SharePoint Tidbits from the Trenches

Migrating SharePoint data seems like it should be a straightforward process but as with any task within SharePoint, planning is your greatest ally.

Any time you migrate SharePoint data from one server to another, additional applications, web parts, and features may need to be reinstalled.

Below I have listed several scenarios and the expectations you should have when performing each of them. In the coming weeks, we will expand on each of these with more detail on the process involved.

As may or may not know, Microsoft SharePoint is a massive development platform with more API’s than the .NET Framework. There are a number of blog entries and webcasts out there, but I thought I would share what has worked well for me in my experience developing solutions on top of the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Here are the tools and applications required prior to setting up your new SharePoint development environment.

Have you ever created a new SharePoint site using the Collaboration Portal template or the Report Center Template then navigated to the sample dashboard and received this ugly error?

Me too. Here’s how my team and I at Fpweb.net resolved the Excel Services Error:

Call me captain obvious – but the fact of it is that since we’re a SharePoint hosting company, our engineers work extensively with SharePoint backups. We receive requests from customers moving their sites to our hosted SharePoint environments, or customers requiring a local copy of their business-critical information that we’re hosting for them. There are multiple third-party tools out there that will execute SharePoint backups for you, but there are also several fully functional options built right into SharePoint that can be leveraged to ensure the safety of your data.

We recently had a Fpweb.net hosting customer inquire about uploading multiple files to SharePoint 2007 using a Mac (with drag and drop functionality). We all know that you can map a network drive to your SharePoint document library in Windows Explorer. It utilizes the WebDAV protocol to retrieve SharePoint data and to upload files into SharePoint.

The problem:
The default web interface for shared documents on macs doesn’t give me the option of multiple uploads or explorer view.