When Software Attacks!

Netware 6.5 on Hyper-V

As part of a customer project I needed to create a Netware environment for testing. It’s been a little while since I did any netware management and I quite enjoyed it. I did, however, encounter a couple of gotchas which I thought I’d write up for the greater good. Netware OS Installing the Netware OS was actually pretty straightforward. There are no integration services offered for Netware so from the outset I knew that I would need to use legacy hardware options in the virtual machine.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, August 14, 2008

Configuring ActiveSync on Windows Mobile for Exchange Push

I’m not certain how many of you will find this useful, but I had a question about configuring the Touch Diamond to talk to Exchange which I regrettably failed to notice. It’s an interesting point of debate, now I come to think of it. When I got my Diamond the first thing I did was confgigure ActiveSync directly on the device. Whilst I do connect to my laptop from time to time, I don’t actually have any real sync going on between the two, other than possible for OneNote and Notes.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

SharePoint Website Schematic

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider. After some of my colleagues pestered me to draw it again, I decided to create an electronic version, and since everybody seems to find it so useful I thought I’d post it here as well.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

Sometime ago we noticed an issue with My Tasks in Project Server. Certain users were unable to access My Tasks at all - they simply got a SharePoint error page. A little jiggery-pokery with callstack and custom errors later, we saw that the error referenced a GUID for a task. I then searched the Project Server Publishing DB for the task GUID and subsequently located the project to which it belonged.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

My apologies to Craig, who posted a comment to my earlier post about our FBA problems and I didn’t notice until today. To update you all on the situation, the fault is still with Microsoft and I have not yet received a hotfix. However, for anybody considering FBA in their deployment, I would not let this issue stop you. There are two reasons I say that: Normally with FBA you would extend the web application in question, having both FBA and Windows authentication available on the same content via different URLs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Workflow and SQL Error: Update

I posted last week about a couple of issues we were experiencing with SharePoint. I made some traction on the Workflow History issue at the end of last week and the revelation was pretty far-reaching, so I’m posting again. It turns out that the stuff I said about systemupdate was wrong… up to a point. There is a bug with systemupdate and triggering events, but it’s not the one we thought it was!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 14, 2008

Useful .Net Search and Replace tool

I need to update something like 300 web.config files today, with the same change in each. I turned to my old friend Google for his recommendations and up popped a magnificent free tool from Nodesoft. Why magnificent? It’s advanced mode allows you to specify start and end tags and update everything in between. That’s fantastic for dealing with big chunks of web.config files! Better yet, give it a file mask and a path and it will run through the entire folder tree if you like.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, July 5, 2008

Problems with Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint 2007

If you are using Forms Based Authentication and try to access Site Policies you may well find that you get an Access Denied response. If you do, this post will help you! I’ve been meaning to post this for a while because I’m sure it may help somebody. As usual, it’s been pushed back and back until now I finally have some time. I also have another, workflow-related post on another problem which will follow shortly.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

Workflow History and SQL Error

When trying to view an item in a list which has workflows run against it, you get an error: Some part of your SQL statement is nested too deeply. Rewrite the query or break it up into smaller queries Problem Background Trying to explain the exact nature of our configuration in this case would break many people’s heads. This, therefore, is a bit of a simplification. We have a custom webpart which allows users to log an enquiry.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 3, 2008

A great article on handy SharePoint controls

I don’t know about you, but I always mean to gather various bits of knowledge into one place, but just like tidying my filing at home, I never quite get around to it. Fortunately for me, Chris O’Brien is a bit more organised and in my ever expanding blogroll today I saw a great article about really useful SharePoint controls to use in custom pages for that handy bit of functionality.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 17, 2008