Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

 Through this post I will show you how to setup the send to connector in SharePoint 2010 with this enabled you can move or copy documents from one location to another in your SharePoint install exactly the same way that you can in windows. This post is really a continuation of a previous post “SharePoint 2010 drop Off Library” as to use the send to feature the drop off library needs configuring so please check out the previous post before trying to set up the send to connectors.

 In this demo site I have set up 2 document libraries with the aim to be able to move a document from one to the other. I have set these libraries up on the same page but they could be on any sub site that you create.

The first step is to load up central admin and navigate to General Application settings -> Configure Send to Connections  

When you click on the “Configure send to connections” link you will be presented with the page illustrated below.  

You have to append the connection string with _vti_bin/officialfile.asmx so on my test setup it was http://dave1/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx i also chose to move the file but you can choose to “copy” or “Copy and leave a link”. When all the details are filled out test the link and you should get the same output as illustrated below

 When you go back to your main page and click the down arrow next to a document you should now see a new send to connector displaying whatever text you put in the display name field when you set up your connection.

After clicking the link you will be presented with a success screen and in my case the document will appear in the location that you specified in the connection setup.

  Last April myself and the whole SharePoint team from Twynham attended the Best Practice Conference in London and the time is fast approaching for this year’s event. The 2009 event was superbly organised and the 2010 version looks bigger and better with six tracks to choose from including:-

ITPro Track

Deep Dive 400 Track

Developer Track

Power User/Business Adoption 1 Track

Power User/Business Adoption 2 Track

Community – Tales from the trenches track

The list of speakers at the Evolution conference looks equally impressive and I am very pleased to see the education community is well represented with the likes of Alex Pearce, Matt Hughes and Richard Willis amongst the 67 confirmed speakers. So if you decide to attend any SharePoint event this year I can highly recommend the SharePoint Evolution Conference. Myself and Chris will be attending and posting blogs each night on the highlights of the day. So hopefully we will see you there.

Confirmed Speaker List

   I know that a lot of people have been having problems with the user profile synchronization in SharePoint 2010 so I thought I would share with you the location of the Forefront Synchronization Service Manager. With this hidden gem you can see the steps and success/failures of your user profile imports. So in a default install if you navigate to

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell

You will see an application called miisclient.exe

Once opened you get a GUI interface for the profile import steps as they run and historical data as well. I have to thank Adrian Edgar from Culford School for pointing me in the direction of this tool so hopefully this will help all of our readers diagnose any problems that they have.

Dave– End Topblogging tracking code –>

  I am a great believer in keeping not only my network machines patched but also my home laptop having been caught out once many years ago I check my home laptop for updates very regularly, so this morning I checked and was surprised to see “Microsoft Browser Choice Screen Update for EEA Users of Windows 7 (KB976002)” as an important update.

After checking the Microsoft site here I discovered that this is the windows update that gives you a choice of browser for us Europeans. Are we not grown up enough to be able to decide which browser we want to use be it internet explorer, Firefox, opera or even Google chrome among just  a few to choose from, I know that Chris is a big fan of Firefox and the features that it offers so always installed it alongside Internet Explorer. So Mr EU could you please start treating us as grownups and let us choose ourselves not have that choice forced upon us. This update also applies to:-

•       Windows 7 Enterprise

• Windows 7 Enterprise N
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Windows 7 Home Premium N
• Windows 7 Professional
• Windows 7 Professional N
• Windows 7 Ultimate
• Windows 7 Ultimate N
• Windows Vista Business
• Windows Vista Business 64-bit Edition
• Windows Vista Business N
• Windows Vista Business N 64-bit Edition
• Windows Vista Enterprise
• Windows Vista Home Basic
• Windows Vista Home Basic N
• Windows Vista Home Basic N 64-bit Edition
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1
• Windows Vista Service Pack 2
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
• Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3

  This morning I tried to upload a video file to our SharePoint 2010 install in preparation for a presentation tonight and then realised that the default 50mb file size limit was still set so while I was changing the settings to allow larger files I thought I would do a quick post on how/where the setting is and what to change.

  First of all login to Central Admin and navigate to

 Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Web Applications

Once there highlight the web application that you want to change and then click on general settings

Once in general settings scroll to the bottom of the list and you will see the maximum upload size the default setting is 50mb this can be can set to a maximum size of 2047mb. If you try to go beyond this it does flag up and tell you that you have exceeded the Maximum size.

Dave

  Another new feature you may have seen in SharePoint 2010 is the drop folder this is basically a way to set up one folder for users to upload files to and it will automatically route the files to the appropriate locations that you have previously setup. 

  So how do we get this to work? Well it does need some setting up and the routing rules do need some configuring but well worth the effort. First of all from your site go to

Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Manage Site Features and activate the “Content Organizer” feature. After this is activated there are two new items under the site administration section these are “Content Organizer Settings” and “Content Organizer Rules”

As the names imply “Content Organizer Settings” are general site settings and “Content Organizer Rules” are where you set up individual rules for content types. All there is to do now is setup the rules that you wish to use, this took quite a bit of playing with the keep piece being specifying the conditions I will include a screen shot of my Docx rule so you can see how I achieved this, you will also have to create rules for all the file types that you want to route so on my test install I created two rules one for word files and one for Visio

     And now whenever I tried to add a document they route through to the location that I set up. A great way to keep your SharePoint governance intact and all documents in the correct locations. This post will eventually lead on to another post that I have been thinking about for a while on Taxonomy vs. Search but more of that later.   

Dave

Now that we had all of our media files in one location it just came down to the delivery method and media library look and feel below you can see a screenshot of our media library

This gateway page is made up of basically 3 elements the media document library a search box and a recently added list. The only thing left to add was the delivery method, this could have been a list with hyperlinks to the videos but the best solution we found was ASX files and example of which can be seen below.  

<asx version = “3.0″>

                <entry>

                                <ref href = “mms://mediaserver/media/4082.wmv”/>

                                <Title>Episode 6</Title>

                              <Author></Author>

                                <Copyright></Copyright>

                                <Banner></Banner>

                </entry>

</asx>

Using ASX files allows you to download the file and place on any part of the gateway where if we had used a links list we would have had to rewrite the link every time we needed to place a wrapper file anywhere else on the gateway. This also allows us to track our video resources as I stated in a previous post we numbered the videos rather than name them so as long as we maintained backups of the ASX files and video files both could be tied together. We can also tag the ASX files to help with the searches for end users a good example of this was an old Betamax video with a Volvo car in which all staff knew had a Volvo car but could never remember the title. The ASX file method would also allow hosted solutions of SharePoint to stream their own videos as the wrapper file can point to an internally hosted Windows media server but the ASX files reside on the remote server.

 The next problem was backup and restore for us this is a two part process with the ASX files being backed up on a nightly basis as well as the rest of the SharePoint farms content with Avepoint Docave and with the video files we backup once a month using Symantec backup exec. We chose once a month simply because of the size and length the job takes to run (Currently three days) the most videos we would lose are around about 20 so not a total disaster.

I hope you have enjoyed this three part series on streaming media if you have any questions you can always ask through comments on the site.   

Dave

Just a quick post to let people know that Mark Miller @EUSP has made all the recordings from the SharePoint Saturday EMEA event from Saturday 23^rd January available for download from his site here. This really was a fantastic event and superbly organised with a great line up of speakers and wonderful range of subjects. The speaker list included:-

Joel Oleson

Claudio Brotto, SharePoint MVP

Zlatan Dzinic, SharePoint MVP

Marwan Tarek, SharePoint MVP

Mostafa Elzoghbi, C# MVP

Muhanad Omar, SharePoint MVP

Michael Noel

Boris Gomiunik

Christophe Humbert

Jan Tielens, SharePoint MVP

Mohamed Yehia

Nicolas Georgeault, SharePoint MVP

Laura Rogers

Ayman El-Hattab

Dux Raymond Sy

Steve Smith, SharePoint MVP

Ágnes Molnár, SharePoint MVP

Ruven Gotz

Daniel McPherson

 Hopefully Mark and the guys will consider putting on another virtual event this year and if they do my advice would be DO NOT MISS IT!  

At Twynham it has always been our ambition to deliver all of our resources through SharePoint so with the media files that was always high on the agenda. As I said in the previous post this was version three of our media delivery solution, the first thing we discovered was the lack of resources available in fact the only book we could find on the subject was Windows media services resource kit this book proved invaluable. But the first thing to consider was the architecture needed to deliver this.

We had in early 2008 the opportunity to move our resources over to a new setup as we were setting up a new SharePoint farm it seemed the ideal timing for the move. Below you can see the SharePoint setup we decided on. The application server not only handles the SharePoint indexing service but also windows media services, this was built on a windows server 2008 64 Bit install with the application server attached directly to a Dell Power Vault MD300 with 2 TB of storage this allowed us some flexibility and future proofing with the onset of high definition video and the file sizes associated with the HD format media files.

One of the reasons for wanting to deliver our media files through SharePoint was the indexing capabilities of SharePoint as early on we decided to number our video files not name them as naming would leave us open to typo’s, we ended up with over 4000 video files all numbered but with no reference to the name. In the next part of this blog series I will tell you how we delivered the video and audio files to the end user and also touch on the sticky subject of backup and restore of your digital assets…

As I said in a previous post I would cover media streaming and how we deliver all of our digital assets through SharePoint, in the presentations that we give on our learning gateways this subject always gets a good reception as this is a great way to engage staff in the whole gateway experience. Before I get into details I thought I would take you through the media streaming journey.

 What we deliver through SharePoint now is version three of our digital media gateway this all started with the release of windows server 2000, media services was one of those hidden gems that Microsoft never seem to talk about this was not the main reason there where so many other advantages to moving from Windows NT 4 too Server 2000 with active directory and group policy deployment high on the list of big wins. So we put media services on the back burner until the release of windows server 2003 at that time is was a much more mature technology but still very much unknown. But it was not until 2005 that we started digitizing all the video tapes in the school this came about with the news that Dorset County Council where reroofing the main block during the summer holiday of 2005 this is where our server room and majority of IT suites are so I had to find work to cover us during this period.

 After much research we decided to purchase seven pinnacle studio movie boxes this gave us the ability to connect to any video recorder or DVD player through a scart lead I also purchased seven video recorders from comet (I am sure the salesman thought I was mad) and a Dell server with 8 drives bays giving us in excess of a 1 TB of local storage on the server. The call went out to staff for their departmental videos in early July and hundreds of tapes turned up we then divided up the tapes and with the help of the techies Christian Drewson, Sylvia Haghighi and Dan Rolles also family members we started the mammoth task of digitizing the schools video stock. After six weeks we had managed to get over a 1000 online this was delivered through an HTML website on the media server. With the arrival at Twynham of Darren White we did take the next step and Darren wrote a PHP website allowing us to make the delivery of digital assets to staff more automatic. But it was the next step that was our biggest leap delivery through SharePoint which I will cover in the next post……