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The White Pages Posts

I’ll Be At the Microsoft World Partner Conference Next Week

Published July 7, 2010

The Microsoft World Partner Conference (WPC) is being held in Washington next week. It’s an different sort of conference, and I almost elected not to go this year. In the past I’ve found the sessions to be a little light (but then, I am a techie, and this is a business conference) but this year it’s a solid line up.

I’m looking forward to meeting a few of the Product Managers, particularly around the Azure and BPOS space. My spider sense is telling me that very interesting things are about to happen here, and my company is very well positioned to take advantage of the cloud, and the new emphasis on it from Microsoft.

It will also be very good to catch up with our friends from Nintex, who are not only fun, but are always working on interesting things.

If you want to follow the goings on, you can follow the #wpc10 hash tag on Twitter. I’ll probably be more active than normal on twitter, I can be found at @diverdown1964, and I may even try my hand at liveblogging,but don’t count on it.

If you’re going to be there,and you run into one of the many John White there, I’ll be the tall one. Please say hi!

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Using a Fixed Width Page in SharePoint 2010

Published July 5, 2010

For the most part, I prefer dynamic width pages on an intranet. It allows users to take advantage of the screens that they have, and to work the way that they want. They do have one big drawback though in that they don’t allow consistent control of presentation. You never know for sure where a particular screen artefact will be. This can be a  real problem, particularly when it is necessary to maintain a consistent brand. The solution to this is to use a fixed width page, which basically keeps the width of the content constant, no matter what the width of the browser.

If you previously worked with SharePoint 2007, you’ll know that this was the default behaviour of the standard Publishing master pages (like BlueBand.master). Team sites, and most other sites used a variable width template. SharePoint 2010 now uses variable width for both types of templates, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing in a web content management scenario.

I recently had to set up my first fixed length centered page in 2010, and it was harder than I thought it would be. I isolated the class controlling the width of the content (#s4-workspace), explicitly set the width, and refreshed the page. it loaded correctly,but upon load,it immediately snapped back over to the left and filled the page. Obviously, there’s some javascript trickery going on here.

Luckily, thanks to Tom Wilson, the correct solution was quickly obtained. Basically, javascript is looking for that s4-workspace id, and doing what it thinks is best with it. Since we beg to differ, the solution is to first remove that id tag altogether. Then, you need to add in the appropriate styling to compensate for the lack of javascript positioning.

.SFC{
overflow:auto;
background: transparent url(''/SiteCollectionImages/Page_BG.jpg'') no-repeat fixed left top;

}
.SFC form
{
width:958px;
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto
}

The background image isn’t necessary, but it can be used to fill the non content region of the browser.

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Moving To Cloud Based Email–My BPOS Story

Published June 29, 2010

When I first stuck out on my own (OK…some time before I struck out on my own..), I knew that I was going to need to come up with a good email solution. My requirements extended beyond those of the consumer market, and ultimately I needed the power and control that commercial email system would offer. I really didn’t know Exchange very well, and I wasn’t about to set up a Domino server (which I knew very well) as it was no longer the direction I was heading in.

I signed up with a hosted Exchange provider. This worked quite well, and was very reliable, but I quickly bumped into size limitations and integration problems. I think that at the time the maximum size mailbox was 25 MB.  I also wanted to gain experience with Exchange, so I bit the bullet and setup up a full domain with Exchange 2003 (including a Blackberry BES server) in my basement. That setup ran (in various guises) from mid 2006 to this past weekend. Initially it was comprised of multiple Exchange servers on virtual machines (required for remote Exchange access with 2003) to a single Exchange server without the BES after upgrading to Exchange 2007.

Hosting my own Exchange server was instructive, but ultimately a pain. My home internet connection is a consumer plan, and my service provider implemented multiple approaches to prevent any server hosting. This initially included blocking SMTP traffic inbound and ultimately (at a particularly bad time) blocking outbound SMTP. I quickly found workarounds to these problems (if you’re interested, I’ve used DynDNS for years, and I find their service to be exceptional. I’d recommend them in a heartbeat), but each one of these represented a significant drag on my time,and I’m not getting any younger.

In addition to the active blocking attempts,consumer ISV service isn’t exactly industrial grade. To be fair, they don’t claim that it is. In fact, ISPs typically go out of their way to not promise uptime reliability. Far too frequently after an outage, communication or power, my automatic DNS synchronizer wouldn’t update quickly enough and mail flow would be interrupted. Backup was another maintenance headache – yes it was getting done, but I had to have the infrastructure to support it, etc. All of this, and a few other things have prompted me to keep an eye open for alternatives.

My company is a Microsoft Online partner. We initially signed up to this program in the early days because of our extensive work with SharePoint, and recently, we have targeted online services as a significant growth area. One of the packages offered in Online Services is BPOS – The Business Productivity Online Suite. Simply put, this is hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Unified Messaging, and Live Meeting. All of this is offered at a very reasonable rate – $12.50 per user per month.

I decided last week to take my home Exchange system and migrate it to BPOS. The process went incredibly smoothly. The BPOS portal lays out all of the steps, but it can be a little confusing. I’ll quickly summarize them below.

1. Sync the Active Directory with BPOS

This sets up a one way synchronization between your Active Directory, and your BPOS Active directory. To be sure these are 2 different directories, and this just allows for simple user maintenance in the cloud. This step is not required for operation, but it is required for mailbox migration. One annoyance here – the synchronization tool must run on a domain joined Windows server running a 32 bit (!!!) OS. Since I only have 64 bit server set up, I had to spin up a new one. Ultimately, I would hope this was replaced by some sort of claims based model.

2. Set up your domain records

There are a number of steps here that are well documented in the setup section. These steps will allow your Outlook clients to auto discover your hosted Exchange mailboxes.

3. Migrate mailboxes

There is a tool that sets all of the appropriate user records, migrates mailbox content, and sets up email forwarding for the migrated users. It’s a VERY good idea to clean up all of your old junk before migrating. I, of course didn’t. That said, my largest mailbox (~2GB) took only about 6 hours to migrate. During the migration period, mail is still delivered to the on premises server, and it is kept both locally and in the cloud for migrated users. If a migration fails, it can be rerun and will pick up from where it left off. Once a user is migrated, and tested to be working, you use the tool to remove the mailbox from the on premises server, which will also remove forwarding. All mail will be delivered to the hosted mailbox.

3.5. Optionally, set up handheld connections to the hosted mailboxes.

4. Set Domain Records

Once all mailboxes have been migrated, set your domain’s MX record to now point to the hosted server, and use the administration portal to set it as authoritative, and to allow incoming mail. Once this is done there will be a lag while the changes propagate through the internet. Mail will not flow for a period of time, so don’t be alarmed.

5. Shut down your on premises Exchange server

…and rest peacefully.

Performance on the BPOS system has been great, and there appear to be no capacity issues. The per user mailbox limit can be set on a per person basis and the maximum is 25 GB. My mailbox is less than 2GB, and I do next to nothing to keep it cleaned out.

The only potential problem I see with it is integration. The Hosted server IS out in the cloud in a different domain, and therefore can’t reach back into the internal systems when necessary. For example, if running in a coexistence mode, free/busy time searches won’t work between the two groups of users. Also, on premises servers that need to send email won’t be able to use the hosted server to do so. Again, I hope that the promise of claims based authentication will help to alleviate these issues going forward.

BPOS is still using the 2007 Suite of products… Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007. They are slated to be moved to 2010 this fall, and I’m anxious to see what that will bring. When I know, I’ll certainly be posting back here.

I’m very happy with the results I’ve achieve, and heartily recommend it to any small-medium sized business. In fact, given the cost savings that can be achieved, I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t want to go this route.

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Overriding SharePoint 2010 CSS Classes – Background Images

Published June 23, 2010

I just overcame a tough little problem while branding a SharePoint 2010 site. I was trying to override the s4-title class in my themeable class but it just wouldn’t work. SharePoint Designer thought it was OK, my css class was loading last, ond IE Developer tools showed it as the active background image. Still no dice.

image

As is often the case when you’re overriding a class, the parent styles are in effect until overridden. I just couldn’t figure out what – the standard style didn’t show a background image. As it turns out, one was in fact declared in corev4.css (the standard set of classes). It didn’t show because it was positioned way above the page. 

background:url("/_layouts/images/bgximg.png") repeat-x -0px -1023px;

I’m not sure why they do this (I suspect that it has to do with the theming engine), but my background was inheriting it. Once I added

background-position:0 0;

to my overridden class, my background appeared just fine.

image

Hope this helps someone.

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SharePoint 2010 Page Layouts – What’s this UIVersionedContent all about?

Published June 23, 2010

If you work with the publishing features of SharePoint at all, or you do much branding, you’ve undoubtedly run into the UIVersionedContent control. Here’s an example of its use:

image

So what does this thing do? Simply put, it allows the SharePoint visual upgrade feature to work. When a site collection is upgraded from SharePoint 2007 (depending on the options selected), the sites themselves may wind up looking pretty much the same as they did before the upgrade. That’s because the SharePoint team didn’t want to be breaking any customizations or forcing users in specific teams to deal with new design elements, or for those concerns to hold up any upgrades. They therefore have introduced Visual Upgrade – this allows sites (not site collections) to be upgraded one at a time.

However if my site using the 2010features is using the same master page, or page layout as a site that uses the 2007 features, how will that work? That’s where this control comes into play. The control simply contains a ContentTemplate control, which in turn contains the markup to be used. It also possesses an attribute, “UIVersion” which is set to either 3 or 4. These numbers correspond to the old WSS versioning system (WSS 3, SharePoint Foundation 4) and will use the contained markup if the version of the site matches the attribute.

You’ll normally see these controls in pairs, giving an either/or type capability,but there’s no need to restrict them to this.

It’s actually a pretty slick system,but it does add a lot of text to the page layouts. One annoying thing is that all of the V3 supporting code is there even if it’s a brand new install of 2010. This makes sense, because you can introduce a V3 content database into the mix at any time, and you never know when you might need the support. However, if you know that the master pages and page layouts you’ll be working with will only be used in by V4 content, you can feel free to go ahead and remove the V3 tags. Before you do though, make sure that you’re not editing the system default masters/layouts. Always create new ones and do your customization there.

I’ve not seen any other values for the attribute besides 3 and 4 – these are processed by the server accordingly. I’m intrigued by the development possibilities though. Ideally, this could support an environment where I can register a “version” that my site could select to use. This would be much cleaner than keeping multiple master pages for variations in branding, or to support micro sites. This also might be a better model in the WCM world for multi lingual support. I have no idea if that’s the plan, but to me it would make sense.

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