Posts by CrMcKinley:
Use Powershell to delete Outlook offline address book remotely.
September 2nd, 2010Over the summer we moved mail to Exchange 2010 sp1 and being a school we also have new members of staff joining.
The result is that a few people are having trouble finding certain people in their outlook address book when they get back after their summer break.
I’ve done a quick powershell script to remove the offline address book files remotely. Make sure the user has closed outlook*, fire up Powershell ISE as administrator and then run this:
$comp = read-host “Computer Name”
$user = read-host “Login Name”
cd \\$comp\c$\Users\$user\AppData
dir -Recurse -Filter *.oab | remove-item
It will prompt for a computer name and a login name of the user you want to remove the files for. Obviously you will need appropriate network permissions.
When the reopen outlook they will have no problems finding all the new staff members they need to send to!
*If you want to go power(shell) crazy you could script the closing of the outlook process.
Remove the gap between the Icon and Title in SharePoint 2010 document library
August 23rd, 2010It’s hard to explain what I mean in words so here is a picture:
See how the icons do not sit right next to the title of the item and you are left with masses of white space. This bug only seams to appear in IE8 and in firefox it works just fine. The picture below shows the same thing in Firefox:
This looks much better. I did a bit of digging around using the IE developer tools (just press F12) and tracked down what was causing the error. It’s the CSS width attribute which is set to 0.01% in the coreV4.css My colleague Rob Brown @littlemenace1 (who for a 17 year old knows far too much about far too many things!) assures me that only integers are supported here, so 0.01 is meaningless. IE8 must just get confused and ignore the width attribute all-together whereas Firefox just gets on with things and assumes it’s 1 or 0 but then expands the width to fit the icon and any padding.
Here is the offending CSS:
As we already have a custom masterpage and CSS applied, all I had to do was add
.ms-vb-icon {
width: 1% !important;
}
into our CSS and all was fine.
If you don’t have a custom CSS and don’t want to make one then I think you could probably get away with doing what I always say you shouldn’t and edit the core CSS. Just watch out for it being overwritten during updates.
While I was at it I also updated the DOCICON.XML and associated images to make the folder icon and a few others more up-to-date. Results below!
Hopefully the CSS will be fixed in an update or service pack in the future.
Fully Virtualised Environments in HyperV. Theory meets reality head on!
August 13th, 2010You may be aware of a constant debate that goes on between myself, Dave and a few others in education about running virtual environments and whether they should/could be 100% virtual of if you would need some physical domain controllers put into the mix. If you’re not familiar with the debate have a quick read of this http://sharepointineducation.com/?p=2056
So as you see, I’ve always maintained that you can have a completely virtual environment and in theory it’s all fine.
Well theory came crashing into reality this week. There was a planned power outage at school; the only flaw in the plan was that no one told us. We made it to the server room just in time to watch the UPS run out and experience the eeary sensation of a silent server room. One of the things to die was a fully virtual environment we have been playing with. The two node hyper v cluster is part of the same domain as the virtual machines that run on them. They both go off because of power and you have no domain. The theory being that you can just log in locally and start the DC, then boot 2nd node then reboot node 1. What I hadn’t taken into account was that the cluster would not load and the DC was not available to boot from the cluster manager.
Lessons were learnt. Here they are.
If running a fully virtual environment the failover cluster and associated cluster shared volume will not start as there is no domain – this is a problem.
We fixed it by removing the cluster volume and just assigning it a drive letter on node 1 of the hyper cluster, the VHD for the domain controller could then be copied onto the local C: of node 1 and fired up via hyper-v manager. The 2nd node could then be fired up and now having a domain to join was fine and the cluster volume was all good. The 2nd DC was then moved to the C: of node 2. Node 1 could then be restarted and all was good from then on.
So if you go fully virtual don’t put all your domain controllers in the cluster, keep them local, one on each node as they can be started independently of shared storage or cluster.
Although I still wouldn’t be brave stupid enough to do this in production 
Branding your SharePoint 2010 Gateway
July 14th, 2010Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the Learning Gateway Conference on the topic of branding.
I’m going to write a few blog posts going into more detail but for now I just wanted to get the slide deck up.
Microsoft Expression Sketchflow
June 30th, 2010At Twynham we always find the best way to start a new SharePoint project is to get it drawn out, preferably by the end user. This can come back to us in many forms from a pencil and paper sketch through to a fully blown Visio diagram.
I stumbled across this video that shows off Expression SketchFlow, it does look really really good for rapidly prototyping sites or applications/web parts.
This should help us pin down exactly what the end user wants and avoid all those ‘tweaks’ that turn into requirements!
Like to trial here: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx
I’m giving it a try myself at the moment and will update this post with screen shots and my thoughts.
SharePoint 2010 Cannot open workbook because it’s not stored in an Excel Services Application trusted location
June 22nd, 2010If you are using the Office Web apps in SharePoint 2010 then you may come across this error…
“This workbook cannot be opened because it is not stored in an Excel Services Application trusted location.
To create an Excel Services Application trusted location, contact your system administrator.”
If you happen to be the system administrator and you’ve turned to google bing google to find the answer hopefully this blog post will help you out!
I believe this error is most likely if you are going over SSL as the default trusted location is just http://
Jump into central admin (please ignore my heath analyzer!) and goto Manage service applications.
Click on Excel services Application.
Then click on “Trusted file locations”
You can see that http:// is already there, so you could just add https:// or put in a url to a specific location
Fill in the boxes, I also ticked the trust children box.
Once you have done this go back to your Excel document and it will open up in the browser! Nice.
SharePoint Branding useful links and resources
June 15th, 2010Yesterday I gave a presentation about branding at the SharePoint Education event organised by Mike Herrity at Microsoft Reading. It’s the same presentation I gave at the last event, this time going solo without Matt. The slides from this 1st presentation are here.
I’ve had quite a few request for links to resources etc so I will start to build a list here. If you have any more then just leave a comment or tweet me @crmckinley
http://www.codeplex.com/ -microsoft open source developments
http://www.wssdemo.com/default.aspx – sharepoint examples
http://www.heathersolomon.com/blog/ – useful blog, including blank masterpage
http://www.widgetbox.com/galleryhome/ – 1st of a google search for ‘free widgets’
The best SharePoint designer book I’ve found is this one, it may be 2007 but much of the theory still stands true in 2010.
A few more (with thanks to Derek @workerthread)
http://mosshowto.blogspot.com/2010/06/sharepoint-2010-wiki-customizing.html Customising Sharepoint 2010 Wiki team sites
http://www.heatherwaterman.com/blog/default.aspx Heather Waterman
Using Microsoft Word 2010 to blog on WordPress
May 19th, 2010This is a small test post to try out the feature in Word (2007 or 2010) that allows you to post straight to a blog from word.
Make sure that in your wordpress admin section you have XML-RPC enabled. This is found under http://blogname/wp-admin/options-writing.php
Then in Word go to file (what they also call ‘backstage’), select Save & Send, Publish Blog Post. Fill out the fields such as blog URL and you’re ready to post.
Simple and useful, just what I like on a Wednesday morning.
SPEDU – SharePoint 2010 Branding
May 14th, 2010Myself and Matt Hughes from Samworth Acadamy had the pleasure in presenting to a group of teachers and techies about branding SharePoint. Slides are below, we deviated quite alot during the presentation but you should get the gist!
Any questions im @crmckinley and Matt is @mattmoo2
Twynham School SharePoint 2010 – Microsoft Case Study
May 12th, 2010Here at Twynham we have had a case study written about us by Microsoft it’s all about SharePoint 2010. Click here or the image below to read it in full.
