Paul Liebrand's Weblog

Comment from Jay
Time December 8, 2007 at 11:03 pm

Hey there.

About your mail merge issue on sharepoint. We have the exact same issue. I did everything you did before I found your Blog and got the exact same results. We were at one point able to pull it off but I am unable to recreate it, I have been trying for weeks. Thanks for posting the info on the subject…WE NEED THAT FIXED!!! ASAP!

Thanks
Jay

Comment from liebrand
Time December 9, 2007 at 2:42 am

Jay,

Thanks for posting. Unfortunately, this will not be fixed until “maybe” the next release of Office.

Thanks for visiting.

Paul

Comment from Susan
Time February 5, 2008 at 4:48 pm

Always a pleasure to read your informative blogs. Thanks Paul!

Comment from Arno Nel
Time July 22, 2008 at 11:14 pm

Hi there, would you be interested in guest authoring for the mag?

Comment from Terry Brothers
Time March 16, 2009 at 2:32 pm

Hi Pual,

I read your post on egghead about Managed Paths. It was the first that was really clear. I have since read several of your posts and I think you explain things well.

Is there a tutorial, that you know of, explaining how to configure MySites in SharePoint Server 2007?

I read the following post by Anthony Odole and it is “almost” clear to me … but not quite.

http://odole.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/how-to-configure-shared-service-provider-and-mysite/

Regards,
Terry

Comment from liebrand
Time March 17, 2009 at 7:16 am

Terry,

What specifically is unclear — I can then perhaps tailor it to that.

Thanks,

Paul Liebrand

Comment from Terry Brothers
Time March 17, 2009 at 7:29 am

Thanks for the reply!
At the bottom of Anthony’s post, after the SSP has been created, thers are Step 1 and Step 2.

Step 1 – “Go to the main application … ” – Does this refer to the the original web app or the MySite web app that was just created?

Step 2: – “Create a new site collection … ” – Again, Does this refer to the the original web app or the MySite web app that was just created?

Thanks!
Terry

Comment from liebrand
Time March 17, 2009 at 8:32 am

Terry,

Quick question… are you using host headers or is the SharePoint site just using the hostname of the server?

Thanks,

Paul Liebrand

Comment from Terry Brothers
Time March 17, 2009 at 9:36 am

I am not using host headers at this time.

Our Environment
WSS 3.0 WFE (Production)
SQL 2005 Ent (Production)

I have cloned our production environment into a test environment. I have performed the upgrade to SharePoint Server 2007 Ent.

The production environment is virtualized. I have snap shots of both servers at the exact point that the SharePoint Server 2007 upgrade completed. There isn’t even a Shared Service Provider yet.

I will be performing the upgrade of our production server within the next two weeks. I have also been tasked with setting up a portal for our customers. The portal will consist of multiple sites – One for each customer for collaboration concerning projects related to their company.

I will be installing a Microsoft ISA Server 2006 in our DMZ and will publish the sites.

Regards,
Terry

Comment from Terry Brothers
Time March 17, 2009 at 9:37 am

OOPS! I said the “production” environment is virtualized. I meant the “TEST” environment is virtualized.

Comment from Terry Brothers
Time March 17, 2009 at 5:39 pm

You asked a simple question and I bombarded you with information. Sorry!

No, we’re not using host headers and we are using the server hostname.

Terry

Comment from Terry Brothers
Time March 18, 2009 at 12:30 pm

Hi Paul,

I created a PDF showing how I configured MySites on our SharePoint 2007 Server. Fell free to redistribute if you want.

I could still use some help with where to add the Managed Paths and where to add the Site Collection. The two questions that are listed on the last two pages of the PDF.

http://www.brothersfamily.us/MySite_Creation.pdf

Any help will be Greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Terry

Comment from liebrand
Time March 18, 2009 at 3:16 pm

Terry,

Lets take this discussion to email. Fire off me an email at mailer@imaxa.com and we’ll get this sorted out.

Thanks,

Paul Liebrand

Comment from matt
Time August 4, 2009 at 9:10 am

Hi Paul,

I found this entry on msdn:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointdevelopment/thread/13205af5-f246-4608-b930-6c9e202a49b8

I tried your javascript solution. Unfortunately it didn’t work. I get an javascript error: object expected. Did you have any problems with your code?

This is my UrlAction:

I think it happens here:
eval(data.match(/(ctx\\d+)\\s=\\sctx/)[1]);

Do you remember what you have tried here or did it just work?

Thanks,
matt

Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time August 4, 2009 at 2:37 pm

I would check out the source code on the Office File Types solution I built and published to Codeplex (http://officefiletypes.codeplex.com/).

Comment from Clare Stone
Time September 17, 2009 at 9:22 am

Hi Paul

I hope you wont mind me contacting you. We get quite a few visitors to our site who have come from your blog so I thought you might be interested in some news about our latest product development efforts.

I am writing to you from Pentalogic Technology in England. We design web parts for SharePoint. Our products are targeted specifically at end users – which I why I thought you might be interested.

We have just launched v 1.6 of our Reminder web part – which we believe is the only one now on the market that fully supports Recurring Events in SharePoint Calendar lists. It has been the most frequently requested feature from our customers over the past three years and we think it will prove to be really handy for users.

This link will take you to the Reminder section of our website:
http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-reminder.aspx
where you will find details of the new feature, a short video demo, a product comparison chart and access to a free evaluation download, should you wish to take a closer look. If you get as excited about it as we are and would like a full version to really have a good look them just let me know and I will arrange a free license for you.

I hope you find the information useful – if you have any further questions just let me know – and if you would prefer not to get news like this from us in the future, again, please do let me know.

Kind Regards

Clare Stone

Comment from ianparnell
Time October 7, 2009 at 4:40 am

Hi Paul,

Googling for Visual Studio inside ESX turned up your Twitter about improving performance for VS on ESX. Did you get any responses or have any suggestions as I am in infrastructure (not development) and have developers using a VDI environment all on enterprise blade hardware and storage and all works great EXCEPT visual studio which runs extremely slowly. As a result I have some very unhappy developers.

Be interested to know if you have any performance tips at this stage as there doesn't seem to be too much out there.

Regards,
Ian

Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time October 7, 2009 at 8:25 am

Ian,

For the most part, we got our Visual Studio running to an acceptable performance after accepting the fact it will never run as fast as a physical machine. Our biggest problem that led to my Tweet was the build process on web applications (specifically but not limited to SharePoint). We were able to cut our build process from 1 minute down to 10 seconds. If you read this post (http://www.paulliebrand.com/2009/09/18/sharepoi...) it should get you on your way to solve this type of problem.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Visual Studio is disk I/O intensive. So make sure they are on fast disks.

The other thing I highly recommend your developers do not do is store and work on their source code via the network. If there are concerns about backing up the code, etc, have them use something like Visual Source Safe which can be located on a network but their working copy of the source should be local.

If none of the above fits your criteria of problems you are experiencing or setup in your environment give me some specific complaints and I'll see if I can provide some input.

Thanks,

Paul Liebrand

Comment from ianparnell
Time October 7, 2009 at 9:40 am

Hi Paul,

Googling for Visual Studio inside ESX turned up your Twitter about improving performance for VS on ESX. Did you get any responses or have any suggestions as I am in infrastructure (not development) and have developers using a VDI environment all on enterprise blade hardware and storage and all works great EXCEPT visual studio which runs extremely slowly. As a result I have some very unhappy developers.

Be interested to know if you have any performance tips at this stage as there doesn't seem to be too much out there.

Regards,
Ian

Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time October 7, 2009 at 1:25 pm

Ian,

For the most part, we got our Visual Studio running to an acceptable performance after accepting the fact it will never run as fast as a physical machine. Our biggest problem that led to my Tweet was the build process on web applications (specifically but not limited to SharePoint). We were able to cut our build process from 1 minute down to 10 seconds. If you read this post (http://www.paulliebrand.com/2009/09/18/sharepoi...) it should get you on your way to solve this type of problem.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Visual Studio is disk I/O intensive. So make sure they are on fast disks.

The other thing I highly recommend your developers do not do is store and work on their source code via the network. If there are concerns about backing up the code, etc, have them use something like Visual Source Safe which can be located on a network but their working copy of the source should be local.

If none of the above fits your criteria of problems you are experiencing or setup in your environment give me some specific complaints and I'll see if I can provide some input.

Thanks,

Paul Liebrand

Comment from Carolyn Marshall
Time April 6, 2010 at 3:08 pm

Just saw your post about ClusterShot. Would be interested in talking to you about it before I sign up for pro account if you have the time. Thanks.

Comment from Paul Liebrand
Time April 6, 2010 at 4:35 pm

Sure. Send me an email to (mailer at imaxa dot com)