Hardware Geeks

So one of my departments asked for a basic manual/guide on how to use sharepoint. So I wrote up a quick manual on the basics of sharepoint. Attached is a copy of what I came up with. I had to strip some of it out due to privacy concerns, but feel free to use it in your organizations or extend upon it. For end users (read: non-admins/developers) it should prve a handy guide to have.

SharePoint Manual

carry on...HardwareGeeks is not responsible if this image causes years of therapy… ;D

I got a nifty new project handed to me at work, investigating VMWare ACE to replace how we deploy pc’s. What VMWare has managed to do with ACE is, making a central repository of pc images that can be customized and distributed out to users on secure media. So your accounts rep can store his entire pc on a USB stick that follows him around and requires his credentials to login authenticated against your local DC (also works outside of AD but I use active directory). The contents can also optionally be encrypted. Additionally, the repository also acts as a management front end. I’ll be documenting my progress with it over the next few days.

I always forget how to do this very simple trick with data views so I’m going to blog about it. I have a list on the root site of my primary site collection with all the general purpose links for users that should go on every site. The way I propagate them out to the sub sites is through data views. So how do I achieve this? Lets see here…

I wrote a bit of code this morning to update an old web service I wrote that returns users from active directory along with some key data. If you’re interested in a web service that returns a users account name, phone, email and name read on for the sample! The code is fairly straightforward and self explanatory if you need help just respond back.

Vista has this nifty new feature that makes it so the default runas command doesn’t work in domain environments. By default it’s now set to only use the local administrator account of the machine rather than an option for any account local or domain as it did before. So, how to work around this little feature you ask. Read on to find out.

So today I had a stupid sharepoint bug, intermittently the homepage would lock up on load for users. So I log into the server and check things out and happen across the IIS Manager where I noticed nothing showed and I got an erroneous error message of “the path specified cannot be used at this time”. This is course was a useless message so I went ahead and did a forced IISRESET /RESTART this did nothing. I then went and dived into the windows application event log. Here I noticed the SharePoint Admin service was locked up, went into services and restarted it and everything is copacetic again and IIS loads fine now. Why the sharepoint admin service would be tied to displaying web applications and application pools in the IIS Admin I DO NOT KNOW.

So this is an old gripe of mine with SharePoint, it doesn’t set all the permissions it needs by default. This is shown through tons of Windows Error Log entries that look like this:

Application Server job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance (e085fa0b-2cae-4a45-9feb-db5b06c1fbec).
Reason: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed due to the following error: 80070005.
Techinal Support Details:
System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230} failed due to the following error: 80070005.

This is easy to fix. Read on to see how.

So today I went to make a simple database based (that sounds weird but whatever), form in InfoPath for reporting security incidents, but InfoPath misread the datatype of my UID field which I had as a datetime time stamp of now(). It instead read it as simpleType with HEX data. This would cause the form to not submit properly, not tell the user it didn’t submit and change the formatting of the data. So I went in and hand edited the field type. Read on to find out how to hand edit field types in InfoPath.