I had a great time at SharePoint Fest Chicago this year! It started off Tuesday night (September 25, 2012) with our CSPUG (Chicago SharePoint Users Group) meeting. We had over 100 people register and most of them show up (every event always loses some attendees between registration and the event). We had a decidedly full room in the Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont. I had the honor of being the emcee for the evening. Our panel consisted of Brian Culver, Todd Klindt, Sean McDonough, Gary Newman, Dux Raymond Sy, Randy Williams, and Jeff Willinger. The event was recorded, and I’ll tweet about it when the video is available online. The next day, Wednesday, I presented my Introduction to PowerShell in “SIA 100 - PowerShell with SharePoint 2010 & 2013”. You can use PowerShell to work with MOSS 2007 too, but you don’t have any pre-defined cmdlets to start from, so you need a script like define-sharePoint-functions.ps1 that you can get from my CodePlex project: http://psbb.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/20689#259920 Fortunately, all of my audience was running SharePoint 2010, so they get to use all the 500+ cmdlets that ship with the product, as well as any they download or write. My slides for the session can be found in this folder:http://blog.blumenthalit.com/files/spfest2012chi. It’s the PDF called PowerShell for SharePoint Developers and Administrators. I did a brand new demo in that session, which I call “WebParts On The Bus”. So far, it consists of three scripts: - Create the “Bus” site collection using the Blank Site template (STS#1), and open IE to display it.
- Use my Make-Flashcards script to create images for the site’s home page.
- Rotate which web parts are in which web part zones, so the web parts on the page go round and round, and make the computer sing along.
There’s plenty of room for further automation, such as uploading the images, creating the web part page, adding the Image Viewer web parts to the page and configuring them to use the right images. Also, only the third of these three scripts is compliant with my own best practice of being written in a way where running the script file is harmelss and error free by default. What I mean by this is that script #3 only defines a function and announces the function has been defined, but does not do anything unless you call the function. The other two scripts have lines of powershell that would be executed when you run the script. For example, the second script defines the Make-Flashcards cmdlet, but also tries to make flashcards, saving them into a folder that likely does not exist on your machine. Don’t run them until you’ve read them and adjusted them for your environment. In other words, use all three AT YOUR OWN RISK, no warranties expressed or implied, et cetera, et cetera… The scripts can be found in http://blog.blumenthalit.com/files/spfest2012chi. A number of other PowerShell scripts can be found in http://blog.blumenthalit.com/files/powershell%20scripts, but again, use at your own risk. After I gave my session, I walked around the expo hall, and met with a number of new and old friends. Here’s a quick rundown of the expo hall highlights, focused on the ISVs. - K2 was there, with Chris Geier at the booth. K2 provides workflow solutions. I’m sure that oversimplifying, but my primary goal was to learn about the vendors I hadn’t heard of before, and secondarily to talk to the vendors I already knew.
- Newsgator was there. Better than out of the box Social communities for SharePoint. They can integrate Yammer feeds into activity streams!
- LimeLeap has a web-forms-on-SharePoint product called Pistachio
- ShareGate – Migration tools
- Actiance – compliance solutions for social computing
- BA Insight is now focused on helping you create search-based applications (whereas before I thought of them primarily for their Longitude product which enhances the SharePoint search experience with rich previews).
- Ontolica by Surfray was also there.
- Both BA Insight and Surfray offer ways of enhancing the SharePoint out of the box search experience with better previews and more. See http://www.surfray.com/products and http://www.bainsight.com/Pages/sharepoint-fast-search-document-preview.aspx
- Axceler – Management tools for SharePoint
- Idera – SharePoint tools for administration and bulk metadata updates, tools for PowerShell, SQL, and backup.
- mylyli Arc – a solution for publishing intranet content to an extranet without content duplication.
- SharePoint Hosting – Rackspace and FPWeb were there. FPWeb hosts my blog and CSPUG.org. I’ve also had a client that has used Rackspace successfully, so I only have nice things to say about both companies.
- A number of companies have a variety of different solutions for compliance and data security. Among these are:
- Imperva. Again over simplifying, they provide a set of application firewalls, such as a web app firewall, a db firewall, and a file server firewall.
- Varonis – Admin tools focused on “data governance”
- Both of these offer, among other things, a way to report on security / permission assignments.
- CLM Matrix has a solution focused on management of contract documents.
- Arx CoSign provides a way of applying cryptography based (rather than digital ink based) signatures to documents in a SharePoint site. No more printing out documents just so they can be signed and scanned back in!
- HP was there demonstrating a scanner that scans documents directly into document libraries with the help of an application that watches a network share for the scanned files.
Although they weren’t in the exhibit hall, I met with several people from Claysys and got a brief product demo of their InfoPath-like web-based-forms-and-workflow-on-top-of-SharePoint product. Makes it even easier to build business applications via configuration rather than coding…. I didn’t include links to websites for each product above, because I want to get this post written tonight and you can Bing on any of the product or company names and I am sure you will find them. On the second day, I had the honor of co-presenting a PowerShell workshop with Todd Klindt. This was an open format session where attendees could bring their SharePointy PowerShell questions, and we would try to answer them live. My slide deck for this workshop is at PowerShell for SharePoint Workshop although I also showed some slides from PowerShell for SharePoint Developers and Administrators and there is significant overlap between the two. One of the questions asked was about checked out files with no checked in versions, and I pointed out the link on the list settings page to view these. That’s ManageCheckedOutFiles.aspx in _layouts. [Sidenote: Handy tip for being able to view POSH scripts in Windows Explorer’s Preview Pane] To further explore the issue, I uploaded a file to a document library, and then we looked at some of its properties, in particular, the Level property. $web =get-spweb $siteURL
$list = $web.Lists["Shared Documents"]
$doc = $list.items[0] As I explained at the time, indexing into the items collection is fine when you know you have only a few (in this case one) list items. However, it can have significant memory impact when it’s a large list. Once we had the document in $doc, we could do things like this: | $doc.File.Level #This showed that the file was checked out. | | $doc.File.CheckIn("checked in by code") | | $doc.File.CheckOut() | | $list.Items | foreach {write-host $_.Name, $($_.File.Level)} #could be memory intense for a large list | Todd talked about how the SharePoint Product Team had to comply with the naming standards set forth by the PowerShell product team. Here’s how to see all the verbs that are used in SharePoint cmdlets: get-command -noun "SP*" |foreach {$_.Name.Split("-")[0]} | select -Unique Someone asked a question about running these cmdlets remotely. Since we are working on the server object model, they need to execute on the Web Front End or an App Server. However, you can use a remote PowerShell session. To find out more about running PowerShell commands remotely on a server, get-help about_Remote . To find out about the commands you can use to work with remote sessions, try: get-command -name "*pssession" There was another question about the User Information List, which caused me to do this: $web = get-spweb http://pac.contoso.local/sites/bus $web.Lists $web.Lists | select -p Title $web.Lists["User Information List"] $web.Lists["User Information List"].items | Out-GridView Note that Out-GridView only exists if you have the ISE installed. Todd talked about how he doesn抰 use the ISE because you can抰 use Start-Transcript in the ISE. Whereas I do most of my work in the ISE, and use the script pane rather than the execution pane so I can keep track of what I抳e done. Finally, someone had a question about getting a list of the servers in a farm, so I did this: Get-SPServer get-help get-spserver -examples Another small PowerShell example is that earlier that morning, I had saved my presentation deck to JPEGs, but the first 9 slides had single digit slide numbers. Here抯 a little script to rename those slides to prefix the single digit with a zero: Get-ChildItem "C:\Users\michaelbl\Documents\profdev\2012\09-Sept\SPFest\jpegs" | where Name -like "Slide?.JPG" | foreach {
$newname = "Slide0" + $_.Name.Substring(5)
Move-Item $_.Name $newname
} Had no one asked questions, I was prepared with a few scripts to show off. Since we had a good set of questions, I never had a chance to show this: - First, I started with a blog post of Todd抯: http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=362
- I ignored the download link he provided, and copied the script into the ISE, INCLUDING THE LINE NUMBERS, then saved it as a file called CreateUsersTK.ps1
- To clean up the line numbers, I just removed the first three characters from each line:
get-content .\createUsersTK.ps1 | foreach {
$_.Substring(3)
} > .\createUsersTK2.ps1 After that, I took the script and giftwrapped it by turning it into a function which you can find here:giftwrap.ps1. Note that I've not tested the result yet. We gave a away a few books at the end of the session. After that, I attended a few sessions and spent more time in the exhibit hall, and had a chance to sit down with Jamie Story and Leo Doyle to plan upcoming CSPUG meetings. Alisa Swann gave a good presentation on what's new in Office 2013. Seamlessly switching between devices and your recent file list syncs - cool. I think that about covers it. I'm looking forward to the next one! --Michael
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10/8/2012 8:58 PM
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