Working with Large Lists in Sharepoint

So when we decided to move to Sharepoint 2010 every one was excited and so were the uses because as per the readings we can make larger lists (then what we already have) yes its never enough :) 

As they say SharePoint Lists supports Items upto 50 million  - During read operations. 

However the challenge has always been to make the data in the large list available for retrieval and display in timely and efficient manner.
Although the users can create as many items as they want the query operation shows down as the list grows in size. 

So what do poor administrators like you and me do ... 

Introducing our life saver : Resource Throttling

Resource Throttling is new with SharePoint 2010 and is set on site collections by default standard users are throttled when retrieving 5000 items from the list with a warning of 3000, these warnings can be changed using PowerShell.

the mechanics works like this:
if a user is pulling data with 4999 items the query runs all the data without any error.
however if the user or query tries to retrieve 5001 items an expensive query will be returned. 

so what we can do is we can use Central Admin to set a time frame when these expensive queries cannot be run for example a query cannot be run at some time frame like 9 to 6 and then later these query would yeild results. 

this can be done from Central admin>Application Management > Manage web application > select your application> General settings > Resource Throttling. 


hope this would help :) 

Create your SharePoint 2010 themes easy

Branding the site is something each organization is looking for and  even if I had my own personal site which I use to share stuff I would love it brand it ... throw in some colors add icons and images. 

So If you wanna quick brand your SharePoint website you can do so from the Inbuilt themes from:

Using the Interface:

1. Open SP site
2. Go to site actions > site settings 
3. under look and feel choose site theme
4. click select a color to change the color of a specific item.
5. choose theme from the list
6. click preview to view the site changes before publishing 
7. click apply

well wasn't that easy but if you want to make your own themes rather then the well defined ones before jumping into CSS  consider this option. 

Creating Themes with PowerPoint 2010

1. Open PowerPoint 
2. Create a new document but if you have an existing document that your organization uses then skip step 3.
3. Change the theme, you can do this also from the design tab of powerpoint choose the theme that defines your style, choose fonts and hyperlinks so on. 
4. Choose the color pallette for the site by clicking the Colors. 
5. Save the PowerPoint Document as MS powerpoint theme which is *.thmx
6. Now go back to your sharepoint site> upload this file under Galleries and Themes. 
7.  Keep / as destination. 
8. Then choose this new theme for your site from the about way. 

tadaaaa .. you have your custom theme for Sharepoint and did we even touch Designer or CSS ...no sir :)

Sharepoint 2010 Metadata

SharePoint Metadata is advancing with the versions and if you know how to work with the metadata you can make it easier for the users to search, locate, organise and use stuff within your organization.

The tags and the site columns makes it easier to get what you need within the search query, Below is a video from Sean Bordner who explains sites columns, Content Types, Term Store and Term set with real world examples we really found it useful and think if you spend 21 minutes here you can understand the sharepoint metadata in a better way

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1ZiDWycyfs

Practice question answers for exam 70-332 | Advanced Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013

If you are looking forward to clear 70-332 paper and looking for practice questions answers like me, here i have combined a set of links which can be useful.

The best place where i could see the questions and answers is mcseananswers.com

I am listing down the links to go step by step these are 12 part series which contains 70 questions and answers which might give you an idea of stuff you can expect in 70-332 paper
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-1-10.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-02.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-03.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-04.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-05.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-06.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-07.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-08.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-09.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-10.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-11.html

http://www.mcseanswers.com/latest-mcse-70-332-real-exam-download-part-12.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will add more links here when I make progress.

More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-in/exam-70-332.aspx

Linked table is unavailable. Microsoft access cannot contact the server.

Linked table is unavailable. Microsoft access cannot contact the server.

We got this error message when we tried to export our big fat list to “open with access”

We recently found this issue coming up for one of our lists and we are still searching for the solution but when I tried googlng for solution. The only part I found was a hot fix. We have users complaining about this list not working since morning and the hotfix would not make any sense at this moment because it used to work and everyone swears no changes were made.  

What should be your check list for such type of issue? I have tried to list what I did, hope it helps you.

1.       What are the statists of the list.

·         Number of columns

·         Number of items

·         Number of lookup columns

This part in my case was way above the ordinary 163 columns and 12 thousand+ items

2.       Does it work with a different view and less columns

3.       Does it work with Access 2007 and Access 2010

4.       Does it work with a other lists in the same site or sub site (this worked for me)

5.       Does export to excel option works ( this one didn’t work for me, it just helped us to drill the problem down further to the list contents)

6.       I saved the list as a template without content and created list again and tried opening with access (this worked – not sure what that really mean)

7.       Can you apply the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2552989

Close assumptions:

According to the kb 270262

You cannot receive data from SharePoint lists in Microsoft Access if the following conditions are true:

• When there is a problem with the health of the Microsoft SharePoint Server (for example, it runs slowly).
• You have a low bandwidth connection.
• You have a large or complex SharePoint list/document library.
• There is a large distance between you and the server.
• There are more than 255 columns in the SharePoint list/document library.

Out of this the large distance to server sounds funny.  The only point I could use to my defense was” You have a large or complex SharePoint list/document library.”

But MS did not specify what that meant so I checked on the threshold section of MSDN  at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

Which says :

SharePoint Server 2013 data is stored in SQL Server tables. To allow for the maximum number of possible columns in a SharePoint list, SharePoint Server 2013 will create several rows in the database when data will not fit on a single row. This is called row wrapping.

To prevent too much load, by default a maximum of six SQL Server rows are allowed Each time that a row is wrapped in SQL Server, an additional query load is put on the server when that item is queried because a SQL join must be included in the query. for a SharePoint item. This limit leads to a particular limitation on the number of columns of each type that can be included in a SharePoint list. The following table describes the limits for each column type.

The row wrapping parameter can be increased beyond six, but this may result in too much load on the server. Performance testing is recommended before exceeding this limit.

And you can find from the table how row wrapping is determined.

For Single line of text SQL Server row wrapping occurs after each 64 columns in a SharePoint list.

So on and so forth. Please check the technet link for more information.

This could be a reason of the error message popping up.

As mentioned I was still not able to determine the cause, will update this article when I can.