Trinkit, Thinking Web Solutions

There is excatly one week to go until the NZ SharePoint Community conference in Wellington starts. There are still a few tickets remaining at the super bargain price of $500 so you should get one now!

My session on SharePoint and NZ Web Standards is on the Thursday at 4.15pm in Chamber Room 1 and I'm really looking forward to it!

I don't particularly enjoy installing SharePoint, I've done it a million times and really it's quite a boring process. When I do end up having to install it, I generally use a simple 4 account method:

1. Admin (SPAdmin) - Used for installation and administration of SharePoint
2. App Pool (SPAppPool) - all web apps except central admin run with this account as their identity
3. Services (SPService) - App pool account for central admin and the SSP service account
4. Search (SPSearch) - Used for all search services

Generally I'm installing SharePoint for my own dev/test purposes, so this suits just fine. I think it is also fine for small scale installations or instances when the admin in charge of account creation isn't interested in creating 8+ accounts. To be honest I think a lot of the time using the 8+ accounts is a tad overkill, and people are just blindly following 'best practices' without applying them to their specific environment. But being more of a dev type than an infrastructure type I don't feel qualified to formally make that recommendation.

Even for a development server it is really important to have some separation of accounts. It is in your best interest to simulate a production scenario as best you can. Take for example if you were to use the SharePoint admin account as an application pool identity. You may have permissions to do things on your dev server (in code) that will probably have issues in a production scenario.

When developing against lists, column names with spaces can be rather annoying. Internally SharePoint encodes spaces with the characters '_x0020_'. This isn't the end of the world but is a bit of a pain when writing code that uses the column names. Over the past few months I have found that I got into the habit of always creating columns without the space, and then renaming them.

As an example if I wanted to create a column named 'Account Number' I would first name it 'AccountNumber'. The internal name is set only once and is based on what the column is called when it is created. After the initial creation I can then safely rename the column with the space and still reference it as 'AccountNumber'.

I have developed the same habit for naming lists. With lists I think it is even more important to not have spaces as you end up with urls that look like this: http://site/lists/my%20task%20list/allitems.aspx. This is not particularly nice to look at and may even cause problems for some search engines. This is also makes it hard to read the URL and ends up as a bit of an accessiblity negative.

You can use the exact same technique as described for naming columns.

As a web developer, building your own website can be one of the most challenging jobs you have. There can be a lot of pressure and expectation, not so much from your clients and peers, but from yourself. As a result the proverbial mechanics car situation seems to occur and the website gets poorly neglected. Either that or you are just really busy.

At any rate we finally have a website that we are somewhat happy with. I still have a huge list of improvements to roll out and I hope to talk about some of these enhancements over the next month.

As far as providing SharePoint services go, creating public websites is definitely one of Trinkit's specialties, so we want to showcase some of our skills on our website and blog. Our website might not look hugely different but a lot has changed under the covers. The main difference is that the site is now built on our new SharePoint web framework. The framework provides a lot general plumbing and optimisation which allows us to spend more time focusing on the development of actual functionality.

I hope you like our "refreshed" site :)