Karthick's Blog!

Steps for Send To from Windows Explorer SharePoint 2010 with Windows 7 Steps: Open your Document Library Navigate to your Library Ribbon, click on "Open With Explorer" Copy the path from the URL bar Go to your My Computer, Map Network Drive to this path Now, from all your files, you will have the Send To Appearing for this Network Drive You will be able to directly send files to your Document Libraries from your exploer

When you want to pick users from multiple domains in your SharePoint Site's PeoplePicker (it will comfortably work in the Central Administration though!), here is what you need to do. 1. Ensure there is a trust relationship between the two domains (one domain could also be a child domain of another) 2. Run the stsadm -o setapppassword command 3. Run the stsadm -o setproperty command Find screenshots below:

When we have developed complex workflows using SPD, we always find a way to migrate / re-import SharePoint Designer Workflows within the same site or different sites. There is a WF Migrator tool here: http://spwflmigrator.codeplex.com/ . You should try this to see how it works. If not, there seems to be a SPD WF migration tool for $99: http://www.elegrity.com/content/ElegritySharePointTools The below URL has got screenshots too – to explain this. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2007/07/06/porting-sharepoint-designer-workflows-to-visual-studio.aspx Before reading the above, I would recommend reading this – where they talk about why it is not easy to port and what aspects to be considered. http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2008/12/08/why-can%E2%80%99t-i-easily-port-sharepoint-designer-workflow-solutions-from-one-list-to-another-part-1/ This is also another blog, which describes this: http://decodesharepoint.blogspot.com/2010/01/migrate-spd-workflows.html B...

I have been using IE 9 beta for a month now and this is what I have observed. Positives: 1. Very clean UI and with lots of real estate for the actual page itself 2. Just drag and drop a browser bar and you can have it open from your system tray itself, like an application 3. Separate downloads window like FireFox 4. IE 9 identifies that you are in a unfilled state in any form and gives you a warning when you try to close that tab or window "Leave this page or stay" 5. Shows the most active sites right in the home page, very handy to navigate to them quickly Not so good: 1. Sometimes, the browser does not allow us to enter text into any textboxes - just appears completely frozen, quite frustrating, I just need to open it in any other browser and do the entry

Whenever you encounter this error in your Excel Web Access, check your event viewer, you may find, that a particular account (configured to run your services, including Excel Services) has failed to gain login into the respective content database of the particular web application. SQL Database 'WSS_Content_555' on SQL Server instance 'KARTHICKLAPTOP\SharePoint' not found. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below. Cannot open database "WSS_Content_555" requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user 'KarthickLaptop\spservices'. Just give read permissions on the database for that login and your excel services, after that should work like a charm.

This is one resource you should not miss, if you are starting with SharePoint 2010. Hover over any feature and you will get a small description of what it is! http://www.sendspace.com/file/4b4xyw

If you ever happen to change the password of your FASTUser, SPFAST for example, following are the steps you need to follow: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff384287.aspx When you have a 2 server environment, just ensure, you change the windows service passwords in both the Admin and Non-Admin Server. In the above instructions link, it has been specified that you should change the FASTSearchAdminAppPool account's identity in the IIS. When you look at it for the first time in your admin server, you will be surprised to not find your IIS! Not to worry, your password change has not done any damage to the IIS. FAST Installation by default installs the Web Server Role but does not install the IIS Management Console. So add "IIS Management Console" role services to your Web Server Role. And then you will be able to find your FASTSearchAdminAppPool, where you can now change your identity. Ensure, you restart your FAST Servers.

If you encounter the "Service Unavailable" error in your Central Administration, you might try running the Configuration Wizard and also check if the Application Pool is running fine, but if all this does not work, it is definitely ready to take you for a ride. One thing you should check is EventViewer and you might find an issue with any SharePoint Services like SPSearch for exampe not being to successfully login to the content database. You might go to the Control Panel -> Services -> SharePoint Server Search, change the Log On identity to the Farm Admin account and run it successfully, but still you might have a problem with the Central Admin. This is where you need to step back and think if someone has changed the password for the service accounts without actually letting you know! Now, start going through the various stsadm commands over here and update the service accounts one by one... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838 Now, this will definitely do...

I have a Project Server 2010 Environment upgraded from Project Server 2007 and on the Projects published in to the Project Center of the PWA and when one clicks on the Project to go to the detail page, it gives the following error. You can see in the below image as to how to get the PDP (Project Detail Pages) working...

Often times we wonder why Microsoft pushes us to upgrade client tools when we acquire new server products. Example is Project Server 2010 pushing us to use Project Professional 2010 only. But all hope is not lost, there is a way to get Project Professional 2007 get working with your Project Server 2010 even though you have not upgraded your Project Server 2010 from Project Server 2007 (while which it supports backward compatibility mode OOB). Here is what you need to do. 1. Download Project Server 2007 blank databases from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=bb47fb30-d7e9-4850-9432-12e283eabe70 2. Restore these databases to your SharePoint 2010 DB Instance that is also running your Project Server 2010 databases 3. Create a new Web Application and a Site Collection on a desired port number : this is for hosing the new BCM enabled PWA, the earlier PWA has to be just discarded :( 4. Once the Top Site (Team Site for instance) is created, enabled SharePoint Pu...

When you want to rename your SharePoint Server Machine (where SharePoint is already installed and running), follow the following steps: 1. Use the StsAdm or Windows PowerShell Command to rename your SharePoint Server 2. Change the Computer Name in Computer, Properties 3. Restart the machine 4. Go to the Farm Administrators Group in Central Administration to possibly change the Name of the Administrator from oldserver\admin to newserver\admin 5. Then change the Alternate Access Mappings to refer to the new server instead of the old server 6. Bingo, you are done! stsadm -o renameserver    -oldservername <oldServerName>    -newservername <newServerName>

In SharePoint 2007, for us to have a common metadata across multiple sites, we used to hunt down the Cross Site Lookup Component. We can bid goodbye now for the same. SharePoint 2010's Enterprise Metadata is the perfect answer for the same. You can just have the complete hierarchy appearing for you as a column (with intellisense) in any document library or you can just have one group selected there. For example, you could have Hardware Servers Desktops Laptops Software OS Applications Mobile as two sets. In a document library you could have terms appearing from either of these or you could have just a term appearing from one category! Cool, try it out. You can check out screenshots in : http://www.cmswire.com/cms/document-management/overview-sharepoint-2010-metadata-and-taxonomy-management-006015.php

I have a 2 Server FAST 2010 Search Server environment. Initially you would have installed with the default location of C:\FASTSearch. Later, if you would like to change the index location, to let's say a SAN Drive where you have mapped a SAN Partition of few terrabytes Go to FAST 2010 PowerShell of both SPFAST1 and SPFAST2. Run nctrl status You should see the relevant services running. In my SPFast2, I have the RTS Indexer service running. I have changed the FAST Index Location to E: (SAN Partition) in the SPFAST2 machine. The configuration of index and Filter XML Directories are present in c:\FASTSearch\etc\rtsplatformrc.xml file. After I changed, I restarted the machine and bingo, I could see the index files moved to the SAN Partition!

Element Outsourcing as a Project Doing the project in-house with a resource (mid level resource to developer category) Requirements Gathering You will have Senior and experienced consultants doing this activity, which results in precise understanding of the requirements The resource will be more technical and so this would not be an easy task for him to do, even if he does, it would result in a poorly compiled understanding Project Scoping Results from the Requirements: Sr People would be in a much better position to do this Would not be able to do Hardware Sizing and Capacity Planning Sr. Consultant required Would be out of reach for a Jr Resource Creating High Level and Low Level Design documents Sr. Technical Consultant required Would not be able to be do Development and Quality Control Can bring in a team of people monitored by excellent team leads a...

Many people wonder (I used to as well) how to go about configuring SharePoint 2010 incoming e-mail support without Active Directory or Exchange. Not to worry, here is what you need to do. These are the steps to do that: In my environment, I had a standalone SharePoint 2010 Implementation on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with a Static IP address I had the SMTP Services enabled The server name was "demoserver"  In the Central Administration, in the System Settings, in Incoming e-mail support, I gave demoserver.com as the e-mail id I went to the hosts file located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc and placed an entry for the IP address with demoserver.com Then just make sure demoserver.com is pinging - it should now show the static ip of the current server To test this, configure incoming e-mail settings on a document library - for example shareddocs@demoserver.com Now - in your Outlook, configure POP and SMTP as demoserver.com or the machine's IP address - ...

When you make web services call from Silverlight, you are advised to have a crossdomainpolicy file in place in order for Silverlight code to make the web service call without any issues. In Windows 7, apart from doing this, you also need to turn off identity impersonate in the web.config of the Web Services virtual directory.

SharePoint 2010 comes with the most wanted "Multi-Lingual" capabilities! Installation and Configuration is not that difficult too. All you need to do is the following: 1. Download Windows Server 2008 R2 Arabic Language Pack and Install (Do not download the one for Windows Server 2008!) - 93 MB ( http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=ar&FamilyID=03831393-eef7-48a5-a69f-0ce72b883df2 ) 2. Download and Install SharePoint 2010 Arabic Language Pack - 160 MB ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=ar&FamilyID=046f16a9-4bce-4149-8679-223755560d54 ) 3. Run the Products and Technologies Wizard 4. Go to your site settings -> Language Settings and enable Arabic, ensure Overwrite Translations is left as "No" 5. For your User defined text, you can now export translations in Arabic (.resx), open in VS 2010, place the new Arabic text and then import the translation back into SharePoint! - Very cool! But please be ...

I am truly excited with the potential and possibilities of Office Web Apps 2010 (comes along with Office 2010 Volume License). Users with just a browser can edit the document and save it right back on their SharePoint Server. Document formatting everything is preserved just as it is. Very useful for Secure and "reduced" environments.... Deploying Office Web Apps 2010 should be right after your SharePoint 2010 Installation and there are certain steps to be followed, which are explained quite well in technet - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431687.aspx   - Just follow them carefully and you will be pretty fine. After deploying when creating Word Service, PowerPoint Service applications, you will find your Excel Service Application already existing if you have installed SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition. Not just this, if you are planning FAST 2010, FAST gives document previews right in the search results pane if you have Office Web Apps 2010 deployed :) Cool ...

Role tailored client issue Changing stored procedure to 64 bit in NAV 2009 Did install Dynamics NAV 2009 on windows 2008 64 bit / Windows 7 65 bit. When trying to connect to the database in classic client I got this error. The following SQL server error or errors occurred: 17750,“42000”,[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Could not load the DLL C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\60\Database\xp_ndo.dll, or one of the DLLs it references. Reason: 193(failed to retrieve text for this error. Reason: 15100). SQL: INSERT INTO [#$ndo$groups] {CALL [master]..[xp_ndo_enumusergroups](?,?)} The reason for this error is that the installed xp_ndo.dll is 32 bit and not 64 bit. My solution was simple to replace xp_ndo.dll with the 64 bit version. 1. Stop SQL server 2. Copy \\vedfssrv01\DynamicsNAV2009\W1\DVD\Sql_esp\x64\ xp_ndo_x64.dll to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Dynamics NAV\60\Database 3. Rename existing xp_ndo.dll to xp_ndo_x32.dll 4. Rename xp...

Whenever you encounter this error, when having Server Side Script in your custom ASPX Page stored in your Pages Library, you just need to add this line in your site's web.config. Do not forget to replace the VirtualPath to point to the folder or library which has those pages. <PageParserPaths> <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/sites/TestSites/page/*" CompilationMode="Always" AllowServerSideScript="true" /> </PageParserPaths>

For people who were troubled with the 4 GB DB limit in SQL Express, here is the good news, the DB limit has been increased to 10 GB, enjoy!

For people who work in ISA or trying to explore, stop googling or binging for ISA, it is now ForeFront Threat Management Gateway 2010 or more popularly MS wanting us to call it as TMG! This works only on Win 2008. http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/threat-management-gateway/en/us/default.aspx - Explore more here

Create Backups Directory Create a backup directory for storing the scheduled SharePoint backups (e.g.d:\backupsharepoint) Create Bat File Directory Create a directory for storing the backup script file (e.g. d:\scriptssharepoint) Create Bat File Create a bat file using the code below, modified for your environment. Use UNC paths when using in a server farm environment. @echo off echo ==================================================== echo Backup Script For Office SharePoint Server 2007 echo ==================================================== cd \program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin @echo off stsadm.exe -o backup -url http://servername -filename d:\backupssharepoint\backupsharepoint.dat -overwrite @echo off echo completed Schedule bat file Schedule the backup to run frequently, during off peak hours. Open Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks Add a Scheduled Task Schedule...

By default, MOSS 2007 has a setting of allowing file sizes of upto 50 MB. If you need to change it, do the following: 1. Change the Max Upload Size in Central Admin -> Application Management -> Web Application General Settings 2. Also in IIS 7, change the Connection Timeout to how many ever seconds you want - reason is, the more the file size, the longer it is going to take to upload, so to be safe, default is 120 seconds

Scenario : you are trying to use this ACE OLEDB provider to programmatically import from an excel file in your ASP.Net 2.0 application running on Windows Server 2003 64 bit What google / forums say: they tell you to change your target platform to x86 in VS 2008 and compile it, now unfortunately for a web app - you cannot do that. So we need to see some other means. Some facts to know: IIS 6.0 does not have the capability to have different application pools running on different bits, whereas IIS 7.0 on Win 2008 Server brings in that capability. But here we are with IIS 6.0 ASP.Net 2.0 however supports both 32 bit and 64 bit and IIS 6.0 supports runing them in parallel. This is what you need to do: 1. Enable 32bit on 64 bit App using the Adminutil script 2. Run Aspnet_regiis -i from the c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework folder - this represents 32 bit. 3. Changed ASP.Net v2 32 bit to Allowed in IIS 6 Web Service Extensions After that, your 32 bit ASP.Net code will run like ...

Whenever you are having your code trying to manipulate files in document libraries and they have to work in different identities, you most properly will have your "Allowunsafeupdates=true" line added in your code. This works most times, but at certain scenarios, it might throw up the below error (at the time when the code is trying to move a document from one library in one site to another library in another site). The same code however would have worked for the Admin login. Resolution The resolution for this is not in the code unfortunately! All you need to do is go to your Central Administration -> Application Management -> Web Application general Settings and turn off the "Security Validation" Bingo, your code for all users starts working fine!

This is my scenario. I have one server running AD, SQL 2008, MOSS 2007 SP2 and wanted to separate the AD into one server and MOSS into a new server. This is what I did (and definitely not as simple as I thought it would be!) Leave the AD server as it is Install Windows, SQL, MOSS on the new machine Format and install AD on the first server Re-join the MOSS server to the Domain Create all required SharePoint accounts in the AD Now, you will have your SharePoint site giving an HTTP 404 error mostly If you check the EventVwr, you will have "Cannot open database...Login Failed" error for the SharePoint content access account You need to delete this user from the AdminContent database and re-add by giving that respective login After that, you need to re-create the Schema as well (Ensure the particular admin account for example domain\spadmin is scripted in a notepad and kept Once you do the above, you will have both the Central Admin and Sites opening properly but not...

When doing stsadm restore, sometimes you might end up getting access denied error. If you get this, first, check whether your command prompt is running as Administrator even if that does not solve the issue, go and add your Administrator account (assuming that is your main services account), as your primary site collection administrator (this is in Central Admin). Make sure Secondary Admin is not the same as the primary admin. Secondary admin ideally can be the machine's administrator (assuming your server is a member server of the doman and you alreay have added the domain administrator as the primary admin)

On your desktop, create a folder and rename the folder with this: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} Once done, just open the folder and you will see magic :) - You can access almost ALL administrative functions from this single Window!

After installing SharePoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2, you may start to see the following error message in the event logs : Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine RegOpenKeyExW(-2147483646,SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\Diag,…). hr = 0×80070005, Access is denied. Inspection of the detailed tab of the event log entry will show information about the process that generated the error. Take note of the user mentioned after the “- User: Name:” portion of the bytes. To resolve this error, simply give that user full permission to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\VSS registry key.

If you have the above problem, check your Time Job Definitions and Delete the "Enable Features" job, that should stop this particular activity from running indefinitely.

Whenever you have issues connecting to SQL Server 2008 from your SharePoint installation wizard or when you are having trouble accessing your Windows 2008 machine from outside (your VMWare or VirtualPC) - trust me, the issue is with the Windows Firewall! Turn it off (it has Domain, Public and Private Profiles) and turn all of them off for you to seamlessly connect through!

You get this error when you have a custom ASPX page having a ReportViewer WebPart. I initially had my SSRS 2008 running in SharePoint Integrated Mode, later I changed the mode to Native and also uninstalled the SharePoint Reporting Services Add-in. Even after this, I still had this error coming up. This is what I did to fix it : added inside the tag of my SharePoint application as well as the virtual directories of ReportServer and ReportManager (these are inside C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services) Last but not the least, I also restarted the server for this to start working! :)

I usually want to keep my blog to only technical stuff, but am unable to resist writing about this new speakers that I have bought! - Logitech V10, I must confess I am a big fan of Logitech products, they are just superlative quality at the same time, value for money! - costing about US$35, it attracts right from its presence in the shelves - its just compact among every other speakers kept in the store... Once you bring it home and get it connected to your USB! - You will just be very surprised with the fidelity, volume, quality, build quality, nice little compartmented pouch (you can just easily keep it in any standard laptop bag) - trust me, this is the best if you are looking at something that just powers from your USB, is compact and does not hit on your wallet!

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component When you are running your SharePoint 2010 beta 2 on a machine that has the domain controller, you might sometimes face this issue of SharePoint search sevice not working, inspite of a Search Service Application being associated. This is what I did to solve this: I had this problem as well on my SharePoint 2010 machine and I feel this specifically occurs when you have the Domain Controller running on the same machine. I sorted out with the following steps:    Deleted the 3 databases that gets created along with a Search Service Application from SQL Server directly Stopped the SharePoint Search Service using stsadm command Reset all the crawled index Started the Search Service again using stsadm Created a new Search Service Application (I also ensured - the same account - for example spsearch is used for the Crawl Service, Search Service and Query Service Application pools)...

Whenever you encounter this error "The given key was not present in the dictionary" when opening a SharePoint List or when creating a new item on a list, am sure you are led to search your own code to see if you have wrongly referenced any non present field... But, that is not the case unfortunately! This mostly comes in lists where you have Custom Fields (inherited from SPField) created. You will have to check if you have the corresponding fldtypes xml created and placed in the template/xml folder apart from placing the .ascx file in the ControlTemplates folder. So in your case, you will mostly not have placed the xml file and that is what will be causing this issue!

When you have a missing feature in your SharePoint that refuses to go away inspite of deactivating it as well as uninstalling it by force, a site template (.stp) that depends on - fails to work... so how do you make this work? Well, you have to manually delete the feature id reference from the manifest.xml that is present in the .stp file. As you know, .stp files are nothing but .cab (cabinet) files, so all you need to do is rename, change the extension, open in WinRar or any such cabinet handling program, extract the files out, modify the manifest.xml file  (just delete the xml tag that points to that missing feature) and then when you have to place it back - you have to be careful! You have to make sure there are no sub folders that get created! Check my another post on how you can use the makecab.exe utility to recreate the cabinet file. Once you create that, then you need to rename it back to .stp, upload it back to the Site Template Gallery - and start using it!!!

To compress multiple files into a single CAB file, you need to use a directive file. The directive file contain instruction how MakeCab should compress and package the files. Below is a sample of the most basic directive file. Replace the file list with your actual files. .OPTION EXPLICIT .Set CabinetNameTemplate=mycab.CAB .Set Cabinet=on .Set Compress=on "file1.pdf" "file2.doc" "This is a third file.doc" All directive start with ".". Comment start with ";". In the above example, option explicit specify all variables must be declared before it is used. CabinetNameTemplate specify the name of the output CAB file. Cabinet specify whether include the files in the CAB file. When creating setup package, you can use this directive to exclude certain file such as setup.exe from being included into the CAB file. Compress specify whether to compress the file. The remaining lines specify the files to be included into th...

I have moved onto Project 2010 for the last couple of months and I must confess its been a great experience, experiencing the new features.... Among the visually new features, the feature that I would say is of best utility is how copy, paste to excel works, you select a set of tasks from anywhere in your project plan and paste into excel - the formatting is so nice, the fonts are nice and clean and on top of it, it automatically adds "Tasks" and "Duration" headings in the first row! Try it and you will simply love it!

In SharePoint when activating through GUI, "Publishing infrastructure" feature, you get this error inspite of the product not being in Trial. I fixed it by first running stsadm -o activatefeature -name PublishingResources -url http://site/  in command line and then activating using the GUI.

I found this behaviour when you have just changed your index location to a different folder instead of the default location. The full crawl just does not stop! It keeps running forever! All I did was to "Reset all Crawled Content" and then reran the crawl. It started working like a breeze! :)

Change Default Index File Location In a farm environment it will be usually a requirement to have the index file location on a separate drive and folder as opposed to the default location which is: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Data\Office Server\Applications" You can set this path for an SSP by using the UI through Central Administration. But to set the default path for Office SharePoint Server Search Service and for WSS Search Service you will have to set the location through STSADM command. Office SharePoint Server Search Service is configured using OSEARCH command: stsadm -o osearch -defaultindexlocation e:\Data\MOSS_Search_Index (By default, the search index will be located at this path on this server. For index servers, you can specify a different path when you create an SSP. Note: Changing the index location will reset the index. To move an index with a reset, use the noreset parameter of the Spsearchsensitive or Osearchsensitive op...

Excel 2010 sparklines feature seems to be one of the favourites among people using the beta version of the most anticipated Office package!

If you ever have issues in your Outlook 2007 not doing instant search, the article here : http://www.thenetworktechnician.com/2009/06/how-to-fix-outlook-2007-instant-search-from-not-working/ certainly helps! For me it started working before even repairing the installation. So, just the Control Panel, rebuilding the index, worked for me.

If you are a person who is eagerly looking to use Office 2010, kudos to you! - Yes, please go ahead... but Outlook 2010 Beta is sure to surprise you.... with not just the good features but also the most important aspect of Outlook Send/Receive not working!!! Outlook 2010 is inspired from Gmail and shows your mail as conversations, so that is really good! Send/Receive however simply does not work :( I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. After hours of struggle, I lost hope and reverted back to Outlook 2007. Now, every other software in my machine is Office 2010's apart from Outlook. Atleast, my Send/Receive is now working!

When you try to install the new breed of Microsoft OS' on a VMWare Workstation, especially using a iso image, VMWare gives us the option of going with "Easy Install" and prompts us for the product key right in the beginning, after the installation starts, it gives us a invalid key message! Quite annoying, don't worry, all you need to do is open the autoinst.flp file in notepad and re-enter the key... Now start the VM and the installation will go through fine!

Sometimes, when you save your Site as a Template, you get a .stp file and then when you try and create a new site out of it, it could give you a Site Template Invalid or not found issue.... This usually is because your Site Template has got dependencies (features) which are not correctly present ie installed. The best way to see this is to use STP Inspector tool ( http://stpinspector.codeplex.com/releases/view/38429 ) which will show you the various dependencies and then you can independently go and troubleshoot them. Once you correctly install all dependencies, the site template will start working correctly.

You may sometimes (for me, most times! - on both Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008 R2- in Windows Server 2008, this error may not come sometimes come during installation, but when you are attempting to run the services, you will get a User Profiles error, so it is better to install this fix before you even start the SH installation) end up getting an error which has this text : Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport' Do not panic, all you need to do is install a hotfix from this link: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=23806&wa=wsignin1.0

When you are installing SharePoint on a single machine, we usually simulare a 2 server farm environment by choosing "Complete" and then in the Products and Configuration Wizard, we put in the local administrator username as "Workgroup\Username" and it just goes through fine, basically we were able to cheat SharePoint 2007 to consider the same machine as 2 machines! Not with SH 2010, SH 2010 "Complete" installation, during the products configuration wizard, does not allow you to enter a workgroup administrator, it definitely requires a domain account! Which means, if you need to have SH 2010 installed on a single machine, either the machine needs to be a Domain Controller with Active Directory hosted or you need to just use the inbuilt database installation.

If you are looking at running 64 bit guest machines inside a Virtual PC, you will only end up disappointed as both VPC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC (that comes with Windows 7) do not support running 64 bit guest machines.... very disappointing indeed. The only way if you need to do this, is to use VMWare Workstation : not free though :( . Ofcourse, do not forget the fact that your processor needs to be VT enabled and Hardware Virtualization option needs to be enabled in BIOS

There are two tracks of certifications in MS Dynamics GP 1. Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) 2. Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCIP) MCTS goes into every module of GP, so normally people start with MCIP. There are two exams in MCIP for GP. • Applications for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 • Installation and Configuration for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 The recommended one for starters is the second - Installation and Configuration. These links might help: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=MB3-527&locale=en-us#tab1 http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/dynamics.aspx#tab3 http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/dynamics-gp-specialist.aspx#tab2 All the best!

When buying your new laptops or desktops and if you are looking at SharePoint 2010, you must already know that it only works on 64 bit. So make sure you get a 64 bit machine with atleast 4 GB of RAM in it. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is VT (Virtualization Technology) enabled processors (and thus BIOS as well) - basically this is hardware support for virtualization and the new Windows Virtual PC in Windows 7 as well as Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 require this. All the more important is the ability to run 64 bit guest OS and applications - so on a Windows 7 x64 host, inside Windows Virtual PC, you can have you Windows Server 2008 x64 with SH 2010 installated and running... Intel Site helps you to find, filter and choose processors with VT technology and so is the case with the AMD site...

Windows Powershell in new breed of Operating Systems (Windows 7, Windows 2008) be the way to move forward... - Command Prompt will just die out, there is almost EVERYTHING that you can do with this... quite powerful

It is important to note that - Unified Messaging Role is not supported inside Hyper-V. So when installing Exchange Server 2010 inside a VM (Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2), you can only choose Mailbox Role, Hub Transport Role, Client Access Role and Management Tools.

7 Things Never to Say to Your Boss Everyone has a boss. Even if you "work for yourself," you're still an employee to your client. A big part of maintaining the boss-employee relationship is to never allow a boss to think you dislike your work, are incapable of doing it, or--worse--consider it beneath you. These sound like no-brainers, but many statements heard commonly around the workplace violate these basic rules. Looking for an example? Here are seven heard in workplaces all the time. They may seem ordinary, even harmless. But try reading these from your boss's point of view. You'll see right away why it's smart to never allow these seven sentences to pass your lips: "That's not my job." You know what? A lot of bosses are simple souls who think your job is to do what's asked of you. So even if you're assigned a task that is, indeed, not your job, refrain from saying so. Instead, try to find out why your boss is assigning you t...

I did a comparison between SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010 and also for certain search needs, identified certain 3rd party tools! - This I thought would be useful to many!  Download from this link http://www.sendspace.com/file/3kd8se

External Sites search in SharePoint 2010 is definitely far improved than 2007, a site which had about 7 pages got indexed completely within a minute in my Windows 7 Machine! - Almost every word has become searchable!

According to Microsoft, SharePoint 2010 along with Office 2010 releasing on 12 May 2010! I am eagerly awaiting the same!

Today, in my SharePoint Site, Create, Edit Menus under Site Actions, New Menu, New Users menu - basically all New menus stopped working in my libraries and lists!!! The action that we had performed earlier was that - we had stopped a just started backup (using the stsadm command). The stsadm command had just locked the site and before the backup could complete, we had closed the command window. So all we had to do was to unlock the site collection using stsadm -o setsitelock -url http://servername -lock none This was a great lesson!!!

I have my SharePoint backup script created as a backup.bat (batch file stored in 12\bin folder) and the same script that was working in a Windows Server 2003 machine did not work in Windows Server 2008 Task Scheduler.... oops, that was really painful and the worst part is the task history is not reporting any failure. It was finally a silly problem - I had to just add cd c:\Program files...12\bin folder line above the stsadm backup command! - it is not working like a breeze!!!

Today, I had a strange problem - the SharePoint 2007 sites that were working fine in Windows Server 2003 environment were migrated to Windows Server 2008 x64 environment and the Explorer View in all document libraries stopped working!!!! After hours of search, I found that I had to Remove the WebDav Publishing Feature from the Server Manager (under Web Server Role) and viola!!! :) Explorer View Started Working!!! Great lesson learn!