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Month: October 2011

SharePoint Road Trips!

SharePoint Road Trips!

With the devastating storm that has hit New Hampshire over the weekend, there is no better time for a SharePoint Road Trip to start than today!  It was so bad up here that our city postponed Halloween Trick-or-treating until next Sunday.  Here are a couple of pictures of the devastation, just from our driveway:   Here is a quick list of where you can find me over the next 2 months. I fly out to Las Vegas this evening to…

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How to: Run PowerShell ISE as Administrator under alternate credentials

How to: Run PowerShell ISE as Administrator under alternate credentials

Coming from a security focused AD background I prefer to have the Managed Service Accounts OU locked down with a GPO restricting interactive logon to a server. This helps avoid service accounts becoming compromised and being taken advantage of in attacks. Having an ISE is especially helpful when you are doing SharePoint work on the farm and while I am a big fan of PowerShell, running straight at the command line is often a pain. Rather than installing one of…

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PowerShell Account Creation Script

PowerShell Account Creation Script

When building repeatable SharePoint farms I need to quickly create new service accounts. Since there is no need for a SharePoint Farm to be built using a Domain Admin account, there is really no need for a SharePoint Consultant to ask for or be granted Domain Admin rights. I spent a good portion of my career prior to SharePoint as a Domain Admin/AD Architect, and a good portion of that role is knowing that most people who ask for Domain…

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1941 days later: Gilad Schalit is finally home

1941 days later: Gilad Schalit is finally home

I normally keep my personal views on world happenings and politics out of this medium, but today is a very special day, so please feel free to disregard this post if you want but I feel that I must share my views on this topic. At the beginning of June 2006 I ended my time as a USY Advisor after more than 10 years of working with Jewish teenagers.  Much like my passion for technology, my passion for informal Jewish…

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SQL Server 2012 Announcements & a new Blogger

SQL Server 2012 Announcements & a new Blogger

The big news of the day in the technology world… no, not the Blackberry outage… no, not iOS 5 being released…  the big news about SQL Server Code Name: “Denali” becoming official SQL Server 2012!  Product release is slated for the first half of 2012 (not specifically Q1 as many of us had hoped) Project Crescent has been rebranded as Power View and announced that there will be a browser based version that will work on iOS & Android devices,…

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Presenting “Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux” tonight at BASPUG

Presenting “Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux” tonight at BASPUG

My good friend, Cornelius J. van Dyk, & I are presenting one of our favorite topics at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group this evening, Heavy Metal PowerPivot! For those of you who have seen us present this topic in the past, you might be asking “ok, I’ve seen it before, why should I attend?”.  The answer is simple: SQL Server 2012 CTP3.  We will be demoing the new installation experience as well as a few of the new features…

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SharePoint/Office 2007 Service Pack 3 coming Q4 2011

SharePoint/Office 2007 Service Pack 3 coming Q4 2011

The Office Sustained Engineering Team has announced that Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Office 2007 & SharePoint 2007 will be coming some time during 2011 Q4.  This appears to be the last major update to the 2007 client & server stack as the team states: “We are offering this release in preparation for the April 2012 end of mainstream support for the 2007 client and server products. The October 2011 release provides a 6-month window to test and deploy the…

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How SharePoint Governance is like a moose in a swimming pool

How SharePoint Governance is like a moose in a swimming pool

I was watching the news last night and a story came on about a man in Manchester, NH (about 30 minutes from my house) who heard a noise that was coming from his backyard, and when he turned on this lights he found a Moose in his backyard.  The moose was spooked by the sudden flood of light and charged through his fence and directly into the man’s swimming pool. The man from didn’t have many options going in to…

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SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-In

SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-In

This was referred to this morning in the keynote at SharePoint Conference 2011 and appears to be a really cool solution. Source: Visio.Microsoft.com “SharePoint Network Topology Diagram Add-in leverages Visio Services to deliver a near real time intuitive rendering of the status of SharePoint farm’s infrastructure and associated services. Visio Graphics services – A key part of SharePoint 2010, enables customers to share their dynamic data driven Visio diagrams and dashboards within SharePoint. This helps extend the reach of valuable…

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