SharePoint Forums

Yeah - Microsoft Loosened the MOSS Licencing - Let the Party Begin

For those that hadn't heard, Microsoft has greatly relaxed both the price (for MSPLA) and also the restictions for MOSS farms in an internet facing capacity.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/09/24/important-change-to-moss-2007-for-internet-sites-mossfis-licensing.aspx

Yipee !!!!!

Old School SharePointing - Blackboard Style

I gave a presentation last night to the SharePoint Users Group in Tulsa on how we built www.fanu.com. Although the site is not launched yet, I did not want to leave the group hanging in regards to our monthly meeting. Since we have been scrambling around trying to get the site finished out for launch, I didn't even have time to prepare anything. So, when I got there, It was me and an old school blackboard talking about SharePoint. I thought the meeting went very well and there was lively discussion, great questions and (hopefully) some solutions to problems that the folks were having in thier SharePoint environments.

I promise to come back after the site is launched to give a better presentation about the site with more "Show" and less "Tell"

Happy SharePointing !!

Community Kit For SharePoint - Microsoft Meets DotNetNuke

Ok, for those of you that haven't picked up on it yet, I have moved out of the DotnetNuke world and square into the SharePoint World. Not that I don't have great respect for DNN and all that it can do, I merely saw the value of SharePoint as a platform and decided that will be a better investment long term (check out my SharePoint Architecture Site for more info there :-))

But really, if you haven't seen it yet, check out the Community Kit For SharePoint out on CodePlex (and if you don't know what CodePlex is, check that out while you are there... Microsoft does SourceForge.. Team Foundation server Style ;-) ) )

There are LOTS of good nuggets of source code out there for SharePoiont and there are starting to be a slew of projects for lots of different things... I am feeling a MUCH bigger buzz much earlier on than I did with DotnetNuke and I am sure that with the platform Microsoft has produced for WSS 3.0, we are going to start seeing these things springing up in the wild like crazy :-)

Can't wait to Get this site and the Sharepoint Architecture site redone in SharePoint !!!! Looks like I won't have to do all of the coding myself !! yeah.. We LOVE open Source and Frameworks !!!

Back in the Blogosphere

I apologize for my lack of involvement in the site the last couple of months... Life altering events have a way of doing that (sucking up all of your free time :-) )

I am embarking on a project at my current employer that has me very excited. I am the Platform Architect for our systems and have a lot of work to do to get us ready to deploy our MOSS Server for internal and external collaboration.

First step (and those that know me can guess what this one is) is to get our Network Infrastructure in order. Ad / Exchange / DNS / ... etc... I am a HUGE proponent of getting that house in order before you begin to build systems on top !

We are kicking that project off today and should move fairly rapidly (we are a smallre organization that manages quite a few hosted applications that we have developed. This is a slightly different environment than I am used to working in. The previous AD design and deployment projects that I have done were large companies with many applications / environments. Our Resource Side of the house will be just as complex as the big boys but the Organizational side will be a snap ! I like it when things are easier than you anticipated :-)

Look for many more blog entries coming int he future as I know have some time to devote to my professional interests again !

Happy SharePointing !

Windows Live Local for Outlook

For those that haven't seen it, Microsoft has released an add on for outlook that allows you to integrate with local.live.com. Download it here; http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=4876660

This is interesting as Ihave said before that microsoft is looking to leverage the dominant position that they hold on the desktop / office front to bring web2.0 to users through the applications that they already use. i love this stuff !!

MOSS 2007: Web Part Development

For those of you haven't checked them out yet, The videos that Randy suggested int eh forums by Ted Pattison are a pretty good introduction to developing SharePoint Web parts for V3/2.0

What struck me as I walked throug hthe first video, is that Microsoft has not really given you a way to graphically design web parts STILL. It seems that you would have to use the "Smart Part" methodology to develop user controls in ASP>NET that can be hosted as web parts. Or am I missing something ?

TechFest2006 - Wow - Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell !!!

Here in Tulsa, the Tulsa Developers Association is organizing Tech Fest 2006 as a Technology Expo and Technology Showcase. We are planning on having Lots of Technical Sessions like a conference and a vendor area for everyone to show off their wares :-)

We just got confirmation from Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from .NET Rocks Fame that they would be willing to come and speak/participate in the event.

If you haven't checked out .NET Rocks, I highly recommend it. it is entertaining and they talk to some great folks about .. what else.. Technology. Carl and Richard make it highly entertaining to listen while you are coding away :-)

I am excited. Kudos to David Walker for organizing and co-ordinating !!

Custom Web Service Accessing SharePoint

Someone asked me how to have their custom web service access SharePoint securely without having to give the end users administrative access to SharePoint. The service would work fine when run by an administrator for SharePoint but when a normal user would use it, ti would crash and tell them they were not authorized. I have had this question asked a few times so I thought it worthy of a blog post so maybe others can benefit as well.

Ok.. So here would be the options for this:

Option 1 - Preferred Method -

Create a "Service Account" for your service (or use an existing one). This needs to ne a network Account.. not a local machine account.
Create a "Service Principal Name" for your service/user account in your AD. This must be run by a domain admin. setspn.exe is the utility that you need to use for this. THis is a crucial step for Authentication to work properly. setspn.exe -r http/machinename domain\accountname is the syntax I believe but I would have to look that up for you. If you are using a CNAME in DNS and have a hsot header for IIS, you need to register http/hostheadaer as well.
Create an Application Pool in IIS for the web service (or use an existing one that is already running under your "service account") and assign the idenitity of the app pool to our service account.
Set up a web site in IIS to host your "Custom Web Service" (Or use one that you can assign to the application pool we created.
Run this service under a specific "Service Account".. NOT network service or localsystem !! You can run multiple service applications under a single service account but this account will hold your provleges into SharePoint. You cannot use these generic well known accounts to access resources accross the network.
Add the "Service Account" used in the application pool to the IIS_WPG, STS_WPG groups on the server that is hosting your custom web service
Turn OFF impersonation in your web service.. but leave windows authentication on. You can still access who is calling you to run security checks in your web service code but we will use the Application Pool identity to connect to SharePoint (or SQL databases, etc..)
Add the Service Account to the "Administrative" account for Sharepoint on the SharePoint server.
Run your web service code. It access SharePoint using the credentials that you supplied in the app pool :-) Your end users hit your service and you call sharepoint. thuse providing a security boundary between them and your sp admin access ;-) Your service can return the objects from sharepoint to your users for the most part.. or you could make a smaller object to pass back to your app if you don't need the entire object. would be much more performant that way as the SP objects are a bit "Fat on the wire" so to speak :-)

This would be the most secure way to do it and would avoid the end users having to be administrative over Sharepoint. Only code that YOU publish to your service tier would be available to them to execute. I would recommend security checks in your service tier to ensure users have rights to invoke your service. At a minimum set the security at the IIS level in your web service.

Option 2 (Not preferred)

Turn off impersonation in your web service tier. Keep windows auth on
in your code, elevate your privelges by impersonating an administrative user account in your code. Impersonate Admin User, Attach Credentials to the call to the sp web services. revert to old credentials.
Store Administrative user name and password in config on your server somewhere.. encrypted of course ;-)

either method will accomplish your goals. I prefer option 1 as it utilizes the security infrastucture that should already be in place in your network. It allows you to avoid storing your administrative SharePoint credentials for your application. In a production environment, your developers don't even need to know the administrative credentials at all to deploy thier code (if you are a public company that is a concern)

I sometimes take security a bit farther than some developers... but I guess that what comes when you used to be a security guy for a living ;-)

Happy SharePointing !!

SharePoint Web Services

I had a question posed to me on how to access SharePoint through web services. Specifically, they needed to be able to list all of the web sites that a user is a member of.

For a basic example of how to access the web services , I would recommend downloading and tearing apart Jan Tielens' SharePoint Explorer Application. This winform application allows you to connect to a SharePoint Instance and list all of the sites on the server.

In order to list all of the sites that a user has access to (or is a member of) you would have to iterate through the sites, checking the membership using a call to the permissions service (after retrieving the list of sites).

Here is a Reference Article that lines out talking to SharePoint Web Services pretty well. Just remember, if you can't do what you want through the existing services but can accomplish it throug hthe API, its very easy to write your own web servcie that simply makes calls into the API on the server side.

This would not be a very performant solution IMHO (would take a long time to iterate through each site checking membership. If you do take this approach, i would look at caching the results somewhere to avoid latency issues. especially if this were an application with many users. This would be a perfect application of AJAX as your web part could retrieve the lists client side so the page would load first :-)

The next version of SharePoint makes this much simpler (and has this capability built right in). They way they accomplosh it is by running a service on a schedule to compile the lists of sie meberships, etc.. similar to the way the existing audience compilation works in SPS 2003.

Hope that helps !

New RSS Feed Icon Standards

I like the new icon that everyone (including Microsoft) is adopting for newsfeeds. This should really start to foster adoption of the technology on a widespread basis. I am already seeing RSS used in the mainstream media. I have been a HUGE proponent of the power of this technology to effectively distribute information. It's finally going mainstream !

So, everywhere that you are used to seeing hte familiar orange XML icon for obtaining a newsfeed, look for this icon instead: