When Software Attacks!

Fujitsu Stylistic Q550: A Tablet for the Enterprise

Every now and again, whilst I’m away from the office, the gadget pixies visit my desk and leave something interesting for me to play with. It’s a bit like Bagpuss, except stuff works when it arrives and I can never get the guys to wake up when I need them too. The last time this happened there was a tablet sitting on my desk. I like it enough to write about it.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Streaming video to XBOX 360 from Windows Home Server 2011

This one threw me for a while and I could find nothing specific on the web. I wanted to use my Xbox 360 to watch video streamed from my Windows Home Server. Streaming is switched on by default, I hear you say. Why, yes it is, but each time I tried to connect the Xbox I received an error. The solution? Enable the Guest account on the server. Do this with care – revoke it’s access to everything except the folders you want to stream unless you want to allow read access to everything on the server.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, December 9, 2011

Displaying a SharePoint 2010 library on a page in a different site within the same site collection

One of our customers contacted us the other day with a problem. They wanted to put a view of a document library that was located in the top level site of a site collection onto the landing pages of all the second level sites in that collection. The customer had consulted the internet hive mind and found a blog post with instructions which had been diligently followed and yet whenever a user clicked ‘New’ on the ribbon bar an error occurred.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Fundaments of planning your beautiful SharePoint web site

This article is all about preparation. It’s about the thinking and planning you need to do if you’re going to successfully build your wonderful, unique and striking website on the SharePoint platform. I’ve been helping customers implement SharePoint solutions for quite a while. Life gets interesting when those customers want to use SharePoint to host their public website or an intranet of published content. SharePoint is a great platform with a host of powerful features that make it a solid choice for large or complex websites, sites that have to deal with large volumes of traffic or simply sites that need real business processes wrapped around the publishing model.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Making SharePoint 2010 search pages work with a proper master page

If you talk to those who know me about my pet hates in SharePoint, the search pages will come up every time. It’s not that I hate search itself – that’s great, but the minimal.master is just plain annoying. It makes the search centre a black hole into which you can fall but not navigate out of – there’s no navigation and the portal site connection doesn’t work. I’ve been meaning to get search working with a real master page (step forwards, v4.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, May 12, 2011

Content type replication not working on imported or migrated site collections

A while ago I posted about a hidden feature that was needed if you want to use Managed Metadata columns in your SharePoint 2010 sites. We were doing some 2007-2010 migration work for a client recently that also involved exporting and importing sites and site collections to rework the content structure. Once we’d got the new structure sorted we discovered that content type replication was not occurring on the site collections we had imported.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 4, 2011

Content Types programmatically added to SharePoint libraries not appearing on New menu

This one caused some consternation, I can tell you. As usual, the solution could be found on the great wide web, but it took some digging, so as usual I am repeating it here. As part of a SharePoint migration we did recently, we replaced a SharePoint 2007 feature that the client was using (which added content types to libraries from a central list) with a mix of content type replication and PowerShell to add the content types to the libraries.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 4, 2011

Avviso Page Templates and Editing Video

We’ve just put a video of the page templates and editing process up on the AvvisoSharePoint YouTube channel. Our plan is to add more videos over time to show the different things Avviso can do. Enjoy!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 21, 2011

Demonstrating Avviso at NEBytes on 23rd February 2011

avvisohead I am really chuffed to have been invited back to NEBytes for a follow-up to my last session on content publishing with SharePoint 2010. This time I’ll be demonstrating Avviso and talking about the thought processes that lead to its development, the problems we are trying to solve and where we’d like to go next. If you’d like more information about Avviso, take a look at my recent post.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Errors with TMG + Exchange Edge Connector + FPE resulting in rejected emails

Frustrating errors with little or no explanation… Once again I find myself wiring a blog post in order to save people the time we spent figuring out what was going on and getting help with our fault. We have Microsoft Threat Management Gateway installed at our perimeter. The Exchange 2010 Edge Connector is also installed as our mail gateway, and finally Forefront Protection for Exchange (FPE) deals with mail scanning. There are some gotchas that can trip you up when installing that lot, which I suppose I should put in another post, but the overall result is that you can manage the email filters (spam, malware etc) from within TMG’s console.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, January 26, 2011