Australian SharePoint Conference 2012, March 20-21, Melbourne

2012 will be the third Australian SharePoint Conference [agenda], and my third time speaking at this fantastic event. In my opinion, the AUSPC conference has some of the world's best speakers (and I gladly exclude myself from that list), exceeding even the Australian Tech-Ed event in terms of breadth and depths of SharePoint content. There are simply no other event this dedicated to SharePoint within Australia.

In the year 2011 we saw tremendous growth in SharePoint, and new techniques with jQuery becoming very popular.

Silverlight is now moving towards a backseat, to my dismay - I argue that it remains a very useful arsenal in providing the tools to extend SharePoint's capabilities, but with the advances in HTML5 and the myriad of devices that our users are now plugging to SharePoint, a different future is fast approaching, and it doesn't look that great for Silverlight.

In the new year 2012, I think there will be stronger focus in using HTML5 and JavaScript going forward, with may be a good sprinkle of Metro, pending Windows 8's release.

I will be presenting an updated version of my talk "Building your own Custom REST services and consuming them with jQuery AJAX". Time permitting, I want to add a tiny section on KnockoutJS. Aside from future SharePoint Saturday events, I'll be posting the entire REST services talk in a series of blog posts in the upcoming months.

Also, consider the sad cancellation of January's Sydney SharePoint User Group, I hope to be able to present a talk on KnockoutJS in a Developer session as early as February, fingers crossed. A previous version of my talk on REST services is still here.

If you thought you've seen everything there is to know about SharePoint, hold on to your seatbelts, because you are about to be blown away! See you soon around Australia, our first stop, in the Australian SharePoint Conference, March 20-21.

serverfault.com hasn't launched and I hate it already

http://serverfault.com/ launched, and I hate it already.

edit: SF.com is Open to Public, so this should have read: serverfault.com hasn't launched yet and I hate it already

It’s basically http://stackoverflow.com/ for sys admins.  Great in concept, and probably a well-requested idea by SOers to keep SO pure… 

But then you’ve got guys like me.  I’m not a pure developer.  I’m a knowledge sponge.

I want to know everything to do with SharePoint, because I know there’s a lot that I don’t know, so anything new to read is awesome.

And now, I’ve got one extra place I have to check.

  • StackOverflow search RSS
  • SharePointMVPs twitter
  • MS SP General Forums RSS
  • Various MVP blogs
  • SP Team Blog
  • don’t want ServerFault.com

So…

SharePoint Configuration – SF.com
SharePoint Application Development – SO.com

And possibly the worse part of it is that I now have 2 reputations to grind – this is just like another WOW reputation grind.

FAIL FAIL FAIL!

 

Already, people are asking:

http://serverfault.com/questions/7384/site-collections-in-sharepoint-2007-how-many-and-why

Great questions, but I hate having to check two places.  Why couldn’t they just stick a tag on SO just baffles me…

Who came up with this stupid idea anyway!

 

What’s next?

http://ArchitectureInstability.com for architects?

 

Anyway, if you are a sys admin and never wants to see a line of .NET code, feel free to head over and never see SO again – but as for me…

</3 ServerFault.com

SharePoint: MOSS SP2 Major Bug

The SharePoint Team blog announced a major bug with SharePoint MOSS SP2:

This is funny, but extremely serious and important.

During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

  • Does not affect data
  • But it will silently deactivate after 180 days
  • Users can come to work without warning and SharePoint will be unavailable.
  • If you are installing SP2 - apply hot-fix from MSDN immediately afterwards.

Get the word out.

What am I looking for in SquareSpace

Going to spend this next week seriously giving SquareSpace a twirl.  I'm looking for:
  • Easy maintenance
  • Import from spaces.live.com without doing something really stupid
  • Better traffic tracking - compared to Windows Live probably anything is better
  • Comments with OpenID

 UPDATE:

Maintenance - I seem to be able to make the changes I wanted - looking for info in the FAQ / forum is awful though.

From Windows Live Spaces to SquareSpace - ended up writing my own MetaBlogAPI export for Live Spaces to MoveableType txt format, then get squarespace to import it.  Again the help dialog is bad and it wasn't clear why things weren't working - have to go back to import page to see the error.

Traffice tracking - I know it was better already

No comments with OpenID - I think in this generation if you have to force someone to create an account in your particular blogging system just to comment - there's something wrong about it.

SharePoint – IE8 standards mode causes trouble in SharePoint

Running SharePoint on IE8 – JavaScript errors when using the rich text editor.

‘null’ is null or not an object – in form.js

clip_image002

 

The debugger shows that the SharePoint javascript code was trying to call:

document.getElementById("ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_EditModePanel3_ctl04_ctl00_RichHtmlField_displayContent_LTR")

The id of that element is actually: ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_EditModePanel3_ctl04_ctl00_RichHtmlField_displayContent_ltr

In IE7’s incorrect JavaScript behavior – it finds the element and returns it.

In IE8’s correct JavaScript behavior – it doesn’t find the element and returns null.  -> Error!

---

IE8 will attempt to use IE7 compatibility mode when accessing intranet sites.  It will use IE8 standards mode when accessing public internet sites.

This means that when accessing your SharePoint site via the extranet URL – http://sharepoint.company.com/ you will get this error, but accessing it internally – http://sharepoint/ will be OK.

----

Ways to fix this (easy to hard):


  1. Custom Header in web.config (site-wide)
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817572.aspx
  2. Meta tag in master page (specify per masterpage)
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc817574.aspx 
  3. Use Telerik’s RadEditor Lite – free alternative
    http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax/sharepoint.aspx
  4. Wait for MS SharePoint hotfix
    UPDATE: waiting for MOSS service pack 2 - which contains IE8 support
  5. UPDATE: tell your editors to run SharePoint in compatibility mode