BIFocal LLC

Month: October 2011

  • SharePoint Road Trips!

    With the devastating storm that has hit New Hampshire over the weekend, there is no better time for a SharePoint Road Trip to start than today!  It was so bad up here that our city postponed Halloween Trick-or-treating until next Sunday.  Here are a couple of pictures of the devastation, just from our driveway:

    1 2 3

    Here is a quick list of where you can find me over the next 2 months.

    banner

    I fly out to Las Vegas this evening to present 5 sessions at the SharePoint Connections Conference this week (October 31st – November 4th), 3 of which are with my good friend and collaborator Cornelius J. van Dyk.  I am presenting:

    HAD13: SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend (Tuesday)

    HAD14: SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field (Tuesday)

    HAD15: Battle Scarred But Still Standing: A SharePoint Admin’s Tell-All (Wednesday)

    HAD12: Heavy Metal PowerPivot (Thursday)

    HNC04: Human Workflow with Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 (Thursday)

    denver

    After Las Vegas I head to Colorado to take part in SharePoint Saturday Denver (November 11-13), an amazing 2 day event (registration is open and there are still some seats available), where I will be presenting:

    SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend (Friday)

    SharePoint Performance: Best Practices from the Field (Saturday)

    I am also planning on taking part in my first ShareSki as a part of SharePoint Saturday Denver!  I haven’t skied in Colorado in almost 10 years (East Coast skiing is nothing like Colorado sadly), but if you can’t find me on the slopes after my sessions, look for the guy in the full body cast by the fire drinking scotch  

     nhspug

    Corne & I will be presenting at the December installment of the Granite State SharePoint Users Group located at Daniel Webster College on 12/8 @ 6pm, which I happen to co-organize, followed by a SharePint.

    We will be doing our SharePoint Logging & Debugging: The Troubleshooter’s Best Friend session.  If you are in the area New Hampshire / Northern Massachusetts area please check us out.  We have had 7 sessions and we are continuing to grow.  We have great list of speakers already lined up for 2012!

    sasug

    I am heading back to the Lone Star State to round out the calendar year of SharePoint where I will be speaking at the SASPUG meeting on December 15th and presenting Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux, a session featuring the goodness of PowerPivot v1 and a preview of PowerPivot v2 and Power View.  Join us at Rackspace – Castle I-35 and Walzem starting at 530p. 

    fireworks Happy New Years!

    That will wrap my SharePoint Road Trip to a close.  I hope to see you at one of more of these great events.  The 2012 calendar of SharePoint events is already starting to fill up with amazing events so keep an eye out for an announcement later in the year about those dates.

  • How to: Run PowerShell ISE as Administrator under alternate credentials

    Coming from a security focused AD background I prefer to have the Managed Service Accounts OU locked down with a GPO restricting interactive logon to a server. This helps avoid service accounts becoming compromised and being taken advantage of in attacks.

    Having an ISE is especially helpful when you are doing SharePoint work on the farm and while I am a big fan of PowerShell, running straight at the command line is often a pain. Rather than installing one of the terrific third party solutions out there for an Integrated Shell Environment I try to only install the PowerShell ISE.

    As we know, there are something that you cannot do unless you are running in the context of the Farm Administrator account. There is code out there that will let you elevate your PowerShell script and run in the context of a different user, but I really wanted to be able to open PowerShell ISE as the farm account so that I can run parts of a script at a time, or rerun specific lines.

    Here is the code that I compiled that allows me to launch PowerShell ISE as the Farm Admin account:

    Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -EA 0

    # Farm account name
     $farmAccountname =     “domainservice_account”

    # Load the Farm Account Creds
     $cred = Get-Credential     $farmAccountname

    # Create a new process with UAC elevation S
    tart-Process     $PsHomepowershell.exe -Credential $cred -ArgumentList “-Command Start-Process $PSHOMEpowershell_ise.exe -Verb Runas“ -Wait

    Once your PowerShell ISE window is launched you can run the following code to validate that you are running as the user that you are expecting:

    [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent().Name

    Great you learned some more neato PowerShell, but why do I need to use a PowerShell command for this?

    You may be asking why wouldn’t I just do a simple “SHIFT+Right Click” and “Run as different user” rather than resorting to a PowerShell solution. The answer is that doing that does not give you the runAs Administrator privileges that we need to do so many of SharePoint’s PowerShell Functions.

    Smarty Pants.

    powershell PowerShell launch code on GitHub

    notepad Text launch code

    powershell User Context validation code on GitHub

  • PowerShell Account Creation Script

    When building repeatable SharePoint farms I need to quickly create new service accounts. Since there is no need for a SharePoint Farm to be built using a Domain Admin account, there is really no need for a SharePoint Consultant to ask for or be granted Domain Admin rights.

    I spent a good portion of my career prior to SharePoint as a Domain Admin/AD Architect, and a good portion of that role is knowing that most people who ask for Domain Admin rights don’t actually need them.

    If you want to start off on the right foot with the AD team in any company, tell them you do not want or need Domain Admin rights. Immediately you have more credibility with them than most other people.

    As a result of this, I have put together an account creation script that I use and turn that over to the Domain Admins so that they can handle the creation for me. I simply list out the accounts that I want and then populate them into the following PowerShell:

    $domainName = $env:USERDOMAIN
    $LDAP     = “LDAP://CN=Managed Service Accounts,DC=$domainName, DC=%local%“
     $objCN = [ADSI]$LDAP
    $objUser     = $objCN.Create(“user”,“CN=%Friendly Name%“)
     $objUser.Put(“sAMAccountName”,“%SAMAccountName%“)
     $objUser.Setinfo()
     $objUser.psbase.invokeset(“AccountDisabled”, “False”)
     $objUser.SetPassword(“pass@word1”)
     $objUser.setinfo()

    Using the $env:USERDOMAIN I am able to grab the current logged in domain context rather than having to specify it. Make sure that you change the last DC to the correct domain suffix (.com, .net, .org, etc). You will need to specify the %Friendly Name% & %SAMAccountName% that you are trying to create.

    The code above will allow you to create accounts that are active immediately without additional intervention.

    There are additional steps that need to be taken to grant rights for the User Profile Sync account and local Administrator rights that need to be granted to the Farm Admin account, but those will get covered in later posts.

    Sample scripts: powershell notepad

  • 1941 days later: Gilad Schalit is finally home

    gilad

    I normally keep my personal views on world happenings and politics out of this medium, but today is a very special day, so please feel free to disregard this post if you want but I feel that I must share my views on this topic.

    At the beginning of June 2006 I ended my time as a USY Advisor after more than 10 years of working with Jewish teenagers.  Much like my passion for technology, my passion for informal Jewish education was all consuming.  I am proud to say that I have watched many of my former USYers, affectionately known as my kids, go on to do amazing things: join the Marines, become doctors & lawyers, get married, have children of their own, start successful companies, start their own clothing lines, become teachers, and most amazing of all become informal Jewish educators themselves and dedicate some of their time to give back.  I was honored to allowed to participate in helping them learn and grow as young Jewish men and women and still keep in contact with many of them today.

    A few short weeks after Jill and I attended what was to be our last SWUSY Regional Convention as advisors we heard the news that Gilad Schalit had been captured.  At not even 20 years old it was impossible not to draw correlation between Gilad and some of my kids, especially since one of them who I consider to be family had just enlisted in the United States Marine Corp.

    It was heart wrenching and as the days and weeks went on news would periodically come out about Gilad, but the hopes were dwindling as the days went by.  Jill and I moved to Massachusetts and our synagogue had a picture of Gilad as a reminder.  Even without that, we have never forgotten.  We are a people of remembrances.

    In my lifetime I have seen some awe inspiring things: the Berlin Wall fell, the mapping of the human genome, the electing an African American President (whether you like/agree with/hate him or not, this was still a ground breaking thing for this country) ,Tiananmen Square, the invention of the personal computer, NASA, and the end of Apartheid but few things have touched me the way that the freeing of Gilad Schalit has. 

    The Marines have a mantra: Never leave a man behind.  Israel has freed 450 prisoners and will free a total of 1,027 prisoners at the end of 2 months, in exchange for 1 Israeli soldier. 

    In truth and honestly, I never expected to see the day when Gilad would be coming home.  I never believed that Hamas would allow him to see his home again. 

    It is my hope and prayer that the Israel/Palestinian conflict will come to a peaceful end.  My question & concern is what will that peace cost.  When reasonable people come to a negotiation table they generally are willing to compromise in some way.  To date, we have not seen that on both sides of the table with this conflict. 

    Bottom line here, after 1941 days it gives me goose bumps to finally be able to write the words “Welcome Home Gilad”.

  • Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux Deck from BASPUG meeting is now online!

    My friend and co-mischief maker, Cornelius J. van Dyk, & I were honored to be able to present last night at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group, and as promised below you will find a link to our deck.  Thanks to everyone who came out to hear us speak!

    Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux

    BASPUG

  • SQL Server 2012 Announcements & a new Blogger

    The big news of the day in the technology world… no, not the Blackberry outage… no, not iOS 5 being released…  the big news about SQL Server Code Name: “Denali” becoming official SQL Server 2012!  Product release is slated for the first half of 2012 (not specifically Q1 as many of us had hoped)

    Project Crescent has been rebranded as Power View and announced that there will be a browser based version that will work on iOS & Android devices, but will not be full function.  The other great thing is that the story board to PowerPoint functionality was stated to be in the RTM release.

    Project Juneau has been rebranded as SQL Server Data Tools as well.

    The other big news is that my great friend, Dave Feldman, that I have quoted here on a number of occasions, is a co-creator of SPFLogger, and one of the smarter Microsoft BI & general troubleshooters that I know has finally started a blog.  Check out his take on the announcements from SQL PASS as well as some videos that he was able to get posted from the keynote.  His new blog is http://bostonmusicdave.blogspot.com

    Lastly, you can check out the Official Press Release from Microsoft, the SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services information, the SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services info, and the SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Information Management info for updated information.  SQL Pass’s site is also a resource, but I have found that following @MicrosoftBI and @SQLServer on twitter have been more useful thus far.

    More BI goodness when I hear it!

  • Presenting “Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux” tonight at BASPUG

    My good friend, Cornelius J. van Dyk, & I are presenting one of our favorite topics at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group this evening, Heavy Metal PowerPivot!

    For those of you who have seen us present this topic in the past, you might be asking “ok, I’ve seen it before, why should I attend?”.  The answer is simple: SQL Server 2012 CTP3.  We will be demoing the new installation experience as well as a few of the new features that are coming in the update to this amazing product.

    We hope you will come out and join us for this deep dive into the existing version and a glimpse into Denali.

    Our friends at BASPUG would like me to mention that you can/should register for the event at http://baspug18.eventbrite.com/

    BASPUG

  • SharePoint/Office 2007 Service Pack 3 coming Q4 2011

    The Office Sustained Engineering Team has announced that Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Office 2007 & SharePoint 2007 will be coming some time during 2011 Q4.  This appears to be the last major update to the 2007 client & server stack as the team states:

    “We are offering this release in preparation for the April 2012 end of mainstream support for the 2007 client and server products. The October 2011 release provides a 6-month window to test and deploy the release prior to exiting mainstream support.”

    The Service Pack will be a roll-up of all prior 2007 Cumulative and Public updates since Service Pack 2 plus some new hotfixes.  As always with the SharePoint 2007 world, you will need to install the WSS update before the MOSS update.  There is not a planned or expected CU requirement following the SP3 installation. 

    To quote the article directly:

    “SP3 will include changes in the following areas:

    Office Client 2007 Suites
    Office SharePoint 2007 Servers
    Office SharePoint Search Server 2007
    Office SharePoint Designer 2007
    Office Project 2007
    Office Visio 2007
    Office Proofing tools 2007
    Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007
    Office InterConnect 2007
    Office Compatibility Pack
    PowerPoint Viewer
    Visio Viewer
    Office Servers Language Pack
    Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
    Office Access Runtime and Data Connectivity Components”

    Soapbox time!!!!

    upgrades

    As always, please plan to test your upgrade plan in your Development/Test/QA environment prior to ever consider installing in Production. 

    Keep in mind that if you only have a Production environment, you really only have a testing environment.  Now is a good time to start updating your resume if you haven’t and you are even thinking about heading down an upgrade path. 

    Consider spending as little as $50 a month with a company like CloudShare to get a testing environment.  They have a great pre-production hosting option that will allow you to validate your scenarios without having to invest a ton of capital to do it.

    NOTE: Best Practices for installing SharePoint 2010 Service Packs and updates changed as of August 31, 2011 according to the Update for SharePoint 2010 Products page: 

    “As a result of the new packaging, it is no longer necessary to install the SharePoint Foundation cumulative update and then install the SharePoint Server cumulative update.”

    Keep an eye on this, the story has now changed and then changed back since RTM.

  • How SharePoint Governance is like a moose in a swimming pool

    I was watching the news last night and a story came on about a man in Manchester, NH (about 30 minutes from my house) who heard a noise that was coming from his backyard, and when he turned on this lights he found a Moose in his backyard.  The moose was spooked by the sudden flood of light and charged through his fence and directly into the man’s swimming pool.

    moose

    The man from didn’t have many options going in to the situation, it just descended upon him from nature and he was forced to simply deal with the situation.  He went from having a nice quiet evening at home to needing help from 12 people to get a moose out of his pool, having a shredded pool cover, and ending up with his saga documented on the evening news.

    How this relates to SharePoint

    Lying in bed after fasting all day for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Atonement, all I could think was how similar this man’s scenario was to all too many deployments of SharePoint: Someone hears something, starts to investigate, the next thing they know they have a 2000 pound angry animal on their hands.

    In our many cases we have the ability to hold off the animal and redirect its efforts into something more productive and healthy with governance and proper planning, however many times the beast barrels through our defenses and we are dealing with a world of trouble that we didn’t intend on.

    The man in the story had many options:

    1. ignore the situation and hope it clears itself up
    2. grab a gun and shoot it himself
    3. call a local hunter to deal with it for him
    4. calmly call the police and figure out how best to deal with the situation with expert assistance

    I sincerely hope that when faced with situations like this we deal with things as well as the man from the news story did because in the end, all that was really lost was part of a fence, a $200 pool cover, and some time.

    Here are a couple of things to keep in mind, whether you are dealing with an angry moose, or an impending SharePoint deployment:

    1. Find out what you don’t know
    2. Stop and determine the correct plan of action before proceeding
    3. Understand what the drivers of your situation are
    4. Get control over an out of control situation

    When it comes to SharePoint deployments, whether properly conceived or not, it is always best to stop and examine your options.  It is always going to be best to take a bit of time up front to save a complete rebuild later.

    The moral of the story

    When cooler heads prevail, everyone comes out alive, and with a reasonably interesting story to share.  Think before you act, and in our world, before you implement.

  • SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-In

    This was referred to this morning in the keynote at SharePoint Conference 2011 and appears to be a really cool solution.

    Source: Visio.Microsoft.com

    “SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-in leverages Visio Services to deliver a near real time intuitive rendering of the status of SharePoint farm’s infrastructure and associated services. Visio Graphics services – A key part of SharePoint 2010, enables customers to share their dynamic data driven Visio diagrams and dashboards within SharePoint. This helps extend the reach of valuable information and insights across relevant teams within the enterprise for capacity planning and general IT maintenance.

    The timer job fetches all the key technical metrics about the SharePoint farm infrastructure using SharePoint object model and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). It’s frequency can be adjusted based on specific administrative needs. The timer job creates a SharePoint list that is linked to a Visio diagram. A client add-in helps you generate, customize and link the output of the timer job to a Visio diagram by using a wizard driven interface.

    Upon publishing the Visio diagram within SharePoint, Visio Services enable users to refresh their diagram from within SharePoint.”