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By PlateSpinner, July 16, 2008 9:12 am

Yesterday, Microsoft published an “Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)“.  As I look through the list of fixes and read the post from the SharePoint Team Blog, I’m pretty psyched to see what they’ve put in this update.

New Search features such as federated search and a unified search administration dashboard.

This seems to be coming up a lot with larger companies and a few Govt. agencies.  The ability to easily join searches from multiple farms with multiple content.

Several core fixes to Search to improve performance and scale.

Platform performance improvements and fixes.

Both of these could be a very big deal as we are seeing companies and agencies that are really testing the “recommended” boundaries of architecture in things like document libraries, custom lists, and amount of site collections in a web application.  I have seen a document library with 1,000,000+ pdf’s in it.  And it was completely indexed.

Don’t forget to RTFM when installing patches to SharePoint, kiddies.

UPDATE: Browse here for very important installation instructions.

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By PlateSpinner, July 7, 2008 9:41 am

Let’s say you’re using a virtual machine to develop SharePoint on and you need to test some mail alerts.  These instructions will show you how to set up the built-in SMTP on Windows Server 2003 so that it will accept mail and forward it to a production mail server such as a home ISP mail server or your company’s Exchange server for delivery to either another mailbox account or any other e-mail address.  This would allow a developer to enable and test e-mail notifications from SharePoint or any other application.

Follow these instructions to turn on SMTP and set it to use your current mail server as a Smart Host e-mail relay with authentication:

Continue reading 'Set up local SMTP service to relay e-mail to a mail server'»

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By PlateSpinner, July 3, 2008 2:48 pm

Use this procedure to completely blow away a MOSS (or WSS 3.0) farm in 4 easy steps.

Purpose:

The reason this is important is that some people are convinced that they have to uninstall SharePoint or even completely rebuild their box in order to start from scratch.  This is not so.

NOTE:: 

• This assumes you’ve backed up and kept everything you want to keep.
• The psconfig.exe command is located in the “%WINDIR%\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin” folder.
• this does not remove any custom code or other types of files from the 12 hive
• this procedure will keep the SharePoint patch and service pack level of the host so there’s no need to rerun hotfixes or anything

Procedure:

1. From the host that runs Central Admionistration, run this command psconfig.exe -cmd configdb -disconnect to disconnect Central Admin from your database.
2. Run this command: psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -unprovision to unprovision the Central Administration site.
3. Delete all application pools and web sites from affected IIS servers.
4. Delete any SQL user databases related to SharePoint e.g. SharedServices*,SharePoint_AdminContent*,SharePoint_Config,WSS_Search

Now you’re ready to run the Configuration Wizard just as if you had never set up a farm.

TechNet info on psconfig.exe

“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit…  It’s the only way to be sure.“

  – Aliens

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By PlateSpinner, July 2, 2008 12:50 pm

Well I hope everyone had a nice Microsoft Tuesday…

As noted in Mike Watson’s blog, Microsoft has released a rollup of fixes for Content Deployment in the form of the May 2008 package.  I’m going to say this is pretty significant since I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some of the errors fixed by it at client sites.  (Does “Object reference not set to an instance” sound familiar to anyone?)

For WSS:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952698

For MOSS:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952704/

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By PlateSpinner, June 30, 2008 1:02 pm

This is so win I can’t even describe.  Bruce’s ability to make fun of himself is unsurpassed.  And Ted Raimi is there… but what about Sam?  Will there be a cameo from Sam Raimi?

One thing is for sure.  I’ll be in the theater to see it.

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By PlateSpinner, June 23, 2008 10:35 am

I’m a big fan of the changes to the Windows Mobile OS from version 5 to 6.  But 6.1 has got some very compelling stuff added to it.  It looks like the biggest additions are stuff involved with enterprise support.  Obviously they’re going after Blackberry and Blackberry Enterprise Server for corporate use.

Going by history, it may be a very very looong time before AT&T Wireless lets HTC create a distribution for the 8525 (AKA HTC TyTN) seeing as they only released a 6.0 version on Halloween this past year.

Get a look at the feature comparison of the different versions from the Windows Mobile 6.1 site after the jump.

Continue reading 'Windows Mobile 6.1 is here but will I see it on my 8525?'»

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By PlateSpinner, June 12, 2008 2:05 pm

Microsoft just released an update to the whitepaper “Data protection and recovery for Office SharePoint Server” on TechNet.

(direct link to the doc download)

The original version was geared for small or medium farms but the update includes information that is good for and intended for enterprise deployments.

• More info and explanation of using Central Administration (GUI) backups
• More info about stsadm backups
• Included information about using Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2007
• Added a section about using a recovery farm (yay!) as part of your recovery plan

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By PlateSpinner, May 1, 2008 8:01 am

Well it looks like the new “Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit” is now out.  It’s got just two peices of funtionality that is added.  But they look pretty good.

1.  “Batch Site Manager”:  This thing adds a new link in the Applications Management tab of Central Administration that is called “Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections”.  It looks pretty wicked… especially since it allows you to move site collections from one DB to another.

2.  “updatealert” switch for stsadm.exe:  This will allow you to fix email alerts that get broken after you change the URL of a site.

For more information, go here to Zach Rosenfield’s blog.

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By PlateSpinner, April 29, 2008 8:33 am

This is something that tripped me up on a client-site recently.  I installed Adobe’s PDFs IFilter onto a MOSS farm so that PDFs could be crawled.  A week later I came back to check on it and there were consistently 400+ error items in the crawl; all PDF docs.

It took me a while to figure out what went wrong but I had mistakenly installed version 5 of Adobe’s PDF IFilter when I needed to use version 6.  I think this happened because, currently, the Microsoft KB article about crawling PDFs in WSS 3 and MOSS points to version 5.

Adobe’s instructions to install the IFilter v6.0 are very vague.  Apparently this is because they didn’t want to make specific instructions for every search engine out there.  Here is a handy blog post that explains pretty well how to install it on MOSS.

PS:  The newest version of the Adobe IFilter is version 8 and it will have support for 64-bit platforms. Unfortunately, it’s still only in prerelease.  You can find more information about it and download the prerelease version from Adobe Labs.

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By PlateSpinner, March 31, 2008 10:07 am

I had a dream that Rick Astley was a realtor selling a house on my block.

I just wanted to share that.