Installing SharePoint 2010 RTM

Jan 10, 2013 9:34 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

Hi everyone,

 

It’s been ages since the last time I wrote my last blog article. I feel great now knowing that I have got time to start writing again.

 

So, Sharepoint 2010 RTM is finally out. The one in my VM is still the BETA version. So I decided to ditch my VM and rebuilt one with the RTM version.

 

I will also be using SQL Server 2008 instead of SQL Server 2005.

 

Installing Sharepoint 2010 is really just a matter of double-clicking on SETUP.EXE and follow the instructions. However, these SQL patches need to first be installed before you can proceed:

– SQL 2008 SP1 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=66ab3dbb-bf3e-4f46-9559-ccc6a4f9dc19&displaylang=en

– Cumulative Update Package 2 for SQL Server 2008 SP1 – KB970315 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970315

 

Once we’ve installed these patches, Sharepoint installation can then proceed.

 

One thing that I noticed as well now is, on BETA when I tried to install SP using SP_Admin, somehow this user is not added as SP Farm Administrator. This is now fixed in the RTM version so it’s all good and ready to go.

 

 

Cheers,

Tommy

User Profile Configure Synchronization Connections Error – MOSS MA not found

Jan 10, 2013 9:33 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

Hi everyone,

 

It’s me again. I’ve just rebuilt my SP2010 Beta VM because of the error I had with the Search service.

 

Anyway, everything now works fine after the rebuild except I can’t create a Sync Connection. When I checked the log I get the following error message:

 

MOSS MA not found

 

 

The resolution is to actually restart both Forefront Identity Manager Service and ForeFront Identity Manager Synchronization Service through Services in Administrative Tools (or services.msc in Run command).

 

Once you’ve restarted those two services, you can now create a new synchronization connection.

 

 

 

Hope this helps,

Tommy

Sharepoint 2010 BETA – My Sites

Jan 10, 2013 9:32 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

Yo all,

 

Setting up My Sites ain’t simple in Sharepoint 2010 BETA.

 

Please follow the instructions on this blog:

http://www.helloitsliam.com/archive/2010/01/18/sharepoint-2010-%E2%80%93-my-sites.aspx

 

 

Cheers,

Tommy

Sharepoint 2010 – External Lists and Content Types + Business Connectivity Service INTEGRATING SugarCRM + PHP + MySQL

Jan 10, 2013 9:32 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

Hi everyone,

 

After attending a session at Sharepoint Saturday Perth regarding BCS and External Lists and Content Types, I was actually very-very interested in using it to connect to a non-Microsoft systems.

 

So far I notice that a lot of the integrations project are with other Microsoft apps such as MS CRM, Axapta, etc. But what about with a totally different system such as PHP + MySQL?

 

In this opportunity I want to share with you the walkthrough to represent MySQL data in Sharepoint using BCS and External Lists.

 

First of all let me introduce to you the PHP apps I want to integrate with: Sugar CRM. It’s an open source Customer Relationship Management written in PHP and using MySQL as the database backend. See below:

 

 

So, it’s now time for me to prepare for the integration. First of all I need to use Visual Studio 2010 to create the project. If you open Visual Studio and create new project, under Sharepoint -> 2010 you will see this project template: Business Data Connectivity Model.

 

 

 

Let’s create the project. By default it will look like the following:

 

 

You will also see the BDC Explorer window:

 

 

 

 

– It has a feature that is deployed at Farm level.

– It also has the BDC entity model on it.

 

Now, it’s time to do a bit of class renaming. By default you will get Entity1.cs and Entity1Service.cs. Entity1.cs is the entity that will be passed through/from BDC and Entity1Service.cs is the “business logic” class that BDC will use to read methods from. There are 2 methods by default: ReadList (used to display ALL items on External Lists) and ReadItem (used to display a particular item). You obviously can add more to this to perform CRUD operations.

 

Let’s now rename Entity1.cs to SugarCRMContact.cs and Entity1Service.cs to SugarCRMContactService.cs. If we now go to the BDC Explorer window, I would actually expect Visual Studio to auto-rename the BDC Entity object but it actually doesn’t. Therefore, we need to rename this as well. Let’s rename Entity1 to SugarCRMContact. We will need to modify the return object as well.

 

I’m hoping that this automation will be fixed in the released version of VS 2010.

 

The project is available for download. Therefore, if you get lost/confused with this step, don’t worry.

 

Once we’ve done all the renaming, it’s now time to create the “repository”/data layer class to connect to MySQL. As we all know, it’s always good to program with DDD/TDD (Domain-Driven-Design/Test Driven Development) methodology in mind so that our code is decoupled and not tight/dependent to each other. There are a lot of posts on the Internet about DDD/TDD so I won’t discuss much about this.

 

Once I’m finished with my data layer class, it’s now time to serve them in Sharepoint using BCS. If I now go back to my SugarCRMContactService.cs class, I can now do the following:

==

public static IEnumerable ReadList()

 

{
List bdcContacts = new List();

IContactRepository contactRepository = new DefaultContactRepository();

List contacts = contactRepository.GetContacts();

 

foreach (ContactEntity contact in contacts)

{

SugarCRMContact bdcContact = new SugarCRMContact();

bdcContact.ContactId = contact.ContactId.ToString();

bdcContact.FirstName = contact.FirstName;

bdcContact.LastName = contact.LastName;

bdcContacts.Add(bdcContact);

}

return bdcContacts;

}

==

 

Once we’ve done that, deploy your WSP to your farm and that’s it! Sharepoint will automatically create the BDC entity for you. Go to Central Admin -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications then click on Business Data Connectivity then you’ll see the following:

 

 

 

Now we can start creating the External List for it. Open your site in Sharepoint Designer 2010, then go to External Content Types. You will automatically see your custom BDC entity. Double click on it and you’ll be brought to this page:

 

 

 

On the top click Create List & Form. Give your list a name and that’s it! If you now go back to your site and View All Site Content, you’ll see your external list in there. When you click it…

 

 

 

There you go: MySQL data in Sharepoint.

 

Download the project here.

 

Note:

1. You will need to download SugarCRM (http://www.sugarcrm.com/) and WAMPServer. WAMPServer runs PHP + MySQL + Apache at the same time.

2. Add the following connection string in your Sharepoint site web.config:

 

<add key=”ConnectionString” value=”Server=localhost;Database=sugarcrm;User=root;Password=;” />

Sharepoint 2010 Lists, Lookups and Columns – KEWL!

Jan 10, 2013 9:32 PM, - Posted by Tommy Segoro

I have to say that I am impressed with the way Sharepoint 2010 handles lists, lookups and columns. It now has the concurrency ability whereby – if turned on/selected – if you perform a lookup on a data from another list and you try to delete that data, Sharepoint will not allow you to.

 

See below for screenshot:

 

Lookup field settings page

 

 

 

Error when trying to delete an item that’s referenced by other list

 

 

Plus, you can now view multiple columns of the looked-up data (EXCELLENT!). See below:

 

 

 

 

So yeah..I have to say that I will definitely upgrade to SP2010 once the released version is available! 🙂 It definitely eliminates a lot of problems that I (and other clients) are having at the moment with columns and content types.

 

 

Cheers,

Tommy