My SharePoint PowerShell Scripts

1. Get the template name and ID for a web site:
   (Get-SPWeb http://website) | select WebTemplate, WebTemplateID
   A list of templates names and ID's can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607979(v=office.14).aspx.

How to Install SharePoint 2013 Project Templates on Visual Studio 2012

1. Download and install Web Platform Installer: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx.
2. Close all VS instances or the setup will fail.
3. On the Web PI select "Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012".

After that open VS and the SharePoint 2013 templates should be on the New Project dialog, under Installed | Templates | <language> | Office/SharePoint | SharePoint Solutions.

SharePoint 2013: Configure user profile synchronization service

On the default SharePoint 2013 configuration, the User Profile Synchronization Service (UPSS) is not enabled, so alerts are created but don't work because users don't have a valid e-mail address. Supposing user e-mails are somehow already loaded on AD, here what's you gonna do to configure user profile synchronization:

1. Follow the article "Synchronize user and group profiles in SharePoint Server 2013" (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee721049(v=office.15).aspx). Notice that the synchronization account must be Farm Admin, and local admin on the box running the UPSS instance.
2. Use ADSI Edit on the DC to give "Replicate Directory Changes" permission to the synchronization account on the container where your users are.
3. My test domain had no Exchange or other similar mail server program, so the AD attribute "proxyAddress" was blank. By default SharePoint loads an user e-mail address from this attribute, so I had to remap SharePoint "Work E-Mail" property to the "mail" attribute on AD (which I already had filled). Then run a full synchronization (an incremental one did not load the values).

Cheers,

GB

Saving InfoPath form back to subfolder in SharePoint library

Recently I needed to save an InfoPath 2007 ( :-P ) form back to its original location. The original location was on a subfolder inside a SharePoint form library, and the subfolder was created dynamically during form creation time, named based on some data that was not available on the form itself. So there was no way (at least I didn’t see one) I could create a form submit connection that enabled me to save the form back to where it was.

I’ve Googled for a solution and the only one that looked ok was to include the form URL as a field on the form itself, so I could retrieve it later when saving the form back to the SharePoint library. But since the form is running inside SharePoint, and it is an item in a list, I thought I might give it a try to the SharePoint Server API inside the form code behind, and it worked! I used SPWeb.GetListItem() to retrieve the item in SharePoint corresponding to the form, and then used the item’s properties to retrieve its location:

     public void FormEvents_Submit(object sender, SubmitEventArgs e)
     {
         // Retrieves reference to the form in the SharePoint library based on its URL
         SPListItem item = SPContext.Current.Web.GetListItem(this.Uri);
         // Saves the form. There must be a connection on the form named “SaveFile”, pointing to the
         // SharePoint library. In the following code the connection generates the file name, but if the file
         // name must be generated at run-time, it can be set through FileSubmitConnection.FileName
         FileSubmitConnection spConnection = (FileSubmitConnection)this.DataConnections["SaveFile"];
         spConnection.FolderUrl = item.Web.Url + item.File.ParentFolder.ServerRelativeUrl;
         spConnection.Execute();
         e.CancelableArgs.Cancel = false; // Tells InfoPath that form submit was ok
     }

SharePoint: The site theme is not applied to my custom page

If you created and/or customized pages in a SharePoint 2007 site, and when changing the site theme this change does not appears on the customized pages, one possible cause is the absence of the ASP.NET server tag that includes site themes on the page. Try placing the following markup on the <head> session of the page:

<SharePoint:Theme runat="server">

This server control writes the <link> tag that includes the selected theme CSS styles on the generated HTML.

Using Microsoft.SharePoint.dll to find out the ID of a list

When moving a site between web applications using SharePoint Designer backup (Site > Administration > Backup Web Site menu), several web parts wich had been converted to XSLT were displaying a "strange" message:

The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.

When an web part is converted to XSLT, SharePoint Designer places on the page a control of type WebPartPages:DataFormWebPart to display the data. This control uses the list ID to specify wich list is the data source (each list in a SharePoint site is given a GUID as its identifier, wich is stored in the list's ID property). Well, when the site was recreated at the destination, so were its lists, and that generated new ID's to them. And the web parts could not find their lists anymore, so they stopped working.

Being a restless geek, I decided to test the classes on Microsoft.SharePoint.dll by coding a little console app that listed the ID's from a SharePoint site lists. The code is bellow, and can be used as an intro to classes in namespace Microsoft.SharePoint. If you want just the app, just download the following file and run it from a command prompt on your SharePoint machine: SPListId.zip.

Imports Microsoft.SharePoint

Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        Try
            Console.WriteLine()
            If My.Application.CommandLineArgs.Count = 0 Then
                Console.WriteLine("SPListId - Lists IDs from lists in a SharePoint site")
                Console.WriteLine("Copyright (c) 2010 SrNimbus. No rights reserved ;)")
                Console.WriteLine("Usage: SPListId site_url")
                Return
            End If
            ' The System.Uri class helps manipulating network addresses
            Dim urlSite As Uri = New Uri(My.Application.CommandLineArgs(0))
            ' The Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite class represents a site collection on SharePoint
            Dim siteCollection As New SPSite(urlSite.GetComponents(UriComponents.SchemeAndServer, UriFormat.Unescaped))
            ' The Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb class represents a site on a site collection
            Dim site As SPWeb = siteCollection.OpenWeb(urlSite.AbsolutePath)
            Console.WriteLine("Lists on {0}:", urlSite.OriginalString)
            Console.WriteLine("------------------------------------")
            ' The SPList class represents a SharePoint list
            For Each lista As SPList In site.Lists
                Console.WriteLine("{0}: {{{1}}}", lista.Title, lista.ID.ToString().ToUpper())
            Next
            Console.WriteLine("------------------------------------")
        Catch erro As Exception
            Console.WriteLine("Ooops:")
            Console.WriteLine("{0} - {1}", erro.Source, erro.Message)
        Finally
            Console.WriteLine()
        End Try
    End Sub

End Module

Remember to add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.dll in order to compile the project. It is located on the SharePoint server, at %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI.

SharePoint 2007 Content Deploy Quick Start Guide

And there was I working my 455 off preparing for teach Microsoft´s 50149 SharePoint Operations training when...

A word of advise: stay away from this training. The author tries to show EVERYTHING about SharePoint operations but there's no details on *any* of the topics shown. The result is frustrated and/or distracted students, and that's a saddening thing to me as an instructor - not to mention to the students...

Well, there I was studying the module on Content Deployment when I stumbled upon this guide from Stefan Gossner (great SharePoint blog!). It gives a quick and straightforward view on the main points about Content Deplyment on SharePoint 2007. Nice reading if you are new to the subject. Till now, the guide covers the following:

Part 1 - The Basics
Part 2 - The Basics continued
Part 3 - Configuration
Part 4 - Communication
Part 5 - Quick Deployment
Part 6 - Logging
Part 7 - Change Token Basics
Part 8 - Job and Change Token

Part 1 has an link index to the other parts. Enjoy!

STSADM: Access Denied

You may get an "Access Denied" error running the SharePoint command-line administration tool stsadm.exe on Windows 2008, even if you are loggend in with an administrator account. One possible reason for that is UAC (User Access Control). According to the UAC Guide on TechNet, administrators receives two credentials set when they log on: a "normal use" credential and an "administrative" credential. That's because on Vista and W2008 an application may mark itself as administrative task, and when someone tries to start that application, UAC shows the "Windows needs your permission to continue" dialog box:


When you click "Continue", Windows uses the "administrative portion of your logon credentials" to run the application.

The problem is when this dialog box is not shown. For instance, when you open a command prompt and try to run stsadm.exe. You simply get and "Access Denied" message. That's because the command prompt trying to run stsadm has to be opened with administrative rights:

Since the application trying to run stsadm (the command prompt itself) is running with the "administrative credentials" of your administrator account, the access denied message should go away.