sharepoint 2013 logoI came across an interesting bug while trying to add a user the Administrators of a Search Service Application in SharePoint 2013. When I tried adding the user, and clicking OK, and error is returned: “User does not have permission to perform this action” along with a correlation ID. Further investigation in the ULS logs revealed that the problem was SQL permission related: “The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘proc_MSS_GetConfigurationProperty’, database ‘SPSearch’, schema ‘dbo’.” Additionally performing a search fails and logs the error: “There was an exception in the Database. Please retry your operation and if the problem presists, contact an administrator.” (The error message has a typo too).  Read More…
Image courtesy of James Mollison for Colors Magazine

“I want the site to look like REI” is the first thing my government client says as I sit down for our meeting. I laugh out loud because the purpose of my client’s site has little and less to do with selling camping gear and North Face jackets. However, I know exactly what he means. REI sells a huge range of products and the web interface is loaded with helpful filters to make searching the huge inventory simple. Plus, the site just looks good.  Read More…

I have a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) app currently in testing and this week it came back with some weird issues. The app uses the Client Object Model to consume SharePoint 2010 lists and UX is a factor in the design, so we’ve decided to do some metrics recording to see how people interact with the app. We want to know what features people use and which efforts were wasted.

Strangely, we started noticing that the names of the metrics (which were also being written to a SharePoint list) were displaying some incorrect results…names like “ShowAllItemsOpened” were instead “showAllMenuItem_Click.” What’s that you say? Clearly that’s the name of an event handler! Well, you’d be right! But it worked before! What changed in testing? First, some background information …

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How many times have you been tasked with building a UI at runtime? I know I’ve had to do it plenty of times. This can often be a time consuming and tedious process. Check the data type, decide what kind of control to use, add that control to some placeholder, rinse and repeat.

I was recently given a task that would take selected search results, compare the items selected, and then present the user with a UI of all fields common across the selected items. Pretty straightforward…and potentially lots of code.

Being new to SharePoint development, little did I know that there was a hidden gem (they tell me there are more) that would aid me in my endeavor.

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In addition to contributing to AIS’ brand-new corporate blog, many members of our team have their own personal blogs. We may be biased, but we certainly think they’re worth a spot in your bookmarks or reader feed. Here’s what some of them have been writing about lately:

Beyond the Agile Programmer: Innovative Teams: Ryan Cromwell attended illustrator Brad Colbow’s session on Building a Design Culture at Midwest UX (where AIS was a sponsor). It got him thinking about how Scrum can enable a culture of innovation.

Using Windows Azure IaaS to host SharePoint 2010: Harin Sandhoo shares the time-saving PowerShell script he uses to set up the infrastructure for SharePoint farms in Azure’s IaaS offering. (sandhoo.wordpress.com)

Update Azure DB Firewall Rules with PowerShell: Here’s another handy PowerShell from Tom McKearney for work-from-home Azure developers who are tired of constantly updating their SQL Azure Firewall settings.  (Codemares)

Setting Up SharePoint 2010 in Amazon Web Services (AWS)
: Chris Hettinger has absolutely everything you need to know about migrating a SharePoint environment to Amazon’s great big datacenter in the cloud. (messor.com)

The goal of our project with the Kennedy Center was to digitally archive the entire collection of National Symphony Orchestra recordings. That’s over 100 years of precious, irreplaceable audio files— each of which were up to 2GB in size — that needed to be electronically preserved in a secure and searchable archive. Not to mention the Orchestra needed an efficient process and system for their future archiving, so it was important to get it done right the first time. An out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 feature set alone was not sufficient, so we developed and implemented a customized solution. It was an awesome project and one that we were thrilled to be a part of.

Kennedy Center Case Study: Executive Version

Kennedy Center Case Study: Technical Version

About half of what we do here at AIS is for government clients. And as much as we’d like to brag about the innovative work we do for them, we usually can’t, for obvious national-security-related reasons.

But occasionally we can put together case studies and project descriptions, so if you’re curious about the sort of work the AIS Federal team does, please check them out below.

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