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June 25

Upgrade MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010

So I spent this past week at Microsoft upgrading a MOSS 2007 environment to SharePoint 2010.

There are a lot of cool features in SharePoint 2010, but that is not what this is for, This is to talk about some of the features regarding upgrades and what will eventually be migrations. Let me start with some of the basics.

In place upgrades from MOSS to SP 2010 will be much easier. That said they will be a little confusing too. The greatest part of SP2 in MOSS what the Preupgradecheck command that will run against your farm and give you some basic feedback. Sadly this shipped in SP2 so it is final and lacks in a few areas, but is far better than MOSS prescan. The preupgradechecker needs help in the ares of information given, how to mitigate this information and let you know if you really should upgrade. Right now it will make you feel warm and fuzzy while really you should fix some major issues before you upgrade. This was a major point at Microsoft the hope is that they release a newer version even if it is a stand alone.

The concept is simple. Do in-place upgrade or be normal and do a database attach migration.

The best new upgrade feature is the ‘Visual Upgrade” The visual upgrade in SharePoint 2010 upgrade process allows you to upgrade without touching your master pages. This way you can keep your current look and feel and then gradually change this look and feel as needed. The coolest part is that you can preview the new look and then change it back if you find it does not work with your environment. This allows you to update your master pages and CSS and test it before even applying it. This is a really cool feature. The only problem right now is that you can only apply this from the Web application or Site Collection level. I hope we see more options with the final release.

The in place upgrade is far better than any in place upgrade option MOSS 2007 had, but I think it has it's place. Keep in mind that Microsoft is sticking to it's guns and making SharePoint 2010 64Bit only and you must also run 64Bit SQL along with it. Not that you should be running any 32 bit servers, but you very well might be at this point and that would nean you will be upgradeding OS's or hardware and at the very least doing a database migration for the upgrade.

It is really simple to do a database attach to a clean install and even with the alpha bits it worked well.

Aslo be sure to learn PowerShell now if you want to be a part of SharePoint 2010. There are so many reasons to access the object model in PowerShell/ Just learn pwerShell if you do not know it or get better at it...

I also got a chance to play around with the Office 14 client. All I will say is Outlook is going to be awesome. Great improvements in many areas. Conversation views are better, clean up tools are better and there is a built in connection to view and use OCS directly via Outlook and much,much more. This is a great advance and I am enjoying running it.

This post will be updated with more and more info on upgrading to SharePoint 2010.

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Technorati Tags: Office 14 SharePoint 2010 Upgrade to SharePoint 2010

5:57 PM | Add a comment | Read comments (2) | Permalink | Blog it

"The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service" MOSS

Simple fix. This basically means that there is no query server in the farm. So go to Central Admin>Services on Server and then open Office SharePoint Search Service. Then check the box for query. This is of course unless you have other servers that are acting as a query server.

"The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service" MOSS

That's it. Your problem should be resolved.

5:40 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | MOSS Administration

March 29

Add Local Weather Web Part to SharePoint/MOSS

Adding the Weather to a web part in MOSS is not tricky, but making it look good takes some effort. So I decided to do all the hard work for you. Actually I just bundled up many other ideas from other users and made it simple for you to add images and weather to a web part in SharePoint that looks like this:

Like I said I have packaged everything to make it really easy. Just follow all these steps and you are in business.

So here are 5 simple steps to get the weather web part of your SharePoint site

Step 1

We need a place to store the images (You will download the images in a minute) so we need to create a folder in our style library. I am assuming you are using a publishing portal for this. If you are not using this template you will have to edit the XSL. If you follow this you will not have to edit anything.

So, create a folder named weather.com_images in this location - /style library/Images See below.

Step 2

Download the zip with the images Here

Once you have downloaded and unziped the file you will have 3 folders of images. Copy these three folders to your new folder you created in your images folder. Here is the easiest way:

Open the images folder in Explorer View and drag and drop the folders in there.

Now the images are in place and we will create our web part.

Step 3

Now to create our web part we will use a built in web part called the XML Web Part. Add this wherever you wish on your page.

Step 4

Now we need to edit this web part and paste the correct code into it.

Just copy and paste the following into the XML Link section. Be sure to change the zip code after local to the zip code of your choice.

http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/92646?cc=*&dayf=5&link=xoap&prod=xoap&par=1071490537&key=b9ace7e5685511e8

Step 5

We now need to paste some XSL to format the link and add references to our images. If you used the directory above for your images then all you need to do is copy and paste the below XSLT into the XSL Editor and save it. Make no changes unless the images are in another location.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes" encoding="iso-8859-1" />
<xsl:template match="/weather">
<xsl:variable name="med-img-dir">/Style Library/Images/Weather.com_Images/61x61</xsl:variable>

</a>
</td>

<td valign="top">
        <table width="100%">
            <tr>
                <td valign="middle">
                <table width="80%">
                <tr>
                    <td>
                    
                    <xsl:variable name="img-ext">png</xsl:variable>
                    <xsl:variable name="iconnumber">
                    <xsl:value-of select="cc/icon"></xsl:value-of>
                    </xsl:variable>
                    <img src="{$med-img-dir}/{$iconnumber}.{$img-ext}" alt="{$iconnumber}.{$img-ext}" width="61" height="61" />
                    </td>
                    
                    <td valign="middle">
                    <span style="font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;"><xsl:value-of select="cc/tmp"></xsl:value-of>�F</span><br/>
                    <xsl:value-of select="cc/t"></xsl:value-of>
                    </td>
                </tr>
                </table>
                </td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>
                Feels Like: <xsl:value-of select="cc/flik"></xsl:value-of>�F<br/>
                Humidity: <xsl:value-of select="cc/hmid"></xsl:value-of>%<br/>
                Wind: <xsl:value-of select="cc/wind/t"></xsl:value-of> at <xsl:value-of select="cc/wind/s"></xsl:value-of> mph<br/>
                <input TYPE="TEXT" SIZE="20" VALUE="Enter city/zip" STYLE="font-size:10;" name="where" onFocus="this.value='';" />
                <input TYPE="image" src="{$med-img-dir}/transparent_orange_go.gif" alt="transparent_orange_go.gif" onClick="window.open('http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/local/' + document.getElementById('where').value);" ALIGN="ABSMIDDLE" width="28" height="19" />
                </td>
            </tr>
        </table>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

That is it. You should now have everything you need to display weather in a web part on your page.

March 26

5 Minute SharePoint Site Plan

Thanks to our fine friends at EndUserSharePoint

2:44 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it

March 05

Hide a List in SharePoint

Why would we want to hide a list in Sharepoint? First this could be a lookup list and you do not want random users with contribue rights to the site to add to this list. So we can hide a list in SharePoint.

First open the site in question in SharePoint Designer Double click the list folder in the Web Site view and then find your list. Right click your list and choose properties. Then on the settings tab click Hide from Browser. Save and close. You are now done.