SharePoint 2010: Faster, Better Decisions – Self Service Business Reporting, will be one of my topics for the executive track at the SharePoint conference on June 26, 2012 at Atlanta.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a powerful and feature rich platform for Business Intelligence. SPS 2010 empowers business users to easily consume data using various MS BI tools. With the recent release of SQL 2012, Microsoft dramatically enhanced the Microsoft BI platform. During this session, I will explore the improvements to SQL 2012 self-service reporting with SharePoint 2010 and talk about creating blended value from your BI platform.  

My other session will cover upgrading SharePoint 2003/2007 to 2010. More information at

http://www.gr8technologyconferences.com/Pages/Conference/?ConfId=2&Content=Speakers

Upgrading from SP 2003/2007 to SP 2010 will be my session topic for SharePoint Conference on April 5th, 2012 at Philadelphia.

Check out the conference details at:

http://www.gr8technologyconferences.com/Pages/philadelphia-20120405-Sessions/

I will share “Gotchas” based on numerous upgrade projects that I have been involved with. See you there!

Here are the steps to crawl a RSS Feed using FAST Search Web Crawler

1) Locate the RSS feed URL

2) Configure FAST Web Crawler

3) Search your RSS Content

Configure FAST Web Crawler:

Locate the xml file under C:\FASTSEARCH\etc\crawlerconfigtemplate-rss.xml. Make a copy of it and place it under C:\FASTSearch\bin\rss.xml

Before making the following changes, check the correct collection name is mentioned for DomainSpecification (example: sp) :

    <section name=”rss”>
            <!– List of start (seed) URIs pointing to RSS feeds. –>
            <attrib name=”start_uris” type=”list-string”>
              <member> http://yourRSSfeed URL </member>
              <!– <member> http://www.contoso.com/feed.rss </member> –>
            </attrib>

  <!– Delay in seconds between requests to a single site. You can mention 5 or 10 seconds –>
        <attrib name=”delay” type=”real”> 5 </attrib>

  <!– Length of crawl cycle expressed in minutes –>
        <attrib name=”refresh” type=”real”> 30 </attrib>

<! — include your domain so web crawler can download the content –> 

<section name=”include_domains”>
            <attrib name=”exact” type=”list-string”>
                <member> sathishtk.com </member>
            </attrib>
        </section>

<! — authenticate FAST Search web crawler to access SharePoint content.  –>

<section name=”passwd”>
 <attrib name=”http://www.sathishtk.com” type=”string”> username:password:sathishtk:auto </attrib>
 </section>

 Save changes and configure crawler to reflect changes made by executing the PowerShell command on the FAST Server

PS C:\FASTSearch\bin> crawleradmin -f rss.xml

Open up QR Server interface page – Example: http://localhost:13280 and test some search words present in your RSS feed. If the above steps are configured right, you should see the search result.

I was facing a minor issue with an upgraded site from 2007 to 2010. Navigate Up button TOP level entry was pointing to a wrong entry. The screen shot below shows 2 masked entries. One entry was showing the right link, where the top level was pointing to the old 2007 site.

This is not the case, when you have issues with the whole Navigate Up button. For that you would remove “PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb” content place holder, this was much simpler than that.

To fix, Navigate to the Portal Site connection under Site Settings – Site Collection Administration (thanks to Samer – colleague who pointed me to the link). Change the settings on the page to “Do not connect to portal site”. That should take care of the issue. Simple step but handy solution.

Recently, I had to troubleshoot a custom .NET web application within SharePoint not loading as it was encountering the following error: ( the web site was deployed to a folder within _layouts)

Cannot create file when that file already exists. (Exception from HRESULT:0X800700B7)

It turns out the culprit was the entries in the web.config for the custom web application. There was some entries in the web.config that was conflicting with SharePoint web.config and the above error occurred.

Suggestion is to remove configsections and controls and try out. If you still encounter errors, try with minimal entries in the web.config such as customErrors, connection strings, app settings, and assemblies. That should fix the error.

Here is how to convert an existing web application configured with Classic Mode Authentication to Claims Based. This can be done using PowerShell.

Note: Once converted from classic to claims, you will not be able to revert the change.

Screen Shot showing web application in Classic Mode

Now, run the Powershell command:

You can see the web application is now converted to Claims Based Authentication:

I will be doing a session on FAST Search 2010 at Atlanta SharePoint Saturday event. Check it out:

http://sharepointsaturday.org/atlanta/speakers/35/SathishTK/

My colleague David Pallmann has just released his book on Windows Azure – Volume I.

I was part of the review group for this book. Check it out.

http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Azure-Handbook-Planning-Technical/dp/145657471X/

Here is my webcast on SharePoint Application Lifecycle Management

Download the Recorded Webcast from Neudesic.com

Join me at Atlanta SharePoint UserGroup monthly meeting. The topic I will be presenting is SharePoint ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) Deep Dive.

More Information here.

Registration Link

See you there!