I'm pleased to announce I have joined the board of the International SharePoint Professionals Association (“ISPA”). ISPA is a professional association dedicated to the promotion and global adoption of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information.
I'm very excited to be working with a great team to drive this much needed community initiative, we have lots of great things planned for the near future.
We recently put out a FAQ page that we hope answers some of the questions we have been getting and we will expand on this as we move forward.
Did you know we also offer sites for SharePoint User Groups? Well its true we do. You can submit a request here.
Do you already have an existing User Group and just want it listed on our site? You can submit your information here.
Most importantly ... would you like to be a member? We admit that this is still a work in progress offering with regards to the web site but we are moving forward nicely and hope you will grow with us. You can sign up here.
September 15th - 17th, Washington, DC.
I'm pleased to be presenting a couple sessions at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference this September in Washington, DC. I hope to see some of you there. For more information, please check out the conference web site at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/.
It promises to be a great event with some great speakers and excellent material from the real world of SharePoint deployments - not much marketing spin here is what I'm saying :). If you register before August 1st, you'll also get a copy of the recently released MS Press book, SharePoint Best Practices.
My sessions are:
Mythbusters - Debunking Server Farm Myths
(ITP305, CIO305, PM305, IA305)
This highly interactive, whiteboard session will dive into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm Topologies, Shared Service Providers, High Availability, Security and more. Alongside best practices for each "myth", the SharePoint "magic numbers" will be covered and there will be plenty of scope to discuss any particular queries you may have on farm deployment.
Global Taxonomies with Office SharePoint Server
(ITP317, IA317)
Large enterprises often require the ability to manage their taxonomy and metadata "globally" across their MOSS deployments, and the inherent architecture of SharePoint presents some significant barriers to implementing such a solution in a manner that can scale to the enterprise. This session dives into approaches which address this conundrum along with a number of best practices for bridging the gap between a global taxonomy and the restrictions imposed by SharePoint Site Collections.
...and little if any vendor involvement - just the way it's supposed to be.
Today, well yesterday actually, the International SharePoint Professionals Association officially launched. The Association provides support and guidance to the community by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information. For more information, visit their web site and be sure to join right away. I'm pleased to be one of the regional leads for EMEA, and want to take this opportunity to thank Bob, Natalya , Darrin and Chris for their efforts getting things off the ground.
http://www.sharepointpros.org/
Announcing the International SharePoint Professionals Association (Bob Fox)
What's the best thing about the recently released Infrastructure Updates for SharePoint 2007? The super cool new search functionality? Content Deployment fixes? Improvements in performance and security?
Nope, none of those me ole china, it's the new support for Kerberos Authentication for the SSP Web Services. This was only previously possible with a heinous hack that I promised I would never detail publicly due to it's nastiness.
The problem was that the SSP Web Services run under a IIS Virtual Web Site with a high port. It's client (the .NET Framework) along with SharePoint was unable to construct the correct request to match the SPNs configured (if you configured them correctly, and not many did). So setting the setsharedwebserviceauthn to negotiate using STSADM would make your SSP Web Services nice and secure, but break your farm. Try doing this and then click Manage Search Service within Application Management and you'll see! (Everything is OK on a single server, but erm, who runs them in production!!).
The Infrastructure Updates address this, and it's now possible to configure the SSP Web Services to use Kerberos. This is a pretty big deal for enterprises who are serious about their farm build and configuration. It's not all great news, as there is an extra step (a reg key). This is something that I will be adding to the SharePoint Kerberos Configuration utility, which as it happens I've been delaying until these updates were shipped.
In addition to the updates, the IT Pro UA folk have done a great job of updating the Kerberos Configuration Guide on Tech Net. The section relevant specifically to this change is at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263449(TechNet.10).aspx#section14
One of the freakiest things about running on an excellent MacBook Pro is the keyboard layout. Keys in the wrong place and a few missing ones like #, PrtScr and AltGr. Once you get used to it it's all good however. There's combinations and so forth to get at things you need. The trouble is just as you've gotten used to it, you fire up those development virtual machines and they don't know squat about the Apple keyboard. This is because the custom Input mapping installed as part of the Boot Camp package isn't installed on the VM. Arse!
Many people think that installing the Apple Keyboard Driver might fix this issue, it doesn't - that driver is for a USB or Bluetooth external Apple Keyboard, which a VM won't know about (even in VMWare). The bits needed are actually in the Boot Camp MSI, and it's reasonably straightforward to figure out how to extract just the bits needed and hack up an installer, but that's way more work than needed. Plus, you don't want to install that crap on your VM, all you need is an alternate keyboard layout.
There's a much easier way, using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.
In a nutshell, you install the MSKLC on your host and then open up the Apple Keyboard which is already on your host. Then you can create an installer for it from MSKLC. Copy that guy to your VM and run it. You then have a Apple layout available:
Now your keys are in the same place regardless of whether you are working in a VM or on your Host. Kickin'.
I've created an installer for my VMs, which you can download here. Of course, mine is a UK layout. To create your own layout for your preferred language simply follow the instructions above.
You know the score - you've a couple of indispensable applications which refuse to install on your operating system of choice because the idjut vendor decided it would be a good idea to bake into the installer some sort of version check. This is usually when you're trying to use a 64 bit operating system or wish to install something on a server OS. I have a couple examples - Sony's Ereader is a must have for me, but the installer doesn't like 64 bit. Others include Live Messenger and LifeCam which refuse to install on Windows Server.
It turns out that if the installer is an MSI you are in luck - the Microsoft Platform SDK includes a program called Orca which allows you to edit the MSI to remove the offending entries, usually in the Launch Condition table which look something like this:
Thanks to all who attended the Edinburgh SUGUK meeting last week for a great event. A big shout out to Steven Hynds and crew for facilitating the venue. The slide deck for my talk can be found here. Hope to see you again soon (probably towards the back of August) for more SUGUK events north of the border!
As you may have noticed, I've been getting a bit carried away with my shiny MacBook Pro of late. I have this bad boy set up to triple boot Mac OS, Vista x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64. The idea here is to have a small Win2k8 partition running MOSS for demos/presentations (and the odd bit of coding) running on the metal rather than in a VM. The latest Boot Camp drivers enable this goodness, they all work flawlessly. All that is, apart from the Bluetooth stack.
This is a problem because I use the excellent Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter mouse. This little guy is a regular mouse but has media/slide controls on the underside. Very handy. It comes with a transceiver but I don't wanna use that rubbish, I don't like dongles that are unnecessary.
So why doesn't it work? Well it's all down to driver signing on x64 and also the generic Bluetooth stack INF files preventing installation on Server class machines. Bit of a PITA. After installing the Boot Camp drivers Device Manager shows the first issue:
The good news is I've done the hard work after a couple hours of sillyness and mostly thanks to Gil Kirkpatrick, a Directory Services MVP. You need my ZIP file of modified drivers for the generic Bluetooth stack. Use this entirely at your own risk! You backup, right?
To get things working we need to hack about a bit...
- In Device Manager, right click Bluetooth USB Host Controller and choose Update Driver Software...
- Click Browse my computer for driver software.
- Click Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
- Click Bluetooth Radios and Next.
- Select Apple Inc and Apple Built-in Bluetooth and then Next.
(See, Boot Camp did install them, it just couldn't make them function, because of...) - On the Update Driver Warning, click Yes.
- After a short while the driver will be installed, click Close.
- You will see some annoying dialogs (three of them) - cancel them.
- You will now see that Apple Built-in Bluetooth shows up under Bluetooth Radios, but we have three new Unknown Devices in Device Manager. At this point the Bluetooth icon will also show up in the notification area.
This is where our modified driver INFs are needed. Extract the ZIP file someplace, e.g. c:\bt before continuing.
- Right click the first Unknown Device and choose Update Driver Software.
- Click Browse my computer for driver software.
- Enter the path to the extracted ZIP and click Next.
- Windows will moan about driver signing - click Install this driver software anyway.
- After a short while the driver will be installed, click Close.
- Repeat 10 thru 14 for the other two unknown devices.
Once complete we will see the MS Bluetooth Enumerator show up in Bluetooth Radios and a couple more Bluetooth devices in Network Adaptors:
Unfortunately we are not quite done.... Don't close Device Manager yet.
This is the stage to install the MS Intellipoint software. We could have done this before - it doesn't really matter. When it prompts you to insert the transceiver, click Cancel.
Now we need to pair the mouse using the Bluetooth control panel. Our mouse won't yet work, but we will get another device show up in Device Manager.
Follow steps 10 thru 14 above and the Bluetooth HID Device will be installed.
Waggle your Wireless Notebook Presenter - all is good.Click the presentation mode button - all is good :)
At this point you can delete the folder containing the modified drivers etc.