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Just Another Web Application

A SharePoint support engineer holds forth on subjects diverse

It's not SharePoint, but it's moderately interestingMay 21 2008

Like many of you out there, I have a Windows Mobile Smartphone. The one in my case is an i-Mate SP5, and I really like it. Recently though, it developed a problem which was really annoying me.

By default, it offers quick access to menu items using the numeric keypad. For example:

1. Phone
2. Sounds
3. Profiles
4. Home Screen
5. Clock & Alarm
...

One day though, my device decided numbers were uncool. Alpha characters were now the way to go:

A. Phone
B. Sounds
C. Profiles
D. Home Screen
E. Clock & Alarm
...

This annoyed me no end, as I couldn't now use easy shortcuts and had to use the joystick to navigate everywhere. Painful.

So today I decided I'd have a dig round in the device and see if I could find the setting that had changed. I think it changed around the time I hacked on A2DP support in order to use my car's bluetooth handsfree and audio capabilities. So could be I'd changed something there. Or it could be something else. Either way I was entirely unable to find anything in the UI, so I resorted to the registry. Kids! Don't try this at home!

Using Pocket Controller, I valiantly cracked open my phone's registry with n

On the subject of the Central Admin websiteMarch 27 2008

I've been rooting round in SharePoint internals today, mostly out of curiosity, after a fellow engineer here at the GTSC mentioned changing the port number on which Central Admin is published. We have a supported way, and some unsupported ways, and some ways that are sort of outside the scope of SharePoint entirely. So I figured why not a blog post?

The officially supported way:

psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -port 5950

Pretty simple, but not commonly known (I had to double-check myself). Reprovisions (or more accurately, alters the existing provisioned copy of) your Central Admin site on the appropriate port. This command can also provision or unprovision Central Admin entirely, and can change the authentication scheme.

The unsupported way:

• open inetmgr.exe
• right-click the central admin website
• click properties
• on the first tab, change the port binding, click OK and go merrily about your business.

The downside here? Well the shortcut in your start menu will no longer point at the right port, for one thing. You may be able to live with that, but in addition, our config and deployment tools won't be able to talk to central admin if they need to, service packs and updates may break your changes and indeed future updates may flat-out fail.

Internally, the central admin URL is stored in two places, which won't be updated by this method. First, in the registry, at:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared

Blogging catchup and mailbox spring cleanMarch 6 2008

Having recently spent some time in India attending training on Microsoft Search Server 2008, and having been quite sick as a result, I've got a bit of a backlog of SharePoint blogging to catch up with. First of all, to comment on Search Server: This is a great product. It significantly builds on the search already offered by WSS and MOSS, streamlines the admin and search interface, adds Ajax functionality and Federation, and comes in a free Express flavour to boot. This is a new, standalone product, but you could potentially also look on it as an expansion/update for your current WSS 3.0 installation. An update for MOSS adding this functionality will be available on a provisional timeframe of mid-2008 (calendar).

MOSS administrators, you may be aware that SQL Database maintenance can be the bane of your existence, as well as being something of a dark art with documentation having been thin on the ground. The good news is that there is now a whitepaper covering all aspects of DB maintenance for SharePoint.

I love SushiFebruary 19 2008

No, I really, really love sushi. Quite often you'll find me dining out at Hamachi-Ya, Sushi Train, Sapporo or Sushi Club, four of my favourite japanese restaurants in Sydney.

So imagine my joy when I found SharePoint Sushi, a neat UI utility to carry out all those day-to-day annoying tasks like backing up, restoring, security checking sites and so on. It's, in essence, a GUI wrapper around many of stsadm's common commands, so it's nothing you can't already do if you're willing to type your fingers to the bone, but oh! It's so much easier and more fun.

In other news, off to Melbourne this weekend, then I'm in Bangalore for some SharePoint training - will be a new experience for me, first time on the subcontinent. Wish me luck.

EventID 5566 Troubleshooting in InfoPath Form ServicesFebruary 4 2008

This post has been snatched from the headlines of Premier Support. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Now read on...

Imagine for a moment you're creating a new InfoPath form t recieve user input. Imagine furthermore that you're pre-populating this InfoPath form with information from a web service, in this case based on some sterling advice you found on a Microsoft blog. Further imagine that this InfoPath form works perfectly in the InfoPath client application itself, so you pat your own back and deploy it to SharePoint site for initial testing and feedback.

This is a very common scenario, and most people would never run into the problem my customer did, which was this: When SharePoint users who did not have the InfoPath client app installed came to use the form, it tried to open in InfoPath Forms Services, a wonderful feature of SharePoint. This is fine, the form was designed with this in mind and was set up to be a browser-compatible form. But this happened:

In addition, an