and if there's a fix out there.  If anyone's seen the above, and has a fix (the fix cannot be disable the feature) I'd love to hear bout it and put it in this post.  Note that commenting has been turned off of late here (spammers are *killing* me!) but you can email me and I'll add it to the post.

Thanks! - M

With the new year approaching, it can mean only one thing.  It’s that time again, time for...*insert drum roll*…SharePoint Saturday: Philly!

Join SharePoint architects, administrators, developers, and other professionals who work with SharePoint for this SharePoint Saturday event on February 4, 2012.  The day will be filled with educational and informative SharePoint 2010 sessions and provide you with an excellent opportunity to network with Microsoft MVPs and other SharePoint professionals in Philly area. As always SharePoint Saturday is FREE and is open to the public.

Previous SPSPhilly events we’ve held have had over 300 people attend and each year that number grows!

SPSPhilly is scheduled to return to DeVry University in Fort Washington, PA, just outside of Philadelphia on February 4th, 2012.

If you're interested in speaking at this event, and we'd love you to, you can submit your abstract by clicking here.  This will add you to the list of submissions.  The Call for Speakers closes on December 2nd.

If you're interested in sponsoring this SharePoint Saturday, sponsorship package information can be found by clicking here.

Thanks and hope to see all of you there! – SPSPhilly Staff

This weekend is SharePoint Saturday: Richmond, and I'm lucky enough to get to speak twice!  The first session will be an introductory topic on SharePoint 2010 Lists and Libraries, walking through a few examples and scenarios.  The second will be a discussion on the management of Large Lists in SharePoint 2010, with discussions of throttling, concepts on how to maintain those lists, as well as a couple demos.  It's gonna be a great time!  See y'all there! - M

As promised, find here my slide deck for my talk on "Managing Large Lists in SharePoint 2010".  Thanks again to all organizers, speakers, sponsors and attendees.  If not for all you folks, events like this'd never happen.

- M

SP2010 Large List Maintenance.pptx (479.78 kb)

Well, it's that time of year again.  The second Philly.NET Code Camp of 2011 (as denoted by the .2 in the title) is slated for this coming Saturday, October 15th.  The event will be held at the DeVry University campus in Fort Washington, PA on Saturday, October 15 from 8:30-5:00. The event is sold out but you can get on a wait list at EventBrite. Detailed directions are on the DeVry web site.  Here are some details on the event:

Lots of code, just say no to slides! 8 hours of learning and networking 70 sessions by 60+ speakers (8:30, 10:00, 11:30/12:00, 1:40, 3:10) 13 tracks + Open Spaces Forum 600 seats with tables (laptops welcome) Breakfast, lunch (two groups), and afternoon snack Raffles and prizes after second lunch and closing Booster registration option for charity donations, parties, and prizes Easy parking Convenient hotels (Horsham Days Inn, 245 Easton Rd, Horsham, PA 19044 (215) 674-2500, ask for group philly.NET Code Camp) After hours party at the Brick House (network with speakers and attendees) The official Twitter hash tag will be #phillycc. Use it when you tweet and search it to stay in the know.

For this Camp's SharePoint track we're in Room 111.  Check out the following agenda for the SharePoint topics:

So stop on in, say "hey", learn up on SharePoint and anything else .NET related, and enjoy your fellow community members in the .NET space!

- M

Some folks may already be aware of this but I've been asked it a number of times lately so I wanted to put it up for the masses.

When accessing a list's RSS feed, the columns that are displayed in the feed are actually set in a different location than the view that you're working with.  From the settings of the list, look for the RSS Settings item under the Comunications section.  Clicking this will take you to the Modify RSS Settings page where you can select the columns to display in the feed.  Select the ones you want, and then *bam* they appear in your feeds.

Just a quick hit, relatively simple, but I had a few people ask me the same question on this recently.

Enjoy! - M

This was one that was wracking my brain, and then I came across a post that explains the issue and proposes a resolution.

In a nutshell, there's a hidden list at the top-level site of a site collection named Relationships List.  This list is an internal list that stores all of the metadata involved in the creation of Variations.  Apparently during the migration (in this case I was doing a Content DB migration/upgrade) this list wound up not migrating correctly, and it didn't have the necessary GroupGuid column.  The article says that you can download a tool from codeplex to perform the migration of this list, however, given where I was doing this work, external tools weren't an option.  So...

Enter PowerShell!

(I'm really liking PowerShell more and more...granted I'm a devhead at heart, but you're able to quickly address issues that occur in your implementation in a quick manner, with repeatable solutions)

So...how to do this?  Well, deleting/migrating the list wasn't really an option, and given that the field type of the column isn't available through the UI (it's a GUID, as well as being a hidden column), I turned to PowerShell to create it.  So...let's take a look...

Basically, I took a look at the list in a working site collection and grabbed its properties, and used it to create a working script to add the missing field to the site collection with the issues.  It's relatively smiple...grab your web, grab your list, create the field, add it, modify some properties, and you're good to go.  Running the script enabled the site collection that had the above error work right away.  So, take a peek at the below, and enjoy. - M

# load up SP PS Snappin            
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell            
# get web            
$web = Get-SPWeb -Identity http://websiteUrl            
# get list            
# note that the code below isn't optimized            
# but just to get the list quick 'n' dirty            
$list = $web.Lists["Relationships List"]            
# create Guid SPFieldType field            
$guidField = [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFieldType]::Guid            
# add the created field to the list, the name 'GroupGuid' is necessary            
# and it's required            
$list.Fields.Add("GroupGuid", $guidField, $true)            
# once added, let's grab it as a SPField            
$groupGuidField = $list.Fields.GetField("GroupGuid")            
# set its ShowInEditForm property to False            
$groupGuidField.ShowInEditForm = $false            
# add an index on this field            
$list.FieldIndexes.Add($groupGuidField)            
# cleanup            
$web.Dispose()            
# remove SP PS Snappin            
Remove-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell