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SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: How to Monitor SharePoint Performance Issue?

27 Apr

SharePoint is a fast-growing platform, more and more lists and documents need be managed may cause SharePoint performance issue. How to avoid SharePoint performance issue? You can use tools to monitor it during develop SharePoint AddIn.

- SharePoint Dispose tracker tool

SPDisposeCheck is a tool that helps developers and administrators check custom SharePoint solutions that use the SharePoint Object Model helping measure against known Microsoft dispose best practices. This tool may not show all memory leaks in your code and may produce false positives which need further review by subject matter experts.

- Install SharePoint Dispose tracker tool

Make sure you have installed Microsoft visual Studio 2010. Then run installer file SPDisposeCheck.exe.

After install successfully, you will able to find SPDisposeCheck Addin in Visual Studio 2010 Tools menu.

- Configure the project what you analyze

Click SharePoint Dispose Check, get SPDispseCheck setting form.

Select the project what you analyze and treat problem type

Check “Execute After Build” and the assemblies to analyze file.

Save it.

- Analyze the code

Open the project, then check below code.

Build the project, the SPDispose Check tool will execute auto.

Go to View menu->Error List. You will see the error; this reason is in this code I did not disposed the objects properly.

Double click the error, you will locate to the incorrect code. Then you are able to correct it.

You also can get help to how to fix the error by select “Show Error Help” in right-menu of the error.

After click Show Error Help, will auto direct to the page(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rogerla/archive/2008/02/12/sharepoint-2007-and-wss-3-0-dispose-patterns-by-example.aspx)

Fix above code according to the help

Recheck the code, no error appear

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: Programatically Retrieve Credentials from the Secure Store Service in SharePoint 2010

20 Apr

SharePoint 2010′s Secure Store Service provides a way to map credentials and delegate access to remote resources. You may already be familiar with the MOSS 2007 Single Sign-on Shared Service, which was the former equivalent. The Secure Store Service integrates seemlessly with Business Connectivity Services (BCS), but it also features an API that can be taken advantage of within custom development projects. This makes the service an attractive option for storing sensitive configuration data such as connection strings, Web service credentials, etc.

The Secure Store Service allows us to create Target Applications which house sets of credentials. The two main types are Individual and Group applications, Individual meaning credentials are mapped to individual users, and Group meaning all users share the same set of credentials.

While the raw API isn’t very intuitive, its design was likely intentional (additional security by obfuscation). With a little marshalling help from our interop library friends, we are able to retrieve credentials (provided the appropriate permissions to the target application).

To begin, we need to reference a couple of assemblies.

Microsoft.BusinessData.dll

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\Microsoft.BusinessData.dll

Microsoft.Office.SecureStoreService.dll

C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.Office.SecureStoreService\14.0.0.0__71e9bce111e9429c\Microsoft.Office.SecureStoreService.dll

And now for the reason you came to this post … the code

using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security; using Microsoft.BusinessData.Infrastructure.SecureStore; using Microsoft.Office.SecureStoreService.Server; using Microsoft.SharePoint;   namespace Trentacular.SharePoint.Util {     public static class SecureStoreUtils     {         public static Dictionary<string, string> GetCredentials(string applicationID)         {             var serviceContext = SPServiceContext.Current;             var secureStoreProvider = new SecureStoreProvider { Context = serviceContext };             var credentialMap = new Dictionary<string, string>();               using (var credentials = secureStoreProvider.GetCredentials(applicationID))             {                 var fields = secureStoreProvider.GetTargetApplicationFields(applicationID);                 for (var i = 0; i < fields.Count; i++)                 {                     var field = fields[i];                     var credential = credentials[i];                     var decryptedCredential = ToClrString(credential.Credential);                       credentialMap.Add(field.Name, decryptedCredential);                 }             }               return credentialMap;         }           public static string ToClrString(this SecureString secureString)         {             var ptr = Marshal.SecureStringToBSTR(secureString);               try             {                 return Marshal.PtrToStringBSTR(ptr);             }             finally             {                 Marshal.FreeBSTR(ptr);             }         }     } }

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: How to create event receivers using Visual Studio 2010 in SharePoint 2010?

06 Apr

In this post, I will show you how to create event receivers using VS 2010 in SharePoint 2010. Please follow this steps:

Step-1:

Open Visual Studio 2010 -> File -> New Project -> Select SharePoint 2010 under Visual C# section. Then choose Event Receiver project template from the list of templates. Give a name for the project and click ok as shown in the figure below

Step-2:
Then choose deploy as farm solution and give the URL for debugging in the drop down as shown below then

click on Next.

Step-3:

This step is very much important. Here first choose what type of receiver you want. Here I have added List Item Events.
Then select the event source and Here I have choose custom list.
Then choose what the events and I have selected Item Added and Item Updated Event. After selection the window should be look like the below figure.

Step-4

Now you can write code for the events that you have selected in Step-3. Here I have only add a sample code for a ItemAdding event as below. This will cancel the operation with error message if the particular list title is not “Test”.
Here is the code below:
public override void ItemAdding(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
//base.ItemAdding(properties);
if (properties.ListTitle != "Test")
{
properties.Status = SPEventReceiverStatus.CancelWithError;
properties.ErrorMessage = "You can only add to the Test List !!!";
properties.Cancel = true;
}
}

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: Creating a Custom Database Name for the Central Admin Content Database in SharePoint 2010

20 Mar

Problem

While configuring SharePoint 2010 using the GUI, the Central Administration (CA) content database name will have a GUID in it (long 36 character alphanumeric string). This is not a real problem but it looks annoying. Moreover a custom name would make it easy to remember if there are multiple CA databases in a SQL Server.

Solution

To solve this we need to do a scripted configuration. If we run the PS configuration Wizard after installing binaries it will create a CA content database with a GUID. However, if we create a CA content database using PowerShell we can have the database name of our choice.

The inspiration for this article came from the technet article Deploy by using DBA-created databases which talks about some cool PowerShell commands for creating and configuring configuration databases.

Here are the steps to achieve this:

1. Run Setup on each server computer in the farm. You must run Setup on at least one of these computers by using the complete installation option.

2. Do not run the SharePoint Configuration Wizard after setup finishes. Instead, cancel it. Open the SharePoint Management Shell.

3. From the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, use the New-SPConfigurationDatabase command to create a new configuration database, for example:

New-SPConfigurationDatabase -DatabaseName "SharePoint_Config" -DatabaseServer "SQL_DB" -Passphrase (ConvertTo-SecureString "MyPassword" -AsPlainText -force) -FarmCredentials (Get-Credential) -AdministrationContentDatabaseName "SharePoint_Admin_Content"

The cmdlet above creates a config database named “SharePoint_Config” and also creates the Central Admin content database and names it “SharePoint_Admin_Content”. Values in quotes in the above command can be customized.

4. Run the following commands in order, the comments touch up on what the commands do:

#install help collections
Install-SPHelpCollection -All

#Secure resources
Initialize-SPResourceSecurity

#Install Services
Install-SPService

#Install Features
Install-SPFeature -AllExistingFeatures

#Provision Central Administration on port 2010
New-SPCentralAdministration -Port 2010 -WindowsAuthProvider "NTLM"

#Install Application content
Install-SPApplicationContent

This finishes the setup and provisions the Central Administration website on port 2010.

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: SharePoint Information Architecture Diagram Using PowerShell and Visio

06 Mar

Having a well-planned Information Architecture is critical for the success of a SharePoint implementation. Sometimes, as we all know, our environments get away from us and site owners start running frantic – sites are created without our knowledge or placed where they shouldn’t. You have had enough and it’s time for reorganization (and perhaps a new security model) – but how do you know what you have now in order to thoroughly plan things out? Technology to the rescue! Let’s use the “power” of PowerShell and Visio to do this for us.

What we will have at the end – a nice Visio Information Architecture diagram to help us with a site reorg!

Now, how we got there:

On the SharePoint server, open the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and perform the following command:

Get-SPWebApplication https://portal.contoso.com | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | Select Title, URL, ID, ParentWebID | Export-CSV C:\InfoArch.csv -NoTypeInformation

Open the CSV file in Excel.

To link all of the Site Collections to the Root Site Collection, replace all ParentWebID’s that are “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000″ (minus the Root’s) with the ID from the Root Site Collection. So, in our example, all of the “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000″ values would be replaced by the ID of the Root Site Collection “0c187a2c-e3fa-42e8-9de6-6b2987e41972″.

Save the file as XLSX, then open Visio 2010

On the New selection, pick Business under Template Categories and then Organization Chart Wizard

The wizard will start, accept the default of” Information that is stored on a file…” and click Next

Click Next again to say that the data is stored in an Excel file

Browse for the saved XLSX file and click Next

This screen is the most important; this is where you tell the wizard what the Employee-Manager relationship is. For our case, Name is the ID of the site and Reports To is the ParentWebID.

On this screen, we tell Visio which fields we want to display on each box. To keep it clean, I just pick the Title.

For Shape Data, you should pick all of the columns. This way you can select each box and display the data relevant to that site. For instance, we could have included the Site Owner, Last Modified Date, or Created date in our PowerShell command and included those columns in the Shape Data as well.

Leave the default of “I want to specify how much…” and click Next

Leave the default again and click Finish

Once the process completes, you should have a single page Visio diagram with the Root at the top and Site Collections and subsites connected underneath. I applied a green theme to help showcase the chart more.

Zoomed in view of a Site Collection named IT with subsites Helpdesk, Apps, and Forms

Zoomed in view of shape data after clicking on the Helpdesk subsite

Now,  you can save this as a Visio Web Drawing file, publish it to SharePoint 2010 using the Visio Graphics Service and have users click on each site to see Owners, Created Date, Web Template, and more!

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: Configuring a SharePoint 2010 Website to Allow SSL Connections

27 Feb

This post will cover how to configure a SharePoint forms based web application to allow SSL/HTTPS connections. The process involves setting up an SSL certificate and configuring IIS and SharePoint to allow requests over HTTPS.

The following steps assume that you have a SharePoint web application already set up using forms based authentication. If you need details on how to do this see the article on Technet titled “Forms Authentication in SharePoint Products and Technologies”. We will be using IIS 7 in this example but a similar process can be followed using IIS 6 using the SelfSSL utility. As mentioned in the previous article this will differ if you are using off-box SSL termination and/or already have a registered SSL certificate.

Architectural overview

The following diagram shows the logical architecture for the setup that will be covered. The default web application is configured at www.company.com and uses forms based authentication with a SQL database to store membership and role information. This web application allows anonymous access and is exposed to the public over the internet. The default web application has been extended onto a second IIS web site at author.company.com that is configured to use Windows authentication. This is a simple configuration that allows internal users to enter content on a separate site that is not available externally. Other configurations are possible (including using content deployment) but aren’t in the scope of this article.

The first step we will cover is shown on the right of the diagram and involves adding an additional binding to the www.company.com web site in IIS and adding an alternate access mapping to the web application in SharePoint.

Associate an SSL certificate with the IIS website

On a production environment you will obviously need to purchase a SSL certificate for the domain that you wish to secure but on a development environment an easy way to mimic this is to create a self signed certificate.

Create a new Self Signed Certificate for the existing web application

1. Click on the root node in IIS 7 Manager and select the “Server Certificates” icon in the feature pane on the right:

2. Click the “Create Self-Signed Certificate…” link on the right hand side of the page

3. Enter a name (I’m using www.company.com in this example) and click OK. You should see your certificate appear in the list of server
certificates.

4. Select the IIS site that is running the SharePoint application and click on the “Bindings…” link on the right hand side of the page

5. To enable SSL click “Add”, select “https” and select the SSL certificate we created earlier:

6. Click OK. At this point we have configured IIS to allow connections to this site over SSL but we need to let SharePoint know to map these requests to the correct web application.

Configure SharePoint to accept requests over HTTPS

7. Navigate to Central Administration > Operations, select “Alternate Access Mappings” and click “Edit Public URL’s”

8. Select the Alternate Access Mapping Collection for the FBA web application and enter the relevant HTTPS address (e.g. My FBA site is
located at http://www.company.com as an example so I would enter https://www.company.com). It is up to you which Zone you put the URL in as this doesn’t affect anything and is just there to help you remember what they are each used for.

9. That’s it! You should now be able to browse to your site using SSL. If you are using a self signed certificate you will first be presented with a certificate warning so click on the “Continue to this website (not recommended)” link and your site will be displayed.

Now we can browse to our site over HTTP and HTTPS but will need to do some more work to ensure that the right protocol is used for each page. We need to ensure that pages displaying or sending sensitive information like passwords and/or address details are delivered over HTTPS, but pages such as the homepage are delivered via HTTP to avoid the additional processing encrypting and decrypting these non-sensitive page

 

SharePoint Server 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: Configure User Profile Services in SharePoint Server 2010

17 Feb

The profile import architecture in SharePoint 2010 is all new. Now it uses the same .NET connectors that Search and BDC are using. At the same time it’s very important to note that getting profile import configured is not that easy since the configuration is little weird.

Before we get in to the actual user profile configuration, there is a mandatory home-work need to be performed. That is the service account you are planning to use for this service application to run, must be a member of Local Administrators group of the server. And if you are planning to configure this in multiple servers, then this has to be done in all the servers. In case if you are running SharePoint 2010 on a server which contains an Active Directory, then the service account needs to be part of the Domain Admins group, since there is no Local Administrators group.

I’m running a Single-server SharePoint 2010 farm on VMware and I have an Active Directory configured already. So as the 1st step, I will do the home-work of adding the service account to Domain Admins group as illustrated below:

1. Open the Active Directory Users and Computers by going to Start -> Administrative Tools -> Active Directory Users and Commuters.

2. Right-click the service account you wish to configure for profile import service application to run and select Properties. In my VM the account is, SP_Farm.

3. Go to Member Of tab, and select Add… to add a new group membership.


4. Type Domain Admins and click Check Names to resolve the name correctly.



5. Click OK and OK to close all the opened windows.

Unfortunately, in order to take effect this change, you must restart the server. Go ahead and restart, before you get your fingers burnt.

After you restart the server, we can go and start the User Profile Synchronization Service as illustrated below:

1. Navigate to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site.

2. From the System Settings section, select Manage services on server link.


3. Services on Server: page shows all the services installed in the server. Scroll down until you see User Profile Synchronization Service. Click Start link in the Action column for the User Profile Synchronization Service.


4. Next screen prompt you for the credentials required to run this service application. Since we have already configured our account as a member of either Local Administrators or Domain Admins group we can enter Password: and Confirm password: for the same account, and click OK.


5. This is where SharePoint team checks your patience.  Status of the User Profile Synchronization Service will say Starting for few minutes. In my VM, it took 4 minutes and it can go even longer than that. Keep on refreshing the page and as long as it says Starting, you are good.


6. After few minutes, status will become Started.


Before proceed to next set of configuration steps, remember to restart your IIS by following:

1. Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt.

2. Type iisreset and press Enter.

3. When it completes, type exit and press Enter.

After restarting IIS, proceed to configuring the User Profile Synchronization connections:

1. Navigate to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site.

2. From Application Management section, select Manage service applications link.


3. From the Service Applications page, scroll down until you see User Profile Service Application. Click the User Profile Service Application link.


4. You will be taken to Manage Profile Service: User Profile Service Application page. From the Synchronization section, select Configure Synchronization Connection link.


5. You will be taken to Synchronization Connections page. Select Create New Connection link to configure new profile import connection.


6. You will be taken to Add new synchronization connection page. Specify a meaningful name for the Connection Name. Select Active Directory for the Type. In the Connection Settings section, specify the forest name for the Forest name: field and enter the service account name in the form of DOMAIN\account for the Account name: field and enter the password for Password: and Confirm password: filed.


7. Click Populate Containers button. This will communicate with the given forest and populate the containers such as Users, Groups and OUs.

8. Scroll down and select the Users container and click OK.



Now that you have configured your User Profile Synchronization Service to communicate with the Active Directory Users container, next you need to fire it up so that it can bring the users from Active Directory into SharePoint. Let’s go and start a Full Import to get all the users.

1. From Application Management section, select Manage service applications link.


2. From the Service Applications page, scroll down until you see User Profile Service Application. Click the User Profile Service Application link.


3. You will be taken to Manage Profile Service: User Profile Service Application page. From the Synchronization section, select Start Profile Synchronization link.


4. You will be taken to Start Profile Synchronization page. Select Start Full and click OK.


5. Now you are back in Manage Profile Service: User Profile Service Application page. Observe the right side of the Manage Profile Service: User Profile Service Application page. Initially, Number of User Profiles will be 0. And the Profile Synchronization Status will change from Idle to Synchronizing.


6. Keep on refreshing the page and after few minutes, you will see Profile Synchronization Status will come back to Idle. Also Number of User Profiles will show a number indicating how many profiles were synchronized. Be patience in this step as well since it will take more than you expect to finish the synchronization. I had 6 users and it took nearly 8 minutes to complete this.


Now that you have done a full import and I suggest you depending on the frequency of the changes in the Active Directory, you can decide whether you configure an incremental import or not. If it’s a demo setup just like mine, leave it for the moment because you know how to do a full import whenever you need.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: How to Solve – Cannot connect to the configuration database in SharePoint 2010

13 Feb

Maybe some of you face this problem when connect to your SharePoint Central Admin:

“Cannot connect to the configuration database”.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPageUserException: Cannot connect to the configuration database.
Source Error: 
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request.
Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

It is very simple issue, The reason might be that your SQL Server service might be stoped.
So Open the Services (start -> run -> services.msc click on enter, this will open services list).

From there check the service name as SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER). Right click that and click on Start or Restart. Once started successfully open your central administration, it will work fine. It should be in started state as shown in the figure below.


Good luck and I hope it will help.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: SharePoint 2010 XML Navigation with Selected Highlighted Tabs

08 Feb

So you’ve got you XML Navigation set up and ready to go on your SharePoint 2010 Site. You log into your site and now you noticed that the XML has no idea what site you are on and so the Top Navigation Tab isn’t selected (highlighted) when you click on a site and some of your end users use this as a queue to know what site they are on because it stands out a little more than the site title. The Steps below will get you your XML Navigation implemented onto the Master Page and all of the tools that will help you control the behavior of your navigation.

The first step is to open your SharePoint 2010 Master Page in a tool like SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio 2010. Now look for the asp content placeholder: <asp:ContentPlaceHolder
id=”PlaceHolderHorizontalNav” runat=”server”>

Now you will want to change the Data source from DataSourceID=”topSiteMap” to DataSourceID=”DemoXmlDataSource”.

Then we are going to change the SiteMapProvider from:
<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server"
ControlId="TopNavigationDataSource"
Id="topNavigationDelegate"><Template_Controls><asp:SiteMapDataSource
ShowStartingNode="False"
SiteMapProvider="SPNavigationProvider" id="topSiteMap"
runat="server" StartingNodeUrl="sid:1002"/></Template_Controls></SharePoint:DelegateControl>

To:
<DataBindings> <asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="0"
DataMember="siteMapNode" NavigateUrlField="url"
TextField="title" ToolTipField="description"
ValueField="title" />
<asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="1" DataMember="siteMapNode"
NavigateUrlField="url" TextField="title"
ToolTipField="description" ValueField="title" />
<asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="2" DataMember="siteMapNode"
NavigateUrlField="url" TextField="title"
ToolTipField="description" ValueField="title" />
<asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="3" DataMember="siteMapNode"
NavigateUrlField="url" TextField="title"
ToolTipField="description" ValueField="title" />
</DataBindings> </SharePoint:AspMenu> <asp:XmlDataSource
DataFile="/_layouts/XMLNavigation/topnavigation.xml"
ID="DemoXmlDataSource" runat="server"
XPath="/*/*"/>

The above change has the SiteMapProvider switched from pointing to the SharePoint site to point to a folder location on my server that has my XML Navigation in it. My new location is:
/_layouts/XMLNavigation/topnavigation.xml

Here is a complete view of what the asp content placeholder should look like:
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderHorizontalNav" runat="server"> <SharePoint:AspMenu
ID="TopNavigationMenu" Runat="server" EnableViewState="false"
DataSourceID="DemoXmlDataSource" AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"
UseSimpleRendering="true" UseSeparateCss="false" Orientation="Horizontal" StaticDisplayLevels="1"
MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="5"
DynamicHorizontalOffset="0"
SkipLinkText="" CssClass="s4-tn">
<DataBindings>
<asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="0"
DataMember="siteMapNode" NavigateUrlField="url"
TextField="title" ToolTipField="description"
ValueField="title" />
<asp:MenuItemBinding
Depth="1" DataMember="siteMapNode"
NavigateUrlField="url" TextField="title"
ToolTipField="description" ValueField="title" />
<asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="2" DataMember="siteMapNode" NavigateUrlField="url" TextField="title" ToolTipField="description" ValueField="title" />
<asp:MenuItemBinding Depth="3" DataMember="siteMapNode" NavigateUrlField="url"
TextField="title" ToolTipField="description" ValueField="title" />
</DataBindings>
</SharePoint:AspMenu>
<asp:XmlDataSource DataFile="/_layouts/XMLNavigation/topnavigation.xml"
ID="DemoXmlDataSource" runat="server" XPath="/*/*"/>
</asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

Now I will need to properly create my XML Navigation with URL’s that will allow me to highlight a tab when it has been selected on the SharePoint site. The main rule is that you will need to use the entire url for your site in order for this to work. So instead of having http://yoursharepointsite you will need to have http://yoursharepointsite/default.aspx or whatever the entire path is to the aspx file for your landing page is on your site. The limitation that should be noted is that the top nav items will only be highlight when you are on the root level of each site collection or sub-site.

Here is an example of what your XML file navigation should look like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><siteMap>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Home" description="Home"/>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/SearchCenter/Pages/default.aspx"
title="Search Center" description="Search Center"/>
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/subsite1/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Subsite #1" description="Subsite #1"/>
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/couseling/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Counseling" description="Counseling">
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown1"
title="Housing Services" description="Housing Services"/>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown2"
title="Specialized Services" description="Specialized
Services" />
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown3"
title="Services" description="Services" />
</siteMapNode>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/TestSite/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Test Site" description="Test Site"/>
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/finalsite/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Another Test Site" description="Another Test
Site"/>
</siteMap>

Now we will need to reference and create some JQuery to allow for the magic to happen. We will be using jquery-1.6.1.js for this tutorial. So that file will need to be referenced in your masterpage to get the JQuery to work on the Top Navigation Highlighted selection.

For the JavaScript needed to make the Top Navigation stay selected when you are on the site you will need to create a JS file using the following code:

var TCSC = {};
TCSC.ShowMenuSelection = function () {
var url = location.href;
var url_parts = url.split('?');
var main_url = url_parts[0];
$('[href="' + main_url + '"]',
$('div.menu-horizontal')).addClass('selected');
};
$(function () {
TCSC.ShowMenuSelection();
});

Save the file as something like topnav.js. You can create this file in a program like
notepad and then just save it with the .js file extension. The JavaScript above tells the tab to add the Selected class to the class id when you are landed on a page in the XML
Navigation file.

Now we will reference your two JavaScript files in your SharePoint 2010 Master Page. Before the closing </head> tag put <script type=”text/JavaScript”
src=”/_layouts/jquery/jquery-1.6.1.js”></script> first and then below that add: <script type=”text/JavaScript” src=”/_layouts/jquery/topnav.js”></script>
Let me explain my file location that you see above. When I create a master page solution I put my JQuery files into a folder called jquery that will be deployed to the layouts directory on my server. I will be including a Master Page Solution at the end of this posting that you can deploy to your site and all of the files can be edited to your liking.

The XML Navigation created to use in this solution will be deployed to the directory: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\XMLNavigation on your server. There you can change and experiment with the URL’s on your site to create the selected tab. What you see below is the example XML Navigation file’s contents.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><siteMap>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Home" description="Home"/>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/SearchCenter/Pages/default.aspx"
title="Search Center" description="Search Center"/>
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/subsite1/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Subsite #1" description="Subsite #1"/>
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/couseling/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Counseling" description="Counseling">
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown1"
title="Housing Services" description="Housing Services"
/>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown2"
title="Specialized Services" description="Specialized
Services" />
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown3"
title="Services" description="Services" />
</siteMapNode>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/TestSite/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Test Site" description="Test Site"/>
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/finalsite/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Another Test Site" description="Another Test
Site"/>
</siteMap>

Part of this XML gives you the ability to have dropdown links as well. Located here in the code:
<siteMapNode
url="http://yoursharepointsite/couseling/SitePages/Home.aspx"
title="Counseling" description="Counseling">
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown1"
title="Housing Services" description="Housing Services"
/>
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown2"
title="Specialized Services" description="Specialized
Services" />
<siteMapNode url="http://yoursharepointsite/dropdown3"
title="Services" description="Services" />
</siteMapNode>

The Master Page will be called xmlnav.master and the server side copy will be located at:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server
Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\XML.SharePoint2010.Masterpage\Masterpage

Also a virtual copy will appear in the _catalogs/masterpage folder on your Site
Collection once you deploy and activate the Feature.

With a combination of having a full URL path for your links and some JavaScript you
can now have the ability to highlight your tabs when using XML just like
SharePoint 2010 Navigation does by default without XML.

If you are using the supplied WSP file you will have to manually update the XML file to
have your website url’s for this Solution to work, but I wanted to supply this
to help get you started.

Note: If your aren’t familiar with using XML within SharePoint, you must enable the XML Data Source to be “True” in your web.config file as shown below:
TypeName=”XmlDataSource” Safe=”True”

 

SharePoint 2010 Hosting – ASPHostPortal :: Encoding .WMV files in Silverlight and Publishing to SharePoint 2010

30 Jan

The following post will walk you through the steps on how to encode your Windows Media Video and then how to publish that file to your SharePoint 2010 site.

What you’ll need:

  1. Your .WMV file recording
  2. Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 – download
  3. Optional Service Pack 1 – download
  4. Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 SharePoint 2010 plugin – download

Restrictions: .WMV files longer than 10 minutes. The reason for this is that the free version of Expression Encoder 4 limits video to 10 minutes; however, if you have the Encoder Pro version then there no time restrictions.

Once you have the downloads installed, it’s time to get started!

1. Start Expression Encoder. The default Load a new project screen will appear. Choose Silverlight Project.


2. Now to import your .WMV file. From Expression Encoder: File -> Import and browse to your .WMV file and then choose Open. Note: you can also drag and drop the file into Encoder.

3. At the bottom of Expression you’ll see a line item showing the name of your imported file and that Expression is Analyzing the file.

4. Once that is done you will see the details of your imported file.


5. Within the right hand columns find the Output section with a few categories below it.

6. Thumbnail: Here you can specify which frame to use as the thumbnail of the video. In my case it was simply the first slide in the PowerPoint deck.


7. Job Output: Here you will tell Encoder the local directory to save the encoded output and the option to preview the Silverlight video result in a browser.


8. Publish: In the Publish To section select SharePoint 2010 and check the box for Publish after encode. Now enter in your SharePoint Server address, Asset Library (this is the library name, not a URL address, took me forever to realize this part), and authentication method. Once you have done that simply click Authenticate and if all is well you’ll see a green dot. That is all for the Output section of Encoder.


9. Another handy section you might change is the Template section. This is where you can change the way the Silverlight controls display from the dropdown menu. By default there are 16, but you can get more online if you desire.


10. OK, now that we have all of our settings the way we want them, we are ready to finally Encode. (I say finally, but it’s really not that difficult).

11. Simply look down in the bottom left corner and click the Encode button.


12. After that you’ll see the progress pie graph.


13. Once that is done you’ll have a local copy of the .WMV file and it will publish that file to the SharePoint destination that you defined earlier in Step #8. Also, if you flagged Preview in Browser in Step #7 then your default browser will open and display the Silverlight video.

14. Navigate to your Asset Library where you published the video, find your file and click play to view the Silverlight video.


15. Done, great job.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.