One of the great site templates that comes with SharePoint 2010 is the blog template. For a lot of organisations that are looking to encourage knowledge sharing an internal blogging initiative is often seen as a great first step. Blogs are a concept that many users are familiar with from regular use on the internet and are a great channel for employees to share information without having it feel ‘too corporate’. However, one of the challenges that can exist with a large number of bloggers within a SharePoint solution is how to surface the latest blog posts from around the environment.
On our company intranet we had a similar challenge with our own blogs. The first thought is to aggregate all the posts via the Content Query Web Part, however as many blogs are often created at an individual’s My Site, which is its own site collection, that approach will not work (I’ve discussed approaches to cross site collection aggregation previously). We therefore went with a search based solution to display the latest posts and I have updated the solution for SharePoint 2010.
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During testing of a SharePoint 2010 public facing website we noticed that when using mobile devices anonymous users were getting authentication prompts. Not good! The intended behaviour was to send users to the standard view of the website but SharePoint was detecting mobile browsers and redirecting to the mobile view of the site. We ended up modifying the compat.browser files as pointed out by Randy Drisgill so that all users on all devices got directed to the standard view. It got me thinking about if the out of the box mobile views could ever be used with SharePoint 2010 WCM solutions, and I’m afraid my conclusion has to be probably not!
The closest I could find to others people experiencing the issue was on this TechNet discussion, and also being able to confirm the issue on other public SharePoint sites (e.g. try ?Mobile=1 on http://sharepoint.microsoft.com). To track down what was causing the authentication prompt I created an out of the box Publishing Portal site collection and then enabled anonymous access for it in an extended web application. By forcing my browser to hit the mobile view of a page (by appending ?Mobile=1 to the URL) I could see from Fiddler that I was being redirected to a layouts page at /_layouts/mobile/mblwp.aspx. It seemed to be this page that was returning a 401 error and prompting for authentication.
So a publishing site and an error when hitting a layouts page – that has to be the lock down feature right? It turns out that it was and here are the steps I followed to confirm it.
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The more I work with SharePoint 2010 the more I am starting to love PowerShell. My scripting skills are pretty basic (!) but here are a couple of useful little snippets to get back some information from a site that previously I would have spent a while going through the UI or SharePoint Root – mainly as a reminder for myself!
List all installed features on the farm
It’s really straight forward using the Get-SPFeature command to return all installed features. To provide a little more readability to the output it can be sorted as follows:
By feature display name alphabetically,
Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property DisplayName
By feature ID,
Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property Id
By feature display name alphabetically and grouped by scope,
Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property Scope,DisplayName | FT -GroupBy Scope DisplayName,Id
And to write this to a file to allow for viewing in Notepad, Excel etc,
Get-SPFeature | Sort -Property Scope,DisplayName | FT -GroupBy Scope DisplayName,Id > c:\AllInstalledFeatures.txt
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On my last SharePoint 2010 project (building a public-facing website) I saw that the event log was getting deluged with errors with an Event ID 5548 from the Web Content Management source in the Publishing task category. The detailed event message was:
Event ID 5548
A malformed reusable content HTML fragment was found: A placeholder was found within the HTML Content but there is no ID Section header at the beginning of the HTML.
Although the site was up and running and there was no noticeable impact on the end user, these events were disturbing. Perhaps they indicated something deeper was wrong with the structure of solution?
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I recently saw a tweet by Ian Morrish (@imorrish of wssdemo) pointing to a site where he has kept track of sites built on the SharePoint platform. On its own this is worth a mention but wait – there’s more! He’s also captured additional information, such as country, industry and SharePoint version etc. All of this is presented in the most fantastic Microsoft Live Labs Pivot. I can strongly recommend checking this out.
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