One of the big claims in the WCM space for SPS 2010 was it’s conformance out-of-the-box with the WCAG version2 standard to the AA level.

It’s only at Beta release at the minute and it’s subject to change but early indications look like this:

(NB: i have used a couple of common Accessibility Audit tools and am looking specifically for WCAG AA errors. NNB: While these tools are useful from an Audit perspective, there is no satisfactory measure of accessibility other than a proper evaluation with disabled users).

Also testing with client-side scripting (JavaScript) disabled as there needs to be an acceptable level of functionality without relying on this.

Team Site Template – Home Page

Total Validator (www.totalvalidator.com): Total errors found: 524 (Parsing: 7, HTML: 467, WCAG v2 A: 49, WCAG v2 AA: 1)

WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/): WAVE has detected 12 accessibility errors

Disable JavaScript: Site Actions button doesn’t display a menu, none of the Ribbon controls work, ‘My Profile’ button doesn’t work, Search doesn’t work, Tags / Like It doesn’t work

Team Site Template – Document Library (Ribbon View)

Total Validator: Total errors found: 449 (Parsing: 12, HTML: 413, WCAG v2 A: 23, WCAG v2 AA: 1)

WAVE: WAVE has detected 13 accessibility errors

Disable JavaScript: Site Actions button doesn’t display a menu, none of the Ribbon controls work, document context menu doesn’t work, Search doesn’t work, Tags / Like It doesn’t work

Publishing Site Template – Home Page

Total Validator: Total errors found: 210 (Parsing: 3, HTML: 193, WCAG v2 A: 14)

WAVE: WAVE has detected 3 accessibility errors

Disable JavaScript: Site Actions button doesn’t display a menu, Help button doesn’t work, Search doesn’t work, Search field pre-populated with text.

Summary:

These figures are not totally accurate as several of the ‘errors’ flagged by these tools can be safely ignored, but we can see that things may not be as clear cut as stating that SharePoint 2010 has out of the box compliance with WCAGv2.

Hi all,

So I’m on the SP2010 MS Ignite training in Dublin. The course is a beta but its providing useful. Here’s some observations:

• STSADM for the most part replaced by Powershell. Aim is that STSADM will be deprecated in the next versions of Sharepoint. Powershell specific sharepoint version exists and users can create scriptlets for SP manipulation.
• We now have a 14 Hive. Bye bye 12!
• VS2010 is running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper V. 8GB Ram and it runs ‘ok’. VS2010 is fickle and crashes a lot. Our laptops will struggle. Not sure even a central dev server will cut it.
• New facility for mapped folders within VS2010, i.e. a mapped images folder that maps directly to the 14 hive images
• Contents=1 still works for webpart maintenance page
• Support for Visual Webparts (ascx files) as a project type.
• Great new facility within VS2010 for managing features & solution packages. Very easy to move features about. Need to find out if this is scriptable. Best thing I’ve seen so far.
• SharePoint explorer within VS2010 looks ok. Read only view of local sharepoint installs only. Currently available free tool SP Explorer is better than this but you can knacker your SP environment with it.
• WebTemplates are replacing Site Templates. All WSP based. Can be exported and brought back into VS2010 & customised. I.e user creates site, exports into VS2010 and boom, rebuilability (new word!)
• Features now have versions and dependencies (one level deep). With versions you can specify what gets upgraded.  We’ll need practice with this one..
• We can target event receivers against the top level site ‘RootWeb Only’. Possibility that a ‘Child Web Only’ attribute will be available in RTM version
• Can also target event receivers againts specific lists.
• Workflows can now be associated to sites.
• Features now have a property bag
• Developer dashboard is good. At the moment it can only be turned on/off via code (PS or c#)
• SharePoint can toggle UI Versions. Version 3 is the ‘classic’ look. Version 4 is the ‘ribbon’
• Webtemplates are stored in the solution gallery. Site Template Gellery is gone.
• Solution Sandbox stores content within the content db. I suspect this may use SQL Server 2008′s disk based storage.
• Solutions now have a ‘resource point’ system. Limits can be assigned to ensure that a solution doesnt hog resources.
• We can specify that solutions can be upgraded.
• New events exist, i.e. site added

Davey

Poor Spencer Harbar,  he has produced some very good, detailed and useful  articles on applying Kerberos and then TechNet publish an article “Using Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication”  full of the very points that may work in the lab but not necessarily in the real world.   I sense he was a bit miffed on writing this article!

He has listed the main points to be aware of in this article on his blog post:

TechNet Misinformation: How NOT to use Kerberos for SharePoint Authentication

You will be able to find other Kerberos related articles in his blog.

In order to turn off or disable the "My Site" or "My Links" functionality you need to be a SharePoint Administrator. Then follow the steps below.

• Go to the Central Administration Web Page
• Click on the link for Shared Services Administration
  • If you have more than one Shared Service Provider (SSP), select the one that is running the "My Sites" functionality
  • Under "User Profiles and My Sites", click "Personalization Services Permissions"
• Select the group you want to limit the functionality.  More than likely you will just have "NTAuthority\Authenticated Users"
• Click Modify Permissions of Selected Users
• In the next screen, you will see a list of checkboxes
  • To disable "My Sites" uncheck "Create Personal Site"
  • To disable "My Links" uncheck "Use Personal Features"
• Select the checkbox that is appropriate for you

Ever had to merge SharePoint lists? Typically you can open them in Excel, copy & paste from one sheet to another and bob’s your uncle. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in all cases, especially when attachments are involved or the data uses lookup columns.

I’ve been playing about with MS Access 2007. It has a handy feature in that you can open SharePoint lists directly, as shown below:

You can then get to do pretty cool things with the list as it’s pretty much a DB table within access, albeit still linked to SharePoint.

It’s simply a case of using the ‘External Data | SharePoint List’ option to open the lists you need merged and copying/pasting from one table to another. There’s a couple of caveats here to be careful of though, namely:

• Your content types have to match across lists, otherwise it doesn’t work. You’ll have to switch into the query designer and map the columns manually.
• Beware of lookup columns. They’ll cause a ‘data integrity error’ if your data doesn’t match correctly. What I tend to do is paste a row in at a time and manually select the lookup value from the relevant column. This seems to sort it.

The plus side of using MS Access is that you can build up queries and reports from your SharePoint list data. Pretty powerful and not often mentioned!

Anyone that’s worked with SharePoint 2007 knows it’s a pain to make accessible. SharePoint spits things out as tables and the Site Actions menu is grim to behold in HTML. The guys working on the NSPCC NSU site used the ARF toolkit to replace the standard SharePoint 2007 controls with ARF controls that basically pull the info from SharePoint, render it as XML and apply an XSL to this. The result is the NSU Safeguarding Unit site that’s fully accessible. (Cue Ciaran or Nicky for a full blog post! =) )

Andrew McConnell has recently blogged about SharePoint 2010’s rendering; namely that it’s WCAG2.0 AA compliant ootb and it even converts existing sites! His post is definitely worth a read and can be found here:

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2009/11/04/sharepoint-2010-changes-to-rendering.aspx

I wonder how accessible the admin interface is though? I’ve seen a few requests for accessible admin interfaces and I have a feeling it’ll be the next big thing.

I installed and configured SharePoint 2007 on a farm but ran into a problem accessing the site from the web front end servers.

When trying to navigate to the site, SharePoint would prompt for user credentials, no matter who you were logged on as and then return a 401 error.

Spence Harbar has a really good article explaining this issue which is caused by a security feature installed in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2003 (SP1). http://www.harbar.net/archive/2009/07/02/disableloopbackcheck-amp-sharepoint-what-every-admin-and-developer-should-know.aspx

He points to Microsoft’s KB article 896861, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/896861

which details two workarounds to resolve this issue.

I recently had to export a site and import it to a different server.  Everything worked well using the stsadm export/import command.  EXCEPT when I tested adding a new content type in a Document Library, the document opened in Word 2007, but I got an error saying the Document Panel will not load and I was not able to add in any metadata for this document.

It turns out that I have two lookup columns on the site which contain metadata for a content type and to resolve this problem, I had to delete and recreate these columns, then add them back into the content type.

Luckily I had set these columns up in a parent content type and was able to push down these changes to the other content types inheriting from this parent.

Here’s an interesting post (http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=305) from Maurice Prather on SharePoint 2010 Web parts.

It seems that now your web part will be stored against the page if check in/checkout is activated against the page library in a WCM site.

Sounds useful as in previous cases if you exported your site the web part settings were lost. Now hopefully your web part settings will stay with the page during export or the web part itself will reappear in a previous page version if inadvertently deleted from the current page version.

The one thing I’m curious to see is if the page differences / web part differences are visible to the user from the SharePoint UI, rather than having to revert to a version and manually check for differences Could be a useful WinDiff add on for SharePoint.

Found this new blog via the SharePoint Facebook group – http://blogs.msdn.com/vssharepointtoolsblog/ looks pretty good. The latest post has some info on SharePoint 2010 tools in Visual Studio 2010:

As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 was announced earlier this week and it contains a lot of cool features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

Configurable deployment

With all new SharePoint project templates you can leverage new configurable deployment feature which lets you configure the way you want to deploy or retract your project. Besides using provided, out of the box deployment steps (Run Pre-Deployment Command, Run Post-Deployment Command, Recycle IIS Application Pool, Retract Solution, Add Solution, and Activate Features) you can use SharePoint extensibility to create your own, custom deployment steps and deployment configurations.

Sandboxed and farm solutions

Some SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed or farm solutions. Sandboxed solutions run in a secure and monitored process that has limited resource access and with farm solutions user must have SharePoint administrator privileges to run or deploy the solution. You can read more about SharePoint sandboxed solution here.

Extending SharePoint Tools

Even though Visual Studio 2010 contains a set of project templates you can also extend them. You can create extensions for projects, project items, define your own project item types and create deployment extensions. You can read more about extending SharePoint tools on MSDN.

Feature and Package Designer

Feature and package designers give you the ability to customize features in your solution and with packaging designer you can customize which features are getting deployed and how. More about feature and package designer is here.

SharePoint Explorer

SharePoint Explorer is a new tool window that gives you a view into your SharePoint server. You can get a hierarchical view of lists, sites and workflows on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates

The following SharePoint specific project templates and project item templates are available in Visual Studio 2010:

Project Templates

• Empty SharePoint project
• Visual Web Part project
• Sequential and State Machine Workflow
• Business Data Connectivity Model
• Event Receiver
• List Definition
• Content Type
• Module Project
• Site Definition

Project Item Templates

• Empty Element
• Web Part
• User Control
• Application Page
• Association Form
• Initiation Form
• Business Data Connectivity Resource Item
• List Instance
• List Definition From Content Type
• Global Resources File

Besides above mentioned project templates, there are two import project templates for importing .WSP file contents and importing reusable workflows:

• Import Reusable Workflow
• Import SharePoint Solution Package

How to download, install and get started

If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download Visual Studio 2010 from here. Download will be available to everyone on October 21st.

If you want to know how to download and install Visual Studio 2010 watch Channel9 video.

To get you started, head over to MSDN and read some of the walkthroughs on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010.