SharePoint Tools: A new CAML Query Designer

Praveen Battula has released a new tool on his blog to work with CAML Queries. Not only you can export the plain CAML Query it self, the tool lets you generate code for C#, JavaScript, WebServices and PowerShell as well.

Have a look at his blog:
http://praveenbattula.blogspot.de/2015/02/download-caml-query-designer.html

The future of Forms for SharePoint 2016 and Office 365

As you might remember, Microsoft announced last year, that InfoPath will be discontinued. It seemed the product would come to an end and would only be supported until April 2023. All efforts from Microsoft were heading into Forms designed on SharePoint Lists, or better known as FoSL.

Well these plans have changed. As it seems Microsoft will not be able to provide FoSL on time for the next SharePoint release. Instead they announced that SharePoint 2016 will indeed have full support for InfoPath Forms for Office 365 and On Premises installations. However, a new version of InfoPath will not be part of the next Office.

Read the full story at:
http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/

Code Snippet: Iterating thru all websites

How to iterate thru all SiteCollections and containing the Websites. This script also shows a progressbar on screen:

$sites = Get-SPSite -Limit All
$siteIter = 0
foreach($site in $sites) {
    Write-Progress -PercentComplete (($siteIter / $sites.Count) * 100) -Activity "Iteration Sites" -Status $site.HostName
    $webIter = 0
    
    # Do something here
    
    foreach($web in $site.AllWebs) {
        Write-Progress -PercentComplete (($webIter / $site.AllWebs.Count) * 100) -Activity "Iteration Webs" -Status $web.Title -Id 2
        Write-Host $web.Title
        $webIter++
        
        # Do something here
    }
    $siteIter++
}

Code Snippet: Load the SharePoint PowerShell Module

How do you load the PowerShell module for SharePoint?

Addendum: I've added a try/catch block to the code. This way you can be sure the module is loaded.

# Loading SharePoint Module
try {
    if ((Get-PSSnapin "microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell" -ea silentlycontinue) -eq $null)
    {
        Add-PSSNapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell
    }
}
catch {
    throw "Microsoft SharePoint PowerShell AddIn initialization failed"
    exit 3
}

Remove the performance breaks when using VMWare 5.0 and Windows Cluster services

There are probably a lot of SharePoint Farms that use a Microsoft SQL cluster. Even now with new possibilities like Always-On for SQL 2012. But not only if you use SharePoint might this be of interest for you.

About a year ago, a customer of mine had some very bad performance with his SQL Server. The SQL was version 2008 R2 using the Windows Cluster Service hosted on a VMWare ESX 5.0 private cloud. Nothing unusual and of course the first thoughts were pointing to the VMWare servers. But let’s take a look at the performance test we performed on the cluster.

Log Parser Studio 2.2

Log files are a hassle. Too many entries and bad formatting make it a challenge to work with logs. So if you are already familiar with Microsofts LogParser, you’ll love to hear that there is an even better way to work with Log files.

Log Parser Studio is a Windows Tool that uses LogParser and gives you a GUI to work with. This way it's easier to create adhoc reports of your logfiles. You can export the query as a script and then automate your tasks.
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Log-Parser-Studio-cd458765

LogParser
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24659

Getting Started with the Log Parser Studio
http://blogs.technet.com/b/karywa/archive/2013/04/21/getting-started-with-log-parser-studio.aspx

Fire up those caches

Picture by Caroline Gutman

If you’re working with SharePoint you probable heard already about something called the Warm-Up Script. It won’t keep you warm in the night and you must ask your partner or cat to do so. The Warm-Up script prefetches SharePoints ASPX pages and loads them into the IIS cache. This will help to improve the user experience. There are different approaches to do this. But beside of the script itself, the proper configuration will get things really started.

This post is

Opening Word file from SharePoint 2010 causes Office to crash

Today I wasn’t able to open a Word file from the SharePoint Server. Every time I opened the document from the server, Word crashed. Saving the file to disk and opening it then worked just fine. What made it even worse was that SharePoint thought the file was opened exclusive for my user account and I couldn’t do any action on the file on the server e.g. deleting. Bugs! I don’t like them, but it’s always a good feeling when you found out how to get rid of ‘em.