Activity Feed being empty with Claims Enabled Web Applications

I was having trouble aggregating my colleagues' activities into my news feed page. After searching for a solution on the internet, found out that i needed to do two things

• Add colleagues 
• Enable the "User - Activity Feed Job" because it was disabled for some reason.

Then when i went to the "My newsfeed" page, i found no feeds still. I didn't get the feeds in my "recent activities" either. After some investigations i found out that the "All Authenticated" users for the Claims provider that the Web Application is using must be added to have read permissions on the social data. You can do this by going to the User Profile Management page and then going to the "Manage User Permissions" page.

After doing this, and then re-running the job. The feeds appeared :)

New SharePoint and Office 2010 Image availabe

Overview

This download contains a two Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. 

Virtual machine “a” contains the following pre-configured software: 

1. Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS 

2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services 

3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2 

4. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition 

5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition Beta 2 

6. Microsoft Office Web Applications Beta 2 

7. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 

8. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta 2 

9. Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2 

10. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 

Virtual machine “b” contains the following pre-configured software: 

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, joined to the “CONTOSO.COM” domain 2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Active directory has been preconfigured over 200 “demo” users with metadata in an organizational structure. All of these user profiles have been imported and indexed for search within SharePoint Server 2010, with “contoso\administrator” granted administrator permissions. 

SharePoint Server 2010 has been configured in a “Complete” farm using Kerberos authentication and the default SQL Server 2008 instance for data, and has a site collection created using the Team Site template at http://intranet.contoso.com/ and a FAST Search Center at http://intranet.contoso.com/search/. 

Performance Considerations 

1. If possible, unpack and run the VM image on a separate, fast hard drive (7200 RPM or better) from the operating system of the host machine. If this is being done on a laptop, a second internal drive or external eSATA drive works best, though USB 2.0 (make sure it's 2.0, 1.1 is too slow) or Firewire is acceptable. For absolute best performance use a second internal SSD drive.

To download it, follow the below link

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2&displaylang=en

Integrated Windows Authentication with Claims Based Authentication in SharePoint 2010 error (IE)

Hi

In case you have a problem "signing as a different user" in SharePoint 2010 Web Application that uses "Claims Based Authentication" you will need to turn off the "Integrated Windows Authentication" option in Internet Explorer (As shown below). Without doing this, you wont be able to sign is as a different user.

This does not apply to other browsers and it is an IE issue.

Enabling Taxonomy features on a Site Collection created using "Blank Site" template

When you create a new site collection in SharePoint 2010 using the "Blank Site" or "STS#1" site template, the Taxonomy feature (and possibly other features) will not be activated by default. It appears that Microsoft does not staple any features in the farm with the blank site template. This means, there is no way to activate the Taxonomy features in a blank site using the SharePoint UI because the Taxonomy features are hidden.

To activate the features, run the following stsadm command from the command prompt to enable the feature

stsadm -o activatefeature -id "73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C" -URL "http://siteurl/sitecollection"

This will enable the "TaxonomyFieldAdded" feature on the team site which should bring the "Term Store Management" link in the site administration section of a site. This will also enable you to add the Managed Metada column to your lists and content types.

On a side note, the following features are related to the taxonomy in SharePoint

TaxonomyFeatureStapler

TaxonomyFieldAdded

TaxonomyTenantAdminStapler

TaxonomyTenantAdmin

TaxonomyTimerJobs

All the above features are "hidden" which means that you can't enable them from the SharePoint UI

FileNotFoundException error when installing SharePoint 2010 Beta

On a Windows Server 2008 R2 installation which passed all the prerequisites, you might get the following error :

11/17/2009 16:39:32 9 ERR Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
File name: 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.CurrentUserIsAdministrator(Boolean allowContentApplicationAccess)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.ISPPersistedStoreProvider.DoesCurrentUserHaveWritePermission(SPPersistedObject persistedObject)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.BaseUpdate()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Update()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.RegisterDefaultDatabaseServices(SqlConnectionStringBuilder connectionString)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.Provision(SqlConnectionStringBuilder connectionString)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Create(SqlConnectionStringBuilder configurationDatabase, SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, IdentityType identityType, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword, SecureString masterPassphrase)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Create(SqlConnectionStringBuilder configurationDatabase, SqlConnectionStringBuilder administrationContentDatabase, String farmUser, SecureString farmPassword, SecureString masterPassphrase)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.CreateOrConnectConfigDb()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.Run()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned OFF.
To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog] (DWORD) to 1.
Note: There is some performance penalty associated with assembly bind failure logging.
To turn this feature off, remove the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog].

To resolve the problem you will need to download the following Geneva Framework version that had the required DLL.

Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta

Since SharePoint 2010 has been made available for MSDN/TechNet subscriber now, here’re some steps you would like to follow to get a successful installation. But keep in mind: This beta is not supported and you CANNOT upgrade the installation to RTM when it’s released. This Beta should only be used for evaluation purpose.

Follow these steps to install SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Beta products. The process is split in two parts. The first part will install SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta, and the second part will install SharePoint Server 2010 Beta. You can either install SharePoint Foundation 2010 or Start by installing SharePoint Server 2010.

before you start the installation, you will need the following pre-requisites

• .Net Framework 3.5 with SP1 installed
• Geneva Framework (Windows Identity Foundation) (download here)\
• SQL Server 2005 SP3 and CU3 OR Server 2008 SP1 and CU2
• Install WCF FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 – link not activated yet) . Please note the 2008 fix also applies to Vista, while the 2008 R2 fix also applies to Windows 7.
  If you don't have this fix installed, you will get "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'" error in ULS log. And most of the service applications will not run properly
• Create a special AD account that will be used as the SharePoint Managed Account in your farm. Refer to step 3 of the following post for how to create this account.

After you have applied the fixes and updates

• Run the pre-requisite tool for SharePoint foundation 2010
• After installing the binaries, run the configuration wizard. Setup the farm using complete farm installation. Use standalone installation only on Windows 7/Vista for dev purposes.
• Go to Central Administration and run the "Configuration Wizards" to setup the service applications. Use a special user for the SharePoint Managed Account for services and web applications in the farm
• Enable Developer Dashboard and turn to OnDemand for troubleshooting page performance issues. It can be done by STSADM or SharePoint 2010 Management Shell (Windows PowerShell).
  STSADM: stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv OnDemand
  Windows PowerShell:
  $svc=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService
  $ddsetting=$svc.DeveloperDashboardSettings
  $ddsetting.DisplayLevel=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::OnDemand
  $ddsetting.Update()

After installing this, you will have SharePoint Foundation 2010/SharePoint Server 2010 installed.

External Links

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx
• http://sharepointdevwiki.com/display/spadmin2010/SharePoint+2010+Beta+2+Install+screen+walk+thru
• http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/16/installation-notice-for-sharepoint-2010-public-beta.aspx

Taxonomy Services, Managed Metadata, and Managed keywords

SharePoint 2010 comes with a new services that provides the functionality to tag content types with metadata and keywords. I will be posting more information about how to manage taxonomies within SharePoint 2010 in upcoming posts, for now, i will explain some keywords that we will see a lot in SharePoint 2010.

Taxonomy is a hierarchal tree of Values

Term Store is a DB containing different taxonomies

Term Set is a section in the term store that contains individual terms.

Term is a node in the taxonomy tree with an ID and many text labels

Tagging is the act of linking an item to a node or multiple nodes in the taxonomy tree.

Groups are security boundaries within the term store and above the term set.

Keywords are the actual links (reference) to a node in the taxonomy tree.

Managed Metadata Column is a new column type that can be added to content types

Managed Keyword Column is a new column type that can be added to any content type

At this point, i'm not sure what is the difference between the Managed keywords, and Managed Metadata.

These can be managed in SharePoint 2010 using the Term Management Tool. You will find this in Central Administration --> Manage Service Applications. The tool will allow administrators to publish, Terms, Term Sets, and importing them.

It is possible to tag documents within a desktop Rich Client such as MS Office Word.

---------------------------------------------

More Links

http://manish-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2009/10/taxonomy-services-and-managed-metadata.html

http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/index.php/2009/10/using-enterprise-content-types-and-managed-taxonomies-in-sharepoint-2010/

SharePoint 2010 UI Improvements

SharePoint 2010 has a lot of improvements in the UI which impacts the usability of the WCM in SharePoint in a positive way.

Some of the enhancements are:

• Cleaner Markup: The Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (MSF) controls are no longer table based, and all the CSS classes were re-factored and cleaned up.
• SharePoint 2010 is XHTML compliant, and also supports WCAG 2.0.
• Reduced Postbacks / Page refreshes.
• Server Ribbon, which copies the functionality of the ribbon in Office applications.

Reference: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/10/19/part-1-improvements-to-the-core-sharepoint-platform.aspx

Metadata in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 comes with a huge taxonomy API, put into the Microsoft.Taxonomy.dll assembly.

With SP 2010, it is possible to tag items and pages with keywords from a term store, which then can be leveraged through the search solutions, or navigation solutions.

This will provide SharePoint with another method to visualize the data, together with the folder structure (i.e. SPSites, SPWeb, SPList approach).

SharePoint 2010 Developers Center

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Center is now live on MSDN. The site contains useful learning modules about SharePoint 2010. The site includes modules for getting started developing in SharePoint 2010.

Welcome to SharePoint 2010

Beta version of SharePoint 2010 will be released in November as announced by Steve Ballmer and Jeff Teper today at the SharePoint 2009 Conference.

The new version of SharePoint Office Server has a lot of new enhancements in regards to content management and collaboration. Some of the interesting new features are:

• Social Feedback and Organization
• Enterprise Metadata
• Web Publishing including Digital Asset Management
• Governance and Records Management
• Development on Windows 7

and many more

For more details about SharePoint 2010, visit the SharePoint Team blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/19/sharepoint-2010.aspx

SharePoint Server 2010, no more "14"

So, in case you haven't heard yet, Microsoft dropped the "14" from the next version of SharePoint Server. Yes, there is no "Office" in the name. Microsoft also dropped the word "Office" from SharePoint and therefor, MOSS is no longer an acronym to SharePoint.

You may ask, what about WSS? Microsoft says, that there will be a new version of WSS (v4), and they working on it.

For more info about this read Microsoft's official post here

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/14/microsoft-sharepoint-14-is-now-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.aspx