Change Create By / Modified By fields display

Recently one of our customer ask me how to change Create By and Modified By names that appears on Display form, New form and Views.  Out of the box SharePoint systems only display Created at <time> by <username>. Our Customer request to change Display Photo with Name and other details?.  Can we do it without customization?

The answer is “YES”. SharePoint list setting has options to change.

Go Settings > To List / Document Settings and Click Created By / Modified By fields.

Select Show fields type to Name (with picture and details) and click Ok.

SharePoint All document view display modified fields with picture and name.

When you visit Display form or New form will display created by and modified fields with picture, name and other details.

MySite Personalization site links

When user view MySite the don’t have way to come back to Corporate Portal Site. So we thought of adding link to MySite.

Under Shared Services you can add Personalization site link.

http://yourserver.com/

The system will show URL on MySite as displayed below

When you click “Corporate Home” the URL display as http://yourserver.com/ default.aspx?MySiteView=1 and Page Display as below

If you nice there is a person image icon embedded in to Navigation bar, its happen because of the MySiteView=1, which automatically appended by system.

To overcome above issue you need added # at end of the URL (i.e. http://yourserver.com/# which will display pages as normal.

SharePoint Hit Counter

Today i received request from customer to add Hit counter on SharePoint site homepage.

Let's go through how to insert "Hit Counter"

1. SharePoint Designer Open Site and Page that you need insert "Hit Counter"

2. Open Page in Edit Mode and place the cursor where you want to insert the hit counter.

3. Go to Insert - Web Component

4. Select Hit counter and System display different types styles that readily available.

5. Click on Finish, system will open the below Hit Counter Properties window

6. To start the counter on given number Select Reset counter to option and give number to star.

7. Once you click OK, The counter will be inserted to your page.

8. Preview on Web browser and start refresh your page the counter will increase count.

SharePoint Usage Reports (FREE Tool)

SharePoint Server 2007 out of the box feature provides Usage reporting is a service which helps site administrators, site collection administrators to monitor statistics about the use of their sites. Usage reporting also provides usage reporting for search queries. SharePoint provides following  pre-define list.

• Requests and queries in the last day and the last 30 days.
  Average number of requests per day over the last 30 days.
  A chart of requests per day over the last 30 days.
  A list of the top page requests over the last 30 days.
  A list of top users over the last 30 days.
  A chart of top referring hosts over the last 30 days.
  A chart of top referring pages over the last 30 days.
  A list of top destination pages over the last 30 days.
  Top queries for the last 30 days (if search usage reporting is enabled).
  Search results top destination pages (if search usage reporting is enabled).
  Number of queries per day over the previous 30 days.
  Number of queries per month over the previous 12 months.
  Top queries over the previous 30 days.
  Top site collections originating queries over the previous 30 days.
  Queries per search scope over the previous 30 days.
  

The above reports provide basic information to site owner to analysis, however this reports not inadequate, the chart are not very basic.

Incase if you are looking for alternative solution you may think CardioLog Lite for SharePoint 2007 includes a set of 3 basic SharePoint usage reports: Unique Users, Visitors and Page Views. Additional trial (14-days) reports are provided with the free download.

For more details visit : CardioLog Lite

Configuring Microsoft Network Load Balancing on two Windows 2008 servers install SharePoint Server

This 'How to' guide will take you through configuring Microsoft Network Load Balancing on two Windows 2008 servers install SharePoint Server on the new Windows servers and then adding additional SharePoint servers to your farm and reassign Moss Server Services across the new SharePoint servers.

Download your guide at How to scale out a SharePoint farm and configure IIS 7 Microsoft Network Load Balancing on windows server 2008

Different type of SharePoint Server 2007 server farm topologies. (System Architecture)

Introduction

This article discuss about understanding the different type of SharePoint server farm topologies.

Overview

The SharePoint Server 2007 server farm design vary based on the customer requirements, security perspective and size requirement. The topology designs can be created based on the size of the server farm namely small, medium, and large which can focus on either a single or multiple farm models.

Different type SharePoint Server Roles

Web Front End Server : A front-end server that provides the web services used to render applications (Presentation layer).

Application Server : A front-end server that provides applications services such as search and index (Services layer)

SQL Database Server : A dedicated server running either Microsoft SQL Server 2005. In large farms, this is typically a SQL Server clustered configuration with two or more servers.

Domain controller : Provide authorization and authentication service to Office SharePoint users.

Small server farm :

Small server farm which consist of two-server, one of the servers hosts the Web front end and the application services, while the second server hosts the SQL Server database. This provides a way to manage the database separately but adds complexity without adding scalability or availability.

This type of smallest deployment that is recommended for demonstration, training environment or very small organization or user group.

If you notice that architecture diagram has domain controller, either demonstration environment or very small group, I am sure that there will be existing domain controller server, you may consider re-use.

Small Farm System Architecture

Medium server farm :

Part of this article is to help you determine the minimum requirements which allow you design and achieve your customer goal.

To design high-availability solution, you must deploy a server farm. To decide you may need to discuss following items with your customer and analysis the outcome.

Question	Yes	No
Is your overall availability requirement below 99%?
Is the availability of your data critical?

Question 1 Is your availability requirement 99% or greater? If your customer response to “YES”, which means organization looking for high availability on Office SharePoint Server 2007.

I order to meet above requirement you need to design your Web Front End Server to the two-server deployment, which will gain scalability and availability by load-balancing requests so that if one server goes down, the system up and running.

Question 2 Is the availability of your data critical?, If your customer response to “YES”, which means organization is looking for high availability and gain scalability to safe from data loss, so your design need to be clustered or mirrored database server .

Medium Farm System Architecture

Large server farm :

Part of this article is to help you determine the Large server farm configuration which is suitable for an enterprise-level SharePoint environment:

To design enterprise-level SharePoint environment, you may need to discuss following point with your customer and analysis the outcome (This question are in-addition to medium farm server questions).

Application server role	Service
Query
Excel Calculation Services
Index & Search (External System i.e. ERP, CRM, File share and Lotus Notes)
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 search

Enterprise-level SharePoint environment :

_ Two or more load-balanced front-end web servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007

_ Two or more application servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007

_ One Index & Search servers running Office SharePoint Server 2007

_ Two or more clustered database servers running SQL Server 2000 or 2005

_ SAN Storage

The above architecture diagram shows Web Tier, Application Tier and DB Tier which design to serve different purposes, each of the servers provides specific SharePoint Server 2007 services such as Index Services or Excel Calculation Services, and the front-end servers provide web content services.

The servers in server farm (WFE server, Application server, Index server) must run with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Database server which configure clustered or mirrored environment with SAN storages.

Conclusion

There is nothing special or difficult on above architect design, basically understanding the customer requirements (i.e. future user growth rate, storage capacity, system availability, security, and system performance requirements) put this pieces of information together and analysis and provide possible solutions architecture that meet your customer goal.

Other SharePoint related article :

1. Microsoft Office Servers Overview with Logical Architecture

2. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Features

3. Setup and Install SharePoint 2007 Server (MOSS) on Virtual PC

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Setup and Install SharePoint 2007 Server (MOSS) on Virtual PC

This article describes how to Setup and Install SharePoint 2007 Server (MOSS 2007) on Virtual PC

Before you start installing, Make sure that you downloaded following software’s.

1. 1. .NET Framework 2.0
2. 2. .NET Framework 3.0
3. 3. Windows SharePoint Service 3.0
4. 4. Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 SP 1
5. 5. Virtual PC 2007 and
6. 6. Windows Sever 2003 R2.

The following process includes creating a new VM definition, adjusting the settings, and installing the operating system (OS) and .NET Frameworks. (Take note that this process will take about three hours.)

Setup Victual PC

1. 1. Click New... and Click Next

1. 2. Select Create a new virtual machine. Click Next.
2. 3. Type the name and location. The default is New Virtual Machine. To create the VM on your external hard drive, enter the location and a name called WindowsEntServer2003BaseImage. and Click Next.

1. 4. Select an operating system as Windows Server 2003 and Click Next.

1. 5. Adjust the RAM. For this base image 1 GB or 1024 MB will suffice and Click Next.

1. 6. Select A new virtual hard disk option and Click Next.

1. 7. Create the hard disk in the same location that you selected in step 4. Adjust the virtual hard disk size 6 GB is a good start. You can resize the disk at any time and Click Next.
2. 8. Click Next and Finish to completed the process.

Setup Loopback Adapter

Once the machine is created, add a second network adapter on the virtual machine to your host machine's Loopback Adapter.

1. 1. Click Settings.

2. 2. Click Networking.

3. 3. Change the setting Number of network adapters to 2.

1. Incase if you do not know how to Install Microsoft Loopback Adapter. Go to this website and follow the steps to install (How to install the Microsoft Loopback adapter in Windows XP)
2. 4. Change the setting Adapter 2 to Microsoft Loopback Adapter.

3. 5. Click OK.

Install an operating system on Virtual PC.

1. 1. Virtual PC, click Start

2. 2. If you have a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 CD or DVD, insert it in your host machine now. If you have a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 ISO image file, Go to menu bar, click CD, then Capture an ISO Image, and browse to the location of your Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 ISO image. Open the image.

3. 3. Follow the instructions to install the server operating system.

Once everything done, then the OS need to activate and Windows Update is run to install all available service packs and patches.

Edit the HOSTS File

Since the virtual network will not going to be served by the same DNS server used by the host machine. You need to locate a virtual machine by name rather than IP address, To edit Host file follow the steps.

1. 1. Got Run and enter C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc Right-click the HOSTS file and select Open.

2. 
3. 2. In the pop-up, select Notepad. Click OK.

4. 3. Add the IP address and machine name of your virtual machine on a blank line.

5. 5. Close the Window, and click Yes when prompted to save the changes.

Install ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.0

ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Both are required by SharePoint. ASP.NET 3.0 package Include above items, So follow the steps to Install.

1. 1. Copy .NET setup file to your VPC or Share folder and access form VPC

2. 2. When you double click it prompted to Run, Open, or Cancel, click Run or Open.

3. 

4. 3. Prerequisites will be checked and files will be copied.

5. 4. Agree with the terms, accept the license and click Install.

6. 5. When installation is complete, click Exit.

Allow ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service Extensions in IIS

1. 1. Select Start - Administrative Tools - Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
2. 2. In the Internet Information Services management console, expand the server name in the left pane, then select Web Service Extensions:
3. 3. In the right pane, select ASP.NET v2.0.50727, then click the Allow button:

Install Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 SP 1

1. 1. Copy .NET setup file to your VPC or Share folder and access form VPC
2. 2. When you double click it prompted to Run, Open, or Cancel, click Run or Open.

3. 4. Agree with the terms, accept the license and click Install.

4. 5. When installation is complete, click Exit.

Back Up Your Base Image

Congratulation... Now you have created a reusable base image. Start to make a backup this image. So that you can save time when creating servers in the future.

1. 1. Click Start and Shut down your VM. Enter a reason of "Base Image Backup".
2. 2. Once the files are backed up, you can create a new machine by moving or copying the VHD into another folder, renaming it according to purpose

3. 3. Prerequisites will be checked and files will be copied.

Install SharePoint on Virtual Machine

1. 1. Virtual PC, click Start

2. 2. If you have a SharePoint 2007 Server with Service Pack 1 CD or DVD, insert it in your host machine now. If you have a SharePoint 2007 Server with Service Pack 1 ISO image file, Go to menu bar, click CD, then Capture an ISO Image, and browse to the location of your Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 ISO image. Open the image.

3. 3. Follow the instructions to install the server operating system.

4. 4. Insert the MOSS 2007 installation media, start the installation, enter the Standard / Enterprise product key, then click the Continue button:

1. 5. Select I accept the terms of this agreement checkbox, then click the Continue button:
2. 6. On the Select the installation you want screen, click the Advanced button:

1. 7. Server Type tab, select the Complete option and then click the Install Now button:

1. 8. Once the installation is complete, select the Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard now checkbox, then click the Close button

1. 9. Run and SharePoint Configuration Wizard
2. 10. On the Welcome to SharePoint Products and Technologies screen, click the Next button:

1. 11. In the services may have to be started or reset dialog box, click the Yes button:

1. 12 On the Connect to a server farm screen, select the No, I want to create a new server farm option, then click the Next button:
2. 13. SharePoint Setup will complete 1of10 steps to auto configure
3. 14. Congratulation.. You  installed and configured MOSS 2007 application running inside the virtual machine.

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