​It's been out since 2009, but I haven't spent the time until now to play around with Microsoft's ULS Viewer.  For those of you that have dug around in the ULS log files SharePoint puts in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS, you'll really appreciate this tool.  Basically it will read in those log files and parse them, presenting them ina nice tabular format.  Once you have them in that format, the tool makes it easy to sort, filter, and analyze them.

While not officially supported by Microsoft, it is available on their site at http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer.  There is no install, it is just an executable that you run.  You don't need to run it from the server if you have a network share to the ULS logs.

There's lots you can do with the tool.  One of my favourite features is the ability to filter, particularly by correclation ID.  When you get the dreaded "Unkown error" with a correlation ID, it is easy to track those down and analyze them.  You simply do the following:

1. Launch the ULS Viewer
2. File - Open From - ULS
3. Enter the path for the ULS logs of they are remote
4. Edit - Modify Filter
5. Choose Correlation and enter the ID to filter by

The other nice thing is the tool is real time, and will continue to bring in new entries live from the log files.  Of course there are lots more features that are easy to explore through.

Day One of TechDays 2011 in Vancouver is done now too, and both my sessions went very well.  Damir from Microsoft will be making the recorded sessions available, which I'll re-post as soon as we get them.  For those of you in the Montreal area, I will also be delivering this talk at that TechDays, on Nov 29-30. 

TechDays 2011 - CLB379 - SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication

As promised I'm providing a lot of the content I showed.  This includes a new Excel worksheets for planning out SharePoint FBA and ADFS implementations that actually generates the required web.config entries and PowerShell script needed to complete the installation.  Check them out here:

• TechDays 2011 - CLB379 - SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication
• LAB SQL FBA Configuration Checklist.zip
• ADFS Configuration Checklist.zip

TechDays 2011 - CLB376 - Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2010, On-Premise and in the Cloud

Here's the TechDays 2011 - CLB376 - Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2010, On-Premise and in the Cloud presentation.

The Toronto SharePoint Camp was a great success.  We had lots of great speakers and attendees out.  For more details on the event, please visit http://tspug.sharepointspace.com.  You can also check out pictures from the event on my post at Toronto SharePoint Camp 2011 Pictures

As promised I'm providing a lot of the content I showed.  This includes a new Excel worksheet for planning out SharePoint ADFS implements that actually generates the required PowerShell script needed to complete the installation.  Check them out here:

• Toronto SharePoint Camp - 5.2 - SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication.pdf
• LAB SQL FBA Configuration Checklist.zip
• ADFS Configuration Checklist.zip

For those of you in the Vancouver and Montreal areas, I will also be delivering this talk at those TechDays, on November 15-16, and 29-30, respectively.

​

Saturday November 12, 2011

Come out to a free SharePoint Camp at the Manulife Centre in Toronto.  Envision IT is a sponsor for this year's event, and I will be speaking ​on SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication. For details and to register, visit http://tspug.sharepointspace.com.

Day One of TechDays 2011 in Toronto is wrapped, and my session on SharePoint Extranets went very well. Good feedback from the audience at the Congress Centre.

Damir from Microsoft will be making the recorded sessions available, which I'll re-post as soon as we get them. In the meantime, here's the TechDays 2011 - CLB379 - SharePoint 2010 Extranets and Authentication presentation.

More importantly for many, as promised I'm also including a copy of the LAB SQL FBA Configuration Checklist Excel that I demonstrated in the session. It helps organize the implementation of forms-based authentication in SharePoint 2010.

For those of you in the Vancouver and Montreal areas, I will also be delivering this talk at those TechDays, on November 15-16, and 29-30, respectively.

Day One of TechDays 2011 in Toronto is wrapped, and my session on Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 went very well. Good feedback from the audience at the Congress Centre.

Damir from Microsoft will be making the recorded sessions available, which I'll re-post as soon as we get them. In the meantime, here's the TechDays 2011 - CLB376 - Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2010, On-Premise and in the Cloud presentation.

For those of you in the Vancouver and Montreal areas, I will also be delivering this talk at those TechDays, on November 15-16, and 29-30, respectively.

I've attended all of the SharePoint Conferences over the years, but this year's conference in Anaheim was special on two fronts.  It was a first time for us to be exhibiting on the show floor as we launched out the new brand on our products side of the business, and I was speaking for the first time at the conference.

I've spoken at numerous other events and confierences before, but SharePoint Conference was by far the biggest.  7,400 attendees from around the world is a big number, even if they are running up to 14 different tracks at the same time.  For the session the room was big, as was the crowd.

I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Brad Freels, who is a Senior Collaboration Technology Specialist with Microsoft US.  The title of our talk was "With SharePoint Your Extranet is Easy".  Brad took the front part of the talk to walk through the different types of Extranets and the decision points related to their complexity, and presented a roadmap for determining what is involved in implementing an Extranet.  I then took over and focused on how you provision Extranet users, and walked through a case study of our Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada project.

A copy of the presentation is available for viewing at SPC251 - With SharePoint Your Extranet is Easy.

We've been doing a fair bit of research lately on how better to deal with sessions on a forms-based authentication site.  By default SharePoint creates a fixed 10 hour session using a permanent cookie that persists beyond the browser session.  This means that even if you close all your browser windows and re-open it, you session is persisted and you are still logged in.  The only way to logout is to explicitly do so.

While session persistence has some benefits, particularly around single sign-on and Office integration (you don't need to re-athenticate as you launch Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. from SharePoint), it has some drawbacks from a security perspective.  If your Extranet is more about providing a secure web experience than Office integration, you probably don't want the persistent session.  Thankfully there is an easy solution to the session persistence, in the form of a number of PowerShell  commands we'll get to in a minute.

The other part of the problem is the 10 hour session.  Again this is convenient, but not neccessarily best practice for all secure Extranets.  You can shorten the session, but what we found was that it didn't slide.  What this means is if you shorten it to 10 minutes, at 10 minutes your session will expire and you'll be force to re-authenticate, even if you were constantly using the site throughout those 10 minutes.  What we wanted was for the session to expire after 10 minutes of inactivity.

I'm sure many people have already installed SP1, but I thouoght it would be a good idea to put the file locations and steps down in one place, if only for our staff and customers to be able to refer to.  Bear in mind that these steps are for simple installations, typically with just a single web front end and a separate SQL Server.

As with any update, this should be tested prior to applying to a production system.  These updates cannot be backed out, and they update not only the binaries on the disk, but also the structue and content of the content databases themselves.

It's been a while since I've posted. It hasn't been for lack of things to write about, but rather a lack of time. Hopefully I'll be able to address that over the next while.

I've been working on a better way to publish video content in SharePoint for some time now. Sure there is a Silverlight video player web part, but it doesn't address all the platforms that may be consuming that content. Silverlight is a great video streaming client, but it only works on PC and Mac browsers. With tablets and mobile exploding, we need to support them as well.

I started thinking about ow best to support video, and naturally that needed to work in HTML5 support. The latest browsers for the most part all support video in HTML5, both on PC/Mac platforms and mobile/tablet. The question was how to tailor the page to the device, and also support older browsers and devices.

I decided to support the following hierarchy of players in the page that I was designing.

• Silverlight
• HTML5
• Flash

So you've got a public-facing web site built on SharePoint 2010, and you'd like to use the surveys to poll anonymous users.  How do you go about doing that?  Well there's a number of different things you need to do.

The first step of course is to create your survey.  Go ahead and create a new survey (typically from the View All Site Content page).  Setup your questions and defaults, and make sure everything looks good from that perspective.

You would think that your next step is to setup permission.  Actually it isn't.  Before you can do that, you need to turn off the ViewFormPagesLockDown hidden feature that is turned on by default on publishing sites.  Now don't worry, we're not going to leave it off, as that opens a big security hole on your publishing sites.  We just need to turn it off temporarily.  To do that, run the following command on your farm.

For those of you that didn't get a chance to get out to SharePoint Saturday in Mississauga in December, I repeated the Extranet session in a webinar today.  I've posted a PDF version of the deck.  Look for the video shortly.

You can check out the other presentations and videos at http://bit.ly/spstoweb-assets.  For details on the webinar series go to http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/toronto/default.aspx.

As we see more and more public web sites being launched on SharePoint 2010, mobile support is becoming a hot issue on those sites.  Depending on your approach, you may want to create a simplified version of your site targeted to mobile devices, or you may just want your site to render as normal on mobile devices.

The first approach of a targeted site I'll save for a later date.  We've done this for one of the sites we built for CAMH at www.problemgambling.ca.  If you visit the site on a mobile device, you'll see a significantly simplified site targeted to mobile.  You can still reach the full site, but the default is the mobile version.

In the second approach you just want your site to render on mobile devices.  In both scenarios actually, SharePoint tries to outsmart you to your detriment.  It detects a mobile device, and tries to redirect you to SharePoint's mobile version.  This really only applies to lists and libraries on collaboration sites, and typically gives a 401 Unauthorized on a public site.

I know it's long after the event, but I just got back onto the TechDays 2010 site and noticed that the videos from the Toronto sessions are available there now.  You can go to http://www.microsoft.com/canada/techdays/online/tab-2.aspx and see the session the Bill Brockbank and I delivered titled CLB372: Upgrading Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010.