Data Protection Manager 2012 and SharePoint Issues

Just a quick one this as I’ve not found anyone else with the same issue:

Lately, I’ve been looking into a pretty strange issue with DPM2012 where the backups failed after one day.  I could set up the protection group and make multiple backups no problem at all but as soon as it came time to run a backup the next day, it would always fail.  After some lengthy investigation, I eventually discovered that the netapp ran VMWare consistency snapshots overnight and these were causing the issue.

This instance of SharePoint was virtualised with VMWare and used netapp volumes as it’s storage.  The volume used had nightly snapshots taken and when this happened, DPM saw that something else was accessing the replica share and decided that it wasn’t going to play ball any more.  By removing the consistency snapshot of this particular virtual machine, it allowed DPM to finish creating it’s replicas.

 

European Best Practises Conference – London

Um, What?  Has it really been a year since SPEVO 2010?  My how time flies when you’re having fun with SharePoint.

The European SharePoint Best Practises conference kicks off on Monday and the social networks are abuzz with excitement.  You just need to take a look at the awesome speaker line-up to get a sense of how big this conference will be. Follow #BPCUK to get all the info coming out from London town next week.  The conference website can be found here: http://www.sharepointbestpractices.co.uk/

Last year’s event was marred by the chaos during the now infamous Icelandic Volcano and without wanting to tempt fate, hopefully – we shouldn’t have to endure such a headache this year.  See my review of last year’s events here and here which despite the voncanoes best attempts, was a huge success.  One of the (non-SharePoint) lessons I learned last year was that the iPhone camera really does suck, so this year I’ll be taking a proper camera with me and I’ll get some better shots.  I’ll be posing them to Facebook afterwards.

Once again, it’s going to be a remarkably busy time.  Sunday sees the return of the football match organised by Mark Macrae: http://macraem.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/sharepoint-best-practices-conference-football-tournament/, Monday night is the vendor exhibition, followed by the official SharePint event at The Old Star Pub and Tuesday sees the return of the conference’s party night.  This year, there is free transport being laid on to the secret venue.  Steve Smith and his folk really like to keep the details secret so we will only find out on Monday what the plan is.  If last year’s party night was anything to go by, then we are all in for a real treat.

Due to time constraints, I haven’t even managed to plan out what sessions I’ll be attending so I’ll be playing it as we go along this year.  If you want to meet up, then just ping me via twitter (@DPyett).  Once again, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is meeting all the great people I’ve come to know in the SharePoint Community.  I’ve met very few of these people in person so can’t wait to get to sit down over a pint and talk SharePoint.  Problem though is that there are so many people to meet, I know I’ll miss out on meeting loads of folk so will have to charm up the boss to send me to the next conference as well 😉

See you all on Sunday!

SharePoint 2010 List Views – Formatting Tip

I was working on a custom list in SharePoint 2010 the other day and through SharePoint designer, I had applied various conditional formatting so it was looking pretty cool with colours to indicate various statuses and content hidden when certain fields were set (this all looks so much better when using SharePoint 2010 over 2007!).  The result resembled the following screenshot:

My next job was to then create a bunch of views from the All Items view.  Simple case of create a new view from the ribbon – nothing special there but I found that when the new view was created and configured, all of my conditional formatting was lost.  It turns out that when you create a view based on another, none of the formatting comes across:

This caused a bit of a headache as I needed 10 views and would have to manually apply all the conditional formatting to each one.  Not happy with that, I set about looking for ways to get around this and after a quick chat with Matt Hughes (@MattHughesCK) on twitter, we came up with a solution:

First step is to create all your views through the browser and get them set up to display the relevant columns and grouping etc etc.  (I’m going to assume you already know how to create views so won’t post the process here).  Next up is to switch into SharePoint Designer 2010 and open up the allitems.aspx page for your list.  In the code view, you will find a bunch of GUIDs listed and I’d advise you not to go anywhere near these as changing the GUIDs can not only break your new view, it can wipe out the other views attached to your list – yes, I learned this the hard way 😉   Instead, you want to scroll down your page (in code view) until you find the XSL section.  Highlight the whole XSL section (i.e. everything from <XSL> to </XSL> and copy that to your clipboard. (your XSL will differ depending on what formatting has been applied)

Next, open up one of your other views and go into it’s code view.  Scroll down until you find </DataFields> (line 8 in my example below).  Enter in a new line below that tag and paste in your XSL code.

Save the file and refresh your browser.  You will now see that all your data is still in place with any grouping etc but it now displays the same conditional formatting as previously set in the allitems.aspx page.

I love solutions like this, easy to step through and a great time saver!

SharePoint Dev – A humble request to the community.

For some time now I’ve been thinking about going down the dark side taking a stab at getting up to speed with SharePoint Development.  All of my SharePoint work thus far has been in the IT Pro and IW areas so haven’t even begun to look at the dev side of things yet.  Due to work commitments/family life etc, this has been constantly pushed down the list but the time has come to take action.

I understand that I should gain a firm understanding and working knowledge of .Net first and then using that solid baseline, add on the SharePoint dev skills.

But there lies the first issue: I have no .Net experience at all.

The last time I was involved in any coding work was back in 2001/2002 using a language created for an application we used in my current employer so my understanding of the basics of programming (i.e. For loops, If/Then/Else etc) is fine and I picked that language up quickly so have no doubts about adding a new language to my (albeit very limited) development skill set.

Looking at the twitter streams, there seems to be a constant discussion regarding what hardware is required for this and the costs involved are frankly way out of my reach – I’m doing this off my own back so costs have to be kept to a minimum.

So I’m reaching out to the community here to ask for some advice on what I need to get started.  i.e. do I need a powerhouse of a machine to run Visual Studio or can I work away quite happily on something more low key?

Can you recommend some books, online material, best practices etc and should I ignore SharePoint completely to start with and introduce it down the line?

Do you have any general advice you may be willing to pass on?

If you would like to contribute your thoughts, please use the comments below or you can ping me on twitter (@DPyett)

Many thanks in advance!

Dave.

DVWP – quick tip for new items

Further to my earlier blog post about formatting the dates in the DVWP, I had another requirement to highlight the new content that was being rolled up.  Here, we had 2 options:

1. Apply some conditional formatting to the @Title field.
2. Utilise the !New icon that’s included in SharePoint OOB.

For us, the !New icon was the way to go but this posed a small problem.  If you create a new list item, you will see the !New icon there and then:

However, when this list item is rolled up into the DVWP, that icon magically disappears.

The solution is really very simple:

Fire up SharePoint Designer and browse to your web part page.  Position your pointer where you wish to display the !New icon and go into the code view.

Enter in the following code: <xsl:if test=”ddwrt:IfNew(string(@Created))”><img src=”/_layouts/1033/images/new.gif” alt=”New” border=”0″ /></xsl:if> and save the page.

Now when you create a new list item, it will display the !New icon in your DVWP – easy!

Date formatting in DVWPs – Quick Tip

I’ve been working a lot lately on the DVWP in SharePoint Designer and have found that when you add in a date field, it will render in mm/dd/yyyy by default.  Now this is fine if you are in America but for us over here in the UK, we prefer the dd/mm/yyyy format.

To make the change, we need to highlight the date field in our DVWP and go into the Code view.  There you will see the default format code of 1033 (as shown below) – you simply need to change 1033 to 2057 and save

<xsl:value-of select=”ddwrt:FormatDate(string(@Created) , 1033 ,1)” />

For a list of all the codes available, click here

PS. Thanks to @sympmarc and @jbhoward for all their help in my DVWP journey thus far 🙂

 

#SPEVO – It’s a wrap! (part 2)

This is a continuation from my earlier post on my SharePoint Evolutions conference.

Day 2 dawned to more glorious blue skies and the promise of even more fantastic sessions.

• Power to the People: Design in the Hands of the User with Russell Norton.  This session detailed what the end user can do within the SharePoint UX to modify the look and feel of the SharePoint environment.  I was expecting a bit more design info with SPD etc but was still a good session with Russell and really showcased the improvments made in this area.
• What does Web 2.0 and social networking mean to the user with Matt Groves. This was a great session from Matt and I caught up with him later and he described how he had used a macro developed by SAP that would post a tweet out onto Twitter when he moved onto certain slides.  This was a great use of the tech and tied in perfectly with the session’s subject matter.  Coupled with some great slides, this is one I will definately be watching again when the DVDs come out.
• Configuring Managed Metdata Service with Steve Smith and Spence Harbar.  Another great session and a good demo of the new managed metadata features in SP2010.  This is something that I was wanting more info on even before the conference so a valuable session for me and something I will be playing with more in my test environment.
• SharePoint 2010 Document Sets with Rob Pratt.  Well presented session.  Didn’t really learn much more than I previously knew on the subject but lots of demo which is never a bad thing.  Document sets (alongside the managed metadata service) will greatly improve the DM side of SharePoint.
• Wicked problems and SharePoint – “The one best practice to rule them all” with Andrew Woodward.  Best session of the week for me.  Great slides, great audience participation and a great message behind it all.  Using the IBIS method to log ideas, questions etc seems to be a cool idea and I can see how it helps to define where/what you need to achive.  Convincing people to adopt this method could be an issue but I’ll be looking into this further and will be watching again on the DVD.

Next up came the official conference Party night.  We decided that we should really make sure we get dinner before the party to avoid a repeat of the previous nights adventure so found a nice curry place just round the corner from the party venue.  When we arrived at the party location (The Grace Bar) where we were greeted by a couple of fire dancers: .  The entertainment laid on was awesome.  We had a guy from the UK’s X-Factor singing upstairs whilst burlesque dancers and comedians entertained downstairs.  More drink followed that night but at least we found somewhere to eat in the wee hours of the morning.  @sharepointscot and @dianeeva had arranged for us all to have a chat with Brett Lonsdale for the SharePoint PodShow for the following day.  This is a great site with many some really informative discussions on all things SharePoint with experts from across the globe.  If you haven’t paid a visit, make sure to stop by www.sharepointpodshow.com

Hot Stuff @ The Grace Bar

@brettlonsdale and @chris_e_forbes

Day 3 brought the final day of the conference and I only managed to fit in a couple of sessions as I had to get my train back home.

• Growing SharePoint from Small Libraries to Large Scale Repositories and Massive Archives with Mirjam van Olst. The content *****
• Configuring and managing the user profile service with Spence Harbar. I’ve struggled with this in  my own testing and ended up having to install everything under the one domain admin account to get it to work.  Not exactly what you would call best practise.  So it was good to learn exactly what is required from a service account view to get this up and running.  We did slightly run out of time to get all the profile imports through but Spence did a great job here.

And that was it for me.  I said my goodbyes to the people I’d met and headed off to catch my train knowing that I’d gained a lot of new knowledge and a lot of new friends.  There were still a load of people I simply didn’t get the time to meet so hopefully, we can all met up at another conference or a user group.

The conference was simply awesome from start to finish and I came away on a massive high, full of ideas.  And you know what – SharePoint totally rocks and the SharePoint Community rocks with it!

Dave.

PS. Here’s a couple of other photos from the conference (Apologies for the lack of quality in some of the previous photos – the iPhone camera truly sucks without a flash)

Westminster Abbey

The London Eye (right next to my hotel)

#SPEVO – It’s a wrap! (part 1)

I’m now on the train, heading back to the frozen wastes of Scotland (I’ve heard that it’s been snowing up there over the last couple of day).  The weather during our time in London for the conference was great!  Warm and sunny from start to finish.  And what a conference!  @SteveSmithCK and all the guys involved in arranging to conference should be commended for doing a stand up job.  Given that they had to re-write all the schedules at the last minute due to the ash cloud speaks volumes for his and all the speakers dedication.

I had hoped to post a new blog from each day of the conference but with the sessions/meeting people from the community/visiting the vendors (it has to be done) etc took up all of my time so instead, I thought best to just do a couple of posts at the end.  So here we go….

In the beginning….

There were Volcanoes and they brought forth ash – lots of ash.  And chaos! .

But it would not dampen the spirits of the SharePointers and the conference would march on.

The effects of the #ashcloud were far reaching and pretty much halted the entire American attendees and speakers from making it to London.  This was a massive disappointment for me as I was looking forward to meeting so many of them as we’ve spoken through twitter etc for a while now but have never met in person.  Their absence prompted Steve Smith and the speakers to hastily rearrange the schedules for each day in what they dubbed the “war room”.  Many of the speakers took on the orphaned sessions and did a fantastic job.  My favourite of these was by far and away @AndrewWoody’s session on wicked problems (originally a Paul Culmsee session) but more on that later.

Sunday saw me arrive in London and meet up with @WorTony, @m_macrae, @SharepointAlex and @Sam_Wainright at our hotel before heading up to the Crowne Plaza for a beer or 2 with some of the other guys.  Had some good banter and could tell that even with the American contingent missing, we were still in for a great conference.  As I had to rearrange my travel, I didn’t make it to the football comp which I was really looking forward to but hopefully, we can arrange another one at some point.  The reports came back saying that it was a good laugh and some photos are doing the rounds so well worth a look.

Monday

The first thing that got me on Monday was the number of people still at the event.  I was expecting a much quieter conference but the turnout was awesome.  And so it was onto the sessions.  Day 1 for me consisted of:

• Build a SharePoint Web Site in 60 minutes with Ben Robb.  This was a good session and although some of the demos didn’t quite go to plan, the theory behind using PowerShell scripts to provision your servers means that they will all be consistent and will therefore give your devs a much better platform on which to get their teeth stuck into.  I can see me looking into this more in the future.  It was clear that a lot of people are going to need to skill up on PowerShell (myself included).
• Business Connectivity Services – What’s new with Nick Swan.  Another good session as Nick walked through the new BCS features which has gone from enterprise level CAL to SharePoint Foundation (i.e. it’s free!)  BCS (or indeed BDC in MOSS2007) isn’t something I’ve really had much involvement in so it was good to get some exposure on this area and will be playing with this on my VMs.
• Encouraging User Adoption and Quick Wins in SharePoint 2010 with Steve Smith.  Steve has such a natural presentation style that it’s hard not to enjoy his sessions.  Very informative and lots to take back from this one – well worth attending.  User adoption, whilst not necessarily a techy subject, is still vitally important to any and all implementations.
• Utilizing Roll up Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 with Brett Lonsdale.  Brett took us through the new features in the SharePoint 2010 CEWP, RSS, alerts etc and it’s great to see some improvements have been made in this area.  I still think that it’s lacking in a few areas and if you want to make full use of content roll up and really make it sing, then 3rd party is the way to go *cough* Lightning Tools *cough*
• Everything you need to know deploying SharePoint 2010 in virtualized environments with Brian Wilson and Simon Walker.  Bit of a light-hearted ding dong battle between the HyperV and VMWare camps on this one.  Was a bit dry as no demo but some good advise nonetheless.  Still not 100% convinced that virtualising the SQL instances are the way to go but I’ll be watching this space closely over the next few months.

After the last session, we had the exhibitors evening where the main exhibitor hall was transformed into a casino with blackjack, roulette, craps etc.  We even had someone dressed as a statue on a column who kept giving us drinks vouchers.  I really must learn to just say no as there was plenty of drink going and little did I know at that point what adventures we were going to have later on….

@chris_e_forbes and a statue at #SPEVO

By this time, I had met some fellow Scottish SharePointers: @Chris_e_forbes, @SharePointScot, Liisa Kinnear and @Dianeeva and what a great bunch!  We had such a laugh and I can’t wait for the next SUGUK in Scotland so we can meet up again (There’s a Scotland SUGUK on the 5th May in Edinburgh if anyone’s interested – let me know or even better, ping Chris Forbes on twitter (@chris_e_forbes).

One of the vendors I met were the guys at ClearPeople and had a really good chat about Office integration with SharePoint and in particular Outlook.  This has to be my number 1 issue with SharePoint as I need much more than what is currently on offer.  3rd party hasn’t really been that much more helpful as we have very specific requirements.  However, the ClearPeople guys have a great product called MacroView DMF which displays a tree view of your SharePoint system within Outlook and enables drag and drop emails and attachments into any document library.  The kicker was that you also had access to the SharePoint search through this and it also allows you to add SharePoint libraries/folders etc into your Outlook favourites – that’s cool!  I’ll definitely be following up with them in the near future.

Monday night’s venue

Then came the #SharePint event at the Old Star pub where we all gathered and continued the merriment!  I’d been meaning to meet @AndrewWoody for some time so finally got my chance and we had a good chat.  Before we knew it, we started to get hungry but soon discovered that central London shuts down at 11:00pm!  We ended up spending a fortune on taxi fares and wandered the streets for hours, desperately looking for somewhere to eat – all to no avail.  Only when we got back to our hotel did we find a shop directly opposite that had food……..

We ended up back in the hotel and feasted on beer, crisps and nuts – nothing but the best for us! 🙂

Food fit for kings.....

To be continued….

Follow up to #SPEVO conference

Afternoon all,

The ash eminating from the volcano in Iceland continues to cause major problems for #spevo attendees all over the world.  It’s looking highly likely that the majority of attendees/presenters from America will not be able to make it and that’s shook up the conference schedule no end.  Steve Smith (@SteveSmithCK) is currently rearraning things to fit and hopes to have an update coming out later today.  Check the conference website (http://sharepointevolutionconference.com) later.

My flight has been cancelled as well and have made arrangements to go down to London via train so have a long 8-hour train journey ahead 😦  I’ll be ready for a drink when I arrive in the evening that’s for sure 🙂

If the volcanic ash has done anything, it’s shown that the SharePoint community is as close as ever and the lengths people are going to to help get people to London are nothing short of outstanding.

Although I’m sad that I won’t be meeting so many of the people I had arranged to, I’m sure we will still have a great conference and will be reporting on what’s going on each day.

See you all (well, some of you) tomorrow night!

Warm up to SharePoint Evolutions

The SharePoint Evolutions conference is just around the corner and the excitement in the SharePoint community is building nicely.  If you are on twitter, follow #SPEVO to get all the info during the conference.  The conference website can be found here: http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com/index.html

It’s gonna be a busy time, we’ve got a football match on the Sunday prior to the conference orgranised by Mark Macrae: http://macraem.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/sharepoint-evolutions-conference-football-tournament/, Monday night is the official SharePint event at The Old Star pub from 20:00 (local time).  Tuesday night is the conference party night.  Steve Smith has kept details of this close to his chest so will only find out where/when etc once we get registered.  Likewise, he’s keeping the details of the keynote to himself so will be interesting to see who turns up.

The speaker list is outstanding and trying to plot out which sessions to attend is proving to be problematic to say the least.  So far, I’m looking at (all subject to change):

Monday

IW102 (11:00-12:00)

DEV103 (13:15-14:15)

IW204 (14:30-15:30)

COM105 (16:00-17:00)

Tuesday

IT106 (08:45-09:45)

IT108 (11:45-12:45)

IW109 (14:00-15:00)

IT110 (15:15-16:15)

Wednesday

IW212 (08:45-09:45)

IW213 (10:00-11:00)

IW214 (11:45-12:45)

The thing I’m looking forward to the most?  Meeting all the great people I’ve come to know in the SharePoint Community.  I’ve met very few of these people in person so can’t wait to get to sit down over a pint with then and talk SharePoint.  Problem though is that there’s so many people to meet, I know I’ll miss out on meeting loads of folk so will have to charm up the boss to send me to the next conference as well 😉

Of course, this is all dependant on the ash cloud moving away from the UK and the airports re-opening.  Hopefully, it’ll clear up tomorrow.

If you want to meet up, then you can find me in the above sessions and event or even better, ping me on twitter (@DPyett).

See you all on Monday!