FCPakistan.com – Pakistan’s First SharePoint Site!

Been ages since I blogged, but would like to share FCPakistan.com – which to my knowledge is Pakistan’s first SharePoint 2010 WCM site. So what is it?

Food Connection Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd, Pakistan’s Premiere Food Guide. A Brilliant Platform where Food Industry Gets their due recognition. Food Businesses Thrive, while consumers have the time of their Life. Search Eateries by Hot Deals, Price, Cuisine, Location, Specialty & Facilities.

Visit www.fcpakistan.com today, for the first 3 months the FCPK team are giving away Rs. 500 vouchers to new members, best of all membership is free!

Busy Weeks Ahead, Register to Attend SharePoint 2010 Events

A couple of months back started  Maventor to focus on Training and Mentoring activities around SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 and it’s kept me really busy, here is my schedule for the next few months. I encourage the readers to attend the executive briefs or one of the courses.

• SharePoint 2007 Development in Darwin (15-20 of February)
• Hands On Days in Melbourne – For early adopters and Microsoft customers
  • IT Professionals (25^th of Feb)
  • Developers (26^th of Feb)
• SharePoint 2010 Executive Briefing in Brisbane (1^st of March)
• SharePoint 2010 for Developers in Brisbane (1^st of March)
• SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals in Brisbane (1^st of March)
• SharePoint 2010 Executive Briefing in Melbourne (2^nd of March)
• SharePoint 2010 for IT Professionals in Melbourne (1^st of March)
• SharePoint 2010 for Developers in Melbourne (2^nd of March)
• SharePoint 2010 Executive Briefing in Melbourne (3rd  of March)
• Hands On Days in Sydney – For early adopter and Microsoft customers
  • IT Professionals (8^th of March)
  • Developers (9^th of March)
• Ignite SharePoint 2010 IT PRO Training for Microsoft Partners in Melbourne (16 and 17 of March)
• Ignite SharePoint 2010 IT PRO Training for Microsoft Partners in Sydney (23^rd and 24^th of March)
• Ignite SharePoint 2010 IT PRO Training for Microsoft Partners in Canberra (25^th and 26^th of March)
• Hands On Days in Canberra – For early adopters and Microsoft customers
  • IT Professionals (30^th of March)
  • Developers (31^h of March)
• Hands On Days in Canberra – For early adopters and Microsoft customers
  • IT Professionals (7^th of April)
  • Developers (8t^h of April)
• SharePoint 2010 Readiness Summit – Developer Track Melbourne (5 Days in April)
• SharePoint 2010 Readiness Summit – IT Professional Track Melbourne (5 Days in April)
• SharePoint 2010 Readiness Summit– Developer Track Sydney (5 Days in May)
• SharePoint 2010 Readiness Summit– IT Professional Track Sydney (5 Days in May)
• A couple more SharePoint courses coming in Darwin (stay tuned in April time frame for 5 days)
• Other Hands On Days for SharePoint 2010 Adelaide and Perth to follow stay tuned in April and May
• Microsoft Certified Masters SharePoint 2010 Instructors and Upgrade ALPHA in Redmond (19^th of May to 28^th of May)
  
• SharePoint 2010 Readiness Summit – Developer Track Brisbane (5 Days in June)
• SharePoint 2010 Readiness Summit – Summit – IT Professional Track Brisbane (5 Days in June)

Announcing SharePoint 2010 Hands On Days Australia!

SharePoint 2010 Hands On Days come to Australia! Train with a Microsoft Certified Master and other MCTs to start building with and deploying SharePoint 2010. Hands On Day’s offer SharePoint 2010 focused and accelerated ‘hands on’ learning for Australian Developers and IT Professionals.

Learn more and register at www.handsonday.com

Quick and Easy: Email Enabled Libraries in SharePoint

I only get a chance to setup email enabled libraries once every 4 months or so. My last setup was a couple of weeks back. This was for one of our customer who wanted to use incoming email functionality to support some reports coming from external sources; this particular customer was running Microsoft Exchange 2007.

Before I get into the actual steps, here are some basics: For email enabled libraries to work in SharePoint, you need at least one server in your SharePoint Farm to host the SMTP service (on Windows 2008 and above this service is still administrated through IIS 6.0 Manager) this service stores routed email in a drop folder from where SharePoint timer job picks it up periodically and puts it in the document library linked to an email alias (the LibName part in LibName@companyname.com). The timer jobs run on all severs connected to the Farm but only the server where the mail is forwarded to will actually process it. When Distributed Lists management is turned on SharePoint will create Contacts for all incoming email library under the selected organisational unit.

Here are some quick sanitised steps that I documented for the customer:

1. Create an Organisational Unit under you domain called SPMail, for example the one I created has an LDAP Path: OU= SPMail,OU=Melbourne,DC=COMPANYNAME,DC=COM
   1. On Windows Server 2008 and above ADSI Edit is preinstalled and one of best tool to find the LDAP Paths
2. On the newly created OU setup Delegate rights with Full Control for the Central Administration\Timer Service Account: DOMAIN\ServiceAccountName
   1. Full Control is not Necessary, you can get by Read, Write
3. On your DNS Server add a new MX record, to a new subdomain like SPMAIL such that your entry looks like SPMAIL.COMPANYNAME.COM with Mail Server Priority set to 20 and DNS pointing to the SharePoint box (for example SPAPP.COMPANYNAME.COM) in your farm with the SMTP service running locally.
4. Open up Exchange 2007 Management console and under Hub Transport create a new Send Connector called SharePoint Mail
   1. Use the following for the Address Space value: SPMAIL.COMPANYNAME.COM
   2. Under Smart Host Routing setting select: Use DNS for MX Records
      
5. Install and setup the SMTP service on SPAPP.COMPANYNAME.COM for domain: SPMAIL.COMPANYNAME.COM with the drop folder set to its default value
6. Finally setup the Incoming Email settings under operations in Central Administration (<CA SITE>/_admin/IncomingEmail.aspx)

For testing simply enable email on Shared Document library under the Central Admin Site. This can be done by going to list settings and the clicking on the Incoming Email Settings link.

Library: <CA SITE>/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Email Alias: SharedDocuments@SPMAIL.COMPANYNAME.COM

Verify that a new Contact is created in AD and Exchange and then send an email using you email client to verify if emails are being routed to the library.

How to exclude content from being crawled within SharePoint Sites

A client of mine did not want parts of their Intranet based on MOSS 2007 to be searched; now that’s quite easy to do with Crawl rules. As they wanted strict control over the content that can be crawled I trained them on how to control ‘the crawl’ behaviour for content within SharePoint.

There are three places within SharePoint where end users can change search visibility setting or exclude content for search.

1. Change Visibility for a Web site: In the Site Settings page, site owners can click the Search Visibility link to go to the Search Visibility page SharePoint. In the Indexing Site Content group, selecting the No option to will exclude all content within the site. The crawler will in turn simply skip the site and not include any of its content in the index.
2. Exclude Site Columns: In the Site Settings page, site owners can click the Searchable Columns link to go to the Search Settings for Fields page in SharePoint. This page will enumerate all the site columns defined at the current site level. Selecting the NoCrawl check box for the site columns will exclude them from future crawls.
3. Exclude Lists: The last option for excluding content exists at the level of the SharePoint list settings. It enables list owners to exclude the list and all the content within it from crawls. In the settings page of the list, click the Advanced Settings link. Selecting the No option under Search Available for crawl tells the crawler to exclude the specific list from a crawl.

Also if there are certain pages or entire site content that site designers don’t want to be crawled, simply putting the no index directive in the head section of the master page or layout page’s mark-up will stop the SharePoint crawler from crawling the pages:

 <META NAME=” ROBOTS” CONTENT=” NOHTMLINDEX”/>