Learning Gateway User Group

Chat with SharePoint MVPs Today

Alex Pearce — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:30:58 GMT

Every few months the Microsoft SharePoint team arrange a online chat for you to ask questions to SharePoint MVPs. Well, today is no exception. Come and ask any kind of question you have about SharePoint 2007 or 2010, a technical issue you have or if you want to know something about the product.

Join us today at 5pm UK time. Here is the link

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx

Learning Gateway Conference: Tomorrow

Alex Pearce — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:34:20 GMT

Tomorrow sees the second Learning Gateway Conference that both Richard Willis and I are very proud to bring to you.

We have a very exciting day of speakers and sessions lined up and we hope you enjoy the day.

The twitter hash tag for the day is #LGCUK10 so if you are unable to attend, listen out to what is being said through twitter.

I look forward to seeing you there.

SharePoint 2010: Forefront Identity Service not Started

Alex Pearce — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:53:43 GMT

I was making some changes to my User Profile Sync today and was finding that my changes weren’t taking place so I decided to check that my Active Directory connection in the User Profile Connections. For some reason it had disappeared so I decided to restart my server (its only a demo server on my laptop rather than an install in a organisation). After the restart I logged back into Central Admin and still found it was missing.

I thought I would create a new connection and found having filled in all the details fine and then selecting the OUs I got an error message. “MOSS MA not found”

The User Profile Sync service uses 2 services on the machine which are pre-requirements of SharePoint 2010.

Forefront Identity Manager Service
Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service

When checking these two services were started I found the FIM Service hadn’t started.

When I started the service, I want to the User Sync Connection page and found my original AD connection had come back and having run a sync my changes were now there.

If you are going to restart you server ensure you check these services have started.

These services are not checked by the SharePoint Health Monitor.

Having restarted my server over 6 times in a row I found that the FIM Service didn’t start any of the times but when changing the service from starting Automatically to Automatically (Delayed Start) it actually solved the problem and the service started every time.

To change this

Open Services Manager and find Forefront Identity Manager Service.
Double click on service to open it properties
Change the Start type to Automatic (Delayed Start).

Having now restarted my server 3 times this service has started every time and I can see my User Profile Connections fine.

Moodle Webparts for SharePoint 2007

Alex Pearce — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:28:17 GMT

As a school we have decided to evaluate Moodle for a VLE for our school. The main reasons we have done this is because of the course builder with built in quizs and SCORM builders.

I have to say they are very well built. They are not page viewers like some companies make for their SharePoint webparts but these are written to look at the Moodle database and give you the information presented in a proper ASP webpart. I’m very pleased to see this happen.

What caught my eye straight away and credit to the writer of this is the office presence by the names of the course. One of the web parts is the moodle courses which lists all the available course and as you can see it (screen shot below) has the teachers name and then the office presence. I think it is a shame that in Moodle itself doesn’t show this – because if the pupil was accessing the course, doing some work and they had an issue they could see the teacher straight away and ask them any questions.

In this post I’m going to mainly list the webparts with a screen shot – I’ve already started on another post to do with the install of them and I will also do a post on how to publish Moodle, SharePoint and the Moodle WebApps from the same URL through ISA.

Moodle: Welcome

Moodle messages is the built in online chat available in moodle. Here you can see the message someone has sent you while you were away – the text they sent is ‘testing’

Moodle: Courses

In the Filter Option in this webpart you can select from My Course, Upcoming Courses and All Available Courses

Moodle: Online Users

Again this is more powerful in SharePoint than in Moodle as you can see their Office Presence as well.

Moodle: My Assignment

Moodle: Document Exchange

I do like this web part. On the left you have your Moodle course, on the right hand side you have your SharePoint Document library. This web part will allow you to transfer documents between both products.

There are some other webparts but they are very similar, depending on the user.

Here is the full list of the X Moodle WebParts

Moodle: Courses
Moodle: Document Exchange
Moodle: Messages
Moodle: My Assignment
Moodle: My Courses
Moodle: My Supervisied Assignements
Moodle: My Teaching Courses
Moodle: News and Announcements
Moodle: Online Colleagues
Moodle: Online Students
Moodle: Online Users
Moodle: Welcome

In the next few weeks I’ll do a post on how to install moodle and the webparts on a Windows System with SQL Server and also another post which I have been asked to do on how to publish it all through ISA on a single URL.

Blog Move

Alan Richards — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:39:19 GMT

After blogging on this site for a while now I have decided to move to a dedicated hosting blog environment.

The new blog can be found at http://edutechnow.com

If you want to subscribe to the RSS feed it’s http://edutechnow.com/?feed=rss2

Deploying Windows 7 – Installing Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010

Alan Richards — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:35:57 GMT

In the second of this series I am going to detail the installation and configuration of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. MDT 2010 can be downloaded from the Microsoft website

You will also need to download the Windows 7 Automated Installation kit from here, the file you download will be an ISO so you will need to produce a DVD from it to install the piece of software we need.

Windows 7 AIK

The first piece of software we need to install is the Windows 7 AIK. This is on the DVD you created from the downloaded ISO. Auto run the DVD and select the Windows AIK option from the screen shown below and follow the installation instructions.

That's all we need from that DVD so you can close the window.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010

We now need to install MDT 2010

Double click the file you downloaded earlier and follow the installation instructions

Configuring MDT 2010

Once the installation has completed then expand the start menu and select the Deployment Workbench

The first step is to create a deployment share

From the screen above right click on Deployment Shares and select New Deployment Share

Select a location for the deployment share
Select a share name (leaving the dollar sign in place will ensure it is hidden)
Give your share a descriptive name
The next screen asks you if MDT should ask if an image needs to be taken. If you are ever going to want MDT to capture an image you need to leave this ticked
This screen asks you if you want the local user to set the administrator password. I normally leave this unticked in our domain environment – I don't want users setting passwords
This screen asks if MDT should ask for a product key – leave this unticked

Check the summary page and then configure the deployment share

Add Windows 7 Source Files

After the deployment share has been installed we need to add the source files for Windows 7

Right click on the operating system option and select Import Operating System
Select Full Set Of Source Files
Select the location of the source files. In this case the Windows 7 DVD
Select a name for the destination directory

Check the summary page and click Next

MDT 2010 will now import the source files, click Finish once the import has finished

Update Deployment Share

Once the import of the Windows 7 source files is complete you will need to update the deployment share. Updating the deployment share creates the PXE boot images needed to boot your PC’s and install the images you create

Right click the deployment share and select Update Deployment Share
Select Completely Regenerate The Boot Images and click Next twice

All the boot images needed by MDT 2010 will now be created, we then need to use these images with Windows Deployment Services to allow PC’s to boot using PXE

Install Boot Images To Windows Deployment Services

The boot images are located in the deployment share you created earlier in this post in a folder called boot

There will be two images, LiteTouch for x86 and x64. There will also be .wim, .iso and .xml versions. Remember the location of the .wim files and then open Windows Deployment Services

Expand Windows Deployment Services, right click on boot images and select Add Boot Image
Browse for the location where MDT 2010 stores its boot images and select the x86 .wim file and click Next
Enter a name and description for the boot image and click Next twice

Multicast Deployment

The final step in this basic configuration of MDT 2010 is to enable multicast deployment. On its own MDT 2010 doesn’t support multicast deployments and for this reason it uses Windows Deployment Services to send out the multicast traffic.

To enable multicast right click on the deployment share and select Properties

In the dialogue box that appears put a tick in the Enable Multicast For This Deployment Share option and click OK

That completes the basic configuration of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. The next post will go through the steps needed to deploy Windows 7 using the source files we copied to the deployment share earlier.

Deploying Windows 7 – Installing Windows Deployment Services

Alan Richards — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:00:00 GMT

Its approaching the summer break for Schools so I thought it was time to repeat a series I did a few months ago about deploying Windows 7.

Over the next few days I will do a series of posts that explain the steps we used to deploy Windows 7 across our site. At the end of the series the plan is to publish the series as an eBook that people can download and use as a reference during their deployments.

For all of the posts all of our servers are running Windows Server 2008 R2

Installing Windows Deployment Services

The first step in the process is to install Windows Deployment Services (WDS), to do this:

click on the Server Manager icon

Right click on Roles and select Add Role

Click Next
Select Windows Deployment Services and click Next
Click Next
Ensure both the deployment and transport server options and click Next and Install

Once installation is complete we just need to configure Windows Deployment Services

In Server Manager, expand the WDS node and right click on the server and select Configure Server
Click on Next (make sure you have met all the pre-requisites listed on this screen)
On the next screen you need to select a location for all the images that will be delivered by WDS. Once you have done this click Next
Now select how WDS will respond to clients. This setting will determine what happens when a PXE enabled PC connects to the WDS server. Once you have made your choice click Next
On the last screen you will be asked if you want to add an image, for these posts clear the tick box as we are going to use Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 to actually deploy Windows 7. All we want WDS for is its multicast features.

Windows Deployment Services is now installed and configured. The next post will explain the installing of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 – the next piece of software we need.

Implementing Moodle 1.9 on a Microsoft Highly Available Environment

Alex Pearce — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 17:29:31 GMT

In this whitepaper you will be instructed on how to install a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Cluster, 2 Web Front End Servers running Moodle 1.9 which are network load balanced and the configuration to run Moodle from a remote storage area.

Following the 2 other whitepapers released back in April, I have written another based on how to install Moodle 1.9 on a Microsoft High Available Environment using Microsoft Cluster and load balancing services.

Microsoft have a set of products that are designed to stay online for the maximum amount of time they can by either having a standby servers or sharing the load with another server.

Microsoft Clustering allows for 1 server to be running the services, in this case SQL Server 2008 R2 and have a server on standby ready to pick up those services. The network load balancing role in Windows Server 2008 R2 allows for multiple servers to share the load of the website running on this set of servers.

Click here to download the document

If you are interested in reading on how to implement Moodle on a single Windows Server you can find more whitepapers here.

Implementing Moodle 1.9 on Windows Server 2008 x86

Implementing Moodle 1.9 on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

Changes to WhitePaper: Moodle x64 PHP download

Alex Pearce — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:51:00 GMT

Since I publish the whitepapers on how to install Moodle on a Windows environment, to date (6th June 2010) they have been downloaded over 850 times. I certainly hope you have found they very useful.

Over the next week I’ll be publish a 3rd Moodle whitepaper entitled ‘Implementing Moodle on a Windows High Availability Environment’ where we will go though and install Moodle on two web front ends, a SQL cluster and a SAN.

Since publishing the Installing Moodle on Windows Server 2008 R2 which is a 64 bit operating system the link to the download of PHP x64 has broke and the website you can download it from is no longer available. I have tried to find somewhere else to download it but have not been able to do this. Instead I have added to the Learning Gateway media section for download. You can now get this from the link below.

Deploying Windows 7 - An Event For Network Managers

Alan Richards — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:34:00 GMT

THIS EVENT IS NOW FULL - SORRY

Windows 7 is a year old this summer and many people will be getting ready to install it across their PC network. As the first School in Europe to fully deploy Windows 7, West Hatch High School is putting on an event on the 8th July designed to help you with your planning for deployment and give you some insights into how two Schools deployed it successfully.

By the end of the day you should have a better understanding of the best way to go about deploying Windows 7 using both Microsoft deployment tools and 3rd party deployment tools. The day is specifically aimed at Schools and so two of the people who are giving their time for the event are from Schools with a long history of the innovative use of ICT in education.

We are also very privileged to be joined on the day by Richard Lane from the education team at Microsoft, UK

Agenda

9:30 – 9:50 – Arrival
9:50 – 10:00 – Welcome
10:00 – 11:00 – Richard Lane, Microsoft UK – What’s new in Windows 7
11:00 – 11:10 – Coffee
11:10 – 12:10 – Dave Coleman, Twynham School – Deploying Windows 7 using 3rd party tools and folder redirection
12:10 – 12:30 – Buffet lunch
12:30 – 13:30 – Alan Richards, West Hatch High School – Deploying Windows 7 using Windows Deployment Servers & Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
13:30 onwards – Networking , leaving etc

West Hatch is easily accessed by road (20 Minutes off the M25) and rail (5 minutes walk from Chigwell tube station on the central line)

Places are limited so please email me to book your place.

Learning Gateway Conference 2010, 14th July, London

Alex Pearce — Fri, 14 May 2010 10:52:11 GMT

We are happy to announce that the Learning Gateway Conference is back and we are now taking bookings.

This year we are travelling south and holding the conference in London on the 14th July at Church House around the corner from Westminster Abbey.
The conference will have 3 tracks discussing ‘How to build the Learning Gateway’, ‘User Adoption’ and the new track, ‘School Stories’.
We are delighted to have 5 schools presenting discussing what they have done with the Learning Gateway within their school and how they achieved great adoption in their school.
Here are the tracks and session available.

To cover the cost of the venue and food we are charging £150 for the day which is less than the cost of a cover member of staff for the day and will not blow your budget either.

You can get more information on the session and abstracts for these at the website. http://www.learninggatewayconference.co.uk

You can also get a quote for the event by going clicking here

We look forward to seeing you there.

Learning PowerShell: Part 2

Alex Pearce — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:16:00 GMT

In my previous post I looked at some of the very basics of PowerShell but now its time to create some scripts.

I’m always building new virtual machines on my laptop and I’m fed up having to add IP Address and how I have click so many times to add this and type in a new computer name.

So thought PowerShell can solve this problem for me.

The first issue I had was that there are some security issues to stop you from just running scripts that change computer settings like this. First run the command before to change the execution policy on your computer. You then have to confirm that you want to do this.

        1: Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Firstly I want the script to prompt me what computer name I want and then the different IP settings for the server. I type in $NewName=Read-Host “Computer Name”. If we break this down a little you’ll see the different settings you’ll need for your script.

The $NewName is your variable to store what you have typed. Later in your script where you type $NewName it will be replaced with what you type when you were prompted. Where you can see “Computer Name” is the text that will show up on screen as the descriptions of your prompt.

If we run this simple command below it will prompt me for the new computer name and then display it on the screen

       1: $NewName=Read-Host "Computer Name"

       2: echo $NewName

Here on the 3rd line you can see it has displayed what we typed when prompted.

To actually change the computer name we need to run 2 lines of PowerShell in our script.

Have a look at the code below and you will notice on the second line it has $newname which is from the prompt earlier.

       1: $ComputerInfo = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_ComputerSystem

       2: $ComputerInfo.Rename($NewName)

When adding this to what we already have we the script will change the computer name to what we were prompted. The computer will then change name after a restart.

A new command line tool that I have started to use in recent weeks since I started looking at Window Server 2008 Core is netsh.exe. Netsh allows you to control the behaviour of the networking on your windows device. I change change the IP Address, change the name from Local Area Connection to what ever you want it to be. I can also change the firewall settings as well.

We’re going to add a few more prompts for the IP Address, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway and DNS Server and these will be used during the netsh commands.

All together we have 3 netsh commands in this script, one will set the IP, Subnet and Default Gateway, one will set the DNS Server and other will turn the firewall off (in my development areas I turn my firewall off).

Below is the full script to change the computer and it will have ask for prompts and add the right information into the script.

       1: #Prompts

       2:  

       3: $NewName=Read-Host "Computer Name"

       4:  

       5: $addres=Read-Host "Please state the IP Address"

       6: $subnet=Read-Host "Subnet"

       7: $defag=Read-Host "Default Gateway"

       8: $dns=Read-Host "DNS"

       9:  

      10: #Change Computer Name

      11:  

      12: $ComputerInfo = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_ComputerSystem

      13: $ComputerInfo.Rename($NewName)

      14:  

      15:  

      16: #IP Address

      17:  

      18: netsh int ipv4 set address "Local Area Connection" static address=$addres mask=$subnet gateway=$defag gw=1

      19: netsh int ipv4 set dnsserver "Local Area Connection" static $dns

      20:  

      21: netsh firewall set opmode disable

      22:  

      23: restart-computer

SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference: Slides #SPEvo

Alex Pearce — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:30:33 GMT

Last week was great! I was at the SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference in London hosted by Combined Knowledge.

There were a few issues before the conference had even started with a slight volcano playing its part to stop many of the speakers getting into the UK. There were a lot of speakers who stood up, last minute and gave a someone elses session and talked about the subject even though they weren’t down to do it. It only shows that these people really know their SharePoint. They might want to talk about Multiple Languages in SharePoint 2010 but when they can stand up and give a brand new presentation on the User Profile Sync it’s just amazing.

It was also a great time to catch up with some friends and I also got to see the venue for the Learning Gateway Conference this year, that alone excited me.

I was there to talk about how SharePoint can be used to train staff who are in your organisation. I talked about Moodle, SharePoint Learning Kit and also how we should be using acronyms and how difficult it can be if you are new to an organisation.

Here are my slides from that session.

I also did an extra session on the Microsoft Office Web Apps that are part of SharePoint 2010 and how documents render differently to Google Docs. (Office Web Apps came out better).

Steve Smith did a great job to organise this conference and then reorganise it following so many speaker being unable to get into the country. Congratulations to him and all that worked on the conference.

Learning PowerShell: Part 1

Alex Pearce — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:09:51 GMT

I’ve been meaning to learn PowerShell for some time now as its an important of SharePoint 2010 and I thought I better get started. In SharePoint 2010 even if you wanted to try and avoid PowerShell you won’t be able to as this is the best way to patch your farm.

Over the years I have created several batch scripts from collecting computer programs and services installed on all machines on a network, creating all my default Active Directory accounts and a user creation script that adds user to the correct Organisation Unit and AD Group which then allows the user to access the correct sites within SharePoint. I love these scripts and I love batch files as they have always done what I wanted them to do at the time. But PowerShell is here now and its a new learning curve and I need to learn it.

I’ve played around with it a little before when I’ve mailbox enabled an Active Directory username and it has returned the PowerShell command but that’s cheating as it has already given me the code. I’m not going to learn it by copying and pasting, I need to work out how to do things and get error messages, do some research and then get the results I want.

Windows PowerShell is an extensible automation engine from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language (Source: Wikipedia). It now comes standard with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. There are some built in command that manage the operating system but there are also modules you can add to add command and script against that product.

To import a module you need to know the module name for example Active Directory is activedirectory and to use the Windows Server Manager Console you need to use servermanager

        1: import-module activedirectory

       2: import-module servermanager

In Windows 7 you also get Windows PowerShell ISE which stands for Integrated Scripting Environment which is a great way to write scripts and see what is going on with errors. You can run it in this environment to test the script.

As you can see in the middle section of this screenshot when I tried to import the servermanager console returned an error mainly because the module can not be found on this machine.

There are some command line commands that still work in PowerShell, like changing directory is still cd %foldername% or to create a new folder is still md *newnameoffolder*.

There are new commands to do these as well, like change directory is set-location and create a new folder is new-item

To me, I prefer the older version – its quicker and I already know this and when it comes to creating a script I still use the older commands. If you think you are going to have to learn everything in powershell, don’t worry there are some old commands that still work ;-).

The old style batch command were easy to create and they are the same in PowerShell. Instead of using the .bat extension you have a new one called .ps1. Microsoft have really helped with editing the file. If you want to edit the file double click on the file and it will open up in notepad and if you want to run the command you right click on the object and then click Run with PowerShell. The number of times I’ve gone to edit my batch script and I’ve run it by mistake is not worth counting. Now I can’t make this mistake again.

I had to do some research for the next part. I’m in my PowerShell console and I can’t load my .ps1 script. I type in the file name and it just doesn’t run. To run your powershell command type in .\file.ps1 and it will run it for you.

I’ll keep you updated on how the learning is going. My objective is to install Active Directory, SQL, Exchange and SharePoint all through PowerShell.

Setting Up Exchange 2007 ActiveSync – Part 2 (The iPhone)

Alan Richards — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:24:00 GMT

This is part 2 of a series on setting up Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway and the Apple iPhone so that you can access your work Email. Part 1 showed setting up TMG, the instructions below show setting up the iPhone.

From the iPhone main screen click on your Mail icon *Note:* If you already have mail setup on your iPhone then you will need to follow these steps. Settings Mail, Contcts, Calendar Add Account You can now continue to step 2
Select Microsoft Exchange
In the next screen enter the following details Email : Your Email address Domain : This can be left blank Username : Your login name Password : Your network password
If your TMG and Exchange boxes are setup to do so the iPhone will automatically pick up the public name for your server, if not, you will now get another screen with all the settings you entered above but with an additional field Server : The public address for your Exchange server
If you are using a public certificate then the setup will proceed to the next step if not you will now get a warning screen about certificates Select Allow
You will now get a screen asking which sections of your Exchange profile you want to synchronise Leave the defaults settings and select Done

Your iPhone is now connected to your Exchange server and will synchronise all your email, calendar and contacts.

Setting Up Exchange 2007 ActiveSync –Part 1

Alan Richards — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:50:01 GMT

In our organisation we have a number of staff who use iPhones and for a while now they have been asking me if they can get their work email on their phone. For a long while I have resisted the pressure due to the fact that you know it will increase the support calls from staff who think they know what they are doing. Recently though I have relented and so this 2 part blog shows you the steps to setting up Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway to publish Exchange ActiveSync to users with mobile devices.

Certificates

For this demo I am going to use a self signed certificate on the TMG box. This will secure all communications but will also give your user a warning message that they will need to accept. You can use a public certificate if you have one.

To setup the self signed certificate follow these simple steps

Open up IIS on the TMG box, I have it installed on the TMG box for this purpose only, no sites are setup.
Double click the Server Certificates icon and then select Create Self-Signed Certificate from the menu on the right hand side
Give the certificate a friendly name, one you will recognise and click OK

The certificate will now appear in the server certificates section

Publishing Rule

To create the publishing rule for ActiveSync follow these simple steps

Open up the TMG management console and select the Firewall Policy node
Select Publish Exchange Web Client Access from the Tasks panel
Give the publishing rule a name
Select the version of Exchange you use and the access you are setting up, in this case Exchange ActiveSync

The next screens will ask you if you are publishing a server farm or single server and if you wish to use SSL to communicate with the internal server. These are your choice and will be governed by your internal policies

Tell the rule the name of the internal server
Fill in the public domain name

The next step will ask you to create a web listener. Click New

Give the web listener a name
For ActiveSync you will require SSL
Select the network and IP address that will be used for this listener
On the next screen click the Select Certificate and select the self signed one you created earlier

For the next screens select the following settings

HTML Form Authentication
Disable SSO

Your Web Listener is now set up

Now lets complete the publishing rule setup

Click Next
Leave Basic Authentication as your selection You will get an error message about security which you can ignore
Leave All Authenticated users as the selection

Click Finish and then Apply at the top of the screen

Your Exchange ActiveSync publishing rule is now setup. Part 2 of this post will show you how to setup the iPhone

Note:

You will need to talk to your Exchange administrator to ensure that ActiveSync is enabled on your Exchange server

Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Free Event

Alan Richards — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:09:00 GMT

UPDATE:

The 14th May date is now full. A 2nd date has been added - 14th June.

On May the 14th I along with fellow network manager Dave Coleman from Twynham School will be presenting a session called Moving to SharePoint 2010- why, how, when and where? This event is free but places are limited so please check the details below and if you want to attend please get in touch ASAP.

Free event for schools on Microsoft’s next generation Learning Platform

SharePoint 2010 is due to be launched on May 12^th as Microsoft’s next generation Learning Platform. Many schools across the UK are currently using SharePoint 2007 and this event will help schools with their strategic planning, including when and why to consider moving to SharePoint 2010, regardless of whether you are planning to change this year or in the future. It may be that you are not using SharePoint at all but would like to see what the new version can do.

In the UK we are lucky to have schools who have been involved in Microsoft’s global Technology Adoption Programme, and as result have had a chance to influence Microsoft’s developments, as well as implement early versions of SharePoint 2010.

This SharePoint 2010 event is intended for ICT leaders, School Leaders and Network Managers and will be led by schools that have been using SharePoint 2010 during the last year and have significant experience. Places are limited and the session is completely free including all food and refreshments.

Microsoft UK have sponsored the event through the provision of their conference facilities

Event Details:

Microsoft Campus, Reading, RG6 1WG

Date: Friday 14^th May 2010

Time: 10 a.m. - 2 p.m.

Key topics covered:

Why SharePoint 2010? 10 great features for teachers and students

Social in SharePoint 2010. Capturing students’ interest in social networking to help their learning.

Moving to SharePoint 2010- why, how, when and where?

SharePoint 2010 as a Leadership and Management tool.

Branding SharePoint 2010- how to make SharePoint look like your school, and work for your school!

Using SharePoint 2010 to hit government targets – online reporting to parents, managing absence, community cohesion and personalising learning.

To book places for this event for you and your colleagues please contact Mike Herrity, Assistant Headteacher at Twynham School by email at mike.herrity@twynhamschool.com

For further details go to Mike’s blog www.sharepointineducation.com

Installing Moodle on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, SQL, IIS

Alex Pearce — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:01:07 GMT

Its been a few weeks since I released my first whitepaper on how to implement Moodle on Windows Server 2008 x86, SQL Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 (click here to download and click here to view blog post) and I have very pleased with the number of downloads it has already.

Today I’m releasing my second but is very similar to the last. This new whitepaper will talk you through how to implement in a 64 bit operating system using, Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2, x64 PHP and IIS 7.5.

I hope you enjoy reading and implementing this in your organisation.

Moodle and SharePoint better together: Store your course material in SharePoint

Alex Pearce — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 08:27:06 GMT

Microsoft have released a whitepaper this week on ‘Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (2007) as a File System for Moodle’ which shows you the steps to storing all the course material you upload via Moodle into a document library in SharePoint.

The Microsoft Education Labs team who work out of the Seattle office are a great team and I’ve got to meet a few of them over the last few months. They are a great innovative team always thinking ahead of the games. They have produced several other add-ins that can complement both Moodle and Microsoft products. Make sure to visit their site on a regular basis to see what they are working on and released.

Installing Moodle on Windows Server, SQL, IIS

Alex Pearce — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:53:56 GMT

Like me you might find implementing Moodle on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) a little tricky and I personally want it on Windows Server, SQL Server and IIS.

A Windows System can scale differently to anything like MySQL and you can manage it in a high availability environment with Microsoft SQL Clustering and Mirroring.

Here is a whitepaper that I have put together on how to installing Moodle 1.9 on Windows Server 2008 x86, PHP5, SQL Server 2008 and IIS.

In the near future I will be releasing a whitepaper on how to install Moodle on Windows Server 2008 R2 which is a x64 bit system.

SharePoint 2010: Where do my User Profile Photos Go?

Alex Pearce — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:40:30 GMT

I got an email the other day asking “where are the User Profile Pictures Stored?”

All the photos are stored in a picture library in the root of the My Sites called User Photos. They are then stored in a folder called Profile Pictures.

Navigate to your profile home page, delete default.aspx and type in ‘/user photos/’ (for example http://sp2010/my/user photos/). This will take you to the root and then navigate to the folder Profile Pictures.

You will notice there are 3 photos for each user.

Each photo is resized to fit into either 144 x 144, 96 x 96 and 32 x 32. If the photo you uploaded is a rectangle it will resize so one side is 144 pixels and the other is shorter. For example the screen shot above has George Clooney and his photo sizes are 102 x 144, 68 x 96 and 23 x 32.

Each photo is also named with a ‘_LThumb’ for the large 144 x 144 photo, ‘_MThumb’ for the medium 96 x 96 photo and ‘_SThumb’ for the 32 x 32 photo.

A blueprint for all School Learning Gateway ?

Alan Richards — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:16:53 GMT

You may wonder why the title of this post is a question, well that's because I downloaded and read an e-book yesterday and wondered if what the book portrayed should be how all School learning gateways should be setup. I will be emailing the e-book to my SLT as the blueprint for any future direction our gateway takes.

The e-book in question is written by Mike Herrity of Twynham School, you can view his blog here and you should definitely add it to your RSS feed.

You can view the book below or download it from Mikes blog.

Twynham School Learning Gateway 2007-10

SharePoint 2010 for Education: Part 3, Wiki’s

Alex Pearce — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:44:00 GMT

We are still looking at some of the great feature in SharePoint 2010 that will enhance the education sector.

Everywhere we go now in SharePoint 2010 we see wiki pages. If you create a new Team Site from the default site template list you will find the home page (home.aspx) is a wiki page and we can edit the page like we did in Part 1.

What if we want to create a new wiki page. You could go to Site Actions and click New Page. Yes you could do this in SharePoint 2007 but you couldn’t like them very well to each other.

Click on the edit button at the top of the Ribbon (marked in yellow)

And add some text to your page. To create a new wiki page as we are type that will link to the new page type [[ (double square brackets) and type the name of your new page. Then close the square brackets to ]]

Save your page by clicking on the Save button on the Ribbon at the top.

You will now see that the text within the square brackets is underlined with gaps. The gaps mean the new wiki page hasn’t been create yet.

When you click on the hyperlink it will ask you if you want to create this page.

You will now see a new page that you can use to add more text and images.

We can also link to existing wiki pages by adding the [[ and waiting a moment while it collects all the current wiki pages available. Select the one you want and it will link to that page.

SUGUK: 101 Question before Implementing SharePoint in Education

Alex Pearce — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:12:04 GMT

Last night on the 18th March the SharePoint User Group held their first meeting in Leicester round the Education market space. It was a great meeting with over 30 people attending asking many questions.

Richard Willis also presented on SharePoint Learning Kit and the new features in the recent update to 1.4. You can find more on Richard on his blog at http://blog.salamandersoft.co.uk/ and SharePoint Learning Kit can be downloaded here http://www.codeplex.com/slk.

I spent the hour asking 101 questions that will help you both to install SharePoint from an IT Pro all the way through to how would you gather information to upload for staff, pupil and parents to access. We asked questions on day to day operations and on going training.

If you were up able to attend you can still see the question from the presentation slide that I have uploaded to SlideShare.

View more presentations from pearce.alex.

Microsoft SQL 2008 Failover Cluster – Part 3

Alan Richards — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:20:14 GMT

So if you’ve followed all the previous posts you now have a Hyper-V cluster with a SQL Cluster within it. MSDTC has been setup as a highly available service and now its time to install SQL – nearly.

Roles and Features

Some are added automatically when you enable failover clustering and the web server role

Cluster Storage

For SQL clustering to work correctly it needs to have some free storage space that isn’t owned by the Windows failover clustering service. The screen shot below shows you the virtual disks assigned to the Windows clustering service, but only the Quorum and MSDTC disks are being used.

You will notice in the image above that cluster disk 2 is available and this will be used by the SQL cluster. I would recommend though that you go into server manager and assign it a drive letter, SQL setup will love you for it later.

SQL 2008 Service Pack 1

For the setup of SQL 2008 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 box to work you will need to slipstream the installation with service pack 1. Here are some simple steps to achieve this.

Download the service packs from here
Extract all the service pack files to a folder on the C: drive using the command line, SQLServer2008SP1-KB968369-x64-ENU.exe /x:C:\SQLSP1\
Run the setup support files .msi file from the service pack extracted files for your server architecture, you should find the file in this location, C:\SQLSP1\x86\setup\1033 (assuming you have unpacked it to the C: drive)
Run the following command to install a slipstreamed version of SQL 2008 setup.exe /PCUSource=C:\SQLSP1

The 2 videos below show the steps in the process of installing a SQL 2008 failover cluster and adding a node.

Installing SQL 2008 Failover Cluster

Adding a node