SPServiceContext or SPContext in SharePoint 2010

After attending the SharePoint Conference 2009, I’m just trying to get clarification on the use of SPServiceContext and SPContext.

In a couple of the developer sessions, the speakers suggested we should use SPServiceContext now instead of SPContext.

Is there an instance where we should use one over the other or should it now always be SPServiceContext?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

SharePoint Conference 2009 – Day Two

I’ve now managed to get my head around most of the new and enhanced features of SharePoint 2010.

My main focus has been around enterprise search and social computing. Two areas I believe are going to massive, when SharePoint 2010 gets released.

I managed to attend the following sessions;

• SharePoint 2010 Search: Capabilities Deep Dive
• Adoption Strategies for Social Computing
• Microsoft Unified Communications and Collaboration in Action
• Deep Dive into SharePoint 2010 My Sites and Social Networking Architecture
• Search Relevance and Relevance tuning

There has been a large investment in the new and enhanced features. My Sites have become the hub for interacting with people through My Sites, User Profiles, Status Updates, Activity Feeds and Knowledge Mining.

SharePoint Conference 2009 – Day One

Well I made it. After travelling for about 12 hours from London to San Fransico to Las Vegas and managed to get over the jet lag (nothing to do with Vegas!)

Today was about getting to know the new version of SharePoint 2010.

We were given an introduction to the product by Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) and Jeff Tepper (Corporate Vice President). There were some nice little sneak peaks and I was surprised that the first demo was a code demo!

My first break session was the “SharePoint 2010 Overview and What’s New” and this gave me a good overview of all the exciting new features available in SharePoint 2010.

Here is a break down (In no particular order) of some of the most exciting

• PowerPivot (Project ‘Gemini’)
• Taxonomy management including tagging and ratings,
• Business Connectivity Services and External Content Types
• Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint
• Excel, Access and Visio Services and the Office Web Apps
• Sandboxed Solutions

There is a shed load of more features and I’ll blog on them, when I know more.

I then made it along to the ‘Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2010′ and ‘Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010′. The Social Computing of SharePoint 2010 has been greatly improved and their definitely seems to be a nod to Facebook there (The status update and note board).

Pictures from the SharePoint Conference 2009

Some pictures from the conference so far

SharePoint Conference 2009

Just received confirmation that I’ll be attending the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas.

I’m really looking forward to this event and can’t wait to see all the new features of SharePoint 2010.

See you there!

My Productivity Toolset

I use a range of devices in a number of different locations and have always found it difficult to find the products to help manage my various sources of content.

My problem is that at home I’m a Mac man, at work I’m a PC man and out and about I pray at the altar of the iPhone.

I like products that focus on a particular job and do it well, I have yet to find a product that covers them all (though here’s waiting for SharePoint 2010 Server ). I need these products to be able to easily switch between work and home and back again (that’s why SharePoint is not in the equation).

And my last crtieria? It has to have a good old desktop client version. As much as I love “the cloud”, in my world the “the cloud” is were my data lives and not were I do my work.

These are the core areas I need to manage in my life and the products I’ve found best at doing that. Please feel free to add your favorites.

Email / Contacts / Calendar

Thanks to companies now supplying low cost Exchange accounts through hosted solutions, this is a viable way of managing email, contacts and calendar through all devices and locations.

You need to make sure the companies includes Outlook Anywhere / Exchange Web Services and OWA, this will then tick all the boxes. I can access it through Outlook client on my PC, using the Exchange Integration in OSX Snow Leopard and through my iPhone with Exchange Integration. And when I don’t have access to any of this I can access it through OWA.

Task Management

I sort of adopt to the GTD method of managing tasks, I like the idea of having projects and contexts when managing tasks and I like to store all my tasks together from both work and home.

EasyTask Manager seems to tick all the boxes again. It provides a client for both the Mac, PC and iPhone and has a web interface. Some of the clients are not perfect, but they seem to be ironing out all the problems quickly.

Scrapbook

I like to use a scrapbook to pull together all my notes, links and other odds and sods. I had previously used OneNote for this, but it tied all my information down to my PC.

Evernote is my tool of choice now. It provides a client for the Mac, PC, iPhone and web (It also has a Windows Mobile client). It has browser and email addins that allow you to take snapshots of sites or emails (very useful for storing links to sites if the site then disappear).

News Feeds

Using a combination of NetNewsWire for the Mac / iPhone and FeedDemon on the PC and Google Reader to sync, I’m able to keep up-to-date with all my favourite feeds, flag ones that I may need to reference again. This is then all kept synced up between all my devices by Google Reader.

Blogs / Twitter

I like to use Ecto for the Mac, Windows Live Writer (I wish they did a Mac version) and WordPress for the iPhone as my blog is hosted through WordPress.

For Twitter I’m not really into the over complicated tools like TweetDeck and prefer to stick the simple client like Tweetie which I use on the Mac and the iPhone.

Document Management

Mesh is my tool of choice for managing my documents and making them available to all my devices. It doesn’t currently support the iPhone, but rumor has it that it’s not too far off.

Invalid object name ‘Groups’ when using PSCONFIG

I have been trying to rebuild a development environment recently using DBA created tables.

Every time I ran the PSCONFIG -cmd configdb -create command it ran and then threw an  error.

The error message above was logged.

After looking through the tables, I noticed that some of the tables in both the config db and the config admin db had been created under the user account I had been running the installation under and some had been created under dbo.

There are a couple of SQL scripts in the layouts folder under SQL that are run to create the schemas and here I think is the problem.

Most of the CREATE TABLE statements using the following syntax CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TableName], but there are a few tables in both databases that just use CREATE TABLE TableName.

The error occurs because further SQL script is then referencing [dbo].[TableName], but these tables don’t exist under the dbo user schema, so it errors.

The solution is to change the SQL scripts so all CREATE TABLE statements have [dbo]. infront of them. Before you run it again you will need to clear out all the objects from both the databases.

We have some rather quirky database rights in our environment, but the install account and the farm service account both had dbcreator and secuirtyadmin rights and were in the db_owner role for each of the databases. 

Site Definition Woes

Can someone help me please, I have the following problem.

I developed a custom site definition solution in Visual Studio 2005 using the following process detailed in my post earlier.

I had no problems in my development environment and added the solution into our UAT environment using STSADM and deployed through Central Administration.

The template was successfully deployed and able to provision sites based on that template.

After a cycle of UAT some changes and bugs came back which I fixed in my solution and tested in the development environment no problems.

I took the wsp files and used the UPGRADESOLUTION operation in STSADM. I tested the provisioning of a new site and it worked, but when I checked an existing site that had been provisioned from the site definition the homepage just displayed a 404 – file not found.

I am still able to view the settings of the site if I access the _layouts pages. I have tried resetting the site to the site definition in the Site Settings with no luck.

I have opened the site in SharePoint Designer and can see all the files including the default.aspx site that cannot be found, but if I try to open it comes back with a soap error saying the file does not exist.

Nothing is entered in the event logs or SharePoint logs.

Please help I am desperate, we are meant to be going live in 2 weeks and am not very confident if I am unable to upgrade an existing site definitions through a solution.