I had her for 13 years – since she was the tiniest kitten you could imagine. A rescue found on the side of a field with her father and the rest of her litter. She was the runt, and the last one left. We grew up together and I loved her dearly.

Everyone loved Rockie. How could you not? She rocked. She had brains, attitude, a quirky personality, and the softest coat just begging to be pet.

She didn’t really like having her back pet but she LOVED having her head/chin/ears scratched. I trained her to enjoy having her nose rubbed, and to sleep under the blankets. Which, as an afterthought, might not have been the best idea – though it created some pretty amusing memories. So many times I accidentally, very nearly, sat down on her while she was napping underneath a pile of blankets. Then she started sleeping under the blankets and leave her tail hanging out. I think this was her “me” time away from Boo.

I tried to toilet train her once. Man, what a disaster that was. It actually worked for a while! Seriously. But then either she or the other cat (Boo) decided that they’ve had about enough of that. It’s hard to tell which cat is doing something when you have more than one unless you catch them in the act… Soon after it was pretty obvious that the other one followed suit and neither were using the toilet. A year and a half this battle of wills lasted. As you can imagine, the cats won out and I reinstated the litter box… begrudgingly.

She was patient and gracious. Most of the time. As long as it didn’t involve delaying her mealtime. She humored Boo, but it was obvious that she knew she was the real queen of the house.

She could be pretty creepy too. When we watched scary movies she’d sit in a dark corner just stare at us. Eventually we’d start to get that feeling that we were being watched. You know that feeling. We’d look around and notice her just sitting there. Looking at us. I’m pretty sure she did this on purpose and picked these moments in particular – for maximum effectiveness. The winner of the Most Creepy award: when she sat in that dark corner and watched us watching Paranormal Activity late one night.

Oh, and she was a hunter. Always the hunter. She tracked and ate countless spiders and other creepy-crawlies for me over the years. She’d go absolutely bonkers if there was a fly or beetle buzzing around the house where shouldn’t catch them. And those birds! Always just out of her grasp on the other side of the window…

She was quite the cat.

I remember when she and I lived together alone in our own place for a while. She got used to my schedule and knew that sound my alarm made that meant “that was your last chance – you’ve run out of snoozes.” It meant that it was time for breakfast, so she paid close attention to the sound of my alarm. She began anticipating it, and would sit on my pillow next to my head looking down at me in expectation. If I didn’t get up after that last chirp of my alarm, well… She knew she had to do something. I was being bad and delaying her breakfast. So she would put her paw on my closed eyelid. When she felt my eyes start to open, she’d remove it and look down at me with a look that said “You shouldn’t still be laying there with your eyes closed. You know that.” If I closed my eyes again, she would place her paw on my eyelid again. We’d repeat this process until I finally dragged my lazy butt out of bed.

On the flip side, if I stayed up too late watching TV she would sit on the couch next to me and try to get my attention. She would start inching closer and look at me. Then she’d tap on my arm. If I ignored her, she’d put her paw on my arm and hold it there until I’d acknowledge that yes, I understood that it was “passed my bedtime.” After a while she’d throw in the towel and just curl up next to me until I went to bed.

Years ago I had given her a squeaky mouse that was made of fur. She LOVED it. It was like her baby. Except that she chewed the eyes, nose and tail off, and eventually pealed the fur off completely. I threw the squeaker out because that obviously did not interest her. She would carry that “mouse carcass” (as I lovingly called it) all around the house. She’d leave it in random places – sometimes on my pillow or on the floor next to where I slept. I really loved that. It’d always put a smile on my face. Gradually she started ripping pieces of the pelt off and we’d have to throw them away. Eventually it got to a point where we had to throw the final piece away and ended up replacing it with a different type of mouse. No squeaker, not real fur – just a soft, stuffed mouse of approximately equal size to the predecessor. She loved that too. Only ate the nose and tail off. The rest of the body remained intact. This mouse she would actually carry around the house every night – yowling while it was still in her mouth – as if to announce to every room “Helloooo. I’m Rockie, and this is my mouse.” She’d do this in each room throughout the house, and it’d make us giggle. As soon as she noticed that you noticed her, she would drop it and come walking over, as if to say “Oh, sorry, didn’t realize you were watching that. I’ll try again later when you go to bed.” Funny thing was, if Rockie took a night off of “mouse duty”, Boo would try to parade the mouse around in the same manner as if she was picking up the slack. I almost buried her with the mouse, but I didn’t want to take it away from Boo.

Even before the mouse, I had these giant bunny slippers that she grew attached to. She would sometimes track and hunt them. Other times she’d snuggly with them, or I’d find her carrying them off (they were almost as big as she was) and would curl up with them in her carrier.

As most cats do, she loved laying on & in bags – paper, plastic, canvas – didn’t matter. It was always terrifyingly hysterical when she’d get herself stuck in one of the bag’s handles… She loved laying on top of boxes – but what she loved even more was trying to curl up in an empty box that was just slightly too small for her. Yesterday morning I had actually left out just such a box for her, and got to watch her try to get inside it while I was getting ready for work. That put a smile on my face and made me chuckle…

She seemed to pass peacefully, and presumably happily. She was napping in one of her favorite spots, on a soft & fuzzy carpet, laying next to her mouse in a beam of sunlight. I couldn’t have chosen a better way for her.

She wasn’t just a cat to me. She was an old friend that shared my good times and bad times. She was an awesome personality and the loudest pur you’ve ever heard.

I’m going to miss her being the mother of the house and grooming everyone whether we like it or not. I’m going to miss the evening yowls while she parades the mouse around. I’m going to miss her trying to snuggle with me while I work on my computer, and sit in the gap between me and the back of my chair while sitting at the dining room table. I’m going to miss that obscenely loud motor when she was happy. And I’m going to miss those ridiculously cute sleeping poses.

RIP Rockie, May 1 2013

When attempting to convert a file from .docx to .pdf via Word Automation Services we were receiving:

Unrecognized attribute ‘allowInsecureTransport’. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. (D:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\WebServices\WordServer\Proxy.config line 77)

This was a brand new SharePoint install and everything appeared to be configured correctly. The ONLY solution that I could find was to apply a .NET hotfix (KB976462). It made sense. It sounded perfect! However… the .dlls that the hotfix wanted to apply were at an older version than what was already on the SharePoint server. At this point, we opened a case with Microsoft…

Microsoft found that more than just the Word Automation Services were generating this error – the Security Token Service and Search were also generating this error. It took about 2 weeks, but we were able to find the culprit.

It was in fact a .NET patch – but it was not KB976462. In our case, one of the SharePoint 2010 prerequisites had failed during the install and no one had noticed. This particular patch did not actually prevent the installation of SharePoint, so it continued to go unnoticed until we started experiencing problems.

I don’t recall the exact patch that was missed – if I find it, I’ll update this post. We could have just re-run the Prerequisites Installer to have it applied, but in our case Microsoft just sent us the patch.

If you run into this scenario, take a look through your prerequisites log – if you still have it.

Sure, you can use the SharePoint wiki as-is. It’s fine. It “works”. But I like to take it a step or two further. Here are some “extras” that I implement on most wikis that I create these days.

The first step: Automating a link back to “Home”
Technically, the first step is to empty out the contents of the “Home” page, delete the “How to Use This Wiki Library” page, THEN… automate the link back.

Go to the Library Settings and add a new Hyperlink field. I usually name this “Back To:” (or rather, to be extra diligent, I first name it “BackTo”, then go back and rename it to a nice name with spaces and symbols).

Next, open the site in SharePoint Designer (SPD) and create a new workflow for this wiki library. Set it to run on new item creation, and title it something like “Wiki Home Link”. Build a dynamic string with the contents:
https://sharepoint/path/to/wiki/Home.aspx, My-Wiki-Name-Home

Make sure that there’s a space after the comma!

For the final workflow step, update the current item’s “Back To:” field using the data in the string.

First step done*! Now any new page will automatically have a nice hyperlink back to the wiki’s home page. No need to remember to type [[Home]].

Next step: Create more metadata
If this is going to be more than a few pages, I like to create additional metadata. Categories, tags, etc., to help group, filter or sort.

Go to the wiki Library’s settings again. Add as many new columns as you prefer. I like:

• Category: A predefined dropdown list. Required, 1 selection. For a “SharePoint HowTo Wiki” I would use options like “General HowTo”, “Extending SharePoint”, “Informational”, “Quick Tip”, etc.
• Audience: Sometimes. Setup similarly to Category, but allow multiple selections. I use this when I have a lot of articles for different role types. Why would someone who’s only submitting content care to read an article about how to administer it? I would have options such as “Everyone”, “Project Owners”, “Power Users”, etc. Keep in mind that some pages are applicable to multiple user types.
• Skill Level: Could be redundant with “Audience” – depending on what your content is and how you’re intending to use the wiki. I like to use “(1) Beginner”, “(2) Intermediate”, “(3) Advanced”.
• Tags: A predefined dropdown menu, or lookup list (as you prefer) allowing multiple selections. This is helpful to be able to find all the wiki articles that are related to “Productivity” or “Permissions & Security” without having to fully read or understand the article title.

Step 2.5(ish):
Now that you have your metadata fields prepped, create some views to put them to use. I group all items (expanded) by Category for my default view. Then I have a similar view grouped by “Skill Level”. I also create views for “Recently Updated” (where “Modified” <= [Today-5]) and "New" items.

Step 3.14…?
Now that you have the new fields created, new views to make use of the fields, let’s put it all to better use.

Go to the Home.aspx page and edit the page – using the Site Actions tab – not using the wiki rich text editor. Add the wiki Library’s web part to the available web part zone at the bottom of the wiki content. Title it “Table of Contents” and select the appropriate view to be displayed (I usually display the “grouped by category” view and remove the Modified/Modified By fields).

Upgrade Your TOC
Let’s make the Table of Contents even better!

Check out the Path to SharePoint blog’s Easy Tabs. This is where the additional views come in handy. Create a tab for each view to let the users decide how they would like to browse through the articles.

Finally, clean it up.
The down side to the SharePoint wiki pages is that you can’t customize the display of the fields on the page as you can with a SharePoint List item. Sure, you can rearrange them in the Library settings, but the wiki content will always remain at the top.

At this point I would open the Home.aspx page in SPD and remove the additional fields (*including the “Back To:” hyperlink field). It’ll customize that page, which I really don’t like to do unless really necessary. However, it’s just the one page in the Library.

In Summary
At this point, you should be good to go.

• You have automated your “Home” link so your users can always quickly get back to the home page.
• You should have a short “welcome” page with a nice, clean table of contents. No need to manually maintain the listing because the links to the pages are there as soon as you create the new page.
• You’re providing the users with the ability to quickly find the content that’s relevant to them.
• And you can still utilize the wiki functionality to quickly create/update articles, and provide links within the content as you always could.

Enjoy!

If you use the trick http://www.sharepointology.com/setup/add-web-parts-to-dispform-editform-or-newformaspx/ to add web parts so that you don’t unghost the page… ListViews added will not display the title, or a border. They’re “stuck” with a default. If you convert it to a DVWP, everything’s snazzy.

If you want to use a query string filter, this also will not work. You will need a DVWP to do this.
TIP!
Add a LVWP to the page using the trick above, then open in SPD and Convert to DVWP. Then setup a query string parameter to filter the DVWP on. As long as you don’t start monkeying with the code, making these changes in SPD doesn’t seem to unghost the page.

Maybe someday we’ll actually finish it. *crosses fingers*