When Software Attacks!

Enabling the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature to fix ManagedMetadata Column errors

We’re working on a solution at the moment that uses a custom site definition. For various reasons we stated with the Blank Site definition and worked from there. Our customisations include content types using custom columns that link to managed metadata term sets. We create all those through features – great! The tricky bit came when after deployment our managed metadata columns were greyed out. Examining the column we say an error telling us that the feature supporting the functionality was not activated.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 11, 2010

Speaking at NeBytes in November on SharePoint for Content Publishing

On the 17th of November I’ll be keeping Richard company on the drive up to Newcastle to speak at the NEBytes user group. My session will be a shortened version of the Using SharePoint for Content publishing I will deliver at the Black Marble event on November 3rd. I will be showing what can be done with SharePoint 2010 when the brief is for a content publishing site, be it internet- or intranet-facing and I will talk about the things we have learned along the way whilst delivering such projects – things to avoid as well as things that work well.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Living with the Acer Aspire 1420P

This blog has been a very quiet place for a long time now, reflecting somewhat how busy I have been elsewhere. During this period of heavy work I have found a new friend in my Aspire 1420P. In some ways it’s sad – my trusty and reliable Dell Mini 9 has been neglected in favour of a younger, sexier model. tablet mode The 1420P is the production model Acer convertible tablet, a variant of which was given to all Microsoft PDC conference attendees last year.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, October 22, 2010

Powershell script to rename files for use as SharePoint 2010 User Profile thumbnails

User profile photos have changed in SharePoint 2010 in that they are now stored in a single image library in the MySite Host root site collection. They have also changed in that when you change the profile photo, SharePoint takes the file and creates three new images at specific sizes, then discards the file you gave it. These files have specific names to link them to the user account and come in small, medium and large flavours.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 29, 2010

Thoughts on the BCS EGM

Stepping along the path ploughed by Richard and Robert, I thought I’d try to order my thoughts on the BCS EGM through a blog post. Like Richard, I am (as I begin writing) uncertain as to my final leaning on this, although I have clear views on some of the issues. Democracy In Action One of the most important, in my view, is one which might be missed by many. Should the membership vote in favour of the Board of Trustees they are also strongly encouraged to change the bye-laws of the Royal Charter to stop this happening again.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, June 9, 2010

It works! 8Gb RAM in my Acer TravelMate 6593

I thought I’d post this because so many like me might benefit from my experiment. We have a number of Acer TravelMate 6593 laptops here at Black Marble. They’re great machines – plenty of grunt, a lovely screen and most of the toys you could need in a laptop that’s used for a mix of IT admin, dev and technical sales (including demos). The only downside is that they only ship with up to 4Gb of memory, and Acer say it won’t take more.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Solving a mystery: Windows 7 games won’t work on HP TouchSmart TX2

This one has been nagging at me for a long time. My grandmother has an HP TouchSmart TX2 tablet. It was bought with Windows Vista, but as with her main computer, I upgraded it to Windows 7. It was a good plan – Windows 7 should make it perform better, and the touch capabilities of 7 are better than Vista. There was, however, a small matter of the N-Trig digitiser drivers not being great at point of release – something which would lead me down the wrong path over the problems I encountered.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, May 1, 2010

Unable to remote control Hyper-V VM after installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

True to form, you only discover something isn’t working when you’re in a desperate hurry. We use lots of Hyper-V VMs here at Black Marble and they are mostly running on our four node cluster. I use Failover Cluster Manager and this morning I couldn’t connect remotely to any of the Hyper-V VMs. I kept getting an error: Virtual Machine Connection: A connection will not be made because credentials may not be sent to the remote computer.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, April 30, 2010

Fixing SharePoint 2007 IIS WAMREG DCOM 10016 activation errors on Server 2008 R2

Anybody who works will SharePoint will grumble if you mention DCOM activation permissions. No matter how hard we try, how many patches we install (or how hard we try to ignore it), granting activation and launch permissions to the SharePoint service accounts is like plugging a dike with water-soluble filler. On Server 2008 R2 our job is made that much harder by the fact that, by default, even administrators can’t edit the security settings for the IIS WAMREG service (GUID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}, for when you see it in your application event log).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 8, 2010

Social Networking: The double-edged sword of maintaining an online presence

Exploring the new frontier I’m writing this post whilst watching my Windows Home Server slowly copy data onto an external drive. I mention that not because of its pertinence, but to indicate why I found myself having time to join Facebook. The other reason was the excellent session given by Eileen Brown at our most recent event. After Eileen had finished admonishing me for not taking my online presence (and therefore reputation) seriously enough I took the step of installing the Twitter Notify plugin for Live Writer so I could connect two of my online personas together.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, January 31, 2010