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