Archive for category: SharePoint

You will need to download Office Web Apps from the Microsoft Download Site.  This download is available to Volume licensing customers or those with TechNet and MSDN subscriptions.  Let’s begin by launching the setup.exe and entering our product key;

Accept the licensing terms.

Click Continue

Choose a file location for installation.  Ensure you select a drive with adequate free space for your Data partition which stores the Office Web Apps search index files.

Click Install Now

Upon successful installation, you will be greeted with the “Run Configuration Wizard” window.  We will immediately run the configuration wizard by leaving the checkbox ticked and clicking close.  You can also achieve the same by running PSConfig.  Both methods will register the Office Web Apps services.

Click Close to Run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard.

Click Next and click Yes to acknowledging the restart of the IIS, SharePoint Administration, and Timer Services.

Click Next

Click Finish to acknowledge the successful configuration.

You will then receive the below Central Administration screen regarding configuring your SharePoint farm.  Because we have been configuring each service application one by one as needed (best practice) we will click cancel and proceed to activate the Office Web Apps services individually.

Provisioning the Office Web Apps Service Applications

Let’s begin by starting the relevant Office Web Apps services located under Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on a server.

Scroll down until you locate all of the Office Web Apps specific services, namely Excel Calculation Services, PowerPoint Service and Word Viewing Service.  Click Start for each respective service.

Let’s now navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage service applications.

Click on New / Word View Service

Enter the following details to complete the creation of the Word Viewing Service Application.  Ensure that you select “SharePoint Web Services System” from the Use existing application pool option.

Click OK

Your service application will then proceed with the creation process and will be listed with our previously provisioned service applications.

You can now further provision the “Excel Services Application” and “PowerPoint Service Application” in the same manner following the above steps.  Please note that there isn’t a separate service application for OneNote.

Activating Office Web Apps

Depending on where you want the feature activated, you will venture to your Site Collection(s) and activate each one individually or you can utilize PowerShell to activate multiple site collections at once within a single script.

From within your SharePoint Site, click on Site Actions / Site Settings.

Under Site Collection Administration, click on Site Collection Features.

Navigate down the page until you find Office Web Apps and click on Activate.

Faster loading websites are the need of the day as even a minor delay in the website response could cause frustration on the visitors part. Faster websites lead to happy users which in turn lead to increased business. A study by Google reveals that visitors spend less time on websites that are slow.

With our experience in building internet websites with Sharepoint, we have acquired knowledge of several techniques that will greatly improve the website performance. Some of the techniques are listed below

1. Setup compression at web server level

2. Setup caching at web server level

3. Remove Core.js and other scripts that are used internally Sharepoint but required for anonymous users

4. Remove unwanted styles and markups from Sharepoint master page

5. Remove unwanted images

6. Minify Javascript files and style sheets

7. Use CSS sprites

8. Remove unwanted web parts

After applying the performance enhancement techniques the speed of Sharepoint internet websites has increased drastically. If you want IOTAP to help you with improving your Sharepoint website performance drop in an email to [email protected]

Every SharePoint developer who has worked with extensively with data view web part in SharePoint Designer would have encountered the below misleading error at least once

“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.”

There are several solutions out there in the web for this error like the ones listed below but none of them are sure shot fixes

http://blogs.msdn.com/spdsupport/archive/2008/06/06/how-to-fix-error-unable-to-display-this-web-part-on-data-views-after-restoring-site-from-backup.aspx

After having tried out several solutions with no luck we tried to copy the data source from a newly created data view and replace the data source in the erroneous data view. Gotcha this worked.  Below are the steps we did,

1. Create a new page in SharePoint designer.

2. Add a data view web part to the new page and set the data source as the same list or library that the erroneous data view uses.

3. Switch to the code view.

3. Open the page with the erroneous data view in code view mode.

4. Copy the data source element from the data view in new page

5. Replace the data source element of the erroneous data view with the copied data source element

Purpose of Colligo Reader for SharePoint:

Colligo enables you to easily download content from SharePoint sites to your laptop or machine so you can access the content offline such as document libraries offline, Get read-access to document and forms, view customs and standard lists, Access events, issues, links, contacts, tasks and agendas rather than having to copy files one by one through a browser. The reader is a client-only application – no server modifications are required. Colligo Reader works with all shipping versions of SharePoint, including Windows^® SharePoint^® Services (WSS 3.0 & 2.0), Microsoft^® Office SharePoint^® Server (MOSS 2007), and SharePoint^®Portal Server (SPS 2003).

Installation:

Download the Colligo Reader for SharePoint and install it.

Written By,

A.Ramu

What Can Best Practice Analyzer for WSS/MOSS do?

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System creates detailed reports to help administrators achieve greater performance, scalability, and uptime.

Install Best Practice Analyzer for WSS and MOSS 2007:

1. Download the best practice analyzer from the following URL.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cb944b27-9d6b-4a1f-b3e1-778efda07df8&displaylang=en

2. Create the BPA folder on C drive.

3. Now run the downloaded file that Extracted to the C:\BPA folder.

Now we are going to execute the best practice analyzer on WSS/MOSS using the command.

4. Start -> RUN-> CMD and type the following command.

Cd C:\BPA

Where C:\BPA is the location that contains the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. (If the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System is in a different location, replace C:\BPA with that location.

5. Type the following command, and then press ENTER:
sharepointbpa.exe -cmd analyze -substitutions SERVER_NAME CentralAdministrationServer

where “CentralAdministrationServer” is the server name for your SharePoint Central Administration.
It is important that SERVER_NAME is included in the parameters capitalized and that CentralAdministratorServer is replaced with the server name that is running SharePoint Central Administration.

6. After the analysis is complete, open sharepointbpa.report.htm in a web browser.
sharepointbpa.report.htm will be in the same location that the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System was installed.

7. Exit the command. Now on the report HTML page, you will get available Error on your server and warning message with a solution.

8. Find the Problem and resolve it one by one.

Written by

A.Ramu