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Adobe PDF iFilter not working after installing June 2010 Cumulative Update for SharePoint

Peter Bojanczyk — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:52:39 GMT

Recently I installed the June 2010 CU for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 on one of our farms and noticed that after the installation, the Adobe PDF iFilter stopped working; more specifically, it wouldn’t crawl the content within the PDF documents. Quick look in the crawl log shows the following:

Upon further analysis I decided to uninstall the PDF iFilter and reinstall it again. The problem I’ve noticed is that uninstalling the iFilter doesn’t clean up the registry entries.

As you may have guessed, reinstalling the iFilter did not solve the problem. I reset my crawled content and tried to full crawl again only to find the same message in the crawl log. I’ve decided to look a bit deeper. The Adobe’s documentation for installing and configuring the 64bit iFilter shows the registry entries that the iFilter needs. One of the entries in the documentation was different that what I had on my machine.

The documentation specified that the registry entry \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf should have the value set to {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} but my registry had a different value {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02}.

I decided to change that value to the one that the documentation recommends, recrawled my content and voila it started working again. The crawl logs no longer have that message and when I tried search for some content within the PDF document it found it whereas previously it didn’t.

Hope this saves someone from a major headache!

PS: The better question is, why would a Cumulative Update for SharePoint change registry entries for Adobe’s PDF iFilter but I’ll leave that alone for now ;)

Visual Studio Test Suite 2008: Unit Tests Pass but Load Tests Fail

Boyan Tsolov — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:53:00 GMT

This is a problem I recently ran into:

- I am using Visual Studio Test Suite 2008 to create load tests that run multiple unit tests

- I created unit tests that run by getting configuration settings from an app.config file

- If I run the unit test by itself, they pass

- I placed the unit tests in a load test and ran that: the load test fails at the line of code that tries to access the app.config:

if (System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["xxx"].Equals("xxx"))

Fixing this is extremely simple. In fact, this blog post describes it perfectly: http://www.apexa.net/Blog/web_design_Blog_20080602.aspx.

View the properties of the load test's Run Settings and set the property: "Run unit tests in application domain" to TRUE.

Done!

Styling SharePoint 2010 - Refrencing Your Custom CSS

Nicole Pullin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:36:00 GMT

As I delve deeper into styling a SharePoint 2010 site, I am discovering a few quirks here and there. Normally as each new challenge arises and I find a fix for it I just move on, rarely documenting what I did to fix the problem. This made it a bit of a challenge for me when on the next project, the same quirk arises and I'm left pouring through MasterPages and CSS files trying to remember how I fixed it last time. So, I have decided to start documenting these little things as they happen as a reference for both myself and other developers out there.

Now what prompted this particular post was something tha thad a very simple solution. You see when I started this particular project I decided to use Randy Drisgill's 2010 Starter MasterPages. I thought this would be an easy way to strip out all of the the extra coding that came with Microsofts v4.master. Everything worked great, until I tried to apply the MasterPage on another team site and for some reason I was getting a 404 error when it referenced my custom stylesheet. I had uploaded my custom css and images to the appropriate folder in the team site but the MasterPage was looking for the files in the root site and not the current site collection.

After a bit of research I discovered that I needed to update how I referenced my custom css. In Randy's Masterpage he references his Custom CSS like so:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="custom.css" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

Using the format above it will always look for custom.css in the root directory, not the current site collection. By updating it to the following it will reference the current site collection:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~SiteCollection/custom.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

Hopefully this will help someone else out there.

Cheers!

Print Stylesheets affecting the Rich Text Editor

Nicole Pullin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:04:00 GMT

Every now and then a client will have some very specific requirements when it comes to the print view of their website. For those clients we will create a custom print only stylesheet that is referenced when the page is printed. I will not go into detail here about what you should include in your print stylesheet but if you are interested in learning some best practices I would highly recommend Eric Meyer's article on A List Apart titled Going to Print.

What I do want to talk about is the fact that this week I came across a strange bug with SharePoint Moss 2007 and how it referenced my print stylesheet. Specifically it was affecting the Rich Text Editor dialog that opens when the user edits a Content Editor Web Part. For some reason, the print stylesheet was overiding the default stylesheet but only within the Rich Text Editor dialog box. Once you clicked OK and the content appeared within the site, the styling was fine.

I admit I was stumped for a while and could not find anything online that talked about this specific issue. Everything looked OK from my end, the media for the stylesheet was set to print and by all accounts it should not be referenced at all but of course there it was every time I opened up the Rich Text Editor. After hours of searching for a solution, I decided to open up my print stylesheet and wrapped all of my print styles within the @media rule. I figured it was worth a shot and 'lo and behold it worked! The print styles now behave as expected and they no longer affect the Content Editor Web Part's Rich Text Editor dialog box. Instead my beautifully crafted print styles only appear when the page is printed. At that moment I did a little chair dance and decided I had to share this little fix with other developers out there.

So, to help someone else that may come across this issue, below is how I implemented my print stylesheet in a SharePoint Moss 2007 project. The important elements are in red.

In my MasterPage I have added the following link after my main CSS has already been referenced. Please note that the media must be set to print for it to work properly:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Style%20Library/project/css/print.css" media="print" />

In my print.css file I have surrounded all of my styles within the @media print rule:

@media print {
/* ----- Add Your Print Styles Here ---- */
BODY, form {text-align: left;}
}

If you found this helpful, please let me know! I would love to hear from you.

Cheers from your helpful Interaction Designer

Building a User Experience Team

Kerri McKenna — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:34:00 GMT

A while back I was asked to answer some questions on how to build a User Experience team. I'm always interested how other teams work, so I'm sharing this in hopes that people will share their experiences with what works and what doesn't. This is how we're working now...

What is the typical workflow for interactive design? Who provides the project requirements and how are those requirements typically communicated? Wireframes? Functional requirement document? Back of a napkin?

Our workflow has evolved over the years to best meet the needs of the client, designers and developers. What's been working well for us for quite a while now is:

Business Analyst meets with client stakeholders to understand the short-term goals (1-3 years) of the business, and how they map to the goals of various groups in the business. Then we discuss how the proposed solution is expected to help achieve the primary goals. Having all of this context helps us guide the client towards making informed decisions and trade-offs throughout the rest of the project.
Business Analyst works with Interaction Designer to create annotated wireframes, which serve as the detailed requirements. We've gotten away from using use case documentation on many projects. Clients and developers continue to positively respond to the more visual representation of requirements that the wireframes provide.
Wireframes are used to achieve consensus on the features, information architecture, and screen layouts. Once an agreement is reached, developers can use the wireframes to start coding.

How to coordinate workflow between designers and developers? Currently the architect provides wireframes to designers, designers provide comps to developers, developers create websites. This breaks a lot.

Our Interaction Designers are graphic designers who can code great HTML/CSS. So after they work out the comps and get approval from the client, they're also the ones who do the front-end coding which gets handed off to the developers. This is our ideal mode of working and the developers respond well to it. However, the ratio of Interaction Designer ("ID") to Developers on a project is usually 1:many, so the ID doesn't always get to do everything at the start of the project. But they're usually assigned to the project at approximately half-time during the Implementation period so that they can continue to help with the HTML/CSS coding and tweaks that need to be made again once the developers are done with their portion. The collaboration between the two groups continues to go very well — there's a mutual respect for each other's roles on the project.

What types of hires should I be looking for? How should I configure my team and what roles should be in place? Currently I have graphic designers, developers, and an information architect. Am I missing anything? Should I replace graphic design with "interactive designers"?

Tough question. The title "Information Architect" tends to mean different things at different places. Most commonly, I find that this person is a jack-of-all-trades (usability, interaction design, information architecture, front-end coding – maybe even copywriter). It sounds like you've been using them in the role of what we call Interaction Designer to create wireframes based on the requirements. I find that by having the person who does the graphic design also do the front-end coding we're always producing designs that can be implemented.

How to manage creatives? General management philosophy about how to manage and inspire designers.

I think the most important thing is to foster respect between your creative team and development teams. This takes a lot of teaching and the job is never really complete. Create dialogues that help both sides understand each other's perspectives and frustrations. Let them figure out how they can best work together. What's worked for us is to encourage everyone to look beyond the design of our web applications to the design of everyday things. We have an email alias, comprised of creative people and developers who often discuss the user experience of many aspects of the world and it's a great alias that exposes people to new ideas (good and bad). Your designers probably all have their favourite places/things (websites, books, blogs, art) for gathering inspiration but they'll also gain inspiration from the ideas of others. So making your design process more collaborative and iterative, when possible, will only benefit the final product. This blog post I wrote was inspired by working with developers for years, and hints at how we try to work together at imason.

So how do you work?

Turning on Basic Web Parts such as the Content Editor Web Part

Peter Grigoriou — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:20:00 GMT

I have been working on a SharePoint 2010 MySite implementation and wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple which was adding a Content Editor Web Part to the page. When I went to add the web part I noticed it did not show up in the gallery. I figured it must be because of the template being used for MySite and that a particular feature was not activated so I started activating a bunch of Features until it became available. The feature that made this and a few other web parts such as the Image Viewer and Page Viewer web parts available was the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrustructure however this makes a bunch of other stuff available and so I wanted to know if there was something else I could do. A person from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) helped me with this and mentioned that you can turn on a hidden feature called "BasicWebParts" that enables this feature. I activate this as part of a Feature Receiver on the site and voila I now have access to those web parts.

Enterprise Search: Ask for help after you have a starting point

Jeff Dunmall — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:28:14 GMT

Your employees can't remember all of the information sources inside your company, much less keep track of the search interfaces that exist. Each of the following system likely has its own search interface: SAP for customer data, Ariba for expense data, Siebel for contracts, the E: drive for sales related information, http://www.yourintranet.com to look up product info, unless it is related to the US division, in which case you should visit http://www.us-yourintranet.com. Information about Project...(read more)

Options for a SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

Peter Grigoriou — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:41:00 GMT

One of the first things you will probably ask yourself when you start embarking on SharePoint 2010 development is where do you set up your development environment. As I started investigating this, I realized there are a number of various options each with their own implications. Below is listing of each option I found and some of my personal thoughts on each of them:

Option	Pros	Cons
Install SharePoint 2010 directly on our Windows 7 / Vista workstation/laptop	It's nice to have SharePoint available to you at any time.	I don't like the "clutter" it adds to my laptop as I like to keep it fairly clean in terms of what's installed. Pretty manual install
Create a bootable Hyper-V image	Keeps your development environment clean and partitioned from your business applications	If I have to boot to that image, I don't have access to my other application such as Office unless I decide to install all of that on the image which I don't think is very practical.
Create a Hyper-V image on a centrally located Hyper-V Server	Similar to bootable option except you can usually take advantage of better hardware which usually mean better image performance	If you are offline and can't connect to the image there's not much you can do.
Run VMWare Workstation	It supports 64-bit OS's which means you can run it on your Windows 7 or Vista environments without having to install SharePoint 2010 directly on your box. Allows you to keep your image portable	Not a great solution if you want to standardize on Hyper-V which can result in a little pain when you want to share an image.
Run Windows Server 2008 as your workstation/ laptop OS with Hyper-V	Works great if you have the right hardware.	Performance can be horrible if you don't have the right hardware. (Details on this here)

You may have noticed in the list above that there isn't a Microsoft Virtual PC option. That's because it doesn't support 64-bit OS's which is a requirement for SharePoint 2010. I have tried to find out if there is a plan for Microsoft to update Virtual PC to support 64-bit OS's however I have yet to hear anything that indicates this.

For my purposes, I decided to run a VMWare image because I just felt it worked well for me given the hardware I have, the desire to keep my laptop clean, and the fact that I want to remain portable with respect to the image. One other thing to note, if you want to take advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 you'll need to have SharePoint 2010 installed on the same environment as Visual Studio 2010 which, in my opinion, makes the choice of the environment you choose all the more important.

I'd be really interested to hear other's thoughts on this topic.

Some noteworthy new features of SharePoint 2010

Peter Grigoriou — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:57:00 GMT

In my last post I mentioned I had the privilege of attending the SharePoint 2010 conference. In this post I'd like to review the things I think were quite notable based on the sessions I attended:

Sandboxed Solutions: I have run into a lot of clients who want to use SharePoint as their application development platform and have various groups within their organization building their own applications. However the question that is always asked is how do we make sure that they can’t do something that brings down the entire farm. Sandboxed solutions provide the ability to limit access to resources and isolate worker processes from the rest of the platform reducing the risk that a particular application will bring down the farm.
Configurable Deployment: Deployment has always been big challenge and resulted in a lot of effort with SharePoint applications. With Visual Studio 2010 there is now a series of out of the box deployment steps as well as the ability to create your own custom deployment package. From what I have seen so far I think this is going to greatly improve SharePoint deployments.
Branch Caching with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 and the Office Document Cache in Office 2010: These are features to improve the performance of global SharePoint deployments (ex. A centralized SharePoint Intranet being accessed from around the world.) Office 2010 provides an Office Document Cache which basically stores documents requested for SharePoint locally on the persons computer. Subsequent requests to the same document in SharePoint will result in a check to the server if the document as changed and if not, will serve the document from the local cache and if it has changed will send just the differences over (this is limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote). Branch caching provides the ability to cache documents at particular locations via either a Windows Server 2008 R2 server or on local Windows 7 workstations. Once cached subsequent requests will either go to the local Branch cache server (Windows Server 2008 R2 Box) or request the document from a local peer workstation thus reducing the need to transfer the document over long distances.
Multilingual User Interface: This is the ability to install multiple language packs and toggle between languages on the same site. Prior to this you would need a third party or completely custom solution to make this work and usually involved a lot of development effort. I am not sure of all the limitations but it’s a step in the right direction.
Social Computing: There are a lot of features that pull in Social Computing concepts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc that should add a bunch of excitement to what is possible from a development perspective.
Phonetic People Search: This was pretty impressive. The demo showed the presenter misspelling a person’s name (ex. Cowfman) and it finding the person named Kauffman. It also does the same for common nicknames.

Other notable items:

All Search Web Parts will be open source.
Vastly improved SharePoint Designer Workflows (particularly being able to package them into a WSP so that you can deploy the workflow to other lists and SharePoint sites).
Very scalable farm architecture with a new concept of the Application Services Server. You can view the architecture here.
Integrated SharePoint support in Visual Studio IDE
Improved Search and FAST integration

I'll dive into this in more detail in future posts as I work with some of these items.

Another version of SharePoint? Actually SharePoint 2010 is pretty impressive.

Peter Grigoriou — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:47:00 GMT

So this is my first blog post...ever! Yeah, I'm pretty excited that I have finally taken the plunge and decided to write about something, so here goes...

I have been working at imason for over 6 years now and in that time my main technology focus has been around SharePoint. I was lucky enough to attend the SharePoint 2010 conference in Las Vegas and have to say I came away being thoroughly impressed at what I had seen over the 4 days. If you had asked me prior to attending the conference what I thought about SharePoint 2010 I would have replied "Oh great, another version of SharePoint that I need to get up-to-speed on". Today, however, I am pretty excited about the new features and improvements in 2010 and I think it will make for some great potential solutions once it is released.

The SharePoint conference itself was fantastic. The sheer size (around 7500 attendants) and number of sessions (over 250) was very impressive and the sessions I did attend were very informative and went smoothly considering it is a beta product. I think the thing that stuck out to me the most was that for 2010 Microsoft focused on fixing the issues that developers and business users routinely complained about in MOSS 2007, providing a wealth of additional features that really solidifies SharePoint as a great development platform, and building in a lot of the social computing concepts we see in the public domain. Microsoft did a great job of focusing on what was new and improved which helped me understand the key differences between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010. One of the things that can be overwhelming with a product the size of SharePoint is having the knowledge that something exists so that you can leverage it when needed and the conference was great at providing those details. At some point, you will probably be asked the question, "Why should we move to 2010?" and my hope is that over the next few weeks and months my posts will help provide some insight into helping you answer that question.

Performance Testing: The Performance Test Plan

Boyan Tsolov — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:57:00 GMT

I have always had a problem doing performance testing (aka load testing). I am quite adept at recording web tests and collecting counters, but I still find it troublesome interpreting the counters that I gather from load tests. The problem is that I need a plan that will produce relevant results with which I can conclude with confidence: "This system is a juggernaught! It can withstand more hits than Google.com." If you are like me and you have trouble planning your load tests, then maybe this post will help you. The following post describes how I like to run my own plan and what conclusions I can make with this plan.

Special thanks goes out to Jeff Dunmall, our co-CEO, whose article "Real-World Load Testing Tips to Avoid Bottlenecks When Your Web App Goes Live" got me to write something more about load testing here, and Randar Puust who uses this plan (and thus now I use it too).

There are a number of facets to load testing:

- setting up a load testing rig and setting up your environment in Visual Studio

- recording the web tests

- planning the load tests

- collecting performance counters and figuring out what the recorded result mean

Unless you have a plan, planning the load tests and reading the results will be meaningless. A performance test plan will keep you on track throughout the last two phases mentioned above. The results from a test plan will allow you to determine:

- maximum number of users that can hit the site before it becomes unresponsive

- can the system recover from overload

- are there memory leaks in the code

A performance test plan consists of four types of tests that need to be run in the following order:

1. Performance Tests

2. Load Tests

3. Stress Tests

4. Endurance Tests

1. Performance Tests

These are the benchmark tests. By this point you should have recorded web tests which cover the most-used parts of your web application. Now, you will create a load test that gathers and runs all of the web tests that you have recorded. Run the load test with settings similar to these:

- load: low end of the expected number of users for the system. I like to start with 5 or 10.

- time: 10 minutes

- think time: 5 seconds

- warmup: 30 seconds to 1 minute is more than enough

A load test like this should not stress the web server, it should be low-impact. The goal of this test is for it to be run later on in this plan and be used to compare against (i.e. a benchmark). Collect and save the result counters from the web server and from the client. Web Server counters to collect are: "CPU %", "Used Memory". Client counters to collect are: "Respose time per page", "Number of Requests per second". Other counters you might like to save are "pages that take the longest time to load", "number of errors", "network usage" - these are useful for neat reports that you might want to compile.

2. Load Tests

The load tests are going to stress the web application and try and find its breaking point. The goal of these test will be to find the lucky number X. This number is the number of users that are concurrently hitting the system and that cause the system to be unresponsive or response times to be unacceptable. For this part of the plan you will need to run a number of load tests. In each case, increase the number of users and collect the counters:

- load: 10 users, 15 users, 20 users, 50 users.... until the response times get too large, or server CPU % gets dangerously high.

- time, think time, warmup: same as for the performance test. Basically we are running the performance test from step 1but with more and more users.

By the end of this step you will know what is the maximum number of users that can hit the system.

3. Stress Tests

Stress tests check that the web application can recover from errors induced by overload.

- load: X + 20% (where X is the magic number from step 2 which causes the system to be unstable)

- time: 1 minute

- think time: 5 seconds

After this test is run the system should become unresponsive. If it is not unresponsive, then increase the 20%. One way to check if it is unresponsive is to check that response times are suddenly exponentially far worse than the results in step 2 and CPU % usage on the server is close to 100%.

Immediately after this test runs run the performance test from step 1. If the performance test runs fine and the results are comparable to the test that was run at step 1, then your system passes! It can safely recover from overload issues.

4. Endurance Tests

The endurance tests are unrelated to the other 3 tests. These tests are run over a long period of time, which causes many users to hit the site. If there are memory leaks, then over the course of this endurance test the free memory on the web server should decrease dramatically.

- load: X - 20% (where X is the magic number from step 2 which causes the system to be unstable). We'll use -(minus) 20% because we don't want to overload the system

- time: 12 hours

- think time: 5 seconds

Remember to record the "Free" or "Used Memory" on the web server. The goal at the end of this step is to make sure that the memory usage on the web server has not decreased dramatically and thus there are no memory leaks in your code. If that is the case with your results then tip of the hat to you!

At the end of these four types of tests you should have a better idea of where your system stands in terms of load that it can handle. You will know:

- what is the maximum number of users it can handle before performance is unacceptable

- can it recover after an overload

- are there any memory leaks

Happy testing!

Create TFS Work Items directly from Outlook Emails

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:36:50 GMT

This is a great little productivity tool for teams actively using Work Items to track dev activities in TFS. Used it at a recent customer (thx Dilip!) and found it helpful.

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2007/03/04/Team-System-Outlook-2007-Addin-_2D00_-v1.0.aspx

technical; TFS; work items

Don’t Tell Me You’re Not a Designer

Kerri McKenna — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:03:00 GMT

Often, when I’m working on a project with someone who isn’t an Interaction Designer I’ll inevitably hear the phrase, “I’m not a designer, but...” followed by an idea or suggestion for changing the user experience. This is frustrating to hear.

Designers are facilitators of ideas. We assemble requirements, best practices and ideas into visual representations for consideration. But we’re not omniscient divas who will storm off at the first hint of a non-designer’s opinion.

Good designers analyze the big picture and the minute details of a design problem. We should be able to tell you why our concepts work well, and where there’s room for flexibility. Rather than telling you that our design is perfect, we need to hear your feedback. We want to collaborate with you to improve our design – it will probably never be perfect, but it can always get better.

So if you’ve got an idea for changing a design or interaction, throw it out there. Sure, designers may have more experience and knowledge about the rules of engagement for design and usability principles – but a good designer won’t shoot you down. Just like we hope that you won’t immediately dismiss our first take on a design solution. Let’s work together here – no ideas are bad, they just might not be the best ones. But we can filter out the good ones together.

Think of a designer’s concepts as sparks for a fire of ideas. I don’t care that you’re not a designer. I do care about your sparks.

Enterprise Search: Why Search Scoping Doesn’t Work

Jeff Dunmall — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:57:00 GMT

My previous post outlined the problem with the ‘traditional’ approach to search scoping. To explore the problem and a solution that leverages Microsoft FAST search, I’ve invented a fictitious company called Canadian Financial . That gives us some context – it is a bank with multiple geographies, lines of business, languages, and products. There are dozens of internal sites up that provide a massive amount of information required to do your job more effectively, if you can...(read more)

A tribute to Michael Jackson

Bob Brown — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:24:00 GMT

Last night I found a great site commemorating Michael Jackson by letting people post a video of themselves doing the moonwalk. Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm a huge fan, so I took the opportunity to have some fun and shoot a mini clip of me moonwalking to add to the Eternal Moonwalk reel!

If you want to see me, here's the direct link: http://www.eternalmoonwalk.com/bob-nxv. I'm in the clip right after Michael Jackson...

imason in the news with Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Launch Event

Stephen Kearns — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:13:00 GMT

Jeff Dunmall, co-CEO and Stephen Kearns, Principal Consultant recently participated as Partners in the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Launch Event.

First a little terminology – the Technical Preview is an “engineering milestone” indicating that product development has been substantially completed such that Microsoft is ready to start showing it off and generating excitement about the new product. However, it’s not showing up in a shrink-wrapped package just yet.

Jeff, participating from the World-Wide Partner Conference in New Orleans was quoted in IT Business:

“Customers are coming to us and telling us they want to get involved with Office 2010. That's unusual. We normally enter a proactive sales approach with new releases. We have to talk to customers about the benefits and differentiators and that gets the customers engaged. With Office 2010, they're already excited about it,” Dunmall said.
This wasn't the case for Office 2007, Dunmall said. Customers hesitated on Office 2007, but for Office 2010 it has turned into enthusiasm.” [1]

Stephen, participating in Toronto at the Microsoft Canada launch event was quoted in IT World Canada and IT Business respectively:

Microsoft partners at the event said extending the ribbon interface marks a commitment to continuing to include the context-sensitive GUI in future versions of Office. In the words of Stephen Kearns of imason Inc., "It's not going away." [2]

Office has long been the predominant productivity suite for enterprise and home-based users but the release of a collaborative platform is a "game changer," according to Stephen Kearns of iMason Inc. [4]

Curious to see what some of the new features look like? Check out the gallery hosted by Microsoft [3]. Interested in finding out more about how Office 2010 can help you and your organization improve team productivity? Contact us directly at info@imason.com or (416) 597-3256.

[1] http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=53868&PageMem=2

[2] http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/f83346b9-5007-43c5-b3f0-cd10ccd5b45d.html

[3] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2010office/imageGallery.aspx

[4] http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/Home/News.asp?id=53871

Celebrating 10 Years Building Web Technology That Works

Kerri McKenna — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:59:00 GMT

May 1st marks the start of 10 years in business for Toronto-based imason inc. Starting out in a humble office (i.e. basement) in Etobicoke, imason’s first paid project was for writing an article for Microsoft’s MIND magazine titled, “Make Your Legacy Apps Work on the Internet”. Since then we’ve grown to 40 people in a renovated space in the Entertainment District working on projects with many of Canada’s top companies. There have been numerous accomplishments worth noting over the years – awards, customer wins, technology firsts, and recognition from many sources. And all the while we’ve been teaching and helping our clients, and learning from them too.

Founders Jeff Dunmall and Scott Howlett sought to create ‘the best place to work’ in 1999, and have succeeded in attracting top talent who exemplify imason’s original mantra: experience, focus and passion. Although we’re a diverse team of skilled professionals who have many interests outside of imason, we’re bound by an enthusiasm for learning. We’re voracious consumers of information and we love solving the tough problems related to business IT strategy, programming, infrastructure and user experience.

We’ve got a lot to be proud of as a team, and you can bet that we’re heartily celebrating reaching the 10 year mark with Jeff and Scott. Every single person at imason helped us get here, and contributes to accomplishments that enable us to celebrate our core purpose: To revel in dramatically impacting our customers, our company, and each other. But we also wouldn’t be here without our valued customers, some of whom we’ve worked with for many years and others who we’re just getting to know on new projects. The relationships we’ve formed with you, and the challenges you’ve trusted us to solve, are two other important reasons we look forward to getting out of bed and coming to work every morning.

Cheers to our customers, our company, and each other!

Office 2010 Technical Preview Announced Today

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:14:10 GMT

Hi All – I was at the Microsoft Technical Preview Press Event this morning to participate in a panel discussion with members of the press. Session was hosted by Jason Brommet and the good folks at High Road communications.

ITWorld Canada picked up the event and some of the partner discussion:

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/f83346b9-5007-43c5-b3f0-cd10ccd5b45d.html

Here were a few quick hits on stuff that jumped out at me that I’m going to really enjoy in the new version.

Outlook
1. Convert voicemail to text (when hooked up to exchange)
2. You can mark a given conversation thread to ignore further updates
3. When you receive invites, body of message includes a calendar preview
4. Mouse-over emails/presence jelly-beans pops up a little contact-preview
5. New pane listing recent contacts you’ve interacted with (quick click to IM or email)
6. Quick-steps – kind of like a section on the ribbon where you can stick in some canned/customized macros – e.g. Reply with Invite – takes an email you’re on and creates invite with all the people on the email as invitees. Nice!
PowerPoint
- video as “first class citizen” – basic video editing and effects tools built right in
- more powerful image editing
- Record your PowerPoint presentation without having to go out to a 3rd party tool like Camtasia
- You can broadcast your presentation (pops up a provider list, including Windows Live for individual consumer audience)
Excel
1. Sparklines looks interesting – visualization/charting right inside a spreadsheet cell – may seem small, but when you’re pouring over volumes of data, the ability to visually highlight key points so person consuming the information can spot it quickly is really valuable
2. Slicers – ability to surface up your data filters on table or pivot tables as a little persistent dialog/window and see what filters have been applied, apply new ones, deselect.
Word
1. Backstage (across all apps) – surfaces lots of great doc properties/tools – e.g. integrates print dialog with print-preview
2. Ability to minimize the ribbon

You can see more screenshot info here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2010office/imageGallery.aspx

Looking forward to seeing many of the other good stuff coming down the pipe including the web versions - “Office Anywhere” later this summer and the SharePoint side of Office 14 in the fall.

Graphic Design Guidelines for SharePoint 2007

Kerri McKenna — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:31:00 GMT

Problem: You've been asked to create a graphic design that can be applied to a SharePoint 2007 site - but you've never seen one before. Or, you've seen one but don't have access to the CSS to see how things are set up.

Here are some basic guidelines for creating a graphic design that can easily be applied to out-of-box Microsoft SharePoint 2007 sites. The guidelines apply to designs that will be implemented using SharePoint “themes”, which means that only CSS and graphics can be altered but the HTML on pages cannot. This is by no means an exhaustive list of SharePoint elements - but if you're trying to work on a mock-up of new graphic design, hopefully this will help clarify some of the terminology and limitations you might hear about when discussing the feasibility of implementing the design with a technical team.

Disclaimer: When I say that something "cannot" be done - I don't mean it's impossible, but rather that it's not easily done by modifying a theme file alone. And I won't claim to be a CSS guru either. I have no doubt that people have figured out ways to overcome some of the points below with more crafty CSS than I am capable of.

PAGE WIDTH

Pages have a fluid width and are designed to occupy 100% of the width and height of the browser window.
Pages are optimized for a 1024x768 browser resolution.

Tip
If designing with a “grid layout”, commonly used in print design, percentages will have to be used to define the column and gutter widths.

NAVIGATION

Tabs

Unselected tabs all look the same.
The selected tab can have a distinct look from unselected tabs.
You cannot single out a tab and change its style (e.g. adding a “New!” icon or unique colouring that draws attention to it).
The width of each tab defaults the width of the name of each tab, plus padding of XX pixels on either side of the text.
The widths of the tabs can be made consistent through styles, but longer tab names should be considered when defining the width.
The small arrow icon is a graphic, and shows up when a tab has menu items underneath it.

Left Navigation

In Sharepoint terminology, the left navigation bar is referred to as the “Quick Launch” bar. The links in this area are generated dynamically as users add lists and libraries to their Sharepoint site.

The width of the left navigation area is static and set in pixels. The width is the same on all pages.
Headings all share the same styles.
Links under headings all share the same styles.
The “View All Site Content” link can have its own style.
The Recycle Bin area can have its own style.

Breadcrumb

The breadcrumb uses plain text, hyperlinks, and the “>” character to let users know where they are in the site hierarchy.

Links can be styled.
Plain text can be styled.
The “>” character cannot be changed.

Global Links

Global links appear at the top of each page.

TITLES

Area / Site Title

The area/site title appears at the top of every page and is a hyperlink which can be styled.
The height of the white background seen in the screen shots can be modified as required.
The white background behind the area/site title, logo icon/graphic, and search bar can be styled.
The position of the title within the white background can be controlled with styles.

Logo / Icon

The default icon can be replaced with a JPEG, GIF, or PNG file.

The white background around the logo will increase or decrease in height depending on the size of the replacement graphic.
The icon can also be hidden and replaced with a background image that contains logos or graphics.

Page Title

The page title is plain text that can be styled.

Page Description

The page description is plain text that can be styled.

Consider a link colour for the page title, because on some pages the title may be a hyperlink.

WEB PARTS

“Web part” is a SharePoint term that in other platforms means “widget”. A “web part page” could be considered as a dashboard view of various lists consolidated on a single page. The condensed view of each list is referred to as a “web part”.

Web Part Title Bars

Web part title bars all use the same styles.
Sometimes the text is a hyperlink to the full view of a list; other times it’s just plain text.
The arrow icon on the right side of the title bar cannot be changed. When hovered over a drop-down menu appears.

LIST VIEWS

Toolbar

The toolbar options change depending on the type of list you are using, but the same styles are used everywhere.
The “View” option on the right side of the tool bar can have its own unique style.

SEARCH RESULTS

There may be more than one search scope available, in which case tabs are used to indicate the available options.
The title of the result is a hyperlink.
The URL for the result is a hyperlink.
The paging options are hyperlinks.

CONTENT PAGES

Article Page

The article title is a mandatory fields and shares the same style as all page titles.
The article date is an optional field that can be styled.
The article byline is an optional field that can be styled.
Content is entered through a rich text editor (RTE). Default styles for RTE text can be modified, and custom styles can be added.

Online forms - inline labelling

Aaron Bernardo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:49:00 GMT

Any site or app that collects user information of any kind will more than likely require that a form be filled out. This is never the most fun part of the user experience but it is a necessary step in the process. If an online form has any obstacles there is a high probability that the user will either; contact someone and ask for assistance, bail on the process, or leave and never return. Therefore, anything that makes the entire process easier on the end-user can only have a positive outcome for everyone involved.

I’m interested in any tips that help the form completion process, these are never drastic additions that make the user's squeal with excitement, like a well developed RIA (Rich Internet Application) such as Flash or Silverlight, but… “It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” – John Wooden

Here’s a nice tip I came across when creating forms…

http://www.zurb.com/article/271/making-forms-convert-through-awesome-inli

Inline labelling that remains even after the user has selected the input field, then disappears as the user types.

Usually the inline label disappears after it is selected which can cause problems if the label contains instructions or it is selected by default.

This effect is achieved through a combination of html, css and javascript.

It is being used with good results here …

www.me.com/

SharePoint FBA and the 403 Forbidden Error

Bob Brown — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:05:00 GMT

Scott alluded to the issue here (http://www.imason.com/blogs/scott_howlett/archive/2009/04/03/ie8-and-crm-3-0-unsupported-browser-or-is-it.aspx), but I’m going to take a deeper dive for all of the SharePoint users experiencing the following problem.

Set-up: SharePoint 2007 using Forms Based Authentication (FBA)

Problem: When trying to access the root site URL to log in, some users experience a blank screen or a 403 Forbidden error instead of the forms login page.

Reason...and it might shock you: Because of a conflict between the new Office Live Components and a by-design condition in WSS 3.0’s implementation of WebDAV, SharePoint gets confused, thinks that the web request is for WebDAV and returns a 403 error code.

Let’s look a little deeper...

If a user has installed the new Office Live Components (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=91fe0002-eb00-434b-8726-27911326d2b2&DisplayLang=en) two new entries will be added to Internet Explorer’s user agent on each GET request: OfficeLiveConnector.1.3 and OfficeLivePatch.0.0

GET / HTTP/1.1

Accept: image/gif, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-application, application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument, application/xaml+xml, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/x-silverlight, application/x-silverlight-2-b2, */*

Accept-Language: en-ca

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618; MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

Host: mysharepointsite.com

Connection: Keep-Alive

But the WebDAV implementation in SharePoint looks specifically for the substring “Office” in the user agent to make some assumptions about the request:

From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc250199(PROT.10).aspx

<4> Section 2.2.8: The WebDAV server in Windows Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology checks the product tokens in the User-Agent request-header field sent with a request for the presence of "Mozilla" and the absence of either "Office", "FrontPage", or "non-browser" to determine whether to send an HTTP 302 redirect message to a login page when using ASP.NET Forms Authentication for unauthenticated clients. Otherwise, the server assumes that the client user agent is not a browser and will return either an HTTP 401 "Unauthorized" error to prompt authentication when using Windows Integrated authentication, or an HTTP 403 "Forbidden" error when using ASP.NET Forms Authentication along with an X-MSDAVEXT_ERROR message [MS-WDV] section 2.2.3 with an Extended-error value of 917656. This specific error combination is used by the Windows client WebDAV Redirector as a signal to send a Cookies request-header along with the request. If the Windows client does not have a Forms Authentication cookie, the server will resend the HTTP 403 error with the X-MSDAVEXT_ERROR message with an Extended-error value of 917656, as a signal to the Windows client that it needs to prompt the user to authenticate.

So there you have it: the new Office Live Components add new entries to the IE user agent, but WebDAV confuses these entries with requests coming from a WebDAV compatible client (not a browser), causing an error to be returned.

I’ve come across two other people with the same issue, so you can check out the following links for more details:

I was really hoping that WSS 3.0 SP2 would have patched up this issue, but when I installed it recently, sadly no fix.

Workarounds: Unfortunately, I still haven’t come across a silver bullet solution for this but there are a couple things that you can do (I’m open to other ideas too if you want to suggest them in the comments):

1) Get your users to hit the FBA login page directly; for instance, instead of going to http://mysharepointsite, get them to go to http://mysharepointsite/_layouts/<FBALoginPage>.aspx?ReturnUrl= (notice the ReturnUrl query string parameter -> it’s mandatory)

2) Get your users to change their user agent by uninstalling the Office Live Components or using a tool like the User Agent Picker: http://www.enhanceie.com/ietoys/uapick.asp. This isn’t an ideal approach, but it does work

Hope this helps someone else!

MOSS: Indexing HTML from a Publishing HTML Field

Suleman Ibrahim — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:21:00 GMT

I was working on a custom search (Full Text Search) web part when at a point I came to know that managed property of a Publishing HTML field is returning just Text (simple) not actual HTML saved in that field. Whereas client requirement was to show formatted text with hyperlinks etc. in the web part. Initially I thought that there might be something wrong with either crawl or managed property for the field. However, I ran some tests and figured out that there is nothing wrong with crawl or managed property. So only other thing was, may be there was something wrong the way I setup/created Publishing HTML field.

For testing purpose, I created a new Publishing HTML field add some contents in that field, create crawl and managed properties then did a search against that new property and I was surprised new property was returning HTML instead of simple text… see screenshots below;

Added contents in both fields (having some bold, underline text)
Ran incremental crawl and see following results in the custom web part (I had already changed the web part query and XSLT to show both fields in the web part)

In this screenshot you can see Test Additional Text (New Field) is showing formatted text but Additional Text (Actual Field) is showing simple text.
Then I ran same query in SPQuery Tool and got following results that described the difference in both fields.

In this screenshot you can see Additional Text is returning just Text whereas Test Additional Text field is returning html.
Now this was confusing for me; apparently I wasn’t able to see any difference the way both fields, crawl and managed properties were being created. But then I got the difference and that was Face value of both field is different in the List view form.

May be some of you are thinking that AllItems.aspx looks ugly but in my case only Site Owners and Administrators can go to this page, all other users see results in the custom search web part on home page.
So yeah! I got the clue; actually problem was Crawler crawls face value/text not the hidden value/text that’s why I was facing that problem. But as I mentioned earlier there wasn’t any difference the way both fields were created.
I wrote a utility to compare all of properties of both fields --- Hurray :), I found something; that is RichText property of Additional Text is set to true, which make sense to show a nice and pretty view on AllItems.aspx page but as mentioned I wasn’t worried about AllItems.aspx.
I wrote following lines of code to set RichText property to False.

Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Fields.HtmlField field = (Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Fields.HtmlField)list.Fields["Additional Text"];
field.RichText = false;
field.Update();
Finally! my web part shows formatted text instead of simple text.

I hope this can save someone’s bunch of time who is facing same kind of problems with publishing fields :).

Retrieving source code from a specific TFS label

Peter Bojanczyk — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:07:53 GMT

Technorati Tags: TFS,Team Foundation Server,Visual Studio 2008,Labels

Grab a specific version

Choose Label and make sure both checkboxes are set (this ensures that your current Source code gets overwritten by the code you’ll pull from TFS), then click the “…” button (marked by arrow)

Choose your project and click Find. After that highlight your label and press Close. This will put the label text back into the previous screen

Your screen should now look something like this.

Click Get and you’re done!

Configuring Enterprise Library 4.0 for Exception handling and Logging

Suleman Ibrahim — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:18:00 GMT

A few weeks back, I was trying to configure Enterprise Library 4.0 for Exception handling and Logging exception into event log but was not able to find any help on internet so it took me long time to do all the configurations for handling and logging exceptions using Enterprise. Library 4.0.

Follow following steps to configure Ent. Lib 4.0 Exception Handling and Logging blocks.

Configurations:

Download and install Enterprise library 4.0, you can download it from here.
After installation go to Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft patterns & practices -> Enterprise Library 4.0 – May 2008 -> Enterprise Library configuration
A new wizard console will open then go to File -> Open Application -> (Navigate to your SharePoint web Application web.config) and click Open button.
After loading web.config, right click on the web.config path (see screen shot) –> New -> Exception Handling Application Block
A new block Exception Handling Application Block will be added to left pan of window.
Right click on Exception Handling Application Block –> New –> Exception Policy
A new sub block will be added click on Exception Policy and type some meaningful name for your project in right pan of window

Note: Exception Policy will change to new name you had written in this step in left pan as well. This step is the most important step, if multiple developers are working on the project you need to make sure everyone is using same name across the board otherwise you can run into issue while integration.
Right click on My Custom Exception Policy(left pan) –> New -> Exception Type
A new dialog window will open look for Exception and click OK button.
A new sub block Exception will be added to left pan.
Right click on Exception –> New –> Logging Handler
Another sub block Logging Handler will be added as well as a Logging Application Block. So left pan will looks like:
Click on Logging Handler and make following changes in Properties Pan.
Click on Formatter Type -> click … button (in value field)
A dialog window will open select TextExcetionFormatter then click OK
Select General in for LogCategory field.
Click on Formatted EvenLog TraceListener and change source to something more meaningful e.g. Application ABC Exception

Note: This step is not important but it would be good if team uses same Source name across the board.
Go to File -> Save Application to save all the configurations.

Web.Config Configurations:

Note: web.config changes are required if you are using Enterprise Library with SharePoint for .Net application you can skip these steps.

Copy following DLLs from “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.0 - May 2008\Bin” and paste them into your web App Bin directory or deploy into GAC.

a. Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common.dll
b. Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.dll
c. Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging.dll
d. Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.dll
e. Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder2.dll
f. Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll
Add following safe controls in web.config

a. <SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
b. <SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder2, Version=2.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder2" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
c. <SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Practices.Unity, Version=1.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="Microsoft.Practices.Unity" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
d. <SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
e. <SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />
f. <SafeControl Assembly="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" Namespace="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging" TypeName="*" Safe="True" />

Code:

Add following references and namespaces in your project

Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling
Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging

Note: Use Browse tab while adding reference and add above references from “<System Drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.0 - May 2008\Bin”

User following code snippet for exception handling:

try

{

//CODE

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

bool rethrow = ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(ex, "My Custom Exception Policy");

// Policy Name should be same as we configured in configuration step 7

if (rethrow)

throw; //Throw Exception if you need to show an error message to end user otherwise no need to throw exception.

}

finally

{

// Close/Dispose all objects

}

You are all done to get benefits of Enterprise Library 4.0 – Enjoy!!!!!

MOSS 2007 - Uploading and Indexing Large Files:

Suleman Ibrahim — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:13:00 GMT

A client has reported an issue that users were not able to upload files larger than 50MB file which we can resolve easily by updating Web Application settings; however, users were getting Timeout exceptions as well. Furthermore, business told us that business requirement is to be able to upload up to 100MB files.

There are few simple configurations setting those needs to do in order to upload large files in to SharePoint document libraries….

SharePoint Configurations:

Increase the maximum upload size
The maximum size for uploading files is set to 50 MB for a Web Application. If you need to be able to upload larger files, you can change this setting to any value up to 2 GB (2047 MB). However, as this is web application level setting so even if you have multiple site collections, this change will replicate to all site collections.

1- Go to Start –> All Programs -> Administrative Tools –> SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration -> Applications Management.
2- Go to Web application general settings under SharePoint Web Application Management section.
3- Look for Maximum Upload Size and update that field as required up to 2 GB (2047MB)
4- Click OK to save Settings.
Increase the default chunk size for large files
The chunk size is not related to the maximum upload file size. The chunk size simply specifies the amount of data that can be read from a file at one time. By default, the large-file-chunk-size property is set to 5 MB. If you notice performance or scale problems on the client or server, then you may need to tune this setting to get the performance you are targeting.
Note: If you raise the chunk size too high, the files might use up too much front-end memory and you may need to lower this setting.

The large–file–chunk–size property must be set from the command line. This property is configured for a server or server farm, and cannot be configured for an individual virtual server. To set this property, use the following syntax:

1- Open Command Prompt
2- Navigate to 12 Hive Bin Folder (usually C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\Bin)
3- Run Command: Stsadm.exe –o setproperty –pn large–file–chunk–size –pv <Size in Bytes>
4- After making a change to this property, you must restart IIS. You can restart IIS by typing iisreset on the command line.

Tune the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) connection timeout setting:

By default, timeout for is set to 120 seconds (2 minutes). Depending on your maximum file size and how long it takes for the file to be uploaded, you may not need to change this setting. If, however, IIS is timing out when you upload large files, you can change this property to ensure that larger files can be uploaded successfully.

1- Go to Start –> All Programs -> Administrative Tools –> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2- Right-click the virtual server you want to configure, and then click Properties.
3- Click the Web Site tab.
4- In the Connections section, in the Connection timeout box, type the number of seconds you want IIS to wait before timing out.
5- Click OK to save settings.

Those who are working in SPS 2003 and want to make changes for web parts, please have a look to this article and find Configuring Large File Support.

Web.Config configurations:

Update maxRequestLength and executionTimeout attributes for the httpRuntime node:
excecutionTimeout = <Time in Seconds>
maxRequestLength = <File size in KB> (by default for ASP applications, its set to 4096 (4MB), but because SharePoint supports 50MB so its set to 51200)
e.g.
<httpRuntime executionTimeout="999999" maxRequestLength="102400" />

Indexing Large files:

If large files needs to be crawl then we need to make following changes in the Registry and central administration.

Registry Configurations:
By default, Search Services can crawl and filter a file with a size of up to 16 megabytes (MB). It will always crawl the first 16MB of a file. After this limit is reached, SharePoint Portal Server enters a warning in the gatherer log “The file reached the maximum download limit. Check that the full text of the document can be meaningfully crawled.”
To increase the limit of 16 MB, you must add in the registry new entry MaxDownloadSize. To do this, follow these steps:

1- Start Registry Editor (Start –> Run –> Regedit).
2- Locate the following key in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE –> Microsoft –> Office Server -> 12.0 –> Search –> Global –> Gathering Manager
3- If already MaxDownloadSize exits then move to step 5.
4- Right click –> New –> DWORD Value. Name it MaxDownloadSize.
5- Double-click on MaxDownloadSize, change the value to Decimal, and type the maximum size (in MB) for files that the gatherer downloads.
6- Restart the server (this is an important step to do, otherwise changes will not effect).
7- Start Full Crawl.

NOTE: Increasing the file size may cause a timeout exception because the crawler can timeout if the file takes too long to crawl/index (because of its size). To increase timeout value, follow these steps:

Central Administration Configurations:
1- Go to Start –> All Programs -> Administrative Tools –> SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration -> Applications Management.
2- In the Search section, click Manage search service
3- On the Manage Search Service page, in the Farm-Level Search Settings section, click Farm-level search settings.
4- In the Timeout Settings section change Connection and Request acknowledgement time. (here you need to do your math that how big files are suppose to be index and approximately how long it will take to crawl – for 100MB I haven’t change it so it’s still default 60 seconds for both).

You are all done and ready to test your scenarios :).

Enjoy!!!