I’m really proud to announce my first SharePoint application… to be exact it’s the first tool developed and distributed by my company ‘Andreas Glaser Software Engineering GmbH’.

Management summary

Content Generator 2010 allows the automatic creation of SharePoint content and structure containing list items, documents, lists, pages, sites and sub site collections.

Features

All the features offered by my application:

• Content generator
  Create list items, documents, lists*, pages, sites and sub site collections with predefined content. Create content on different SharePoint farms, e.g. development-, integration- and staging environment**.
  
• Save time and money
  Create content once. Recreate it any time at different SharePoint farms. Don't waste the precious time of your software engineers and project managers. Find errors during development and quality assurance because you are developing with real world content.
  
• Real world development
  Don't develop in a sandbox. Arrange content in a structure which is similar to your customers’ information architecture.
  
• Easy to use
  Quickly create content and structure. Easy to use editor. Re-use html from any web site as your sample content.
  
• Jobs creating content
  Save content and structure as templates for different customers. Create them using jobs.
  
• Large quantities of content
  Create large quantities of content (list items, documents, lists, pages and sites) either by item or globally for all items.
  
• Check in and approval
  Check in and approve list items, documents and pages either by item or globally for all elements.
  
• Logging
  The application supports logging of informational events and errors. Solve errors fast since they are referenced to the user manual.
  
• Portable
  No installation required.

* Custom list templates are not supported.
** Production environments are not supported.

Business value

As an IT service provider focused on SharePoint you have Software Engineers creating solutions for your customers. Content Generator adds additional benefit to your software development process because it enables your software engineers to develop with real world content, meaning content which is similar to your customers’ information architecture.

You create it once with an easy to use editor and reuse it on different SharePoint farms, e.g. development-, integration- and staging environment and / or by different software engineers.

Download

Content Generator 2010

Your opinion?

Please write me what you think… you can either post a comment below or write a mail using the contact form.

What’s next?

Of course there will be SharePoint 2010 support if the new version of SharePoint is officially released.

Michael Pertek and I have written a professional article Hart am Datenlimit - Externe Speicherung grosser Datenmengen in SharePoint 2007 for a German database magazine called database pro (sorry no English translation available). This article is based on a white paper I have written with Michael in September 2008. The first link includes the white paper and the last two links contain the English translation.

• Externe Speicherung von Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) mit SharePoint 2007 sowie SQL Server 2005 / 2008
• SharePoint 2007, SQL Server 2005 and 2008, FileStream, External BLOB Storage and ISPExternalBinaryProvider - Part 1
• SharePoint 2007, SQL Server 2005 and 2008, FileStream, External BLOB Storage and ISPExternalBinaryProvider - Part 2

A translation for the article is not intended.

Summary

The following summary is in German since the article is not translated…

Die Speicherung von grossen Datenmengen ist zu einem zentralen Entscheidungskriterium bei der Auswahl einer strategischen Plattform für businessrelevante IT Applikationen geworden. Wo liegen meine Daten, wie können diese regelmässig und einfach gesichert (Backup) und im Bedarfsfall wieder hergestellt (Recovery) werden? Am Beispiel eines Patientendossiers für ein Krankenhaus erläutern Andreas Glaser und Michael Pertek wie Speichermechanismen für grosse Datenmengen mit SharePoint interagieren. In dem Artikel werden verschiedene Varianten vorgestellt, wie unstrukturierte Daten gespeichert werden können. Als konkrete Beispiel und Variationen werden angerissen:

• VARBINARY (MAX)-Datentyp
• Filestream
• External BLOB Storages (=EBS)
• Remote BLOB Storages (=RBS)

Anhand von konkreten Anleitungen und Codebeispielen zeigen die Autoren die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten mit den jeweiligen Vor- und Nachteilen und geben eine Ausblick auf herstellerseitige Lösungsansätze, die hoffentlich mit SharePoint 2010 zumindest teilweise realisiert werden.
Der ganze Artikel unter: http://www.namics.com/wissen/hart-am-datenlimit
Das passende Whitepaper unter: http://www.namics.com/download/Whitepaper_SharePoint_23Sep08.pdf

This problem was another result because of a snapshot taken at the virtualized SQL Server. After stepping back to a state in the past using the snapshot I got the error “The object SPPersistedFile Name=SOLUTIONNAME-SOMEGUID.bak Parent=SPSolutionLanguagePack Name=0 has been deleted by another user since it was last fetched.” and after that the COM exception.

You can read more about the previous error:

• The object SPPersistedFile Name=SOLUTIONNAME-SOMEGUID.bak Parent=SPSolutionLanguagePack Name=0 has been deleted by another user since it was last fetched.

Problem description

I can’t remember what I exactly did but it was upgradesolution, deploysolution or retractsolution which resulted in the following error:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {A8F03BE3-EDB7-4972-821F-AF6F8EA34884} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

This error occurred on a Windows Server 2008.

Solution

iisreset ;) I was really lucky that the problem was gone after doing an iisreset because I didn’t want to track down a COM exception.

Using SharePoint 2007 in a virtualized environment can bring up new or different problems compared to a physical machine. With Hyper-V or VMware ESX you can take a snapshots of your SharePoint 2007 environment including SQL Server. Jumping back to a state in the past can be helpful if something is corrupted. Jumping back can also corrupt your SharePoint farm. In this case a snapshot of the SQL Server was taken and after some time used to go back to a state in the past resulting in the error.

Problem description

After running stsadm with the operation upgradesolution the following error was display in command prompt:

“The object SPPersistedFile Name=SOLUTIONNAME-SOMEGUID.bak Parent=SPSolutionLanguagePack Name=0 has been deleted by another user since it was last fetched.”

I wasn’t able to retract, remove or upgrade the solution neither by stsadm nor using Central administration.

 

Solution

The reason for this behavior was the retraction of a snapshot regarding the SQL Server. The snapshot was taken at the SQL Server with a certain version of a solution package. After taking the snapshot a new version of the solution package was deployed. Retracting the snapshot resulted in a different state of the solution in the configuration database and on the file system of the SharePoint server.

Fortunately two of my colleagues came up with a solution. Microsoft released a knowledge base article (KB39308) which solves a different problem but can be used to solve my upgradesolution problem too:

Error message when you try to modify or to delete an alternate access mapping in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: "An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action"

There is a cache folder stored on the SharePoint 2007 server which has to be deleted using the instructions given by Microsoft.