If you haven’t registered or made travel arrangements to the SharePoint Conference this year, check out our web site and register for a VIP trip.  The winner will get to hang out with me… no seriously we wouldn’t make you do that, but you will get your conference fee, airfare, hotel, limo service and dinner paid for.  SharePoint 2010 will be unveiled at the conference and most sessions will be centered around the new Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Did I mention it’s in Las Vegas?

You can register to win at http://www.knowledgelake.com/events/SP_Contest2009/default.asp.

Regards,
Chris

Just wanted to give a shout out to Russ Houberg on becoming a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint.  Makes me very proud to have Russ as part of the KnowledgeLake organization.  Thank you Russ!

See Russ’ post about his accomplishment at http://www.houberg.net/archive/2009/07/28/microsoft-certified-master-sharepoint2007.aspx.

Chris Caplinger
http://www.knowledgelake.com

I know there are a lot of doubters our there, primarily our competition who insists that SharePoint is a mere departmental solution and cannot be scaled.  KnowledgeLake got a little tired of hearing about this so we decided to put our money where our mouth is and we tasked Russ Houberg with the creation of a SharePoint Scalability Whitepaper.  I'll point you to his blog entry in a second, but to just quickly summarize, Russ, with the help of Fujitsu and Microsoft, was able to load 50 Million documents into SharePoint at a rate of 7+ million documents per day.

To do this Russ likes to elude to the "KnowledgeLake Secret Sauce".  We've been doing mass uploads to SharePoint for years now (Since 2003 to be exact) and have learned a lot of things that can be done to optimize these uploads.  During a recent trip to Japan we even picked up a few more ideas that have increased the speed even over what Russ is detailing in the whitepaper.

Here's a link to Russ's blog where he starts to talk a little more about this....

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/rhouberg/archive/2008/02/08/sharepoint-scalability-whitepaper-at-sp-conference-08.aspx

Also, if you're going to the ODC Conference this week, be sure and look me up, as I'm heading over to San Jose with Hao Zhai, our Commercial Product Manager.

Chris

Coming up to the SharePoint Conference in March, the Senior Product Manager for the Office Business Platform at Microsoft talks about our Document Imaging Solution...

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/partnersonpoint/default.aspx

I've been wanting to talk about this publicly for a long time and now that the scanners are getting ready to hit the U.S. shores it's time to let the cat out of the bag.  PFU Limited, the maker of Fujitsu scanners, and KnowledgeLake reached an agreement that puts our Connect technology in the box with the upcoming S300 scanner.  The application is called "Scan for Microsoft SharePoint" and is one of the installation options when installing the ScanSnap software.  The really cool thing is since the ScanSnap software is the same for all devices, so the ScanSnap S510/S500  can take advantage of this too.

The way it works is after you push the button to create a searchable PDF with the ScanSnap you get a quick menu with an option for saving to SharePoint.

Clicking this button launches a lightweight version of our Connect software (which you can read about elsewhere on my blog) and allows you to index and save the PDF to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Windows SharePoint Service 3.0/2.0 or SharePoint Portal Server 2003.  Like Connect 3.2 there will be an update available shortly that will also integrate with Office Live.  You can also upgrade to KnowledgeLake Connect 3.2 and get the same integration plus the features of the full version of Connect.

As for the S300, it's a great little USB powered device that can fit inside your laptop bag.  It has an ADF, scans in duplex color up to 600dpi, automatically detects paper sizes, automatically cleans up images, at speeds up to 8 ppm.

This also marks the first time we've entered into an OEM relationship as the supplier and it was a big step forward for us.  PFU was great to work with during the development, showed us great hospitality while we were in Japan, and I hope to have a long relationship with them and other similar companies in the future.

Happy scanning,

Chris

Just wanting to put up a quick post announcing KnowledgeLake Connect 3.2.  The product should be released next week, both for free trials and for purchase.  Although listed a minor release, don't let that fool you.  This product has a bunch of great new features, plus it went through a testing and QA cycle greater than most products twice it's size.  Basically it's a small package with great feature set.

The first change you'll notice is the the slide out indexing window.  In previous versions, the indexing window was always visible, creating quite a bit of blank space when nothing was really happening.  When you are actually indexing a document in 3.2 you will then see the window slide out.

We also added Office Live support, which gives users the ability save, index and edit documents in Office Live libraries, just like it was SharePoint.  You don't even have to know the location of you Office Live sites, but just simply connect using your Windows Live ID.

We also solved a problem that was causing some complaints and that was the way we allowed indexing on SharePoint 2007 sites.  We used to show the different Content Types on the tree, but now we simply show Document Libraries for specific sites and let the user select the Content Type when indexing.

If you are an KnowledgeLake Imaging Server user, we only show Document Classes for the particular site and its sub sites.  This is a major improvement over the previous version that showed all Document Classes for the entire farm.

There are a lot of other minor updates, including support for Windows Vista and 64 bit platforms.  For more information about Connect and it's features, check out http://www.knowledgelake.com/connect.  The new 30 day trial should be available next week.

Happy SharePointing,

Chris

Time wasted today?  ~2-3 hours.  When I was in Japan last month I ran across the problem of accessing a SharePoint site which was on a different domain than where my browser was running from.  At the time I simply changed over to SSL and accessed the site with no problem.  However, today while creating a testing site for WSS 3.0 I brought the server up on a different domain within KnowledgeLake, I ran into the problem again.

Let me explain.  Windows Vista comes with IE7 and the "Enable Integrated Windows Setting" is on by default in all zones.  This seems to work wonderfully when accessing sites within the domain my laptop is running on, however when trying to access this new server I brought up today, on a different domain, IE refused to let me in.  I tried every possible combination of the domain name to no avail.  Remembering my trip to Japan, SSL was not an option on this test server, but then I remembered that Firefox worked when I was over there too.  I tried it again and what do you know!  I got in with no problems.

Scratching my head I dug through IE settings, even set my server to be a trusted site with "Low" as my security setting.  No luck.  Going through the advanced tab the only setting I saw that was related was "Enable Integrated Windows Authentication"... but that was already checked.  No luck... or so I thought.

Making Google servers cry I tried ever search combination I could think of with no luck.  Figured this was a cross domain issue, but those answers seemed only point towards XMLHttpRequest (AJAX) usage.  Plus everyone said Firefox was more picky than IE, so that couldn't have been the right track.

Going back through the settings in IE, I figured I'd start trying what didn't make sense.  First thing I did was disable "Enable Integrated Windows Authentication", and luckily that seemed to resolve the issue.  WHAT!?!?  That makes no sense.  I tried looking at IE Help in Vista and that was totally worthless, which brings up another subject.  Does Microsoft have any useful information in help files?  Anyway, back to Google.  So what does Microsoft say about this setting?  From TechNet:

With Integrated Windows authentication (formerly called NTLM, and also known as Windows NT Challenge/Response authentication), the user name and password (credentials) are hashed before being sent across the network. When you enable Integrated Windows authentication, the client browser proves its knowledge of the password through a cryptographic exchange with your Web server, involving hashing.

Also:

Integrated Windows authentication uses Kerberos v5 authentication and NTLM authentication. Kerberos is an industry-standard authentication protocol that is used to verify user or host identity. If Active Directory is installed on a domain controller running Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003, and the client browser supports the Kerberos v5 authentication protocol, Kerberos v5 authentication is used; otherwise, NTLM authentication is used.

I'm not using Kerberos on this server so that leaves me with NTLM.  I'm not a security genius, but it sure seem to me that checking that box should give me the right behavior, correct?  At least it used to be this way in previous versions of IE.  So after an hour or so of Google, I found one person that said to uncheck the box, but no explanation.  If you can explain this to me, please drop me a comment.

Good night,

Chris

You will encounter some strange security problems such as not being able to get to your sites without using the page name. Okay, let me slow down here, we've been testing our software on so many different SharePoint configurations these last few weeks, I've seen just about every stupid thing that can possible happen. The problem I encountered was when installing IIS on Windows 2003, the FrontPage option is selected. This sets up FrontPage Extensions on the Default Web Site, and maps some of the sub directories (vti_bin in my case) to application pools created by FrontPage Extensions. When you extend your Web Application to the Default Web Site, this virtual directory will not be changed.

Is it okay to just access the pages? In my opinion, the answer is no. This puts these directories into a potentially insecure of application pool and one subject to even possible deletion later on as administrators will eventually realize they are not necessary. Also, since application pools should be pre determined accounts with limited rights, you should put the entire SharePoint site under one application pool.

Here are some things you can do to prevent this from happening:

• The obvious one is not to install FrontPage Extensions.
• Delete the Default Web Site before extending it.
• Don't use the Default Web Site as a SharePoint site, but create a new one on a new port.

I hope this ends up helping someone at some point, and my apologies for the lack of detail, I'm writing this in a major hurry while it's on my mind.

Regards,

Chris

I made it do Vegas yesterday morning and quickly made my way over to the Mandalay Bay to get our booth setup. I forgot one minor detail and that was too actually register myself for the event. Luckily the folks at registration were more concerned about pleasing exhibitors than taking their money and I landed a badge fairly quickly. Not actually having a conference badge keeps me out of the sessions so you'll have to read the blogs of me teammates to get the full skinny on those. For me personally, I like to spend my time networking and marketing at our booth anyway.

So that gets me to the booth, which we setup and quickly realized the entire theme was about Office 2003, which wasn't going to work, so I hacked together a SharePoint 2007 logo with Photoshop and made my way to the business center for some color printouts. That's where the real fun started as my PDF seemed to break the color HP printer. After notifying the nice lady behind the counter she tried in vain to fix the printer but the nasty noise just seem to get worse. She nicely told us we'd need to wait for their "printer person" to come back to fix it. After waiting patiently for 15 minutes or so Gregg piped and informed the lady that I was a real nerd and could probably fix it for her. She surprisingly seemed thrilled by this and allowed me into the "employee only" zone for me to test my true nerdhood. I looked at the printer, with its front door open, and promptly slammed it shut as hard as I could and magically fixed the broken printer. So getting our hot color copies we headed back to the booth and made our best attempt at pinnate creation.

We only had one more minor problem and that was my complete lack of preparing for this show had me not realizing the show actually started on Tuesday evening and of course no one on our team even had any type of KnowledgeLake shirt on. We had our cool exhibitor badges though so came out okay, and Gregg even said our Vegas attire made us more approachable (uhhh, okay Gregg).

So as ready as we were going to be the doors opened at 5pm and to our complete surprise the place packed instantly. We had twice as many people interested in Document Imaging with SharePoint than at Tech Ed (the last conference I worked) and we kept our booth packed way past the 2 hour time span for the exhibitor floor. A lot of the visitors simply wanted their card stamped so the could win the free Harley, but the interest in our software just validated our plan again, to create a first class Document Imaging System using Office and SharePoint technologies.

From Vegas Baby,
Chris

I have mixed emotions about this recent post by the SharePoint Product Group.  Last year at PDC, Microsoft stated their goal was 100 million documents, so of course I was a little dissappointed in they only reached half of their goal.  On the other this is great news for KnowledgeLake as one of the supported search providers in KnowledgeLake Search 2007 is the SharePoint Server 2007 Search engine.  We also focus on column level searching and not the full text searching the engine was really built to handle.  This means less rows in the "single index" table and therefore we should be able to bust right through this recommended maximum when we are implenting a Document Imaging scenario that doesn't use full text OCR.

We plan on testing this scenario in the coming months in something called "Project Rhino", that I will be blogging quite a bit about.  The project is due to kick off immediately after we get the RTM release of SharePoint 2007 in our hands.

Chris