Create site collections in SharePoint 2010

Before creating site collections, you can read how to create a web application in this tutorial. You can see this article if you want to create a site using SharePoint designer.
Site collection is a hierarchy of sites having one top level site with a collection of child sites below it,the top level site is called as Parent site.

Thease are the steps to create a site collection

Step-1:

Go to Start->All Programs->Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products->SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

Step-2:

Click the option Create Site Collection under Application Management.

Step-3:

Then you can use the default web application or else you can cahange the web application by clicking web application dropdown ->Change Web Application.

Step-4:

Then provide Title,Description and the Url name.

Step-5:

Then select a template so goto Collaboration->Team Site, you can also create Blank Site,Document Workspace,Blog,Group Work Site like this.

Step-6:

Provide Usernames in both the two username textboxes,select a Quota template(its not mandatory) and then click ok.

Then one new window is going to open with a message Top-Level Site Sucessfully Created with your Url.

Comparision between Wss and SharePoint

Wss Primary Benefits:

• It provides a feature workspace ,which is responsible for teams to share documents and informations .
• Another feature Libraries provide a better way of creating an important document.
• Deploying team collaboration site is easy so no need for skilled resources.
• It gives acceptable security policy,recycle bin item retrieval and document versioning features.
• Facility of sharepoint designers to customize your teamsite.

SharePoint Primary Benifits:

• It is helpful to create,store,manage centrally using document library settings to define workflow.
• It has features like page layouts and master pages to manage webcontents.
• No need for manual data entry because it provides infoPath client based forms.
• For automating content approval and publishing process it provides workflow tools.
• Dashboard capabilities,key performance indicator,Report center is here to manage critical bussiness data in a better way.
• Search center,Business Data Catalog,Excel services are here to find information and acess the information from the browser.
• Working offline with lists and libraries using outlook is another important feature of sharepoint.

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a web based platform having tools and technologies by which different digital information of an organization is going to create, store, share and manage in a centralized location.

This helps the business user to create,deploy and manage team websites with out depending upon developers.

This provides lists, libraries and webparts which can help to transform team websites into business applications.

SharePoint Prouducts and Technologies has two offerings like Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is free version with windows server 2003 with functionality need for Document management and Collaboration with lists and document libraries.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is newer version to SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It provides all the features of wss 3.0 as well as some new features like Excel, Form services, Business Data Catalog, Business Inteligence and Search.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) provides tools and features like Built-in webparts,like a site aggregator and content query webpart and Workflow Templates.

SharePoint foundation 2010 is for smaller organizations for the purpose of lowcost, secure, web based collaboration and for the purpose of organize documents,coordinate schedules and participate in discussion through team workspaces,blogs,wikis and document libraries.

But SharePoint server 2010 includes some additional features like search, secure store service, External data webparts, Profile pages, External data in workflows, reach client integration.

Location of Microsoft.SharePoint.dll

Sometimes if you are doing something in a clinet machine like XP machine. You will not get the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll.

For this you should go to the machine where SharePoint is installed and you will get the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll from the below location.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI

Important web parts in SharePoint 2010

In this article we will discuss some important SharePoint 2010 web parts.


List View Web Part: It shows list or library data. When a new list or library is created, a List View Web Part with the same name is created to go with it.

Image Web Part: It enables to show picture in a page.

Page Viewer Web Part: Enables you to add content from another location to a page. This content can be another web page (or web application), a file share, or even an individual document and is typically displayed in an IFRAME on the current page.

Form Web Part: Enables you to add HTML form field elements and other content to a page.

Content Editor Web Part: This web part allows client side scripts and also used to show static rich text in a page.

XML Web Part: Responsible to display and style XML data.

Data View/Form Web Part: This web part is available only in SharePoint designer. You can not add it from the user interface.

What is Portal Technology?

Portal Technology is a webbased technology by which different important informations like contact lists of all the employees, Task lists, HR department information, other department information, Projects information and different rules and regulation inside one organization are going to create,store and manage securely in a centralized location. Employees and decision makers can acess that information inside the company as well as from remote location.

How to make the content type as sealed in SharePoint 2010?

Suppose you need to design a SharePoint 2010 application that created a content type. And you need to design in such a way that users are not able to change the content type from the SharePoint 2010 user interface. To achieve this you have to make the content type as sealed and deploy as a feature.

You can do this by using SharePoint 2010 object model. Just get the particular content type and set the Sealed property to true like below.

 using (SPSite currentSiteCollection = new SPSite("URL of the site collection"))
           {

            SPContentType contentType = currentSiteCollection.RootWeb.ContentTypes["ContentTypeName"];
           contentType.Sealed = true;
           contentType.Update();
            }

Remember that you must be a administrator for the site collection to make a seal content type.
If you want to unsealed the content type then just make the Sealed to false like below.

 using (SPSite currentSiteCollection = new SPSite("URL of the site collection"))
           {
            SPContentType contentType = currentSiteCollection.RootWeb.ContentTypes["ContentTypeName"];
        contentType.Sealed = false;
           contentType.Update();
            }

Logical and Physical Architecture of SharePoint

In this article we will discuss about logical and physical architecture of SharePoint 2010.
Here are the common servers available in the SharePoint farm.

Front-end web servers: These servers responsible for publish web sites which are called as web applications.

Application servers: These servers host back-end services, such as the search index service, the crawler service etc.

Database servers:These servers store configuration and content data for the entire SharePoint farm.

A single tier deployment is something like the farm which is build based one single server only.
A two tier deployment is something like: It should have two front-end web servers and a back-end database server.One of the Web servers hosts the Central Administration site and the other handles additional farm-related tasks, such as serving content to users.

And a 3 tier farm has many dedicated application servers.

SharePoint always use a Microsoft SQL Server database for storing farm configurations and content. It creates a main and fundamental farm configuration database as soon as you deploy a new farm. Usually this database is called SharePoint_Config or SharePoint_ Config_<UniqueId>.

SharePoint 2010 Search

Search is much more improved now in SharePoint 2010 over MOSS 2007. There are 2 major engines used for SharePoint 2010 Search.

1. SharePoint 2010 search engine.
2. FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint

1. SharePoint 2010 search engine: This has a lot more new capabilities and impreoved features for the SharePoint users and administrators. Like:

• SharePoint 2010 Search Engine provides a new, rich UI.
• There is a Refinement Panel where user can filter the results based on meta data fields.
• In SharePoint 2010 now boolean expressions are valid and can be processed in the search query.
• Based on the previous queries, it will show suggestion while typing a search query.
• A new feature Did you mean suggestion is implemeneted.
• Enahanced relevance for better matching and ranking capabilities.
• Now you can federate the search result from a remote search service and display them in a separate web part as a part of the search result in different page.
• With the results for your query, SharePoint 2010 also provides related searches for additional results from previous searches.
• Now you can see all kind of office documents in the browser with the View in Browser capabilities.
• Very much improved people search. you can search on the basis of phonetic search, presence, organization and recent content information, Refinement Panel with filtering status skill.
• Now you can do people search using nick name matching.
• The more active a user is in a special topic area, the more relevance he or she will get in the search results.
• Now search is integrated with Windows 7. The search results and all associated data will be displayed in Windows Explorer.

For administrators Now search comes as a separate service rather within SSPs.

• Now administrators can use power shell to create or manage search service applications.
• A new search dashboard provided that contains lots of useful information like status of the system, crawling, queries.

We will discuss FAST search in a different posts.

ULS : Unified Logging Service in SharePoint 2010

This service is responsible for saveing or reporting logs in SharePoint. It report 3 different locations:

• SharePoint trace logs
• Windows Event Log
• SharePoint logging database

SharePoint trace logs:
These are simple text files and by default the logs are located at the LOGS directory of the SharePoint root at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14. The naming convention of the Log file is machinename-YYYYMMDD-HHMM.

And a new log file is created in every 30 minutes.

SharePoint 2010 adopts NTFS file compression for the Logs folder, so it will take less space. In SharePoint 2010 also you can customize your logs from the Central Administration.

Another feature is you can change the location of the Log from the Default location to a different location from the central administration. For this Go to Central Administration -> Monitoring -> Confi gure Diagnostic Logging. Also you can configure the number of days the trace logs are kept. Also you can use power shell command by using the following command: Set-SPDiagnosticConfig -LogLocation e:\Logs

You can also assign the amount of space the log will consume from the drive. SharePoint maintains a GUID for each conversation between a user or process. When an error occured an administrator can use the correlation ID to track the issue.

You can also check SharePoint Articles and SharePoint Jobs.

Different sharepoint 2010 workflow activities

Here we will discuss about SharePoint 2010 workflow activities. In our previous article we have discussed about How to attach a workflow to a content type?

Code: The code activity allows you to drop code into the template.

If-else: if-else activity allows you to make logical decisions in the workflow.

Parallel: The parallel activity allows you to run two or more trunks of activities in parallel.

Terminate: The terminate activity terminates the workflow.

While: A while activity is used for looping.

CopyItemActivity: This CopyItemActivity activity allows you to create a copy of a list item or document in another document library or list.

CreateTask: The CreateTask activity creates tasks in task lists.

OnWorkflowModifed (and EnableWorkflowModification)—OnWorkflowModified activity responds when the workflow is modified. With Workflow Modifications, users can change the behavior of a workflow after it has already started.

sendEmail—The sendEmail activity uses the exchange server specified in SharePoint Central Administration to send emails to users.

SetState—The SetState activity is used to set the state of the workflow.

You can also check more articles on SharePoint 2010 Workflows.

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage in sharepoint

After creating a site collection in SharePoint 2010, when I visited the URL I got the error as "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". The error you will get in SharePoint 2010 very often. One solution I am trying to say is while After creating the Site collection and before visiting to URL, you should go for an iisreset /noforce. Run this command on your Run window and then try visiting the URL that will work.

SharePoint 2010 Object model

There are 4 type of SharePoint object model are available. SharePoint server object model will use for any SharePoint code that runs on the SharePoint server. Another object model known as Client object model for .Net 3.5 or higher client applications. Another object model for Silverlight applications and the last one is JScript object model.


Examples of SharePoint Object model:
Microsoft.SharePoint.SPList : A SharePoint list that can be used to modify the contents of a list.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb : To work with a SharePoint site.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPUser : To work with a SharePoint user.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext : The context of an HTTP request that
gives information, such as the current web application, site collection, list, etc.

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem: To work with an item in a SharePoint list.



Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite : To work with a SharePoint site collection.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFile : A file in a SharePoint site, for example, a web part page, a file in a folder, or an item in a document library.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPField : A column defined for a SharePoint list.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery : A query (in CAML) that can be used to return required list items (SPListItem).


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity : Provides a method called RunWith-ElevatedPrivileges that lets you run code with more permissions than the one the current user has.


Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication: An IIS web application that has methods and properties for modifying web applications settings and administering at the web application level.


Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm : A SharePoint Farm that has methods and properties for modifying farm settings and administering at the farm level.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: An exception thrown by SharePoint.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListItem-Collection:The collection of SPItem objects from a SharePoint list (SPList) or query (SPQuery).


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFolder: A SharePoint folder in a list or document library.


Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility: A utility class that provides methods like SendEmail etc.


Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite-DataQuery : A query that can act against multiple lists in multiple sites in the same site collection.