I attended the Central Texas SharePoint User group the other night and one of my long time friends said “Where have you been? Why aren’t you blogging as much?” To which I could only reply “I have been BUSY!”. In the past month I have been to:

1. Orlando for SharePoint Connections

2. London for the Best Practices Conference

3. Monterey, CA for my Dad’s 80th birthday

4. Mountain View, CA to Teach for Critical Path Training

5. San Jose for the Silicon Valley SharePoint Users Group

6. Back to Monterey (I LOVE it there)

Following an installation, nothing gives me more joy (pertaining to SharePoint anyway) than having a clean Health Report days after my installation (AKA: Review Problems and Solutions). Recently though, I was doing an installation and I decided to try to “force run” the health rules rather than wait for them to run.

I wrote this in PowerShell to run all the jobs on demand:

$jobs = Get-SPTimerJob | Where-Object {$_.Title -like "Health Analysis Job*"}
foreach ($job in $jobs)
{
  $job.RunNow()
}

After the run, return to Monitoring | Review Problems and solutions and see how you did.

Way back before the 2009 SharePoint Conference I was building a Silverlight and SharePoint demo and ran into an issue whenever I tried to use Silverlight and call certain methods of the SharePoint User Profile Service. If the web service returned a GUID type, which is part of the PropertyData type from methods like GetUserProfileByName, I would get the error:

The formatter threw an exception while trying to deserialize the message: There was an error while trying to deserialize parameter http://microsoft.com/webservices/SharePointPortalServer/UserProfileService:GetUserProfileByNameResponse. The InnerException message was ‘Error in line 1 position 528. Element ‘http://microsoft.com/webservices/SharePointPortalServer/UserProfileService:Value' contains data of the ‘http://microsoft.com/wsdl/types/:guid' data contract. The deserializer has no knowledge of any type that maps to this contract. Add the type corresponding to ‘guid’ to the list of known types – for example, by using the KnownTypeAttribute attribute or by adding it to the list of known types passed to DataContractSerializer.’. Please see InnerException for more details.

Way back in SharePoint 2007 there was a great feature on the Search Settings for each User Profile property page called Alias. The field description states:

“Alias properties are treated as equivalent to the user name and account name when searching for items authored by a user, targeting items to a user, or displaying items in the Documents Web Part of the personal site for a user. Alias properties must be public.”

I am spiffing up my search demo for my talks at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in La Jolla and London (and Connections in Orlando) and wanted to add a few additional sort options to the FAST Search Center in my environment like Author and Size. When I set up the environment I was careful to follow the excellent installation and configuration guide on TechNet. Yet, when I tried to configure the Search Actions Links web part in the search center it only showed two properties.

I am a total convert. I have seen the light. The road is not always easy, but nobody promised that. Here I go. I LOVE Expression Blend 4. (I am learning to love MVVM, we’re still in the “getting to know each other” phase.) Sure, there is tons of help available, including some amazing assistance in the form of MVVM Light. Guys like Laurent Bugnion scare me just a little. They know SO much about the topic that mere mortals like me struggle to get ramped up. Anyway, on to my topic.

Many of my clients are concerned about the loss of “link juice” when moving their public facing site to SharePoint. The issue is easy to understand. Even if you keep the structure of your site exactly the same as your current site, SharePoint forces the inclusion of the “pages” library in the URL. This means that moving http://www.mycompany.com/default.aspx to SharePoint will become http://www.mycompany.com/pages/default.aspx. In general this is not a problem because accessing http://www.mycompany.com/ will redirect to the default welcome page. The problems my clients have are three specific issues:

I had a great time yesterday speaking for folks who attended the 2011 Technology Expo at St. Edward’s University Technology Expo. My topics were:

1. First Look: What’s new for Developers in MS SharePoint 2010
2. Business Productivity: What’s new for Developers in Microsoft SharePoint 2010
3. What’s new in Office 2010 for Developers

Thanks again for the attendance and let me know if you have an questions about the content.

SharePoint 2010 Multi-Tenant: Why and How to Use it

RSVP:

January 12th Meeting Description:

As organizations grow in their sophistication, multi-tenant scenarios become a superior alternative to more traditional single-tenant implementations. Speaker Javier Barrera will discuss how you should use a multi-tenant environment and why it might be right for you and your organization.

We will also discuss the following:

• When it makes sense to use a multi-tenant farm for both internal and external situations.
• How multi-tenancy effects SharePoint 2010 service applications when used in conjunction with new implemented subscriptions.
• The advantages gained from using a multi-tenant farm.
• The PowerShell steps involved when using SharePoint 2010 multi-tenant farm.

Meeting Details

Date: Wednesday, January 12, 2010
Time: 6:00-8:00pm (Dinner Included)
8:00pm: SharePint (Roaring Fork)

Location: Microsoft
Quarry Oaks II
10900 Stonelake Blvd.
Building B, Suite 225
Austin, TX 78759

The fine folks at Microsoft have seen fit to award me MVP for SharePoint Server for another year. I am again honored and humbled to be included in the fine group of exceptional folks who are the Microsoft SharePoint MVPs. 2011 is going to be a big year for Aptillon, AbleBlue, and me personally. I have a lot of speaking engagements already booked for this year. They are:

• 2011 Technology Expo – St. Edwards University PEC, Austin, TX – 1.6.2011
• SharePoint Summit 2011 – Toronto, Canada – 1.31.2011-2.2.2011
• SharePoint Best Practices Conference – La Jolla, CA – 3.7.2011-3.9.2011
• SharePoint Connections – Orlando, FL – 3.27.2011-3.30.2011
• SharePoint Best Practices Conference, UK – London, England – 4.11.2011-4.13.2011

Of course I’ll also continue to support the Central Texas SharePoint User Group here in Austin.