Richard Willis – SharePoint Learning Kit Coordinator, SalamanderSoft Owner

Over the next few months Tech.Days online will be bringing you IT insights and debate most Tuesdays afternoons from 1400 – 1500 GMT. These will be real-time webinars will be hosted by Microsoft’s leading experts on the private cloud, public cloud and the desktop and are completely free.

The full list is:

Public Cloud

Desktop

Private Cloud

I’ve created an iCalendar file containing all the events which you can import into your favourite Calendar program. Download from here.

It’s that time of year again when Olympia opens its doors to the world of IT in Education and BETT begins. The themes of BETT this year are Managing Change and Learning for Less which are obviously very topical, however I expect that fewer than normal will be going this year due to budgetary constraints. Even though tickets are free (and still available) the transport and cover costs can be large, although you justify the costs on visiting the Microsoft stand and finding about their money saving tips and licensing changes (more later).

I will again be there all day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and would love to meet up with as many of you as possible. We can either arrange a meeting before hand, or just get in touch on the day by mobile, email or Twitter (@rpwillis) – although it can be hard to hear your phone amongst all the hubbub.

Highlights include

but most of all is the networking opportunity with people you normally only email or talk to on the phone.

I hope to see you there.

I have just created another free utility for Sims – a utility to export details of all reports in Sims into a csv file. That’s reports as in the reporting engine, not student reports. This will allow you to easily see what reports are in Sims, who created them and hence whether you want to remove any. Inspired by this thread on EduGeek.

To use:

1. The utility must be run on a machine where Sims.net workstation or server is installed.
2. First run GenerateConfigFile.bat. You must also run this everytime Sims.Net is updated. If Sims.Net is not installed in c:\program files\Sims\Sims .Net, you will need to modify the bat file.
3. Copy a connect.ini into the folder.
4. Run SimsReportList from the command line with 3 arguments, Sims username, Sims password and output folder.
5. SimsReportList will then save the report details into the file.

You can run SimsReportList.exe /? for a brief help summary.

Download Here.

I now have a way to script bulk loading of photos from Sims into SharePoint, for example to enable the use of the Learning Gateway My Children web part.

The script is in 2 parts. First extract the photos from Sims using our free Photo Export tool

PhotoExport.exe simsuser simspassword outputFolder /names:mapping.csv

where mapping.csv is a csv file mapping admission numbers to Active Directory login names

The use the PowerShell script in my last blog entry Using PowerShell to Bulk Upload Files to SharePoint to upload the images to SharePoint.

You could even set up a scheduled task to automatically upload them on a predefined schedule.

While building a school’s Learning Gateway I needed to bulk upload all their student images into a picture library so that the My Children web part could display them. Since there were several hundred of them I wrote a little PowerShell script to perform this.

$siteUrl = "http://sharepoint/schools/test"
$listName = "Students Picture Library"

[system.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Sharepoint")
$site = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteUrl)
$web = $site.OpenWeb()$list = $web.Lists[$listName]
$fileCollection = $list.RootFolder.Files

$files = get-childItem -Exclude *.ps1

foreach ($file in $files)
{
    $stream = $file.OpenRead()
    $uploaded = $fileCollection.Add($file.Name, $stream, $TRUE)
    "Uploaded " + $file.Name

    if ($stream) {$stream.Dispose()}
}

if ($web) {$web.Dispose()}
if ($site) {$site.Dispose()}

In order to use this:

1. Save as as .ps1 file in the same folder as the files to upload.
2. Change the site url and name of the list at the beginning of the script to your values
3. Make sure that only the files to upload and the ps1 file is in the folder
4. Open PowerShell using Run As Administrator
5. Navigate to the folder
6. Run the .ps1 file

The script will then iterate through all files in the current folder and upload them to the given list, overwriting them if they already exist.

I’ve updated the free Sims Photo Extract Utility to have the following extra functionality:

• Choose image format to save as
• Ability to read a csv list of names to save images as. Useful for example if you want to save the images with their network login name – you would just have to provide a csv linking their Admission Number to login name
• Display list of years if an invalid year is passed

Details of how to use these are detailed in the README.txt file and by running PhotoExport /?.

I’ve also fixed a bug where the wrong extension was used in some circumstances.

You can download the updated version from http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/utilities.html.

I have just released SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 Release Candidate which is available from the downloads page.

The main changes are to support Claims based authentication in SharePoint 2010.

Unless any major bugs are found I will move this to the stable version on 1 Feb 2011.

Changes

Rewrite of Domain Group Enumeration Of Members

I’ve completely rewritten the code to pull the members from Active Directory domain groups. Both to handle claims based authentication and to increase performance. I’ve also handled the groups DOMAIN\Domain Users and NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users more gracefully. Groups such as BUILTIN\Administrators are now supported as well.

Users logging in via NTLM & Claims Based Authentication get all of their assignments

Previously if you had multiple authentication methods i.e. NTLM for internal access and claims based for external access, how you logged in made a difference to the assignments you saw. You should now get a consolidated view of your assignments.

Return All Button works

Bug fix. Return all button now works.

Users in OUs with forward slash in their name can be assigned to.

Bug fix. You can now assign work to users in an OU with a forward slash in it’s name.

Localise Calendar Control on Assignment Properties Page

It should now pick up the first day of the week from the site properties.

SLK Configuration Page can create Permission Levels in Claims Based Authentication Site Collections

Bug fix. Before this release it failed to do so.