Bander's Blog

It’s been a while for a technical post. As usual whenever I go through an exciting experience, I look forward to share it with you. Today I went through upgrading one of our clients servers from MOSS 2007 to SP 2010. The upgrade is a bit late because the Arabic language pack took a while [...]

My interview with Microsoft Feed has been published Check it out:
http://microsoftfeed.com/2010/meet-bander-alsharfi-sharepoint-server-mvp-from-jordan/
Check out more interviews with MVPs
http://microsoftfeed.com/tag/mvp-interview/

Honestly I never saw that coming. Looking hilarious! Microsoft always amaze me with their marketing, unlike it’s alleged competitor Apple, their ideas are out of the box. Apple always had that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, PC sucks!! At the beginning it was funny, after a while it’s just meh! whatever, [...]

You can checkout my prevoius technical review post here.

Everyone is excited to get their hands on Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 7. Not having its successor’s marketing launch budget – around $400 million – and coming out in a time were the world is going through a rough credit crunch! It must have been a [...]

Welcome to the 4th and final part of this guide. The first thing you will notice after starting SharePoint Server 2010 setup is that you have 2 steps of the installation. First you start with the installation of SharePoint Server 2010 prerequisites and then move on to installing the product server components. Click on Install [...]

Welcome to the 3rd part of this guide. We have a vanilla cream Windows Server 2008 installation with Active Directory Domain Services and DNS roles installed and configured. The next step is installing SQL Server 2008.
First of all we need to mount the SQL Server image on the virtual machine drive. Using the Hyper-V Virtual [...]

Welcome to the second part of this guide. After creating the virtual machine using the Hyper-V Manager, we need to install Windows Server 2008 and configure both Domain Services and DNS roles.
If you remember from the previous post we instructed the virtual machine to load the Windows Server 2008 image. I remind you again that [...]

I’m so excited to get the green light of publishing content about SharePoint Server 2010 Being SharePoint MVPs. we had an early access to the Office 2010 bits, to both Server and Client products but we were asked not to share any of the information, even product screenshots until Microsoft officially launches SharePoint [...]

Back in previous versions of SharePoint (e.g. 2003 release) we had to have a full installation of SharePoint for a specific language, one language per installation, which meant that if we install an Arabic version of SharePoint on a specific server then we can only create Arabic sites on that installation, if we need another [...]

I remember back in the days when Vista was code named Longhorn. I was so excited that I was reading a big number of blogs, downloading every video I get my hands on and sitting restless on the torrent sites looking for leaks to get my hands on and play with. With the first [...]

Source: JO Magazine
Jordan’s government is hoping to expand the country’s appeal in ‘niche’ tourism sectors. But maybe some niches are best left unexplored.

(Emily Carwell)
THE GROWTH OF TOURISM is expected to provide opportunities and jobs for Jordan’s young people. But for some, particularly the Bedouin of the south, the opportunities it’s providing are not quite the [...]

I’m planning on delivering a BI on SharePoint community night this June. Part of the session will be dedicated for a quick preview on SharePoint Business Data Catalog (BDC). In my quest in looking for a decent data source I stumbled into the Adventure Works database. It was not what I was looking for, [...]

I never imagined myself writing such an Article about Jordan. Foremost we as Jordanians try to reflect a good image of our country to attract more investors and tourists. But enough is enough! after all If we don’t take serious actions or at least a stand towards bad customer service and experience the good [...]

Before diving into SharePoint data protection and recovery practices, let’s elaborate a little bit about the levels of data recovery.
Logically we have 4 levels of data recovery:

Content LevelContent stands for uploaded files, lists and web parts. This level is the most common and happens when users delete or update content then want to roll back [...]

Calendars
Navigation
We can navigate through the calendar by days, weeks, months, and years.
You can use the calendar for appointments, milestones, etc..
To open an existing event on the calendar, just click on it.
Managing Items
Adding New Items
To add a new event to your calendar, click on the New menu and click on New Item.

Updating Current Items
To update the [...]

Back to you with the second part of the training. In this part I will be covering document libraries. It took me a while to just try and simplify things as much as possible from an IT perspective, or as one of my colleges used to say: “Take of the technical cap and wear the [...]

One of my responsibilities is delivering SharePoint training to other departments. They just need to know what they are planning to use, no more or less! You can’t blame them for the fact that in Tatweer everyone is trying to outperform, yields they’re totally swamped with work I love this culture, every IT [...]

Went through this in work, just thought I would share it
Let’s start by creating our Excel sheet.

Nothing fancy, couple lf KPIs pull me back on track. Looks like I’m doing well with the games part! hehe
Now after creating the Excel sheet, we need to upload it.
Let’s create a Document Library and place it [...]

There are times when you need to use your own custom error messages not the default IIS ones. In my case, I wanted to use it for redirection, assume that you want to tell IIS that if it gets a request like http://i-bander.com/, http://i-bander.com/subsite/, or http://i-bander.com/subsite/subsite/somepage.aspx to redirect to http://i-bander.com/newsubsite. At first when I thought [...]

It started with this Document Library that contains important documentation. A group of people should be subscribed to it and alerts should be sent whenever documents where added, modified, or deleted. That’s the easy part. I used the “Alert Me” in the “Actions” menu of the document library.

More libraries where added to the site [...]

Sometimes I used to get confused big time about this. I had sites that had "Navigation" management and others that had the annoying stupid "Tree view, Top link bar, and Quick Launch" in Site Settings.
 
To get the "Navigation" management back again in your site, go to Site Settings, Site Collection Features, look for the "Office [...]

Once I was asked to remove the Sign In link and deploy the site over the internet. Removing that link was easy, I simply opened the master page and removed the “wssuc:Welcome” control. I ran into a speed bump, how will the content manager be able to sign in and populate content and then sign [...]

I’ve been meaning to do this blog for awhile and it’s a long one so better get a fruit flavored drink of your choice and curl up on the couch with your laptop for this one. Sorry, I do apologize for the rambling (and length) as this post has now encompassed a couple of hours [...]

Windows PC Accelerators is the new term that encompasses Windows Vista’s new performance-enhancing technologies. The Windows PC Accelerators are:

Windows® SuperFetch™
Windows® ReadyBoost™ (formerly code-named “EMD”)
Windows® ReadyDrive™ (formerly code-named “Piton”)

Windows SuperFetch™ is a memory management innovation in Windows Vista that helps make your PC consistently responsive by tracking what applications are used most on a given [...]

Windows SharePoint Services SP2 does support the .NET Framework 2.0, CLR 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0; therefore you can build ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts using Visual Studio 2005 and deploy them on Windows SharePoint Services SP2; however, this process is not as straight-forward as it sounds here!
To leverage ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services, [...]

A weird night!
We went to Barnnies, TCHE TCHE, Starbucks, and even to Zuqaq.. no place to sit!!! So my friend and I decided to go to Chili Ways (next door to Zuqaq) and start eating Zuqaq’s 1 MB bandwidth as usual with Channel 9 videos.
Now what relates all this to Sharepoint?
Simple answer, since I’m a [...]

As you all probably know, XBox is priced at $150, has a hard drive, built in Ethernet, and it has x86 architecture with a P3 cpu. There is a Linux distribution that is being ported to run on the XBox architecture. You may be thinking why does it need to be ported if it uses [...]

From: Larry Osterman’s WebLog
Way back in the day, I was chatting with Tom Miller, one of the NT file system developers – he and Gary Kimura were the guys who designed and built NTFS.
At some point, the conversation drifted around to our motivations for working on NT, and Tom made a comment that’s stuck with [...]

I would like to share some information about changes in Certification with you. With launch of VS 2005 and SQL 2005 MS Learning is also launching a new family of certifications… These certifications will target the new family of product and will be laid down in a new exciting way than earlier MCP, [...]

I assure you guys, this was a very bad experiance!
I prepared a website using DNN and I was ready to start uploading, I went on and changed the host and admin passowrds to new complicated ones, and guess what? I forget them!
For 2 days I was surffing the internet wishing to find a thread that [...]

I had a question the about recovery models for SQL databases. This is the setting that you are shown when you do a right-click on a database in Enterprise Manager and view the properties. It is under the Options tab in the database properties dialogue window. You have 3 choices for a recovery model on [...]

When we have join in queries, the SQL optimizer uses one of the following three physical operator to perform the join 1. Nested Loop 2. Merge 3. Hash Nested Loop In nested loop, while computing the join each row of one [...]

Index Scan
Index Scan means performing a full scan on Index Pages. This is especially done for table that have non clustered index on them.
In case of Non Clustered Index the leaf pages contain links to the rows in the data pages whereas in the Clustered index the leaf page contain the row itself. So when [...]

1. sp_columns_rowset: Given a tablename it provides the schema for the table i.e. column information not exacly but somewhat similar to Oracle desc command.
Exec sp_columns_rowset ”
2. sp_who:Provides information about the current database users and processes.
Exec sp_who
The above will provide list of all database users.
3. sp_who2:This is similar to sp_who the only difference being it provides [...]