Copy Paste between two environments

I wanted to copy paste something from my laptop which is in the production domain to a VM in the staging environment. I found out it wasn’t that easy. Instead of using notepad and deployment servers I decided to dig in to it. Just because I knew it’s possible. 

It turns out that VMware disabled the copy and paste functionality by default since vSphere version 4.1 because of security measures. To re-enable it you have to undertake the steps below. Just keep in mind that if an option is grayed-out it eighter means the VM need to be shut down or you don’t have enough admin rights.

 

1. Log in to vSphere Client and select the virtual machine in the inventory.
2. The configuration page for this virtual machine appears with the Summary tab displayed.
3. Power off the virtual machine.
4. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
5. Click Options >> Advanced >> General >> Configuration Parameters.
6. Click Add row.
7. Type isolation.tools.copy.disable in the Name field and false into the Value column.
8. Type isolation.tools.paste.disable in the Name field and false into the Value column.
9. Power on the virtual machine

 

 

 

 

 

Compare differences in Word files using SharePoint versioning

A moment ago I got a question from a user who wanted to know what the differences where between two files (versions) in a document library which where uploaded.

I knew in Office there was a function to compare two documents but how to use it with SharePoint versions I never tried. Sometimes the answer is so close in front of you it turns invisible.

The trick is to just open the file from SharePoint in Edit mode. Word will open and under the review tab you find a button called compare. Just choose Specific version from the pull downmenu and a list with the versions inside SharePoint is being displayed. From here Word will take over and do the rest. Even if you choose to combine SharePoint will turn it in to a new version.

This function only works if versioning is enabled for that document library and is not available in Office Web Apps. You need the full Word application for this.

I had to shamelesly steal some images of the internet and make one with a Dutch version of Word, but all together it gives a nice image of the words descibed above  🙂

Windows Updates error 9c48

At the moment I’m deploying 10 new VM’s to host a SharePoint 2010 farm. Beside a little bit of clicking here and clicking their I’m running multiple v-sphere consoles with the good old Windows Updates. After a few reboots I’m getting a nice error message forcing me to stop. No magical reboots can help me out of this one.

I made sure no group policies are aplied to the VM so how to get rid of the pescie Windows Update 9c48 error

The solution is simpeler then exspected. Just go to the control panel and uninstall IE 9.0. After an other reboot just run the updates again but first click check updates so you get more updates then Windows show you. After this little escapade it’s back to business.

SharePoint warm up scripts

Why a warm up script?
SharePoint is a beast and is being walked by his friend the IIS server. Every night by default the application pool is being recycled by IIS. This means that things like cache is being cleared. This is a good thing but also has a down side.
After the application pool is recycled and you enter your SharePoint site this will be slow and can even cause a time out error in some cases. A warm up script can prevent this. 

There are two ways to set a script. One with the good old fashion batch file and *vbs script which you can download from codeplex or with a nice tool made by Spencer Harbar. The last one will touch the sites directly after the pool is recycled as the batch file has to be scheduled with the windows scheduler.

 

Batch file
Download link

 

Application Pool Manager
For MOSS 2007 servers you need to use v2.0 as v3.0 is only for SharePoint 2010. After you configured it you need to place a shortcut in the startup folder in case of a reboot.

http://www.harbar.net/articles/apm.aspx

 

 Resources

• http://www.harbar.net/articles/apm.aspx 
• http://sharepointgeorge.com/2010/warm-sharepoint-web-applications-windows-2008-r2-iis-75-application-warmup-module/ 
• http://www.gokanozcifci.be/subsite/warm-up-script-for-sharepoint-2010.html
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx
• http://www.gokanozcifci.be/subsite/warm-up-script-for-sharepoint-2010.html
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx

 

 

 

 

 

Unable to display Excel workbook after configuring the SSA

Sometimes it can happen you configure the SharePoint Service Application for Excel Services and when you add the web part to show a Excel workbook you get a nice friendly error message about authorizations and all.

The reason for that is that the Application Pool account from the Excel Service SSA doesn’t have any authorisations on the web applications your trying to use it in.

The PowerShel script below will fix this. Just change the url in the one from your site collection. 

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication “http://UrlSiteCollection”
$webApp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity(“DOMAIN\SPexcelSSA_Pool”)

 

Hide LinkedIn notifications

Since I’m quite active on LinkedIn keeping my business network active and expand it with useful contacts and all I keep track of my business buddies and their notifications as well.

LinkedIn has a nice feature that you can connect your Twitter account or by the a browser bar post directly on LinkedIn and share cool and interesting things with your network. Only with everything it’s cool until you over do it. I love ice-cream but 20 on a day is too much. Now one of my contacts is flooding LinkedIn with practically anything he loves to share with the world. Maybe it works for him but not for me. If you got one of the guys as your contact here’s how to hide just his LinkedIn notifications and clean up your homepage a bit.

I’s all very simple, just hover over one of the posts and in the right top corner the word hide appears in light gray. Just click it and voila all the messages are gone. Hope this tip can help you to good use.