Mavention Blog
We have a new location! Well allmost
I'm very proud. Recently we found a fantastic location for Mavention. We will soon be moving to "The Caballero Fabriek" in The Hague.
 
But before that, we have to arrange a few details:
- Painting
- Electricity
- Internet connectivity
- Hardware
- Furniture

Quite a lot, but a lot of fun too.
Here are some pictures:
Key day  
     
Paint day 1  
Paint day 2  
     
Tools  
Outside  
Always available

Keep y'all posted...
Posted: 27-1-2009 0:19:58 by Marcel van der Lem | with 0 comments


Different types of SharePoint personalization features
Personalization is an important feature in modern portals and web 2.0 concepts. When thinking of (and searching for ) personalization features within SharePoint 2007 you, most often, only find 2 ways of personalization:
  • MySite
  • Target Audiences
These two personalization features are the ones that are used most often and that you will find in your search results when you’re looking for SharePoint possibilities for personalizing your portal. Even when you do a google search for “sharepoint personalization”, the first hit is a Microsoft article that describes only these two features.
 
Maybe not the personalization feature you use most often, but still a very interesting one to keep in mind is the fact that you can enable every Web Part page to allow users to create a personal view of that page.
For every Web Part on a page the editor of that page can set a couple of properties for allowing users to personalize that Web Part, for instance:
  • Allow Close
  • Allow Hide
  • Allow Zone Change
  • Allow Editing in Personal View
With these properties set for one or more webparts on a page, users with the “Update Personal Web Parts” permission now have the option “Personalize this page” in the “Welcome [your name]” dropdown menu.

I find this personalization feature useful when, for instance, you have a Web Part page with lots of query webparts that display the latest announcements for one department in an organization with a large amount of departments. Users can then place the Web Parts showing the announcements of their favorite departments on top of the page and can close the ones showing the announcements they have nothing to do with.

Of course, the editor of the Web Part page can choose which WebParts are enabled for personalization. The Web Part showing the announcements for his department most likely will not have the property “Allow Close” set to true ;-)
Posted: 20-1-2009 10:42:46 by Lennard van Leuven | with 0 comments


Copy/Paste disabled?
Not really a MOSS related issue, but since we all use Remote Desktop Connection to our MOSS servers (right?), I figured this is a need-to-know-basis message.

At a sudden moment my Copy/Paste functionality stopped working on my laptop. On this laptop I have Virtual PC running and in this virtual PC I have a Remote Desktop Connection to my MOSS server. When I closed the RDC, my Copy/Paste worked again.

So even if you're using a RDC in a VPC, it could block Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V on your hosting PC.
Nice rhyme...
Posted: 13-1-2009 9:50:02 by Marcel van der Lem | with 0 comments


DCOM Error event 10016 after sp1
I installed MOSS onto a 2 server farm (DB and WFE), completed the farm and created ssp, mysites and a portal site. At that time I decided to run WSS sp1 and MOSS sp1. Both ran successfully.

However I got a nasty DCOM error in the system log of WFE. I directly navigated to Component Services to enable Local Launch and Local Activation to the IIS WamReg component. That did not do the trick.

Further investigation showed me the error was raised by CLSID 3D42CCB1-4665-4620-92A3-478F47389230, being the microsoft office sharepoint server gathering manager. That one pointed me to AppID 58F1D482-A132-4297-9B8A-F8E4E600CDF6, being OSearch. And that one I found in the Component Services MMC. I gave Local Launch and Local Activation rights to WSS_Admin_WPG on OSearch and my errors (at least these) were gone.
Posted: 13-1-2009 9:37:25 by Marcel van der Lem | with 0 comments


WSS v3 sp1 did not complete, site not available
Lately I wanted to install WSS v3 Service Pack 1. Server farm is very simple: 1 WFE, 1 DB. Should not be too much of a problem, right?

I started the sp1. At step 7 of 8 it seemed to hang. After an hour of no progress, I decided to cancel the installation. Even that failed.

Again I waited for an hour and then ended the process psconfigui manually. Let's try that again... "This service pack has already been installed".

Oh? Well ok. Let's navigate to my updated portal site then. "The schema version (3.0.149.0) of the database... not he expected database schema version (3.1.3.0)". Therefore the site will not be available?!

Ouch. Fortunately we live in the Google ages and I found this: run psconfig -cmd upgrade –force and then start the configuration wizard again. That did it for me.
Posted: 13-1-2009 9:35:41 by Marcel van der Lem | with 0 comments