SharePoint 2013 publishing site blog won't allow anonymous access

Problem:  I have a public facing website that has a blog.  I have been hitting my head trying to make it anonymous when eureka Google saved me on a topic I had totally forgotten. 

Initial Hypothesis: I have anonymous access enabled on the web application and on the site collection.  I started thinking it was the blog not inheriting permissions so I tried applying anonymous access at the site level followed by examining permissions on the posts list.  All erroneous so I reverted to full inherited permissions.  I Google-ed the symptoms and viola, it is the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature.

Resolution: Turn off the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature for the site collection and anonymous access users will not get the credential prompt when accessing the post.
PS> $lockdown = Get-SPFeature viewformpageslockdown
PS> Disable-SPFeature $lockdown -url http://sitecollectionURL
and confirm the change.

More Info:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/varun_malhotra/archive/2012/01/13/can-t-access-a-list-on-an-anonymous-site-sharepoint-2010.aspx
http://blog.mastykarz.nl/preventing-authenticated-visitors-browsing-system-pages/ (Important)

Anonymous REST JS call error using SP2013

Problem: I am making an anonymous JavaScript REST call to a image library.  I get the error "Request failed.  The method GetItems of the type List with id ... is blocked by the administrator on the server.nundefined".

 

Resolution:  Change the ClientCallbackSettings on the web application as shown below.

 

 



$wa = Get-SPWebApplication http://www.demo.dev
$wa.ClientCallableSettings .AnonymousRestrictedTypes.Remove([microsoft.sharepoint.splist],"GetItems")
$wa.Update()

More Info:
http://www.sharepoint-zone.com/search/label/ClientCallableSettings.AnonymousRestrictedTypes
 

Content Type Hubs - Thoughts on running Global Content Types for an Enterprise - Part 1

Rough Notes - Publish once cleaned up

Problem: Content Types are a misunderstood and often underutilised set of functionality for syndicating metadata.  Management of the syndication's and ramifications of decisions often lead to unpleasant scenarios.

Notes:  Not a lot has changed between SP2010 and SP2013.

General if you need to reuse a content type in more than 1 site collection it is a good candidate to go into the content type hub.

It is a good idea to ensure that each DTAP environment has identical Content Types in the Content Type Hub.  Concept Search has a product that synchronises Content type across env.  So changes made in production can be pushed to pre-production and then onto your UAT environment.  Writing code to do this is fairly simple.

Concept Search is a third party solution designed to auto-classify content that’s dependent on metadata in the MMS Term Stores.

If is a good idea to have a service owner for Content Type across the enterprise, as this role is very closely related to the Taxonomy/Term store, it is a good idea for this service owner to manage both of the MMS relevant functions. 

A good break down is to work out what the required columns on all data is and this improves search considerable.  For example all document should have a country.  This could be a Term Set with Global, regions (e.g. EMIA), countries (e.g. United Kingdom) and provinces/states (e.g. )  allow each document to be tagged to a country.

I like to group Global Content Types into 2 or 3 layer namely (Enterprise CT's, Division Specific CT's and application specific CT's).  The CT's created in any of these layers inherit from the layer above.  For example, all our documents have an additional field country that applies to all documents (Enterprise global CT), at a division Marketing (A marketing medium media e.g. Newspaper) is appended.  Lastly in our contrived example we have built a specific application for tracking our marketing and this would add the fields (product Type, Audience age range) shall be added.  This allows for consistent tagging/metadata of data within an enterprise.

A good example of search working with meta data is not on the enterprise search you can add a filter on country and allow folks to easily filter down to country specific documents quickly.

How it works:

• Site Collections can subscribe to CT in the CTH
• CTH is a site collection
• Site Collection consume the CT's in the CTH

MMS Term Groups are closely related to the Content Type Hub:

SharePoint 2013 SEO Note

Overview: This post looks at optimising a public facing website built on SharePoint 2013.  This version of SharePoint has additional SEO capabilities built into the product.

WebCEO  - http://www.webceo.com

http://www.awesomium.com/ - Nice for displaying html from a custom windows application.

PageSpeed Insights:  This is a Google service to check the speed of your public website and provides a nice summary of items you can optimise.  Useful for SEO also.

SharePoint 2013 Licencing

Overview:  I have looked at licencing in the past and SP2013 licencing seems

• There is only 1 server licence (not longer, standard, enterprise or Internet as was the case in SP2010), pricing for the server licence has come down significantly.
• Cals are still broken into Standard or Enterprise.  Pretty similar pricing but you can mix and atch cals depending on what your users use.
• OWA is not paid for at the server level, no cals needed in read-only mode but if you are editing documents you need office cals licences.

Disclaimer:  These are my note and I'm not an expert on licencing.  This is my rudimentary understanding.  If any one with good info pls comment or let me know so the post has real value.

SP2010 licencing
SP2010 licencing ore info on this site 

SharePoint 2013 Zurb Foundation Publishing site tips

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Tabs



Hover over image display
<h4>Executive Directors</h4>
<style>
#tooltip1 { position: relative; }
#tooltip1 a span { display: none; color: #FFFFFF; border-style: inset; border-color:#FFFFFF;  }
#tooltip1 a:hover span { display: block; position: absolute; width: 150px; background: #aaa url(/PublishingImages/150x230/pbeck.jpg); height: 224px; left: 300px; top: -40px; color: #FFFFFF; padding: 0 0px; z-index:1; }
#tooltip2 { position: relative; }
#tooltip2 a span { display: none; color: #FFFFFF; border-style: inset; border-color:#FFFFFF; }
#tooltip2 a:hover span { display: block; position: absolute; width: 150px; background: #aaa url(/PublishingImages/150x230/rlarkin.png); height: 224px; left: 330px; top: -40px; color: #FFFFFF; padding: 0 0px; z-index:1; }
</style>
<ul>
<li id="tooltip1"><a href="#">Paul Beck, Chief Executive Officer<span> </span></a></li>
<li id="tooltip2"><a href="#">Richard Larkin, Commercial and Strategy Director<span> </span></a></li>
</ul>


 

SSRS 2012 with SP2013 component diagram

I like diagrams as they help me understand faster.  I wrote a post about 9 months ago about installing SSRS for SP2013, and recently a friend called me to moaned about the documentation available and I remember it being very poor.  My posts cover the topic be re-reading the posts and it could be clearer.  The key is to understand the pieces and where they sit.  He had seen my posts but some related to SP2010 and the 1 specific post relating to SP2013 using SSRS 2012 is not instantly understandable.  It has valuable info but where the parts/components reside is not perfectly clear so I put this diagram together.

There are only 4 parts, the fewer servers to have the easier it is to do theses steps.  I.e. on 1 server farms like dev it's pretty easy as all the SQL components are installed hopefully during the initial SQL Server 2012 SP1 install.

Part 1, you need a SP 2013 farm
Part 2, you need to have a database with the SSRS components/functionality install.  Now if you are using the same database as your SP database ensure the SSRS components were installed at the initial build.  This diagram assumes you have a separate SQL instance which is pretty reasonable.
Part 3, you need to run a core SQL install (only needs the SQL component relating to SSRS) on the SharePoint App/web server.  This 1 or more servers containing the SharePoint binaries.  This is the step that is new/different and most people don't do.
Part 4, run some Powershell to create the SSRS SSA and hook up the relationship.  This is done on any of the SharePoint servers such as your main CA box.

This post couple with the overview should help you understand the components needed for large or automated installs.
http://blog.sharepointsite.co.uk/2013/08/installing-ssrs-2012-on-sp2013-within.html


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Tip: If you need to move your Reporting Services database to another server, you need to manually add the RSexecRole to the new SQL Server.