SharePoint 2010 – Here we come!

Glyn Clough, Solutions Consultant

We’ve just heard about the official launch date of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, along with the other Office 2010 applications. To businesses, SharePoint will be available from May 12, 2010. To general consumers it will be available in June.

We’ve been working with the new version of the SharePoint product since the Technical Preview stage through to the current Release Candidate stage and are fortunate enough to have been working on several fantastic Proof of Concept projects with some of our clients already. We’re delighted that we now have a firm date in the public domain so that we can plan with our clients how we are going to make the most out of this new release and see all the great new features in action.

Hyphens in domain names get trimmed from account names in SharePoint 2010 User Profile Import

Tristan Watkins, Infrastructure Consultant
We've identified that the user profile import in the SharePoint 2010 public beta can't handle hyphens in domain names. The import will succeed but the portion of the domain name preceding the hyphen will get trimmed. When a user logs on a new profile is created but it is orphaned from the imported data. In principal we've been able to work around this by migrating the user profiles with STSADM (thanks to my colleague Martin Hatch for the suggestion) but we haven't put this approach to the test over a sufficient period of time to be able to recommend it firmly yet. We also don't have a mechanism for triggering the update for newly-imported users but it shouldn't be rocket science to come up with a solution to that problem for the duration of the beta.

Microsoft have confirmed this is a problem in the SharePoint 2010 public beta and that a fix will be included in the next release. Their response was on a closed beta forum, so I can't include that detail here, but this is my description from MSDN:

Understanding SharePoint Application Security and Elevating Privileges

Martin Hatch, Solutions Architect

This post was prompted because of a particularly challenging bit of security that I needed to traverse. I needed some way of presenting the status of a Content Deployment Job (configured in Central Administration) in the Web Application that it relates to.

Seems pretty straight forward?
Well, its not, and this article will hopefully explain why.

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment - Part VI: Issues and Results

Tristan Watkins, Infrastructure Consultant
In the first five parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build, automated deployment and the guest virtual machine build. In this post I review some of the questions and issues we've encountered after a few months of working this way and some overall reflections on the approach.

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment - Part V: Guest Build

Tristan Watkins, Infrastructure Consultant
In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.

Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?

In short, we're working on it. I've produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we're not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally...

Building Accessible SharePoint Systems - SharePoint User Group UK

Glyn Clough, Solutions Consultant

Last night it was good to see Martin Hatch presenting at the SharePoint User Group in London. Martin is a Solution Architect and a colleague of mine at Content and Code who has worked extensively on building accessible SharePoint solutions - most recently for the Royal National Institute of Blind People.

Key highlights for me were the use of Rendering Templates and Control Adapters to override out of the box controls and how they are displayed and function. These techniques can be used on both MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010, and are not solely aimed at delivering accessibility improvements.

Martin has now made available the materials from his presentation:

• PowerPoint Slides (2007 – 2010 format) (.pptx)
• PowerPoint Slides (97 – 03 format) (.ppt)
• Sample Code – SUGUK Visual Studio 2010 Solution (.zip)
• Sample Code – Control Adapters (.zip)

If you would like to read more about Martin’s work with the RNIB and the SharePoint Accessibility Solution (SAS) from Content and Code please see the accessibility section of our website.

[Also posted on Glyn’s personal blog]

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part IV: Automated deployment

Tristan Watkins, Infrastructure Consultant
In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there's a lot to cover.
Before I begin, I need to reiterate a "gotcha" that I stumbled across during the pilot. If you're thinking of testing this out by adding the Windows Deployment Services role to a machine that's using Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), think again. They don't play nicely together. Rather, you'll be able to deploy the physical machines but any ICS recipient network adapters will be left without connectivity. If you only have one physical machine for testing, consider deploying WDS to a new virtual machine or adding the role within an existing virtual machine.