Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 Prompt for Data Refresh

While working to get the various dashboards to work for the TFS 2013 Agile template I noticed the all the charts kept asking me Do you want to enable these queries.  After clicking on yes a few times this got old.  Did some digging and there is an easy way to allow them to connect to there data sources and refresh when the page loads.

Here is the message I was talking about:

To remove the warnings you will need to do the following.

1. Browse to your SharePoint Central Administration page
2. Under Application Management click on Manage service applications
3. Click on Excel Services Application
4. Click on Trusted File Locations
5. For both your short name address (http://shortname/sites) and FQDN (http://sitename.mysite.com/sites) change the Warm on Refresh setting to No/False and click on OK to save it

Happy Face!  No more click on Yes

TFS 2013 Excel Charts in SharePoint 2013 Aren't Showing Areas

I am still in process of setting up Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) as an Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution for a company.  All of the companies products are being managed under one Team Project and I am breaking it apart by using teams and areas.

Upon searching there was little documentation out there regarding how to set this up in SharePoint.  The best sites I found was by Martin Hinshelwood and can be found here.  In addition to the instructions listed there is some additional configuration needed for each sub-site so that it only shows the area's affected.  After the various dashboards are present several Web Parts need to have their queries adjusted by adding the area for that team to it.

Web parts that needed adjusting for the Agile template were:

• Project Work Item (right side)
• Recent Checkins (right side)
• Burndown dashboard -> Open Issues (bottom)
• Bugs dashboard -> Active Bugs (bottom)

Next I went to the Excel Reports on the left to start to modify those for each sub-site.  When I opened one up and went to select the area to match the sub-site it was not listed.  I found this odd since the area I had created was available for the queries of the web parts I changed earlier.

After some tinkering I realized that the areas for reporting off of don't show up until you have created a work item and assigned that area to it.   I created a work item and stepped away for a meeting.  When I got back and reopened the spreadsheet the area was now present.  Not knowing the inner workings of TFS I can only assume this had to be done for the area to be created in SQL Server Analysis Services cube.  If you are setting up the SharePoint sites ahead of time I would recommend you create dummy work items and get the areas populated.  That way you can reconfigure each sub-sites spreadsheets ahead of time.

Happy TFSing!

Image courtesy of  renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Story Points in Agile for Defects

Story Points for Defects

I have been working with several teams on implementing TFS as they want to follow ALM.  Currently they are doing velocity and burn up charts in a spreadsheet.  I noticed that they were assigning story points to defects.  They were doing so to help with planning as a certain percentage of the teams time is dedicated to fixing defects reported by the customer.  I started thinking about if that was the right way to go about it.

If story points are the measure of value delivered to the business or customer then defects should have a negative impact on the value.   A piece of working software with no defects has a perceived value of non-working software (defects).   Therefore fixing the defects later should be 0 story points since that “value” was already delivered to the customer in a previous release.
 Teams with better quality will have a higher velocity and teams that spend more time fixing bugs will have a lower velocity.  This may portray a more accurate picture when planning work and releases.

Your thoughts?

Image courtesy of ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Outlook 2013 Contact Pictures Gone

I had upgraded my Outlook from 2010 to 2013 on my laptop.  After doing so I no longer got the nice contact photos in each email.  This was useful to me since it helped me put peoples names to their face.  A friend showed me how to remedy it at work.

1. In Outlook go to Send/Receive tab (next to Home at top)
2. Click on the Send/Receive Groups drop-down in the top banner
3. In the drop down select Download address book

After doing this I had the pictures of the people.  Note that I believe I will have to do this every-once in awhile as people are added to the global address book for my company.

Alternate:
Download from the File Tab is also an option.

Heartbleed iRule

This iRule found on devcentral.f5.com looks at all server responses and blocks any that are longer than 128 bytes.  The only downside I see to this is the overhead at looking at all the packets.

https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/ssl-heartbleed-server-side-irule#.U0vQBE0U-Hs​

What schedule do you follow?

I was reading another article about time management (most are the same these days) and came across an old link to an essay by Paul Graham.  I found it a good read and worth 5 minutes of my time.

The Short

There are two types of schedules in our world.  The managers and the makers.  The managers make the big decisions and direct work at a high level.  To accomplish this their time is chunked into 1 hour meeting blocks all day.  The makers are the ones producing products to sell.  They need large blocks from 1/2 of a day to 1 day to focus on their work.

Take Away

 If your an engineer try to shift meetings to the beginning of the day or the end.  Better yet make sure you are attending the right meetings and not just any meeting your invited to.  This will give you more time to focus and complete work.

SharePoint 2013 SP1 Generate New Key Issue

I am in the process of setting up TFS 2013 with SharePoint 2013 SP1 and ran into a generic error that took me a good deal of trial and error to figure out.  Luckily someone else in this world ran into the same issue and posted the solution on MSDN.

My application and SQL server are both Windows 2012 SR2.  SQL 2012 version 11.0.3128.  To get SharePoint and it's prerequisites to install properly with little intervention I had to use SharePoint 2013 SP1.  I don't think SP1 made any difference as the solution was for 2013.

One of the steps in configuring SharePoint 2013 SP1 for use with TFS is to Generate a New Key in the Secure Store Service Application.

After entering my passphrase and selecting OK the message An error occurred during the "Generate Key" process.  Please try again or contact your administrator appeared.



The event log may have an entry generated by your domain account that looks like the below message.

The next step was to start searching for solutions and came across one good page that didn't work for me but might for someone else.  I tried everything in this article with no luck.  I did come across the one that worked for me as well but executed it wrong the first time.

Basically there is a service that is not running in SharePoint called the Claims to Windows Token Service.  You are to start it and restart 3 SharePoint services.  Then reset IIS.

1. SharePoint Administration
2. SharePoint Timer Service
3. SharePoint Tracing Service
4. Start -> Run -> iisreset

My problem was I started the service the old fashioned way.  This did not work for me.

To get it working you have to go to the System Settings -> Manage Services on Server page in the SharePoint Central Administration site.  From there start it and then restart the other services.  Once done give creating the key a shot.  It worked for me!