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Yes, we all know how much of a pain it can be when you want to edit an Excel or Word document in Firefox but it opens up in Read Only mode.  With IE 8 and Office 2007, you would get a popup like this asking what you want to do when you left click on a document:

but in Firefox, you only get to download the document.  No option to edit it like this:

The quick solution I found that works for me is to install a couple of plugins for Firefox.  There are 2 ways to get around this:

1. Install the Coral IE Tab plugin – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10909- This allows you to switch whatever page you are looking at into a page rendered by IE but you are still in your Firefox tab.  You can also right click on your page in Firefox and open it in a new tab using IE so you have both versions.  Just use the “Switch Rendering Engine” option.  You can also have it actually open up in IE as well in a brand new IE window.  I PREFER CORAL IE over any other plugin because look how easy it is to change your rendering engine.  Just click the icon in the bottom right and your page is displayed in that browser .

Firefox + Sharepoint:

IE being rendered in Firefox + Sharepoint:

2. Install the IE View Lite plugin – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1429 – This allows you to to right click on a page and quickly load the page up in a new IE window.  Kind of like Coral IE but a “lite” version of it that only allows opening up a secondary window.

I know, not the easiest solution but it works for now until I find a better way.  MS treats Firefox like a second class browser with no AJAX or rich text editing for some reason.  All this will change with Sharepoint 2010 but for the great majority of the world that will remain on Sharepoint 2007 for a while, we have to come up with workarounds.  Looking forward to May 12th, 2010 when it’s officially released along with Office 2010.

You’ll notice a lot of nice little features you are used to in IE missing when browsing your Sharepoint site with Firefox because of this.  One thing I miss but haven’t looked into is getting the “Open with Windows Explorer” action back.  This “Explorer View” uses WebDav (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV) to open a connection straight to your Sharepoint document library in a familiar Windows Explorer interface making it easy for end users to upload, move, rename, etc. in bulk. I am heavily dependent on this feature myself.  I’m thinking Firefox has to have some kind of WebDav plugin installed to get this working.  I’ll look into it and post here if I find something.

One thing to note, and I haven’t tried it yet, is that some guys over at Codplex are working on some basic Sharepoint 2007 + Firefox integration here:

http://wssfirefox.codeplex.com

The only reason I haven’t tried it out is because of the server side components that need to be installed.  I need to get around to trying it on one of my test farms at some point.  Most enterprises are not going to support Firefox anyhow so it’s not a priority issue to get resolved for me.  More of a personal challenge.

Here’s a simple pointer you can use when using Firefox with Sharepoint 2007 that makes life much easier.  The first thing you will notice when visting your Sharepoint site will be a pop-up box asking you to login.  This is because by default Firefox won’t pass NTLM credentials like Internet Explorer does. You have to specify trusted URLs that Firefox will pass credentials to.  In the pop-up box, you will see the site or server name it’s trying to authenticate against.  Just use your mouse to highlight this and press Ctrl + C to copy.  Cancel the login box and in your address bar, type the following:

about:config

These are the advanced settings for Firefox where you can customize pretty much anything on the browser.  Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button and scroll down until you find:

network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

Double click on it and press Ctrl + V to paste your URL.  You can add more URLs by seperating them wite a comma like this:

http://sharepointsite1, http://sharepointsite2, http://sharepointsite3

Now trying navigating to your Sharepoint site and it will automatically login.

When you’re applying updates to a large farm, you really need to check the version number of SharePoint running on each server in the farm in order to maintain consistency.  You can do this easily by going to CA > Operations > Servers in Farm.

But what do these version numbers actually mean?  There’s a great Wiki maintained here that can answer this:

http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/SharePointAdministrationWiki/SharePoint+Versions

This page will show you all the past and current version numbers and their associated KB articles.  Very handy when troubleshooting updates or if you want to check the change log between versions.

This is an easy one but requires a little bit of work to get working correctly.  SharePoint uses a feature called Index Server to search documents but it doesn’t search within PDFs by default. Searching inside PDF documents requires an iFilter from Adobe which they designed for 3rd party systems to read the PDF file format. Adobe includes this filter with Adobe Reader or you can download iFilter separately from Adobe’s site if you don’t want Reader installed on your SharePoint servers. 

http://www.adobe.com/products/reader – Latest version of Adobe Reader

or

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2611 – x86 iFilter
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025 – x64 iFilter

 
CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION
Now in SharePoint itself, you need to configure the search service to index files with the .pdf extension:

1. Go to CA and open up the Shared Service under Shared Services Administration.
2. Click Search Administration under the Search section.
3. Click File Types in the left nav bar and then click New File Type.
4. Enter “pdf” and click OK.

ICONS
You will also want to display the PDF icon next to PDF Documents in SharePoint.  You can download the icon from here:

http://www.adobe.com/images/pdficon_small.gif

and copy it into the 12 hive folder here:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

Then open up this XML template file:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions \12 \TEMPLATE\XML\DOCICON.XML

and add the this line in the <DocIcons.ByExtension> section if it isn’t there already:

REGISTRY
Now on to the registry changes you need to make on each index server.  Make sure to backup your registry before making any changes.  These two changes will register the Adobe PDF iFilter with the Office Search service.  The values that need to be changed are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf

Both values should be changed to:

{E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

Then go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\{Random GUID}\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList

and add “pdf” to this list. You will have to create a new String Value for this. Just number it the next number in the list, should be 38 on most Sharepoint installs.

SYSTEM PATH
Now you need to add the Adobe install directory to the System Path environmental variable so that the search service can find the dll which provides the iFilter service:

1. Right click My Computer
2. Click Properties
3. Click Advanced
4. Click Environment Variables
5. In the bottom half of the window, find the Path variable and double click it.
6. At the end of the value, add:

;C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader

RESTART SEARCH SERVICES
Now you need to restart the Office Search service so that all changes are reflected. Open up cmd prompt and type

sc stop osearch [press enter]
sc start osearch [press enter]

Or just restart it via the Services MMC.

If you already have PDF documents in SharePoint that you want to search inside, you have to ”Reset all crawled content” in Search Settings and then begin a new ”Full Crawl” under Content Sources.

UPDATE 9/20/2010: Installing SP2 or cumulative updates to your Sharepoint farm may sometimes reset your registry changes. Specifically your {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603} registry key will be reset to the old {4C904448-74A9-11D0-AF6E-00C04FD8DC02} value or it might include both keys. This will cause your PDF indexing to stop. Just edit the registry values above and put the correct value back in, restart search services & IIS, then run a full crawl. Your PDFs will begin indexing correctly again.

Anyone that builds SharePoint environments knows CodePlex (Microsoft’s Open Source Project Community) is the biggest hub for free SharePoint solutions.  I’m always looking for add-ons to play with in my SharePoint farms.  Here are a few that I find very useful.  MAKE SURE to test them out in a test farm before deploying to a production environment!!!  Every company’s SharePoint farm is unique so you must make sure a 3rd party add-on doesn’t break functionality for existing or custom webparts or create security issues before deploying to a live farm:

1. SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK) – http://slk.codeplex.com/ - Used as an e-learning and delivery system.  Think of it as a student teacher portal.  A lot of school districts like this one and it has a huge following. 

2. PlanetWilson Color Calendar – http://planetwilson.codeplex.com/ - Gives you the ability to color code Sharepoint calendar entries.  Immensely popular with users!  Once you install it, you’ll wonder how you ever used a Sharepoint calendar without it.  Big kudos to Mark Wilson for developing this project!

3. Smart Tools for Sharepoint – http://smarttools.codeplex.com/ - A ton of nice little tools that will make your life as an admin or user easier.

4. ChartPart – http://chartpart.codeplex.com/ - Generate graphs from Sharepoint lists.  A lot of users request this feature so give it a shot.  There are other alternatives out there too that I have tried but ChartPart has been prettty popular with my end users.

5. SharePoint Access Checker Webpart – http://accesschecker.codeplex.com/- Allows site owners to check access for users within their site.  Helps keep requests to Sharepoint farm admins down when site owners can easily check their security settings.  It can also check permission inheritance.

6. SPWakeup – http://spwakeup.codeplex.com/ - I had previously made a blog entry about this.  It allows you to “warm up” your Sharepoint farms so the first users of the day don’t have to wait for your app pools to spin up and your IIS cache to be rebuilt.

These are just a few I find very useful.  Hope they help you out!

So let’s say you have http://originalurl and you want to change it to http://newurl.  Don’t do it through IIS!!!  Pretty much everything you will ever need to manage a Sharepoint farm will always be found in CA.  Here’s how you accomplish this simple task:

1. Login to CA
2. Click the Operations tab
3. Click on “Alternate Access Mappings” under Global Configuration
4.  In the top right, the default view is “Show All”.  Just choose the web application you want to change.
5.  Click Edit Public URLs and change the URL to whatever you want it to.

Done!  Test it out and verify it works.

If you’re running Sharepoint, I can bet if you try using it in the morning, it takes a good while before the page initially loads up. Then for the rest of the day, every page you hit is lightning fast. This is because the IIS application pool for Sharepoint resets at night between 1AM – 2 AM (right click on the application pool in IIS and check the Recycling tab for the exact time on your server). When you access the page for the first time in the morning, IIS has to wait for the application pool to “warm up” and rebuild the cache before it presents the page to you.

I had been using the scripts that Joel Oleson (Former Sr. Technical Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft & current Sharepoint Evangelist) made available on his blog back in 2006 for the longest time:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx

Since then, a tool called SPWakeUp has been created inspired from these scripts and I have been using this on all my Sharepoint and Project front end servers instead. It is maintained at CodePlex here:

http://www.codeplex.com/SPWakeUp

Just follow the instructions and set it up as a scheduled task to run on your web front ends after the app pool recycles at night. I created a .bat file containing the following arguments that the scheduled task is pointed at:

C:\SPWakeUp\SPWakeUp.exe -discover -log:c:\SPWakeUp\log.txt

This will automatically discover all your Sharepoint sites (which is the default behavior of the tool anyway) and also log the results to a text file. This will eliminate the slow loading in the mornings of MOSS, WSS, PWA, etc.