Friday, January 23, 2009

Sharepoint Communication

There is a series of two great posts about Sharepoint communication – ports, protocols and proxies, developed by UK MCS Sharepoint team.

Martin Kearn wrote in 3 points why is necessary to understand the farm communication:

1. Secured or ‘locked down' farms may have servers on different network segments and you may have to configure firewalls to only let the minimum traffic through. Without know what traffic needs to go where, this is a very difficult process.
2. Understanding network activities is very useful when trying to troubleshoot strange problems since SharePoint does not do a great job of reporting when there are network issues preventing something from working.
3. Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008 are both ‘locked down' by default. Meaning that a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 will have everything disabled in Windows Firewall. Clearly you could simply enable all inbound / outbound communications (and I've done that once or twice myself in the past! J) but that kind of defeats the point. It is much better to understand what traffic is coming in and out of the server and open ports as necessary.

Read the posts here:

SharePoint Ports, Proxies and Protocols .... An overview of farm communications by Martin Kearn

and

SharePoint Ports, Proxies and Protocols .... Search Communication by Peter Reid

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Sharepoint Best Practices

 

Very easy to use portal for best practices on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepointserver/bb736746.aspx 

 

Categories:

Operational Excellence

Team Collaboration Sites

My Sites

Publishing Portals

Search

Capacity Management

Developing Custom Applications

Additional Resources

Check whether the current user has rights for specified web site (Sharepoint Object Model)

 

With Sharepoint object model you can check whether the current user has rights to specific SPWeb site, using the following code segment:

public bool UserHasRigtsToSite(string webUrl)
{
  SPUser currentUser = SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser;
  bool result = false;
  SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()
  {
    using (SPSite site = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.ID))
    {
      using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(webUrl))
      {
        try
        {
          result = web.DoesUserHavePermissions(currentUser.LoginName, SPBasePermissions.ViewPages | SPBasePermissions.Open);
        }
        catch (System.IO.FileNotFoundException ex)
        {
          result = false;
        }

      }
    }
  }
  );

  return result;
}

Friday, January 16, 2009

External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint

Organizations need tools to simplify the process of collaborating with people outside their firewall. Currently, many such organizations collaborate using methods that are not efficient or secure, such as unencrypted e-mail and instant messaging. The External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint includes software and guidance to quickly and easily deploy a collaboration environment based on SharePoint Products and Technologies that you can use to collaborate with partners across the Internet.

Solution features include a setup wizard to automate the setup process, Web Parts to automate the process of provisioning new site collections and new users, form-based logon for external users, and automated password reset functionality.

This solution accelerator is a collection of software and guidance that you can use to easily deploy a SharePoint-based environment for collaboration with people outside your firewall. The accelerator allows users to create collaboration environments that use the familiar SharePoint interface.

External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint

Downloads for offline viewing

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

SUGBG 2-nd Meeting Details

The second meeting of SharePoint User Group Bulgaria had again 60 visitors and the hall was overfilled. The speakers Robert, Didi and Ilian presented the case study for www.akzonobel.com, the business needs, architecture and main elements of the technical implementation. They also made a quick overview of MOSS 2007 WCM features and security model.

In the end of presentation Robert started a raffle with SharePoint related questions and prizes, provisioned by Virtual Affairs and Microsoft Bulgaria.

Here you can find a several photos from the meeting:

STA41503

STA41508

STA41512

STA41513

STA41516

STA41520

STA41535

STA41527

Saturday, January 10, 2009

SUGBG 2-nd Meeting

The second meeting of Sharepoint User Group Bulgaria is scheduled for January 14-th. The title is:

"Using Sharepoint for your corporate website – Case: Akzo Nobel"

Description: One platform for all corporate websites and brands for Akzo Nobel. How to go from Business Case to a working solution using Sharepoint for Web Content Management.

The presenters should be Didi Farell (Services Manager in Virtual Affairs) and Ilian Stoyanov (MOSS architect in Virtual Affairs).

For registration and more details (in Bulgarian), visit http://www.sugbg.org/

Administrator’s Guide of Topics to Consider before Deployment

Shane Young, MVP; Randy Drisgill; Larry Riemann; Jennifer Mason; and Chris Caravajal of SharePoint 911 provided this excellent guidance for administration, configuration, branding and development of Sharepoint products and technologies. It is very suitable for who are new in this field and contains key articles to consider before deploying Sharepoint to their environments.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=139163