January 23, 2012

Erik Swensson's book about Sharepoint Branding

Erik Swensson’b book about Sharepoint 2010 branding Today Erik Swensson’s book Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization came to our company. I am looking forward to read it. It’s about time to see alternatives to Randy’s starters.

January 23, 2012

Save an excel sheet as a clean table

To save an excel sheet as a html table is very easy. Just select the needed area, then go to Save as and check the selection and choose html as output format. It works fine. It even looks like it did in Excel. But what if you don’t want all this junk, you want only the plain html table (e.g. for pasting into WP). When I saved my permission levels to html, I used this javascript code. First open the html page which Excel has created in Chrome, open the Dev Tools console, load the latest jQuery into the page, and remove all unnecessary attributes and styling, remove the comments, after that you can just copy the outerHTML of the table and paste into a text editor:

January 23, 2012

OOTB permission levels in SharePoint

There are much info about standard permission levels in SharePoint. Here is my visualization for that. Just a little bit easier to find out the right permission level. Enjoy:

Full Control (FullMask)

Design

Contribute

Read

Limited Access

Restricted Reader

Manage Hierarchy

Approve

ViewListItems

AddListItems

EditListItems

DeleteListItems

ApproveItems

OpenItems

ViewVersions

DeleteVersions

CancelCheckout

ManagePersonalViews

ManageLists

ViewFormPages

Open

ViewPages

AddAndCustomizePages

ApplyThemeAndBorder

ApplyStyleSheets

ViewUsageData

CreateSSCSite

ManageSubWebs

CreateGroups

ManagePermissions

BrowseDirectories

BrowseUserInfo

AddDelPrivateWebParts

UpdatePersonalWebParts

ManageWeb

UseClientIntegration

January 23, 2012

Remove protected Organizational Units from AD

To remove a protected OU, go to ADUC (Active Directory Users and Computers), select the domain and enable “Advanced Features” in View. When Advanced Features are enabled, just right click you OU go to Properties -> Object and uncheck “Protect against accidential deletion”. Disable Advanced Features after that. By the way. When Advanced Features are enabled you can even see the distinguished Name of objects directly in ADUC UI.

January 22, 2012

Settings in Sharepoint_config database instead of appSettings

An alternative to store key-value paired properties in appSettings in web.config we can use Sharepoint_config database by creating our own SPPersistedObject. First we have to create a class which inherits from SPPersistedObject and decorate its properties with [Persisted]:

namespace Takana.SharePoint
{
    public class Settings: SPPersistedObject
    {
        \[Persisted\]
        public string DbConString;
 
        public LinkCheckerPersistedSettings() { }
        public LinkCheckerPersistedSettings(string name, SPPersistedObject parent) : base(name, parent) { }
    }
}
```Then we must create such an object. Let's do it in Powershell:

if(-not(Get-PSSnapin | Where { $_.Name -eq “Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell”})) { Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell }

January 22, 2012

Adding organizational units to AD through powershell

Want to create some organizational structure in AD, I suppose it is specifically useful in a development environment, well the best solution is powershell then. Mastering Powershell by and Powershell.nu by Niklas Goude provide examples how to do this.

$domain = \[ADSI\]""
$ou = $domain.Create("organizationalUnit", "OU=Administration")
$ou.SetInfo()
```Be sure you write "organizationalUnit" in lower case. Otherwise you'll get "Exception calling "SetInfo" with "0" argument(s): "The specified directory service attribute or value does not exist" when you invoke **$ou.setinfo()**. If you want to create an OU under another OU, just create $domain and specify the location: \[code language="powershell"\] $domain = \[ADSI\]"OU=Administration, dc=takana, dc=local" $company = $domain.Create("organizationalUnit", "OU=Accounting") $company.SetInfo()</pre> To save some other properties: <pre>$ou.put("Description", "this is a dummy ou") $ou.SetInfo() \[/code\]

#### Update 2013-12-10

In PowerShell V3 you have a built-in cmdlet for doing that once you add the Active Directory role in your server. It simple as that: \[code language="powershell"\] New-ADOrganizationalUnit "Accounting" -Path "dc=takana, dc=local" \[/code\]

January 22, 2012

Install a custom timer job in Powershell

First we have to create a class for our timer job which inherits SPTimerJobDefinition, build it and deploy it.

public class TakanaTimer : SPJobDefinition
{
	public TakanaTimer(){}
	public TakanaTimer(string jobName, SPService service,
		SPServer server, SPJobLockType targetType)
		: base(jobName, service, server, targetType) { }

	public TakanaTimer(string jobName, SPWebApplication webapp)
		: base(jobName, webapp, null, SPJobLockType.ContentDatabase)
	{
		Title = jobName;
	}
	public override void Execute(Guid contentDbId)
	{
		Log.Info("Running Takana Timer");
	}
}

There is a powershell example for this, but it has not been updated since MOSS.

January 22, 2012

Shrink sharepoint database

A Sharepoint Database can become big and have unused spaces. To shrink database go to CA-> Health Analyzer: http://takana:1337/Lists/HealthReports/AllItems.aspx See if there is a list item about unused space in db under the Availability. Click on Repair Automatically in the opened Modal Dialog:

January 22, 2012

Set ObjectTrackingEnabled = false when reading

In LINQ 2 SP we work with a data context. By default a data context has the property ObjectTrackingEnabled = true. This property is crucial for all other operations in CRUD except Read. I performed a mini experiment. I created 20 000 items in my task list. Every seventh item contains “pärla”. Allright, here is what I found out:

2857 / 20 000 items

ObjectTrackingEnabled = true

January 20, 2012

The new interface of wp.com is great.

The new interface of wp.com is great. For a while I had some considerations to migrate to tumblr, now I definitivly stay with wp. Now wp takes the best from itself, tumblr and twitter.