Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

  One of the greatest features of SharePoint in my opinion has always been the search capability, but out of the box you cannot index the content of PDF documents but the ability to achieve this is freely available with the Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms, the documentation for installing this is also available on the Adobe website but has not yet been updated for SharePoint 2010.

 So through this post I will show how to install and configure the iFilter for PDF, the first step is to make sure the PDF icon shows up  when you upload a PDF file if not how to achieve this is here.

 You may also wish to check out this post if every time you click on a PDF it only offers a save button.

 So now we have covered all the prerequisites we can now continue with our configuration. Once the iFilter is downloaded extract the MSI installer file and install this on your SharePoint servers.

The next step is to navigate to Central Admin | Manage service applications | Search Service Application and once there click on “file types” to add the PDF file type.

The next step is to make a registry change so as always be careful as this can have an adverse effects on your server if you make a mistake. First of all start up regedit and navigate to:- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\Filters, right click on the filters folder and create a new key and enter ‘.pdf’ as the value do not forget the full stop. Next enter the following values to your new key:-

<REG_SZ> Default = <value not set>
<REG_SZ> Extension = pdf
<REG_DWORD> FileTypeBucket = 1
<REG_SZ> MimeTypes = application/pdf

You should end up with the new key as illustrated below

Next navigate to

 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OfficeServer\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension  

Just one key to enter here, right click and choose new key and again enter ‘.PDF’ as the value double click on the default REG_SZ and enter {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} as the value data.

 The final step is to restart your SharePoint server and initiate a full crawl, all of your PDF files will now be indexed and searchable.

Dave

Well it is September SharePoint 2010 came out in May and already we have had two sets of cumulative updates, now I will be honest and say that we did not keep our SharePoint 2007 totally patched, but new version out so time to turn over a new leaf and keep our SharePoint 2010 environment  totally up to date.

 So what I thought I would do is keep this post updated with all the latest patches, hotfixes, cumulative updates and service packs hopefully this will not only help me but you as well.

 To find out which version of SharePoint you have installed navigate to Central Administration| System Settings | Manage servers in your farm or from PowerShell (get-spfarm).buildversion don’t forget to run PowerShell as an administrator.

It’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.

Yesterday we were meeting a customer when the question of the difference in SharePoint 2010 versions came up well we answered the questions but I did not have a definitive answer or a document or URL that I could refer people too. So today after a bit of searching I managed to find on the Microsoft site a list of differences in each version but I could not find it in a PDF or Word format so the only thing to do is the hard miles of writing my own table. I will also make this available for download in PDF format at http://www.scribd.com/doc/35796153/SharePoint-2010-Version-Comparison , and if you would like it in word format just drop me an email and I will send you a copy dave@sharepointedutech.com   

  Over the last few weeks we have completed quite a few installs of SharePoint 2010 and one of the questions we get asked time and time again is what is required to run SharePoint 2010, so I thought through this post I would write down exactly what is needed so I can point customers to this blog post and they would then have a reference chart of what is needed in their environment.

Hardware

Software

 I do hope this simple post helps in your decision on SharePoint 2010.

Dave

  I have previously written a series of articles on how we stream media files and deliver these through SharePoint (Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3)  but these are all based in our MOSS 2007 environment now that we are moving over to SharePoint 2010 I thought I would give you a heads up on ASX files and 2010.

 We were horrified to find that when we click on an ASX file in SharePoint 2010 it did not stream the file as in 2007 but only gave us the option to save or cancel as illustrated below

Now we have found a way around this you can either change the file extension from ASX to WMV and then it works or go to Central Administration |Application Management | Manage Web Applications highlight the web application that hosts your media library and click on general settings

Once you have done that scroll down to the “Browser file handler” section

The out of the box setting is set to strict change this to permissive and then click OK no IIS reset is required and now when you click on an ASX file your video will stream.

We have in excess of 4500 so finding this setting was a god send and I do hope that it helps others.

Dave

Today 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.

  Last night on twitter I asked a question would SharePoint Saturday work in the UK? And to say the least it certainly got people’s attention with replies from Alex Pearce, Spencer Harbar, Matt Hughes, Mike Herrity, Agnes Molnar, Veronique Palmer and Dux Raymond Sy and others.

 This morning I had an email from Veronique looping me in with others that may be interested in trying to put on the first SharePoint Saturday UK event. I have already been offered a location at no cost that is centrally situated in the UK, but I think it comes down to people’s attitude to the weekend in the UK.

 So can it be done? Well back in January Mark Miller from Endusersharepoint.com organised a virtual SharePoint Saturday EMEA and I must say it was a great success but there is nothing like meeting people face to face. Now with the venue sourced I should imagine the big question comes down to when?

 Now I know that the UK winter can be a bit bleak so I would suggest the winter months as we all like to make the most of the sun when we do see it, my suggestion would be end of January or beginning of February. I have this morning set up a new email address at sps@sharepointedutech.com so if would be interested in presenting a session or attending please drop me a line and we will see how we get on. I am more than willing to organise this event for the SharePoint community in the UK so please show your support and let’s make it happen.

Dave

 Myself and Chris along with Darren White presented a session entitled “Our Journey To SharePoint 2010 Land” at the SUGUK meeting in Southampton on June 24th so i thought i wiould do a quick post to share this presentation with you, We tried to make it entertaining as well as informative hence the pirate themed presentation. WE hope you enjoyed it and see you again at the next meeting.

Dave And Chris

If 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.