Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

This seems to be a pretty straightforward thing, but I’ve been hearing this one question a lot recently:

How can I create a SharePoint meeting workspace in Outlook 2010?

Typically, you create the meeting workspace in SharePoint first, and then link to it in outlook or you can create the meeting request and the workspace both at the same time in outlook. In Outlook 2007, the button to create a meeting workspace was right there on the ribbon. However, in outlook 2010 it was decided to hide it for whatever reasons. To add the button back to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) and create a SharePoint meeting workspace, you need to take the following steps:

Create a new Meeting in Outlook:

Click on the Customize Quick Access Toolbar and from the popular Commands, select the Meeting Workspace. Next, Click on the “Add >>” button.

Fill out the required information for your meeting request: 

Now, click on the meeting workspace button you just added to the QAT:

This will open a new pop up window where you should type in the URL of your SharePoint Site (SP2010 or 2007 both works just fine in Outlook 2010): 

Click Ok (You may be asked to enter your credentials and authenticate to the site you are trying to create the workspace). At this point you should see the site and a bunch of other options available to you. Click Ok again.

This will take you to the confirmation pane where you need to click on the Create button to create the meeting workspace in SharePoint.

Once the workspace is created, a link will be included within the body of the meeting request. When you send the meeting request, the attendees can click on the link to browse to the meeting workspace.

Obviously, you should have already given the attendees the required permission to access the workspace in SharePoint. Don’t worry, Outlook is smart and enough SharePoint aware to forewarn you about that by showing a nice little notification to you.

Below is the meeting workspace I created in my BPOS SharePoint site in Outlook 2010:

Sure enough, when you create a SharePoint 2010 meeting workspace, you will get many more template options for your meeting workspaces, as shown in Figure below:

And here is a Social Meeting Workspace I created in one of my SharePoint 2010 sites:

One thing is worth mentioning here though! Once you create one meeting workspace in your Outlook, you can link to that workspace for future meeting requests if needed:

Happy Organizing!

This came up a few times and I seem to forget it after a while:

1. SPWeb.SiteGroups: As the documentation says this gets you a collection of cross-site groups for the site collection. These groups are cross-site, because they can be used in more than one SPWeb object in the site collection.
2. SPWeb.Groups: This returns a subset of the groups above (SPWeb.SiteGroups) that are used in the specified SPWeb object. The word “used” is important to note here. These are the groups that are referenced somewhere in the site. For example, in a securable object such as an SPList or SPListItem with broken inheritance.

So, the logical conclusion is that:  SPWeb.SiteGroups >= SPWeb.Groups.

SharePoint Administration Toolkit ships with a very handy tool that’s installed at web site level (SPWeb) named Check Effective Permissions. Essentially, this tool checks to see if a SPPrincipal object has got permissions to any objects within the current web site and all the sub sites that inherit from the current site. It also provides other permission related reports such as anonymous access level or other factors that effect the level of access for the given SPPrincipal object.

Sometimes when you use the tool, it throws the “Value does not fall within the expected range” exception on SPRoleAssignmentCollection.GetByPrincipalId(Int32 principalId) method call. See the stack trace below:

[Xml]

Value does not fall within the expected range; at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleAssignmentCollection.GetByPrincipalId(Int32 principalId)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPRoleAssignmentCollection.GetAssignmentByPrincipal(SPPrincipal principalToFind)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.SecurityReport.SecurityReportAccountManager.CheckPermissions(Object contextObject, String username, AclUIMode aclType)
at Microsoft.Office.Server.SecurityReport.SecurityReportAccount.BtnCheck_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)

….

[/Xml]

In our case, since the exception was only thrown for some SPPrincipal objects, I did a quick analysis and found out that if the SPPrincipal has no role assigned to it (see the figure below), it blows up the API call. I know this may sound kinda bizzare. Why do we need an SPPrincipal without having a role assgined to it? For a number of reasons. For example, you may need to create the groups in advance and assign the permissions later. Or, maybe the groups are auto-generated by an import process, but something has gone wrong when assigning the roles. As a result, some groups do not have roles assigned to them.

By the way, people have reported other similar issues on the bottom of this page.

As a member of the SharePoint Summit 2010 board of directors and on behalf of the rest of the team, I am extending this invitation to all members of the SharePoint community to submit their session proposal to us at the following address:

http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com/call_speakers.asp

This is a great opportunity for you to showcase your expertise and knowledge of SharePoint with your peers that are also interested in SharePoint technology. The selection committee will pick speakers based on the following criteria:

1. Subject quality
2. Presentation content and relevance (Preferably SharePoint 2010)
3. Innovative aspect

The deadline for submissions is January 15th, 2010 Dec/01/2009!

Location : Montreal (12-14 April , 2010)

Issue:

• Environment:A medium server farm.
• Identity:A brand new custom domain account with no special permissions assigned.
• Action : Assigning the domain account as the application pool identity when creating a new Web application.
• Error Message: Invalid Username or password.
• Point of confusion: The same credentials work like a champ when logging to a test box in the domain. I can also add the user to a SharePoint group.
• Event Log and ULS Log : Nope,nothing!
• Googling (mmmm…Binging) : No dice!

Steps to find the real error:

• Tried a simpler password by taking out the “!” because I was aware of some issues with usual culprits -%,&,$ etc used in app pool password.
• Added  the user to a test site and tried to login – Yup… the user can NOT login to any SharePoint sites ; so there was something wrong! DUH!
• Checked the Event log and that was where the following nasty little error rears its ugly head all over.This event was generated when actual logon request of the last step failed not when the central admin “Create or extend Web Application” was throwing “invalid username or password”. It was generated on the WFE where access was attempted.

Resolution (or Workaround!):

• Deleted the account and recreated it.