Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

 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

Myself 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

Dave and Chris are very pleased to welcome Cognitive as their first sponsor to the blog. We hope that you will find this partnership useful as we continue to blog about the world of SharePoint and technology. With SharePoint 2010 really beginning to take off we know that there are plenty of SharePoint experts around and also people in desperate need of these people, we hope that this is where you will benefit from Cognitive!

“Cognitive are delighted to sponsor the http://sharepointedutech.com/ blog; it was an easy choice really given how Dave managed to defeat the “Ash Cloud No Fly Period” to get back in time for Spevo via Twitter and the supportive SharePoint community!

Following Spevo and the imminent launch of SharePoint 2010 everyone is asking the burning question “When do I get to use it commercially?”  That’s where Cognitive can assist….

We work with a select number of end users, who are either planning an upgrade to 2010 or a product re-write to the latest version, and Microsoft Enterprise Gold level Partners adept at convincing Client’s to implement 2010. As  a key player in the expansion of Microsoft’s Enterprise Gold partners, and the exclusive staffing partner to several Microsoft president’s club members and end user clients, Cognitive offer you a variety of opportunities that will enable you to attain your desired career goals.

Our SharePoint search & selection practice has over 22 years Microsoft centric recruitment experience and, as such, you will be working with individuals who understand the Microsoft channel, take an active interest in your  existing circumstances and genuinely care about your career goals.

We look to ensure that your next move is the right one.

So if you want to ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee then please get in touch.”

ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee

If you have your nice SP2010 setup you may notice that when you go to open a PDF file it prompts you to save it rather than opening.

This is really annoying and would send everyone here at the school completely bananas! Not to mention the fact that we try to get everything on SharePoint only to force people to save it to their own area!

Never fear there is a solution. It’s in central admin.

Go there and click ‘Manage Web Applications’

Click on the web app you want to change, and go to ‘General Settings’

Scroll down the list until you reach ‘Browser File Handling’

Change the radio box from Strict to Permissive.

Click ok.

Go back to your PDF document and click on it – and it will open up without forcing you to save it somewhere first.

You may have noticed in the first screen shot there was no PDF icon. Well, follow this guide to right that wrong!

 Who would have thought a week ago that I would be trapped until Tuesday 20^th April in Holland because of a volcano but that is what has happened, I have checked all the options Eurostar, ferry’s etc. but no good, my final plea for help is via Twitter but we will see if the power of the tweet pays off . I was very much looking forward to attending the SharePoint Evolution conference in London, the people that I feel the most sorry for regarding the event are Steve Smith and his team at Combined Knowledge who last year organised a superb event and I am sure that the conference this year will be bigger and better.

 But as it has turned out attendees and speakers are stuck all around the world and unable to get to London but the good news regarding the conference is that Steve has started putting alternative plans into action and also the session DVD will still be sent out post conference. Hopefully we will get a best practice conference in the UK in 2011.

UPDATE

The power of twitter is wonderful i now have a lift back to the UK and i will make it to SharePoint Evolution Thankyou all

  I am very pleased to be able to tell you that our speaker submission for SharePoint Saturday in Washington DC has been successful, so on May 15^th myself and Mike Herrity will be presenting a session on our work over the last 3 years of working together starting with our first project a revision gateway and on to our rollout of SharePoint 2010 in a highly available virtual environment. We will also revisit the past and look at how we first used SharePoint team services back in 2001 and give some topology examples of our journey up to the present day and our 2010 rollout.

 The session will also focus on how Twynham has gotten the most from the out of the box elements in SharePoint 2007 to our custom web part developments during our Parental Engagement strategy. We will finish with a demonstration of our SharePoint 2010 set up and work with Microsoft.

  A while ago I did a post on adding icons for SharePoint 2010 and MOSS 2007 so that you get icons in document libraries for PDF and other files that do not have file association icons built in. Well if you run your SharePoint on Server 2008 R2 called by many including myself Server 7 you have the ability to create libraries to give access to the folders that you regularly access on the file system.

 So how? Well it works the same as on Windows 7 from the start menu click on your name then right click on libraries and choose new library

Name your new library in this example I called mine SharePoint Files. Then if you then navigate to your favourite location C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14 and right click on a folder you can include in your new library as illustrated below

If you then add more folders you then end up with an aggregated view of all your favourite locations and easy access to your SharePoint files. If you then tie this tip in with my previous “Easy access to STSADM” you can then save yourself hours of navigating via a command prompt and windows explorer.

Enjoy and Happy Easter Dave.

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In Dave’s previous post he talked about the back-end for our delivery of remote programs. I’m going to explain how we then surfaced this through SharePoint.

For those of you that have set up remote programs you will probably be aware of the web part for it, we found that using this didn’t give us very much flexibility in which programs are surfaced. So we came up with a couple of other methods.

The first is by far the simplest; the good old content editor web part! Just put your .rdp files in an accessable location along with some icons. Add the content editor part to the page and add the images, hyperlinked to the rdp file. Simple.

The way we now deliver remote programs is to store the rdp file, the icon and any description or meta data in a sharepoint list. We give them categories to enable us to group them and just render the list with xslt. Again very simple but very effective.

Of course all this transfers to SharePoint 2010 without issue.

Mike Herrity recently did a post on delivering programs to all of our users through SharePoint 2007 so I thought I would do a quick follow up post with a bit more technical detail on how we achieved this.

  We have been using terminal services for about 9 years giving students and staff the ability to logon to our servers remotely and still get the same desktop experience as though they had logged on to a workstation at Twynham. So with the release of Server 2008 for me one of the best new features was remote programmes now I know that Citrix had been delivering remote apps for many years but this was beyond our pocket. After creating an RDP file it soon became very obvious that this was very easily delivered through our SharePoint Gateways.

 Below you can see the final RDP file when opened with notepad, this was very much an OOTB solution just requiring a document library to store the RDP files and a page setup up for users to find the programmes that we offered.

The situation we suffered before was that students who did not have access to Microsoft Office used to bring work in in varies formats that office could not open which meant the coursework deadlines where missed simply because they did not have Office installed at home. This situation no longer exists as if students do not have office they now know to logon to the gateway and use remote programmes. The spin off was that we can now offer faculty specific software a good example is the technology department who use 2D Design and Pro desktop two technical drawing packages that no students would have installed on their PC’s at home enabling staff to set homework tasks using this software.

 Delivering programmes through our SharePoint gateway will also enable us to deploy Office 2010 when it becomes available just by uninstalling Office 2007 and installing Office 2010 giving students access to the latest version of as soon as this appears on our licence site.

 Hands up who is fed up with navigating to “c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\bin\” just to use the STSADM tool?

 Well there is an easier way. Back in the day I used to use DOS “yes I am that old” Well I used to use Path statements in my autoexec.bat files which meant that I could run command line tools from anywhere in the file system. Now you can also do this in modern server systems by going to System properties – Environment Variables and then edit the path statement in system variables if you then add the path to STSADM in the Variable value and reboot your server you can then run the STSADM tool from a command prompt from any location in the file system. Easy to do and makes life so much easier.