Content organizer feature.

Content organizer is a really cool feature available in SharePoint 2010, This is available at site level and  activation is quiet straightforward, as we always do, navigate to the site features of the site where we plan to use the content organizer and activate the content organizer feature which is mostly the first feature in the list of site features.

As usual, as long as the feature get activated, we are happy and we do not attempt to look any further and enjoy using the content organizer. The only and also the interesting time that we tend to look at this feature in detail is, if it fails during activation or if you want to customize the application of content organizer, if you are in the latter category, the following will help you bit in understanding  a bit of internals of this  feature.

In fact the basic content organizer feature is coming with two features, one is at the site level and the other is at the site collection level. The site collection level feature is hidden and the main content organizer feature is depending on this. The folder names for these two features are DocumentRoutine and DocumentRoutineResources,

The DocumentRoutine is the site level feature and which get activated when the content organizer feature is activated, but this feature as I mentioned above depends on the DocumentRoutineResources hidden site collection level feature, so the DocumentRoutineResources hidden feature is activated by the site collection feature known as "SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection Features"

 


Normally, this feature is always activated by default as such the DocumentRoutineResources is also activated bu default.

As the name implies, DocumentRoutineResources features adds all the required content types and site columns for content organization while the DocumentRoutine feature creates the  two lists, the Drop off library which is available under the libraries and the other is the routing rules list which can be accessed by the link provided at the Site Administration under site settings and also one more link to access the content organizer settings page.

GUIDs of the standard features in SharePoint 2010

We can always goto the hive \template\features and open the feature xml and find the unique ID of the feature that we are after but only intrigue part is most of the time the name appear in the feature folder is different to what we see in the SharePoint feature list either at the site or site collection level, one good example is Content Organizer, the folder name is DocumentRoutine, so I founnd the following link is very usefull in this aspect.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2010/01/07/features-and-their-guid-s-in-sp2010.aspx

Use DataSets in document libraries.

Document sets is a really cool thing in SharePoint 2010, I have read many articals about this and also seen how to get it to use.

Here is the simple steps to get the document set content type into your document library.

- Goto the site collection features and activate the Document Sets feature for the site collection
   Once this is activated, the document sets content type is available for this site collection.
- Goto the library settings of the document library where you like to have the document sets.
- Select the advance settings
- Select Yes for the Allow management of content types under the Content types section and save it.
  Now the Content types section is available under the library settings.
- Click Add fromm existing site content types under the Content Types section.
- Select the Document Set fromm the list.
This is pretty simple but we forget so I decided to keep it here :)

Change the application pool identity in SharePoint 2007.

I know now we are so used to SharePoint 2010, but we still need to support SharePoint 2007 and we always forget the simple things that we always need to have at our finger tips, I reckon this is one of them that we frequently need during development and testing, so I thought of recording this in this post so at least I can come back to this when ever I need it and similarly I thought there may be lot of devs out there who will need this.

Launch central admin and select operations and then select service accounts under security configuration.

Select the application pool that you need to change the identity.

Delete the default SharedServices in SharePoint 2007

The way to delete the default SharedSevices provider when you have only the default one available.

stsadm -o deletessp -title {SharedServices1} -force

Use the correct title instead of the SharedServices1 in case your default name is different. The above will not work if you drop -force.

SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

It is really cool that we can install the SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 even though the installation is not as smooth as on Windows 2008 servers but following the explanation given in the msdn article, we can get it to work.

I installed the SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 (x64), 99% of the installation completed but it failed in executing the dbwrap.exe with the following message in the log file.

Executing command path: 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER14\Server Setup Controller\dbwrap.exe', args: 'timeout=2950'

You can find the log file at C:\Users\[User name]\AppData\Local\Temp\SharePoint Server Setup(201008052159032560).log

To get around this, check the and see whether the SharePoint instance of the sql express is installed in your machine, most likely not, then manually, install the SharePoint instance of sql express and run the configuration wizard to complete the configuration.

This solved my problem and finally I have a stand along SharePoint 2010 in my Windows 7.

Adding a new federated location to search service applicaitons.

As we know the Shared services provider is gone in SharePoint 2010 and instead we have a nice SharePoint service application model. I do not try to explain the difference in details as I found some nice well written article readily available and hit easily by googling. The way I understand, in brief, the consumers can access the service application using the service application proxy which knows how to find out where the application is running. I think that is enough here and my focus is to tell you how to add a new federated location to a search service application.

I recently played with the search service application and I had to add a federated location to the search application automatically, we did that in SharePoint 2007 using SearchContext but it is not an option here in SharePoint 2010, SearchContext is still available but that is marked as obsolete.

So way to do is, by getting all the search service application and iterating through them and adding the new federated location if it is not already existing.

The challenge is how to get all the search service application in the farm.

First get all the services using the SPFarm.Local.Services, and iterate through all the services and find the services of type SearchQueryAndSiteSettingsService. The search applications can be found there.

//Get all the services in this farm
services = Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Local.Services;

//Iterate through all the services to find the SearchQueryAndSiteSettingsServices
foreach (SPService service in services)
{
//All Search service applicaitons are under SearchQueryAndSiteSettingsService
if (service is SearchQueryAndSiteSettingsService)
{
//Get all the search service application.
serviceApplicaiton = service.Applications;

foreach (SPServiceApplication applicaiton in serviceApplicaiton)
{

//Check whether the application is a search service application
if (applicaiton is SearchServiceApplication)
{

//This is a search service applicaiton
searchApplication = (SearchServiceApplication)applicaiton;

//Check whether the new location is already added.
if (!IsLocationExists(searchApplication.LocationConfigurations))
{
//Create a new locaiton
federatedLocation = new LocationConfiguration();

//Import the federated location
GetStream(ref filestream);

federatedLocation.Import(filestream);

searchApplication.AddNewLocationConfiguration(federatedLocation);
}
}
}
}
}