Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

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   

  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

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.

Yesterday 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)

Sam ‘pinkpetrol’ Dolan

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

   Last year I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at the learning gateway conference in Birmingham and this year myself and Chris will be speaking at the conference, this year also looks bigger and better. The conference itself will be based in London at the Church house conference centre . This year the conference has been split into 3 tracks:-

Building and maintaining The Learning Gateway

• Understanding SharePoint 2010
• Branding
• Patching SharePoint and Preparing your SharePoint 2007 for 2010
• A Look At Live@edu
• Virtualization

User Adoption

• 2010 Social Networking Features
• Encouraging user adoption & quick wins
• SharePoint 2010 for Education
• Integrating InfoPath Forms
• SharePoint Learning Kit

School Stories

• Parental Engagement
• How we drove adoption
• Hosted SharePoint
• How we use our in-school SharePoint
• Replacement of the File Server

I will be running a session on installing SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 in a virtualized HyperV environment and Chris’s session is focusing on branding your SharePoint 2010, Speakers so far confirmed include

Alan Richards

Alex Pearce MVP

Chris Rothwell

Neil Hodgkinson

Mark Leighton

Richard Willis

Steve Smith MVP

And still more to be confirmed.

The cost for the day is £150 per delegate more details can be found at the conference website and if you do get along please pop into mine or Chris’s session and say hello.

 Dave

 Today I received an email from Microsoft stating that the next Worldwide SharePoint conference will be held in Anaheim California October 3^rd – 6^th 2011. Now I have been lucky enough to attend 2 SharePoint conferences so far and I can tell you they really are superb events so start saving and save the date and hopefully see you there. More detail can be found here

As you may know last week I gave a presentation at Microsoft Reading as part of a series of events showcasing SharePoint 2010, one of the slides in the deck was on the thorny subject of licencing prices, now I know from past experience that this is always a shall we say “lively” subject and I am also aware from the consultancy visits we have done over the past couple of years one of the most confusing and troublesome areas when it comes to making the decision to rollout SharePoint in an education establishment. So I thought I would be brave (Some would say fool hardy) and write this article on education prices for SharePoint 2010 in the UK and I hope that this goes someway to helping people decide and also clears up some confusion that seems to exist in the licencing world.

  I would also be very interested in hearing about education prices for this product worldwide so that I can update this post with more information and hopefully create a one stop shop before people plunge into the murky world of SharePoint licencing so any info gratefully received please comment or email me at dave@sharepointedutech.com .

 So here goes (Deep Breath) all of these prices I have gathered from the Ramesys website here there are of course many licence resellers available but the Ramesys site was the easiest to find the product details.

 You will require a SharePoint server licence which retails at £560.12 you then get a choice of device CALS or user CALS you DO NOT need both user CALS for adult or members of staff are £11.95 each and for your students that are going to use SharePoint £0.89p each, device CALS are also £11.95 each, another common misconception for schools is the need to purchase the internet connector licence this sells for between £4500 and £5000 and is another component that is not required by schools, Ray Fleming from Microsoft has also written a blog post to cover this and included a link to a document that covers the exemption of schools for the need of the internet connector licence here

 Also covered by your schools SharePoint licencing is parent logins these parents/guardians do not require user CALS and are covered by this letter from Microsoft here

So to summarise I have created a table of licencing for a fictitious school with 1000 pupils and 150 staff.

 There are also many ways to licence your school with Microsoft products including the Schools agreement or Campus agreement all of the prices I have shown here are based on perpetual select licence prices. More details can also be found at Ray’s blog post on SharePoint licencing here

A quick update:- Some questions where asked today via twitter about hosting a website on SharePoint and the internet connector licence well Ray Fleming came to the rescue with this information “You don’t need an external connector for a SharePoint school website unless people login. It’s fine for anonymous”

Todays Update (20/5/2010)

After looking into this a little more, it seems that a few things have changed with SharePoint 2010 licensing. As that’s just been released, I’m going to look into the changes, and then I’ll let you know how it affects this summary Dave.

I appreciate you taking the time to describe this simply, because I am sure there are lots of schools with similar questions up and down the country.

Ray

Today myself and Alan Richards from West Hatch presented a session at Microsoft Reading on different options for upgrade or migration with SharePoint 2010 and also had a great debate on virtualization using Hyper-V, and again should it be a wholly virtual environment or a mixture of both. We are presenting at 3 more SPEDU sessions over the coming couple of months but I thought I would share the slide deck with you that we used today. Any questions please contact myself or Alan via twitter, Chris also presented a session on SharePoint branding with Matt Hughes and their presentation can be found here