.Net Consultant

Microsoft Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010

With Access 2010 you can move your table to SharePoint 2010 and have user forms show up in SharePoint as well.  One thing to note is that forms need to be created as Access web forms.  This makes it so, for one, SharePoint can use these forms and two, it relies on the new Access Data Macros to drive the behaviors.  Below is a nice diagram I found depicted the connection between Access and SharePoint 2010.

Let's take a closer look at how this all works!
Open Access and go to your database you want to send to SharePoint.  You will need to run the Web Compatibility checker to make sure everything can transfer over smoothly.  If any table fails, you will be given a list of the errors or problems so that you may try to fix them.  Assuming all pass, you can then publish your database to SharePoint 2010.  While publishing, Access moves the forms, reports, macros, tables etc to SharePoint.  This will allow any users that have Access 2010 on their machines to download a local copy of the database to edit them if needed. 

All your tables should now be SharePoint 2010 Lists and create all the necessary links between Access and the Lists.  This way if someone were to download the database to their machine, Access will get all the SharePoint list data to maintain a local cache.  While a user has this database open, Access will periodically sync with SharePoint with any changes made on either end.

All your forms get converted to ASP.NET (.aspx) pages, including javascript for any supported page events.  The layout for these pages is mainly driven by HTML tables. One thing to keep in mind is that your controls on the form need to be placed within the cells.  This helps Access transform the form into an appropriate .aspx page.

If your organization is looking to move your Access database(s) to SharePoint, you can do so with the peace of mind knowing everything should go over smoothly.  Luckily, for those that are not using Access 2010, you can link SharePoint with Access 2007 as well.  The link between Access 2007 and SharePoint is slightly different, but most functionality should still work as intended.

 

IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.

During a San Francisco developers event held on Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed that it will release a public beta for Windows 8 in late February 2012 instead of the early January date indicated by a recently road map. The news arrived as Antoine Leblond VP of Windows Web services, introduced the upcoming Windows Store to the press.

So far the new tablet-console-friendly OS seems to be on track for a full retail release in Fall 2012 based on the beta's February launch. Given that Microsoft released a public beta of Windows 7 back in January 2009, there was speculation that the Redmond company was sticking to the same schedule. Yet the Developer Preview launched a month earlier (on September 13) than Windows 7's October distribution. That said, comparing the two release schedules seems to be somewhat pointless.

According to Microsoft, more than 13 million copies of the Windows 8 Developer Preview had been downloaded since its release back in the fall. California-based Net Applications said that, based on the Developer Preview downloads Windows 8 already accounts for three-hundredths of 1-percent of all PCs accessing the Internet. That's reportedly one-fourth the number of Windows 2000-powered PCs and half the number of Windows 98 PCs.

Despite the beta announcement, Tuesday's event was focused on Microsoft's app market simply called Windows Store. It will open its doors at the launch of the Windows 8 Public Beta and only offer free apps. Previous reports indicated that the storefront will only provide Metro-style applications, and that legacy applications for Windows 7 and later will only have a landing page that links back to the software publisher.

Being that IncWorx Consulting is a Microsoft Gold Partner and provides SharePoint Support, It makes me wonder what enhancements Microsoft will make in the way Windows and Internet Explorer interact with SharePoint 2010. Windows 7 and Office 2010 have odd quirks that create issues, like the inability to open Excel files from a SharePoint site using Internet Explorer 9 64-bit and many others.

Posted by IncWorx Consulting: Microsoft Lync 2010 has the ability to share your desktop with anyone. The following blog post will give you step by step instructions on how to do so.

Step by Step Instructions

Start by clicking meet now.

If do not have the File bar you can access Meet Now by clicking the settings icon dropdown and selecting Meet Now 

The following prompt will appear.

You can use Lync’s audio if you do not already have a conference line. For this example we will select Do not join audio. Then we will select OK.

The normal Lync dialog box will appear. This is the screen in which you can invite either internal Lync subscribers or non Lync users.

To invite non Lync users select the participant drop down and select Invite by Email.

The prompt will appear with a hyperlink for users to send non Lync users a meeting invite. This hyperlink is static and will join the user to your screen.

When the user clicks the hyperlink they will be prompted to download Silverlight if they do not already have it. Once the user downloads Silverlight, or if they already have it installed, the following prompt will appear for them:

The following prompt is what the user and the sender will see. Once the user has joined  the meeting as a Guest, as an attendee, he will wait in the lobby until being admitted.
Once the user has joinded the meeting youwill see their name above yours.

To share your desktop select Share and select Desktop.

You know you are sharing your desktop by the top box indicating you are "currently sharing".

I hope this step by step guide was useful. For help with other Microsoft technologies please feel free to check out or offerings at www.incworx.com

About IncWorx

IncWorx Consulting is primarily known for SharePoint consulting and Custom .NET consulting. Recently, IncWorx has expanded their offering to include Microsoft Lync consulting, Microsoft Commerce Server and Microsoft BizTalk consulting

IncWorx Consulting is the SharePoint Consulting Guru

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    <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Extensions" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35"/>
    <bindingRedirect oldVersion="1.0.0.0-1.1.0.0" newVersion="3.5.0.0"/>

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Outlook 2010 shared calendar error

In Outlook 2010 you can share your calendar so that other people can see if you are busy. To do this you can select the Share Calendar icon in the ribbon:

Once you select this, the following prompt appears:

This blog post will show you a work around if you are getting an “Error while preparing to send sharing message”.

This is what the message looks like:

My work around is by going directly into calendar permissions and assigning the individual rights to view my calendar.

Once Selected the following prompt appears.

From this prompt you can add the individual by selecting add and assign the appropriate fields you would like to share with the shared calendar recipient.    

IncWorx Consulting can provide you with help on many aspects within information technology. We specialize in SharePoint Consulting and .NET Consulting. We were the partner of the year from Microsoft. If you need help please send me a message.

Work with the industries best SharePoint Partner!

IncWorx Consulting RBS Dilemma

• Extender Tool: Extend SharePoint storage beyond SQL to improve performance and increase scalability
• Connector Tool: Connect any network or cloud file share directly to SharePoint, for seamless presentation and management
• Achiever Tool: Business-rule aware and on-demand archiving of dormant content with unfettered end-user access to all archived content
• Remote blog storage
• Report Center: One dashboard for comprehensive platform intelligence, with fully customizable dashboard views and reporting on all aspects of platform usage, health, and resource utilization
• File Share Multimedia: Present audio and video files stored in network file shares or cloud storage resources via SharePoint, bypassing the WFE for faster delivery and reduced storage burden

• Site Activity Report - This enables you to generate reports showing the data transfers between users and sites. The reports can be made very granular depending on need.
• Improved error pages - It is now much easier to customize the error pages
• Kerberos authentication for NLB arrays - Users will now be able to authenticate using Kerberos version 5 protocol to connect to TMG arrays with Network Load Balancing(NLB) setup.

AvePoint released the DocAve 6 public beta that simplifies deployment, monitoring, and enforcement of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 governance policies.  It manages development and lets you test production farms with ease.  It also features a redesigned, ribbon based interface to simplify and automate SharePoint governance and management. 

Key benefits of DocAve 6 include Increase Business Productivity, Reduce Total Cost of Ownership, Provides IT Assurance and Enable Security & Compliance for Business Content.  These benefits help deliver high-performance, global collaboration, increase operational efficiency and improve quality of service & minimize business disruption. 
DocAve 6 is built upon Microsoft technologies including .NET, WCF(Windows Communication Foundation), and Silverlight which works well with SharePoint Design.

Installing Exchange 2010 SP1 can be a challenging task. Microsoft requires a metric ton of prerequisites prior to install. Recently after patching exchange 2010 with SP1, I found  OWA  was no longer working properly and displaying a blank page. I tired several steps to fix OWA including recreating the virtual directory per Microsoft's recommendations. Unfortunately Microsoft's white papers didn't give any hints to this problem before hand. Fortunately I found this solution:

Issue - After installing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1 out of the box successfully, owa no longer works and displays a blank page: https://xxx.yyy.local/owa/auth/logon…l/owa&reason=0

Solution 1 - Open Power shell (Run As Administrator) copy and paste the following commands to add the HTTP over RPC service.

1. Import-Module ServerManager

2. Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart

Solution 2 - If you want to do this via GUI rather than via the PowerShell command, then navigate to Server Manager->Features->Add Feature, select to install the “RPC over HTTP Proxy” feature.

These will install the needed feature, and all dependent features, which will resolve the “blank OWA page” issue.

This post may also relate to Microsoft Exchange Upgrade and or Microsoft Server Virtualization with Exchange server

If you find yourself needing to move the SCVMM database from one server to another this will explain what you will need to do and potential pitfalls. For instance, this situation can occur when moving from local to remote SQL or from a stand-alone SQL server to a SQL cluster. The following instructions are provided as a guideline on how to accomplish this move from a SCVMM perspective.

Important! Before undertaking this process perform complete backup of the SCVMM database And save it to a secure location.

The two methods to accomplish the task of backing up and moving the SQL database are using SQL Server Management Studio or the built in scvmmrecover.exe tool built into SCVMM.

Technique #1 - Using SQL Server Management Studio

How to move SCVMM database to another server (local to remote SQL)

1. Backup the existing SCVMM DB
2. Uninstall SCVMM with the Retain Data option
3. On the remote SQL server, import SCVMM db
4. Install SCVMM pointing at the new SQL server and using the imported SCVMM db
5. If any managed host has the status of Access Denied, right click and select Re-associate

Technique #2 - Using the scvmmrecover.exe tool
The scvmmrecover.exe tool is discussed in great detail at the following TechNet article:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956045.aspx

Microsoft Server Virtualization has become the backbone for many companies infrastructures. Utilities like SCVMM makes monitoring and deploying to your Virtualization infrastructure easier to manage.

While attempting to configure Outlook Anywhere using RPC over HTTPs in Outlook, I ran across and issue where the Exchange server's hostname would not resolve outside of the office during setup.  When I attempted to configure Outlook Anywhere on the internal office network, it was successful.  Once Outlook Anywhere was configured properly internally, Outlook would connect outside the office.  However, important Outlook features such Calendar and Tasks were either limited or unavailable.

This client of ours received a Microsoft Exchange Upgrade to Exchange 2007 running Server 2008 R2.  At first I thought it was either a configuration problem on the Exchange server, or a network security problem on their Cisco ASA firewall.  Using this extremely helpful Outlook and Exchange connectivity tool found here: www.testexchangeconnectivity.com, I was able to track down and resolve the issue preventing me from configuring Outlook Anywhere outside the office.

The test results showed the Exchange server could not be reached on port 6004.  After some research on the Microsoft TechNet Exchange library, I discovered the problem was related to connection requests defaulting to using IPv6 in Microsoft Server 2008.  The simple solution is to comment out IPv6 and add the IPv4 address and local hostname in the Exchange server's host file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
#::1 localhost
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mailserver
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mailserver.domain.local

Once this was saved to the host file, Outlook was able to resolve the hostname outside the office and all functionality of Outlook was restored!

IncWorx Consulting a Microsoft Gold Partner can assist you with all of your various Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 needs.

• SharePoint 2010
• InfoPath 2010

• Create a new Custom List called Continents.

• Add some values to this list.  I added Asia, Africa, and North America to make this short and simple.

• Add a new column to this list called Continent with the type as Lookup (information already exists on site)
• Require that this column contains information
• Under Get information from: Select Continents
• Under In this column: Select Title
• Now just add some Countries.  I added just a couple from each Continent

• In the States list add a new column called Continent of type Choice (can leave the default choice values)
• Add a new column called Country of type Choice (can leave the default choice values)

• Click List under List Tools and select Customize Form

• Right click the Continent field and select Drop-Down List Box Properties
• Check Get choices from an external data source

• To the right of Data source: Click Add
• Data Connection Wizard should open
• Create New Connection to: Receive Data

• Recieve Data From: SharePoint library or list

• Enter your website where your library or list is located

• Select a list or library: Select Continents

• Select Fields: Title and leave sort by as ID

• Click Next through the next couple screens till you are finished (**make sure the box that asks for automatically retrieving data when the form is opened is checked)
• Click the Xpath button  to the right of Display Name: and choose Title 

• Right Click the Country field and select Drop-Down List Box Properties
• Check Get Choices from an external data source
• Click Add to the right of Data source:
• Data COnnection Wizard should open
  • Create New Connection: Receive Data
  • Recieve Data From: SharePoint library or list
  • Enter your website if it is not already there
  • Select a list or library: Select Countries
  • Select fields: Title and Continent, again leave sort by as ID
  • Click next till you see the check box for automatically retrieve data when form is opened and make sure it is not checked
  • Click the Xpath button  next to Value: and set this to Title
  • Repeat last step for Display Name: Title

• Get back into the Countries Drop-Down Properties if you are not still there
• Click the Xpath button  next to Entries:
• Select Filter Data button in the Select a Field or Group window

• Click Add
• In the far left column drop down menu: Choose Select a field or group...
• Under Data source: Choose Main in the drop down list
• Click the + symbol next to the dataFields folder
• Select Continent and hit OK

• In the second (middle) column choose is equal to
• In the third (right) column choose select a field or group...
• In the Select a Field or Group window, under Fields: Choose Countries (Secondary) from the drop down
• Click the + next to dataFields and again next to d:SharePointListItem_RW and select Continent and Click OK

• Click the Continent field
• Click Add Rule and navagate to This Field Changes
• Select Query For Data
  

• In the new Window Under Data connection: Choose Countries from the drop down menu and hit OK

• Again, while Continent is selected
• Add Rule and navagate to This Field Changes
• Select Set a Fields Value

• In the Rule Detail window, click the Xpath button to the right of Field
• Select Country and hit OK and OK

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 RC0 released

• You can't install SQL Server 2012 on mapped drives or compressed drives
• You have to have the "no-reboot" package installed prior to installing SQL Server 2012). This is included in Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Otherwise, you can download the no-reboot package from Microsoft.
• Requires .NET 4.0
• You will need at least 3.6 GB of free disk space
• Recommended Processors & RAM
• 64-bit version: AMD Opteron, AMD Athlin 64, Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T Support or Intel Pentium IV with EM64T support running 2.0 GHz or faster. Recommended RAM is maximum that operating system supports or at least 2 GB
• 32-bit version: Pentium III or compatible running at 2.0 GHz of faster. Recommended RAM is maximum that operating system supports or at least 2 GB

• Failover cluster nodes can be connected to a completely different subnet
• Subnets can be spread out to different geographical locations
• Subnets must be in the same Active Directory domain

• Sequences are now added, this is a user defined object that generates a sequence of a number
• Enhanced Order By option in a Select statement.  You can now use Offset and Fetch along with Order By to help performance by bringing back exactly what you want to show to users.  The Offset command states the starting point for the Select statement (in terms of paging), and Fetch let's you say how many records to return at one time
• You can now search and index data stored in extended properties or metadata

The following link shows screenshots of the installation of SQL Server 2012
http://newtech.about.com/od/databasemanagement/ig/SQL-Server-2011--Denali----Installation-Gallery/

IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.

How do I create a SharePoint 2010 Bar Chart Dashboard using Excel Services?

The purpose of this blog post is to give users a step by step guide in how to display a bar chart dashboard in SharePoint 2010. For this example we will use Q1 Sales figures for a sales division. The first step is to post a Microsoft Excel document, with sales figures, in a document library. This document location will need to be used in a later step so keep the URL handy.

The video below will show how to do the written steps below:

Step by Step Guide in Making a Bar Chart in SharePoint 2010

• Post content in Excel sheet
• Place Excel Sheet in a SharePoint 2010 Document Library

The following bar chart shows how the data will be displayed in SharePoint 2010

• Click Edit

• Click the location on the page of the destination of the graph 
• Click Insert
• Click Web Part

 Once in the web part prompt:

• Click Business Data
• Click Chart Web Part 
• Click Add

• Click Data and Appearance 

The following prompt will appear:

Let’s start with the look and feel and Customize SharePoint by selecting Customize Your Chart. Once in the editing prompt:

• Click Custom
• Click Column
• Click Next

The next few steps are completely customizable, for demonstration purposes I have simply selected next, next, finish. The new appearance will show up on the site. Now to configure the data, click Data and Appearance again and click Connect Chart To Data. The follow prompt will appear, Click Connect to Excel Services.

From this prompt you will need the url of the Microsoft Excel document I mentioned earlier in the blog post. Keep in mind to read the instructions on how to enter the Excel data. Something like this: Sheet1!$G$21:$L$30 for this example I used (Sheet1!$B$3:$C$7) based on the Excel Sheet above.

• Enter URL
• Enter Value of Data
• Click Next

The data should now show up as you intend:

• Click Next (if it does, click back if it doesn’t)

Once you have selected Finish the Graph will appear on the SharePoint page with the data configured. Congratulations, you just found out how to customize SharePoint.

IncWorx Consulting is the leader in Microsoft Consulting. We specialize in SharePoint Consulting, .NET Consulting, and Dynamics CRM Consulting. 

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