This is the first of many how-to posts on some of the basics and more advanced ways to style and design SharePoint 2010 using SharePoint Designer 2010 to give it extra appeal.

I was working on a marketing site the other day that I wanted to make fixed width for 1024px screens and centered on the page.  Very easy to do in most applications but will all the CSS that SharePoint has it can be difficult sometimes to find the location to make that easy change.

Here is how you can make your site a fixed width and centered on the page in SP2010…

Open up the corev4.css file and look for the “form” tag.  Specify it below to your desired width.  Typically this would be done in the body and “container” (or whatever you like to call your main wrapper div) tags on traditional sites.

form {
 width: 950px;
 margin-left: auto;
 margin-right: auto;
}

Save and your site should now be centered!

It is always nice to a have a consolidated place to find what you are looking for, and in case you are in need of specific ports that concern Citrix XenApp environments, then please use this as a guide.

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Recently when installing ESXi 4.1 for a customer I noticed a little quirk in the new setup of the management console that had me chasing my tail for a good while and I thought I would share my experience with you guys so you didn’t make the same mistake.

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Sometimes looking at an old idea in a new way completely blows your mind. I just had such an experience.

I have a Samsung NC240 in my office and have been using it to be the first adopter of the View technology, as my previous boss at eGroup (www.egroup-us.com) used to say "We eat our own dog food". I use View primarily becuase I’m in the process of forcing my entire work force into using a VDI solution and I want everyone to see that I make myself use it as well. One of the features I like about this technology is that I can go to any terminal, log in as me, and get my desktop; basically I’m more mobile than ever before. I’ve used this feature and others to sell the technology up stream. Click Here to read more…

So you have virtualized and consolidated your physical datacenter into a fraction of the size (and COST!) it once was over the past several years (if you haven’t you really should, but thats not what I am here to write about).  How did you go about doing it?  Did you utilize the proper tools like Capacity Planner with a eGroup virtualization engineer to maximize your consolidation?  If so, Great! If not, still not what we are here to talk about.  What I am here to tell you today is how you can take your datacenter from efficient to downright squeezing every drop of processing potential out of every last host resource you have as well as plan for virtual infrastructure growth in a proactive manner. 

That tool? VMWare’s Capacity IQ.

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I ran into an issue recently with a customer that was having an issue with Virtual Center’s services not starting automatically starting after a reboot of thier vCenter Server. They were able to manually start the service one the box was all the way back up but even with the service set to retry every 5 minutes it would not start on its own. I did a little bit of research that was able to not only figure out what the problem was but to also solve it relatively easy. Click Here to read more…

Unfortunately, the Blue Screen of Death is alive and well. We all were hoping that Microsoft, with Windows 7, would have tightened up the driver issue, but the fact of the matter is bad drivers are still prevalent in the marketplace. And there is no telling what end users are installing on the PCs these days. So your best bet is to know where to find the memory dump file that is generated after your PC blue screens to accurately know what caused the issue.

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Recently I ran into a customer who had forgotten their password to log into thier OfficeScan Console portal. I knew there had to be a quick way to reset it and did some digging and this is what i came up with…
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This is not so much an issue in smaller environments, but if you come across larger more complex Citrix Farms, then quickly identifying the Citrix License can be very handy.

Here’s how:

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Three weeks and counting since the production launch of SP2010 here at eGroup and we are already reaping some productivity benefits over the MOSS2007 site.  One of the items I have been thoroughly impressed with is the multitude of ways in which SharePoint can interact with your office applications while not locking the user into one specific path.  SharePoint 2010 gives users three main ways to interact with the application…

• The traditional web interface - by traditional we mean greatly enchanced with inline edits of doc libraries and lists without page refreshes using AJAX techniques.
• Outlook Integration - certainly nothing new here but SP2010 Foundation does allow two way communication in the free version of SharePoint (Foundation).
• SharePoint Workspace 2010 - Far and away my favorite.  SharePoint Workspace 2010 ships with Office 2010 Professional and doesn’t disappoint.  Many have said that SharePoint Workspace 2010 is to SharePoint what Outlook is to Exchange.  The ability to manage, communicate and receive alert notifications on changes within the site through a client side application is excellent.  Not to mention offline access to document libraries and SharePoint data and a sleak background sync mechanism to keep it all up to date.  If this doesn’t finally kill Exchange shared folders then nothing will.

There are many features within these three components that make SharePoint 2010 integration with your traditional Office tools much more in depth such as…

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