jamesb

Is the website declined to show this page a Sharepoint error that's coming through, or something from IIS? If it's from IIS, does inetmgr show everything running as normal?

Good point. I've actually managed to find a .NET user group nearby, and will be going to that next week so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Otherwise of course, anyone in the Woking/Guildford area who can put up with a few rants about security practices, SharePoint, user management and suchlike in exchange for a beer or two?

Due to some, ahem, technical difficulties with getting the custom usage provider to actually trigger (registering wasn't a problem, and it did intercept the event, just never actually triggered it's own handler so I essentially spent several days in order to write a solution which comprehensively breaks usage logging) I've been re-evaluating my approach to this. New method will still involve logging organisation IDs along with users (any direct memberships get logged with the user, chains are ignored to simplify report filtering), but will log these to a dedicated SQL table in the WSS_Logging database, along with Content Type details, and the custom fields of documents. Then it should be a simple case of creating View and Reports which leverage all of this and pipe them into SharePoint. I'll be putting the code up here once I know it's working. Update - The code is now up in another blog entry, unfortunately it was too long to include in this one. Currently uncommented but essentially just collates the data required, processes it, fires it off to a couple of methods in order to turn the data into stored procedure calls for SQL, finds the local logging database for SQL and drops the data in through the stored procedures. The stored procedures are there to make sure that entries are updated rather than duplicated if they already exist.

I'd love to have someone to talk to about work - unfortunately no one I talk with on a regular basis (face-to-face) can follow what I'm doing for more than a few minutes at most. It doesn't help that that includes the people I work with, so I have to talk in a simplified overview style and can't just chat about the technical aspects with anyone.

Yep, on Windows 7 it's under User Accounts, then Manage your credentials.

If you're using a later version of Windows try going to Control Panel\Credential Manager - you may find it's stored in there. If it is, just delete it.

Here you go - Move all databases (SharePoint Server 2010)

It's no more likely to fail than provisioning a single user - the service involved generally either works perfectly, or fails to work, there isn't really much middle ground. If it fails it just doesn't create the users - the actual requests aren't lost, and can be usually run through after the service has been fixed. Even if you provision all of your users at once, they'll be created sequentially so there should be no risk of blowing up your AD (or Capita's, if you're on hosted).

I've seen both, but it's better to provision at least one as a test since then if anything does go wrong you only have a dozen or so provisioning requests to delete, rather than thousands.

That one's probably easier in a way - you could always just run the GetUsageData for each web object, import that into a data table and filter users with another foreach which looks through the user IDs from the report and creates a subset of the data based on your criteria. In fact that would be a lot easier than the method I'm currently looking at - I may have to look at doing the same thing myself rather than trying to hammer a custom receiver into the setup. For quicker building of a reporting app to do it, you could always grab Lightswitch. Currently it's in beta and looks pretty powerful.

To run SharePoint Foundation? SQL Express, IIS, and a few other prereqs - nothing major. With a bit of work you can actually install it on a Windows 7 or Vista machine as well, though that's intended for development only.

MOSS How to ...: Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 2008 Server R2 - any use?

Yes, but it might be a little overkill. You can always go for SharePoint Foundation (free), see how you get on with it and upgrade it to Enterprise later if you're having fun.

One of the first tasks I've been faced with in my new job is to get some sort of SharePoint usage reporting working. At first I thought this would be nice and easy, after all, SharePoint comes with a nice set of usage reporting which could simply be plugged in to some custom reporting modules - easy, yes? No. The problem comes in that they want reporting for groups of users. These groups are currently ill-defined, conceptual groupings, so part of the first challenge is to deal with that by getting user management set up. For the time being I've put that off while I concentrate on a method for getting the reports working at all, with the added information that's required. After some hours of hunting I did manage to find this lovely post which was enough to make a start at least. So after numerous meetings we have now settled on the actual information that needs to be reported, and I've thrown together a quick and dirty system design which'll allow for all of the stats processing to be done away from the SharePoint farm other than the initial collection. So far I've only got the usage receiver itself coded, since interfaces need to go through a few more discussions (Silverlight or no Silverlight, how customizable do the reports need to be, and so on) but I do at least seem to be getting a nice lost of HTTP posts going out with the information and can start building a web service to receive and log them. If nothing else this should at least keep me out of trouble for a while. Any suggestions or ideas others might have, either for this area or the user management, are more than welcome.

We have them here - both staff and students. Main reason is that the bar and restaurants will only serve people who have a badge since safeguarding isn't an issue.

Thanks to all who replied - I've actually ended up going with a different (though potentially more headache-producing) solution to the problem, in trying to build a custom usage receiver to track usage between separate sites using a handful of custom profiles attributes to link users with their 'group'.

I am absolutely certain that there must be some way to do this. Essentially I've got one library (currently in the root, but that's flexible) which is my 'master' library - I then want to have the same library available in other site collections, using only the one copy (all other 'copies' of the library would be read-only). I'm positive that there's a way to do this, but really can't work out how. Any help greatly appreciated.

What? You mean they didn't invent it? But...but...Apple wouldn't imply they invented something they didn't, surely?

Don't forget - they also invented touchscreen phones, video calling (however limited their version may be), camera phones, application stores (currently they are trying to enforce their trademark for the term App Store), and much, much more.

I'm just a little curious about a comparison made earlier in the thread. How many people would select a 'status' car (such as a BMW) over a cheaper, more practical car - potentially with better performance and much cheaper (though potentially more regular) maintenance? I'm really starting to think that the whole debate is caused by a fundamental difference in the way that people perceive value (incidentally, I'm on the anti-Apple side, but that's my natural dislike of designer branding coming in to play, so is a biased opinion).

Come the end of January I'll be working in a school again, of sorts. Lots of SharePoint 2010 stuff so I expect to be asking for a fair bit of help to start with. Also just wanted to say thank you to Witch for some perfectly-timed reassurance while I was applying.

Or not - I got fed up of smashing things for a bit, so decided to give Forbidden Valley a go. One hour and three dead dragons later, I was having the time of my life with my shiny new katana of freezing. Sadly I didn't think to grab the quest to defeat the three dragons first, so I'll be tackling them again tonight with any luck.

Will do - just working on getting the rest of my Tier 2 Engineer gear at the moment (which admittedly might take a little while).

I'm convinced that there must be other overgrown children on here who've at least looked at this game. I will admit to having spent a large part of the weekend (and I mean a very large part) playing it, having got it on Friday. So are there any other LU players here? And if so, does anyone want to organise a team to tackle Forbidden Valley?

Which'll end the console wars. That'd be a great loss. Most of the innovation comes out of trying to get one up on the competition - if they're all just getting identical games, why bother trying to come up with a USP?