A blog on Microsoft Infrastructure, but mostly SharePoint
February 21, 2008 Leave a comment
Came across this today when inspecting the HTTP headers for a site.
Very odd because…
I'm guessing the headers have not been updated, and its just a typo in the expires statement for the caching.
I'll go more into the caching at a later point, still compiling research.
February 11, 2008 Leave a comment
If you've ever tried to rename a site collection without SP1 for wss installed you know the headache it can be. A high level overview of this is :
1. Backup Site Collection to file.
2. Delete Site Collection.
3. Create Site Collection with the new name.
4. Restore Site collection from backup taken in step 1.
Its a fairly clunky way to do it, fortunately since SP1 has been released its become really simple :
stsadm -o renamesite -oldurl http://OLDURL -newurl http://NEWURL
Its really made my life easier 🙂
January 2, 2008 Leave a comment
I had a forced introduction to Auditing Reports, a subject which isn't very well convered pretty much anywhere.
What is it? A history of all actions taken on a site collection since the creation of the site collection.
Where is it stored? Dbo.auditData
What does it look like? Heres a row from the table
| Site Id | Item Id | Item Type | User Id | Machine Name | Machine IP | Document Location | Location Type | Occurred (GMT) | Event | Custom Event Name | Event Source | Source Name | Event Data |
| ed91340f-e335-45d2-82f3-c6521eb23fc0 | 59af845e-b604-436e-9c08-0a948a27d996 | Document | NT AUTHORITYlocal service | _catalogs/masterpage/Editing Menu/CustomSiteAction.xml | URL | 2008-01-02T00:44:43 | View | SharePoint |
<Version> |
How do you get to it? http://server/sitecollection/_layouts/Reporting.aspx?Category=Auditing or alternatively Site Settings > Site Collection Administratoin > Audit Log Reports
First issue you might come across starts here. The feature has to be enabled on your site, fairly easy to do :
stsadm -o activatefeature -name Reporting -url http://server/sitecollection/ -force
That will enable the feature on your site collection, allowing you to view the URL listed above.
The usage of this page is pretty straight forward, you can view all of the audit data for your site, or if need be create a custom report. If you do create a custom report, make sure you do not click "OK" to return to home, you'll miss your report and some of them can take a little while (minutes) to generate, especially if your site has 6 months or more of auditing data. Even on a site with light usage your auditData table can get big very quickly, for instance one of ours hit 47,000 rows and a content viewing report was over 50 meg being generated. This was causing timeouts from the site.
The reports will look like XML unless you have Excel installed in which case you will get a look like this :
| Site Id | (All) | |
| Count of Occurred | Event | |
| Document Location | View | Grand Total |
| _catalogs/masterpage/Editing Menu/CustomSiteAction.xml | 1 | 1 |
| Site Images | 16 | 16 |
| Style Library/Custom.css | 45 | 45 |
| Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/Header.xsl | 3 | 3 |
| Reporting Templates/audit1.xml | 7 | 7 |
| Site Images/kc.png | 4 | 4 |
| Style Library/FinalHeader.jpg | 33 | 33 |
| Site Images/initiatives.png | 4 | 4 |
| Style Library/FinalHeader.png | 33 | 33 |
| _catalogs/masterpage/default.master | 6 | 6 |
| Pages/Default.aspx | 9 | 9 |
| Style Library | 112 | 112 |
| Style Library/XSL Style Sheets | 9 | 9 |
| _catalogs/masterpage/Editing Menu | 1 | 1 |
| _catalogs/masterpage | 6 | 6 |
| Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/ContentQueryMain.xsl | 3 | 3 |
| Pages | 9 | 9 |
| Style Library/XSL Style Sheets/ItemStyle.xsl | 3 | 3 |
| administration/default.aspx | 6 | 6 |
| Site Images/contact_list.png | 4 | 4 |
| Site Images/newsletter.png | 4 | 4 |
| Reporting Templates | 7 | 7 |
| Grand Total | 325 | 325 |
I should also add that if you wish to configure the audit logging you can cut it down a bit. The "Configure Audit Settings" option under "Site Settings" will allow you to determine which events are audited, its high level but enough to significantly reduce the size of the table if needed.
December 23, 2007 Leave a comment
I've been looking for good documentation on FBA, and short of writing it myself, I came across these on the MS Sharepoint Team's blog.
Forms based auth has been one of those features I've had difficulty getting to work smoothly, especially in a hosted environment. Harder still is making it work with an Active Directory membership provider instead of a database. Why would you want to do this anyway? It looks prettier.
A side note also, one of the things I noticed about the above documentation : While very thorough it tells you how rather than why to take certain paths. For instance a web application is extended rather than using the default zone – why? Setting the default zone to FBA would mean search would be unable to connect and through a plethora of fairly vague messages in the event logs. Etc.
December 5, 2007 Leave a comment
A couple of times I've found clients asking for information on how to enable presence information for OCS or Live Messenger within sharepoint, and its actually really easy to setup – but appears to be fairly obscure information.
The following steps are all that need to be done.
If you are using Live do this step, it is not necessary for OCS.
Go to http://settings.messenger.live.com/applications/websettings.aspx. Sign in with your Windows Live ID as needed.
Turn on your Web settings to show your presence and receive IM from the Web.
Now login to your sharepoint site. Go to "Tools" > "Internet Options" in your browser.
Click on the Security Tab, click on 'Trusted Sites', then 'Sites.
Add your site to the list, if need be untick the 'Require Server Verification' box at the bottom if your site is not a secure site.
Close all windows and relogin to your site.
Log on to your sharepoint site. Click on the "Welcome User" dropbox on the top right and select "My Settings"
Click "Edit Item". Add your Windows Live address or OCS address to the SIP address field. Click "OK"
Messenger Presence should now be displayed!
Mark Rhodes 