Discard Check Outs by the System Account

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

SharePoint has a wonderful check-in/check-out system for any library with minor versioning enabled. Users with the Override Check Out permission on a particular library have the powerful ability to discard or check in a document, page, etc. that is checked out to another user. This can typically be easily achieved via any of the library’s views using the out-of-the-box user interface.

Moving an Event Source to a Different Windows Event Log

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

It is typically best practice when developing .NET applications, including SharePoint customizations, to create an event source for Windows Event Logging while installing the application. Each event source on a Windows computer is tied to a specific log upon registration. I recently provided guidance on how to move an event source to use its own brand new event log. The following lines of PowerShell can do this quickly. Unless your .NET application has the event log hardcoded into itself, which it shouldn’t because the event source should be registered to a log during installation, then the move shouldn’t require any code changes.

"Application Pool"-Specific Warm Up Scripts

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Thanks to Thomas Vuylsteke and his ADdict blog for providing the foundation of this post!
FIM 2010: Warm Up Your Portal (IIS)
Be sure to read this post first to get the foundation of how one can configure a scheduled task to execute a warm up script whenever IIS recycles an application pool or whenever IIS is reset.

I had a scenario recently where one of my clients needed a rather long running warm up script to execute upon the recycling of a particular application pool. Being a larger farm, there were several application pools and the client only desired the warm up script to run when one specific application pool was recycled. The Windows Task Scheduler allows tasks to be triggered for execution when specific events are logged. When an application pool is recycled (automatically or manually) or when IIS is reset, events are logged in the System event log. Those events can be used to trigger tasks to run a warm up script in the Windows Task Scheduler!

Finding Sites with a Particular Feature Activated

Saturday, February 12, 2011

I continually have a question arise that seems easy to answer, yet from what I can tell, is not yet available with SharePoint out-of-the-box in its user interfaces. That question is:

What are all of the sites with feature xyz enabled?

Hiding the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon for Readers - A Proof of Concept

Saturday, February 5, 2011

In SharePoint 2010 publishing sites, the ribbon is the new way of life for authors. However for readers, the ribbon provides very little, if any, functionality. A few days ago, I was asked about hiding this empty space by a client. Their current 2010 master page had the ribbon moved to a custom position on their publishing sites. They had also suppressed the breadcrumb/folder navigation in the ribbon; thus for a typical reader view, there was no ribbon contents that would be displayed. However, the space on the page where the ribbon would live for authors still remained as empty space!