The LandPhil

Author: phil

  • Firefox, Root Certificates, and you

    If you’ve ever dealt with a certificate authority (CA), you may know most of this.  If this is your first foray into it, hold onto your butts. Many enterprises stand up and run their own certificate authorities to 1) maintain control over certificate issuance, 2) maintain the security of the certificate chain, and 3) not…

  • Coding!

    So I have to toot my own horn for a bit. First off, I haven’t really written a program since I was in college.  And that really isn’t a decent real world coding experience anyway.  In school, you’re working in a fairly closed environment in terms of what’s expected and what’s provided.  “Here’s what a…

  • Leave SharePoint Alone!

    This is only funny if you’ve ever worked with SharePoint.  Or really any enterprise level Microsoft product.  Or really any enterprise software product… No, only funny to SharePoint folks: Leave SharePoint Alone Props to Christian Buckley.

  • SharePoint: Upgrading is a bear

    So you’ve patched SharePoint.  And then you’ve run the configuration wizard on all of the farm machines to actually apply the updates.  Or, perhaps you prefer to use the command line psconfig.exe.  In any case, you get the dreaded (and very generic and not at all helpful) “an update conflict has occurred, and you must…

  • SharePoint: Search gotcha

    So below I detailed the steps I had to take to get SharePoint Foundation Search running on my farm.  It worked great.  It even indexed content I didn’t expect it to index! On the one of the sites that I am indexing now is a list.  That list contains seemingly innocuous information, but one of…

  • SharePoint: Configuring Foundation Search

    You’ve got SharePoint installed.  You’re generating content.  Now you’d like it if that little Search bar on the top right actually returned something other than: Your search cannot be completed because this site is not assigned to an indexer.  Contact your administrator for more information. The first step is to turn on the Foundation Search…

  • SharePoint: Using custom CSS

    For the love of all that is holy, don’t try and do this in SharePoint designer.  I’m still not entirely sure what was going on, but it’s not pretty. Let’s say you have a page that you want to put some custom CSS on.  You could open the page in designer and modify the corev4.css.…

  • SharePoint Designer: Getting the DateTime into a readable format

    There are 3 view forms in SharePoint Designer for lists: New Edit View The default versions of these forms are created by SharePoint when the list is created.  They use a ListFormWebPart to display their information.  This is done by querying SharePoint for the objects directly. When you create a custom form of any of…

  • Google Accounts

    So, like many people of my ilk I’ve had a gmail account since way back when you needed an invitation to join. (You actually might still need an invitation to join, I have not tried to create a new account recently.) I’ve also had my own domain for more than 10 years now. It used…

  • SharePoint: PowerPivot gotcha

    PowerPivot is an interesting beast. If you don’t know what it is, I’ll give you a very brief (and probably incorrect overview): PowerPivot is an Excel plugin, provided free from Microsoft, that allows you to import data from external sources into your very own localized cube for analysis. It’s very, very fast AND very, very…