Adventures in SP2013

I've finally gotten around to setting up a demo VM of SharePoint 2013. Of course, it was necessitated by looking forward to see if we could utilize it to solve a problem a user is having now, so I haven't exactly gotten to dance around in the snowflakes and stare in awe and wonder at the freshness of it all... That said, I'm very much liking what I see so far.

I've had a couple of minor gotchas arise during the testing. For starters, I'm using CriticalPath's SP2013 VM setup guide (free registration required). It's been really good so far, though I got briefly thrown off track due mostly to a dumb mistype on my part and a red herring in the guide. When setting up your new users in Active Directory, the CriticalPath guide includes a PowerShell script and annotations in the document which state that it will handle SQL permissions.

This is not accurate. It's also not a problem, because the SP installer does it for you (provided the account you run the SP installer under has permissions to write to the database to begin with). Just provide the account/credentials for your would-be farm account, and SP will set all the privileges accordingly. That's nice.

When SP offers to create your first site collection, I was thrown off slightly by the fact that the installer defaults to the /sites/ managed path. I had assumed that the root site collection (eg - "/") was going to be created by default, and so after the configuration wizard completed and I couldn't visit http://mynewvm/ but http://mynewvm/sites/test worked, I was a little puzzled.

Part of my testing scenario involved setting up some metadata terms for working with refiners. It was easily done in the site settings for my test site, but then when I was nosing around in the Managed Metadata Service application, I couldn't seem to edit the term store at all. After a short time browsing the Internet unsuccessfully, the reason finally dawned on me - I didn't have permissions to edit the global term store because nobody is defined as a Term Store Administrator! I added myself here, saved the changes, and voila - I can now start creating termsets.

More later.

CredSSP across forests (except not)

Sorry, this post isn't going to give any insightful gleaning into how this works. I'm making a guess that it could work, but I would have to get a bunch of people to dedicate time and cycles to making it work, and only a small number of said individuals would likely think it important enough to actually do.

We're in the process of domain consolidation, and the domain my office is moving to is admin'ed by different folks. Our farm is not moving, we're opting instead to keep it in its current domain and simply stand up 2013 in the new domain and (to channel some Xzibit here) "migrate while we migrate". There's trust issues (from a certificate standpoint, not human trust) meaning that anytime I try to RDP into my own servers, Windows complains that they're not trusted anymore (don't recall getting those warnings before when I was in my old domain trying to remote into servers in the current domain, so I'm guessing their GPO doesn't have our certificate server as trusted, or some other AD nonsense). Accordingly, it's fouled up my credential delegation configuration (or perhaps this is also GPO at work).

At any rate, I have actual work to do and don't have time just yet to suss this out...so...saying goodbye to PowerShell remoting for now...

A Farewell to Groove

I've been trying to keep an eye on the Office 15 rollout. Less concern in mind over the new applications and more about the implications they have for SharePoint. I'd heard from Becky Isserman that my trusty old friend InfoPath was getting barely a manicure, let alone a full makeover, but it seems that this is not quite correct.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa947697(v=office.15)

Lots of new web controls supported, sandboxing, full support for Visual Studio. Heck, all we really need is support for Managed Metadata and we're golden. I can't imagine why we're dragging our feet for so long on that, but c'est la vie.

Now then, as Redmond giveth, Redmond taketh away...

http://www.brainlitter.com/2012/07/28/rip-sharepoint-workspace-in-2013-we-hardly-knew-ye/

Groove is finally dead. A single tear rolls down Ray Ozzie's cheek. Apparently this functionality is to be replaced with SkyDrive and SP2013 integration. We'll have to see how that works exactly, but if the offline support is as-advertised (because that always happens!), then we might just be hurrying to SP2013 sooner rather than later.