When upgrading to windows server 2008 R2 from sans R2 the Security Token Service loses its self-generated certificates and an error “The requested service, 'http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc' could not be activated.”  The resolution is simple enough.  Re-Provision the Token Service.  This seems like a popular way to fix a lot of things in SharePoint 2010.  Something’s broken?  Recreate the service application.  Jon in support was awesome he gave me a nice little PowerShell script.

$sts = Get-SPServiceApplication | where {$_.name -like "*token*"}
$sts.provision()

All this does is find service application with the name token in it and then it provisions it.  Simple enough but took forever to figure out.

So maybe you have a slow people picker?  We did.  The network guy said “Let’s check which ports are being blocked.”  I thought “well, it’s working so I don’t know what good that’s going to do?  It’s just super slow.” but I bit my tongue and went through the motions.

We saw that port 3268 was being blocked from SharePoint servers to AD.  We unblocked it and the people picker ran like the wind.  I was amazed.  Now that we new the port number things became easier to find.  First thing I did was tweet about it.  Then we went and did some research.

Our infrastructure was a little weird, they are . . . let’s say, firewall friendly.  Between the 3 servers in the SharePoint farm there are 3 firewalls and then between all that and AD there’s one going out and one before active directory.  The outbound firewall ...

So Google officially came out and killed Wave.  Here is yet another technology that I've learned that has one away.  They claimed adoption, frankly I was waiting for it's release!  I was planning on speaking about it at the SPEVO conference in London, but I got volcanoed out but I was going to switch topics anyways. 

Some of the problems stem from the browser war.  Chrome loosely interpreted an HTML tag while IE strictly interpreted it.  This meant that worked in chrome and not IE.  So that kind of killed the whole Google wave to SharePoint integration.  Another thing that got worse was they playback.  It sometimes got out sequence and didn't playback character for character like they promised.  In the beginning it was great because it was different by providing the user with the context of time.  Towards the end it was just another forum or discussion board. 

It's really too bad ...

A question that I've had on the back burner for quite some time is what are the functions in SharePoint calculated columns.  I've taken a cursoury look here and there and never found the answer.  I've recently been passing direct messages via twitter to AndrewClark, @sharepointac, and he sent me a message that had the answer I've been looking for http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/CH011711171033.aspx 

Every week I have to fax a form that has data that I keep in a log, a SharePoint list actually.  The recipient expects it to be done by hand, I guess there aren’t many people who go the extra step and make a SharePoint list.  I was just hoping to export the information to an excel spreadsheet,  but the spreadsheet confused them.  They just wanted to see their little for filled out by hand.  I don’t like to do anything by hand.

Using GDI+ to load up the form as a bitmap then using the Graphics object to draw text in a comic font, kind of looks like I wrote it by hand.  I had even considered (and still considering) buying our own fonts, for each person who enters information into the log, from a place like www.yourfont.com.  By checking the “last modified by” to see whose font ...

My workstation operating system (OS) is Windows Server 2008, for a number of reasons, but mostly so I can better describe what settings need to be set where.  Everyone once in a while my audio has quite working.  Actually on any server os my audio quits a lot.  It usually comes back when I reboot but I don’t reboot but every 15 to 30 days.  I have a bazillion things open and rebooting is always a pain in the butt.

Start > Administrative Tools > Services > Restart “Windows Audio”

or if it happens enough make a batch file:

net stop "Windows Audio"
net start "Windows Audio"

I just read the Ferrari case study and was surprised by this statement, “Site traffic has increased by 237 percent, with a 150 percent increase in unique visitors.” SharePoint by itself doesn’t increase traffic.  Understanding how search engines look at your site and being able to manage the content search engines look at increases traffic. 

The article did state that it’s now easier manage content than it was in their previous java based version.  It almost sounded like they had to have a developer make all content changes.  I’m not a Java fan, but I do think this is a cheap shot at a whole platform.  There are plenty of bad content management solutions in .NET technologies too.  The increased traffic was a combination of a few things.

When the content, meta tags, titles and other asset areas are easy to manage it’s easier to make the search engines like ...

Here’s a page out of my Sunday morning.  I went to Chrysler.  I heard that they had some pretty good deals so I thought I’d go find out more about it. Having crappy luck online and being in the area to big one that didn’t close down recently I thought I’d just drop in.  Just on a whim and maybe walk out with a car.  I just need adaptive cruise control and a few other things and I’d be set.  Walking into the dealership I saw this sweet little Dodge Challenger and it looked cool.

Upon entering the Arrigo dealership I found there were 4 sales people and a receptionist.  One of the sales people greeted me and asked me how I was doing and if he could help me.  I said, “Sure, I’ve heard you got some great deals and I’d like to know more about your product line.”  ...

After receiving notice that I was accepted into the program  I get my user name and password in less than 30 minutes.  I get logged in and it was confusing at first because it’s a whole new interface and paradigm.  Like chat and forums all mixed into one.  Like forums with the extra ability to reply right in the middle of someone else's sentence.

The first thing I wanted to do was build extract a wave to my own web page.  I did that at http://www.wildwires.com/wave/demo1.aspx it’s my wave attempting to recruit other developers to help build a bunch of controls around wave. 

I was trying to figure out how to keep the screen shot in sync like take one every 5 minutes for example,  but I couldn’t figure out an easy way to do that.

So far there are three of us and 2 features, create new wave and ...

Twitter is pretty awesome.  I couldn’t figure out when windows 7 was going to be in MSDN.  Post a question and get a response, “krichie@stacyDraper August 6th http://bit.ly/OFsrN”.

Other times twitter can be a pain with all the “Look at me” posts, this time it worked out pretty good.

 

Thanks Keith,

Stacy