Configuring My Site in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint My Sites are commonly referred to as “Facebook for the enterprise” and are personal site collections providing each user with the ability to store private and public information such as documents, pictures, status updates, etc easily and efficiently.  My Sites in SharePoint 2010 takes social enterprise computing to the next level and builds upon what we have come to love in previous versions.  Microsoft saw the need to continue to invest and enhance SharePoint’s social networking capabilities, and as web 2.0 technologies continue to sprawl all over the world wide web, Microsoft have again successfully set the bench mark in the enterprise by introducing an array of social computing features to enhance end user collaboration in SharePoint 2010.
In my last article I introduced and configured our first service application for our SharePoint 2010 deployment, User Profiles, which provided us with a central location for storing user details that will later be imported from a content source such as Active Directory.  Today we will continue our journey to plan and configure User’s My Sites in SharePoint 2010.
Prerequisites
This article is the 5th in my series on deploying SharePoint 2010 for the enterprise, so if you have missed the first 4, you can easily catch-up via the links below;

1. Installing SharePoint 2010 using Least Privilege Service Accounts
2. Configuring incoming email in SharePoint 2010 with Exchange 2010
3. Configuring outgoing email in SharePoint 2010 with Exchange 2010
4. Configuring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010

Create the My Site Web Application
We begin by first creating a Web Application that will eventually house our My Site Host and subsequent site collections.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Web Applications
Click New

Authentication: Select either Claims or Classic depending on your requirements.  I will select “Classic”
IIS Web Site: Create a new IIS web site (enter your details as per your requirements)

Authentication Provider: Select your preferred provider based on your requirements.
Public URL: Specify the URL that users will type to access their My Sites.

Application Pool: Create a new application pool and give it a descriptive name
As we have been utilizing the least privilege model whilst configuring our SharePoint farm in this series, we will click on Register a new managed account and enter the details for our My Site Application Pool Identity.  Note: This account will be required to be provisioned in Active Directory before you can proceed. e.g. In my example I have created an account called DOMAIN\sp_mysite.

Click OK

Database Name and Authentication: Specify your Database server and Database name.
Failover Server: Specify your failover server if you are utilising SQL Server database mirroring.

Click OK
You should receive the below confirmation that the Web Application has been successfully created.

Click on our newly created “SharePoint – My Site” Web Application and click on General Settings.  Proceed to fill out your Web Application specific settings such as the Default Time Zone etc.

Create the My Site Host Site Collection
Now that we have successfully created our My Site Web Application, we can now proceed to create our My Site Host Site Collection.  This will be the top level site that will house our individual user’s site collections.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Create site collections.
Ensure that the recently created My Site Web Application is selected, enter in a Title and click select the My Site Host Template located under the Enterprise Tab.  Lastly, specify your site collection administrators and click OK.

You should then receive confirmation that the top level My Site Host has been successfully created.

Setup My Sites
Now that we have successfully provisioned our My Site Web Application and Top Level Site Collection that will host our My Sites, we can continue to configure our My Site Settings.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage service applications.
Click on User Profiles.
Click on Setup My Sites located under My Site Settings.

Enter the details of your Preferred Search Center if you have one setup already.
Enter the URL of your My Site Host that we have just created in the previous step and the personal site location.

Finally, select your Site Naming format, configure your Language Options, Permissions and My Site Email Notifications.

Click OK.
Add our Managed Path
Because we have specified “personal” as our Personal Site Location, we will need to define our managed path against our My Site Web Application.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.
Click on your My Site Web Application and click on Managed Paths from the Ribbon.

Add “personal” as a Wildcard inclusion, click Add Path and click OK

Enable Self-Service Creation
Our last configuration step provides our users with the privilege to provision their own My Site’s by enabling the Self-Service Creation.
Navigate back to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.
Click on your My Site Web Application and click on Self-Service Site Creation.

Select On and click OK.

If I now browse to my My Site URL I will be presented with the following “What’s New” Page.

It is only until I click on “My Content”, that SharePoint will proceed to create my personal site as per SharePoint 2007.

My Content

As you can see, we have now successfully completed our setup of a My Site Host which will house our user’s My Sites.
There is a whole bunch of new exciting features within SharePoint 2010 and its latest iteration of My Site in which I will deep dive in future articles.

References : msdn

Using the Managed Metadata Service in your SharePoint 2010 Sites-Part 3

We come to the conclusion of our 3 part series in configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010 and today is where all the hard work comes into play.  We shift our focus away from Central Administration and I will be providing you with examples on how we can utilise our managed metadata within our SharePoint sites.
If you have happened to miss out on the first two articles in this series, click on the links below for some light catch up reading;

1. Configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010-Part 1
2. Configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010-Part 2

I mentioned way back in part 1 of this series that the Managed Metadata’s primary purpose is to provide you with a central location to store your metadata that can be later utilised in ANY SharePoint site.  Notice that the word “any” is in caps!  This flexibility is one step ahead of what we referred to as Content Types and Site Columns in SharePoint 2007 where it wasn’t as straight forward.
Adding Managed Metadata to a SharePoint List or Library
Let’s navigate to a List in which we would like to add our Managed Metadata as a column.  Navigate to the List or Library in question and click on List under List Tools in the Ribbon and then click on Create Column.

Enter a name for your Column.  In my example I will call it State as I will be using the State Term Set which we created in Part 2 and select Managed Metadata as your column type.

Set your “Display format” so it either displays just the term label or the entire path.
Under Term Set Settings, select your Term Set. You can also utilise the search facility in the event you have a large number of Term Sets.

Finally select whether you want to Allow Fill-in, which is only available if your Term Set was set to allow it. This is handled by the Submission Policy set to Open, (discussed in Part 2).

Click OK once done.
I will now proceed to add a new item in my fairly bland Custom List via Add new item.

You have the option to click on the browse button on the right or you can begin typing in which it will provide you with Suggestions.  In the above screen capture I began typing in one of the “other labels” or commonly referred to as synonyms which we discussed in detail in Part 2. The end result will be the actual “Default Label” Term listed in the Taxonomy Term Store in Central Administration.  E.G. I was typing in “New South Wales” and the default label in the Term Store was set to “NSW”.

One thing to note is the “Send Feedback” link, which is visible if you click on the browse button beside your metadata field.  This allows users to provide feedback if an email address was specified under “Contact” in the properties of the Term via the Term Store Management Tool.

There are a couple of neat navigation enhancements made available out of the box in SharePoint 2010 which tightly integrates with our Metadata.  Commonly referred to as Metadata Navigation, these options are listed under our List Settings.
Navigate to List Settings / General Settings / Metadata navigation settings.

Within this screen we can specify which fields we want to utilise and incorporate in our Navigation Hierarchies and or Key Filters which are both displayed below the Quick Launch.  Both allow for enhanced and easy drill down when filtering your list.  I have gone ahead and added our “State” Metadata field to both Navigation Hierarchies and Key Filters as examples.

Example of a Navigation Hierarchy.

Example of Key Filters.

Well, that’s just about it on the Managed Metadata service application.  I hope you have enjoyed this 3 part series in which you can now take away and utilise within your own deployments.  Taxonomy in SharePoint 2010 has definitely come along way, easily allowing you to create and maintain your metadata in an organised fashion.
Until next time.. Happy SharePointing!
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Configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010-Part 2

n my previous article, I introduced you to the Managed Metadata Service in SharePoint 2010 and discussed some of the key concepts, before delving into the setup and configuration of the Managed Metadata Service Application.   Today we continue our journey and venture into creating Groups, Term Sets and Terms utilising the Term Store Management Tool.  I will then demonstrate how we can utilise our managed metadata within our SharePoint sites in the next and final article in this series.
Let’s begin by venturing back into the Term Store Management Tool which we first introduced in Part 1.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.  Highlight the Managed Metadata Service and click on Manage.

This launches the Term Store Management Tool which we briefly introduced in Part 1 of this series.
Let’s begin by creating a new group.  You can do so by clicking on the Management Metadata Service node (or whatever you called it) and selecting New Group.

In my example I will create a group labeled “Office Locations”.  I have entered a description to help others identify the purpose of this group and added the Group Managers and Contributors, so what’s the difference between the two levels of permissions?

Group Managers have the privilege to add items to the group and also have the ability to add users to the Contributors group.
Contributors have the privilege to only add and edit terms and set term hierarchies within the group.
After adding the above details, click on Save.
Our new Group will now be listed as per the below.

I will now create 2 Term Sets which will sit under “Office Locations”.  They will be, “State” and “City”.
You can do so by clicking on the Group Name and selecting New Term Set.

I will label my first Term Set as “State”.
Here I will identify the owner of this Term set, optionally specify an email address for “term suggestion” and list the Stakeholders who are notified before major changes are made to the term set.
We can also set the Submission Policy which dictates whether we allow users to contribute to the Term Set (commonly referred to folksonomy) or restrict it to only metadata managers (Taxonomy).
Our last option determines whether we will allow our end users to utilise the term set for tagging.

Once you have specified your options, click Save.  I will now proceed to create a second Term Set labeled City as per the above instructions.  Once finalised, our Term Sets will be listed under our Group as per the below screen capture.

I will now proceed to create our Terms below our Term Sets.  I’ll begin by selecting the first Term Set “State” and then selecting Create Term.

I will create my first Term,  “NSW” which is an Australian State.  You will then be greeted with the below screen;

Here we can specify whether the Term is available for Tagging, add a Description to assist users and add “Other Labels” in which we can enter synonyms and abbreviations relating to the Term.  This might come in handy when adding Terms and in my example, I have added “New South Wales” as an additional Label to the abbreviated “NSW” Term.
Click Save once you have completed the modifications.  I will proceed to create a Term for each State and City following the above steps and you should have something similar to the below once you have finished.

Note, we can expedite the creation of Term Sets by using the Import method

As an example, I have utilised the sample Import File provided by Microsoft and imported the contents within our Managed Metadata Service.

Now that we have a thorough understanding of the creation of Groups, Term Sets and Terms we will continue our journey in the next and final part of this series where we will utilise our Metadata within our SharePoint Sites.
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Configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010-Part 1

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Configuring the Managed Metadata Service Application in SharePoint 2010-Part 1

The Managed metadata service application is a welcome addition to SharePoint 2010 and is one of my favorite Enterprise Content Management features within this release. In this three part series I plan to delve into the configuration of the Metadata Service Application and then finish off with real life examples on utilizing our metadata throughout our SharePoint sites.  So what is the Managed Metadata Service Application all about and what value does it bring over what we had in SharePoint 2007?
The Managed Metadata’s  primary purpose is to provide you with a central location to store metadata (commonly defined as data about data) that can be utilised throughout any site within your SharePoint farm.  This is definitely one step ahead of what we referred to as Content Types and Site Columns in SharePoint 2007 where it was cumbersome to deploy to more than one site collection.  I touched upon the Managed Metadata Service Application in my article inConfiguring the User Profile Service in SharePoint 2010 as this was a prerequisite for the User Profile Service Application.
Primer on the Managed Metadata Service in SharePoint 2010
Managed Metadata and the word Taxonomy go hand in hand, and as mentioned previously, the Managed metadata service application allows us to formalize our Taxonomy or metadata which will be utilized across the entire farm.
There are a number of concepts that you will need to familiarize yourself with before we embark on the configuration.
Term Store This is the database in which our managed metadata is stored in.
Term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item in SharePoint Server 2010.
Term set is a collection of related terms.
There are two types of Terms available within SharePoint 2010.  These are “Managed Terms” and “Enterprise Keywords”.
“Managed terms, commonly referred to as “Taxonomy” are predefined words or phrases that can only be created by users with the appropriate permissions.  We can refer to this special group of users as “Metadata Content Managers”.
“Enterprise keywords, commonly referred to as “Folksonomy” are words or phrases that have been added by the end user.
Now that we have a better understanding on some of the key concepts, let’s deep dive into our setup and configuration of the Managed Metadata Service Application.
Setup the Managed Metadata Service
To setup our Managed Metadata Service, navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.
Click New and select “Managed Metadata Service”
Enter the follow details;
Name: Managed Metadata Service
Database Server: 
Database Name: Managed Metadata DB

I will utilize the sp_farm account for the Application Pool Identity.

Click Create.
Lastly, navigate to Central Administration / System Settings / Manage services on server and start the Managed Metadata Web Service.

Now that we have successfully setup our Managed Metadata Service, let’s venture into the Term Store Management Tool.  You can do so by navigating to Central Administration / Manage Service Applications and clicking on the newly created Managed Metadata Service.
Note, You can achieve the same by highlighting the service application and clicking on the Manage icon located in the ribbon.

This will launch the below screen which is referred to as the Term Store Management Tool.

Let’s quickly highlight what is made available on this screen.
Available Service Applications: If the farm has been setup with multiple Managed Metadata service applications you can easily navigate and configure each one from the single interface.
Sample Import: Here, Microsoft is providing your designated Metadata Managers with a template import file.  This template can be used as a base of creating your own which can then be later imported.
Term Store Administrators: This is where you would add the designated users which will provide them with the ability to create new term set groups.  By doing so, they will in turn be able to provide the necessary permissions to the group manager role.  Note, users added here have full control of the specified term store.  In the above screen capture, I have gone ahead and added Administrator and myself as Term Store Administrators.
Default Language: This one is self explanatory
Working Languages: In addition to the Default Language, you can also specify additional languages available for translation purposes.
That’s it for now.  Stay tuned for my next article in which I will venture into creating Groups, Term Sets and Terms and demonstrate how we can utilize our managed metadata within our SharePoint sites.

Reference : msdn

Configuring Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint Server Search is a service application which we have come to learn about over the past few articles that it is independent of other services and is no longer tied to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) that was introduced in SharePoint 2007.
SharePoint 2010 search architecture is made up of the Crawler, Indexing Engine, Query Engine and the User Interface and Query Object Model.  We now have greater flexibility and expandability with our search design in 2010 and can setup not only multiple Query Servers but can now scale out our Index server and add multiple instances.
Below is a logical overview of the components that will make up our SharePoint 2010 search configuration.

Configuring the Service Application
As always we begin our journey in Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Service Applications.
Click New / Search Service Application.
Name: Enter a name for your Service Application.
FAST Service Application: Select “None” (we will leave the configuration of FAST for a future article)
Search Service Account: Click on Register new managed account and ensure your domain account has already been provisioned in Active Directory.  I have created a separate search account; e.g. DOMAIN\sp_search

Application Pool for Search Admin Web Service: Create a new application pool for your search admin web service application.

Application Pool for Search Query and Site Settings Web Service: Create a new application pool for your search query web service application.

Click Create
The search service application will begin its configuration process.

You will eventually be presented with confirmation that the search service application was created successfully.
If we now navigate back to Application Management / Manage Service Applications, you will notice that 2 additional services have been added to our list.  These are;

1. Search Service Application (Typical Search Administration page which is similar to that in SharePoint 2007. From here we can create content crawl rules, reset indexes, setup content sources etc).
2. WSS_UsageApplication (This is a new service in SharePoint 2010 that specifically handles our Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application.  This service application handles web analytics such as usage, search query usage, rating usage etc  More on this in a future article).

Let’s now launch the Search Administration page by clicking on our Search Service Application.

Our Default content access account should be set to the account that we had specified at the time of provisioning the Search Service Application; i.e. DOMAIN\sp_search
Confirming Permissions
There are a couple of areas to note that we should check to ensure that our Default content access acount (sp_search) has been provided with the appropriate access permissions.  Let’s first begin by checking our User Profile Service Application by Navigating to Service Applications / User Profiles.  Just highlight the User Profiles and select Administrators from the ribbon.

Our newly provisioned sp_search account should have “Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers” selected as a permission.

We will also confirm that our sp_search account has the necessary “Read” permissions against the Web Applications being crawled.
Navigate to Central Administration / Application Management / Manage Web Applications.  Again, highlight the Web Application in question and from the ribbon select User Policy.

Ensure that the Search Crawling Account is set to the sp_search domain account.

Content Sources
Let’s venture into our content sources listed in the Quick Launch navigation bar under Crawling.
As was the case with SharePoint 2007, our Local SharePoint sites will be detected by default, albeit without a crawl schedule.

Check to see that your Start Addresses are located within your content source via editing the content source from the drop down menu.  These includes all SharePoint Web Applications and the sps3 “User Profiles” address.

You can easily create your crawl schedule by clicking on Local SharePoint sites and scrolling down to Crawl Schedules.

Let’s initiate a Full Crawl by clicking on Start all Crawls from the Manage Content Sources page.
Once your crawl has completed, you should confirm that there were no errors encountered during the initial crawl.  Usually any errors noted are most likely due to incorrect permission assignments.
Creating a “Basic Search Center” Site
If you haven’t done so already, from your top level site, click on Site Actions / New Site.
Select “Basic Search Center”

Enter a Name and URL and click on Create.
This will provision the Search Center similar to the below.

Creating an “Enterprise Search Center” Site
Let’s also create an Enterprise Search Center for comparison.  The key difference here is that we are provided with two tabs for searching, one for Sites and the other for People.  The “Enterprise Search Center” will be the search site of choice for most organizations running SharePoint Server.
From Central Administration / Application Management / Site Collections, click on Create site collections.   Ensure you are creating the Site Collection below the relevant Web Application.
Enter your Title, Description etc and select the Enterprise Tab under Template selection.  Select the Enterprise Search Center, specify your site collection administrators and click OK.

This will provision the Enterprise Search Center similar to the below.

As we have already completed an initial Full crawl earlier, I can now test my new search centers by performing a couple of searches.
Searching Content

Searching People

Now I ran into an issue when trying to search for content located in My Sites.  The crawl log displayed the following warning;
“This item and all items under it will not be crawled because the owner has set the NoCrawl flag to prevent it from being searchable”
In order to fix this issue (and this is true for any Site Collection), is to navigate to your My Site host and click on Site Actions / Site Settings.
Click on “Search and offline availability” under Site Administration, and ensure that you have Indexing Site Content, Allow this site to appear in search results? set to “Yes”.

After enabling the indexing of My Sites, I was able to successfully perform My Site Content searches and the warning disappeared from the Crawl Log.
That’s all that is to it in setting up a search center in its most basic form.  From here you can expand your service applications over multiple servers providing you with redundancy, scalability and increased performance .  Until next time, happy searching

SandBox Solutions in SharePoint 2010

1. Solutions that you deploy into a sandbox, which are known as sandbox solutions.cannot use certaion computer and network resources and cannot access content out side the site collection they are deployed in.
2. Solutions can be added to a production server SP server 2010 environment with out the risk of affecting process outside the sandbox.
3. Site collection adiministrators can deploy sandbox solutions,freeing farm administrators from this task.
4. Scalability and flexibility are increased because sandboxes run in seperate process that can be restricted by quotas,and their effect on the farm cannot be monitored.

Script to Report all Sandbox Solutions :

• Get -SPUserSolution -site http:// sbx:03:222/sites/TeamTest

Issues or Concerns about Sandbox Solutions:

• SPSecurity class is not part of the sandboxed SharePoint API i.e

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(

        delegate

        {

          Label ListCount = new Label();

          ListCount.Text =

            String.Format("There are {0} Lists",

            SPContext.Current.Web.Lists.Count);

          Controls.Add(ListCount);

        });

The above code is not supported in sandbox solution. It will throw the following exception.

Web Part Error: Unhandled exception was thrown by the sandboxed code wrapper's Execute method in the partial trust app domain: An unexpected error has occurred. Visual WebParts are not supported in sandbox solution.

• The SPWebApplication class is not available. Among other things, this means that a sandboxed solution cannot access anything outside its hosting site collection.
• Mapped folders cannot be added to the project.