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…
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…
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…
My friend and co-mischief maker, Cornelius J. van Dyk, & I were honored to be able to present last night at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group, and as promised below you will find a link to our deck. Thanks to everyone who came out to hear us speak! Heavy Metal PowerPivot Redux
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…
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…
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…
Ever have trouble remembering when you last deployed a specific solution? Now, none of us would ever allow an environment to be uncontrolled and let people willy-nilly install solutions, but in the real world sometimes things slip through our well controlled documentation and we need a hand. For those of us with more than 5 farm solutions hunting and pecking for the last installed date can be problematic. One of my colleagues (at this point I am forgetting who, so…
Some people have noticed the unusual lull in my posting. Others are probably wondering why in the world they are still reading after the title doesn’t have anything to do with SharePoint. The out of the norm silence is due to several things happening in my personal world, which I normally try to keep out of my blogging, but since this has a direct correlation to my SharePoint community involvement I have decided to share it here. Since my vacation…
I ran into an issue today where I needed to quickly pull the MaximumFileSize setting for every web application across my farms. I found lots of blogs that told me how to change the setting, but none that told me how to pull the information from the farm before I change it. The UI method for this is simple, but cumbersome if you have multiple web apps and multiple farms. Simply go to Central Administration|Application Management|Manage Web Application and select…