Ashwin Bhagwat's Blog

Recreating a Shared Service Provider

Ashwin Bhagwat — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:00:13 +0000

SSP and MySite is not working and displaying Page Cannot be displayed error. Previously It was working fine and suddenly it stopped working. Web application pool is working properly. When click on SharedServices1 it display the error “Page Cannot be displayed” same is happening with MySite.

Find out old Database name

Open Central Administration Site and click on Shared Services Administration. Go to SharedServices1–>Edit Properties. Copy the old content database name & search database name.

Create Dummy SSP

Open Central Administration Site and click on Shared Services Administration. Click on New SSP to create a new one.

Make default SSP

Click on Shared Services Administration–>Change Default SSP (from the Shared Services Administration) and choose your new SSP (SharedServices2).

Delete old SSP

Delete the original SSP (SharedServices1) by choosing delete from its context menu. DO NOT DELETE ITS ASSOCIATED DATABASES! This might take a second to complete.

Restore the SSP

Now we’re going to click on Restore SSP and restore the original SSP with a brand new Administration site. Name it SharedServices1 and fill out fields. Create a new web application and when it comes time to fill out the fields for Search Database and but this time fill out the two databases for the SSP. This will include the databases that we identified in step 1. This will ensure that you don’t lose all your data from the SSP like Search Content Sources, Excel Services Settings, Audiences, and BDC etc.

Delete Dummy SSP

Now we should have two working SSPs, SharedServices1 and SharedServices2. Click Change Default SSP and change it back to SharedServices1. After that delete SharedServices2 (this might take a while).

Now reboot the machine and check your SSP.

InfoPath publishing: The following URL is not valid

Ashwin Bhagwat — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:55:36 +0000

After publishing a lot of InfoPath forms, suddenly InfoPath 2007 started to present me with an error:
The following URL is not valid: www.url.com
Make sure you have a created site at root level.
No need to stop system event notification.
I have just created site at root level. when we create new site collection at that time do not forget to create root level site, if u create root level site it avoid the error “the following url is not valid” wich will come afterwards.

Missing Master Page link under Look and Feel

Ashwin Bhagwat — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:50:08 +0000

Click on Site Action
Click on site settings
Go to site collection features
Activate the “Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” feature
Now Under Look and feel in site settings you can see the Master Page link.

Custom Site Theme for SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) and WSS 3.0

Ashwin Bhagwat — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:47:31 +0000

SharePoint site theme basically consists of theme.inf, theme.css, and image files. Theme.inf file simply represents the title of the theme.

Theme.css is a stylesheet file that defines colors, header images and layouts of a site and image files can be referenced here to display on the page. By creating a custom site theme, you can easily change the style but in fact, writing and editing the stylesheet can be somewhat chanllenging when you have more than a hundred of elements to deal with.

Here is a short procedure of creating a custom site theme named “Ghost”:

1. Copy any theme folder in “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES” folder and paste with its name replaced with “Ghost”. In this example, copy GRANITE folder.

2. In Ghost folder, rename GRANITE.INF file to GHOST.INF in upper case.

3. Open GHOST.INF file with notepad.

4. Change the value of title under [Info] to Ghost.

5. Replace every word, Granite, under [titles] with Ghost.

6. Open “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML” file with notepad.

7. Add the following lines under tag:

Ghost
Ghost
Ghost theme.
images/thghost.gif
images/thghost.gif

Notice that preview and thumbnail paths are images/thghost.gif. By default, MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 will not have such image files.

8. In order to display thumbnail and preview correctly, you will need to capture the screen and save the file in “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES” folder with thghost.gif name. You can change the .gif file name if you change the thumbnail and preview file names in tag.

9. Do an iisrest for the server to recognize the new theme.

SharePoint 2010 List Lookups and Relationships

Ashwin Bhagwat — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:37:00 +0000

The SharePoint lookup field allows you to connect an identifier of one list and to display a different, friendlier field – such as name – for users to select. SharePoint 2010 adds the ability to create additional columns which display other fields from another list. (e.g.: In the case of a customer, it is possible to create a lookup on the ID of the other list and not only display the customer name but to also bring across multiple other fields).
The second major improvement in lookup fields is that they now allow you to enforce relationships. You can choose to reject deletes which would otherwise orphan data – or you can have SharePoint automatically cascade deletes so that when you delete a customer all of their invoices are deleted as well. As a result SharePoint 2010 can now be used to create sites which have related data connected in ways familiar to users of traditional database tools – with the additional user interface options provided by SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 – Client Object Model

Ashwin Bhagwat — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:40:12 +0000

SharePoint 2010 introduces the new Client Object Model.

“The Client Object Model (OM) is a new programming interface for SharePoint 2010 where code runs on a user’s client machine against a local object model and interacts with data on the SharePoint Server. Client OM methods can be called from JavaScript, .NET code or Silverlight code and makes building rich client applications for SharePoint easy.”

Approach for accessing data from server:

SharePoint Server 2007: We use the SharePoint Web Services which then interacts with the SharePoint API to access the data. SharePoint Server 2010: We can use Client Object Model to interact with the SharePoint site to access the data.

Please refer below link for detail:
Article: http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/SharePoint-2010-Introducing-the-Client-Object-Model.aspx
Video: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Developer-Video.aspx