SharePoint Double Encoding Space in URL to %2520 - An Easy Solution

I got bit by SharePoint double-encoding a %20 (space) in a list name when I tried to rename a customized display form used in that list.

Now, mind you, these are two things I always avoid - spaces in list names and customized forms. But I inherited these, and then I proceeded to muck it up with the rename. The result was that links on tasks that went back to the list were double encoded - the % in %20 becomes an incredibly insidious %25, which is just a horrible thing in a web browser.

Now you might want to try some simple workaround or fix, like a redirect or something, but touching that %25 is real hard. I found a great solution using jQuery to rewrite the URLs. I did not try this but it seemed like it would work.

I found that if I renamed the list without any characters to encode, the links were all fixed.

Next I wanted to put the list back to the original name. This turned out to be impossible. No matter how I did this, SharePoint was nice enough to double encode the thing and make it %2520.

So the answer is to permanently change the URL for the list to not have any encoded characters (spaces, etc.). If need be, you could do some sort of redirect for anything with the old name, but this is largely unnecessary as SharePoint really does a good job with fixing all the URLS (just as it broke some of them).

Opening Form in a Popup from a Link

I know I figured this out more than once (who knows, there may be another version on THIS blog somewhere). That, and there are multiple ways to do this. It should also be noted that sometimes this is a bad idea and won't work right, so think about how it might not work and test it!

Take yer link:

http://yadayada.com/qa/_layouts/listform.aspx?PageType=8&ListId={F06E16DD-3D2B-4022-8E76-495BAAED3DDC}&RootFolder=

and transform it into:

javascript:OpenPopUpPage('http://yadayada.com/qa/_layouts/listform.aspx?PageType=8&ListId={F06E16DD-3D2B-4022-8E76-495BAAED3DDC}&RootFolder=&IsDlg=1')

Bingo!

You CAN Attach the Same Content DB More Than Once

... you just have to detach it first.

Let me back up. I think at least three times I've gotten all excited and apprehensive about restoring a test DB to a SharePoint 2010 farm for a second test because I already did a test in the same farm with the same database.

If you read this great Technet topic http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287634(v=office.14).aspx you could walk away with the idea that you won't be able to attach the database (even though you have detached it).

Rest assured, that although the Technet posting is accurate, it is not trying to say that you can't attach the database, detach it, and then reattach it. I think it would have been better worded to simply say that all the site collection/GUID combinations must be unique, so you can't attach the same one twice.

Why the Farm Account Can't Access or Configure Service Accounts ...

... and What is the Correct Domain Account for running SPTIMERV4?

These are two questions that have plagued man for too long. The answers are both 42.

The farm account can't access configure service accounts because it is not in the local administrators group on the server (or at least it is not supposed to be). Thus, it cannot change who runs services. If you want to configure service accounts you must use an account that is in the local administrators (make it yours or maybe the setup account).

The farm account is the correct account for running the SharePoint Timer Service (Windows service). The permissions must get delegated to it by psconfig or some other magical process.

Those are my answers and I'm sticking to them until I get a better answer. I based this on a bit of painstaking research and experimentation. I did not find the correct answer anywhere, but you just found it!

This is based on SP 2010 Foundation on Windows Server 2008R2, but I am pretty sure it holds true for a number of others.

How to Disable Themes in SharePoint 2010

Once you establish a particular look and feel and you don't want users with lots of permissions to mess it up, you need to lock down themes. If you don't want to do anything stupid like mess with the page in _layouts and you don't want to add screwy code to look for the themeweb.aspx you can do it a simple way ...

For the site scope where you want to disable it, run from the SharePoint Management Shell (not valid for SharePoint Foundation):

Disable-SPFeature -identity enhancedtheming -url http://hostname.net/sitename

Then delete all the themes from the gallery. Done.

I will be monitoring the fallout from this as we move to QA, but this seemed obvious!

The iPhone and the Large Law Firm

Warning - this post contains some of my thoughts about iPhone use at a large law firm from my perspective of an iPhone user who works in a law firm IT department. I have no practical experience with any level of iPhone integration in a large law firm.

Unfortunately, when one talks about things that law firms are commonly doing, it frequently doesn't include the largest firms. What works for most law firms may not work for one of the biggest. Yet there are some things that are common to most decent-sized firms. In large law firm IT departments, iPhones are very common, though probably not as prevalent as the officially supported (and subsidized) Blackberry. I know there has been some work by vendors to provide the necessary hooks to do some cool things with iPhones in large enterprises. It was encouraging to see this http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/profiles/sonnenschein-nath-rosenthal/, especially since it included SharePoint integration.

To me it seems like Apple's http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf misses the mark. I'm not sure how all large enterprises work, but I think most of them have no interest in providing the kind of support this manual suggests. I think they would prefer to carefully allow access to things like email, SharePoint or a Citrix Desktop from employee owned phones rather than owning and babysitting the entire operation. Coordinating phones from different carriers all over the world is much better pushed back to the individual (at least organizationally).

Various strata of integration could strengthen iPhone support in larger, more secure enterprises. Of course it starts with email, Lotus Notes integration being of interest to me. Sybase iAnywhere, IBM's iNotes, Notes Pro and maybe a couple other apps provide Notes email to iPhones. Mail should always work fine in this form factor, you just need to make the necessary security hops. There are a few others vendors that do some Notes database replication as well, but I don't see that as a strong draw since Notes has been dying as an application platform. Secure access to SharePoint servers providing mobile-optimized web pages could be useful, and fairly easy to establish. Attending meetings through a mobile device is a natural. A Citrix desktop might also be OK, but have you ever tried operating a desktop on a little touch screen? It's not a very useful capability.

Having a resourceful, always connected computer in my pocket has been great, and I don't expect to ever again be without such service. Integrating this level of mobile functionality into large enterprise will take some time and effort and I look forward to it.

Customizing SharePoint RSS Web Part

I will be brief, because this is pretty simple and obvious. I have my favorite reader (Google on my iPhone) and the RSS web part sometimes seems crude, but it is sometimes very useful when a site really is crying for relevant news.

Don't be afraid to mess with the XSL Editor. Just copy the contents into Notepad - that's your backup. Now start hacking away. If something goes bad, paste back in your backup.

You want to remove the titles? Just snip out the whole node: div class="groupheader item medium."

So have at it!

SharePoint Fast Search Conceptual Speculation

Excuse me while I think out loud here (what else is new). As someone who truly likes the SharePoint platform, and as an IT professional who had an opinion about Fast (that it was aptly named, a pretty good product and expensive) BEFORE Microsoft had anything to do with them, I have been trying to come to grips with what the Fast SharePoint marriage means to us all.

I think that to the portion of Fast's clientele that had no interest in SharePoint it may be an annoyance (that may be an understatement). Doubly so for any of them running it on something other than Windows. For the rest of us, though, it is supposed to be an easy path to a high quality enterprise search engine. It's funny, though, because I have been a proponent of SharePoint as a very good poor man's enterprise search engine. SharePoint 2007 search works well. Yes, it is a bit quirky, but it is pretty powerful. It has served us well (though not as an enterprise search engine, just for SharePoint search).

Microsoft isn't content to stand still, though, so they have added this great option. I have not worked with even a beta or demo of the product, and as far as I know, pricing has yet to be released, so my impressions are based on fairly thin marketing vapor, but it's still OK to start thinking about what it all means.

One would expect this product to scale better than OOTB SharePoint 2007 search, but I wonder if the this is really the case. After all, if you implement this product you probably will be taking it more seriously and devote more resources to it, so THAT will make it scale better too. Old SharePoint search can be scaled quite large without having to resort to anything magical. A million or two documents is a piece of cake.

But I would expect the product to deliver better relevance, with or without active intervention. I am anxious to seek how well search librarian tasks can be delegated - this is important functionality.

Unified installation doesn't look like it is really coming in 2010. From what I've heard, it may be in the same box (or on the same box) but the code base isn't really all that close to SharePoint. Unified administration, on the other hand looks like it IS in the box. But like I said earlier, administration needs to be distributable (think "librarians").

Soon it will be time to stop thinking about possibilities and testing the release product to see how it meets these expectations. Fast in SharePoint may democratizes enterprise search, but a lot will depend on pricing. Soon we will see!

Adding Zip Search File Type in MOSS 2007

I am a little behind the curve on this. Better late than never.

1. Get the filter pack here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=60C92A37-719C-4077-B5C6-CAC34F4227CC&displaylang=en
2. Install it
3. Set up the item type in the SSP
4. Set up a new key for .zip in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\
5. Give it a value of {20E823C2-62F3-4638-96BD-90F4F6784EBC}
6. Restart the search service

That is the shorthand version! This is done for you in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 (Caveman Edition)

I am hopelessly (humorously) politically incorrect and caveman readers probably will be offended, but it seemed like the 2010 beta was aimed at them. I mean this as a big compliment to the killer Install Software Prerequisites option in the 2010 installer and the smoothness with which a simplistic stand alone install runs.

Install Software Prerequisites does the following steps from a one click operation:

• Application Server Role, Web Server (IIS) Role
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client
• Microsoft "Geneva" Framework Runtime
• Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64)
• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET

Any installation "cookbook" will be streamlined by this (assuming it is putting in the right settings).

The configuration wizard of the 2010 install failed when I first ran it Tuesday morning. I got the same "Failed to create sample data" error lots of people did. I corrected it Wednesday (when I didn't see anything official posted) by removing the two references to "allowinsecuretransport" (deleting both entries entirely) from the Client.config file in the 14 hive /WebClients/Profile folder.

I don't think this change is recommended, but it gets you over this hump for now. This is a pain future cavemen will be spared. More time for Visio cave wall workflow diagrams.

SharePoint 2010: Honing Up on Powershell

One of the interesting bits to come out of the SharePoint 2010 previews is the inclusion of more than 500 Powershell cmdlets. As a SharePoint admin or developer (remember, you developers, you have to know admin and end-user stuff so you know what NOT to develop) it will be important to know your way around Powershell.

I wouldn't call myself either a command line junky or command line phobic. I always liked command line scripting. Powershell is something I have used, but having touched the surface of it, I've known that I need to know more. I think most of you are in the same position (be honest).

A little knowledge, while being dangerous, can calm those feelings of ignorance. A quick search brought up this TechNet lab:

TechNet Virtual Lab: Introduction to Windows PowerShell

If you spend the prescribed 90 minutes studying it (and trying other stuff), you won't be an expert, but you will feel more comfortable when it comes time to sort and pipe and filter all those SharePoint 2010 commands that are coming your way.