Atlanta .NET Regular Guys

Matt Ranlett - reselected as a SharePoint Server MVP

Thanks to a year's worth of hard work and some fantastic support from my family, friends, and colleagues, I have been reselected by Microsoft as a SharePoint Server MVP.  This acknowledgement is extremely gratifying and encouraging as it is in recognition of countless SharePoint focused Twitter posts, magazine articles, blog entries, books (authored and reviewed), forum posts, and in person presentations and conversations.  As honored as I am to have my contributions recognized, I feel that this is a call for me to get a bit more focused in the future with higher quality (and quantity given my recent track record) blog posts and speaking engagements.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make me who I am today!

Protecting SharePoint with System Center Data Protection Manager

This is one of those posts where the main target is myself.  Today a coworker of mine ran into some trouble getting SC DPM to install properly.  The problem turned out to be a permissions issue which is detailed on a TechNet page that seems to be a bit disconnected from the rest of the directions.

Matt Beaver wrote up an extremely easy to follow, concise set of directions for configuring DPM here - http://mattbeaver2002.spaces.live.com/default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=73386213

The missing permissions in our environment came into play during the “Registering the WSS Writer Service” section.  As you are attempting to run the configuresharepoint.exe commandline utility, keep the following guidance in mind(Technet):

I hope this helps you as it helped me!

Atlanta SharePoint User Group meeting next Monday (6/15/2009)

Home - Atlanta SharePoint User Group

Come hear Tom Scott talk about “SharePoint Infrastructure Planning and Considerations” and Michael Lotter talk about “Building Browser Based InfoPath Forms for the Enterprise”

Atlanta SharePoint User Group

The second meeting of this new monthly User Group is next Monday. Head over to the Atlanta SharePoint User Group website and join the dozens other individuals who have registered.  The meeting topic will focus on the development process and experience and will feature our illustrious leader Mr. Attis discussing how to build a proper development environment.  We look forward to seeing you there!

SharePoint Saturday Atlanta Registration Open

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’, on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at the Microsoft Office on Sanctuary Pkwy in Alpharetta, GA.  SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.  SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

Michael Lotter and Dan Attis are happy to announce that registration is now open.  If Atlanta follows the trend as other SharePoint Saturday events registration will fill up quickly.  So don't delay and register today. 

http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=136991

Lot’s of great talent from Atlanta will be speaking Brendon Schwartz, Doug Ware, Matt Ranlett as well as many more!  Some great out of town guests too Joel Oleson and John Holiday

Migrate SharePoint 2007 content between farms effortlessly

I love it when tools work exactly right.  This was so simple to do once I had the tool installed correctly I just had to blog about it.

I was faced with the requirement of migrating SOME but not all of the lists and document libraries from one SharePoint 2007 farm to another SharePoint 2007 farm and I had to preserve ALL of the security settings and user created alerts.  However, there were certain things which had to be left behind.  So I turned to AvePoint and a trial version of the DocAve 5.0 Administration Suite’s Content Manager.  This tool was brilliantly simple to configure and use to instantly move content between the farms.

Notes:

• I was migrating content inside of the same AD domain.  There is a domain and user mapper utility (seen near the top of the screen in the screenshot) but I was not required to use it
• I had to call support twice to work out an issue where my chosen service account didn’t have the right credentials on the required servers, but after the IT department straightened out my security I was able to do the rest myself.  Credit goes to the AvePoint support team and Mr. Dae and Ms. Chan for their excellent off-hours help.
• The content migration service account needed to be a farm admin on both farms and a local admin on the web servers and DB servers.  Once this was set correctly, I received no errors and my content is in place EXACTLY how I wanted it.

Social Computing and SharePoint - Houston SharePoint User Group presentation

This past Wednesday (Oct 15) I was the featured presenter at the Houston SharePoint User Group.  I gave a well received presentation on Social Computing in SharePoint and how the Web 2.0 ideas can be used in combination with SharePoint to bring real business value to the enterprise.  Due to time limitations, I broke the slide deck into two parts (in case I couldn't get to the second part).  I've posted the slide decks online along with the demos I talked about.  During the presentation, I only managed to get through the Wiki walkthrough.

About fifty people showed up, based on my rough eyeballing of the room.  I was able to convince some members of the audience that I was serious about having an interactive presentation and managed to get some great feedback during the presentation.

It was great to meet everyone there and I'm sure that I'll be back.

* cross-post with SharePointGuys blog

Presenting at the Houston SharePoint User Group tonight

I'll be presenting at the Houston SharePoint User Group tonight, for anyone who knows me in that area.

Great news Andrew Connell is coming to Atlanta to teach WCM

Here is the information I received from AC.

I’m pleased to help announce that there will be a local (Atlanta) training class for SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management. The instructor for this class is Andrew Connell, who is one of the world’s leading trainers for MOSS 2007 Web Content Management & recently released the first and only book on the subject: Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development. Andrew was also a renowned specialist in the previous Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 and 2002 technologies.

This isn't like other classes that hire contractors to write their courses, this course was written and developed 100% by the instructor, Andrew Connell. The class covers virtually all development topics related to WCM / Publishing sites such as building master pages, page layouts, field types & controls, Web Parts and custom workflows. In addition, it also covers creating multilingual sites using variations, performance enhancing techniques required for Internet-facing SharePoint sites, extending the authoring experience and security.

While the course does demonstrate and teach you how to use tools such as Office SharePoint Designer 2007 in creating master pages, page layouts and custom workflows, but students are taken a step further in understanding SharePoint customization vs. development. Along this concept, students will learn how to create all these different things (master pages, page layouts, custom workflows) as well as site columns, content types, list templates & instances among other things using Features and solutions. This latter approach makes life much easier for developers and WCM site implementers to move their custom code and layout files to other members of their development team as well as from development to user acceptance to staging and ultimately onto production.

Here's a list of the modules in the course:

1. WSS Development Primer
2. Web Content Management Architecture
3. Authentication & Authorization
4. Master Pages & Navigation
5. Creating Custom Page Layouts
6. Extending the Out-Of-The-Box Authoring Experience
7. Leveraging WCM & Custom Web Parts
8. Custom Field Types & Field Controls
9. Performance Tuning Publishing Sites
10. Understanding WF (Workflow Foundation) & Creating Interactive Workflows
11. Content Deployment
12. Implementing Multilingual Sites Using Variations

This is a 4-Day class, and will be held on the Microsoft Technology Center in Alpharetta, GA. The price is $2,395. To register, please use the URL below.

More Class Information: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossWcmDeveloperClasses.aspx

To Register: http://www.tedpattison.net/register.aspx?OfferingID=117

DNS Client causes IE to ignore the hosts file

Did you know that if you start the DNS client service on a Windows Server 2003 box, that it will ignore entries in a hosts file and proceed out to the Internet to resolve the name?  THAT was fun during a demo.  http://publishing.sample.com takes you to Viagra sales!

Nice.

Dot Net University - SharePoint class

The Dot Net University has release a new SharePoint class.  This brings the number of classes offered by the virtual University to three, SharePoint, BizTalk, and .Net Fundamentals.  The new SharePoint class has 4 PowerPoint decks, associated Hands On Labs, and accompanying video recordings complete with demos.

I am proud to say that I helped record two of these videos, with Josh Carlisle and Doug Ware recording the other two.  Brendon Schwartz, Dan Attis, and Brian Gough pitched in to create the Hands On Labs and PowerPoint decks.

Crack the Code - SharePoint Designer Webinar

I'm giving a sort of intro to SharePoint Designer webinar for Intellinet on Wednesday at noon.  Rather than attempt to re-craft the descriptive text, check out what the Intellinet marketing department (Rebecka, Laura, Alysha, et al.) put together.

We're going to cover some customizations to master pages, data view web parts, a bit of no-code application logic, and some workflow.  The challenge is getting it all to fit in a single hour!

Our reporting article got extended

JOPX on SharePoint just released a blog post which extends the work Brendon and I started in our 2 part ASP.Net Pro magazine article (part 1, part 2).  JOPX went so far as to release his extension on CodePlex.

Check it out!

I'm now a SharePoint MVP

I just received notification that I've been selected as a SharePoint Server MVP, after 2 years of being a SQL Server MVP.  I'm glad someone more deserving got the SQL spot I'd been occupying, but not as glad as I am that I'm now able to hang out with my SharePoint buddies and not have to hide in the shadows!

Thanks everyone!

SharePoint posts moving to a new blog

 
Brendon and I are moving our technical SharePoint related posts to a new URL - http://blogs.sharepointguys.com.  We'll each have our own separate blog which can be independently configured and populated with great SharePoint-specific content.  My blog is at http://blogs.SharePointGuys.com/Matt and the RSS feed is through Feedburner.

The idea behind this move is to refocus a bit on DevCow and to turn it back into the Community Service project it was originally envisioned to be.  In the past year or so, I've stopped posting coverage of user group events and conferences and started posting a lot of personal details and the occasional technical nugget.  I'll probably keep posting the personal details here, until I decide to move them somewhere else, and I'll keep the community announcements here.  The new SharePoint blog fills the dual purpose of keeping posts on topic and encouraging me to post more technical content more frequently.