Solving failed to lock the file error in VMWare on booting of virtual machine

Just delete the .lck files that you see in the VM folder and your virtual machine will boot up again nicely. Apparently these .lck files are used for locking the VM storage files (VMDK files) – in case that your virtual machine stopped unexpected – these files were not removed automatically – so it is safe to remove them manually.

Tags van Technorati: vmware,lock+error,lck

Next BIWUG session September 8th at RealDolmen

BIWUG, the Belux Information Worker User Group – www.biwug.be - is announcing another session about SharePoint 2010 on Thursday September 8th 2011 in the RealDolmen Huizingen offices.

Agenda
18:00-18:30 Welcome with sandwich lunch
18:30-19:30 SQL Server for SharePoint Geeks (Speaker - Thomas Vochten – @Thomasvochten). Topics: which SQL Server editions to use, configuration best practices, common misconceptions and its impact on SharePoint.
19:30-19:45 Break
19:45-20:45 Office 365 – but mainly SharePoint Online - from a technical perspective (Speaker - Joris Poelmans – @jopxtwits) Topics: focus on SharePoint Online both from an administrator and developer standpoint.

Location: RealDolmen Industriezone Zenneveld, Vaucampslaan 42, 1654 Huizingen, Belgium (Roadmap in PDF format)

Entrance is free but registration is required on the BIWUG site – www.biwug.be . Hope to see you there.

Tags van Technorati: BIWUG,community,SharePoint,Office365,SQLServer,SharePoint+2010,administration

SharePoint 2010 Healthcare site templates freely available for download

For SharePoint Server 2007 Microsoft made the Fabulous 40 stie templates available as sample site templates but decided not to upgrade the Fabulous 40 to 2010 although you could do it yourself.

Warning – it seems that Microsoft has removed these downloads – I will put them back when I find them again.

But apparently Microsoft released a new set of application templates for SharePoint in June called the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Templates for Health Organizations:

• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Request for Proposal - The Request for Proposal application template helps manage the process of creating and releasing an initial RFP, collecting proposal submissions, and formally accepting the selected proposal from among those submitted.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Help Desk - The Help Desk application template helps departments such as IT, Facilities, and HR manage service requests
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Physical Asset Tracking and Management - The Physical Asset Tracking and Management application template helps departments such as Facilities, BioMedical, and Surgery manage requests and the tracking of physical assets.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Team Work Site- - The Team Work Site application template provides a place where clinical and business teams, such as Medical Management or Environment of Care committees, can upload background documents, track scheduled calendar events, initiate discussion topics, and submit action items.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Clinical Trial Initiation and Management - For those who work in academic medical centers, the Clinical Trial Initiation and Management application template helps teams track clinical trial protocols, set objectives, select subjects, and manage the budget.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Employee Training Scheduling and Materials - The Employee Training Scheduling and Materials application template helps nursing educators and other instructors manage courses and related materials.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Employee Activities Site - The Employee Activities Site application template helps departments such as HR and Marketing manage the creation of and attendance at employee events.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Case Management - The Case Management application template helps case managers track the status and tasks required to complete their work.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects - The Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects application template helps project teams track and budget multiple, interrelated sets of activities.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Business Performance Reporting - The Business Performance Reporting application template helps managers in healthcare organizations track the satisfaction of internal customers/patients through a combination of surveys and discussions.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Event Planning - The Event Planning application template helps teams organize events efficiently through the use of online registration, schedules, communication, and feedback.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Knowledgebase - The Knowledge Base application template helps teams manage the information that is resident within their organization.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Change Request Management - The Change Request Management application template helps users track risks associated with a design change.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Call Center - The Call Center application template helps departments such as Billing, HR, and IT manage customer service requests, from issue identification to cause analysis and resolution.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Discussion Database - The Discussion Database application template provides a location where team members can create and reply to discussion topics.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Document Library and Review - The Document Library and Review application template helps people manage the review cycle common to processes like publication, knowledge management, and project plan development.
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations: Compliance Process Support Site - The Compliance Process Support Site application template helps both teams and executive sponsors manage compliance implementation endeavors, such as HIPAA.

If you want to try all of them out there is also a separate download containing of the different templates – check out Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Application Template for Health Organizations – All templates – single download

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,sps2010,healthcare,sharepoint+server+2010,microsoft

Don’t forget service pack 1 for the SharePoint language packs

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010 has been released a couple of weeks ago – check out Update Center for Microsoft Office, Office Servers and Related Products for more details. Just don’t forget to install the service packs for the language packs as well - listed below are the ones for French (just switch language for the other languages:

• French language pack SP1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010
• French language pack SP1 for SharePoint Server 2010

So if you have language packs available you need to install in the following order:

• Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation
• Language Pack Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010
• Language Pack Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2010

Important: Although the official page recommends that you install the June 2011 Cumulative Update after installing SP1 – I would not do this if you are not affected by one of the issues which is fixed in the Cumulative Update.

Related links:

• SPDeletedSite – quick overview of SP1 improved recycle bin
• The mystery behind SharePoint 2010 patching
• So what the Fuss? Service Pack 1 and June 2011 CU for SharePoint 2010
• 10 best practices and recommendations for SharePoint 2010 SP1 and June 2011 CU
• Changes to Social Computing features in SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 1
• FAST for SharePoint Service Pack 1
• 10 reasons SharePoint 2010 SP1 will rock your world!

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,servicepack1,sp1,microsoft,sharepoint+server,language+packs

Solving the No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator error when using Powershell to modify SharePoint 2010 user profiles

SharePoint permissions can be quite tricky – yesterday I stumbled upon an error “No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator." when trying to update SharePoint 2010 user profiles using Powershell – luckily Steve explained what was wrong “No User Profile Application Available” Mystery in SharePoint 2010.

You have to configure security in 2 different places:

• Click the administrators button on the Service Applications page and add yourself with Full Control
• On the same page you will also notice a permissions button to the far right – don’t forget to add your account here as well

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,sps2010,Powershell,user+profiles,microsoft,sharepoint+2010

Installing Office Web Apps on Windows 7 not supported

Don’t try to install Office Web Apps on Windows 7 – apparently it is not supported – check out KB2276219 – When Installing Office Web Apps you get a message “Windows Server Features or Role Services required by this product are not enabled”

Technorati Tags: office+web+apps,sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,sps2010,windows+7,microsoft

SharePoint data visualization with the Silverlight Pivot Viewer

A while ago I was looking for another way to visualize large dataset from within SharePoint – a cool way to do this is using the Microsoft Silverlight Pivot Viewer (check out The Silverlight Pivot Viewer Control documentation and videos  for more background info how to use this) – a great example of this is the Top SharePoint Internet Sites liver pivot .

At first I thought about writing a generic webpart myself which would load the cxml file (this is basically a specific xml format for defining the Pivot collection which you want to display) – but then I found this great project on Codeplex from Xavier Vanneste called the Pivot Viewer for SharePoint.

The Pivot Viewer for SharePoint Codeplex project contains an HTTP handler to dynamically generate a cxml file for a specific list or library – it also handles the Deepzoom image generation using Office Web Apps - and a webpart which is used to render the cxml file created by the HTTP Handler.

Off course you can still build your own custom solution on top of the Silverlight Pivot Viewer – these are the tools that you need to install to get going:

• Silverlight 4 Toolkit – April 2010 on Codeplex
• Microsoft Silverlight Pivot Viewer SDK – after installing the SDK there’s a directory added with sample code - C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\PivotViewer – unfortunately the Aug10 release did not work for me.
• (Optional) Pivot Collection tool for Microsoft Excel – enables you to represent a PivotViewer collection in a spreadsheet, and then export that spreadsheet to a format understood by Pivot Viewer

Some other links which might get you started:

• Excellent blog post explaining how to use  the Silverlight Pivot Viewer control with data from the “Cricket World Cup 2011” – you will still need to rip the cricket players pictures to get it working though
• PivotViewer – Collections – with MSDN Magazine example
• Pivot, OData and Windows Azure: Visual Netflix

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,pivotviewer,silverlight+toolkit,silverlight,visualstudio2010,vs2010,sharepoint+2010,sps2010,microsoft,data+visualization

Setting up a Windows 7 with Boot from VHD option

After finding out that VMWare and Windows Phone 7.1 beta emulator were not very likely to work together correctly – I decided to explore the Boot from VHD option in Windows 7 so that I would create a second “portable and bootable” partition using a VHD file which would contain a clean version of Windows 7.

There is a lot of interesting guidance out there but finally I decided to not go for this option give the fact that I did not want to “generalize” my own portable to build the custom Windows 7  wim image. It would be interesting if a Windows 7 “install.wim” would also be provided as a download on MSDN or TechNet.

Maybe something for when I have more time on my hands:

• TechNet Video  - Windows 7 VHD Boot Demonstration
• 3 part blog series about Windows 7 Boot from VHD
• Building a standard Image of Windows 7
• The Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7

Technorati Tags: windows7,microsoft,administration,vhd,bootfromvh

Third Microsoft MVP at RealDolmen–congrats Thomas

RealDolmen has another MVP – congrats to Thomas Vuylsteke for being awarded MVP for Identity Lifecycle Manager . Definitely check out his blog – http://setspn.blogspot.com

Tags van Technorati: MVP,RealDolmen,ILM,Identity+Lifecycle+Manager,Microsoft

How search suggestions work in SharePoint Server 2010

A while ago I wrote about one of the new features for end users with SharePoint 2010 is that suggestions are provided while you are typing a search query which is commonly referred to as search suggestions in SharePoint 2010. The TechNet posting Manage query suggestions (SharePoint Server 2010) now explains how and when these suggestions are added:

Query suggestions are automatically created over time for any query that has a specified number of result click-throughs. By default, a query suggestion is created after users click through six times.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,search,sps2010,sharepoint+2010,microsoft

Listing features on SharePoint 2010 with Powershell

The Get-SPFeature PowerShell cmdlet allows you to list all the features for a specific scope – to list all features installed on the farm sorted by DisplayName you use the following

   1:  Get-SPFeature | Sort - Property DisplayName

This will give you an enormous amount of information about the different features such as DisplayName, ReceiverAssembly, UIVersion, Scope, … basically all the properties which can be defined for a Feature Element.

You can also specify which fields you want displayed using the following syntax

   1:  Get-SPFeature | Select  DisplayName, Scope, ID

It is also quite easy to export the results to CSV format

   1:  Get-SPFeature | select DisplayName, Scope, ID | export-csv c:\features.csv

If you only need to list activated features for a specific site collection you can use the following

   1:  Get-SPFeature -Site http://url | Sort DisplayName

And similar for an individual SharePoint site

   1:  Get-SPFeature -Web http://url

 

 

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint+2010,powershell,sps2010,administration

Two little known facts about the thumbnail and PowerPoint preview feature in FAST Search Server 2010

Two interesting facts you should be aware of with regards to the thumbnail and PowerPoint preview feature – for those of you don’t know this – take a look at the screenshot below.

For Word documents a preview will be generated of the first page – for PowerPoint files you get a scrolling view of your slides.

• You can actually get the thumbnail and PowerPoint previews to work without having to install FAST Search Server 2010 - the API’s used for generating the thumbnails and the PowerPoint previews are the Office Mobile PowerPoint Web Handler Protocol and the Office Mobile Word Web Handler Protocol, both included with Office Web Apps, this API works for for doc, docx, ppt and pptx files (Office 97-2010 formats) – Mikael actually describes how to do this – Document Thumbnails and PowerPoint Preview for your search results without installing FAST for SharePoint
• The thumbnail and Powerpoint preview feature only works for PowerPoint files and Word documents which are stored in SharePoint. If you are indexing external Office documents it will not work.

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,fast,microsoft,sharepoint+2010