The Edit in Datasheet View is not available on a List or you cannot see "Connect to Outlook" on a list

The data grid view itself comes from web components provided with Microsoft Office. This can be problematic in organizations with customized installations of Office, as they often don’t include the Windows SharePoint Services Support feature. If you can’t edit a list in grid view, go to Add/Remove Programs, change the Office installation, locate the Office Tools category and select Windows SharePoint Services Support.

People Search does not return any results

Follow the steps below to address the problem around People Search returning no results (even though you know that there are people in the database that match your search criteria):

1) Open Shared Services Administration
2) Click on Search Settings > Content Sources and crawl schedules > Manage Content Sources
3) Select the "Local Office SharePoint Server sites" content source
4) On the "Edit Content Source" screen, Update the Textbox for "Start Addresses" to include a new entry for the URL of your site collection name starting with "sps3://". For example, "sps3://intranet:80"
5) Select the checkbox "Start full crawl of this content source" and Click "Ok"
6) Wait till the indexing finishes. (You can check the status of indexing by accessing this area - "Shared Services Administration: SharedServices > Search Settings > Configure Search Settings"
7) Goto your site collection (for example http://intranet:80) and perform your people search to find results

Important MOSS 2007 & WSS 3.0 update

Check out some important updates release by Microsoft SharePoint & WSS team Blog - August Cumulative Update for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

An error occurred during the processing of . The resource object with key 'ResolveBugPageTitle' was not found.

When you use the Bug Tracking Template from the WSS 3.0 Fantastic 40 Templates, you would notice this error when you try to resolve a bug -

An error occurred during the processing of . The resource object with key 'ResolveBugPageTitle' was not found.

This error is caused by missing resource files starting with the filename "tsa.*" which for some reason i noticed were absent from the web directory "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\{your website port number}\App_GlobalResources" on the web server. Here are the steps to fix this issue:
1) Browse the directory in 12 hive - C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\CONFIG\Resources
2) Copy all the files whose names starts with "tsa.*" and paste these resx files into your website directory "C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\{your website port number}\App_GlobalResources"
3) Browse to the instance of your Bug Tracking site's "bugdefault.aspx" page
4) Click on the small yellow, green buttons and EUREKA! - the Bug resolution page appears and everything functions as expected...

How to automatically login corporate / internal users to Internet or Extranet website

I have often been faced with this challenge of automatically logging in internal organizational users to intranet accessed via a public URL. For example IE 6.0+ will be able to automatically login a user to the Intranet accesssed via the internal URL (like http://intranet) but the same internal corporate user will be prompted for a username/password when trying to access the same intranet site via the public facing external URL (like http://intranet.xyzinc.com). I solved this issues by merging the following registry entries at each of the user's computer and this can be automated by including the script below as part of the user's logon script to the domain (my example below assumes that your external public facing url is intranet.xyzinc.com for your internal corporate intranet hosted on a web server named MOSS01):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains]@=""
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\xyzinc.com]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\xyzinc.com\intranet]"*"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains\MOSS01]"*"=dword:00000001

Tips to solve the Error - "No authority could be contacted for authentication"

I have come across this error message "No authority could be contacted for authentication" a couple of times now. Here are the possible fixes i have used:

1. Make sure that your MOSS server is part of the domain whose users you are trying to authenticate against your portal. If it is and you still get error then remove your MOSS server from your domain and delete the server name in the domain, then add the server into domain again
2. Check the DNS configuration (Under TCP/IP settings) of your web server and see that it points to your AD DNS (probably your AD server) and not to the ISP DNS (Make sure you are aware of any Firewalls or Filters between your AD server and MOSS server)
3. Also make sure that your certificate authority (CA) is also your domain controller, you're going to need to find out what IIS is giving out for a cert and then make sure there are no bad DNS entries in there for that.
4. If above doesnt work, try IE Tools > Settings > User Authentication settings for the Local Intranet zone, check “Automatic logon only in the Intranet zone” is selected. If selected then try resetting to User Authentication to “Prompt for user name and password” and the issue might be resolved.

Microsoft MOSS Scalability & Perfomance White Paper

• Microsoft MOSS Scalability & Perfomance White Paper - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=120890&clcid=0x409
• Read the Release Notes on MOSS Team Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/17/belated-announcement-sharepoint-server-2007-scalability-and-performance-whitepaper-now-available.aspx
• Review of White Paper - http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2008/06/18/review-of-the-sharepoint-scalability-white-paper.aspx

Cool MOSS Add-ons & Tools on CodePlex

Some recent releases on CodePlex that i am using in my projects:

• Advanced Sliverlight & AJAX MOSS 2007 WebParts - http://www.codeplex.com/webparts
• Podcasting Kit for MOSS 2007 - http://www.codeplex.com/pks
• SharePoint Migration Framework - http://www.codeplex.com/SPMigration
• SharePoint Content Deployment Framework - http://www.codeplex.com/SPDeploymentWizard
• SharePoint Branding Tool - http://www.codeplex.com/BrandingTool
• SharePoint Events Manager - http://www.codeplex.com/speventsmanager

STSADM extensions - Important additions to MOSS Administration Toolset

You can check out Gary's STSADM extensions - http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2008/06/wss-build-of-my-stsadm-extensions.html

Are you looking to integrate Community server to MOSS 2007?

Check out this really cool article from SharePoint team Blogs showing how to integrate Telligent Community Server with MOSS 2007 - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/09/how-we-did-it-integrating-telligent-community-server-evolution-2008-with-sharepoint-server-2007.aspx

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 introduces ADO .NET Entity Designer

ADO .NET Entity Designer -- a tool that permits direct mappings between a database schema and a conceptual schema. This tool permits designers to relate tables from a database schema to Entity Types that the ADO .NET Entity Designer can create and manipulate LINQ may be used to query Entities within the ADO.NET Entity Framework to create code that is easy to maintain, and that works with strongly typed data objects as well as with various types of business entities. For more information, visit the download page. If you have already installed any Visual Studio 2008 Hotfixes, be sure to run the Hotfix Cleanup Utility before installing this beta code.

Free Utility to Tune and Optimize the SharePoint ranking algorithm through a GUI!!

A Microsoft partner call BA-Insight has developed a free utility that gives the SharePoint administrator the ability to tune and optimize the SharePoint ranking algorithm through a graphic user interface. Download the free utility here.

Create Business Forms using Microsoft Word and Excel (alternative solution to Microsoft InfoPath)

Microsoft has released some really cool pre-formatted document libraries that can act as an alternative option to Microsoft InfoPath business ready forms. Each library is pre-configured to populate the body of document with library fields automatically. Check it out here and download today

"Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file" Error while creating saving site as a template

This follows from my previous blog post. This error "Failure decompressing data from a cabinet file" can be avoided by using the stsadm command line tool of MOSS 2007 and using the "nofilecompression" attribute.For example to export a site template, you would use something like this:

• stsadm.exe -o export -url http://intranet/test -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename C:\backup

Once you finish your export use the stsadm import command with the same nofilecompression attribute. For example:

• stsadm.exe -o import -url http://intranet/test -includeusersecurity -nofilecompression -filename C:\backup

How do i resolve this error "The site is too large to save as a template. The size of a template cannot exceed 10485760 bytes." in MOSS 2007

I get asked quite commonly about increasing the maximum size of List Templates (Saving a list as a template is an easy way of transferring data from one place to another in SharePoint). The quick trick here is as follows :

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size -propertyvalue 350000000

Note that:

• The above increases the maximum size of both site and list templates.
• The propertyvalue parameter is in bytes, so the example above will increase the maximum size to approx 350MB.
• Default value is 10 MB or 10485760 bytes
• There is a hard limit of 500MB so the value must be less than 524288000 or you will get an error when saving the list as a template.
  

Have you heard of Microsoft F# yet?

F# is a functional programming language that runs on Microsoft's Common Language Runtime and the .NET Framework. This means that F# has access to .NET Framework APIs and, conversely, that other .NET languages can use F# libraries. This Fast Guide offers a quick introduction to F# programming best practices and attempts to answer key questions about this new .NET implementation. Click here for more information

Microsoft offers Parallel Programming with .NET 3.5

Late last year, just after Visual Studio 2008 was formally released, Microsoft offered preview software that shows where things may be headed in terms of support for parallelism in future versions of .NET and Visual Studio. Microsoft announced the Parallel Extensions Community Technology Preview (CTP) that runs on the .NET Framework 3.5, thus tapping into features in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 2008. Parallelism APIs in the new .NET extensions support parallel For and ForEach loops. Declarative data parallelism is supported in the form of a data parallel implementation of LINQ-to-Objects that eases implementation of LINQ queries that run on multiple processors. Meanwhile a new concurrency runtime maps and balances code to available concurrent resources on the execution platform. Pretty cool huh!