With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can build complete, rich, reusable, process-centric applications on the SharePoint platform that integrate external data. SharePoint Designer 2010 makes it possible to build composite applications by configuring or designing components such as data sources, lists, content types, views, forms, workflows, and external content types — all without writing any code. Further, SharePoint Designer 2010 now provides tools for all of the important components in a SharePoint solution: “You don’t have to leave SharePoint Designer to build your solution.”

Workflows

SharePoint Designer 2010 includes major improvements to workflows. You can now rapidly design workflows that facilitate a wide range of business and human processes. And many new building blocks means that workflows are more flexible and powerful and capable of modeling more complex business logic and process

Reusable workflows

With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create workflows that are easily reusable. You can create a reusable workflow in the top-level site in the site collection, and that workflow is globally reusable — meaning that the workflow can be associated to any list or library in the site collection. You can also create a reusable workflow in any subsite in the site collection; this workflow is available for reuse in that particular subsite

Export workflows

Now you can export a reusable workflow from one site collection and then upload and activate that workflow in a different site collection. SharePoint Designer 2010 supports exporting a workflow as a solution package or .wsp file

Association columns

If your reusable workflow requires certain columns to be present in the list or library that it is associated to, you can add those columns as association columns. Association columns get added automatically to a list or library when a reusable workflow is associated to that list or library

Associate workflows with content types

When you create a reusable workflow, you can choose to filter your reusable workflow to a specific content type. Then, in the browser, you can associate your reusable workflow either to that specific content type or to any content type that inherits from that content type. If you associate a workflow to a site content type, you make that workflow available for all items of that content type in every list and library to which that site content type has been added

Site workflows

You can think of a site workflow as a general site-wide process. A site workflow is associated to a site — not to a list, library, or content type. So unlike most workflows, a site workflow is not running on a specific list item. In the browser, you can start a site workflow or view the status of running site workflows by clicking Site Workflows on the Site Actions menu

Edit the workflows included with SharePoint Server

The three most popular workflows in SharePoint Server — the Approval, Collect Feedback, and Collect Signatures workflows — have been completely rebuilt as declarative workflows, meaning that they are now fully customizable in SharePoint Designer 2010. These workflows are event-driven, and all of the important events in the workflow are surfaced in the workflow editor, both for each task in the process and for the process as a whole. For example, you can easily add conditions and actions to define what happens when each task is assigned, expired, or completed.

Design a custom approval process

SharePoint Designer 2010 includes three new approval actions: Assign Item for Approval, Assign Item for Feedback, and General Task Process. The “big three” workflows included in SharePoint Server 2010 — the Approval, Collect Feedback, and Collect Signatures workflows — are built with these actions. The approval actions surface all of the important events in an approval process, making it easy for you to design a human workflow process where many people interact or collaborate on a specific document

Impersonation steps

In the previous version of SharePoint Designer, a workflow always impersonated the user who started the workflow and ran with that user’s permissions. Now, in SharePoint Designer 2010, you can now use impersonation steps to have the workflow perform actions by impersonating the workflow author instead of the workflow initiator. Impersonation steps are very useful in approval and publishing scenarios, where the people submitting content for approval and the people approving content have different permissions

Visio integration

Suppose that your organization has a business analyst who best understands the process that a workflow needs to capture. With SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visio Professional 2010, a business analyst can now sketch out workflows graphically in Visio. Visio Professional 2010 includes a Microsoft SharePoint Workflow template that includes shapes for all of the workflow conditions and actions. You can start in Visio and then export to SharePoint Designer, or you can start in SharePoint Designer and then export to Visio, or you can iterate on a workflow design with many roundtrips between both programs without losing any of the workflow settings

Workflow visualizations

You can easily view the status of any running workflow on the Workflow Status page. With a workflow visualization, a Visio diagram of your workflow is automatically created and displayed in a Visio Web Part on the Workflow Status page. The workflow visualization shows a “live” view of exactly where a specific workflow is at. Workflow visualizations require Visio Professional 2010 installed on your computer and Visio Graphics Services running on the server

InfoPath forms

If your server is running SharePoint Server 2010 (not SharePoint Foundation 2010 alone), all of the workflow forms — the association form, initiation form, and task forms — are now InfoPath 2010 forms. It is easy to change the appearance and layout of InfoPath forms, and you can add validation rules to an InfoPath form. To edit a workflow form in InfoPath 2010, just click the form and InfoPath opens directly from SharePoint Designer 2010

Substeps & new workflow actions

SharePoint Designer 2010 includes many new building blocks such as substeps and new workflow actions. For example, if your workflow is associated to a document library or if it is filtered to the Document content type, a group of contextual Document Set actions appear. A document set is a new feature in SharePoint Server 2010 whereby a group of documents are treated as a single unit, so a workflow action for a document set will iterate on all items in that document set. Other new workflow actions include utility actions to manipulate strings and dates; a new relational action that uses Active Directory to look up a person’s manager; and new list actions that a workflow can use to set permissions on a list item


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can build complete, rich, reusable, process-centric applications on the SharePoint platform that integrate external data. SharePoint Designer 2010 makes it possible to build composite applications by configuring or designing components such as data sources, lists, content types, views, forms, workflows, and external content types — all without writing any code. Further, SharePoint Designer 2010 now provides tools for all of the important components in a SharePoint solution: “You don’t have to leave SharePoint Designer to build your solution.”


Redesigned user interface

The user interface of SharePoint Designer 2010 has been completely redesigned to “put the ‘SharePoint’ into SharePoint Designer.” Now all of the important components in a site or solution — lists and content types, views and forms, workflows, data sources and external content types, page layouts and master pages — are easy to find. And it’s easy to see how components are related to each other — for example, when you view the summary page for a list, you can easily see all of that list’s views, forms, workflows, content types, and custom actions.

File tab
When you start SharePoint Designer 2010, the new File tab makes it easy to get started. Here you can open existing sites or create new sites. You can also open pages or sites that you have recently worked with, and add new components such as lists and workflows to the current site

Site summary page
Every site has a summary page where you can change settings or manage various aspects of your site. For example, you can now manage permissions directly from SharePoint Designer 2010. And like every summary page, the site summary page shows related components — for example, here you can easily view and navigate to all subsites in the current site

Navigation pane
The Navigation pane makes it easy to find and navigate to all of the important components in a site that you use to build a solution. Whether you’re modeling your data and need to work with lists and content types, or whether you’re designing workflows to add the logic that “glues” your solution together, you can find the components you need in the Navigation pane

Gallery pages
Gallery pages make it easy to find and edit any of the important components of your solution. In the Navigation pane, clicking any component will show you a gallery of all such components in the current site — for example, you can easily see all workflows or lists in the site. On a gallery page, just click any component to edit it.

Summary pages
A summary page gives you an all-up view or portal into all of the pieces that make up a component. For example, the summary page for a content type shows you the forms and workflows for that content type. The summary page for a list shows you the views, forms, content type, custom actions, and workflows for that list. From a summary page, you can edit the settings for that component — such as the name or permissions — or you can edit the component itself.

List & content type editors
With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can edit all of the important components that comprise a SharePoint solution — including lists and content types. You use lists and content types to model your data, so these components are often at the core of a solution. And now SharePoint Designer 2010 provides a full-page editor for both lists and content types. You can quickly edit the columns and settings of a list or content type in one place, without having to navigate between pages as in the browser

Navigation bar
As you navigate through the components in a site, the Navigation bar can help you understand where you are in the site and how the various components are related to each other. The Navigation bar displays breadcrumbs that show where you are in the site hierarchy. There are also Forward and Backward buttons, a Recent Pages drop-down menu that shows your recent navigation history, and drop-down menus for each node that show all of the children for any page or component in the hierarchy

Ribbon
The Ribbon will make you more efficient and productive in SharePoint Designer 2010 because the Ribbon surfaces all of the important features in the right context for what you’re working on. For example, if you’re working with a Data View in the page editor, contextual tabs appear on the Ribbon that provide all of the tools and options for working with Data Views: conditional formatting, filtering and sorting, adding or removing columns, asynchronous updates, and more are available with just a single click.

Zoom to Contents
A SharePoint page can have a lot going on with content placeholders, Web Part zones, controls, and other page elements. When you’re working with a SharePoint page, often you want to focus on a single element, such as PlaceHolderMain or a Web Part zone or a Data View. Now you can select any of those elements, and then click Zoom to Contents on the Ribbon. After you zoom to contents, both Design view and Code view will show only the element that you want to work with, so you won’t be distracted by the visual clutter or code on the rest of the page

All Files view
The new user interface in SharePoint Designer 2010 focuses on surfacing all of the important components in a SharePoint solution. If you used the Folder List in previous versions of SharePoint Designer, you can still have the experience of working with the files and folders in a site by using All Files view.


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Out of the box templates

SharePoint Foundation includes Pre-defined alert templates for e-mail and SMS messages

Pre-defined Alert Template Location: %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML

Email Template: AlertTemplates.xml
SMS Template: AlertTemplates_SMS.xml

Template includes information such as the format, contents and properties for the alert email and SMS messages.

Customize alerts

(1) Create a copy of the xml template file that you need to change - AlertTemplates.xml and AlertTemplates_SMS.xml

(2) Modify the copy of the alert template file - (The original template file should not be modified)

You can make changes to the template such as add a button/link, include an image or privacy information, modify the look of the alert etc.
To customize the appearance of alerts, modify the css by using the Format element.

Resource variables listed within the template definition file, such as $Resources:Alerts_anything_filter_shortname, can be found in core.resx (in the local_drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Resources folder)

If you are modifying any element other than the Format element, both the email and the SMS templates should be modified, in parallel - the 2 templates should be in sync except for the Format element.

(3) Load the custom templates by using the command: stsadm -o updatealerttemplates. I haven't found a direct equivalent Powershell command.

If both, the email and the SMS template are updated, the UpdateAlertTemplates command needs to be run twice, once for each of the two files.

(4) Restart IIS

(5) The SharePoint Timer service may need to be restarted.


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Introduction

If you install a feature in your MOSS 2007 farm and after that the feature folder or the feature manifest file accidently gets deleted from your Web Front End servers file system, you will get the error "Failed to find the XML file at location '12\Template\Features\Feature_Name\feature.xml" when you go to Site Settings --> Galleries --> Workflows. This is because your feature is still installed in the farm, and when you view the workflow gallery page, the page will go through all the features installed in your farm, and then read their corresponding manifest files from the file system to determine if the feature has a corresponding workflow associated to it. If the feature is installed and the corresponding manifest file has been deleted, this error will be thrown.


Possible Causes of the Error

There are a couple of reasons (that I can think of) why you might get this error:

1. Your current MOSS 2007 farm is an upgrade from a previous version (MOSS beta or SPS 2003). Some features were part of the previus version of MOSS but now have been deprecated
2. You installed the feature in your farm and accidently deleted the feature manifest file from the file system of the web front end server. Feature folders are located at "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES".


Resolving the Error

There are two possible resolutions to this problem:

1. If you have the original feature manifest file and the feature folder, just copy that entire folder back on the file system of all web front end servers at the path mentioned above (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES). Ask developers on your team if they have deployed any features in the farm and get the manifest file from them if you don't have them.

2. This second resolution is for the scenario if you have completely lost the feature manifest file, or if the feature was in an older version of MOSS, and now you have upgraded your MOSS farm and the feature has been deprecated. The only way out in this situation is to uninstall the feature using an stsadm comand. Normally, you can uninstall features by using the feature name and stsadm, but in this situation, because there is no feature manifest available, you will have to uninstall the feature using the feature GUID. Following is a sample code that you can use to figure out the GUID of the feature that has a missing manifest file. Just put this into a C# Cosole Application and execute on your web front end server:

List<Guid> featIDs = new List<Guid>();
            foreach (SPFeatureDefinition featdef in SPFarm.Local.FeatureDefinitions)
            {
                try
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(featdef.RootDirectory + "-------" + featdef.Id.ToString() + "-------" + featdef.GetTitle(System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture));
                }
                catch
                {

                    //This code will be executed if the feature does not have the manifest file.
                    Console.WriteLine("################################################");
                    Console.WriteLine("Error Ocurrred! Attempting to get feature ID of the feature without manifest file...:");
                    Console.WriteLine(featdef.Id.ToString());
                 }
                finally
                {
                    Console.WriteLine();
                    Console.WriteLine("Press enter to view next feature");
                    Console.ReadLine();
                }

          }

Once you have the feature GUID, you can use the following stsadm command to get rid of this feature:

stsadm.exe -o uninstallfeature -id <feature_giud> -force.

Once you do this, we should be good!


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 includes Microsoft Business Connectivity Services, which are a set of services and features that provide a way to connect SharePoint solutions to sources of external data and to define external content types that are based on that external data. External content types resemble content types and allow the presentation of and interaction with external data in SharePoint lists (known as external lists) and Web Parts. External systems that Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can connect to include SQL Server databases, SAP applications, Web services (including Windows Communication Foundation Web services), custom applications, and Web sites based on SharePoint. By using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services, you can design and build solutions that extend SharePoint collaboration capabilities to include external business data and the processes that are associated with that data

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services solutions use a set of standardized interfaces to provide access to business data. As a result, developers of solutions do not have to learn programming practices that apply to a specific system or adapter for each external data source. Microsoft Business Connectivity Services also provide the run-time environment in which solutions that include external data are loaded, integrated, and executed.


Typical solutions based on Business Connectivity Services

Information workers typically perform much of their work outside the formal processes of a business system. For example, they collaborate by telephone or e-mail messages, use documents and spreadsheets from multiple sources, and switch between being online and offline. Solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can be designed to fit within these informal processes that information workers use:

- They can be built by combining multiple services and features from external data systems to deliver solutions that are targeted to specific roles
- They support informal interactions and target activities and processes that occur mostly outside formal enterprise systems. Because they are built by using SharePoint 2010 Products, solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services promote collaboration
- They help users perform tasks within the familiar user interface of SharePoint 2010 products.


Here are some examples of solutions that are based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services:

- Help desk An enterprise implements its help desk, which provides internal technical support, as a solution that is based on Microsoft Business Connectivity Services. Support requests and the technical support knowledge base are stored in external databases and are integrated into the solution by using the Business Data Connectivity service. The solution displays both support requests and the knowledge base in the Web browser. Information workers can view their current requests and tech support specialists view the requests assigned to them. Workflows take support issues through each of their stages. Managers on the technical support team can view dashboards that display help desk reports. Typical reports indicate the number of support issues assigned to each support specialist, the most critical issues currently, and the number of support incidents that are handled by each support specialist during a given time period

- Sales Dashboard A sales dashboard application helps sales associates in an organization quickly find the information that they need and enter new data. Sales orders and customer information are managed in an external database and integrated into the solution by using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services. Depending on their roles, team members can view sales analytics information, individual team members’ sales performance data, sales leads, and a customer’s contact information and orders. Sales professionals can view their daily calendars, view tasks assigned to them by their managers, collaborate with team members, and read industry news


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

We are giving you this information because we found it the most useful hub for AAM data in SharePoint 2007. There is probably no reason ever to be using this in a live production environment.   If you find you are reading this late a night or on the weekend and you are trying AAM to get a live farm working you are probably already in trouble.

The one time we were going to use AAM was to allow the Central Admin server to work on the URL for the Intranet in a farm.  In pre-production we got this working using AAM, but the difficulty caused us to step back and speak to some of the more level heads on our team.  What we decided was that AAM would impose a great deal of risk on the project and we answered back on the requirement.  Once we explained the risk to making your Central Admin a mapping to your intranet URL the client understood and we simply dropped the requirement.

So with that warning please feel free to read on……

To avoid many questions and simplify troubleshooting, we would suggest this order when configuring AAM, which worked for me so far:

1. Understand what AAM is, and what is it being used for in your particular case
2. Create a top level site collection in the application that you are trying to configure ( like http://mymossserver )
3. Browse the site, make sure it works
4. Complete the network configuration for the alternate URL that you are planning to use ( like http://intranet.mycompany.com ). If you do not know how to do this part, get your network administrator involved. This is a fundamental requirement to get it working
5. Create the host header entries on IIS for the web application you are trying to configure. If you do not know how to do this, get your IIS admin, or system admin (whomever configures IIS in your environment) involved. This is a fundamental requirement to get it working
6. Then browse the site using the new url you have configured. If you have configured it correctly, you should be able to browse the sharepoint site with the configured URL ( http://intranet.mycompany.com ), but redirected to the default zone mapping you have at this point ( http://mymossserver )... This means the network is capable of transporting the request to IIS, and IIS is capable of handing the request to the correct SharePoint web application
7. Then add the AAM for the desired zone in central admin, and make sure you have ONE mapping configured for each zone. (intranet zone in this case) Beware, the default zone will be selected when you open the page, you probably want to CHANGE IT
8. Browse the site with the new URL (http://intranet.mycompany.com). Voila ! Note: If you added two mappings to the same zone, you will see the exact same symptom of getting redirected to the first URL mapping in that zone...

Also remember; the zone and the URL mapping should be ONE-TO-ONE, not ONE-TO-MANY, and not MANY-TO-ONE. There is nothing in the UI to prevent you from entering the same url for different zones, or add two URLs to the same zone, so you can add it, but it either won't work as expected at all, or it will be partially broken. In total, you have 5 total AAM available, one for each zone.

Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

The new packaging and deployment stuff for SharePoint 2010 is certainly a lot better than VSeWSS but there are a few things missing, such as the ability to add a WCF service as a project item. One of these days I’ll build a template to do it but for now here’s a quick step by step guide.

Add SVC file to Layouts folder

To make a Windows Communication Framework service available we need to host it somewhere. Since SharePoint runs on IIS, we need to create a .svc file with details of the service implementation. Of course before we create the file we need somewhere to put it and for the purposes of this demonstration we’ll use a custom subfolder within the %sproot%\TEMPLATE\Layouts folder. We can set up this folder automatically using our Visual Studio project

1. From the Project menu select Add SharePoint “Layouts” Mapped Folder. You’ll notice that a new folder is added to the solution
2. We can now go ahead and add our MyWCFService.svc file. In the Layouts\<MyProjectName> folder. Add a new XML File named MyWCFService.svc
3. Replace the contents of the file with the following code

Token Replacement in Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 allows the use of replaceable tokens when creating SharePoint solution packages. Our .svc file makes use of the token $SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$ that will be replaced when the package is built, by the 4 part assembly name for the associated assembly. However, tokens are not automatically replaced in files with an .svc extension. Thankfully this is a simple problem to resolve.

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\SharePointTools
2. Open the Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.targets file. You’ll find that this is an Xml format file that defines various configuration settings for building SharePoint projects
3. Find the TokenReplacementFileExtensions element and append svc to the list of file extensions as shown

<%@ Assembly Name="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$"%>
<% @ServiceHost Service="MyProject.MyService" %>


Adding WCF service configuration to SharePoint

As well as an .svc file, IIS also needs to reads the configuration of the WCF service from the web.config file. For the purposes of this quick how-to we’ll make the necessary changes manually

1. Open the web.config file for our application (this will be found at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\web.config if the application is the first application running on port 80).
2. In the system.serviceModel element add the following configuration details

<serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />
<bindings>
    <basicHttpBinding>
        <binding name="MyDemoBinding">
            <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
                <transport clientCredentialType="Ntlm" />
            </security>
        </binding>
    </basicHttpBinding>
</bindings>
<behaviors>
    <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="MyDemoBehavior">
            <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
            <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
        </behavior>
    </serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>
<services>
    <service behaviorConfiguration="MyDemoBehavior" name="MyProject.MyService">
        <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="MyDemoBinding" contract="MyProject.IMyService">
        <identity>
            <dns value="localhost" />
        </identity>
    </endpoint>
    <host>
        <baseAddresses>
            <add baseAddress=”http://localhost/_layouts/MyProjectName” />
        </baseAddresses>
    </host>
    </service>
</services>

Note: In an ideal world we’d add some code to our SharePoint solution that would automatically add the appropriate configuration details to the web.confg file but that's a story for another dayWe’re now ready to deploy the service to SharePoint.

Introduction

There is a lot of hype about claims based authentication, and unfortunately a lot of confusing jargon.   Our goal in this post is to explain what claims based authentication means in plain English. This includes what it enables, and what it doesn’t enable. We are going to try our hardest not to use any technical terminology beyond the bare minimum.

ASPHostCentral.com, as the premier Sharepoint Foundation 2010 Hosting provider, proudly provides this article to any Sharepoint users and certainly we hope it can help you digest the new feature in Sharepoint 2010 Services. For those of you who are looking to host Sharepoint 2010, you can always start with ASPHostCentral.com as the cost is as low as $9.99/month only!


What is authentication?

Authentication is the process of determining if someone is who they claim to be. It answers the question “Who is this guy really?”

In the Microsoft world, authentication is usually performed by Active Directory.  Foe example: I claim to be Tristan, and I prove this to Active Directory by providing my password. Other systems don’t trust me, they trust Active Directory. Active Directory gives systems a bit of data that says “yeah, I personally vouch for this guy. It really is Tristan.”

Now, if everyone used the same Active Directory installation in the same environment, then that’s all we would need. Claims based authentication is not needed in a simple environment like that

But in the real world, things are different. We face three big challenges:
- Privacy regulations and other pieces of legislation are impacting what kind of information we are allowed to capture and store about users, so in some cases we can’t just demand that people give us all of their personal details
- Businesses want to interoperate with other businesses, and government organisations want to provide more integrated services to citizens. However, different systems use different authentication systems (not everyone uses Active Directory, and even when they do, they have different instances.), and businesses want to integrate in a secure, legally compliant manner


What does claims based authentication do?

Claims based authentication is designed to address the two challenges mentioned above

Claims based authentication addresses privacy and other compliance concerns by requesting less specific, less personal information about people, and by trusting other parties or systems to do the “proof of identity” check

Imagine you have a “sell alcohol to public” ecommerce website, and you are in a country where there are only two laws, called Fantasyland. One of these laws says “alcohol may not be sold to people under 18”, and the other law says “people have a right to privacy and web sites aren’t allowed to track individual people”. (If the law was this simple in real life we wouldn’t need lawyers!)

We’ve got two competing concerns here. Firstly we need to ensure that a user is of legal age, while at the same time we’re not allowed to know who that user is! (Again, I blame the lawyers of Fantasyland).

It turns out that in Fantasyland, the Government has set up a web service that users log on to, which authenticates them based on their citizenId and citizenPassword. It then is able to tell other systems that a user is above 18 or not, without revealing who that user is

So we implement our “sell alcohol to public” website by building a claims-aware system. Instead of building the standard “username and password” login mechanisms, we simply ask the Government’s web service to tell us if the user browsing our site is over 18. The claim that our system uses is a “userIsOver18” claim, and the claim value is either yes or no. We simply don’t build any authentication system at all beyond a simple “if (userIsOver18) then..“ statement

By doing this, we address privacy concerns – we don’t know or keep personally identifiable information – while at the same time ensuring that we don’t sell alcohol to someone under 18

Claims based authentication addresses integration of different systems by allowing communications using open standards, and by providing a platform for developing more specialised ‘identity connectors’ between systems


What won’t it do for me?

Claims based authentication won’t address the lifecycle management of identity information. You’ll need a broader solution to that, but your solution may integrate with claims based authentication systems. How do you deal with new staff? How do you handle staff who are on long service leave? How do you handle fake accounts? Microsoft would like you to use their Identity Lifecycle Management application for this kind of thing

We are going to be a little controversial here, and point out what we believe the biggest limitation of claims based authentication. We believe that what enterprise customers really need is claims based authorization.  Claims based authentication may let our system know that a user is a contractor from a partner company, but it alone won’t let me specify a rule that says “all of my company’s financial spreadsheets must not be seen by contractors”. Not only does claims based authentication not provide this capability, but neither do the role-based access controls provided by SharePoint. In fact SharePoint’s role-based access control model itself is too limited to address this. It still needs substantial improvements

The way industry is addressing this is by producing “entitlement management” systems, for specifying access control rules. Microsoft’s current solution, in my opinion, is strongly deficient in this regard. Yes, you can specify per item permissions for each individual financial spreadsheet. But this imposes such a high maintenance overhead that it is unworkable in practice. In my opinion companies like Oracle are well ahead of Microsoft in this field, but by no means does anyone have a complete turn-key solution


How is it implemented?

The claims-based authentication implementation has a number of components. In simplified terms here’s how the pieces of technology fit together

- From a developer’s point of view, the platform that Microsoft is providing is called the Windows Identity Foundation. This used to be called the Geneva framework. It provides a programming library suitable for building claims-aware applications. This library is also used by SharePoint 2010
- Active Directory Federation Services implements services to create, accept, and transform tokens that contain claims
- Cardspace provides a user interface for users to select which “identity card” they wish to use for a particular system

It can be a little daunting if you're new to SharePoint and tasked with doing something you've never done before. Can it be done in SharePoint? Will doing it break your site or the entire installation? Is doing it so difficult it's not worth doing? Configuring anonymous access is one of those tasks because you're dealing with SharePoint (and ASP.NET indirectly), your site collection (and potentially your database indirectly), IIS, and occasionally the file system.

At the time of writing there are a number of sites and blog posts out there offering instructions on how to configure anonymous access. Some are extremely detailed--and depending on what you're trying to accomplish, unnecessarily so. Others are a bit vague. ASPHostCentral.com presents this article to any Sharepoint users and we certainly hope it can help the community, particularly to those who are using Sharepoint 2010 services. In case you are looking to host your Sharepoint 2010 site, you can always start from as low as $9.99/month only!

What you'll find below is a detailed step-by-step set of instructions for setting up anonymous access for a fully branded web site like http://www.westernaustralia.com/. The anonymous access site gives internet users the ability to browse the site without having to log in and another site allows content editors to post content updates using their domain accounts.

A bit of background information

In brief, the steps below involve 'extending an existing web application' (that's a SharePoint concept) by creating a sister web app from an existing web app. The extended web app will use the same content database as the original and will be configured to support anonymous access. The top-level site of the database will also be configured to support anonymous access. As a final option, I'll show you how to disable all other types of non-anonymous access

The following tasks should be completed by a server administrator and assume you have already created a web application the normal way (it might be a good idea to ensure it's working before you begin...)

1. Extend an existing web application

- Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab
- Select Create or extend Web application from the SharePoint Web Application Management section
- Select Extend an existing Web application on the next screen
- Select an existing web application to extend
- Modify the description and configure the port and, optionally, the host header
- Set Allow Anonymous to Yes
- Set the Load Balanced URL Zone to Internet (you may choose another zone here if you like but Internet generally means anonymous so it's the best option).

Once you've extended a web application, the new (i.e. extended) application seems to disapper from the Central Administration screens: it won't be listed as a web application and it doesn't appear as an option when selecting a web app. You will, however, get a new directory for the extended web app under inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\ and a new IIS site; you can also remove the extended site from SharePoint if required

2. Enable anonymous access on the site's corresponding site collection

Although the site collection will be shared by the existing web application and the anonymous web application, the following steps must be completed via the anonymous web application
- Browse to the home page of the extended web application
- Select Site Settings --> Modify All Site Settings from the Site Actions drop-down menu
- Under Users and Permissions, select the Advanced permissions link
- Select Anonymous Access from the Settings menu
- Set Anonymous Access to Entire Web site

Sites inherit the permissions of their parent by default so if you have any problems with a specific site you can ensure it's set to inherit permission from here as well (browse to the site settings screen for the relevant site first).

If you can’t see the Anonymous Access menu item, either the web app hasn’t been configured for anonymous access (see above or below) or you’re accessing the site via the default zone instead of the internet zone—you must access the site via the internet zone (at the extended URL).

3. Test

- Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (or turn off integrated windows authentication if you're using IE); the site should be rendered without the Site Actions menu and other SharePoint controls
- Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx) and you should be prompted to supply login credentials

At this point your site is set up to allow anonymous access but will also prompt you to log in as an administrator if you hit any of the SharePoint screens. This may be desirable but alternatively you may want to lock down external access to your public site; if that's the case, read on...

4. Remove integrated authentication from the anonymous web application (optional)

- Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab
- Select Authentication providers from the Application Security section
- Select the Internet zone (this is the zone specified when the anonymous application was extended).
- Deselect Integrated Windows authentication
- Set Enable Client Integration to No

5. Test

- Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (restart any open browser windows if you receive a 401 error immediately after completing step 4). The home page should appear as it did previously.
- Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx); you should receive a 401 UNAUTHORIZED HTTP error (which, in this case, is appropriate).

6. Troubleshooting

If you run into difficulties (mainly with 401s and 403s popping up where they shouldn't), these ideas may help

- Make sure the page you're trying to access is published. It's easy to forget this simple step in all the excitement but if a page (or image, etc) doesn't have at least one published version MOSS won't serve it up
- Reset IIS--it's quick an easy
- Grant the Read & Execute permission to the Authenticated Users group on the anonymous site's web.config and /bin directory (both can be found below Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories); do the same again for the authenticated site. Permissions on these files are reset every time the authentication method is changed in SharePoint
- Recognise extending a web app creates a new site in IIS and corresponding directory under wwwroot with its own web.config. Ensure the newly-created web.config in the extended site contains everything it needs to; ensure any virtual directories and applications are properly configured
- Redeploy any solutions, features, etc to make sure everything’s where it needs to be (custom private assemblies in particular)
- It's possible your custom code is doing something that requires elevated permissions. The Visual Studio debugger will help you locate the culprit. If you can't remove the offending code, you can wrap it using a delegate:

SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated elevatedAction =
new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(delegate() { /* dodgy stuff */ });
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(elevatedAction);

- If necessary, remove the extended web application using the Central Administration console (also remove the IIS site) and start again


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

SharePoint server has become a very popular enterprise application to enhanced collaboration. As the quantity and value of data stored on SharePoint platform rises, backup and recovery becomes critical and it proves to be a challenge for administrators

ASPHostCentral.com, as the premier reliable and the most affordable Sharepoint 2010 hosting provider, proudly presents this article to anyone who are starting to use Sharepoint 2010 service and hopefully, it can truly help the Sharepoint Community. In case you are looking to host your Sharepoint 2010 site, you can always start from as low as $9.99/month only!

SharePoint offers full farm backup options out of the box: First, the web-based Central Administration backup and restore. Secondly, command-line backup tool stsadm.exe. Third option is SharePoint Designer

Unfortunately, these three options have some limitations: no true item level restore option (if a single item needs to be recovered, the entire site must be restored), manually front end backup necessarily , high restore time, frustrating command-line utilities, no back up directly to tape, no custom solution files backup, no IIS backup, no alternate access mappings backup

Because of the intricate nature of SharePoint server and its vital mission, companies investing in the platform should look for reliable backup and recovery solution able to provide complete range of protection. And since out of the box solution does not offer that level of protection, a third-party solution would be a good investment. This article presents most notable third-party backup and recovery solutions available on the market. Did I miss anything? What is your choice for SharePoint backup and recovery?

Microsoft has listened to its customers and has delivered a complete solution with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM).


Data Protection Manager (DPM)

System Center Data Protection Manager delivers unified data protection for Windows servers and clients as a best-of-breed backup & recovery solution from Microsoft, for Windows environments. DPM 2010 provides the best protection and most supportable restore scenarios from disk, tape and cloud — in a scalable, manageable and cost-effective way

Key Benefits of Data Protection Manager (DPM):
- Recover site collections, individual sites, or an individual document in minutes
- Easy browse and restore of individual sites, documents, lists, ASPX pages, templates, contacts and entire SharePoint databases and systems
- Restore the entire configuration of SharePoint farm including the configuration database, administration content database, and the content databases
- Copy to a network folder or tape for archival purposes
- Restore a single content database to the SharePoint farm


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!