Microsoft Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint Beta

Publiziert am 9.1.2008 von Timo.Heidschuster

Right now I wanted to write my custom ADAM provider (well I will do this for personal interests). I found an interesting tip for anybody who want to use ADAM as a provider for WSS.

Microsoft started to write there own provider. So ADAM is supported. That’s good news. Next week I will see if all is written good including the role provider. You can download the Toolkit here. Now you can use some sceanarios what was possible with form based authentication only. You can have AD for your internal users and ADAM for external users. To manage the ADAM users you can use some sites from WSS or implement some predefined workflows.

Logical diagram of ECTS

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Next week I will give you all the rest informations about it. After my personal tests. The release date, if nothing is changed, is end of january 2008. The project is closed february 2008. May they will show the solution at the sharepoint conference in Frankfurt. We will see.

Timo

Veröffentlicht unter General, Infrastructur | Kommentare deaktiviert für Microsoft Extranet Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint Beta

Sharepoint Explorer Client

Publiziert am 6.12.2007 von Timo.Heidschuster

Hello,

Normally I do not like post which just link to another website. But today I’am really fascinated about the Sharepoint Explorer Client from the Dot Net Factory. This is a IE add in and connect you to a given Sharepoint site. You can navigate extremly fast between sites and lists.

But be care. You see everything where you have access with your account. For my opinion it’s a tool for experienced users.

Timo

Veröffentlicht unter General | Kommentare deaktiviert für Sharepoint Explorer Client

System Event Notification error when uploading files

Publiziert am 26.11.2007 von Timo.Heidschuster

Just a short hint.

Yesterday when I worked with Excel Services I have got following error:

„This file cannot be saved to this location because there is no connection to the server. Check your network connection and try again.“

I got this error because I wanted to publish a new created Excel file in my document library. When I uploaded the file everything was successfully working.

When I searched for this problem I found out that many people have the same problem including synchronizing errors with outlook.

To resolve your problem stop the System Event Notification service.

net stop sens

If you make an IISReset think about that you need to stop the System Event Notification again.

Last but not least I should say that the error occured when I worked on the server. On the client side I never had this problem before.

Veröffentlicht unter Infrastructur, MOSS 2007, SPS 2003 | Kommentare deaktiviert für System Event Notification error when uploading files

Understanding alert notifications

Publiziert am 16.11.2007 von Timo.Heidschuster

Because of my problems with alerts and notifications I started to figure out when alerts/notifications will sent to users and where alerts are written within the site collection database. When you create an alert on an item/library the alert should be send whenever something is changed. The informations about are written within the „ImmedSubscriptions“ table. If you want to have only summaries about changes of your item/library daily or weekly the information about is written within the „SchedSubscriptions“ table. We start to take a closer look. In both tables we will find the columns „UserEMail“ and „SiteUrl“. If you find no entry within „UserEMail“ the alert will be send to everybody within your organisation. You can set alerts on a library how often you want. So it can be possible that you set x alerts on the same item/library with the same conditions. Every entry will be found within one of the both tables independs on your settings. To get an alert you must have minimum rights to the site collection. If you have no access you wont get it.

At this point we found now two negativ things. First you can set x alerts with same conditions to an item/library. The second thing is that you need minimum access to the site collection. Why is that negativ? Well it is possible that a user of your organisation assign a task to someone else even that user have no access. That is possible because the provider (membership provider) is not ingelligent enough to know the accessibility of that user. To understand this you must know a little bit about how the authentication and the provider of MOSS 2007 is working. The authentication of all users are going against the membership provider. The people picker use that provider to access the users and groups. When you assign a task to someone else you use that people picker. If the timer job (Immediate Alerts) now is running you will get a log entry within MOSS 2007 that the user can not be resolved. The server try to read the mail address of your imported user and not from the place where the users authenticate. You see that is a bit strange. Even some people will say this is correct because the new assigned user have no access so think about that the users of your organisation do not know who can access a site collection or not. One point more. The user who is originally assigned to the item/library will get an information mail about but the new assigned user will never recognize that. It would be better that the new assigend user will get a message. If that user click the message and no access to the site collection exists the user will be redirected to a website. On this site the user could request the access.

In a future block I will describe how to use different membership providers on MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0. As well I will show how to write your own membership provider so you can fix that issue by yourself.

Veröffentlicht unter Infrastructur | Kommentare deaktiviert für Understanding alert notifications

EMail notifications for alerts not sent when changing Task Owner

Publiziert am 10.11.2007 von Timo.Heidschuster

This issue is related to another error already fixed by Microsoft. A lot of people will not match this article to there own problem because they had not the same scenario. Microsoft describe an issue if you migrate from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0. The same problem is going on if you have only MOSS 2007 (WSS 3.0) and you change the url. For example you have a WSS 3.0 and transfer your site collection to another server and rename the site collection name. Even if you have correct „Alternate Access Mappings“ it won’t work correctly. This happens only to libraries which exists before you migrated. If you create a task and set the „Alert Me“ notification you will receive an correct EMail from MOSS 2007. Now you change the Task Owner („Assigned To“). You will not receive any information about. No task change and no alert notification. You will find no log entry or something else.

This happens because the ImmedSubscriptions table and the SchedSubscriptions table have wrong entries within the database. To fix your problem you can download following sourcecode v3UpdateAlert. If you just want to view the source click here.

When you downloaded go on command line and type following command:

csc.exe V3UpdateAlerts.cs /reference:“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI\Microsoft.SharePoint.dll

The csc.exe executable is usually located in the „Microsoft.NET\Framework\<version>“ folder under the system directory.

After compiling V3UpdateAlerts.exe can be run with the URL of the Site Collection „to fix“ the Alerts for.

eg. V3UpdateAlerts.exe http://myv3server

During execution time each „touched“ alert will be listet as all as each sub site that was accessed.

What’s going on when you run this fix. The source code will „fix“ the SiteUrl column by changing the AlertFrequency. Internally this will cause a move between the ImmedSubscription and SchedSubscriptions table. During this move the SiteUrl column will be automaticall fixed.

Now you will ask why I post this here because there is already one fix on the Microsoft homepage. Go on and read again and you will see I describe a different scenario as Microsoft did. It is just the same issue.

This error is related to following issue: E-mail notifications for alerts are not sent when content in a migrated list or in a migrated document library changes after you perform a database migration to upgrade to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 at the Microsoft support site KB936759

Veröffentlicht unter .NET, Development, Infrastructur, SQL | Kommentare deaktiviert für EMail notifications for alerts not sent when changing Task Owner