SharePoint 2013 RTM Available

Just noticed on MSDN that SharePoint Server 2013 is available for download. Office 2013 is there as well. If you don't have volume licensing, you can probably expect to get your hands on it in early December. For preview copies you and other developer tools, you can go here.

This is a little earlier than the November date we'd been hearing fo a while.

Enjoy!



SharePoint Server 2013 on MSDN



SharePoint Farm on Windows Azure

***Update: Microsoft Azure Infrastructure is live (no longer demo) as of April 16th, 2013***

Microsoft recently announced that you can install SharePoint on virtual machines (IaaS) on Azure.

Why would you want to do this? The main motivator is the speed at which you can bring the environment up. If you don't have a robust Hyper-V or VMware environment in house, Azure gives you an easy way to spin up servers with no trips to the data center and no ordering/provisioning hardware. Unlike the Office 365 offering, you have complete control over your SharePoint farm and guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.

What type of SharePoint environment is a candidate for Azure?

• SharePoint for Internet Sites - Move your external website to Azure and you don't need to deal with DMZ's and firewalls (or your networking co-workers).
• Developer, Test and Staging - Bring them up and blow them away as needed. With Azure PowerShell this can all be scripted.
• Hybrid Applications - You can setup a SharePoint environment that pulls or pushes data to applications in your local data center (on-premise).
• Disaster Recovery - When your local environment takes a hard nap, bring it up in Azure and then blow it away when you get it restored.

To learn all about the offering, check out the following paper from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34598

You can also find a great article detailing how to setup a basic Azure SharePoint farm with step-by-step instructions and screen shots over at PointBeyond.

You can also watch the following video from Channel 9 presented at TechEd.  

SharePoint 2010 Event ID 7043

We recently noticed the following error in the Application event log on our SharePoint 2010 servers:

A quick Google search turned up the following article on the SharePoint forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/c894d98c-24ab-416c-aca9-ae57644deb5e

It turns out the issue is caused by bad code. Simply do a search for the file called TaxonomyPicker.ascx (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES) and open it up in Notepad. Do a search for the characters “,” and replace it with a “,” (minus the quotation marks in both cases).

From this:

To this:

Thanks to Brian Lala, this can all be accomplished by creating and running the following script:

# Powershell script to implement the fix suggested in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2481844

$TaxonomyPickerControl = "$env:CommonProgramFiles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\TaxonomyPicker.ascx"
Write-Host " - Making a backup copy of TaxonomyPicker.ascx..."
Copy-Item $TaxonomyPickerControl $TaxonomyPickerControl".bad"
$NewTaxonomyPickerControl = (Get-Content $TaxonomyPickerControl) -replace ',', ","
Write-Host " - Writing out new TaxonomyPicker.ascx..."
Set-Content -Path $TaxonomyPickerControl -Value $NewTaxonomyPickerControl
Write-Host " - Done! Press any key to exit..."
$null = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")

Microsoft finally release a KB article on the issue which can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2481844

SharePoint 2013 - Everyting We Know!!!

***Update October 31st - SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 are now available for download****
http://imperfectit.blogspot.ca/2012/10/sharepoint-2013-rtm-available.html

Microsoft just released a pile of info on the next version of SharePoint. Check the link for everything you need to know:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303422(v=office.15)

Download the SharePoint 2013 Server preview
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397.aspx?wt.mc_id=TEC_121_1_33

Office 2013 training site
http://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/support/training-FX101782702.aspx

Download SharePoint Designer 2013
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30346

Download SharePoint 2013 Foundation
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30345

Download SharePoint 2013 Client SDK
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30355

IT Pro training material
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2012/07/17/sharepoint-2013-it-pro-and-developer-training-materials-released.aspx

Download SharePoint 2013 IT PRO Training material
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30361

Office/SharePoint 2013 store
http://officepreview.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps-for-sharepoint-FX102804987.aspx

MSDN for Office and SharePoint 2013
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/office/apps

Download SharePoint 2013 technical library compiled
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30382