CodePlex Project to create Sub Folders

I've just published a new CodePlex project. This is a utility application to create sub folders each month in a document library. You can schedule this to run each month against a particular document library. It will create a top-level folder with a name like YYYY-MM where YYYY is the current year and MM is the month (e.g. 2008-07). The year and month are based on the current date.

The application then reads an XML file to determine what subfolder structure to create underneath the Year-Month folder. This can include any number of folders and subfolders. You can also specify custom security for a particular folder. Here is an example of the contents within the XML file

<folders>

<folder name="Music">

<permissions>

<security
account="domain\my user name" access="contribute" />

<security
account="domain\group name" access="read" />

</permissions>

<folder
name="Favourites" />

<folder name="Classics"/>

</folder>

<folder name="Pictures">

<permissions>

<security
account="domain\my user name" access="design" />

</permissions>

</folder>

<folder
name="Videos" />

</folders>

 

I'm interested to hear if others find this useful and whether people have suggestions on how the application can be improved. The project is available at http://www.codeplex.com/WSSCreateFolders. Check out the other SharePoint related CodePlex projects – there is some fantastic stuff available here

New Microsoft White Paper – Data Protection and Recovery for MOSS

Microsoft has just released a new White Paper on data protection and recovery for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It's available here. This is a great guide on the various options for recovering content within your environment.

I was lucky enough to be able to review this during its final draft stages, which has earned me a mention on the acknowledgements section. Fame at last! Any errors or omissions in the white paper are the fault of the other reviewers.

June 08 Sydney User Group

The Sydney SharePoint User Group is on the move. We are now located at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (SMSA) at 280 Pitt Street. Map and details available from the User Group site.

The SMSA recently turned 175, which is pretty old for an Australian instituation. The SharePoint User Group is a young whipper-snapper in comparision, at almost 3 years old (our third birthday is on July 15th).

Still, I bet the SMSA doesn't have their whole back-catalogue of powerpoint presentations available online, now do they?

The SMSA's slogan is "Making a Difference through Learning". So I think we will feel right at home there.

Our first presenter at our Pitt Street location will be Alistair Speirs from Microsoft. His topic -

The Collaboration Spectrum: when should you use SharePoint, Groove, email or just pick up the phone?

Want to hear more? Come along to 280 Pitt Street at 5:30pm on Tuesday June 17th. Looking forward to seeing you.

For an e-mail update on the user group is meeting, sign up here, or subscribe to our RSS feed

While you are there - have a look at the new home page for the SharePoint Australian User Groups - what do you think?

Now available on video

The Sydney SharePoint Forum was held in Sydney on May 6^th. You can now watch videos of some of the presentations from the event site. Go to the Resources page and click the View link for the relevant presentation. My session with Allyson Skene is here – Find it faster with MOSS 2007 Search. It's true what they say about the camera adding ten pounds – I'm much slimmer in real life.

Tag – you’re it!

I was putting together an ASP.net page that was retrieving information from a database. This page is going to be indexed by SharePoint. So to make sure that the search experience could be as good as possible, I wanted to make sure that the page includes useful metadata tags.

While trying to figure out the best way of setting the metadata, I came across the HtmlMeta class. This allows you to programmatically add your meta tags to your content:

HtmlMeta metaTag = new
HtmlMeta();

HtmlHead head = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;

metaTag.Name = "DC.Title";

metaTag.Content = "Tag – you're it";

head.Controls.Add(metaTag);

 

Neat, huh?

'Open Mike' session for SharePoint User Group

Would you like to find out;

• How can you leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint technologies to provide a platform for collaboration, ECM, search, BI and social computing?
• The interoperability with MOSS and other line of business applications such as SAP?
• How SharePoint and Office can be the people friendly face of service oriented architecture?

Well we’ve got just the man to answer those burning questions... Microsoft’s Mike Fitzmaurice, Enterprise Technology Strategist and former Technical Product manager for WSS/MOSS, has kindly agreed to hold a lunch time ‘Open Mike’ session on May 5th during his Sydney visit.

We look forward to seeing you there! Please click here to register for this event.

Registration opens at 12:30pm and the Q&A session commence at 1:00pm. This special event will be held at Microsoft’s office, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde, Sydney.

Food & Refreshments will be provided.

‘Open Mike’ – Mike Fitzmaurice Q&A Date: Monday May 5th 2008 Time: 12:30-2:00pm

Visit http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney for further information.

Problem with using a Calculated Field in a Lookup property

I've been playing around with using a calculated field as the source for a lookup column in a document library. I've run into a few annoying issues that I thought I'd share. Try this:

1. Create a custom list
2. Add some rows to your list. In my case I added values like "Quick Pick 1", "Quick Pick 2"…
3. Add a calculated column with the formula of [Title]. Leave the calculated type as single line of text
4. In your Shared Documents library, add a lookup column and point it to the calculated field you created in the previous step

I agree – not the most productive piece of SharePoint work you will do, but bear with me.

1. When you edit the properties for a document via the browser, the Lookup field values display as expected:
   
   
2. Now, edit a Word 2007 document in the library
3. View the Word 2007 Document Information Panel
   

If your environment is anything like mine, this is what you will get:

I don't know why the "string;#" text is visible in the Document Information Panel view. I know that the Lookup column does store an ID along with the displayed value, but I definitely do not want this displayed in Word 2007.

It's a shame that this doesn't work. My search through the newsgroups and blogs didn't bring back any details about this specific issue, but there were some related questions about not being able to reference certain column types as lookup fields. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has found a fix for this. I can work around this issue by developing a simple event handler on my list to set the value of a text box to what I need. That way I can just use an out-of-the-box lookup column on a text field.

There was also another issue that I saw mentioned in relation to calculated lookup fields. If you try to use one of these in a collapsed Group By view, you will see a "Render Failed" message for each column when you expand the group:

My event-handler work-around will also avoid this issue. However, another alternative is to select the "Show groupings expanded" option for the view. You can then expand/collapse the views as you need.

MS Partner Training – On the road again

After appearing to sell-out crowds in 2007, the new and improved "Instructor-lead Chalk-talk to Presales and Business Analyst on the MOSS 2007 Platform" is about to hit the road again. And like all good shows, this time we have a special guest. Mick Badran of Breeze Training is going to attempt the daring feat of stepping into my shoes (spot the pun). I'm going to tackle Brisbane and Melbourne, while Mick will be wowing the crowds in Sydney.

Dates are:

• Brisbane – April 3 & 4
  
• Melbourne – April 7 & 8
  
• Sydney – April 10 & 11
  

This two day session is an instructor lead "chalk-and-talk" training designed for Pre-Sales Technical Consultants, Technical Project Managers, Architects and Business Analysts. The content is level-200. You can find out more information and register for this event here

Building a Windows 2008 x64 Laptop

My primary machine is a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. This has 4GB of memory and a dual core Intel T7300 2 GHz processor. Up until recently I have been running 32-bit Windows Vista as the main operating system. To be honest, I was disappointed with the performance. Considering the specifications, I was expecting the machine to be a bit quicker round the block. I found that I was waiting to switch between applications. Outlook was tediously slow some times.

Now this could be for a number of reasons – Dell pre-loads the application with many "performance enhancing utilities". Anyway, I decided it was time for a rebuild. Daniel Larson has been harping on how good Windows 2008 is, so I grabbed my installation disk and dived right in.

I wanted to take advantage of the whole 4 GB of memory I have, so I went with the 64-bit version (under 32-bit Windows only sees about 3.4 GB). I reckon that going 64-bit should also give me a performance boost too. The challenge is that I would have to make sure all the various software and hardware that I use would still run under 64-bit. There was only one way to find out for real.

I was also keen to see what Hyper-V was all about. This is Microsoft's new version of Virtual Server. The idea is that it takes advantage of features in your processor to run more efficiently. I wasn't 100% sure if my processor supported these capabilities, but I was willing to give it a shot.

I was getting tired of doing development work within a VPC and transferring files between the guest and host operating systems. I liked the idea of running SharePoint 2007 directly on my main operating system. No more booting up a VPC to check exactly where a configuration option was. I would be able to code directly on the host. Now VPCs aren't that much of a pain, and they have their own advantages, but I was keen to see what it would be like to run MOSS natively.

Finally, by going Windows 2008, I can run 64-bit virtual machines. Yes – I could also do this with VMWare on Vista, but since I was going to get all the other benefits with Windows 2008, this was an extra bonus. This may become more important later this year. I suspect that Microsoft will start to release early betas of SharePoint vNext before the year is out. If this is only going to run on 64-bit (just like Exchange), I want to be set up so that I can install them.

Right – so now that I convinced myself, it was time to begin. My first mistake was to back up all my content using Vista backups. I had been running these for a while, so it seemed like a safe bet. The problem came later when I attempted to restore these from Windows 2008. The backup software is not the same between these platforms and I couldn't find any software that would read the Visa backups. I ended up restoring these to another Vista computer and then copying the files across. So I'd recommend just copying your Vista data files onto a separate hard drive.

Another hassle with the Vista backups is that it does not include executable files or help files by default. So even after the restore I had to download the MOSS and WSS SDK packages again. Not a big hassle, but something to be aware of.

As a belt-and-braces measure, I used Acronis TrueImage to take a snapshot of my entire computer. This was in case the exercise turned into an unmitigated disaster and I needed to roll back. My 130 GB of content got compressed down to a 85 GB file. Thankfully I haven't had to use this, so I can't say what the restore process is like.

Now for the risky part. I downloaded the Windows 2008 RTM from my MSDN subscription and created a DVD. I rebooted and walked through the process of deleting my existing partitions (eek!) and creating one new partition for the new install.

WARNING: If you are planning to use Hyper-V then make sure to leave the regional settings at US English during installation. I'm in Australia, so I thought I would change these during the installation process. It turns out that the current (beta) release of Hyper-V does not like this, and I ended up having to re-install from scratch. Note that you can't just revert to the US English regional settings if you experience this problem. You can only change to your correct locale AFTER Hyper-V has been enabled. I'm sure this will get fixed soon.

Apart from that hiccup, the process was straightforward. My Bluetooth mouse worked from the moment the installation commenced. I think the installation process took about 30 minutes before I was booting into my new desktop.

After getting the bare bones installation up and running, here are the configuration changes that I've made:

1. Configured my BIOS to enable Virtualisation support

2. Enabled the following server roles:

• File Server (including the Windows Search Service)
• Hyper-V
  
• Web Server (including ASP.net, and IIS 6 Management)
  

3. Enabled the following server features:

• .Net Framework 3.0
  
• Desktop Experience – includes Media Player
  
• Wireless LAN Service – you need this to connect to your WiFi LAN
  

4. Disabled the shutdown prompt by updating my local group policy

• Start->Run->"gpedit.msc" -> Administrative Template ->System-> Display Shutdown event tracked -> Disable
  

5. Configured my Hyper-V network so that I can easily share files between my host and client machines (Bryant Likes's blog)

6. Installed the Synaptic x64 Fingerprint reader driver

7. Installed the Dell x64 sound card drivers

Now I'm very content with my setup. Response time is much faster than my old build. Hyper-V is very slick. VPCs seem to run more efficiently. There are a few hassles though:

• Sleep mode is gone – I think this is due to Hyper-V
  
• Battery life seems to be worse, probably because the power management seems less sophisticated than Vista.
  
• Even though my Bluetooth mouse worked, I couldn't connect to my Bluetooth mobile phone (a Nokia N73). I did try to install the Dell x64 Bluetooth drivers, but that didn't help. In fact, now my Bluetooth mouse no longer works :(
  
• Picasa won't install (photo management software)
  
• Microsoft Shared View beta installs, but won't log in
  

On balance though, I'm happy. The performance boost is great and I'll now get some experience poking around the new OS. I've just gotten MOSS 2007 up and running, so I can see what it's like to develop straight on the laptop.

Here are some of the links I found useful when doing my installation:

• http://weblogs.asp.net/israelio/archive/2008/02/21/windows-server-2008-as-workstation.aspx?CommentPosted=true
  
• http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2008/01/09/setting-up-hyper-v-virtual-networking.aspx
  
• http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=158277&page=1
  

A SharePoint site by any other name...

There are quite a few situations where you want your SharePoint Web Application available to different sets of users, using different web addresses. For example, our internal users may use http://XYZ to access our web application, but our external clients may have to enter https://secure.xyz.com

SharePoint allows you to assign up to five different "end-user addresses" for each of your Web Applications. These "end-user addresses" are ones that people will type into their browser to access your site. SharePoint uses a feature called Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) to make sure that the web application is available through different addresses while still ensuring that the links in the page sent back to the user are formatted correctly.

For a standard, non-SharePoint web site, this is relatively easy. Microsoft's IIS web server allows an administrator to specify as many addresses as they want for a single web site. These are called "host headers". If you are careful and make sure that all the internal links in your standard web site are written without a domain (e.g. /contactus.aspx), then the end user will always get the correct links based on the address they have used to access the website.

So why doesn't SharePoint work the same way? Well, part of the reason is that there are some scenarios where SharePoint will receive requests using one address, but it needs to translate these to another address before sending the final page to the end user. More on this later.

The end result is that IIS is responsible for accepting the page requests and passing them to SharePoint. It is then SharePoint's job to figure out which Web Application on the server farm the user is trying to access, and what "end user address" it should use when creating the output page.

So this is where Alternate Access Mapping comes into play. However, I got to say, it must be one of the most confusing user interfaces in the whole Central Administration. Even the Search Managed Properties is easier to figure out than this one. Here is my attempt to explain its workings. There is also a great set of MSDN blog articles from Troy Starr, and some screen webcasts from Bob Fox

What I have been referring to as "end user addresses" SharePoint calls Public Zone URLs. We have five different zones:

1. Default
2. Intranet
3. Extranet
4. Custom
5. Internet

They all work the same way, the names just reflect common uses, feel free to use each one as you please. The Default zone is set up for you when you create the Web Application. This zone is given the address that you specified during the "Create Web Application" process. It's up to you to set up the remaining four if you need them.

The easiest way to set these up is to use Edit Public Zone URLs from the Central Administration - Operations - Alternate Access Mapping page:

You need to make sure that you have the correct Alternate Access Mapping Collection specified at the top of the page. This is the Web Application that we want to configure "end user addresses" for. You might find the term "Public URLs" confusing. This does not mean that these are URLs that will be available outside your firewall. It refers to the URLs that your end-users will use to access your site. Some of these may be available outside your firewall, others will only be available internally.

In my example above, I am going to make my Web Application available on all five possible zones. The default name may reflect the machine that my web application is running on. My internal users will go to http://Intranet, but when they are out of the office they will use https://secure.xyz.com. Finally, I will allow clients to access certain information on the same web application at http://extranet.xyz.com

Once we click Save, SharePoint creates one entry in the AAM for each of our Public URLs. I would also update my IIS configuration at this stage to include host headers in my web site for each of these addresses.

But what does the Internal URL section of the table refer to? And how come it is identical to the Public URL? For me, it would have been better if Internal URLs were called Incoming URLs and Public URL was called Out-Going. Basically what happens is that SharePoint looks at the request for a page that it receives from IIS to determine which Public URL to use when creating the final page for the user.

For our example above, this is very straight-forward. If one of our road-warrior salespeople accesses https://secure.xyz.com from their browser, SharePoint will know that they are in the Custom zone, so any URLs on the page that refer to the web application should use the prefix of https://secure.xyz.com on the page it sends to the user. So simple, it almost sounds useless.

However, there are situations when the request that SharePoint receives does not match the address that the user entered. For example, we may have a Reverse Proxy server (such as Microsoft ISA 2006) that receives all the page requests from our external users and then forwards them to our server farm using the SharePoint server name. In this case, we want our our Internal URL to be something like http://AppServer01 but we still want the page sent to the user to use https://secure.xyz.com for any links to other content on the Web Application.

To configure this we use the Add Internal URLs button. This will allow us to specify another address that SharePoint should listen on for requests for our Web Application. By setting the zone to Custom we let SharePoint know what format we want the Web Application links written as.

This will create a 6th entry on our Alternate Access Mapping Collection. Note that we now have two entries for the Custom zone, both with different Internal URLs. We can add as many Internal URLs as we need for each of the zones. However, each Internal URL must be unique across the collection - otherwise SharePoint would not know which Public URL to use to generate the page for the end user.

In our example above, we might think of getting rid of the Custom Zone entry that defines http://secure.xyz.com as a valid Internal URL. After all, SharePoint will never receive requests directly with this URL (only our Proxy Server will). However, this is one of the quirks of the AAM interface - you must have an entry where the Internal and Public URL match. If you do delete this entry, then SharePoint will assign the Default Zone URL to the remaining Custom entry. Just accept that they need to be there.

If you haven't defined a Public URL for one of the zones, you can either use the Edit Public URLs or the Add Internal URLs button to configure it. Confusing, but the end result is the same - a new entry set up in your Web Application's AAM Collection that uses the same URL for both the internal and Public URL.

Similarly, when you use the Edit Public URLs screen to clear one of the Zones, SharePoint will remove the entry from the Collection that uses the same Internal and External URL. If there are any other entries in the collection for that Zone, SharePoint will reconfigure it to use the the Default Public URL.

Finally, here's a graphic to illustrate what is happening. Each zone can have many Internal URLs. SharePoint translates these to the appropriate Public URL based on the Web Application's AAM settings.

Free Wifi from Sydney and Melbourne Cafes

A while back, I was grumbling to myself about the lack of free wireless internet access from cafes in Sydney. OK - you could pay the equivalent of 4 cups of coffee for an hour's access from the national telco, but who wants to do that?

These days I use my mobile phone as a bluetooth modem to access the 3G network from my laptop. Coverage and speeds are sufficient, and my mobile carrier offers 500 MB per month for the price of 8 coffees.

However, I'm please to see that Unwired are setting up free wireless hotspots in a number of cafes in Sydney and Melbourne. I tried out one of these from a cafe near St Peters station in Sydney. Setup was simple and the access was reasonable. The service is branded as uConnect. Keep an eye out for it. The map on the UnWired website shows a number of locations, but not all (map).

Update: McDonalds now offer free WiFi in many of their "restaurants". I took the time to read through their terms and conditions and didn't find anything offensive. At the time of writing, they had 439 stores with free Wifi in Australia. Go to http://www.maccasfreewifi.com/ to find out if your local spot is wified yet.

MOSS Jumpstart Presentation

Here are the slides from the MOSS Jumpstart training that I have been running in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Thanks to all those that attended, I enjoyed it. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment

MOSS Jumpstart training resources

This is for the benefit of those who have attended the training sessions that I have been running recently. These are links to resources that you will find useful for finding more information about SharePoint:

MOSS 2007 Administrators Companion (Bill English)

Microsoft Forums (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN)

User Groups – http://www.sharepointusers.org.au

SharePoint Blogs – (OPML)

SharePointPedia - http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia

CodePlex (link)

TechNet SharePoint site (link)

Ontolica wildcard search http://www.ontolica.com/

MOSS SDK (link)

SharePoint Jumpstart Resources

I mentioned the following resources as part of the SharePoint Jumpstart training I ran today in Perth. I promised to post these links, so here you go:

SharePoint End User Learning Kit

Excel Spreadsheet comparing different versions of SharePoint

Coming to a city near you

I am on the road at the moment delivering SharePoint training on behalf of Microsoft. It's part of their Jumpstart programme to help Microsoft partners and customers get up to speed on the platform. I have just delivered the first session in Perth and the feedback has been positive. Next up is Adelaide, then Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

There is more information available on these events on Microsoft's site

SharePoint Gurus on track

When not obsessing over SharePoint, I like to get out on my mountain bike. Recently my mates and I took part in a 24 hour mountain bike race in Canberra. We had a team of six riders doing a relay, which meant we each did a circuit every 4 hours.

We made up our own team shirts, so I got the SharePoint Gurus logo put front and centre. We even used a public SharePoint subsite for organizing ourselves for the weekend. Talk about collaboration.

This was Dave Turner's going away ride - he has left us and moved to New Zealand. However, as official photographer he has now uploaded some photos of the event here

Needles in Haystack Presentation

Here is a link to the presentation that I delivered at the Sydney Office Dev Con. The session was about the SharePoint Search engine and how you can make use of it outside of SharePoint.

Here are the resources that I mention at the end of the presentation

• Sydney SharePoint User Group (link)
• MOSS SDK and Technical Articles (link)
• Mike Taghizadeh's Blog(link)
• Mick Badran’s Query Ranking command (link)
• Evaluation guide for Search in MOSS 2007 (link)
• Customizing and Extending the Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Search (link)
• Wildcard search from Ontolica (link)
• CodePlex – MOSS 2007 Search Manager (link)
• CodePlex – Test WSS and MOSS Search Web Service (link)

Office DevCon this weekend

Office DevCon is kicking off this weekend at the Microsoft offices in North Ryde. Graham Seach has put a huge effort into setting up this free Office developer event, and there are some great presentations scheduled.

I'll also be presenting - my session is about making use of the search engine in MOSS 2007. I'm scheduled for around mid-day on Sunday. Unfortunately my session didn't make it onto the registration page, so no one had the opportunity to select it as one of their preferred events.

So while all the other presenters are comparing crowd size numbers, I'm preparing to present to myself. Oh well, it won't be the first time.

If you are attending the event and would like to have a one-on-one about the SharePoint search engine, do drop by. I believe they are currently scheduling my session for the broom cupboard on level 1.

Difference between SharePoint and AD Groups

Someone on the SharePoint forums asked about the difference between these two types of security groups. Here are the ones I could think of:

Domain Groups

• Normally created and maintained by the IT department

• Can be used across different SharePoint sites and site collections

• Organisations may already have good AD group structures that map well to your SharePoint implementation

• Groups can be nested - e.g. you can add another AD Group as a member to an existing AD group

• No features for users to submit a request to join a group

SharePoint Groups

• The creation of groups can be done by business users

• When a group is being created, you can define who "owns" the group

• Can allow users to submit a request to join a group

• Can determine who has permissions to see the users within groups

• Groups are created within a particular Site Collection - cannot be used in other site collections

• You cannot add a SharePoint Group as a member of another SharePoint group (no nesting)

• SharePoint Groups cannot be used in other systems (e.g. network Shares)

• The SharePoint Groups are separate from Active Directory - so you can go wild with the SharePoint Groups without upsetting your AD administrator

October Sydney User Group

"You are the Silverlight of my life" - come on down to participate in our discussion on whether Silverlight is going to rock your SharePoint world, or are we just chasing moon beams.

The October event is at Level 14, Roden Cutler House, 24 Campbell Street, Haymarket on Tuesday October 16th 2007. Kick-off from 5:30pm. Click here to register. For more information visit http://www.SharePointUsers.org.au/sydney

New User Group website

FINALLY! We have moved the SharePoint User Group site off version 2.0 of WSS and set up a version 3.0 site. I no longer have to hang my head in shame at the User Group meetings any more - well, at least not because of the website.

The new site has been implemented using the SharePoint Community Kit User Group Edition. We also have a new address so don't forget to update your favourites and/or default home page to http://www.sharepointusers.org.au/sydney. You can even sign up for the new Events RSS Feed so that you can get the details of our next meeting delivered right to your computer without having to lift a finger.

Do drop by and let us know what you think, the Discussion Board is open. You'll also find an archive of all the presentations given at the User Group.

Central Administration site - Service Unavailable

I was working on a client's environment this week when all of a sudden the Central Admin and Shared Service Provider sites stopped working. Requesting any URL from these sites returned a "Service Unavailable" message. The main content web site kept responding though.

When I checked IIS I noticed that the Application Pools for these web apps were stopping as soon as I put through a page request. I'd restart them and they would stop again straight away.

IISReset didn't do anything for me. Two Event Log errors entries being written each time the app pool was shut down. Details are below.

We executed our "Base Cotingency Plan" (i.e. we rebooted the server) and everything went back to working as expected.

I've no real insight on this one, but I thought I'd post it in case others come across it.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1009
Date: 9/10/2007
Time: 12:33:13 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SHAREPOINT1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '11380'. The process exit code was '0x80'.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
==============================================

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1002
Date: 9/10/2007
Time: 12:33:13 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SHAREPOINT1
Description:
Application pool 'SharePoint Central Administration v3' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
===========================================

MVP for another year

I just got word from Above that I have been recognized as an MVP for MOSS for a second year. My acceptance speech contains the usual thanks to all involved in making me look good (you know who you are).

I have a feeling that this is going to be an exciting year, I'm glad I don't have to hand back my MVP t-shirt just yet.

Anonymous Users – Access Denied

At a client recently we tried to enable Anonymous Access to a WSS site, but unauthenticated users were still being prompted for a username and password. If you cancelled the log-in prompt, you would get an IIS "Access Denied" page. So I ran through the default tests:

• Web Application created with the "Allow Anonymous" setting enabled – Check
  (by the way, after the Web Application has been created this setting is managed from the Application Management – Authentication Providers section)
  
• Site Collection has anonymous access enabled for the entire site – Check
  (Site Settings – Go to top level site settings – Advanced Permissions – Settings – Anonymous Access)
  

That should have been it. After some tinkering around I discovered the problem was a web part on the home page. This was trying to filter the list of tasks based on the current user. Taking the web part off the page resolved the problem.

If you really need this functionality you will need to develop your own custom web part that will first check if the current user is authenticated before retrieving and filtering the items.

WSS 3.0 Search Capabilities

Greetings from Singapore! I'm here attending a training course on MOSS Administration, but more on that some other time. Right now what I've brought you here to talk about is WSS Search. So it is common knowledge that the search technology has changed between version 2 and version 3. In version 2, WSS used SQL Server full text indexes. Now WSS uses the same underlying engine for indexing content as MOSS.

However, what I feel isn't common knowledge is how this affects the end user experience. When you performed a search in WSS 2.0 you could only get results back from the document libraries and lists in your current sub-site. You don't see results from any sites underneath it. In WSS 3.0 it's a very different story. Not only will you see results from any child subsites, you will also see results from any site collections located underneath the sub-site you are searching! Surprised? I was.

So this means that you can run a search from the very top of your website and it will search the document libraries and lists in all your site collections. The results are still security trimmed. Nice.

User Presence in WSS

You might have noticed the User Presence icons in SharePoint. They have been there since version 2. You will see them appearing beside a user name, like "Modified By" or "Assigned To".

This will work with your instant messaging software to display your availability status to others. For organisations that have Microsoft Office Communicator installed, this works with little or no configuration. You can see when your colleagues are online, and even look up their other contact details, such as their extension.

The User Presence information also works with MSN Messenger. The only hassle with this in WSS v2.0 was that you had to use your MSN Messenger e-mail address in the SharePoint environment. Well, now in WSS 3.0 you get to specify a separate field for your User Presence details. So you can now get your SharePoint alerts submitted to your work account, but have your User Presence information based on your MSN account.

To update your details just go to the top right corner of any page on your SharePoint site and drop down the Welcome ... menu and select My Settings.

You can then edit the SIP Address to be the e-mail address of your MSN Messenger account. Voila – your user presence details should now be available for others to see. Change your status in MSN Messenger and the user presence information updates almost straight away on the SharePoint site.

No? Still can't see your user presence details? You might want to add your WSS site to the Trusted Sites zone in Internet Explorer (Tools – Internet Options – Security)

One final thing – the SIP Address information is stored at the Site Collection level. If your environment has many site collections, then you will have to update each one individually

WSS 3.0 Content Indexing: The update cannot be started

I noticed recently that I was getting an error in my Application Event log every time the WSS Search Service ran. That means an error every five minutes, which is a little disheartening. One option is to change the WSS index schedule so that the error only occurs once per day – but some might say that is avoiding the issue. Which I suppose is a fair point.

The error that was showing up in my Application Event Log was:

Event ID 2424
The update cannot be started because the content sources cannot be accessed. Fix the errors and try the update again.

Context: Application 'Search', Catalog 'index file on the search server Search'

I fixed this by going to Central Administration – Operations – Services on Server. I selected the Windows SharePoint Services Search entry. I then changed the Service Account username and password to match the Content Access Account details. Click OK on the bottom of the page and wait five minutes.

Once I saw that the error was no longer being logged I went back and set the Service Account back to its original username and password. Still no sign of the error. I also verified that WSS was indexing content again.

So a bit of a strange issue. It looks like some settings got messed up along the way and just need to be reset. I did notice that the error started to happen after some scheduled maintenance on the SQL Server. I'll have a word with the SQL Admin and see what he's been up to.

August 2007 User Group meeting

We have a jam-packed session this month. Brad Saide will be presenting on the Business Data Catalogue. Then Han Duong will cover customizing SharePoint themes. To top it off Jey Srikantha from K2 is returning to show us the K2 Blackpearl capabilities. This extends the out of the box workflows in ASP.net and integrates directly with MOSS 2007.

This month's session is on Tuesday 21^st at the Unique World offices in Haymarket. So come along, grab some beer & pizza and mingle with the local SharePointers. For more information go to http://sps.uniqueworld.net/sydney.

Bluetooth Mouse on Windows Vista Macbook Pro

This post has nothing to do with SharePoint but I thought I'd blog it anyway in case someone else is trying to do the same. I'll admit it probably isn't a common scenario, but you never know.

I'm currently using a 17" MacBook Pro as my laptop. I've used Apple Bootcamp to create a Windows partition and I installed Windows Vista. It's a great setup and I love using the machine. It's got 2 GB of memory and dual 2.33 GHz intel processors. However, one thing was bugging me – I couldn't get the internal Bluetooth device working. This meant I couldn't use my groovy Microsoft Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000.

From the blog posts I could find I seemed to be in the minority. A few people wrote that Bluetooth was working fine for them right after install. Some people had steps for manually enabling Bluetooth, but this seemed to be for earlier releases of Bootcamp because I couldn't find the files they were referring to.

So here are the steps that I used to get it working. Some of these may be redundant – feel free to experiment and leave comments:

1. Downloaded and installed the Bootcamp 1.3 beta software from the Apple site to my Mac partition
   
2. Created a Mac Driver disk using the Bootcamp Assistant
   
3. Booted into Windows Vista and ran the Setup.exe on the Mac Driver disk
   
4. Launched the Device Manager. Expanded out the Universal Serial Bus controllers section. I was looking for the device with a Hardware ID of USB\VID_05AC&PID_1000 (I found these details here). To view an entry's Hardware ID:
   
   1. Double click on the entry under the Universal Serial Bus Controllers
      
   2. Click the Details tab
      
   3. Change the Property drop down to Hardware IDs
      
5. Once you have found the right device select the Driver tab
   
6. Select the Update Driver... button
   
7. Select Browse my computer for driver software
   
8. Select the C:\Mac Drivers\program files\Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP 1.1.2\BthKicker location
   

Once I completed these steps Windows Vista identified a new device and tried to install a driver for it. It couldn't find an appropriate driver. At this stage most people would get dejected, but I'm used to this kind of thing. The next thing to do is run the\Drivers\Apple\AppleBluetoothInstaller.exe file on the Bootcamp Assistant CD that you created earlier.

And that was it, my Bluetooth mouse now works with my Vista install running on a MacBook Pro. I love it.

MySite Hotfix

I ran into a problem at a client site recently. We already had the ability to create MySites, but they were being created under the Shared Service Provider website. We wanted these under the main portal instead. Not a problem – we set up a managed path on the portal and created a new site collection underneath it to host the My Sites. We made sure to select the My Site Host template when creating our new site collection. From the home page of the site collection we specified that we wanted to use this as the location for new My Sites. This worked just fine in our development environment. A user without an existing MySite could click the MySite link at the top of the page and their site would be created for them within the main portal.

Not so good in the production environment though. When you tried to create a new MySite you would see an error along the lines of:

There has been an error creating the personal site. Contact your site administrator for more information

Looking in the SharePoint logs revealed the following error:

The site /personal/demo could not be created. The following exception occured: Value does not fall within the expected range

I certainly wasn't expecting that. Luckily I found that Microsoft has released a hotfix specifically for this issue. The details are at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937207. You will need to contact Microsoft to get them to e-mail you the patch. Once we ran this in our environment all was well again. One thing though – the documentation for the hotfix says that it does not require a reboot, however we were prompted to perform a reboot after installing it.

...In with the New

Microsoft have just announced that they have received Department of Defence 5051.2 certification (DoD 5051.2) for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Great huh? But what does it mean? DoD 5051.2 is a US Government standard for records management. Any records management solution used in the US Government must have this. It's also becoming a de facto standard in other industries too.

Microsoft have developed an add-on pack to provide the additional features required by the DoD 5051.2. If you want to comply with this standard you will need to run this (soon to be released) add-on pack as well. If you don't need to comply, then kick back and relax.

Read more here:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/records-management/microsoft-delivers-on-dod-50152-cert-promise-001323.php

Out with the old...

Got any servers running the Beta 2 Tech Refresh of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server? Well, the bad news is that it expired on May 15^th. The good news is that you can get information on how to upgrade to the released version here:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/3df597d0-bad0-4c73-9c26-a10bb80449881033.mspx?mfr=true

Knock, Knock...

MOSS 2007 allows users to send an e-mail to request additional access to a site. But do you know who this e-mail goes to? Or for that matter do you know where to go to configure this?

This setting is available from the Site Permissions page. To access this go to Site Actions – Site Settings – People and Groups. Now click on the Site Permissions link in the left hand panel. From this page you can select Access Requests from the Settings menu.

If you cannot see this menu item you (or your SharePoint Administrator) should check that the Outgoing Mail Server setting is configured for your environment. This is done through the Operations section of the Central Administration site.

So how does SharePoint determine what e-mail address to use by default? It's simply whoever initially created the sub-site. It can only be set for sites that do not inherit permissions.

So here's a pop quiz for you: Let's assume Bob created a sub-site called Department X along with a child site called Projects. Initially Projects inherits its security settings from Department X. Then Sue comes along and configures the Projects subsite to use unique permissions. Who do you think SharePoint will use for the Access Requests settings?

• Bob
  
• Sue
  
• No-one
  

I'll give you a hint, the answer rhymes with True.

ForeFront SharePoint TechCenter

Microsoft now have content on TechNet specifically about ForeFront and SharePoint - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/forefront/serversecurity/sharepoint/default.mspx. ForeFront is Microsoft's anti virus product. It includes 8 anti-virus engines to scan content. Up to five of these will be used during any individual scan. This ensures good coverage across a range of attacks. Seven of the engines are from external vendors - AhnLab, Authentium, CA, Kaspersky, Norman, Sophos and VIrusBuster.

There doesn't seem to be many other vendors offering SharePoint 2007 AntiVirus software just yet. McAfee and Symantec still only advertise a SharePoint 2003 product. Hopefully more vendors will step up soon. With SharePoint becoming increasingly popular as the collaboration and file storage platform, anti-virus is going to be a must-have feature.

SharePoint User Group tonight

The SharePoint Conference has been a great success. There were some really good presentations and I've enjoyed catching up with a lot of people that I haven't seen in a while. So far the most fun part has been the unicycle - pictures to follow.

Of course the real highlight is the SharePoint User Group meeting that is going to start at 5:30pm. This is going to be in Room 2 on the lower level. Andrew Connell is going to join Mike Fitz and Joel Oleson on the panel to answer your questions.

Looking forward to seeing you there

SharePoint APAC Conference Session Recommendations

Going to the SharePoint APAC Conference on Tuesday and Wednesday this week? Here are my agenda recommendations. I'm presenting the session on MOSS and Enterprise Architecture – the rest of the sessions compliment this theme. There are a lot of other great sessions on though so make sure to check out the schedule.

Tuesday

Code	Session	Room	Time
ARC01	MOSS and Enterprise Architecture	Lower Level Room 4	11:00
ARC03	Business Data Catalog and LOB	Ballroom B	13:20
ARC04	BI with Excel Services	Ballroom B	14:25
ARC05	Web Content Management Overview	Ballroom B	16:10

Wednesday

Code	Session	Room	Time
ARC10	Multilingual Portals	Lower Level Room 2	09:15
ARC06	Search Technical Drilldown	Ballroom A	11:00
ARC11	Document Management & Taxonomy	Lower Level Room 2	13:20
DEV06	Coding Compliance Components	Lower Level Room 3	14:25
Pan01	Panel Discussion with SharePoint Experts	Ballroom B	16:10
SUG01	Sydney SharePoint User Group	Room 2	17:30

Technorati tag: SPCAPAC

Presenting at the SharePoint APAC Conference

I've just finished a round of presentations on SharePoint Enterprise Search. Next week I'm off to the SharePoint APAC conference in Sydney to give another presentation. The topic is "How much can MOSS replace your Enterprise Architecture?"

If you are around, do drop by and say Hi. When not presenting I'll be at the Unique World stand. Don't worry – you won't be able to miss the stand.

Find out more about the conference at http://www.microsoftsharepoint.com

All Joost Up

I've managed to get myself a Joost invite. This is the future of TV. I've been interested in the convergence of TV and PC technology for some time, and Joost looks like the best combination I've seen to date. It took me about 2 minutes to get this up and running, and my initial experience is positive. The picture quality isn't great, and I've been disconnected once or twice from the shows that I was watching, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun.

I don't have any invites yet, but as soon as I do I'll pass them around. It looks like Joost may be days away from launching, so that mightn't even matter soon.

Update: I can send invites now, so if you want one, just drop a comment with your e-mail address

WSS 3.0 Hosting Providers

I have been researching WSS 3.0 web hosting providers, so I thought I'd share my list with you. This is not an extensive list of providers, but I'm hoping to add to it as I find out about others. I'm only showing the basic plan for each provider, to give some level of comparison. Figures valid as of April 22, 2007-04-22

Website	Plan name	Yearly fee	Storage	Users	Notes
http://www.frontpages-web-hosting.net	SharePoint Basic	$212 USD	1 GB	Unlimited	30 day free trial
http://www.webcentral.com.au	Managed SharePoint	$860 AUD	0.5 GB	25
http://www.724hosting.com	SharePoint Hosting	$239.40 USD	0.5 GB	25	15 day free trial
http://www.webhost4life.com	Basic	$139.35 USD	0.5 GB	50	Select the Advance ASP.net hosting option ($9.95 pm), then add the SharePoint Basic component ($19.94 py)
http://www.sharepointsite.com	Bronze	$383.52 USD	0.15 GB	50
http://www.alentus.com	SharePoint Professional Plan	$371.40 USD	0.2 GB	40
http://www.sharepointhosting.com	Bronze Hosting	$299.50 USD	1 GB	Unlimited	Daily backups
http://services.mail2web.com	SharePoint	179.40 GBP	0.5 GB	Unlimited
http://www.ultimahosts.net	SharePoint.net 3.0	$300 USD	5 GB	Unlimited	Nightly backups
http://www.phase2int.com	SharePoint Standard - Basic	$300 USD	1 GB	40	Nightly backups, 30 day free trial

Bob Fox - Screencaster

Check out the following screen casts from Bob Fox that visually demonstrate some useful concepts

How to Screencast:  Setting up your Virtual Lab Part 1 – Setting up Active Directory, POP3, SQL and IIS

How To Screencast: Alternate Access Mappings or AAM – An introduction to setting up alternate access mapping

April SharePoint User Group

Anyone in Sydney on Tuesday April 17^th should try to come along to the Sydney SharePoint User Group meeting. We got two great speakers lined up. Noel Williams from MacroView is going to demonstrate tools that help you manage your e-mails directly in SharePoint 2007.

Then we have Stephen Cummins of www.SPSFAQ.com coming along to tell his tales from the trenches. This guy has been involved in more than 30 SharePoint deployments for companies such as HP, Kraft and the Disney Corporation. That's a wealth of experience that you don't get to meet every day.

So hop over to here to register for the event. It's on at the Unique World offices in Campbell Street (map). For more information about the user group and to subscribe to e-mail notifications on upcoming events check out http://sps.uniqueworld.net/Sydney

Ivan

Slow file uploads

I was working with a client recently that was experiencing poor performance on their SharePoint environment. They were about to go live, but the performance testing was coming back with terrible results, even with only a small number of users. Initially we weren't sure where the problem was, but we were able to quickly isolate the issue down to network performance.

We noticed that certain users were able to upload quickly, but for other users the file upload process crawled. We ran up Performance Monitor on our front end SharePoint server to see what was happening. Adding the Total Bytes/sec monitor in the Network category gave us some useful information. For the users experiencing the good performance, our monitor would spike and then drop back to zero (the blue line below). For those experiencing bad performance the network utilisation would stay low. Something was throttling the network bandwidth for these users

To cut a long story short, the client finally discovered that the issue was to do with a default setting in Internet Explorer 6.0 and earlier. This limits the data rate that the browser sends information. This becomes particularly noticeable with larger files (e.g. greater than 2 MB).

To resolve the issue you need to make an update to the registry on the user's computer. You can read more about this here

Ishai Sagi is MVPed

I just heard from Ishai that he has been awarded an MVP in SharePoint. Well deserved too – this guy puts so much effort into his blogs, forum posts and community presentations. Congratulations buddy!

Publishing from Word 2007

Finally! I now can publish to Blogger directly from Word 2007. I could never get this working before, but I have just rebuilt my laptop and I was able to register my account without any hassles.

Renaming the Central Admin Content Database

I worry sometimes that I might be just a little too pedantic. I can spend way too long figuring out an ideal naming convention. So you can imagine my distress to discover that MOSS 2007 does not give you the option to name the Central Administration content database.

You are able to specify a name for every other database in your installation except this one. It's pretty upsetting for someone as anal as me. All the other databases have a naming pattern that you could write a song to, but the Central Admin content database uses some horrid GUID for it's name.

I decided that I needed to fix this. There is a good reason for this - your SQL Server might host a few Central Admin content databases from different SharePoint Farms. In which case it would be nice to know which SharePoint farm the database belonged to without having to check a list of GUIDs somewhere.

In theory it's relatively straight forward - here are the steps, taken mainly from Ricky Whitworth's blog entry:
1. From Central Admin, remove the existing content database from the Central Admin Web Application.

WARNING: This will break your Central Administration site until you complete the rest of the steps!

2. Backup the existing Admin content database from SQL
3. Restore the backup to SQL using a name that makes you happy
4. Use the STSADM -AddContentDB to attach your renamed content database into your Central Admin site

It was this final step that caught me out. I kept getting a "Access Denied" message. This is not particularly what you want to see when you have just broken your Central Admin site.

What I discovered is that you need to run this command using the AD account that you specified for connecting to the database during your SharePoint installation. Now normally this account should not be a local administrator on your web front end server. However I also found that the command did not work for me until I made this account a local administrator.

So here are the extra steps I carried out between 3. and 4. above:

1. Grant the account running the Central Admin application pool access to the Local Administrators group on your SharePoint server

2. Use the "runas /user:myDomain\myAccount cmd.exe" command line to launch a command window under the credentials of the Central Admin application pool account.

3. Run the following command in your new command window:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.exe" -o addcontentdb -url myCentralAdminSite -databasename myCentralAdministrationContentDatabase

4. Remove the account from the Local Administrators group

Update:Here is a post from Keith Richie on how you can use psconfig.exe to set the database name during your initial installation

What a crazy week

I'm just back from the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle. What a whale of a time. I finally got to meet many of the other SharePoint MVPs in person. We even spent some time with the SharePoint product team giving our input into what we think is important for the next release of MOSS.

If only every week was as interesting as that. You can check out some photos of the week here

Now, must get back to work

SharePoint Conference - Sydney May 15-16 2007

The circus is coming to town!

Well, almost as exciting - the SharePoint Conference is coming. Sydney is the third city to host this show, with great reviews already in from Seattle and Berlin.

The conference is going to be at the Hilton Hotel and will include such SharePoint greats as Mike Fitz, Joel-The-Man-Oleson and ring master Derek Burney. With any luck the Sydney SharePoint User Group will also be well represented.

There are only 500 places available so make sure to book the 15 and 16 of May out in your diary now. Registration for the event will open soon. Check out Angus Logan's blog for more details.

No Underscores in MOSS

I just found out that MOSS doesn't like Underscores in Host Headers. If you try to create a new web application with the "_" in the Host Header, SharePoint rejects it as an invalid character.

This also applies to setting up Alternate Access Mappings for an existing web application

How do I...in SharePoint 2007

Check out this new content on MSDN that descibes how to do common development tasks in SharePoint 2007:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms550086.aspx