SharePoint Workspace 2010 “exceeds the lookup column threshold”

While trying to sync to a SharePoint site using SharePoint Workspace 2010, you may bump into the following strange error: "The query cannot be completed because the number of lookup columns it contains exceeds the lookup column threshold"

This is due to SharePoint’s new resource throttling settings for managing large lists. There is an easy fix in Central Administration.

Go to Central Administration and then browse to Application Management > Manage Web Application. Select the web application you need.

In General Settings choose Resource Throttling. Set the value in the List View Lookup Threshold textbox to a higher value (equal to or greater than the number of site columns you are using on the list where you saw the error).

I bumped into this with Workspace but this error may appear for other client applications / systems that use SharePoint 2010 as a platform, and are trying to lookup lists that have more site columns than the throttle setting.

How To: In Place Record Views in SharePoint 2010

One of the great new features in SharePoint 2010 is the In Place Record declaration. This allows a user to apply Records management to any file in a document library.

To enable this feature, you must first activate the In Place Records feature in your site collection. Next, for a given library, go to its settings and choose “Record Declaration Settings”. Choose “Always allow the manual declaration of records”.

This will allow the Declare Record button to appear in the ribbon.

Now that you have a collection of records and documents in the library, you will probably wish to sort them using views. I like to create two extra views: Active (which means all active documents or “non-records” and All Records (which means anything declared as a record).

It is easy to create the views once you know the steps. The following steps come from my colleague Hoking:

To make the views, you need to first enable in-place records management in the library settings. Then you need to actually declare 1 document as a record manually - this is in order to get the "Declared Record" field visible in the create/modify view pages. For the Active view, filter on Declared Record equal to [blank], as in don't enter a value for the field. For the All Records view, set the filter on Declared Record not equal to [blank].

Hope that helps!

MOSS 2007 Service Pack 2 Backup May Lock and Remove Site Actions Options

We had a very strange error suddenly appear on a client’s site last week – we got the following email:

Anyone know what's happening with site actions menu on the top level site of [the website]? I have limited menu options - i.e. there is no site actions, edit page, create page, create site, etc.

Our support team looked into this and figured out the following:

The issue appeared on the top-level site collection due it being set to “Read-Only” after a backup locked the site and then failed to release it. Changing it to “Not locked” immediately restored the menus.

This is what our guys had to say:

In SP2, Microsoft added a feature to STSADM to automatically lock the site collection during a backup:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287967(office.12).aspx

“In Service Pack 2 for SharePoint Products and Technologies, site collections are automatically locked as read-only before a backup process occurs. Therefore, there is no need to use the Setsitelock: Stsadm operation (Windows SharePoint Services) operation. If you do not want site collections to be locked as read-only, you must specify the nositelock parameter that is available in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2 (SP2).”

It is likely that some kind of error or exception interrupted the scheduled backup, and as a result the lock was not removed.

Here is the page link: http://[your address]/_admin/sitequota.aspx.

Hope that helps others out!

Familiar Faces at the SharePoint Summit 2010

Just got back from attending the SharePoint Summit 2010 in Montreal with my business partner Keith Carter.
One of the nice things about the summit (apart from being in Montreal, which is always fun – awful traffic excepted) was that I saw a lot of familiar faces.
There were a lot of vendors I knew from my days on the SharePoint trade show floors – folks like Gail Shlansky, Yancy Lent, and Ken Allen from Axceler, Dave Seaman from Syntergy, Michael Potter from Nintex, and Tony Lanni from AvePoint.
Other familiar faces included speakers like Ruven Gotz and Wouter van Vugt.
This year, I had a happy surprise - a lot of my former colleagues from Parks Canada were present. We had worked together in the Office 12 TAP days when SharePoint 2007 was about to release and it was  a nice reunion.
Like any summit, it was also a chance to meet new folks. Before the summit kicked off, there was a dinner for all the speakers at the Greek restaurant Restaurant Ilios, organized by Danny Boulanger and Alain Lord. We had some nice chats about SharePoint, Holland, and Canadian culture (it turns out we do have one!).
There were a lot of Canadian government folks at the conference – it seemed like a majority of the participants in fact were public servants. There were some interesting chats about the challenges of buying and deploying SharePoint in the government.
On Wednesday I presented on migrating to SharePoint 2010.The interest in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 was high, so the room was full. I’m embedding my slide presentation below:

SharePoint Summit 2010 - Stress Free Migration

View more presentations from Nick Kellett.

It was a good conference and I look forward to the next one!

SharePoint 2010 Migration - Stress Free!

Things to Get Excited About In SharePoint 2010

Here are some things I’ve been very excited about, in no particular order. They are fairly developer-centric.

• Ability to develop against the SharePoint dlls on a developer desktop! ‘Nuff said.
• Developer Dashboard – makes it easy to see tracing information and web server details when you are working on a SharePoint site.
• LINQ to SharePoint – this is some nice syntactic sugar that helps replace CAML a little bit. You can created strongly typed SharePoint entities using a utility called SPMetal and then query and manipulate the data in them using standard LINQ syntax. 
• Visual Studio 2010 integration – VS2010 will have a lot more tools to make SP2010 development a snap. SharePoint Project and Item Templates, Feature Designer, and Project Packaging, will hide most of the messy details of creating, packaging, and deploying a SharePoint solution from the developers.
• Business Connectivity Services – the next level of the Business Data Catalogue. BCS uses External Content Types which look a bit like Content Types, and are defined in the new SharePoint Designer or in Visual Studio and then added to SharePoint using a definition file (a bit like the BDC currently works). Users can then create External Lists in their sites, which pull in the data from these external sources.
• Client Object Model – an abstraction layer that allows developers to write code that will work in client .NET applications, Javascript (for AJAX type operations), and Silverlight. Basically this is a disconnected, batch-style API that will operate on the existing SharePoint web services and handle requests and responses using XML and JSON.
• SharePoint 2010 Designer – Whereas SPD 2007 was a warmed-over FrontPage, the new version has been rebuilt with a focus purely on SharePoint. The new navigation panel is great because it shows you a list of SharePoint objects, such as Entities, Lists, Master Pages, and Workflows. What’s great about this is it keeps you thinking about what you are trying to do in SharePoint, rather than where that command used hidden in SPD. Another big win is you can export your SPD changes as a .WSP file straight into Visual Studio for further customization.
• The Office Ribbon makes it into SharePoint. The Ribbon kind of grew on me in Office 2007. I think it was a clever paradigm to surface many commands that used to be buried. Now the many SharePoint menus and Site Action dropdowns will coalesce into the Ribbon. I think this will make training and support a little easier. The big weakness of the Ribbon is that you often have to remember which tab the commands belong in. I found that was the case with the new SharePoint Ribbon but after a little while you get used to it, and it becomes faster to modify SharePoint pages.
• STSADM is dead, long live PowerShell! Leveraging the great new scripting environment is a huge win for SharePoint. The ability to write .NET code to manipulate the command pipeline means we will start to see some very powerful “no-touch” deployment and management options for SharePoint
• More events – now you can find out when your web or list was created or deleted. This may sound like a small feature but this enables some provisioning and discovery scenarios that in SP2007 were not even possible!
• Enterprise Metadata Manager. I’ve blogged a lot about the important of governance and centralizing metadata. The new Enterprise Metadata Manager makes it easy to import and manage term sets, keyword and tags.
• Service Application Architecture – the Shared Service Provider was a good idea but it was a bit hard to use in practice. Under the new architecture, you can create Service Applications for things like Excel Services, Forms Services, Business Connectivity Services, and other services that you build or buy, and you can mix and match these in your farms as you like. The services get consumed by web front ends via a standard interface. This should allow a lot of plug-and-play customization of farms. I’m even wondering if there is an opportunity for vendors here…create some services and expose them to clients from the cloud.

There are some other big changes like Claims Based Authentication and Solution sandboxing which are intriguing to me. The Solution sandboxing feature gives me this sneaking suspicion we will one day soon see a Microsoft SharePoint App Store where we can buy, download and run SharePoint solutions in our farms.
Anyway, there’s a lot of exciting new stuff in SharePoint and I think SharePoint development is about to become really fun!

Note: This is a repost from Planet MOSS

Hello World

StoneShare is a Canadian solutions provider focusing entirely on Microsoft SharePoint - we work with 2003, 2007, and 2010 so far! We'll be posting regularly on this blog with a variety of tips, news, discussions, and other items that relate to SharePoint. We hope this blog will be of interest to the community and our clients, and look forward hearing your feedback.
Regards,

The StoneShare Team