Wading Through

SPC12: Just Around the Corner

J.D. Wade — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Happy Friday everyone! Well, this Sunday morning, I fly out of St. Louis to head to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas. Really looking forward to hanging out with friends and just being at the conference with over 9,000 registered attendees.

Booth

This year, Horizons Consulting, the firm I have been with for 7 years now, has a booth for the conference. I will definitely be hanging out at the booth on Sunday evening and some times (to be determined) during the rest of the week. I will be sure to tweet when I am there. Please come by booth 1124 and say Hi!

Speakers

Just wanted to say good luck to some of my friends who are speaking including but not limited to: Mark Rackley, Corey Roth, Chris Caplinger, and Matt Bremer.

MySPC

Be sure to register on MySPC as it is a great way to organize what sessions to attend but, even better, to find out who is going to conference you know and organize a meetup.

Topics of Interest

Some of the things I am really looking forward to dig into more are Request Management, Claims/Authentication, Search, High Availability/Disaster Recovery, Workflow, and Social. Most of these from a general architecture perspective (how they are put together and how the fit together). How about you?

Hope to see you there!

Filed under: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SharePoint Conference, Sharepoint Foundation 2013 (SPF 2013), SharePoint Server 2013 (SP 2013) Tagged: SPC12

Counting Usage of SP2010 UPS User Properties

J.D. Wade — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:03:16 +0000

I needed to report on the usage count of particular UPS user properties such as Skills and Responsibilities. If you look at the property in Central Administration, you can see a usage count on the screen. This field is populated using an internal class so I needed to look for another way to do it. When looking, I found the following property:

Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.CoreProperty.UsageCount

However, when you go to use it, it does not return a value and you will find it is producing a SQL error. You can find all the ins and outs of the issue in this blog post:

http://pholpar.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/bug-in-the-usecount-property-of-the-coreproperty-class/

However, the resolution in this blog post is NOT supported by Microsoft as it requires modifying the SharePoint database. After a quick call with Microsoft, I learned you can use this method to get the count:

Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileConfigManager.CountProfileswithProperty

Hopefully this will help someone else out who runs into this issue. Here is an example PowerShell script with the method used in it:

Add-Type -Path “c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\Microsoft.Office.Server.dll”
Add-Type -Path “c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI\Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.dll”
$propertyName = “SPS-Skills”
$siteUrl = “http://dev”
$site = Get-SPSite $siteUrl
$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$upcm = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileConfigManager($context)
Write-Host $upcm.CountProfilesWithProperty($propertyName)

Filed under: Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010) Tagged: User Profiles

Lync and SharePoint Integration: More Than Presence Information

J.D. Wade — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 01:20:45 +0000

Today I had a conversation with a client who is investigating using an IM/UC vendor other than Microsoft. They let me know that the vendor said they integrate with SharePoint just like Lync because “they show presence information on SharePoint sites.” So my response was “Oh really?” Then I proceeded to share several of the ways that Lync and Sharepoint integrate. I realized it would make a great blog post to share this information so here it is.

Here are major ways that Lync and SharePoint integrate:

1. Online presence indicator next to an individual’s name wherever their name appears in a site collection in SharePoint.

2. Assist in providing colleague suggestions for use in My Sites, My Profiles and People Search.

3. Through Lync, provide access to SharePoint people and skills search including names and skills and a link to the user’s My Site.

Let me provide more detailed information about each of these aspects listed above.

Online Presence Indicator

The online presence indicator shows whether the individual is offline or is online and available to respond to queries via an instant messaging client. When an individual is online, you can click the online status indicator to send an instant message. Also it provides the ability to send and receive e-mail, call the person, and to display free/busy information. The indicator status is rendered by an ActiveX control that is installed with Microsoft Office. The ActiveX control enables online status to be displayed. This control verifies the e-mail address on record for the user and directs a query to the presence server for that client to see if they are online. The ActiveX control does not store online information or e-mail addresses; it simply directs queries from the site to the e-mail address and renders the appropriate status.

To display the presence indicator and its associated contact card (in Office 2010) or menu (in Office 2007 and Office 2003), SharePoint uses the Microsoft ActiveX control name.dll. The ActiveX control makes calls directly to the Microsoft Lync 2010 API, and then Lync makes MAPI or Exchange calls to supply the requested information. More information about name.dll can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms455335%28v=office.14%29.aspx

Colleague Suggestions

Lync as well as Outlook are used to provide colleague suggestions. It is good to know why colleagues are important in people search and how the suggestions are gathered:

SharePoint Server uses your list of Colleagues to help compute the social distance used to rank People Search results. Your Colleagues list starts with your manager, anyone who reports to your manager, and your direct reports. You can remove any of these names and add any name from your company’s directory. You can organize your colleagues into groups and choose whether to show a colleague on your public page.

SharePoint Server proactively suggests colleagues and displays them in a Suggested Colleagues web part on a user’s My Site. It does this through a number of different features.

The user’s Communicator or Lync contacts are examined and are collected from the Communicator client via the ActiveX control (name.dll) for colleague suggestions.

The SharePoint Server Colleague Add-In in Microsoft Outlook 2010 scans the user’s Sent Items folder periodically (every 5 days or so, depending on usage) to look for names and keywords along with the frequency of those names and keywords. The list of possible colleagues is updated periodically and stored under the user’s profile on the user’s local computer. This list is accessed by the Add Colleagues page on a user’s SharePoint My Site through an ActiveX control when you click Suggested colleagues where they can choose the colleagues they want to add to their My Site. The user can approve or reject contact names before they are added. Outlook 2007 supports this functionality but is not as extensive in searching for colleagues.

Although you can enable e-mail analysis for all users in Outlook or only for specific groups by using Group Policy, users can opt out of this feature. If e-mail analysis is disabled for all users, individual users can still opt in. Also, you can choose not to install the add-in as part of the Office install. More information about configuring the add-in can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff384821.aspx.

Lync client direct integration with SharePoint

Through Lync client policy, the Lync client can be configured to use the Skill view, in Lync search results, to search Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 My Site pages for people with specific skills or expertise. Also, it can be figured to access the user’s personal SharePoint Server 2010 My Site profile page from the Lync – Options dialog box.

To see a good overview of skills integration, see this blog post: http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/tharrington/archive/2010/11/15/enabling-skill-search-in-lync-2010.aspx.

To get the best overview of most of this integration, see the SharePoint Integration chapter in the Lync Server 2010 Resource Kit: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/E/94ED1EF4-A2EF-4686-9841-B0390072D524/Chapter_16_SharePoint_Integration.doc.

For instructions for adding the link to the user’s My Site, see the ShowSharepointPhotoEditLink field information on this page: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398806.aspx.

Well, hope you found this informative and feel free to comment away!

Filed under: Microsoft Lync Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), Sharepoint Foundation 2013 (SPF 2013), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), SharePoint Server 2013 (SP 2013), Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Lync

User Profile Properties Worksheet: A More Useful Version

J.D. Wade — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:25:08 +0000

In helping a group getting ready to launch My Sites and My Profile pages, I wanted to go through the User Properties and review their settings with this group. I went out to Microsoft to grab the MS version of the User Profile Properties worksheet. From my perspective, I was disappointed in it since it didn’t have all the information you needed to gather, didn’t contain any of the default user properties settings, and information was in a different order than how it is in the User Profile Service (UPS) service application screens.

So what I did was go through and document the User Properties for a default install of SharePoint 2010 documenting all settings for all properties. Also, I added a couple columns for additional information. First, I added “System of Record” which allows you to record where the master copy of the data lives. An example may be employee number and its system of record could be the HR system rather than SharePoint. This helps you when you need to make updates to information. Secondly, I added “Update Time” which is where you can record how long it takes information to replicate from the System of Record into SharePoint. In some larger organizations with complex systems, this may be a couple days before the information makes it through the various systems. This helps you to think through what times you replicate information which may help you shorten this replication time.

So here is my copy of the User Profile Properties Worksheet. Please feel free to make comments about any errors, updates, or enhancements you think can be made as you have a chance to use it.

Finally, there is another scenario this worksheet can be helpful! How about for disaster recovery documentation? This form allows you to record all the changes you make from the defaults. So if you ever need to rebuild a farm and need to reconfigure the UPS, you would be able to leverage this documentation. So hurry up and get documenting since we all love to do it (this is a sarcastic remark).

Filed under: Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010) Tagged: User Profiles

SharePoint Conference 2011 Recap

J.D. Wade — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:19:58 +0000

Well, I am sitting here on the plane returning home to St. Louis, MO after a lovely week in Anaheim, CA. SharePoint Conference 2011 is finished. Many people are worn out and folks are going home with a lot of information to think about. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of my thoughts and experiences from the conference.

Beginning the week with KnowledgeLake

I arrived in Anaheim, CA on Saturday to be able to attend KnowledgeLake’s first user conference which occurred all day Sunday. For those who don’t know, KnowledgeLake is a software solution that works along with SharePoint to extend its enterprise content management features. In the way of announcements, we learned about new integration with Office 365, the ability to use their Capture product on Windows Azure, new features coming down the pipe for their current products, the overall software roadmap, and a new solution released called Unity are the ones that come to mind. KnowledgeLake has several press releases which provide more details.

In the couple breakout sessions, we reviewed information and tips for upgrading a SharePoint environment to 2010 which has KnowledgeLake’s Imaging solution deployed. From Russ Houberg (@rhouberg), we reviewed important new items that Russ learned while upgrading his Microsoft Certified Master’s certification to 2010. Congratulations Russ on passing!

SPC11 gets fully under way

Then came Monday, when the SharePoint Conference got into full swing. There was so much going on and information shared that if I wrote about all of it, I would have a book chapter. That isn’t very effective for a blog so I just wanted to hits the highlights.

The conference was exactly what I expected and I was pleased to see Microsoft did a good job with it. Some folks I talked to were disappointed. I think it was a difference in expectations. For me, with this being a non-release year, I didn’t expect to be overwhelmed at the keynote or to have a lot of sessions where I was exposed to an incredible amount of new concepts and information. The keynote was as I expected except for the incredibly brave demonstration of SQL Server “Denali” “Always On” failover and the new Office 365 BCS being able to use web services announcement. The “Denali” demonstration went beautifully and Microsoft has done some fantastic work on that product. I look forward to being able to implement “Denali” for SharePoint 2010 at customers in the near future and was pleased to find out they added support for it in SP2010 Service Pack 1. From the sessions, I regularly got useful “nuggets” of information that I can go back and utilize immediately which again met my expectations. Finally, there was the joy of being able to catch up with and see so many of the great folks in the SharePoint community.

I spoke a little before about the sessions but there are a couple I wanted to highlight as they are still in the forefront of my thoughts.

Eric Shupps’ SPC373 Performance Tuning SharePoint 2010

Eric Shupps (@eshupps) had a wonderful session on different items you can do to improve the performance of your SharePoint sites. He reviewed items such as the different methods of caching, IIS compression, and the developer dashboard. His use of the Visual Studio Load Testing application to show the improvements was a great choice and Eric kept the presentation fast paced and interesting. I have to point out a couple great blog posts by Sean McDonough (@spmcdonough) if you want to dig in even deeper into the subject of blob caching:

We Drift Deeper Into the Sound … as the (BLOB Cache) Flush Comes

Client-Server Interactions and the max-age Attribute with SharePoint BLOB Caching

Spencer Harbar’s SPC407 Enterprise Deployment Considerations for the User Profile Service Application

Spencer Harbar (@harbars) did a fantastic 400 level session with detailed information about everyone’s favorite subject, the user profile service application. Spence reviewed the importance of planning your identity management solution, explained the overall architecture, how to properly provision the UPS using PowerShell, and reviewed deployed considerations just to name a few things.

In the end, it was a great week with a great group of folks and has me energized again to go back and do exciting things with SharePoint. But even more exciting is the announcement of SharePoint Conference 2012 occurring in Las Vegas on November 12-15, 2012. Look forward to seeing you there!!!

Filed under: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SharePoint Conference, SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010) Tagged: Musings, SPC11

MS Federated Search Connectors

J.D. Wade — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:29:45 +0000

I just saw a series of new federated search connectors show up on my Microsoft Download site feed. I personally hadn’t heard anything about these being released but wanted to post the links to them and the description provided for them. Here is what the site has to say:

”Federated Search Connectors allow a search solution based on any Microsoft Enterprise Search product (Microsoft Search Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Search Server 2008, or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) to pass a query to a target system and accept and display results from that system.”

So here are the different types of connectors available…I look forward to trying them out:

Encyclopedia Britannica

Business Week

The Register

Filed under: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), SharePoint Server 2013 (SP 2013) Tagged: Search

St. Louis Day of .Net

J.D. Wade — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:12:28 +0000

Well, it is that time of year again. The St. Louis Day of .Net is coming around again this August 20-21. I just found out this week that I get to participate as a speaker for a third year in a row. I am excited to see the event continue to grow and for there to be such great community involvement.

As with other years, they are getting a great lineup of speakers and a greatly diverse topics which more than makes the price of admission well worth it. You can find all the information you need at the website.

This year, I will be presenting a 300 level session called the “Kerberos Survival Guide.” Here is the synopsis: If it were just IIS, Kerberos, and you alone in a jungle, would you be able to survive the encounter? You will after you attend this once in a lifetime event! OK…in reality, if you come to this session, you will the learn basics of how Kerberos works, when you want to use it, what is needed to deploy it for any web site (including SharePoint) in IIS, how to troubleshoot issues, and how to do advanced delegation in code.

Hope to see you there!

Filed under: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Presentations, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), St. Louis (STL) Day of .Net, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Kerberos, Presentations

Maybe just a little more rosemary or thyme

J.D. Wade — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 01:58:28 +0000

Have you ever had this great recipe that you loved cooking over and over again? You got very comfortable with how to prepare the recipe and get it right every time. With time, something happens with that comfortable recipe and you decide it just is not as good as it use to be or just does not fulfill your hunger anymore. When this happens, you usually have a couple of options to choose from. Either you can completely skip using the recipe for some time or you start to experiment with the recipe to try to make it better again. So what on earth does cooking and recipes have to do with SharePoint? I am so glad you asked.

So for almost fourteen years, I have been primarily an IT Pro working on infrastructure. Over these years, I spiced up my own personal recipe by moving from being a MS Windows server generalist to specializing in MS Exchange. From there, I have moved into the SharePoint realm which has so many great aspects to keep me busy. Well, I have been working for a while to add a twist to my SharePoint work which is to equip myself to do more on the development side. I believe to be a great SharePoint architect, you need a foot solidly in each camp (Dev and IT Pro).

So why am I telling you this? Over the next months, you will start to see the “recipe” for my blog change just a bit. I have no desire to completely swap out recipes. But I will be trying to mix in more aspects of development while I keep talking about infrastructure. In addition, I continue to work on posting more frequently. I have come to realize it is easier to post more if I practice it regularly. This means regularly making myself sit down to write.

I will be experimenting. I may get it wrong sometimes but my goal is to learn and make it better the next time. So feel free to let me know what you think and how it is going.

Filed under: Personal Thoughts, Technology and Software Tagged: Musings

SharePoint Saturday Ozarks Recap

J.D. Wade — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:00:00 +0000

On Saturday, June 12, I got the pleasure for a second year to present at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks. I sincerely enjoyed my time there again.

Mark Rackley outdid himself again and put the event together beautifully. He is truly committed to making this event successful and he definitely did that. I am always impressed by the number of folks he can get from all over to attend an event in the Ozarks in Harrison, AR.

For my presentation, I did the Kerberos Survival Guide (link to presentation) . My belief is that Kerberos is not as bad to setup as people make it out to be. However, it is difficult to setup if you don’t understand why you are doing the steps. So understanding is the first step. I want to continue to give this presentation to ground people in the basics so they can understand what they need to successfully implement and support Kerberos.

Filed under: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Ozarks, Presentations, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), SharePoint Saturday, SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Kerberos, Presentations

Back in the Saddle Again

J.D. Wade — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:00:00 +0000

It has been quite awhile since I have posted and I needed to get myself back into gear again. I have had a lot going on but I wanted to make blogging a priority this year and haven’t done well up to this point. I have several posts lined up that I want to write and I know as I get to start helping clients deploying SharePoint 2010, I am going to have some great things to share.

To get my rusty blogging skills going again, I wanted to catch up on posting links to presentation I have done over the last several months.

On December 8, I was in Kansas City, MO working at a client and had the opportunity to present at the Heartland SharePoint Users Group. As you can see by the number of times of presented on this subjects, I am excited about the business intelligence features and integration that is coming with SharePoint 2010. This was my first time doing the presentation SharePoint 2010: Insights into BI.

On December 12, I got to attend the SharePoint Saturday Kansas City. The turnout was fantastic and I enjoyed catching up with old friends and making new ones. SharePoint Saturdays always astound me in the fantastic power of the SharePoint community to put on the events and the wonderful talent of speakers that spend their time putting together their presentations. I gave my SharePoint 2010: Insights into BI presentation.

On December 16, I traveled to Springfield, IL to participate in the SharePoint Roadshow. Darrin Bishop put together a great event, it was great to see large turnout and it was great to see Becky Bertram and Matt Bremer. The presentations I gave were SharePoint 2010 IT Pro Overview and SharePoint 2010: Insights into BI.

On January 7, I presented for clients of my consulting firm about the new business intelligence features that will be available in SharePoint 2010. I have posted the slides for SharePoint 2010: Insights into BI.

Finally, on March 9, I presented to the St. Louis SQL Users Group. I put together a new presentation that I hope to give more in the future about SQL and SharePoint. The presentation I gave was titled What SQL DBAs need to know about SharePoint.

I know…I know…this is May…I told you I need to get caught up and blog more.

Filed under: Kansas City (KC), Kansas City (KC) User Group, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Personal Thoughts, Presentations, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), SharePoint Saturday, SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), SharePoint User Group (SPUG), SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2 Tagged: Business Intelligence (BI), Presentations

SharePoint Road Show: Springfield, IL

J.D. Wade — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I will be part of the panel for the SharePoint Road Show in Springfield, IL on Wednesday, December 16th. Hope to see you there!

The SharePoint 2010 Road Show is an all-day event sponsored by Microsoft, International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA) and other local companies. The SharePoint Road Show has one goal in mind: SharePoint 2010 Education! You’ll see SharePoint 2010 in action, and have a chance to ask questions of professionals whom have been involved in testing in the months prior to the recent Beta release. Speakers include SharePoint MVP’s, SharePoint evangelists and other SharePoint experts from around the country.

Posted in Microsoft SharePoint, Presentations, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010) Tagged: Presentations

Upcoming Presentations

J.D. Wade — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I am looking forward to present next week in Kansas City, MO. I will be presenting on SharePoint 2010: Insights and BI. Here is where you can find me:

Heartland Users Group: SharePoint
Tuesday, December 8 at 7:00 p.m.

SharePoint Saturday Kansas City
Saturday, December 12

Presentation Synopsis: In this 200 level session, we will explore the Insights portion of the SharePoint 2010 arsenal. You will see a quick overview to answer the questions “What is business intelligence?” and “Why use BI?” for those new to this technology. You will explore each aspect of the Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy providing a definition of the components, what’s new for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, and see demos of the components. You will understand how all the components fit together in the architecture and understand the use cases for the technology. We will be reviewing the following components: Excel, PowerPivot (Gemini), Excel Services, Visio Services, PerformancePoint Services, Reporting Services, Report Builder, Integration Services, and Analysis Services.

Posted in Kansas City (KC) User Group, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Presentations, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), SharePoint User Group (SPUG), SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2 Tagged: Business Intelligence (BI), Presentations

Is Your SQL Server Ready for SharePoint 2010?

J.D. Wade — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Alright, if you have been tracking the posts on the upcoming SharePoint release, you may very well say, “Yes, I know…I know. SQL Server needs to be 64-bit.” But I ask you to keep reading because I think there is more to the story.

The Basics

Let me very quickly review the 64-bit story for those who may not seen the posts. In order to install SharePoint 2010, your SQL Server will need to be version 2005 or 2008 and it will need to be 64-bit. You won’t be able to use a 32-bit SQL Server or a SQL Server 2000 instance.

So What Else Is There?

SQL Server is the heart of your SharePoint farm. I continue to repeat this phrase every opportunity I get to discuss SharePoint infrastructure. With the improved functionality of SharePoint 2010 or your current SharePoint 2007 platform, your usage and needs from SharePoint will continue to grow. SharePoint 2010 providing more functionality means you will need more SQL resources. The first place to start to ensure the infrastructure is ready for your needs is SQL Server.

Does your current SharePoint environment’s response time meet your needs? Do you have enough capacity to handle your database growth for the next six months to year? These are important questions to evaluate now. If your answer to these questions is no or I don’t know, I want to give you some steps to begin finding the root of the problems.

Performance

In evaluating the performance of a SQL Server, review these four components: processor, memory, disk and network.

Disk is normally the primary bottleneck I find when evaluating client deployments. The disk subsystem needs to have enough disk throughput (or IOPs) so that it can stay responsive enough to your needs. For small to mid-size businesses, your disks should probably respond to requests within 20 milliseconds (ms). For most enterprise environments, a 10 ms responsive time is ideal. For high performance needs, you will design for 5 ms. Look at performance counters \Logical Disk\Avg. Disk sec/Read and \Logical Disk\Avg. Disk sec/Write.

Memory bottlenecks on a SQL server are harder to identify so I want to provide some very high level guidelines: small servers need 8GB, medium servers need 16GB, and large servers need 32GB. I will do a future post digging into these sizing recommendations in more detail.

Processor and network on your SQL server are pretty easy to evaluate. Processor should stay below 80% average utilization and not have any long sustained peeks at 100% utilization. Network utilization should stay below 70% average utilization.

When evaluating bottlenecks, you want to evaluate and eliminate bottlenecks in this order: memory, processor, disk and network. There are reviewed in this order because the previous item could be effecting the item after it.

Capacity

As your use of SharePoint grows, you are going to want to manage the growth of your content databases. For collaboration environments, you want to make sure your content databases do not grow above 100GB. If they start to approach this size, you need to break up the content in different site collections and move those site collections to other content databases.

Ensure you check the free space on each of your drive letters (LUNS). NTFS performance drops after the free space is below 25%. Therefore, no drive letter should not go beyond 75% utilization.

You want to monitor how quickly your databases grow over time. This allows you to predict future storage needs and plan accordingly.

Putting It All Together

These are a series of check you should do in your environment to make sure today that your SQL Server is ready for the SharePoint workload tomorrow.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Outdated: Do Not Use, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Upgrade

Attention SSRS 2005 SharePoint Integrated Users – Oct 2009 Security Patches Manual Steps

J.D. Wade — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:10:47 +0000

This blog post discusses the additional manual steps SharePoint Integrated Reporting Service instances will need in order to be fully patched correctly.

As part of the October 2009 Microsoft Security Patch Release, the security patch MS09-062 contains fixes for SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS). This patch will normally automatically be applied to your Reporting Services instances either through Windows Update or applied as part of your company’s normal security patch process.

However, for Reporting Services instances that are installed in SharePoint Integrated mode, you need to apply an updated “Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in” also. This will NOT be done automatically as part of the update process.

In most deployments, this updated add-in will need to be applied on your Reporting Services server and all your SharePoint Web Front Ends. Basically, wherever you have already installed this add-in in the past.

There is an SQL 2005 SP2 and SP3 version of this patch so I will list the KB article and the add-in download link:

SQL 2005 SP2 Add-In Details
MS KB 970896
Download add-in here (make sure you grab x32 or x64 as need)

SQL 2005 SP3 Add-In Details
MS KB 970894
Download add-in here (make sure you grab x32 or x64 as need)

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Server 2005 Tagged: Security, Service Pack 2 (SP2), Service Pack 3 (SP3), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2007 August 2009 Cumulative Updates are published

J.D. Wade — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:11:19 +0000

UPDATE – 10/13/09 They have updated the WSS package. It went live on October 7th. Now, you can safely download the WSS CU package using the link below and it should not contain the database attach issue. Links to both the WSS and MOSS CU packages are below.

UPDATE – 10/01/09: They are updating the WSS CU package to resolve the issue described in the blog posts below…I will update this post again when the new package is live. Right now, you just need to wait for the new package and do not use the previous WSS CU version.

New build available for August CU

—————————————————————————————

However, note there is an issue with the current cumulative update (CU) packages. Please read the following posts and determine if this issue will effect you before installing the packages:

Important: Be careful when installing WSS August Cumulative Update

WSS August CU and re-attached content databases

You can download the packages by using the “View and request hotfix downloads” link at the top of the KB articles:

WSS 3.0 August 2009 Cumulative Update “Server Package”

SharePoint 2007 August 2009 Cumulative Updates “Server Package”

As always, you can get the most current information about the updates by visiting the TechNet Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Service Pack 1 (SP1), Service Pack 2 (SP2)

Problem installing SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 R2

J.D. Wade — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This post is focused on installing SQL Server 2008 on a Windows 2008 R2 server for those of only need to do a few installs. In other words, this is the quick fix. At the bottom of this post is the solution for how to resolve this issue if you regularly install SQL Server in this configuration. In other words, at the bottom is the enterprise solution. For me, I ran into this issue building a virtual machine for local testing of SharePoint.

I ran into a problem installing SQL Server 2008 (SQL2K8) RTM onto a Windows 2008 R2 server. After some research, the issue is SQL2K8 is not supported on Windows 2008 R2 without SQL2K8 Service Pack 1. We receive this error message when you try the install:

If you continue the install process, you will get through all the setup screens but the installation of any of the services will fail. The issue is the setup files that come with the RTM version of SQL2K8 cannot properly install the services on the R2 version of Windows 2008. Anything I did from this point forward did not resolve the issue. I did some research and found the answer. I started with a clean Windows 2008 R2 image and started my resolution process from there.

So here is the work around solution. Before you even try to install SQL2K8, run the SQL2K8 Service Pack 1 install. As it starts up, it will install the latest group of setup support files.

After this part is done, it will not detect any installed SQL components (to be expected) and you will cancel the installation. Now run the installation of SQL2K8 just like you always would. The installation will detect that there are newer versions of the setup files installed already and will use them instead. These SP1 setup files are aware of Windows 2008 R2 and your installation will complete successfully.

Remember to go back and re-run the SQL2K8 Service Pack 1 to actually update the installed services on your system now. That is it! You are done!

Enterprise Solution: If you are regularly installing SQL2K8, this solution is very much a work around and adds extra steps and time. The solution for when doing several installs is to make a SQL Server 2008 SP1 slipstream install location. With this solution, you will be able to run the install once, have it install without errors, have the server configured and have the service pack already installed.

Posted in Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Tagged: Tips

St. Louis Day of .Net Presentation

J.D. Wade — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:22:06 +0000

It was great to be able to speak and to see the great turnout for the event this year. There were over 400 attendees this year and with speakers and volunteers over 500 people involved. As always, feel free to provide any feedback and ask questions in the comments.

My presentation on Best Practices for SharePoint Deployment and Management is available for download.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Presentations, St. Louis (STL) Day of .Net, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Presentations, Tips

SharePoint 2007 June 2009 Cumulative Update Finalized

J.D. Wade — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:58:00 +0000

The last of the “uber packages” for the June 2009 cumulative update has been released. This means it is much easier to apply the June 2009 update so I will be recommending this update in my presentations/client interactions to be current.

Joerg Sinemus’ post has the latest information about what packages to install and their installation order to be current.

Also, note in his post that the “uber package” will be referred to as a “server-package” in the future.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Service Pack 1 (SP1)

SharePoint Saturday Ozarks

J.D. Wade — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:35:11 +0000

It was great to be able to present at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks. Thanks to those who attended. Please feel free to post any comments if there are any questions or comments on Best Practices SharePoint Deployment and Management (presentation).

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Ozarks, Presentations, SharePoint Saturday, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Presentations, Tips

Gradualdelete is new

J.D. Wade — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:06:28 +0000

With the WSS/SharePoint April 2009 Cumulative Update, a new parameter was introduced for the “stsadm –o deletesite” and “stsadm –o mergecontentdbs” commands. I noticed it while reviewing some recently published/update TechNet articles and tweeted about it here, here, here and here. Because of that I wanted to summarize the content in one post, point out some other things I found while researching and point you to where you can get more detail. On The Sean Blog, Sean covers all the commands added in the April update.

Here are the things that jumped out at me:

1. There is a new property added which is where the SPTimer schedule for the deletion job is stored and marks the site collection for deletion so it can no longer be accessed.

2. To restore a large site collection (see the Note), you can use the gradualdelete parameter with deletesite and mergecontentdbs to help the process. This is the article that got me looking everything else up.

Also, a note I saw while doing this review…MS is recommending you install the April 2009 update before continuing to use the mergecontentdbs command (see the Important note).

To be the most current on your deployment, you will want to install Service Pack 2 and then the April 2009 Update.

This post was all over the place. I hope it was still helpful. Well…it has been a long time since I have posted so hopefully this post will get me back onto the blog wagon.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Service Pack 1 (SP1), Tips

Call for SharePoint Speakers: St. Louis MOSS Camp

J.D. Wade — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:52:00 +0000

On Saturday, April 18, 2009, there will be an all-day MOSS Camp taking place in St. Louis, MO focusing on all things SharePoint and we are looking for speakers. The current plan is to have four tracks covering the following topics: Development, Infrastructure, Governance/Business, or End User. The session can contain 100, 200, or 300 level information.

Submissions for speakers are being accepted immediately.

Registration being open for attendees will be announced soon. More information will be posted on the St. Louis SharePoint Users Group site as it becomes available and you can follow the St. Louis MOSS Camp twitter account for updates as well.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Presentations, St. Louis (STL) MOSS Camp, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Presentations

Do you need to apply the December SharePoint security patch?

J.D. Wade — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:25:45 +0000

Just a quick note to make sure everyone sees this item. As posted on the SharePoint blog, you do NOT need to apply the patch if you have already installed the SharePoint October Cumulative update. However, if you have not, go get that server patched with the December security patch!

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint Tagged: Security, Updates

64-bit PDF iFilters Update

J.D. Wade — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:53:11 +0000

In this post, I will do a brief review of the state of 64-bit PDF iFilters for the Microsoft platform (this effects SharePoint). There have been a couple things occur in the last few days that I just wanted to point out.

First, let me review the purpose of an ifilter briefly for those who may not be aware. For Microsoft search products, an ifilter allows the indexer to read different file formats. So a PDF ifilter allows a Microsoft search product to open Adobe PDF files so that can be indexed and searched. Also, if you are running the MS Search Product on 64-bit platform, you want to run a 64-bit ifilter for performance and supportability reasons.

Until this month, in my opinion, the only production ready option for a 64-bit ifilter was offered by FoxIt Software. There are two things that have happened that I wanted to point out for your review.

Finally, Adobe has released a 64-bit PDF ifilter. Their filter is free.
FoxIt Software has released an update to their 64-bit PDF ifilter this month. There is a charge for their ifilter if you are using on a server (free for desktop use).

So if you are using FoxIt already, time to update your filter next patch cycle. If you need an ifilter, you may ask, “Why on earth would I use the FoxIt Software solution I have to buy now that Adobe has a free version?” There have been tests done to show that previously, the FoxIt ifilters (even 32-bit) performed better than the Adobe solution. I know the FoxIt version is multi-threaded. I do not know the capabilities of the free Adobe version yet.

So for Production environments, I would ask you to still consider the FoxIt solution. But if you can’t afford it, there is an alternative now. As more testing is done with these filter solutions, hopefully we will have more information to make a decision.

If you need help installing the ifilters, here are some links that will help:

For WSS 3.0: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927675
For MOSS 2007: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/adir_ron/archive/2007/05/03/Just-Released-_2D00_-PDF-IFilter-for-x64-Bit_2100_.aspx

How to add the PDF icon

And if you install SharePoint updates/patches, remember that you need to reinstall the FoxIt PDF ifilter.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (SPF 2010), Sharepoint Foundation 2013 (SPF 2013), SharePoint Server 2010 (SP 2010), SharePoint Server 2013 (SP 2013), Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Search

Video of SharePoint Updates Presentation

J.D. Wade — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:59:02 +0000

The Windows Media video version of my KC Office Geeks SharePoint Updates presentation is available for download now. This presentation reviews what is in SharePoint updates, additional recommendations for other updates to apply, and the 25 step process for properly and successfully deploying the updates:

SharePoint Updates – Standard Quality (37MB)

SharePoint Updates – High Quality (424MB)

UPDATE: My post with the PowerPoint presentation so you can follow along

Posted in Kansas City (KC) User Group, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Presentations, SharePoint User Group (SPUG), Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Presentations, Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Presenting at St. Louis Day of .Net

J.D. Wade — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:50:44 +0000

I will be presenting on SharePoint Updates at the St. Louis Day of .Net on Saturday, December 13th. There is a great lineup of speakers for the one day conference.

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Presentations, St. Louis (STL) Day of .Net, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Presentations, Service Pack 1 (SP1)

SharePoint RTM standard support ending

J.D. Wade — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:33:32 +0000

As of January 13, 2009, standard (mainstream) support for WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2007 RTM (SP0) ends. This is part of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle for their products. Now, I won’t claim to be an expert in the MS Support model so I will just state my current understanding. If I find out more or different information, I will update this post.

You have two options if you wish to be able to continue to be to receive hotfixes (non-security) for problems you have:

Either install Service Pack 1 (my recommended solution). You have to do this option if you want to submit a design change or feature request.
Obtain an extended hotfix agreement, purchased within 90 days of mainstream support ending

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Release to Manfacturer (RTM), Service Pack 1 (SP1), Support

Latest SharePoint Update Presentation

J.D. Wade — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:07:23 +0000

It was great to be able to present for the KC Office Geeks. Thanks for having me out!

My presentation has been posted so you can download a copy. You can get it from my company’s Community page. It is the November 2008 presentation. I video recorded this presentation and will have the video available for download soon. I will post again when it is available.

Also, if you listened to the MOSS Gone Wild podcasts where I was a guest, this presentation has all the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that I referenced.

UPDATE: Video is available

Posted in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Presentations, Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Presenting in Kansas City on Thursday, November 6th

J.D. Wade — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:49:06 +0000

I will be in KC on Thursday, November 6th for the Kansas City Office Geeks meeting to present on SharePoint Updates. They are a user group based out of Kansas City for people who work with Office Products, such as SharePoint, Access, Excel, InfoPath, etc. There is presentation information available on the Community page of my company’s web site with links to the group’s site:

http://www.hrizns.com/Pages/Community.aspx

They meet at Centriq Training at 8700 State Line Road, Ste 200, Leawood, KS, 66206 and the meeting starts at 5:45 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Here is the synoposis:

SharePoint Updates: The Tour Starts Here

JD will discuss the important aspects you will need to know to successfully deploy updates in your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. The presentation will provide an overview of the contents of SharePoint updates released (including the latest cumulative update and security patches), new “stsadm” commands enabled, and new functionality you can enable as needed. You will learn recommended additional actions you should take while upgrading as well as additional recommended updates to apply along the way. Finally, you will learn the step by step process for proper deployment as well as how to create a slipstream install to make future farm deployments and changes easier.

Look forward to get to talk with everyone! Thanks Becky for getting things arranged for me to present!

SHAREPOINT NATION!

Posted in Kansas City (KC) User Group, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), Microsoft SharePoint, Presentations, SharePoint User Group (SPUG), Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) Tagged: Cumulative Updates (CU), Presentations, Service Pack 1 (SP1)

2nd Stage Recycle Bin Fallacy

J.D. Wade — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:39:35 +0000

In the SharePoint community, I regularly hear a statement made that I myself use to believe was correct but I want to clear up the misconception. It is easy to understand why people believe this based on unclear wording in Central Administration.

The statement is made that if you do not set site quotas for the site collection, then your second stage (site collection) recycle bin will never be emptied because the second stage recycle bin is based on a percentage of the site quota. Therefore, your second stage recycle bin can grow uncontrollably because it will never be emptied. This reasoning is incorrect because it is based on some misinformation.

So lets clear up how the recycle bin works including the second stage. I will first explain how it works. Then link to documentation and provide tips if you wish to test this statement yourself.

In Central Admin, you can state the numbers of days items are to be retained in the Recycle Bin. The first stage and the second stage (site collection) are BOTH part of the Recycle Bin. Therefore, items in either the first stage OR the second stage will be deleted after the number of days set for the web application. However, an additional size limit can be placed on the second stage recycle bin by using a percentage of the site collection quota to limit it.

Therefore, I am still recommending that you set site quotas. Without site quotas, there is nothing to stop your second stage recycle bin from growing uncontrolled and increasing the size of your content database on the SQL server.

But you might say, if it is only there for 30 days (the default), why would I worry? Imagine you have many large documents libraries in the same site collection. Then, you have multiple users all decided to do cleanup in those libraries (deleting many files) and empty their recycle bins. Then, they add new documents to the libraries to “update” them. Then, a week later, they do it again. There is still the possibillity of your content database growing larger than you would want to manage or have space on your SQL server to hold.

So I have tested this scenario and I have confirmed on numerous client sites that there are no files in their second stage recycle bins older than the day limit placed on the recycle bin as a whole. If you read this Microsoft article, you will find following statement in the last sentence of the Overview:

Regardless of whether or not an item is sent to the users’ Recycle Bin or to the Site Collection Recycle Bin, items are deleted automatically after the number of days that the central administrator specified.

If you wish to test this yourself, please be aware that in order for items to be emptied from the recycle bin, the Timer Job “Recycle Bin” has to have run. By default, this timer job only runs once per day usually early in the morning. I would recommend you use the stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname job-recycle-bin-cleanup command to set the job to run more frequently while testing.

Data Form Web Part, Web Services, & AAMs…oh my

J.D. Wade — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:03:12 +0000

We had some developers wanting to use a Data Form Web Part (DFWP) in a site and access information through a web service on the internet. They were able to connect to the web service WSDL but when they went to Show Data, they would receive the following error:

“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.”

Well, the problem did persist, so they contacted us as instructed. We spent quite a bit of time troubeshooting the issue. After lots of getting no where, we realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore (actually Missouri) so we opened a case with MS CSS. After several weeks, it was determined that is a bug and there was a work around. I am not seen any KB articles with this information so I wanted to review the exact setup that causes the issue, why it is broken, and how to work around it as learned from CSS.

First the setup that causes this issue.

You have a standard web application setup with a url in the default zone, for our example, we will use http://default.mycompany.com.
You add an additional URL for the web application through the use of alternate access mappings (AAM) to provide access to the same content through a different URL. For our example, we will use http://intranet.mycompany.com. In this case, you do NOT extend the web application. You only add an AAM.
When constructing the data view web part using Designer, we do your development against the additional URL you added (http://intranet.mycompany.com). The DFWP fails to work properly.
If you test against the default URL http://default.mycompany.com, the DFWP works properly.

So here is what is causing the issue. When you are using the http://intranet.mycompany.com URL, the DFWP code tries to go out to IIS on the server, find the web site for http://intranet.mycompany.com to verify if Kerberos is enabled, and that calls fails because there is no web site tied directly to this URL.

The Workaround: If you are needing to use Data Form Web Parts and use multiple URLs through AAMs, you are going to have to extend the web application for each URL you had so there is a real IIS web site (with a seperate web.config) created. This will allow the Kerberos check to succeed.

We had the issue added to the bug list for SharePoint and it will be addressed sometime in the future. I will update this article as I see more information about this problem appear.

SharePoint 2007 SP1 Deployment Tips Presentation

J.D. Wade — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:03:05 +0000

UPDATE (12/03/2008) See updated presentation post

It was great to be able to present this topic at the St. Louis SharePoint Users Group. Everyone seemed to stay engaged and had questions along the way. Please feel free to provide feedback in the comments section if you were at the presentation.

The presentation can be downloaded from the Horizons Consulting, Inc. Downloads area.

If you have questions about your SharePoint 2007 SP1 deployment or the presentation, please leave them in the comments section below.

Backup Content Databases-The Right Way

J.D. Wade — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:39:50 +0000

So running an stsadm command to backup a content database is not difficult in a WSS 3.0 or SharePoint 2007 environment. However, there are some other additional steps you should take when doing these backups which I have outlined here.

1. Run “stsadm -o setsitelock” with the “-lock” parameter of either ”readonly” or “noaccess”
This ensures no changes are made to the database while backing it up.

2. Run “stsadm -o preparetomove”
This breaks the relationship between the database and the SSP. This allows a new/updated relationship to be established with this database and any SSP, as needed, when it is restored. This allows you to avoid the dreaded error message “Failure to synch web application : A duplicate site ID…”

3. Run “stsadm -o backup”
No explanation needed.

4. Run “stsadm -o sitelock” with the “-lock” parameter of “none”
This removes all locks on the database after the backup so changes can be made again.

Please see TechNet or “stsadm -help” for detailed instructions on all parameters needed to run these commands.

UPDATE (May 2008): If you would like more information about why I make the recommendation about preparetomove or you are having the sync issue and need a way to resolve, see this blog post.

Presenting in May in St. Louis

J.D. Wade — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:10:30 +0000

UPDATE (May 2008): The presentation is posted here.

I will be presenting at the May meeting of the St. Louis Users SharePoint Group. I will discuss the important aspects you will need to know to successfully deploy Service Pack 1 in your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. The presentation will provide an overview of the service pack contents, new “stsadm” commands enabled, and new functionality you can enable as needed. You will learn recommended additional actions you should take while upgrading. Finally, you will learn the step by step process for deployment as well as how to create a slipstream install to make future farm deployments and changes easier.

Hope to see you there!

SharePoint Conference in Seattle

J.D. Wade — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:46:26 +0000

Forgot to mention like I have in the past, I will be attending the SharePoint conference in Seattle next week. Let me know in the comments if you are going to be there and would like to meet up.

My Sites and User Profile Interaction Diagram

J.D. Wade — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:38:35 +0000

Mark Arend has a great diagram at this post outlining the interaction between My Sites and User Profiles. I am working on a project at a client where I need this information right now so this is great to come across it.

IIS 7.0 Web Site and Application Pool Actions

J.D. Wade — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:07:22 +0000

Mike Volodarsky has posted a great blog post explaining what different actions (stop, start, recyling, etc.) do to either a web site or application pool in IIS 7.0. From a SharePoint perspective, this helps to understand the mechanics of what is going on when you are administering SharePoint on Windows 2008 servers and working with IIS 7.0.

Estimating MOSS index sizes

J.D. Wade — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:00:57 +0000

Eric Charron has posted about estimating the index size for SharePoint Search. The formulas are great and provide you a good tool set to walk through the estimating process. However, I wanted to add the reminder that those formulas are only as effective as the data you use in the beginning. The first item you need to provide is the size of data to be crawled. Some time needs to be spent understanding the area you are going to crawl including how much of that data is really going to be indexed. Without good information to start, all the other calculations will be meaningless and unhelpful.

For example, if you have a 1TB fileshare you are going to index and 3/4 of the share is applications and install files, you can seriously oversize your index space and waste money on unneeded disk space.

UPDATE (May 2008): If you are going to using SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 1, change Eric’s initial size number from 2.5x to 2.85x. They changed the requirement in SP1…see Known Issues: Error: The search request is unable to connect to the search service.

MOSS Search and Hotfixes

J.D. Wade — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:31:54 +0000

In doing a recent Search Proof of Concept for a customer, I ran into a couple errors along the way that needed some fixes and I wanted to document the ones I will be adding to my install documents in the future. This was a farm environment where there were multiple servers (1 app and 2 wfe) and there were multiple service accounts for each of the different roles within the farm.

First, when trying to create index schedules, “access is denied” errors were displayed. MS KB 926959 allowed us to get past the error.

Second, when trying to view Search Usage reports, we were prompted for credentials even though the account had permissions. I found the solution in Jingmei Li’s Blog and it points to .Net 2.0 hotfix 913384 and we got past the error once we installed the hotfix.

UPDATE (May 2008): Now, I would recommend you install .Net Framework 2.0 SP1 rather than work to install the individual hotfixes.

Surveys, 3.0/2007, and Excel 2003

J.D. Wade — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:04:07 +0000

There is a known, unfixed bug with the combination of using certain survey questions in WSS 2.0 or Sharepoint 2003 and trying to export them to Excel 2003 documented in MS KB 828809.

When doing the export, you may receive the following message from Excel:
This list has hidden columns or read-only columns that require data but for which no default value has been specified. Existing rows in this list may therefore be edited, but new rows cannot be inserted.

This same issue exists if you are using WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 and still trying to export the information using Excel 2003. Once you try the export with Excel 2007, there are no issues.

Right now, I don’t have access to a 2.0/2003 environment…I would be curious to find out if exporting with Excel 2007 resolves the issue there too which would prove that the issue is with Excel 2003 and not Sharepoint.

Let me know in the comments if you test this out, know the answer, or I will post an update if I get the chance to test it.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint+2007, SharePoint+Surveys

Locking Out Outlook 2007 Beta Versions

J.D. Wade — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:26:37 +0000

I mentioned in a previous post that I would post an update on how to block the beta version of Outlook 2007 while still allowing the production version to connect. I am late getting this out but wanted to post it anyway. Using that post, the Outlook client versions you would need to block would be as follows:

12.0.0-12.4518.1013

The 2007 RTM version of EMSDB32.DLL is 12.0.4518.1014 so this entry makes sure any beta versions cannot connect.

Technorati Tags: Outlook+2007, Disable+MAPI+Client

Registered for TechEd 2007

J.D. Wade — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:20:40 +0000

Got my registration put in for TechEd 2007. Here is my TechEd connect card information. Hope to meet other folks who are heading to Orlando this year!

Technorati Tags: TechEd, TechEd+2007, TechEd+Connect

ExBPA recommending Windows 2003 Post SP1 hotfix

J.D. Wade — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:26:58 +0000

Included in one of the recent updates to Exchange Best Practices Analzyer (ExBPA) is a new recommendation for Exchange 2003 servers. There is a Windows 2003 Post SP1 hotfix out for a Terminal Service-Working Set issue. So you may want to just add this to your list when you do your next round of Windows security patching and go ahead and address it.

You will need to contact Microsoft Support to obtain the hotfix as it is not publically available. However, you are not charged for cases where you are receiving a hotfix.

Technorati Tags: Exchange+2003, ExBPA, Windows+2003

Outlook 2007 BETA and your production Exchange server

J.D. Wade — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:12:14 +0000

Now that Outlook 2007 Beta is publically available…have you considered that your users may have downloaded a copy and decided to connect it your production Exchange server? Did you know you can easily protect your server from these connections?

The Disable MAPI Clients entry can keep unwanted clients (old or new) from connecting to your Exchange server. In the case of keeping Outlook 2007 Beta off of your server, your entry for this registry key would be:

12.0.0-

Of course remember, when the production version of Outlook 2007 comes out, you will either need to remove this entry or update it. I will post again when we know the production version number of Outlook 2007 with an update entry.

Also note, that if you are going to try to lock down other versions using this registry key, NEVER lock out the 6.0.0-6.9999.99 range as this is the version number for server-side Exchange components mapi connections. And you do not need to restart services…updates to the registry entry are looked for every 15 minutes. Please check out the details in the KB article linked above if you haven’t used this registry key before.

UPDATE: I have posted the updated version numbers to block Beta versions but not the Production version here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft+Outlook+2007+Beta, Disable+MAPI+Client, Office+12, Outlook+Beta

August Patch that is important to apply

J.D. Wade — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:05:17 +0000

If you have Windows servers that are exposed directly to the Internet so that their Service service is exposed, make you you get MS06-040 that was just released applied to your servers quickly. There is active exploitation and public exploit code being used out there.

UPDATE: MS has posted Security Advisory 992537 related to this vunerability also.

Technorati Tags: MS06-040, Security+patch, Windows+server, US-CERT

MS Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant

J.D. Wade — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:57:32 +0000

The Exchange Team released version 1.0 of the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant. They are putting out some great tools for making it easier to manage your Exchange environments. Keep it up folks!

There is a post on You Had Me at EHLO and Jon Avner had talked about it.

Great resource for info about WCM in MOSS

J.D. Wade — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:43:54 +0000

Andrew Connell has posted about a great page he put together with links about Web Content Management in MS Office Sharepoint Server. Check it out!

Unable to clean your local free/busy information

J.D. Wade — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 21:48:09 +0000

I ran into this issue a few months ago and now that I have my blogged kicked off, I have a couple things I need to catch up on posting here…so here goes another one:

We had just migrated some mailboxes from one E2K3 SP2 server to another E2K3 SP2 server. A couple users reported that their free/busy information was not being updated and they were receiving the error “Unable to update your free/busy information” when creating new appointments or accepting meeting requests.

Well, normally, this is an easy fix. You do one of 2 things:
1. Run a /cleanfreebusy
2. Manually remove the user’s Free/Busy folder

The issue came up when I did Step 1. I received a message I had never seen and could find very little reference to it on the web: “Unable to clean your local free/busy information” The key word here is LOCAL. This post doesn’t apply if you don’t have the word LOCAL.

So I proceeded to some of the more advanced free/busy troubleshooting steps:
1. Check for uppercase characters in the free/busy message
2. Check the SiteFolderServer setting
3. Recreated the calendar folder

Still, not working…so I open a PSS case. PSS had only seen a couple instances of this case and the final fix had been to exmerge the mailbox out, delete the mailbox, recreate the mailbox, and exmerge the data back in. I didn’t want to go with that answer because we had several more migrations to go and this would be a lot of overheard if we had to do it regularly.

So worked with PSS some more and finally off of something they said, got a crazy idea…and it worked! So here what is was…it appears to be some problem with the MAPI property PR_FREEBUSY_ENTRYIDS.

UPDATE (09/12/2012): There is a newer Codeplex project that is a much better tool for working in the mailbox. Check out the new version of MFCMAPI.

You can fix this problem with the ~~MAPI Editor Tool (the tool formerly known as MFCMapi).~~ You will need to create an Outlook profile for the mailbox you want to repair:

1. Choose Session and Logon and Display Store Table
2. Choose the Outlook profile you created
3. Double click the Instance that starts with “Mailbox -”
4. Expand Root – Mailbox
5. Click on IPM_SUBTREE
6. In the right window, if there is a property name of PR_FREEBUSY_ENTRYIDS, right click on it and choose Delete Property (if it exists here…it may not)
7. Expand IPM_SUBTREE
8. Click on Inbox
9. In the right window, if there is a property name of PR_FREEBUSY_ENTRYIDS, right click on it and choose Delete Property
10. Exit out of MAPI Editor.
11. Rerun /cleanfreebusy on the mailbox.

This should resolve the issue…at least it did in our case. I hope this helps someone else and please post a comment if you used this post…I would be interested to know if others experience this! Thanks!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft+Outlook, Outlook+free/busy, local+free/busy, cleanfreebusy

HP NIC Teaming 8 and Windows 200x – Make sure you have the updates

J.D. Wade — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 17:09:19 +0000

First, I definitely want to start out this post by saying that I love what HP has been doing with their network teaming software on the Windows platforms. They are doing a great job on building teaming software that works well and is intelligent on complicated networks.

However, there have been a couple bumps in the road along the way recently that I have seen effect clients. I want to provide some information to get folks back unto stable ground. HP has addressed the issues but action needs to be taken to make sure you are OK.

First, let me give you the information on the articles I have reviewed that seem like they could effect most environments if you are using HP NIC teaming 8 on a Windows 200x platform on HP Proliant servers:

Teaming V. 7.58: SLB Teams need to be reconfigured (this can effect you even if you are on version 8.x)
Document ID: CO050225_CW01

Teaming v. 8.00 or earlier: NC series NICS may not join team
Document ID: EM050819_CW01

Teaming v. 8.10 or earlier: With 802.1Q VLANs configured, blue screen may occur with gigabit adapters
Document ID: c00571541

Teaming v. 8.10: After reboot, may not be able to connect to server
Document ID: c00573469

So after our experience with the problems and some input from HP, here are my recommended steps for getting stable. All downloads would be available from HP’s Support website:

1. For onboard gigabit ethernet cards like the 77xx, there is a firmware upgrade. Check your cards and upgrade the firmware.
2. Upgrade your NIC drivers. This is especially important for the NC series NICS (see above). As of the date of this post, this can most easily be done by installing SmartPack 7.51.
3. Upgrade your NIC Teaming to at least version 8.37. As of the date of this post, this is the current version and can be done most easily by installing SmartPack 7.51.
4. If you are receiving Recieve Path or Transmit Path warnings in your System event log, change the Validation Timer Internal under the team’s Settings tab from 3 to 10.
5. If you have an SLB team, delete and recreate your team. NOTE: Save your IP configuration properties (IP address, DNS server, etc) BEFORE deleting team. You will need to configure your IP properties after the team is created and before you reboot the server
6. Test your failover. Make sure it is working in your environment.
7. If your test fails for any another kind of team other than SLB, I would recommend doing step 5 before opening a case with HP just to make sure all your team’s configuration is written to the registry with the most current version of the teaming software.

Getting things started

J.D. Wade — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:54:29 +0000

Just wanted to get my blog kicked off. I wanted someplace that I can easily share information about things I come across and I hope others will find helpful. Most of it will be around the Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint products but knowing me it will probably be on other technology topics along the way.

So here we go…