David Gardiner - SharePoint

Confluence Wiki

2008-01-18T14:51:00.001+10:30

Last year Ben spent some time evaluating Wiki software. He quickly came to the conclusion that the SharePoint offering was not that impressive. He also looked at some other versions which were much more capable.

I'd noticed that quite a number of sites globally were using Atlassian's Confluence Wiki software. We managed to purchase a 25-user license to test the waters. Apart from anything else, Atlassian are based in Australia, which is nice.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to install it and get it up and running. I found the process surprisingly straight-forward.

It is written in Java, and requires JDK 1.6, but otherwise it was just a matter of following the instructions step by step (including grabbing these JTDS drivers as we're using SQL Server for the database backend).

It defaults to running on port 8080, but after stopping the default web server in IIS, a quick edit of conf\server.xml swapped to standard port 80.

The database setup went flawlessly. I just pointed Confluence at the server, and ensured the username was in the db_owner role, and it created all the tables it required. I've since removed it from the owner role.

We have our own Active Directory so using LDAP for authentication made sense. This too proved simple to configure. I just followed the instructions again, and used an existing AD account.

About the only thing I haven't got working is configuring the whole thing to run as a service. There's documentation on how to do this, but it doesn't work for me. Hopefully I'll hear back from their support people shortly.

I was quite pleased with the whole process. It isn't quite as nice as just double-clicking on an .MSI file, but it was still relatively painless.

Later on, we can try out the SharePoint Connector that lets you integrate Confluence with a SharePoint site.

Importing Excel 2007 into Windows SharePoint Services 2

2008-01-08T11:40:00.001+10:30

In WSS 2.0, there's an option to create a new list by importing an Excel Spreadsheet.

I've got Excel 2007 installed, and so after selecting the cell range of an .xls file I got this error message:

Method 'Post' of object 'IOWSPostData' failed

Searching for this gave me a possible solution

Because this particular SharePoint is still version 2.0, I figured that lVer = 2 was appropriate, and the good news is it worked.

How do you migrate a WSS2 web site to another server running WSS3?

2007-08-02T11:19:00.001+09:30

I've got two servers running Windows SharePoint Services.

Server 'A' is running 2.0, server 'B' is running 3.0.

I'd like to migrate a single web site from A to B.

I found this KB article - How to move a Windows SharePoint Services Web site from one server to another by using FrontPage 2003, and I thought I'd be clever and use SharePoint Designer to try and do a similar thing, but it doesn't work.

You can backup the 2.0 site ok, but when you connect to the empty 3.0 site, the restore function expects a different file type.

It does seem a reasonable thing to want to do, and it's annoying that there doesn't appear to be an obvious solution.

APAC SharePoint Conference thoughts

2007-06-04T10:43:00.001+09:30

Last month I attended the 2-day Asia-Pacific Microsoft SharePoint Conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney.

It proved to be the ideal timing for me, as I've been tinkering around the edges of SharePoint 2007 for most of this year.

There were lots of good technical talks, though I was a bit disappointed at the number of delays for sessions starting because of speaker's laptops being messed up, virtual machines not working or network connections not connecting.

One useful thing I did pick up was that there are a number of handy tools people are writing that will make developing sites in SharePoint a lot easier.

The venue was excellent - we stayed at the Hilton which is probably the fanciest place I can remember staying at! Very comfortable rooms, and the catering for the event was great.

The Tuesday night "entertainment" turned out to be a very creative "Wild West Saloon Bar" theme - complete with lots of gambling tables. I grabbed some food to eat, but then left early (I don't gamble, so there wasn't much attraction to staying around) and saw Spiderman 3 at the Darling Harbour Imax. Seeing it on the very big screen is one way to realise that Tobey Maquire and Kirsten Dunst don't have perfect skin after all!

Passed SharePoint exam 071-541

2007-04-12T14:38:00.000+09:30

I just found out I passed Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 - Application Development, which I took in December.

Ironically, I found out from a message from my wife - they'd sent an old-fashioned letter in the mail. Not sure why they wouldn't just send an email to me :-)

Debugger "Feature" for SharePoint

2007-04-11T09:36:00.001+09:30

Here's a Debugger "Feature" for Windows SharePoint Service 3.0

SharePoint 2007 CSS Reference Chart

2007-04-03T11:37:00.001+09:30

Something to file away for future reference - a list of all the CSS classes and IDs used by SharePoint 2007.

Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

2007-03-16T11:24:00.001+10:30

This appears to be the RTM of the extensions for Visual Studio 2005 that improve support for developing Web Parts, site and list definitions. It also includes the "SharePoint Solution Generator".

Asia Pacific SharePoint Conference update

2007-03-07T13:07:00.001+10:30

It's now official, the conference that had been hinted at last month will be on May 15-16th at the Sydney Hilton Hotel.

Now to wait and see if there's enough "technical" content to make it worth me attending.

Cross-browser editor for SharePoint 2007

2007-02-23T11:50:00.001+10:30

Telerik have released their free cross-browser editor for SharePoint 2007.

Even though they've named it as "radEditor for MOSS", the good news is it also works fine in WSS3 too.

This means that FireFox and Safari users now get a nice "rich-text" editor instead of a text box.