It is that time of the month again, and we have an exciting topics covered in the month of July.

Date: 08 July 2010

Time: 6:4545Pm – 9:30PM

Location: Microsoft Singapore Level 22 CF-12

Scalable SharePoint Infrastructure Management

William Tay, Microsoft Singapore

Come by and enjoy a highly-interactive session with William as he talks about the latest and neatest trick in the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack called PowerPivot and how it fits into the entire Microsoft Business Intelligence solution – and more importantly, how it democratize Business Intelligence in the enterprise with the Microsoft belief of BI for the Masses.

Introduction to Claims Authentication in SharePoint 2010

Chyan Yee Goh, Microsoft Consulting Services

When it comes to identity management intensive applications, it's hard to top SharePoint. Whether you are signing in a portal, accessing a document or using a webpart for reaching out to external web services, your identity is going to be the factor that drives it all.
In this session, we will give an overview of how claims based authentication is used in SharePoint 2010 and how this opens up opportunities for authentication scenarios that were not possible before.

Refreshments will be provided, courtesy of AvePoint Singapore.

Please RSVP to ssofian@mvps.org to confirm your attendance.  And reserve your SharePoint 2010 shirt.  Whilst stocks last.

Hope to see you at the meeting.

Cheers,

Steve Sofian

Todd Carterhad just uncovered a serious memory leak on SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0.  Though there is not an official fix from Microsoft yet.  Todd has provided a workaround fix.  Get more details at Todd’s post.

The SharePoint 2010 Beta virtual machine (Hyper-V) only though is now available for download if you are looking at a quick evaluation of the platform and not wanting to install it yourself.  There are two virtual machines that you would have to download.  These virtual machines contain more than just SharePoint 2010.

Click hereto go the download page.

I will be presenting at the Information Worker Community Day 2010 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. This event is jointly organized by the Malaysia SharePoint User Group and Microsoft Innovation Center (Malaysia).

In many organizations, business data is stored across different systems, legacy systems or custom applications.  Traditionally accessing these data and making it viewable in a web pages, making it searchable requires an enormous amount of custom code.

I will be speaking on the new functionality inside SharePoint Server 2010’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS), evolved from the 2007’s Business Data Catalog, that makes it extremely easy to display, edit these information and searchable within SharePoint 2010.

Event Details:

Event Details

Date:   10^th December 2009, Thursday

Time:   9.00am – 5.00pm

Venue:

Monash University
Jalan Lagoon Selatan, Bandar Sunway,
46150, Selangor Darul Ehsan
Location Map >>

For more information on the event, please visit http://spugmalaysia.org/iwcommunityday.aspx

Applies to:  SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (Nov 2009), Office Web Apps Beta (Nov 2009)

If you are like me, when you have installed SharePoint Server 2010, you would want to check out the new Office Web Applications and see how it works with SharePoint Server 2010. 

Word Document

PowerPoint Slides within SharePoint site

For PowerPoint Slides Pop Up

The Office Web Applications consists 3 service applications which will be available after installation.  And once deployed, 3 additional site collection features will be added to the web application, if these service applications are associated with the web application.

The much awaited SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is now available now.  You can download the trial here:

http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx

And I am sure you are eager to install it right away :)  Well, this is only beta, so the installation will not be as straight forward as the released version.

Do check out the preliminary system requirements before you start the installation here

And also check out the following useful resources which will help you in your installation and the journey, and these articles have helped me a lot.

Useful Resources:

Installation Notice for SharePoint 2010 Public Beta (Jie Li)

Grant “Replicating Directory Changes” (KB303972)

User Profile Sync Setup in SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (Jie Li)

Path to User Profile Synchronization success in SharePoint 2010 Beta (SharePoint Team Blog)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is now available for MSDN subscribers to download.  No worries if you are not a MSDN subscriber, the beta will be generally available on October 22 2009.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

And if you are looking specifically for SharePoint development, there are quite a number of resources available:

Walkthroughs

• Add Feature Event Receivers
• Create a Custom Field, Content Type, List Definition, and List Instance
• Create a Site Definition Project
• Import a SharePoint Designer Reusable Workflow into Visual Studio 2010
• Import Items from an Existing SharePoint Site
• Creating a Web Part for SharePoint
• Creating a Web Part for SharePoint by Using a Designer
• Create a Custom Site Workflow Activity
• Creating a Workflow with Association and Initiation Forms
• Creating and Debugging a SharePoint Workflow Solution
• Add an Application Page to a Workflow
• Creating an Application Page
• Creating an External List in SharePoint List by Using Business Data
• Deploying a Project Task List Definition

How To...

• Add and Remove Features to a Package by Using the Package Designer
• Add or Remove SharePoint Connections
• Create a BDC Model
• Create an Event Receiver
• Customize a SharePoint Feature

Apparently, only SQL 2008 with SP1 is supported on Windows 2008 R2.  You will be prompted to install SP1 of SQL 2008 before you run SQL 2008:

At first, I thought all I need to install the service pack once I have installed the SQL 2008.  However, you will notice that only the SQL Reporting Services, Sync Framework and Books Online are installed, the rest of the SQL services installation will fail.  The issue is that the setup support files that come with SQL 2008.

There is KB article, KB 955392, which provides steps on how update or slipstream the SQL 2008 installation with SP1.  I personally prefer the slipstreaming method.

Steps:

1. Install the prerequisites of SQL 2008:
   • MS.NET Framework 3.5 SP1
   • Windows Installer 4.5
2. Extract the service pack to a folder on the server using the following command:
   • SQLServer2008SP1-KB968369-x64-ENU.exe /x:C:\SP1
3. Run the service pack to install the Setup files
   • C:\SP1\x64\setup\1033\sqlsupport.msi
4. Run the Setup.exe file from the SQL 2008 source media by specifying the /PCUSource parameter:
   • Setup.exe /PCUSource=C:\SP1

Recently, I have just setup my new company laptop to run Windows 2008 as a desktop and reinstalling SharePoint in Hyper-V.  Upon completion of the installation and while accessing the Shared Services Provider, I was prompted continuously with authentication prompt, even I have entered the correct user and password.  Subsequently, I am just presented with a blank page.

There is a KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 that describes the same scenario.

This is more of a note to myself to remember to set the DisableLoopbackCheck in the registry:

Steps:

1. Open your registry editor by going to Start –> Run and enter regedit and click OK.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa in the registry editor.
3. Right-click Lsa, click on New and select DWORD value.
4. Enter DisableLoopbackCheck and press Enter.
5. Right-click DisableloopbackCheck and select Modify.
6. In the Value data box, enter 1 and click OK.
7. Restart your server.

I would recommend that you do this on at least the Central Administration server, if not all WFE servers.