Last weekend was really exciting for two reasons.  First, because my eldest daughter got married on Saturday.  We were so busy getting ready for the wedding that I almost forgot about my MVP award date on July 1st.  But soon enough the wedding was over and things started to get back to normal on Sunday and there was my the email announcing my MVP award again this year for SharePoint. This is my fifth year and I get more EXCITED about the program every year. Every year I make more friends and contacts through the program.  Their help and support is invaluable when it comes to learning all the nooks and crannies in this product.  I often wonder how I learned as much as I did before I gained access to the resources and contacts available to me as an MVP.  And every year brings more opportunities for learning and sharing that knowledge with others in the community.

But the bottom line is still that I wouldn’t be an MVP if it weren’t for all of you out there in the community. In the last year I’ve begun to run into a number of people who recognize my name from the MSDN Forums. Its been great to meet all of you in person and thanks for all the questions that you’ve asked.  Some of them provide an easy outlet for sharing what I already know.  But others provide challenges to learn new things so I can help answer questions.  Without your stimulating questions I wouldn’t be receiving this award. I hope to continue to live up to the honor and hope that I never get complacent about what its really about: Helping to support the SharePoint community.

I was working at a client this last week where we were having trouble getting SharePoint search to crawl the contents of PDF files.  My client said they followed this Microsoft installation guide (KB Article #2293357)  but the iFilter still wasn’t being used to crawl the contents of PDF files.  When I checked their installation I couldn’t find anything wrong either.  I was even more surprised that when I followed the same steps in my virtual dev environment I got the same results.  PDFs were searchable but only by title or other metadata.  The contents were not being indexed.  At that point I started searching the Internet for a solution and although I found lots of people with the same problem I didn’t find any solutions that would work.  For most people the solution was to make sure they added a registry key they missed or make sure it was installed on the correct server.  But there were some people, like my client and I, who followed the instructions correctly and still couldn’t get it to work.  At this point we opened a support ticket with Microsoft and were immediately provided with a solution that worked.  But since I haven’t been able to find this documented anywhere I thought I would record it in my BLOG.  So if you have tried setting up the 64 bit Adobe PDF iFilter and still can’t get it to work, then read on and try the following.  To be thorough I included all the steps required to install the iFilter, but highlighted the additional step that we took which made the difference.

Installing a PDF iFilter

1. Download and Install the Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms
2. Download a 16X16 PDF icon file from the Adobe web site and copy it to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\
3. Add the following entry in the docIcon.xml file, which can be found at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
       <Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdf16.gif" />
4. Add the pdf file type to the Search Service Application’s File types
5. Open regedit and navigate to the following location:
       HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension
6. Right-click and select New > Key to create a new key called ‘.pdf’
7. Add the following GUID as the default value for the .pdf key 
       {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}
8. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the following location:
       C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe PDF iFilter 9 for 64-bit platforms\bin
9. Add your Search Service Application’s Content Access Account to the list of users and groups who have security access to this folder.  Make sure the account has Read, Read & Execute, and List Folder Contents permissions.
10. Reboot the SharePoint servers in your Farm to restart the Search Service Application

Note:  The Adobe installation instructions also recommend adding the bin folder location to the server’s environmental path variable.  But this has not been required in any of my installations and is not included in the Microsoft instructions.

Yesterday was my last day working for Sharesquared.  I’ve really enjoyed working with a wonderful group of consultants and clients for the last couple of years but it was time for a change.  Sharesquared is a virtual company that hires the best talent they can find wherever you happen to live.  The result is a virtual company where most of the work is done through “Telecommuting”.  The result is a company with some really talented people who are a pleasure to work with, but who you only have contact with electronically.  Although I enjoyed working from home it can lose its appeal after a while when all but one of your colleagues lives 2 to 3 time zones away and you only see people face to face at the annual company meeting.  So when an opportunity came up recently to work for a growing consulting firm headquartered here in Cleveland I decided it was time to make the move.  That company is the BlueChip Consulting Group.

Unlike Sharesquared, who focus completely on SharePoint, BlueChip views itself as an “Infrastructure Optimization Consulting Firm”.  They have several successful practices including a growing SharePoint practice.  My role at BlueChip will be similar to the role I had at Sharesquared.  I’ll be a Senior Solutions Architect serving as the chief technical architect within the Portals and Collaboration team at Blue Chip.  In that role it will be my job to help design new SharePoint implementations and provide technical mentoring to the other members of the team.  The difference is that I’ll see the other members of the team face to face on a regular basis.  I’m looking forward to getting to know the members of the team and starting work on some new projects.  I start work at BlueChip next Monday.

So to all my friends at Sharesquared, the best of luck and continued success.  And to all my future friends at BlueChip, I can’t wait to get started.  My new contact info is listed below.  If my email is in your address book please change it to:

paul.stork@bluechip-llc.com

I will be speaking at the Pittsburgh SharePoint User’s Group on Wednesday, January 18th. The meeting will start at 11:00 am and my topic will be "Users, Profiles, and MySites: Managing a Changing SharePoint User population”. Here’s a brief description of the talk:

Users, Profiles, and MySites: Managing a Changing SharePoint User population

Every organization has some level of personnel change and turnover.  The question is, in the midst of this fluid user population how can you manage a user’s access to SharePoint and retrieve important information stored in their personal site efficiently?  Updating existing user information is also often a problem and most people have questions about how security permissions work in SharePoint. In this talk we will examine how SharePoint stores information about users and the underlying processes controlling user accounts, permissions, profiles and personal MySites. We’ll look at what works, what doesn’t work, and possible workarounds.  Along the way we’ll discuss the Best Practices for managing users, their profiles, and MySites in a SharePoint environment. We’ll discuss how this works in both 2007 and 2010.

The group will meet at the Pittsburgh Technology Council.  You can get a map by clicking on the link below.

Pittsburgh Technology Council
2000 Technology Drive
Pittsburgh, PA 15219

Microsoft is currently working on two new certification exams for IT professionals who work with Microsoft Office 365 online systems.  The exams are due to be released in April, 2012.  If you work with Office 365 you should be working on the knowledge needed to pass these exams starting NOW!  You can read more about what skills each exam is designed to test using the links below:

Exam 70-323: Administering Office 365 intended for IT professionals who administer Microsoft Office 365 in an environment that may include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync, and/or Microsoft SharePoint

Exam 70-321: Deploying Office 365 intended for consultants and IT professionals who plan and implement Office 365. This includes migrations to Office 365 (simple and hybrid deployments)

Passing these exams will give you the following  certifications:

1. Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Administering Office 365 (pass Exam 70-323)
2. Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP): Office 365 Administrator (pass Exam 70-323 and Exam 70-321)

The links above provide an outline of what skills are being tested but at this point there is no official training material available for the exams.  Your best way to prepare is to work with the Product.

I’m at the airport waiting on my flight home from the Denver SharePoint Saturday event. Since I promised attendees that I would post my slides I thought I would do it today before I got busy with other things when I get back to work on Monday.  I was originally scheduled to present two sessions. But I ended up presenting a third session when one of the presenters had to cancel at the last minute.  That was a session I did a couple years ago on strategies for implementing SharePoint governance in a collaborative fashion. 

The event was a pure pleasure and I hope I can come back again if there is another.  For any of those who attended, I’ve attached the slide decks from my talks below:

SharePoint Governance:  Dealing with the Culture Change, Power Struggles, and Conflict (Slides) - Implementing SharePoint changes the traditional model used for governing most Information Technology projects.  Gone are the days when IT departments controlled the life and work of end users through software.  Instead SharePoint is built on a model of cooperation where end users control their own data and the IT staff is dedicated to providing them with better more powerful tools.  But change like this inevitably results in power struggles and conflict.  Being successful with SharePoint requires recognizing and confronting this culture change with a new spirit of partnership and cooperation.  Anything less will at best be painful and at worst lead to disaster.

Intro to Developing for SharePoint Online: What Tools Can I Use? (Slides) – The introduction of Office 365 drastically changed the SharePoint development landscape. As a managed online service the rules for developing customizations for SharePoint Office 365 are radically different from the ones for an “on-premise” installation. They are also slightly different than developing sandbox solutions. In addition many companies who currently use dedicated SharePoint installations are beginning to consider eventual migration to the Office 365 cloud environment. That means even current “on-premise” development is often constrained in new ways. No matter what kind of development you currently do you need to know how to develop for Office 365. In this workshop/session we’ll cover the following topics:

• Setting up an Office 365 development environment
• Developing sandbox solutions for SharePoint Online
• Building reusable workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010
• Why the Client Object Model is even more important in Office 365

Users, Profiles, and MySites: Managing a Changing SharePoint User population (Slides) – Every company has some level of employee change and turnover. The question is how do you manage the graceful removal or modification of user information from SharePoint? If everything is perfectly aligned SharePoint will automatically process and delete the user account, permissions, profile, and MySite for users that are deleted from Active Directory. Updates to user information are also automatic in many cases. But most SharePoint installations don’t have all the necessary components aligned for automated removal of old users and some profile properties refuse to update. In this session we will examine the underlying processes controlling user accounts, permissions, profiles and MySites and how they interact. We’ll look at what works, what doesn’t work, and how to work around it. Along the way we’ll recommend Best Practices for managing users, their profiles, and MySites in a SharePoint environment.

I stumbled across an interesting difference between the Enterprise and Professional level plans of Office 365 recently.  If you subscribe to a Microsoft Office for professionals and small businesses plan (Plan P) then any non-admin user added to SharePoint online automatically has Enhanced Contributor permission in all your sites.  But if you subscribe to one of the midsize businesses and enterprises plans (E plans) then adding users gives them no rights in SharePoint online.  You must add the users to SharePoint online sites just like you would add users to an on-premise SharePoint site.  Since most administrators only have access to one Office 365 plan this difference often goes un-noticed. 

But the more important question is how do you change the default behavior in the professional level plan.  Its actually quite simple once you know what to look for.  In your Office 365 admin page there is a link to change permissions on your Team sites and documents (see screenshot below)

Clicking on that link will take you to the Site permissions page for you default Team Site. 

NOTE:  Another difference between the two levels is that in the professional version you only get one Team site collection and one public website.  In Enterprise you can create multiple internal site collections but you are still limited to one public website.

On the site permissions page you will see a Domain Group named Tenant_Users (see screenshot below).  This is the group that contains ALL the users you create in Office 365.  You can see that the group is given the Enhanced Contribute permission level.  So every user that you create and assign a license to is automatically given permission to log on to your SharePoint online site.  This is very convenient, but causes a problem if you want most of your users to be limited to Read Only access to the site.

But once you recognize that this default group exists the solution is fairly simple. 

• Select the checkbox next to the group
• Click the Edit User Permissions button in the ribbon.
• In the dialog that appears clear the check box next to Enhanced Contribute and select the check box next to either Read or View Only depending on how limited you want the average user’s permissions to be.  (see screenshot below)
• Click OK

User’s will now default to either Read Only or View Only access to the site.  If you want to give them more permissions than that you’ll need to add them to an appropriate group or assign them rights individually.

I’m sure there are other differences between the different plan levels that aren’t well documented.  This is just the first one I ran into.

Next week I’ll be headed for Denver to speak at the Denver SharePoint Saturday event.  I will be presenting two sessions.  One will be an overview for users, admins, and developers who are just getting started on SharePoint online in Office 365.  The other is a more in depth talk for developers and admins on managing the various places that SharePoint stores user information.  I’ve reprinted the abstracts for my talks below:

Intro to Developing for SharePoint Online: What Tools Can I Use? – The introduction of Office 365 drastically changed the SharePoint development landscape. As a managed online service the rules for developing customizations for SharePoint Office 365 are radically different from the ones for an “on-premise” installation. They are also slightly different than developing sandbox solutions. In addition many companies who currently use dedicated SharePoint installations are beginning to consider eventual migration to the Office 365 cloud environment. That means even current “on-premise” development is often constrained in new ways. No matter what kind of development you currently do you need to know how to develop for Office 365. In this workshop/session we’ll cover the following topics:

• Setting up an Office 365 development environment
• Developing sandbox solutions for SharePoint Online
• Building reusable workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010
• Why the Client Object Model is even more important in Office 365

Users, Profiles, and MySites: Managing a Changing SharePoint User population – Every company has some level of employee change and turnover. The question is how do you manage the graceful removal or modification of user information from SharePoint? If everything is perfectly aligned SharePoint will automatically process and delete the user account, permissions, profile, and MySite for users that are deleted from Active Directory. Updates to user information are also automatic in many cases. But most SharePoint installations don’t have all the necessary components aligned for automated removal of old users and some profile properties refuse to update. In this session we will examine the underlying processes controlling user accounts, permissions, profiles and MySites and how they interact. We’ll look at what works, what doesn’t work, and how to work around it. Along the way we’ll recommend Best Practices for managing users, their profiles, and MySites in a SharePoint environment.

I’ve done programming in a variety of environments over the years.  Case sensitivity was one of the things that was the most difficult for me to get used to when I moved from VB to C# a number of years ago.  In fact if it weren’t for Intellisense I would probably still be swearing at C# on a regular basis. I’ve learned to live with, and even make use of, case sensitivity in my C# programs over the years.  But it doesn’t come naturally.  I still tend to think in a case insensitive fashion. 

As a result I was somewhat surprised to run into someone having an issue recently when trying to add SharePoint Managed Metadata terms to a user profile programmatically.  They reported that SharePoint wasn’t consistent when adding terms to the Ask me About profile field programmatically.  It turns out that the real problem was that they had duplicate fields where the only difference was the case of the first character of the abbreviation.  After some investigation here’s what I discovered.

1. SharePoint won’t let you add two metadata terms under the same parent if the only thing that differs is the case sensitivity of the term.  The image below shows what happens if you try to add “ABC” as a term when “Abc” already exists under the same parent term.

   

2. You can add (but probably shouldn’t) a term that differs only based on case sensitivity if you also change the hierarchy that the term inherits from.  The image below shows the same “ABC” term added to a different parent.  This time the addition is successful.

   

3. When you try to add any combination that starts with abc to a managed metadata column you get both terms.  You can of course choose the one you actually want, but that’s based on the hierarchy of the term, not its case sensitivity.

   

The lesson here is that unlike some things like C#, the Managed Metadata service is NOT case sensitive.  You should try to avoid adding terms to the service that differ only based on case sensitivity.  This is particularly true if you intend to add managed metadata to fields programmatically.

Please join Dave Milner and me for the webinar entitled Best Practices for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade & Configuration, where we will outline various critical considerations and best practice strategies for the planning and conducting an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

The webinar will include live demonstrations and discussion of the following points:

• Who should upgrade, why & when
• How to assess existing SharePoint deployments and identify upgrade risks and opportunities
• Specific tasks that need to be done to prepare for SharePoint 2010
• How to identify and upgrade existing 2007 customizations
• Best Practices for supporting parallel environments, migration & preserving the investment in your existing SharePoint deployment
• Avoiding Upgrade & Migration Pitfalls

If you are considering upgrading to SharePoint 2010 from a previous version, you will gain an understanding of how to effectively upgrade SharePoint 2010 in accordance with best practices and gain insights into approaches, techniques, and tools that mitigate the effort and risk associated with upgrades.

Sign-Up for the Seminar here:

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=156123