Previously on my blog i posted how to get the most out of working with the branding aspects of SharePoint in 2007. Now with SharePoint 2010 the story has vastly improved and you CSS and web designer types has really nothing to complain about. Furthermore my good buddy AC (Andrew Connell) has done a great job by working with the good folks at Microsoft to create this awesome MSDN article with guidelines on how to “skin” the heck out of SharePoint. So next time before you complain about how hard it is (it’s really not that hard) to brand SharePoint suggest you go over to “Real World Branding with SharePoint 2010 Publishing Sites” and get yourself familiar with how SharePoint masterpages and page layouts are constructed and how you can abstract your design implementation. Let’s face it gone are the days of hand crafting web sites and cre ...[Read More]

If you are installing and or configuring SharePoint 2010 and want to make sure that the people Search capability in SP2010 is enabled make sure to check the following settings. Have provisioned the User Profile Service application and started the User Profile Synchronisation service and done a full sync – Follow the article “Rational Guide to User Profile Service” from Spencer Harbar @harbars Have provisioned the Enterprise Search service application and verified that normal crawls are working (i.e: SharePoint sites and file system) Provision a “Enterprise Search” center with tabs in a SharePoint web application and verify that Search results are displaying Have added the line “sps3://mysites.knowledgecue.com” in the Start Addresses field > i.e: The sps3:// is the protocol handler reference for profile indexing. In this case I ...[Read More]

In some cases where SharePoint deployments that have been carried out by resorting to the “Wizard” you’ll most likely end up with service and content databases that are GUID based. Also no matter what method you use the PerformancePoint service application when initially provisioned will contain a GUID as there is no option to specify the databasename paramter via PowerShell. However you can get rid of these GUIDs and set the database names to be human readable. The correct ay to do this is by first talking with your DBA’s or if you have full access to your SQL deployment you’d be able to run the following SQL script(s) to rename the database correctly. So the high level process as follows. In this example I am going to highlight the provisioning of the PerformancePoint service application and how to rename the DB and then reset the s ...[Read More]