Blogged about SharePoint Governance

 

I recently blogged about SharePoint governance at this. Thanks everybody for the overwhelming response to the blog posts.

Regards,

Sahil 

Content databases and their size in the SharePoint farm.

Quite often we get a request to tell what is the database utilization of the SharePoint farm and then the size of the individual content databases. Then starts a request to the database team which already is really busy and running neck deep in the work.

They would then ask if you need the data file size or log size and the Sharepoint guys will say, all we need to know about it the disk space we are consuming.

Here is the easiest solution

Open the SharePoint powershell and execute the following command.

Get-SPDatabase

Once executed, this command will give you the list of the databases in the farm. You can also export this list to csv to start a further analysis which is where the fun starts.

run the following command.

Get-SPDatabase | Export-Csv c:\scripts\databases.csv

once exported, open this file in excel and that provides you with lot of data.

DiskSizeRequired is the column which provides the number of bytes that the database is using. remember its in bytes so you would need to divide by 1024*1024 to get the  data in MB.

there are various other details that can be found in this excel which can be of real use like id, upgrade needed, version number etc.

 

Hope it helps.

 

Thanks,
Sahil

SharePoint 2010 Certification

I was at tech ed India last week and tried my hand with SharePoint 2010 developer certification. 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development

I was able to clear the exam as i have worked on 4 SharePoint projects in the last 5-6 months but I am sure this is not a very easy exam for most of the people around.

Good job done by MS in preparing a good set of questions.

SQL 2008 R2 SSRS Reports on Safari Browser using ReportViewer Control on SharePoint 2010.

In the last project we faced few issues on the Safari browser when using the ReportViewer Control to render the reports from SQL 2008 R2. The reports were rendered on SharePoint 2010.

The problem that we were facing were that the reports were coming as blank while when we export, we were able to see the data.

Following was the fix.

1. We deleted the DOCType definition XML node from top of the master page.
2. Changed the report rendering mode to Sync rather than async.

Hope this saves some time for somebody facing the same issue.

SPLongOperation : Long running operations in SharePoint 2010 modal dialog

Ever got a request of showing the SharePoint 2010 native processing image for the long running operation in a modal dialog?

Yes I am talking about this kind of page.

The solution is simple, use a in-build class for SharePoint called the SPLongOperation. I am sure most of the people have used this in SharePoint 2007. With SharePoint 2010, as you see i am trying to run this in SharePoint 2010 modal popup page.

This is how you get this page

The question with SharePoint 2010 modal dialog is how do you get this page to close after finishing the operation. In 2007 all we need to do was to call the end method on the longoperation object and pass the page where we need to redirect after the completion, as a parameter to the end method. This will redirect the modal page to the parameter and that will be off no help.

In 2010, the final step in the case when you are running this long operation in the modal dialog box will be to give a to the longoperation.endscript method and pass the script to close the modal popup. This is how the final code will look like.

 

Cheers!!

Dell Latitude E6410 Display problem on Projector

I am running Windows server 2008 on a dell latitude E6410. Everything seemed to be running smooth till i tried giving a presentation for one of the demo that i created.

The machine will not connect to any external display. I searched on google quite a lot without much of a help.

Here is what i did to resolve the issue.

• I applied the BIOS patch available from the dell driver site for the laptop.
• Upgraded the BIOS after applying the above patch.
• Installed the drivers of display for win 7 64 bit from dell site.

 

Things are working great after that. Hope this will help someone.

 

Thanks,

Sahil

Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 : A Practical Example

I have been thinking of writing this one for quite some time. Today I will try to present an example of visio services in SharePoint 2010.

The example is going to be an Movie theater sample where we will create a drawing of 6 screen and will display a visio drawing on SharePoint which will color code screens based on the number of  sold tickets.

Lets assume that there is a separate system for the ticket booking. For the sake of simplicity i have create a table which looks like this.

Lets assume that that table contains the following dummy data.

Now lets open our visio 2010 and create a drawing to represent screens in a movie theater.

The drawing looks like this.

Now lets go to the data tab of the visio and create a new odc file  to connect to the sql server table we just created. This step is similar to the step that we used to do in SharePoint 2007. We can create a odc file from any office application or from “my data sources” in my document. Once we create the odc file to connect to the table. Lets upload the odc file to SharePoint.

Create a data connection library for uploading the odc file and upload the odc file.

This sets up our connection to access the data. Now lets access this data from visio.

Go to Data tab and click on link data to shapes.

Select the option of previously created connection and browse to the odc file that you have just uploaded in previous step.

This will make an connection to the data source defined. And visio will prompt you to provide the column which is the unique identifier of the data. In our case its the movie name

 

Now our visio has the data, we need to connect the datarows with the shapes. That is simple.

Simple select the shape and click on the datarow and associate it with the shape.

We need to click on the option of “Link to selected shape”. Having done that, the data rows are connected to the screens.

Now we need to configure, how the data should look like.

Go on the data tab and select “Data Graphics” drop down and select create new data item.

Click on the new item and configure the graphic option as depicted in the picture below.

This sets the data visualization and we are all set. :)

 

We just need to publish the visio now. For doing this we need to select the following option in the “save and send” menu under file. Select the web drawing option to enable the data refresh.

 

And that completes the whole story. We should have a data driven visio up and running. Here is how the final output looks like

Hope this helps.

-Sahil