The SharePoint Farmer's Almanac

Tom Rizzo and Richard Riley were kind enough to include me on this awesome book that covers everything SharePoint search.

While those guys wrote really deep, geeky chapters I went the other direction and wrote administrator style chapters. One chapter is on planning and designing Search at the enterprise scale. The other chapter covers search administration and the new interface provided by the SharePoint infrastructure update.

Check out the book if you get a chance.

And as a special reward for reading my blog and reading this whole post you can enter to win one of two free copies of the book. All you have to do is send an email to freebook at SharePoint911 dot com before midnight (Eastern time)on 10/15/2008. You must be in the continental US to be eligible, sorry but shipping gets to be painful out of the states, I do appreciate all of my international readers. If we have more than 100 entries I may sweeten the pot a little so spread the word.

Shane SharePoint Consulting

One of my clients this week managed to take his entire farm offline this week by upsetting the timer service. First a little background – currently they are scrambling to get SharePoint back to a happy state. Why? Well, as happens with lots of customers, SharePoint is too successful. When we originally setup their farm and upgraded from SPS2003 to MOSS 2007 they had about 20 GB of content that was growing at a very controlled pace. Fast forward a little more than a year and their content database is about 320 GB. YIKES! Even scarier most of their data is in one site collection. This is bad, very bad! Typical guidance is your content databases should be less than 100 GB.

Part of this growth has forced some moving of the databases to different drives and a database restore to deal with another issue. Well, anytime you want to move SharePoint databases around you should run the command stsadm –o preparetomove as documented by Cory Burns in the post Detaching databases in MOSS. If you didn't you will start getting sync errors once an hour such as:

Failure trying to synch web application 09a21da5-4485-4b00-8268-772aea7fea12, ContentDB 65301403-c277-4b4c-ad5a-e822572d10ea: A duplicate site ID 3b3a4372-aa91-4e0c-ba57-2567958d81bb(http://portal/sites/test1) was found. This might be caused by restoring a content database from one server farm into a different server farm without first removing the original database and then running stsadm -o preparetomove. If this is the cause, the stsadm -o preparetomove command can be used with the -OldContentDB command line option to resolve this issue.

Cory then goes on how to fix it using stsadm –o sync. This is where my client was. He ran this command but for some reason (possible him specifying the wrong switches and accidently deleting a content db) the command hung up for a long period of time, and the portal users were unable to access the environment. So he killed the stsadm process. From that point all hell broke loose.

For several hours they attempted a lot of fixes found on the web. One of the fixes had them rename the folder located at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\<guid>\. This was a bad option. The folder contains XML files for all of the timer job definitions that need to be ran and the idea was renaming the folder would cause SharePoint to create a new empty copy of the folder and then it could start creating the xml files again and get back to work. Nope, that isn't how it works. What they needed to do was delete all of the XML files and leave the folder alone. Then when they restarted the timer service the proper XML files would have magically reappeared.

Hope this helps you

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

Got this email earlier this week.

Shane,

I am using the Microsoft Site Undelete tool (download from here) you recommended. I had user delete his site accidently and I am trying to restore it. It was successfully backed up by the tool to a file called sitename.bak. So I ran the command:

Stsadm.exe –o restore –url http://portal/sites/sitename -filename sitename.bak

When I ran the command I got the error:

Your backup is from a different version of Windows SharePoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version. The backup file should be restored to a server with version '1178817357.0.105904.0' or later.

What gives? Shouldn't my version be 12.0.0.6318 or 12.0.6219.1000?

Thanks

Well after scratching my head for a few minutes I realized the mistake. He was trying to restore an individual site instead of a site collection. The undelete tool is smart enough to know when you do a delete if you are deleting a site or a site collection. When you delete a site the tool will actually do a stsadm –o export before deleting the site, this is what happened to our guy. So to restore the file he simply needed to run the command:

Stsadm –o import http://portal/sites/sitename -filename sitename.bak

That is all it takes. So don't get your site collection backups (stsadm –o backup) confused with your site backups (stsadm –o export).

Also, worth noting because I can hear Todd complaining now. If you will call your sub-sites web and call your site collections sites like the developers do your life will be easier.

Also, also I only have one more chapter on the SharePoint Admin Book to go.

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

Alisa, one of my students from SharePoint Administrator Survival Camp in Vegas sent this picture over on Facebook.  After a scary day of talking about the evil technology Chuck, another student, found this dog and bought it for me.  (Thanks man!)  It was such a big hit that Alisa bought her own to take back to the office.  And who says  you can't have fun and be a total geek at the same time. 

Anyway, the picture totally made my night as i sit her and work on the performance chapter for our upcoming Admin book. 

Shane - SharePoint Consulting

I was adding a new web front end (WFE) server to a farm last week and ran into this error while running config wizard.

Task configdb has failed with an unknown exception

07/21/2008 14:18:39 8 ERR Exception: System.IO.IOException: The device is not ready.

at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)

at System.IO.Directory.InternalCreateDirectory(String fullPath, String path, DirectorySecurity dirSecurity)

at System.IO.DirectoryInfo.Create(DirectorySecurity directorySecurity)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPProvisioningAssistant.CreateDirectory(DirectoryInfo di, Boolean secureAdminAccess)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer.CreateDirectory(String path, Boolean secureAdminAccess)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer.CreateDirectory(String path)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUsageSettings.EnsureLogFileDirectories(SPFarm farm)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication.Provision()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebServiceInstance.Provision()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm.Join()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.CreateOrConnectConfigDb()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ConfigurationDatabaseTask.Run()

at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask(

After some poking around the net I found that my buddy Eric Shupps had seen this error before also. http://www.binarywave.com/blogs/eshupps/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=139 The issue stems from the fact that WFE1 had the usage logs set to go to the D:\ drive in Central Admin. When config wizard tried to provision this folder on WFE2 it errored out because the server did not have a D:. Whoops.

Thanks Eric!

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

I noticed the error message below repeatedly in event viewer and realized it was happening every time a profile import was happening.

Event Type:    Error

Event Source:    Office SharePoint Server

Event Category:    Office Server General

Event ID:    7888

Date:        6/27/2008

Time:        11:37:17 AM

User:        N/A

Computer:    ServerName

Description:

A runtime exception was detected. Details follow.

Message: Access Denied! Only site admin can access Data Source object from user profile DB.

Techinal Details:

System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access Denied! Only site admin can access Data Source object from user profile DB.

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.SRPSite.AdminCheck(String message)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource._LoadDataSourceDef(IDataRecord rec)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource._LoadDataSourceDef(String strDSName)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource..ctor(SRPSite site, Boolean fAllowEveryoneRead)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.DataSource..ctor(SRPSite site)

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileConfigManager.GetDataSource()

at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.BDCConnector.RefreshConfiguration(String sspName)

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

Turns out that on this server they had a least privileged install done. In this case you need to make sure that within the SSP you have granted your default content access account and your SSP application pool account the manage profile permission. If you need help with that check out this article I wrote on SSPs and their rights. http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/08/06/give-a-user-access-to-the-ssp.aspx

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Updated 7/27/08 - I realized the pictures didn't show up the first time. 

Have you ever used the feature Storage space allocation from the site collection administrator's menu?

That is a pretty nice view of all of the document libraries in my site collection and their size. You can also click the drop down for show only and get a couple more choices.

How fun. Finding large lists or documents in the site collection is easy as pie now!

Enabling this feature

As you excitedly clicked into site collection administration you probably found you don't have this as an option.

Why not? These menus only show up when you have site collection quotas enabled. Kind of a bummer. Typically what I will do if I want this reporting is enable an arbitrary site collection quota. This is done from Central Admin > Application Management > Site Collection quotas and locks.

Shane SharePoint Consulting

In the TechNet forums there is a thread that got off topic and somehow came to this question. "What makes a good SharePoint consultant?"

Since I felt the answer to the question and the tone of the conversation were so off base I started to write a reply. I also had another well respected SharePoint consultant tell me they thought someone should bring some clarity to the thread. Well, after beating up my keyboard for several minutes I thought I would take my reply to my private little soap box, my blog. So here goes.

The basic concept of the thread is that a good SharePoint consultant would need to know a bunch of administrator stuff. Active Directory, SQL,  Windows Server, etc. Interesting idea I guess? Joel Oleson does a thorough job of laying it all out in the SharePoint Architect Skill Set post.

The big issue I see with this all being advertised as what you should be looking for in a "Good SharePoint Consultant" is I don't think any of this is as nearly important as the "Soft Side" of SharePoint. There is no mention of the key things like Usability?  Design?  Taxonomy?  Planning?  Rollouts? Search? Branding? Custom apps? Business analysis? User adoption? Discovery?  Etc. These are the things that will decide if you have a successful deployment or not. Poorly setup hardware can cause you issues but can be fixed by someone like myself in hours. A poor taxonomy can take 6 months and a complete redesign to fix.

I got into SharePoint as the guy who knew all of the server stuff.  I was an MCSE and all of that jazz.  Guess what?  For most SharePoint projects I was useful for about 2 days.  Once the hardware was built and rock solid I went home and the real work was begun by the "good SharePoint Consultants".  I have since spent a great deal of effort learning the "human" side of SharePoint.  That is the hard part.  I can teach anyone to install the software in a couple of hours. If you give me a couple of days I can teach you to make it rock solid.  But then what?  You need content.  That is where you get into the black arts that are portal planning and design.  That is the hard part.  Once you design what needs to be built in SharePoint you are back to the easy stuff.  Clicky, clicky and the thing is deployed. One project I am on we are paying a high school kid to build it and bring in the data. He just follows the directions we laid out. And it only took 3 months and a couple of dozen meetings with a few hundred decisions to get to that. ;) Of course that is just phase one.

<RANT> Now here comes the part that annoys me the most. If you don't know most everything SharePoint can do out of box then don't speak to another customer until you do! Seriously! I can't tell you what percentage of my business is cleaning up other so called "consultants" but it is a big part. People who walk in the door with their army of .NET developers and start building the functionality the customer is asking for. This would be great except for one small detail. 9 times out of 10 what they are building is already included out of the box. Do you know how many times I see things that are the content query web part recreated? Or they wrote custom navigation because they couldn't figure out how to use the one that comes with SharePoint? It drives me bonkers. They hard wire in these things and then guess what? You can't upgrade later or the latest service pack breaks something. Why? Because that is your punishment for reinventing the wheel. This may be a great model for the consulting company but really sucks for the customer footing the bill for the never ending cycle of maintenance. <RANT/>

Now don't get me wrong not all SharePoint Consultants are evil. There are a lot of very talented ones, some are even developers ;), (I love you guys) but development is not the first answer when it comes to SharePoint. Squeezing as much as you can out of the box is. If I was looking for a SharePoint consultant I would use SharePoint911 they are the best. (Oh yeah, in case you didn't know I own the company. So take that with a grain of salt.)

So my questions I would ask a potential SharePoint consultant are:

• List your last 10 projects? (If more than 5 aren't SharePoint be scared)
• What was your favorite solution you came up with? (Hopefully something like well we combined the BDC, Forms Server, and a custom workflow. Then we setup a KPI for the data with Excel Services. But any real solution will do.)
• What is your favorite feature? (This gives you insight into the person. If they don't have an answer RUN.) My answer is search.
• What type of Taxonomy would you suggest? (Kind of a trick question. If they list one immediately ask them for a second one to make sure they aren't just using buzz words. They should really answer with well it depends. If they say they already paid their taxes RUN)

I welcome comments. Though I fear I may be opening that darn box of Pandora's again. And yes, I really don't hate developers.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Seriously, I am a slacker. My last post was April 1 and I apologize. I would like to tell you that this post is going to be chocked full of new content but alas I would be lying. Instead I want to offer up my apologizes and tell you about what is in the works.

New Search Book

About a month ago I was asked to be part of a very cool project. Richard Riley (Sr. Program Manager, Search), Tom Rizzo (Richard's bosses boss), and myself are working on a new book dedicated to Enterprise search. We are hoping to have it out by early fall. I just turned in my last chapter today. Shew! I wish I could tell you more about the chapters but some of the stuff in the book is still under NDA. That is how bleeding edge the information in the book will be. In one place there was nothing to link to so I say "go here and search for X it should be there by now". Anyway, if you are into Search (and who isn't) go ahead and buy the book now. Professional Microsoft SharePoint Search

New Admin Book

Steve Caravajal (Microsoft Enterprise Architect), Todd Klindt (SharePoint MVP and straight man), and me have started our own book endeavor. We have decide to take my SharePoint Administration training class, expand a little, and make it into a book. Tentatively titled Inside SharePoint Administration. As I type this I am building my Windows 2008 VPC so I can right the step-by-step guidance for installing MOSS SP1 and configuring Kerberos in this environment. The book is chocked full of advanced SharePoint administration topics including Power Shell for administrators, backups and disaster recovery, performance optimization, SQL admin, planning and deploying for extranets, and the list goes on. This book will be too awesome.

TechEd 2008

TechEd is quickly approaching and this year I am trying something new. Not only am I doing 3 breakout sessions that will be full of guest speakers and lots of new information and a chalk talk, I am also doing a preconference day. The preconference day will cover Upgrading from 2003 to 2007 and then how things are different now for an administrator. To do this I have teamed up with Todd Klindt again. Oh yeah, did I mention this will be in the hands on lab format? Meaning you will not only get guidance on doing the upgrade but then get to do an upgrade. Too fun. More information here https://www.msteched.com/itpro/public/precons.aspx

I am also a featured speaker this year which is quite an honor. Not sure it gets me much than the cool picture in Silverlight but it is a start.

My sessions are Creating Portals that last (Taxonomy and Governance), Admin 1, and Admin 2. For a list of all session check out this page https://www.msteched.com/itpro/public/sessions.aspx

One more thing about TechEd SharePoint911 and the Ted Pattison Group will be doing a booth so stop by and say hello. The booth will be open both weeks. And if you ask really nicely you may be able to get one of the limited edition t-shirts. As any good vendor we will have a supply of t-shirts for the masses but for the lucky few that know to ask for them we will be giving away a special shirt. I have already said to much but there is 3 different shirts and they…. Well they are just too much to even describe in words. You want one! (and not just to wash your car with)

Ok, I promise to get something geeky and technical up here asap, so stay tuned!

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

I got this in email a couple of weeks ago and thought I would share. Figured it would help a few people searching the web for troubleshooting if nothing else.

<email>

Hi Shane,

We are having a peculiar problem with our SharePoint Farm, that we are unable to resolve, we currently have a case logged with Microsoft, but after 3 weeks of no progress we are trying to find any assistance we can. If you have a few minutes would you be able to have a quick read of our problem and offer us any advice you may have?

We have 2 SharePoint Farms, one for production and one for Testing. Both are configured the same, with the exception of content, the test environment does not have the same content as the production.

Both farms are configured with one server for SharePoint services and a server for SQL Server.

Ok so here is the problem, when running a full crawl the CPU usage of the sqlsvr.exe process on the SQL server hits 100% and stays there.

*Stopping the search service on the SharePoint server results in an immediate drop in CPU usage on SQL. Restarting the service results in an immediate spike in CPU on SQL *Several times the search service has failed to stop and required end tasking the search process from task manager *The crawl appears to run without problem with low CPU usage on SQL and high CPU on SharePoint until it has crawled 3000+ items then the CPU on SharePoint drops and SQL CPU maxes out.

*Resetting the crawled content results in a drop in CPU on SQL. This process has occasionally hung as well requiring the restarting and end tasking of the search service.

*Symptoms are similar to this issue http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2364387&SiteID=17 with the following exceptions:

*There are no SQL errors logged

*And the authoritative pages refresh does not work.

*This problem does not occur in our test environment.

*I have setup our test SharePoint Server to crawl the content on production SharePoint server and it successfully completed the crawl without any problems.

*I have also tried separating the content sources and crawling each one separately. Any one of them causes the CPU spike *I have uninstalled and reinstalled the search service on SharePoint.

*Both our SharePoint Servers have the latest service pack for SharePoint installed already (I didn't think it did, but I tried to install it and it said it was running the latest service pack already).

I know there is a service pack for SQL server available http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=d07219b2-1e23-49c8-8f0c-63fa18f26d3a&DisplayLang=en but our test SQL server is running the same version as our production server and is not experiencing the problem, even when I used the test server to crawl the production server.

Many thanks for your time, and look forward to your reply.

</email>

I guessed it was his SQL Database Index as we discussed previously here. http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/07/23/another-day-another-new-error-message.aspx

It was. :)

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

This came up in class today and one my students Eric knew the answer off the top of his head. It was so simple I thought I would share.

Stsadm –o setadminport –port 5555

This command will change SharePoint Central Administration v3 to run on port 5555. Even cooler? Didn't take a reboot or iisreset to take effect, it just worked.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Even after I put in a good MOSS Enterprise key, did and iisreset, and rebooted. UGH. Why?

Well, it turns out as a final reminder this server once was setup as a basic install, my Central Admin app pool was running as Network Service instead of my farm account. And for some reason Network Service did not have the rights to license the product. Change the app pool, recycle the app pool, and no more error message. UGH

Another new error message because of the Central Admin App Pool being wrong:

An unhandled exception occurred in the user interface.Exception Information: Unable to load DLL 'Microsoft.Office.Server.Native.dll': The specified module could not be found. (Exception from HResult: 0x8007007E)

This message occurred when you went to Application Management > Check services enabled in this farm

Hope this helps people when they are searching the web. I couldn't find any help. S

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Ok kids. First time ever I am pimping my class for cheap through my blog. Come hang out with me next week in Reston and you can either get a 25% discount or buy one full price seat and get a second one free.

You know you have always wanted to spend a week with me geeking out over Advanced SharePoint Administration topics now is your chance to do it cheap. And where better than by our Nation's Capital. Maybe you will see our next President eating at the local Cracker Barrel.

Sign up at the web site – http://www.tedpattison.net/Courses/SPA401.aspx and mention my blog to get the discount.

And don't forget to quote one of my students last week "Shane is smart." What better glowing recommendation could you ask for?

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

Once again it is midnight on a Sunday evening and I find myself working. Oh the joys. :) Anyway, a quick post for you.

SharePoint911 got a new client this week and like many of them they had someone in to do SharePoint before us. And I am the lucky guy who gets to clean up after someone else's half ass attempt to be SharePoint consultants. (I will save my rant for another day.) But as normal even though the client has SQL Server running on the SharePoint box the "consultant" did a basic install of MOSS Enterprise which puts SQL Express on the machine and uses it. As anyone who has taken my class or seen one of my admin presentations this annoys me more than anything. SQL Express has a 4 GB HARD LIMIT on database size! But worse than that basic install uses local system for EVERYTHING which works correctly for about 5 minutes, then the first time you try to do anything with the product it explodes. UGH. So before we start the project I am backing up all of their content and then uninstalling and reinstalling. To me this is the only clean way to get rid of the basic install.

After a reboot to make the server stable again I ran the uninstaller from add/remove programs. This will also automatically install SQL Express. After the uninstall another reboot.

Then I reinstalled MOSS choosing the Complete option. When the installer finished it launched Configuration Wizard.

After specifying the database server, farm account, and password I was prompted to setup Central Admin

Here when I clicked next I got the error message.

An exception of type System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException was thrown. Additional exception information: The system cannot find the path specified.

Why? Because for some reason during the uninstall SharePoint failed to remove the old Web Applications (IIS Sites). So SharePoint couldn't create a Web Application for central admin because a dead one was already in its place. So I went into IIS, deleted everything from the previous install and reran configuration wizard. Everything ran like a charm.

Hope this saves someone a few minutes.

Shane SharePoint Consulting

That it actually does NOT import everything but just pulls the data in on demand? You probably just answered yes you already knew that. So why am I playing the role of Captain Obvious? Well, because possibly if the only thing you ever learned about the BDC prior to this was post was from me you might have gotten the above questions wrong. Brad H. from my Boston admin class emailed me today thinking he had misunderstood me. Nope. He heard me correctly, the problem was I was wrong. I will not rehash what I said wrong but will try to say things correctly from now on.

• You use the Business Data Catalog (BDC) to connect MOSS Enterprise to business data sources (such as PeopleSoft, SAP, Seibel, etc)
• You can display that data using the business data web parts
• You can use the data as metadata in lists or libraries
• You can setup custom actions on the displayed data to interact with it
• You can make the BDC a content source for search, creating full indexes of the data (this is what cause my confusion)
• The BDC is defined and administered at the SSP level (Shared Services Provider)
• The BDC is a MOSS 2007 Enterprise feature only

For more information check out this great full feature information from my buddy Sahil http://blah.winsmarts.com/2007-4-SharePoint_2007__BDC_-_The_Business_Data_Catalog.aspx or the official Microsoft scoop at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/04/18/business-data-catalog.aspx

Anyway my apologies for the miss-information.

Shane – SharePoint Consulting

So it is 1:30 am and I am sitting here trying to hodge-podge a medium server farm together to test a Kerberos issue/theory. My environment is a Windows Server 2008 box as my central admin, WFE, Excel, and query server (physical hardware), Windows Server 2003 VPC as the Index server, and a another VPC (running on another host) playing the role of SQL Server 2005 and Domain Controller. Does it sound like fun? Yeah right.

Anyway, I started getting the error below whenever I tried to start the Office SharePoint Server Search service on the index box.

An unhandled exception occurred in the user interface.Exception Information: Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1).
error CS2001: Source file 'C:\Windows\TEMP\xm7qyq1x.0.cs' could not be found
error CS2008: No inputs specified

Quick search? Nothing. A little playing and guessing and the issue turned out to be permissions. For some reason WSS_Admin_WPG and WSS_WPG did not have the any rights to c:\windows\temp on the central admin server. So I gave wss_admin_wpg full control and wss_wpg read & execute. Fixed everything instantly. I am guessing this is an issue with my random servers (not clean installs for this test) and not a W2K8 issue. Anyway, hopefully the error message and fix saves someone else some time.

Shane

SharePoint Consulting

1/14 –Professional SharePoint Administration – Boston, MA. Come and spend 4 days with me hanging out in Boston. How much more fun can it be? I even promise to teach you some SharePoint in the process. Though former students will also tell you that dumb jokes will be plentiful also. ;)

1/28 - Professional SharePoint Administration – Online version. That is right, you sit at your desk and learn. I sit in my pajamas and teach.

3/3 – The SharePoint Conference – Seattle, WA. I am doing 3 sessions at this fabulous conference in March. If you can only go to one conference this year this would be my pick. They haven't posted all of the sessions yet but the ones I have seen are WOW! Lots of new content will come out this week.

I have a ton more conference and classes scheduled but these will get you started. I just submitted some TechEd Sessions so I will cross my fingers that I get to spread the SharePoint love in Orlando this year. Then I got to start working on the international schedule. Should be a fun year.

Shane – SharePoint Help

I know, I am so cool. LOL

Had some students in my Professional SharePoint Administration class ask about how well the class would prepare them for the exam. I was like "Hell, I don't know?". So I went and took the exam the next day to find out.

I would have to say the exam is not as much hardcore admin as I thought it would be. Really turns out to be more about using the MOSS Standard and Enterprise features. Make sure before you take it you have an understanding of Excel Services, BDC, Forms Server, Content Management features and of course Search. There are a couple of deployment/upgrade questions but nothing too complicated. For more information on the exam check out http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-630.mspx.

I think I am going to go try out Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 070-631 soon. I heard it is harder so should be interesting to see what is on it.

Shane – SharePoint Help

One of the joys of owning your own business is every year in December you decide that you should buy some new business toys. Kind of like a second Christmas. One of the new toys we bought this year was a new server. It is an AMD X2 6000 (3 GHz) with 4 GB of RAM. It is actually a desktop class machine that we use as a server. We actually have 3 of them in this place. They have some fancy Antec case that keeps them from making any noise at all. And since one of them is under my desk that is nice. True server class hardware makes way too much noise for me. Oh yeah, and did I mention the server is like $800. If you want to check it out for yourself look at AlphaPCStore and build your own AMD. I have 3 of these things and they rock.

Anyway the server was slated to run Windows Server 2003 with Virtual Server. (Boring) So instead I decided to load up Windows Server 2008 RC1, SQL Server 2008 CTP, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with SP1. I would like to tell you that it was some big long complicated story…. But it wasn't. Pretty straightforward to do. So I am going to beat on it for a couple more days. If all continues to look good then you can look forward to a post or two on how to set it up. I am just going to format the box and do it all again. Should be fun.

Shane

SharePoint Help

Service Pack 1 for SharePoint is here. The SharePoint Team blog has a great full length article on all of fixes and tweaks. You can read it here Announcing the Release of WSS 3.0 SP1 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1.

This post is just meant to give you the easy version of the install instructions. If you have complex scenarios or have issues I highly recommend you read Planning and deploying SP1 for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server instead of my instructions. Cool?

Ok here is my setup that I am about to patch. Server 1 is the SQL 2005 SP2 database box. Server 2 is a Windows Server 2003 SP2 with MOSS 2007 Enterprise installed. I am doing everything on Server 2. I give you run times on the longer parts for reference points. Your times will vary!

1. Backup SharePoint! Seriously handy little paper here if you need help.
2. Download the software you need. For my servers I downloaded the 32 bit editions. You must install BOTH the WSS and MOSS update if you have MOSS installed.
   1. WSS SP1 downloads
   2. MOSS SP1 downloads
3. Stop the World Wide Web Publishing Services to keep your users off the server.
   1. Start > Administrative Tools > Services
   2. Scroll to the bottom of the list, click World Wide Web Publishing Service
   3. Click the Stop button
4. Install the Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack (total time less than 2 minutes)
   1. Find the downloaded file. For me this was wssv3sp1-kb936988-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe
   2. Double click to run the file
   3. Read the license terms, click accept
   4. Click continue
   5. At the reminder message click OK
   6. Now it starts processing the update.
   7. At the installation complete message click OK
5. Now if you have just WSS skip to step 8
6. If the configuration wizard opens close it.
7. Install the MOSS update (total time less than 2 minutes)
   1. Find the downloaded file. For me this was officeserver2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe
   2. Double click to run the file
   3. Read the license terms, click accept
   4. Click continue
   5. At the reminder message click OK
   6. Now the update processes…
8. Run SharePoint Configuration Wizard (15 minutes)
   1. Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Server > SharePoint Product and Technologies Configuration Wizard
   2. Click Next at the Welcome screen
   3. Click Yes at the warning about restarting services
   4. Click Next at the Completing the SharePoint Product and Technologies Configuration Wizard
   5. Your server is now processing step 1
   6. You will be prompted to now install the updates on other servers in your farm. Click OK since you only have 1 SharePoint server.
      1. NOTE: If you did have multiple servers you would repeat all of the above steps on each of those servers before moving on. Also, if you are wondering you should probably start with the server that host central admin.
   7. Now your server is processing steps 2 through 9.
   8. Speaking of step 8 it took my server approximately 13 minutes to process 4.4 GB of content. I am sure your times will vary. Just don't panic on this step if it takes a while. It is essentially touching all of your content.
   9. At Configuration Successful click Finish
9. Check out Central Admin
   1. Restart the World Wide Web Publishing service you stopped in step 2. If you had to reboot this is not necessary.
   2. Click Operations tab
   3. Under Topologies and Services click Servers in farm
   4. Next to your server you should see Version 12.0.0.6219 not 12.0.0.4518. If you do you should be good to go.

That is it. :)

Shane – SharePoint Help