Training

Training

Back from a long haul writing the 2nd book – Whew! Back to the articles. With the large amount of training resources out there, this is my take on the different types of training I’ve seen so far, along with some places and the reasoning behind the training provision. If you can think of more examples of good training delivery for SharePoint please let me know. Note that this article does not sell or advocate any of the training providers or resources – rather, you are advised to build a strategy based on some of the principles in the article. Happy Reading!

An Update also, a PDF download of the same article is on the Institute of Analysts and Programmers website here:

http://www.iap.org.uk/main/geoff-evelyn-on-sharepoint-training/

(more…)

My Software Intro

My Software Intro

Even though I focus on SharePoint, thats not all ! I have over 20 years experience in software development, covering CTI, Client Server, Single Tier, Multi, Web based and more. We follow the development life cycle which marries practical software design principles with SSADM.

(more…)

My Software Intro

SharePoint 2010 Service Applications

This is a list of all the SharePoint 2010 Service applications, and is presented as one of the appendices to my book Managing and Implementing SharePoint 2010 Projects. For each of the services I describe the functionality and the purpose of the Service. I’ve also included links to articles which I found very useful since some of these are quite complex in configuring and more importantly the people who put the articles together have much much more experience in configuring these service applications than I have!!!

(more…)

Training

Productivity 2010 Hub and the SharePoint Service Pack 1 Gotcha

Had some fun with the Productivity Hub for SharePoint 2010 today…

Now, for those who don’t know about the Productivity Hub, go here:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7122

The Hub gets installed into a Site Collection.

So, after downloading then unpacking the Hub, and attempting to run the Powershell command to install the following error message appeared:

Restore-SPSite failed with: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: Your backup is from a different version of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version ‘14.0.0.4762’ or later and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version ‘14.0.0.4762’ or later.

Looking at the install.ps1 file I noticed this:

LogMessage(“Restoring the Productivity Hub 2010 backup to ” + $targetUrl)    

Restore-SPSite -Identity $targetUrl -Path $backupFileName -Force -Confirm:$false -ErrorAction Stop

# Restore-SPSite -Identity $targetUrl -Path $backupFileName -Force # remove Confirm switch to see restore debug info

return $true

Ah, so the productivity hub was trying to do a restore. Seems that the download was created for the original version of SharePoint – not Service Pack 1.

So, how to install? Try this workaround.

  1. Create a single environment on a VM running the original version of SharePoint 2010.
  2. Make a copy of the ProducivitHub2010.bak into a sub-directory for safe keeping.
  3. Copy the file ProductivityHub2010.bak from the hub directory into a folder in that environment.
  4. Restore the ProductivityHub2010.bak into a new site collection in that environment.
  5. Upgrade the environment to Service Pack 1.
  6. Backup the Productivity Hub site collection restored in Step 4 to ProductivityHub2010.bak – if you are unsure on the backup command then its on the lines of this: backup-spsite -identity <productivityhubsitecollection> -path <fileandpath>-force
  7. Copy the backup file created in Step 6 over the top of the Productivity Hub Directory in Step 3.
  8. Now run the install.ps1 file, follow the steps to install the Productivity Hub as normal.

Ok, so is dirty, but it works! Am in the process of finding out from MS when the productivity.bak file will be upgraded to reflect service pack 1.

Update: 01/08/2011 : 19:00 BST. Got a reply from MS and have been advised they are aware of this issue and there will be a communication going out over the summer.

Update: 18/03/2013: 21:00 BST. There is a Service Pack 1 version available on this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28178

Project Planning

Project Planning

When implementing SharePoint in an organization, its not just about dropping SharePoint on a server and saying to the client ‘There you go!’. This introduction to SharePoint Project Planning gives 10 useful steps to ensuring a successful SharePoint implementation.

(more…)