Have SharePoint 2010 open office documents in browser on an live farm

This blog walks through the process of configuring a sharepoint server so that office documents open up in the browser by default for reading and editing. Also for those who are new to Office web apps, Installing Office Web app is the only way to achieve this.

Blog assumes that sharepoint is already installed and configured. Installing office web app on a sharepoint farm that is not configured saves the extra step of re-running the config wizard.

Folllwing are the steps :
1. Install Office Web App on the Server

2. When installation is completed it will open the sharepoint 2010 product configuration wizard.

3. If this wizard is not run then even though office web app is isntalled on the server sharepoint will not recognize it and If you go to Central Admin\ Security settings\ Manage services on Server you will still not see any of the office web app service
a. Word Viewing service
b. Excel service
c. Powerpoint service

4. Run the sharepoint 2010 product configuration wizard
a. Log in to the sharepoint server as the DataAccess account that was configured but this farm and start the Configuation wizard, running this while logged in as any other user can cause the wizard to fail with a database unaccessible error.

b. When prompted with the alert that some of the services needs to be restarted, click on Yes

c. After the config run successfully it will make sure that sharepoint registers office web app services.

5. Start the Service: Go to CA\ security setting\ manage services on server and start the services that office web app installed
a. Word viewing service
b. Excel calculaltion services
c. PowerPoint services

6. Create a Proxy for the web office app services that you need : I will demonstrate it for the “word viewing service”. Go to Central Administration\ Application management\ Manage service applications and click on New and select “Word Viewing Service”

7. Create the new Word viewing service application with the following settings, feel free to improvise depending on your environment.
i. Name the service “Word Viewing Service Application”
ii. Select the application pool – SharePoint web services Default
iii. Add to default proxy list – checkmark the option.

8. Make sure that this service is associted with you Web application, If it is not then you can do it by going to CA\ Applicatoin management\ Configure Service application association.

9. Enable a Site collection to use Office Web app :
a. Before office web apps can be used office web app feature has to be enabled, you will have to install it on all the wfes.
b. Deactivate the feature “Open Documents in Client Applications by Default” in case it is Active.
c. Go to the web application for which you want to enable viewing word documents in the browser, go to site actions\ site collection features and activate Office Web Apps feature

This should make sure you can open office documents in the browser. IR, Safari, Firefox are supported, hopefully this blog helps you, leave a comment.

Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled.

Disabling the loopback check worked for me, below are the steps that i took :
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.

5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.

6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.

Restarting the machine is a good practice but i did not even need to restart.

SharePoint 2010 Master pages

(FYI... i am constatly updating this blog)

Here are some of the new master pages with description :

1. V4.Master : this is the default master page for V4
2. Default.master : this is the default master page that comes with WSS 3
3. Minimal.master : used for search
4. Simple.master : for login and errors

The relative location of the images folder /_layouts/images is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\

Absolute path of the sharepoint master pages is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

MOSS to SharePoint 2010 Migration

This article breaks up the upgrade process into Database upgrade and Visual upgrade.

1. Database upgrade:
a. Create a new database with a copy of the old 2007 database ( just to make sure we don’t mess with the 2007 website)
b. Create a new SP 2010 site
c. Detach the database by going into Central Admin\ Manage Content Databases (under application management)
                i. Select the website whose database you want to detach
                ii. Click on the database
               iii. Select “Remove content database” and hit on ok.

d. Attach the database using the command below, even though the “Manage Content Databases” option can be used for attaching database but it cannot be used for attaching 2007 database, it has to be done through the command below :

                i. Run the following command to attach 2007 database to 2010

               C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN>stsadm -o addcontentdb -url -databasename -databaseserver

This will take some time depending on the database size; it will also show you in the progress in the command prompt.

2. Visual Upgrade :

Now that the database upgrade is successfully done you will see that the website looks just like 2007 even though it is on 2010, it does not show the ribbon or any of the new looks, reason being we still have to do the visual upgrade. This will give your website the new looks. This can be done using power shell also but I am doing it using the interface as a site owner.

a. Open up the site that you have just migrated.
b. Go to Site settings\ Title, navigation, icon
               i. There are 3 options here
                            1. Use the previous user interface
                            2. Preview the updated user interface
                            3. Update the user interface
                ii. Beauty of this is that you can do just a preview of the new looks before doing a final visual upgrade and if the looks don’t look good fell free to revert back to 2007 looks.
               iii. Selecting “Update the user interface” will do the final upgrade to 2010 looks.

Installing pdf Ifilter for SharePoint 2010

Got it done last night and verified that the crawling worked, process is pretty much the same as SharePoint 2007 and here is info :

1. there seems to be several pdf ifilters and below are the most popular ones

a.Adobe IFilter for 64 bit : http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025
( comes free of charge)

b.FOX IFilter : http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/ifilter/
(Seems more optimized and so obviously there is a price to pay)

2. i used the Adobe ifilter and instead of retyping i will point to the blog that i followed:
http://nickgrattan.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/adobe-pdf-ifilter-indexing-with-sharepoint%C2%A02010/

Here is the pdf image!

enjoy!

SharePoint 2010 Outgoing email configuration

comming back to blogging again, entering something simple ...

go to Central admin\ System Settings\ Configure outgoing e-mail settings
enter the Outgoing SMTP server, From email, Reply-to-email.

Sharepoint 2010 New Features

so here's my first posting on sharePoint 2010, it has some new features that i came across out of my research and though would post it, i will be updating this as i come across them.



1. BI features

  a. Performance point server included services
  b. Chart web parts
  c. Excel Services – includes SQL Server Power Pivot
  d. BI Portals can be created that include scorecards, dashboards, KPIs and more

2. BCS ( business Connectivity services)

 a. Offline BCS integration.
 b. Integration with external Databases is great, seems there is JavaScript support for invoking Client Object Model
 c. Ability to connect with External data sources like tables seems to have been enhanced.

3. New SharePoint Developer tools

 a. LINQ for SharePoint for faster DotNet development,
 b. Visual Studio 2010 has more features for SharePoint development

4. Search

 a. Choice between standard SharePoint search and FAST search
 b. Search is much better and it works off external content database as well.
 c. Has Refinement options on the left hand side toolbox

5. Offline Access

 a. Offline access with workspace, mobile access, tighter office integration
 b. MS Grove is now termed as SharePoint Workspace

6. Document on file systems

 a. In SP 2010 it is “much easier” to split the content item from the metadata and place the content item in a file store, rather than placing it as a BLOB in the RDBMS.

7. List Improvements:

 a. Streaming of video placed in document libraries
 b. Relationship with Cascading\ Block, transacted cascading deletion, restriction of deletion.
 c. Lookup to multiple columns
 d. Create Relationship between Lists.
 e. Create Validations on Lists
 f. Use of Silverlight Web part

8. 2010 has got an upgrade tool stsadm –o preupgradecheck

9. Misc

 a. Support Visio services
 b. Supports Firefox, safari, IE, mobile
 c. Content Type reusability across site\farm
 d. Mobile Access
 e. Sand Box available