Technical-Tips | When Software Attacks!

Searching SharePoint through an IE8 Activity

IE8 Activities look cool. They’re almost like favlets from where I stand, but they offer a very simple way for users to access online services and pass simple parameters.

I decided I wanted to play, and we use SharePoint heavily here at Black Marble. The obvious thing to do was to create an activity which would allow the user to search for the selected text using SharePoint search.

Activities are defined through XML. Essentially, you give it a name, an icon and define the actions that can be performed. There are execute and preview actions, but the small preview window doesn’t really lend itself to SharePoint search (I tried!).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 6, 2008

Web development helpers: Redux

After posting yesterday about useful tools for development I stumbled across another little gem of a utility. IE7Pro is much more of a usability-enhancing tool but it has a wonderfully handy tool nestling within - Save Current Tab As Image. If you need to do grabs of pages for documentation or presentations and the page is more than a single screen in length this will transform your life - no more cropping and stitching!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 26, 2007

Web development little helpers

As web development gets more and more complex having the right tools to help you figure out what’s going on is essential. I thought I’d do a quick post on the ones I find most useful. In no particular order, then, here they are.

Virtual PC
This one is a godsend, because as we all know, running multiple versions of Internet Explorer is hard. VPC, now available as a free download from Microsoft, allows me to run the numerous variants of IE our clients require me to test against.
If you just want IE6, Microsoft have a handy downloadable pre-built VPC:
Download Virtual PC
Download the Internet Explorer Compatibility VPC Image

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 25, 2007

SharePoint problems with access rights

I spent a while knocking my head against a problem with a SharePoint server farm that’s worth posting about. It’s also worth a big hats-off to our Technical Support Coordinator at Microsoft Partner Support who dredged up the article that finally pointed us in the right direction.

The problem

I’ll post later about our approach to SharePoint installations, but I’ll summarise thus: We create multiple user accounts to the SharePoint services - a db access account, an installation account etc etc. In this instance we were building a three server setup - db server, web server, index server. The accounts were created first, logged in as a domain admin. I also installed SharePoint as the domain admin, but didn’t run the config wizard.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 18, 2007

X2100 IPMI Redux - success!

In hindsight I should have thought of it, but even if I had, others got there first.

You may remember my problems with IPMI on our X2100 servers from an earlier posting. Today I had cause to revisit the matter, as we’re having terrible issues with the Nvidia RAID on one of our servers.

The lack of a Windows version of IPMItool is still a pain, but I am leagues closer to a usable solution now, thanks to Cygwin. The solution, it turns out, whilst somewhat laborious, is fairly straightforward. Simply build IPMItool under cygwin. Result!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, February 20, 2007

When Software Attacks!