Getting Started with PowerShell for SharePoint 2010

PowerShell is very powerful tool to help to do and automate lot of activities in SharePoint. But somtime it become exhausting to learn the commands which are too many. I found these four commands quite helpful for a head start in PowerShell for SharePoint:

1. If we want to list all the SharePoint cmdlets we can use the following command:

Get-Command “*sp*” –CommandType cmdlet

2. To get a count of all the SharePoint cmdlets grouped by Verb use the following command:

Get-Command “*sp*” –CommandType cmdlet | Group-Object –Property Verb 

3. To list all the SharePoint cmdlets grouped by Verb use the following command:

Get-Command “*sp*” –CommandType cmdlet | Format-Table –Property Name,Definition –GroupBy Verb 

4. To get help for any cmdlet use the following command. Just replace the cmdlet name with the name of the command:

Get-Help <cmdlet>-Full

Addding Option To Group List Items by Content Type in SharePoint 2010

In SharePoint 2007 there is option to group the List Items using the Content Type. This option is not present with SharePoint 2010 so we can not group list items based on the . I think by mistake Microsoft forgot to add that :(

This can be achieved very easily using SharePoint Designer 2010. Here are the steps to do this:
1. Create a view with all the fields which you need and also put a group by clause with any field available. This will generate all the code in the View file. I have updated the All Items view and grouped the items by one field.
2. Open the List in SharePoint Designer 2010 and open the view in which you need to modify this grouping. I am using the All Items view so I will make the changes in Allitems.aspx.
3. Locate the code which mentions the and there you will find a GroupBy Clause.
4. Edit the field for this and put it as:
5. Your final code will look like this:

<View Name="{A1737F54-FE3E-4527-81B9-51C58813F33B}" DefaultView="TRUE" MobileView="TRUE" MobileDefaultView="TRUE" Type="HTML" DisplayName="All Items" Url="/Lists/DepartmentList/AllItems.aspx" Level="1" BaseViewID="1" ContentTypeID="0x" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/generic.png"> 
                <Query> 
                    <GroupBy Collapse="TRUE" GroupLimit="30"> 
                        <FieldRef Name="ContentType"/> 
                    </GroupBy> 
                    <OrderBy> 
                        <FieldRef Name="ID"/> 
                    </OrderBy> 
                </Query> 

Unable To Update Farm Credentials

I was trying to update the password for the farm service account, and get the below error message whether I do it in Central Admin or with STSADM:

Error deploying administration application pool credentials. Another deployment may be active. An object of the type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAdminAppPoolCredentialDeploymentJobDefinition named "job-admin-apppool-change" already exists under the parent Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPTimerService named "SPTimerV4". Rename your object or delete the existing object.

This error indicates that either some timer job is running or scheduled but while checking in the Central Administration I found nothing.

Later after searching for some time I found that the SharePoint Timer Service was not running.

Adding Custom Spellings in SharePoint

While entering the data in SharePoint List/Libraries we have the option to do the spell checking. The Spell checking feature can be activated/deactivated via a Farm Scoped feature.
This Spell check functionality checks any spelling mistake in the content which we are entering into the SharePoint List/Libraries. Suppose if we want to add some new words which should not be considered as spelling mistakes. We can do this by adding our custom dictionary. Let me show this using a example:
1. I will use Task List and in description I will put SharePoint in different ways. The only acceptable way is SharePoint. So my other Sharepoint and SharepoinT will be shown as errors.

2. Now I will create a custom dictionary. To do this create a new Document Library, "Spelling" at the root of the site.
3. Create a text file, "Custom Dictionary.txt" and add all the words that should not be recognized as spelling errors in the text file, one word per line.
4. Upload the text file to the newly created Library.

5. Now I will again use these two added words in my task description and spell check will not show any error:

6. Only one "Custom Dictionary" Document Library is possible for each site collection and the names of the Library and text file need to be exactly same as mentioned. Also the Library must be located at the root of the Portal.

Finding the SharePoint Version Number without having Server Access

While doing a demo on Public sites on SharePoint somebody I asked me how to find what SharePoint version any site is using. After some research I found that If we need to find the version of SharePoint on which a specific public facing site is running we can find it by checking the header of any page from the site. This is quite useful in the situations where we can not access the servers in which the application is deployed and we need to find the version of SharePoint (true for both 2007 or 2010) Farm. In these header we need to check the value for MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices parameter. This value will show the whole version number for the SharePoint build which this site is using.

To find the header for a site we can use any of these sites (just search on any search engine):
http://pgl.yoyo.org/http/server-headers.php
http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php
http://www.rexswain.com/cgi-bin/httpview.cgi

So to find the version of SharePoint on which http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx is running I passed the URL of the site and this is what it returned me:

As highlighted Microsoft is using 14.0.0.4760 to run it's site :)

Learning SharePoint 2010 Step by Step

I am consolidating some very good links from Microsoft which will help to learn SharePoint 2010 Step by Step (See how to learn SharePoint @ How to Learn SharePoint):

3. Working With Lists

4. Working With Libraries

5. Type of Columns and Creating Columns

6. Creating and Configuring SharePoint Views

7. Working with Content types

8. Working with Web Parts

9. Types of Web Parts

10. Scorecards and reports

11. PerformancePoint Web Parts

12. How to Do Document management

13.SharePoint Permissions management

14. Workflows in SharePoint

15. Metadata management

16. Web content management

17. Digital asset management

18. Blogs and wikis

19. Business intelligence

20. Dashboards

21. Forms

22. My Sites and Social Tagging

23.Records management and compliance

24. Solutions and Templates

25. Search

26. Excel Services

27. Visio Services

28. Access Services

29.More categories

Learning PerformancePoint With Step By Step Videos

There some very nice videos on PerformancePoint with SharePoint 2010 published by Microsoft. Check them out here:

1. What’s New in PerformancePoint Dashboards

2. Open a PerformancePoint Web Part in a new window

3. Export a PerformancePoint report or scorecard to PowerPoint

4. Print a PerformancePoint dashboard or Web Part

5. Overview of PerformancePoint dashboard elements

6. Applying filters to PerformancePoint reports or scorecards

7. Explore data in PerformancePoint reports and scorecards

8. Export a PerformancePoint scorecard or report to Excel

9. Use the Quick Launch pane to find PerformancePoint dashboards and dashboard items

Error while creating External Content Type using SharePoint Designer 2010

I was trying to create External Content Type using SharePoint Designer 2010 but while doing so I got 2 different errors. These errors were coming even when I am the site collection administrator on the site where I was doing this.
The first error came saying "The Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store is currently unavailable."

Upon some investigation I found the Web Application under which this Site Collection was hosted was not associated to the Business Data Connectivity Service.  This needs to be done from Central Administration

Once this is done this error is solved but there is another error came when I tried to create External Content Type saying "The Server was unable to process the request due to an internal error".

This one was more difficult to understand. Later I found that any user attempting to create External Content Type is required to have BDC Metadata Catalog Permission which is given from the Central Administration.

Even the Site Owner or Site Collection Administrator can not create External Content Type if they dont have the permission here. Also any user needs to have design permission if they needs to do so.

Central Administration site not accessible in SharePoint 2010

By mistake I stopped the “Central Admin” service in central administration in SharePoint 2010 and after that I was not able to access the Central Administration site.
To resolve it I went to services and made sure all SharePoint Related Services are on (including SharePoint Administration). But still, I am not able to access Central Administration site again. Finally after running following command helped me to bring the Central Administration site back Online:
psconfig -cmd adminvs -provision -port 8000 -windowsauthprovider onlyusentlm