The Selection Service division of the New Jersey Civil Service Commission was bogged down by the large volumes of paper documents required by applicants seeking jobs with the state. To streamline its processes, the agency deployed a KnowledgeLake enterprise content management solution running on Microsoft SharePoint. The result is faster searches for information, improved document management, and the successful deployment of an enterprise-level solution that may make its way across other agency departments.

Read full case study here: Case Study

The following KnowledgeLake Imaging Search case study was selected as a finalist for the “Best Search Solution 2013” by the European SharePoint Conference.  Search technology is at the heart of SharePoint, from every release to the new 2013 release. This award seeks a company that delivers the best search solution and as such enhances the search experience, providing users with the content and the people they need quickly and effectively.

Case Study

In 2012, KnowledgeLake Professional Services successfully completed Phase I of a multi-phase ECM engagement with the New Jersey Civil Service Commission (NJ CSC). The objective was to implement ECM for their “Selection Services” division with SharePoint 2010, KnowledgeLake Imaging, Capture Server, Capture Workstation and Connect. Milestones included the deployment of mirrored SharePoint 2010 farms for testing and production, a business specific taxonomy and the integration to their public facing Online Application Submission (OAS) system.

To read full white paper and VOTE for KnowledgeLake as Best Search Solution Case Study go to Best Search Solution 2013

KnowledgeLake Connect 5.0 has a great new feature the brings functionality to the desktop client found typically at the server tier, the ability to search SharePoint 2010 document assets using SharePoint Scopes.

Read the full post here on our KnowledgeLake Team SharePoint Blog.

With the forthcoming release of Connect 5, KnowledgeLake gives the Office 365 end user more features and functionality for scanning and viewing. This new feature set is also available to SharePoint 2010 Enterprise users as well.

Read the full post here on our KnowledgeLake Team SharePoint Blog.

For years now, at KnowledgeLake Professional Services,  we’ve been building custom cascade lookup solutions for our clients using our SDKs for KnowledgeLake Capture and KnowledgeLake Connect.  These implementations have been successful, although with the frequency of these engagements KnowledgeLake saw the necessity to build this functionality in to our Imaging product within our KnowledgeLake Content Type Behaviors.

Read the full post here on our KnowledgeLake Team SharePoint Blog.

The SharePoint Lists web service is very useful and method rich for working with SharePoint lists, however one issue I ran in to recently left me wanting.

I had a series of tasks to code and one was to determine if a SharePoint list exists in one primary default location and if it did use that list but if it did not I would bind to another list in a backup location.

The Lists web service does not have an Exists method so I created this function below to do the job for me.

   1:  private static bool ListExists(string webUrl, string list)

   2:  {

   3:      try

   4:      {

   5:      Lists lists = new Lists();

   6:      lists.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

   7:      lists.PreAuthenticate = true;

   8:      if (webUrl.EndsWith("/"))

   9:          lists.Url = webUrl + "_vti_bin/lists.asmx";

  10:      else

  11:          lists.Url = webUrl + "/_vti_bin/lists.asmx";

  12:      try

  13:      {

  14:          XmlNode xmlList = lists.GetList(list);

  15:          return true;

  16:      }

  17:      catch (Exception ex)

  18:      {

  19:          Trace.WriteLine(ex.Message + " " + ex.StackTrace);

  20:          return false;

  21:      }

  22:      }

  23:      catch (Exception ex)

  24:      {

  25:      Trace.WriteLine(ex.Message + " " + ex.StackTrace);

  26:      return false;

  27:      }

  28:  }

If GetLists works then xmlList object will contain a XML scheme document, list exists.  If the list does not exist a SOAP exception will be trapped and the ListExists method returns false.

For more information see: Lists.GetList Method

It’s important to understand the there is a difference when you “Close” a Web Part and deleting it via the “Modify Shared Web Page” or Site Actions/Edit Page.

Closing a Web Part essentially hides it.  If you Close the web part you can use SharePoint Designer and view the ASPX page, in this case the default.aspx page and you’ll see the hidden (grayed out) web part.

If you delete the web part, it physically deletes the web part from the page. 

Deleting the web part via Page Edit mode.

Web part is deleted from page as viewed from SharePoint Designer.

So why is this minutia important to know.  Well, it’s about load time and resources.  Closing the web part still loads the web part invisible to the users, hence it requires time and resources to load the web part.

The hidden Web Part Maintenance page

Now, if you’ve used the Close option and want to clean up and delete those old parts you can use the Web Part Maintenance page.  The problem is it’s not on any of the SharePoint administration links (at least none I could find), so you have to use one of the following URL query string command to get to it.

• http://<server>/_layouts/spcontnt.aspx?&url=default.aspx
• http://<server>/default.aspx?contents=1

Once your on the Web Part Maintenance page you can delete the web part for Personal or Shared use.

SharePoint Foundation (aka WSS v4) comes with some new monitoring and analysis features to give administrator better control over activity and performance of SharePoint 2010 Farm via rules (SharePoint Maintenance Engine) and reporting. At KnowledgeLake we knew we needed a little something extra to effectively support our SharePoint and KnowledgeLake implementations, enter the KnowledgeLake Log Viewer, a Microsoft Silverlight application.

Read the full post at the KnowledgeLake Team Blog.

This screen cast demonstrates how to change the behavior of opening PDF files and other un-trusted files served from SharePoint 2010. 

A Web Applications General Settings allow you to change the File Handling as it’s serviced from SharePoint to the clients IE 8 Browser.  By default the X-Download-Options of the MIME-Handling header is set to Force Save or noopen. To change the behavior set the Browser File Handling to Permissive rather than Strict to allow the file to be open in the browser.

Browser File Handling 
Specifies whether additional security headers are added to documents served to web browsers. These headers specify that a browser should show a download prompt for certain types of files (for example, .html) and to use the server’s specified MIME type for other types of files.

• Permissive Specifies no headers are added, which provides a more compatible user experience.
• Strict Adds headers that force the browser to download certain types of files. The forced download improves security for the server by disallowing the automatic execution of Web content that contributors upload.

Here are a few quick tips on kickin’ up the IIS performance for SharePoint 2007.

Disk-based Caching for Binary Large Objects

The purpose of the BlobCache is to avoid extra database roundtrips required to pass down these objects when the page loads. Use this setting in the WebApp web.config file.

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" max-age="86400" enabled="true" />

• location: Make sure you have plenty of hard drive for "location".
• maxSize: The size in GB of the cache location.
• max-age: Can be >= 0. The default is 86400 seconds (24 hours).

Flush the Cache

Use the stsadmin command to flush all binary large object (BLOB) caches associated with a specified Web application on different Web front-end computers on the farm: stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname blobcacheflushcount -propertyvalue 11 -url http://mywebapp:port

Enable IIS 6.0 Compression for SharePoint

REM Turn On Compression

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoDynamicCompression true

cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/parameters/HcDoStaticCompression true

REM Set Compression to High Level

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/gzip/hcdynamiccompressionlevel "9"

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/deflate/hcdynamiccompressionlevel "9"

REM IIS 6.0 Only

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/gzip/hcscriptfileextensions "css" "js" "asp" "exe" "axd" "aspx"

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/filters/compression/deflate/hcscriptfileextensions "css" "js" "asp" "exe" "axd" "aspx"

The compression can be 0 to 10, 10 being the highest.