Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Certifications announced!

I always thought it was a bit odd that Microsoft did not have a certification programme for just WSS and/or SPS but only combined with CMS, which in my opinion is too broad. Many of my collagues are experienced in Sharepoint or CMS and very very few (actually none) in both. Well for people like me, there is good news! Check out this post from Trika

 

Developer certifications for Office 2007

For Office, there will be three MCTS level certifications for developers, each requiring 1 exam. MCTS is Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, which is the technology-series certification in the new format of certification. There is also a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) series that focused on job roles... but we won't have any MCPD for office. I think the betas for these three are scheduled for January (more on betas).

MCTS: Office SharePoint Services (MOSS): Application Development (70-542)

MCTS: Windows SharePoint Services: Application Development (70-541)

MCTS: Office 2007 Client: Application Development (70-543)

More on the new certifcation format here: official overview: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/newgen/default.mspx or here: from one of my friends/co-workers at MSL for interesting take: http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2005/12/are-next-gen-certs-launched-to-make.html

Thursday, November 23, 2006

The configuration database could not be updated

Well I got an error when I tried to add a webpart using STSADM, the thing that suprised me that I managed to do it a couple of hours earlier. Only difference was that I was publishing the webpart on a 'updated' virtual server (hostname was changed). Luckily using Google'as my best friend, I found the solution ;)

Amazing how many things can go wrong. As a mental note-to-self: If I ever end up again with weird errors like 'The configuration database could not be updated.' then the problem is likely due to a change in the site configuration: SSL added, domain name change, IP change, etc. To fix: check web parts: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\BIN>stsadm -o enumwppacks this will show to what sites the web parts are linked to reinstate the site configuration in IIS remove the packs stsadm -o deletewppack -name make the changes to the site configuration reïnstall the packs Likely theirs an easier fix, but can't be bothered to find out.
Thanks Rexy!

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Document library with content approval default in site definition?

The customer I'm working for now required that for a particular area template, that the document library has content approval on by default. I thought that wasn't really a tough requirement (and it ain't if you know where to look for and know the (undocumented) syntax) ;) So here is a step-by-step guide to get a document library that is created during the creation of a site with content approval (and versioning) on by default:

1. Open the SCHEMA.XML file in the folder 60\TEMPLATE\1033\