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| Todd O. Klindt | 3/2/2010 10:05 PM | | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/1/2010 3:03 PM | | 0 | | The last couple of years have been very good to me. A couple of weeks ago another cool opportunity presented itself. Hilton Giesenow of The Moss Show asked if he could interview Shane and I for his show. I was flattered. Anyway, it went up a couple of days ago. You can get to it from here. Enjoy, and let Hilton know how much you liked it. J
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/25/2010 10:34 PM | | 5 | | You don't have to look very hard to see the impact online sales have had on brick and mortar stores. CompUSA is out of business, and even here in Ames the Hollywood Video is closing down, arguably because of competition from services like Netflix. The brick and mortar stores are struggling, no doubt about it. Being an online kind of guy I like to order things online. The selection is nice, the prices are nicer. The fact that I don't have to put my pants on is just icing on the cake. A week ago I got a Droid from Motorola. Not a bad phone and I'm getting used to it. Yesterday I decided to buy the media dock for it. I was more impatient than cheap, so I wanted to pick it up locally. I went to Verizon's site and found it. Their site knew where I was, but didn't show me if it was available for local pickup. Kind of annoying, but I'll let it go. I click the "Find Store" link, get the number for our local store, and dial it. Instead of a human I'm answered by a phone tree. It offered me a bunch of options like get information on my account, other useless stuff like that. There was no option for "see if your local store has something in stock." I ended up picking an option like "talk to a representative about a new line" just to get a human. The whole experience was not what I expected when I dialed a local number for my local store. The guy confirmed they had the media dock in stock. Woo Hoo!
Today after lunch I swing by the store to grab said dock. I was a little excited. As soon as I stepped in the door I was not greeted by a person, but by a rope and a kiosk. In order to step foot into the store I had to "check in." All I wanted to do was take a box off the shelf and pay for it. Nothing else. At this point I was annoyed. There were three people behind the counter, none seemed interested in me, nor were any of them helping anyone in the store, at least not directly. They were all typing furiously with their heads buried in monitors. I looked up and asked the closest guy if I really needed to check in. He explained I did, because there were three people ahead of me. Ahead of me for what??? I just want to take something off the shelf and pay for it! I wanted the media dock though, so I started the check in process. I touched the kiosk to start the check in process. Then I clicked the "Begin Checkin" button. The next screen was it for me. Instead of getting something like "your number is 26" I got form to fill out. Are kidding me?? It wanted me to fill out my full name with separate blanks for First and Last names. All this just to buy a media dock! No way!
So I left. They made it entirely too much work to buy the dock at their store. I ended up buying the dock online. That's right Verizon store at 806 South Duff in Ames Iowa. Your ridiculous check in policy cost you a customer. Not only did I not buy the media dock at your store, I don't plan on buying ANYTHING at your store. It's too much hassle.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/23/2010 9:06 PM | Sharepoint; SharePoint; Netcast | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/17/2010 12:13 PM | | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/4/2010 10:09 PM | | 10 | | As a SharePoint consultant I get to see a lot of things about SharePoint that bug people. This blog post is dedicated to one of those SharePoint annoyances, a GUID at the end of the Central Admin content database.
If you do a regular, wizard driven configuration of SharePoint Central Admin is created. This is the part after the bits are installed, but before SharePoint is configured. The Configuration Wizard runs and if it's a new farm it sets up the farm. Part of that setup is creating the Central Admin web app, and its content database. Web apps in SharePoint can have many content databases. When you add a content database to SharePoint it checks to see if the database exists. If it does, then SharePoint adds the existing database to your web app. If the database doesn't exist, SharePoint creates it, then adds it to the web app. This is important when the configuration wizard creates the Central Admin web app. If SharePoint used a well-known name for the Central Admin content database, like "Admin_Content" then if that database already existed, the existing one would get mounted. This could happen since a SQL instance can hold the databases for many SharePoint farms. To keep this from happening the configuration wizard throws a random GUID at the end of the database name. For some folks, having a GUID in a database name really cheeses them off. To prevent this, you can script the configuration of your farm with a daunting combination of psconfig.exe and stsadm.exe commands. It's not for the faint of heart. Until recently when a customer took exception to the GUIDed database names I was able to tell give them the explanation you just read, explain to them that no other databases will be GUIDed against their well, and we move on.
Recently a customer voiced that same concern, and we had the same talk. Unfortunately they had some 3rd party software that didn't like the GUID in the database name. All my sweet talking was no good. I was forced to find a solution. It took a couple of minutes, then it occurred to me, Central Admin is just a site collection, so I can handle it like any other site collection. I ended up creating a 2nd content database for Central Admin and giving it a more reasonable name. Then I used STSADM's mergecontentdbs operations to move the Central Admin site collection to the new content database. Then we were free to dismount the GUIDed database in Central Admin and delete it in SQL. That made for a happy customer. Below are the steps I took. There's not a man, woman or child alive that doesn't like screenshots. So I've added lots of them to show what I did.
Here's where we start:
Here's how it looks in Central Admin:
First step was to add a new content database to move the site collection to.
Here's the next step
Now we have two content databases:
Next is a screenshot of the next few things I did on the Command Prompt to move the site collection. The line outlined in red is the actual command that moves the site collection.
I used "stsadm –o mergecontentdbs" with the full move option.
Now I can go into Central Admin and delete the GUIDed database. Central Admin will look like this:
There is one final, satisfying step left:
(And the crowd goes wild!)
Hope that helps clean up some SQL instances.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/2/2010 10:41 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 2 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 1/28/2010 7:16 PM | | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 1/7/2010 10:48 PM | | 2 | | This blog post is the heartwarming tale of two warring factions putting their differences aside and working together for a common good. That's right, devs and admins, hand in hand, figuring out this beast we both love called SharePoint.
A couple of days ago I got an IM from a buddy of mine, Dan Attis. Like many of us he's been playing with SharePoint 2010 pretty heavily and that day he had poked it pretty hard and it didn't like it very much. It decided not to work anymore. Dan didn't want to rebuild his VM. Heck, he didn't even want to reinstall SharePoint. So his question to me was essentially, "Is there any way for me to reset SharePoint, without reinstalling it?" Now, keep in mind this was a test dev VM he was working on, it wasn't a production environment of any kind. Because of that I figured I had some latitude. The first thing that came to mind was just creating a new ConfigDB. That resets SharePoint. It's a pretty extreme measure though. I almost felt dirty suggesting it. I told Dan to run the SharePoint Config Wizard and remove the server from the farm. Then run the SharePoint Config Wizard again and instead of connecting it to an existing farm, create a new one. The important step is to give the new ConfigDB a different name than the old one. The server will now essentially be reset with a fresh version of SharePoint. Dan walked through the steps and it did exactly what he wanted. Now he was free to do whatever horrible, torturous things that devs do to SharePoint. Another dev/admin cooperation success story.
Here are screenshots of what it looks like:
The normal config wizard welcome screen.
This is the old, bad farm information. Make sure when you rerun the wizard you use a different name for your ConfigDB than what is listed here.
Click yes, this is exactly what you want to do.
That's all there is to it. The SharePoint binaries are still installed, but it's no longer configured. If you go into IIS you'll notice all your SharePoint related sites have been removed.
Now rerun the Config Wizard and create a new farm.
Click Next.
Click "Create a new server farm."
On the next screen input your farm information. Make sure your Database name is different than what your old ConfigDB was.
You'll have to set up a new farm passphrase, since this is a new farm.
You'll also need to set up Central Admin, since the previous Central Admin instance was removed when the server was removed from your old farm.
That's all there is to it. Look over your settings and hit Next.
Now, fairly quickly you'll have a fresh new SharePoint farm to use, or abuse if you're a dev like Dan.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 1/4/2010 10:40 PM | | 9 | | In the last week I've had two separate incidents where KB973917 was installed on a server and it either prevented a formerly working SharePoint farm from working, or it prevented a clean machine from getting SharePoint installed. I wanted to add a blog post to the chorus of blog posts already out there on this, to make it easier for folks to find.
The first problem I encountered was a MOSS farm running on 64 bit Windows 2003 server. It had been happily running for months. Now all of a sudden whenever someone tried to hit it with a web browser they were met with an "Internal Server Error" and the Application Pool would crash with "Unknown error." The app pool would restart, but would crash again as soon as someone hit it. This was with all web apps, including Central Admin. To make things more confusing, SharePoint itself seemed to be fine. I could use STSADM to do anything STSADM does and it worked great. I could enumerate sites and webs, anything. IIS seemed to be broken, not SharePoint. I asked the customer what they had changed, and they answered, "Nothing." J In their defense, it had been over two weeks since they had applied any patches. Our friend KB973917 was in that list though. I had seen something go across Twitter about a patch breaking SharePoint, but I hadn't paid much attention. I looked through all the patches that had been installed in the last round and started searching on Bing for "<patch> SharePoint." Searching for "KB973917 SharePoint" yielded me a bunch of hits with titles that suggested this might be what I was looking for. Particularly KB2009746 hit the nail on the head and described exactly what I was seeing. Contrary to what the KB said, I did uninstall the evil KB973917, and that alone didn't fix the issue. When I reinstalled SP2 for Windows Server 2003 though IIS started working again, and therefore SharePoint was happy. I probably could have just reinstalled SP2 and been fine.
Today I stumbled onto another problem that was caused by KB973917. I had a fresh build of Windows Server 2008 and I was blessing it with an install of MOSS 2007. SP2 for MOSS was built in. The install went very quickly until it got to the "Applying Updates" part where it installs the patches that are slipstreamed. This went very, very slow. After 35 minutes it crashed, giving me the "Windows is looking for a solution" message box. This was odd. I had heard of something similar to this (though not identical) before, and it was caused by the security on the box being very tight and SharePoint not being able to write to places in the file system and Registry that it needed to. I removed all GPOs that had been pushed down, and disabled UAC and tried again. Same failure. There were no clues in the event log. The SharePoint installer log was very little help, it really only showed this:
Executing command path: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe', args: 'timeout=2950 MsiPath=msxml\msxml6.msi'
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Error: Command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\SERVER12\Server Setup Controller\wrapinst.exe' failed to return after 600000 milliseconds Type: CommandFailed.
Catalyst execution finished: 01/04/2010 12:10:32. Return code: 30008. Exception caught: CommandFailed.
PERF: TickCount=4334578 Name=RunSetup Description=End function
There was my 35 minutes, 600000 milliseconds (10 minutes) at a time. I did some searching and nothing really jumped out. At this point I wondered if something was wrong with the machine, so we jumped over to another machine and tried to install. Same problem. Three attempts, three failures. I tried a few more things to no avail. Almost as a joke I suggested to the customer to uninstall the evil KB973917 and install SP2 for Windows Server 2008. I suggested that only because it seemed the last part of the SharePoint install was trying to configure IIS on the box, and KB973917 broke IIS on the Windows 2003 box I had seen the week before. We did it and SharePoint installed successfully. Another SharePoint casualty of the much maligned KB973917.
I don't completely understand why this patch is wreaking such havoc on IIS and SharePoint. I want to get this post out in case anyone else is having weird problems and can't quite seem to stitch it all together. I've wasted too many hours on this bugger myself, hopefully I can save you folks an hour or two. J
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 12/31/2009 3:08 PM | | 0 | | MOSS 2007 allows you to import profiles from a user store to populate user information in SharePoint. 90% of the time this is an import from Active Directory (AD). While AD is used to store users, it's also used to store other non-user resources like conference rooms and projectors. These are things that you want to have calendars so you can schedule them. That's a good use of technology. However, depending on how your AD is laid out your users and resources end up together in the same Organizational Unit (OU). Unlike chocolate and peanut butter, users and resources aren't always great together if you're using SharePoint profile import. You don't necessarily want all your conference rooms cluttering up your SharePoint profiles. There's good news and bad news about that. The good news is that you can tweak your profile import with LDAP query strings. The bad news is that there are only three people in the whole world that understand LDAP queries. The worse news is that I'm not one of them.
When this comes up there's normally much searching of Bing, gnashing of teeth and swearing when LDAP queries need to be tweaked to fix profile imports on MOSS. It's always a horrible experience for consultant and customer alike. This came up again a couple of weeks ago. A customer had a SharePoint environment that was importing a lot of non-user resources and they wanted it to stop. They had a separate AD team at their company so they couldn't just move the resources into another OU or give them a custom attribute or something easy to search on. I was tasked with finding an LDAP query string that would rid them of all their non-user resources without any help from their AD team. A task nearly impossible for humans. I did find a way…
While trying to figure out how best to accomplish this I asked a buddy of mine, Jason, who deals with AD a lot. I'd link to his blog, but he hates blogs. Probably because he rarely has anything intelligent to post (not that that stops me). So here's your shoutout, Jason. Anyway, as I was whining about my lot in life, Jason came up with probably the only smart thing I've ever heard him say, "Why don't you use ADUC to create your LDAP query strings?"
"ADUC" is the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in used to manage users and computers in your AD. Unbeknownst to me, ADUC has a search function that creates these cursed LDAP query strings with a GUI. More importantly, after you've perfectly crafted your LDAP search string, you can copy it out and paste it right into SharePoint. As an added bonus, ADUC gives you immediate results on your search, so you don't have to run a profile import in SharePoint every time to see if it worked. It worked like a champ for the customer, so I thought I'd outline it all here.
Here's the before picture:
You can see we've got some users here and a whole lot of conference rooms. Here's what our SharePoint profile import settings look like:
We're just importing the whole domain, which is why we're getting all the extra garbage in our imports. Normally we'd set our "Import profile data from" setting to "Custom Source", cross our fingers and hope for the best. We're going to do that, but with a better plan. To start, we'll open up ADUC and start whittling down the results until we get what we want. Normally ADUC is installed only on Domain Controllers (DC) but it can be loaded on any server or workstation version of Windows by installing the Server Admin tools. Let's fire up ADUC and see what our users look like:
I added some extra columns to the Users view to see what information I had to work with. I ended up going with the Job Title column, as all the real users had that populated. Now I just need an LDAP query that says "Only show me objects that have Job Title" populated. No problem for ADUC. Here's a breakdown of how I created the query:
I right clicked on Saved Queries and picked New Query. Then I named it "Only users" and clicked "Define Query." On the next box I clicked "Users, contacts…" from the Find dropdown., then I clicked the Advanced tab. Then I used the Field dropdown to pick a Field and the appropriate Condition and Value that I want. In the screenshot I defined a condition where I only get objects that have a Job Title present. When you click OK the New Query box will show you the query that was created for you. It looks like this:
The Query string at the bottom is what we'll use, if it gives us the results we want. When we hit the final OK box we'll see the results of the query we generated:
As you can see we now are only getting users, which is what we wanted. Now go back in to that query (via Edit) and copy out the Query string. It should look like this:
(&(&(|(&(objectCategory=person)(objectSid=*)(!samAccountType:1.2.840.113556.1.4.804:=3))(&(objectCategory=person)(!objectSid=*))(&(objectCategory=group)(groupType:1.2.840.113556.1.4.804:=14)))(objectCategory=user)(objectClass=user)(title=*)))
That's quite a mouthful. Now we'll paste this in to SharePoint. Go back into your Profile Import settings and select "Custom Source." Then go edit the Content Source, we need to change the User Filter. Paste our new query into there:
Then go back in and run a Full Import of your profiles. Here's what it should look like:
Looks like we pulled it off.
In your organization your query will likely need different formatting to match how your users and resources are configured in AD, but now you have a tool to quickly and easily build these queries and try them out.
Hope that helps,
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 12/29/2009 6:57 PM | Netcast | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 12/27/2009 4:03 PM | | 0 | | In this week's show we cover all my excuses for my two week absense. Then I talk a bit about my trip to India. Then I finish up with some actual technical talk about a SQL Transaction log I had trouble getting under control, and how to use Remote Blob Store (RBS) with SharePoint 2010. As usual, the chatroom was unruly.
MP3 File (Subscribe)
WMV File (Subscribe)
Running Time: 34:18
| | Todd O. Klindt | 12/20/2009 11:18 PM | | 5 | | In my daily perusing of SharePoint blogs a couple of weeks ago I saw a blog post on Jie Li's blog on how to install Remote Blob Store (RBS) on SharePoint 2010. Imagine my excitement! I was under the impression that using RBS was going to be something we were mortals would not be able to use, but here it was. Why was I so excited? Well, with SharePoint 2003 all content had to go in content databases, no exceptions. As people started putting more content, and larger content into SharePoint the question became pretty common, "Can I store my large files outside of SQL?" The answer was always no. Storing files outside of SQL became the holy grail of SharePoint content storage. It would let you take advantage of all the reasons you used SharePoint; metadata, web presentation, workflows, etc. It also let you use storage that was much cheaper than SQL storage normally is. When SharePoint 2007 came out the answer to that question remained the same, "All content must be stored in SQL, no exceptions." However, after a hotfix the support for External Blob Storage (EBS) was added to SharePoint. This was almost what we needed. The hooks were there in SharePoint, but there was no way to actually use them. It was handled much like how SharePoint handles antivirus software. There were hooks into SharePoint for it, but the functionality itself didn't exist in the product. That part had to be handled by third parties or ISVs. Not a lot of ISVs jumped on this, as the interface exposed to them wasn't great, and it wasn't clear what the upgrade path would look like. Again, storing large files outside of SQL seemed just out of reach for the average SharePoint administrator, until now…
That brings me back to Jie's post. I knew that SharePoint 2010 would ship with RBS support, but I wasn't sure what RBS products we'd be able to use. Jie's post not only showed how RBS could be used, but provided an actual RBS provider. That's was pure gold. The RBS provider Jie linked to uses SQL 2008's Filestream support. That works for me. The rest of this blog post is how I installed RBS and got it working.
Again, everything I've done here is based on Jie's blog post and the links inside. Only a couple of things are things I had to figure out myself.
I already had a VM with Windows 2008 R2, in a domain. It had SQL 2008 R2 with the November CTP on it. It also had SharePoint Beta 2 (build 14.0.4536.1000) installed on it, and I had been using it a while. There were several content databases defined with a few site collections. The first thing I had to do was enable Filestream in SQL 2008 R2. I used these instructions on MSDN. Once I had the instructions, it went very smoothly. The only snag I had was I initially ran it as the wrong user. In my VM, SQL is running as contoso\administrator. SharePoint is all running as contoso\sp_farm and that's the account I logged in as normally. That account did not have the permissions to enable Filestream. After I ran it all as Administrator it worked. Now came the fun part, RBS…
In preparation for RBS I created a new Content Database for it to use, since RBS is scoped at the content database level. I used Window PowerShell to do it, since that's what the cool kids are using.
The command I used was New-SPContentDatabase –name WSS_Content_Blob –WebApplication http://shaerpoint –MaxSiteCount 1 –WarningSiteCount 0
Next I went into SQL Management Studio, as contoso\sp_farm, and ran a few TSQL commands to configure my new database for RBS. Here are the commands I used:
Here's the text:
use [WSS_Content_Blob]
if
not
exists
(select * from
sys.symmetric_keys
where name =
N'##MS_DatabaseMasterKey##')create
master
key
encryption
by
password = N'Admin Key Password !2#4'
use [WSS_Content_Blob]
if
not
exists
(select groupname from
sysfilegroups
where groupname=N'RBSFilestreamProvider')alter
database [WSS_Content_Blob]
add filegroup RBSFilestreamProvider contains
filestream
use [WSS_Content_Blob]
alter
database [WSS_Content_Blob] add
file (name = RBSFilestreamFile, filename
=
'c:\Blobstore')
to filegroup RBSFilestreamProvider
I was following the directions from this MSDN post, but I had to make a couple of changes. First, I had to make sure I had the correct database name, WSS_Content_Blob, everywhere necessary. Second, I manually created c:\Blobshare before running the TSQL commands. That was a mistake. SQL needs to make it on its own when you run the third command. Deleting c:\Blobstore fixed that and the command ran successfully.
Next step was to install the RBS bits on the SharePoint servers. (Download RBS_X64.msi) In my case it was pretty simple because SQL and SharePoint were on the same machine, and I only had a single SharePoint server. Here's the command I used to install the RBS bits:
Text:
msiexec /qn /lvx* rbs_install_log.txt /i RBS_X64.msi TRUSTSERVERCERTIFICATE=true FILEGROUP=PRIMARY DBNAME="WSS_Content_Blob" DBINSTANCE="sharepoint" FILESTREAMFILEGROUP=RBSFilestreamProvider FILESTREAMSTORENAME=FilestreamProvider_1
This install seemed to happen immediately. However it kicked off an msiexec service that ran for a couple of minutes. I had to watch it in Task Manager to see when it was finished. I was also monitoring the rbs_install_log.txt file to see when the process was finished. I was looking for the phrase "Installation completed successfully."
If I would have had more SharePoint servers I would have had to install that on all of them, or SharePoint would have been very unhappy.
You can double-check the database was changed correctly if the rbs tables appear in it. That will look like this in SQL Management Studio:
The last step, before feeling the glory that is RBS, is to go back to our old friend, Windows PowerShell and enable RBS on our content database from a SharePoint perspective. Here's what the PowerShell looked like:
Here's one place I had to deviate from the MSDN article. It says the first line should be $cdb = Get-SPContentDatabase –WebApplication http://sitename
That didn't work for me. I suspect the person writing that article had a web application with a single content database, so that command would only return one SPContentDatabase. The web application I was testing this on had three content databases, so $cdb had a collection of SPContentDatabases, which doesn't work for the next line. Reading through the PowerShell it looks pretty clear that $cdb should contain a single SPContentDatabase object. I went through the RBS install three times and had the same behavior each time.
The last step was to test RBS and upload a file and see where it ends up. The rbs_install_log.txt was 1.2 MB and a good candidate for the test. I created a site collection (with PowerShell of course) and uploaded that text file. To see if RBS worked, I navigated the c:\blobstore directory to see if my file was there. Here's what I found:
Looks like it was successful. I went through this three times and it worked every time. I tried various sizes of files and various operations on those files. I added versions, deleted them, added metadata, indexed and searched for them. It all worked just fine.
I hope this blog post inspires some of you to install RBS and play with it yourself. I do have another blog post planned where I go a little more in depth with what I found in RBS.
Have fun,
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 12/10/2009 5:33 AM | | 2 | | Visual Upgrade is capability in SharePoint 2010 that allows you to view upgraded sites as they looked in SharePoint until you are ready to view them in their full SharePoint 2010 glory. Your reasons for this might be user education, or the need to update customizations you have. The Visual Upgrade is scoped at the web level, so all the pages in a web can be rendered as SharePoint 2007 or as SharePoint 2010. There are a few ways to control this. The easiest way is inside of the UI itself, and that is probably how Site Collection administrators will control how webs are rendered. Another option is Windows PowerShell. PowerShell is a great way to take care of this if you have to work with a lot of webs. It has looping capabilities that make this very easy. One scenario were you might want to do this is what a Database Attach upgrade. In this situation you have a SharePoint 2007 (SP2 or later) content database that you attach to an existing SharePoint 2010 farm. While you can force the SharePoint 2010 on the content of this content database when you attach it, that gives you less flexibility. If you choose to preserve the SharePoint 2007 UI you'll need to switch it to the SharePoint 2010 interface eventually. The PowerShell script below will take a Content Database name and determine all the Site Collections in that db. It will then walk through all the webs in those Site Collections and set them to the SharePoint 2010 interface. Let's take a look at it:
$db = Get-SPContentDatabase WSS_Content_SharePoint_2007
$db.Sites | Get-SPWeb -limit all | ForEach-Object {$_.UIversion = 4; $_.UIVersionConfigurationEnabled = $false; $_.update()}
The first line creates a variable, $db, and assigns it an object that represents the content database. Once we have that object, we can use the Sites property to get a list of all the site collections stored in it. Using pipes, we pipe the Site Collection objects through Get-SPWeb to get each web (SPWeb) for each site (SPSite). Once we get the web, we can set the UIversion property of that web to the version we want displayed. Setting the value to 4 gives us the SharePoint 2010 interface. If you want the SharePoint 2007 interface, set UIversion to 3. The next part, $_.UIVersionConfigurationEnabled = $false removes the "Visual Upgrade" option from the Site Actions dropdown. This keeps users from going in and setting the UI back to the SharePoint 2007 interface. Finally we need to execute $_.update() to write our changes to the web.
That's all there is to it. Now all the webs in that upgraded Content Database are using the SharePoint 2010 interface.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 12/3/2009 4:19 PM | | 3 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/24/2009 2:05 PM | | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/12/2009 2:29 PM | | 1 | | After much procrastinating I have finally posted our slide decks from the SharePoint conference. They have been placed here for your viewing pleasure. Those of you that attended our post conference session will notice none of the upgrade material is there. That's because we don't own those slides and legally can't distribute them. Sorry L Attendees of the SharePoint Conference can download Sean Livingston's much better Upgrade deck from www.mssharepointconference.com.
If you have any question, let me know.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 11/11/2009 4:18 PM | | 3 | | Shane and I were preparing some demos for our sessions at TechEd EMEA and we were working with the new Search infrastructure. The changes to Search in SharePoint 2010 are pretty impressive so we were starting from scratch trying things out. One of our first tests was indexing PDFs with Foxit's iFilter. The iFilter installed fine and it makes the necessary Registry changes for SharePoint to use it. I added PDF to the crawled file types and kicked off a full crawl. After the crawl was finished it looked like PDFs were still not being indexed. We double-checked everything and it still wasn't working. After much research and after bothering some folks at Microsoft we found the issue. The Search Service had not been restarted, so it hadn't read the new settings. After running a "net stop osearch14 && net start osearch14" and running a full crawl, our PDF files were indexed correctly. It's been a while since I've installed the Foxit iFilter but my memory is telling me this wasn't necessary before. I'm guessing the Foxit installer bounces the old service name, "osearch", which is why it's not working now, since the service name is "osearch14."
Whether that's what it does or not, if you install an iFilter on SharePoint 2010 and it doesn't appear to work, trying bouncing OSearch14 and running a full crawl. It might work. Or you could reboot the machine, which works too. J
*Note: this was done with pre-release software. That comes with all kinds of craziness. Your mileage may vary*
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/6/2009 12:18 PM | | 0 | | For the last week I've been in the lovely city of Amsterdam teaching 80 lucky IT Pros how great SharePoint 2010 is. This is part of Microsoft's Ignite program. This program was designed to get people fired up about SharePoint 2010. If this week's students are any indication, it's working. I was teaching some of the IT Pro track. I covered the Health and Monitoring, Upgrade and Search sections. The students were very enthusiastic and I had a great time. Hopefully I'll have some time to start blogging about SharePoint 2010. My Ignite adventure is not quite finished; I'll be delivering the same content in Bangalore next month. Next week I'll be in Berlin for TechEd EMEA. Shane and I will be delivering three sessions and hanging out at the Ask The Experts booth. If you're in the area swing by and say "Guten Tag."
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/28/2009 9:36 PM | SharePoint | 3 | |
In this week's episode I recap the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas as well as divulge the secret identity of my new employer. I'm also sporting the runny nose I caught in Las Vegas.
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Running Time: 29:15
Links:
Lori Gowin's blog post
Microsoft SharePoint Conference
SharePoint Saturday
As always, bandwidth for my netcast downloads is generously provided by the superstars at RackSpace. Check them out.
Next week the netcast will likely not be on Monday night due to the SharePoint Conference.
tk
edit: Links fixed. Were previously pointing to wrong files. Thanks to Toni Frankola for catching it. | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/24/2009 12:07 AM | | 8 | | You've heard the rumors, there's been speculation, well, it's happened. Shane Young at SharePoint911 has finally worn me down and I've accepted a position there. My first day was Monday, just in time to announce it at the SharePoint Conference. I don't think it's been decided exactly what my official title will, but I'm guessing something prestigious like "janitor" or "coffee stirrer." Feel free to pop over to their web site and let them know how lucky they are. I'll be taking your condolences and words of encouragement below.
What does this mean for you? Not a whole lot. I'll still be doing SharePoint consulting and still blogging, tweeting and generally being a nuisance on the Internet. If you'd like to employee my services head on over to our web site and drop us a line.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/13/2009 7:47 PM | | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/8/2009 11:04 PM | | 4 | | All of SharePoint's success must have gone to its head. It refuses to use SQL's Model database when it creates new databases. To recap, when databases are created in SQL, they are created using the same settings as System database called Model. Microsoft does a better job than I do explaining it here on MSDN.
When I do my SQL and SharePoint sessions I preach the importance of changing the default database growth settings. Unless you change them your Content Databases will be in Full Recovery Mode. For those that aren't familiar with SQL, this can result in drives filled with Transaction Logs. The databases will also grow at a paltry 1 MB at a time which is laughable for SharePoint. The Transaction Logs grow at 10% at a time, which isn't much better. While Full Recovery Mode is good for production environments, the autogrow settings don't make any sense. I tell folks to change the autogrow settings to something more reasonable like 1 GB at a time, and to pregrow databases so it doesn't have to happen during heavy use. This keeps database file fragmentation low, and users hopefully won't see any slowdowns due to database growth.
I was building a test environment today and I decided to automate some of this. I wrote a script that set my Model database to Simple Recovery Mode and set both data and log autogrow to 100 MB. Neither of those are good production environment settings, but for my test environments they made sense. Imagine my surprise when the next Content database I created had the 1 MB and 10% autogrow settings! It was in Simple Recovery mode, so it wasn't a complete loss. I couldn't believe my eyes. I verified my Model database settings were at 100 MB growth, they were. SharePoint was just dancing to the beat of its own drummer. I reproduced this in a few different farms and had some SharePoint admin buddies of mine verify it.
The moral of this story is that you should pay attention to your database settings and you'll need to manage them manually. You cannot rely on your Model database settings. This is especially important if you have a DBA managing your databases for you. They may expect SharePoint to copy the Model database settings.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/6/2009 9:55 AM | Sharepoint; Netcast; SharePoint | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/4/2009 6:23 PM | | 0 | | In two weeks I'll be landing at McCarran airport for the start of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. I'm very excited. A few folks have asked what my schedule will be. Below are all three of my SPC sessions. I may be helping with another one, but I don't have the detais on it yet. I've also listed a couple of other extra activities I'll be doing. Please feel free to swing by and say "hi." I've included ICS and VCS files in case you want to import these sessions into your Outlook calendar.
Session Title: SharePoint 2010 Administration: Part 1
Speakers: Todd Klindt, Shane Young
Session Date and Time: Mon Breakout 2:45 PM
Session Room: Mandalay Bay Ballroom
ICS | VCS
Session Title: SharePoint 2010 Administration: Part 2
Speakers: Todd Klindt, Shane Young
Session Date and Time: Mon Breakout 4:30 PM
Session Room: Mandalay Bay Ballroom
ICS | VCS
What: Idera Ask the Experts
Where: South Pacific J Room
Speakers: Todd Klindt, Shane Young, Eric Shupps, Errin O'Connor, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough,
When: Monday, 6:00 – 7:30
ICS | VCS
What: Idera Book signing
Signers: Speakers: Todd Klindt, Shane Young, And Steve Caravajal
Where: Idera Booth #813
When: Tuesday, 12:30
ICS | VCS
Session Title: Patching SharePoint 2010
Speakers: Todd Klindt, Shane Young
Session Date and Time: Weds Breakout 4:30 PM
Session Room: South Seas Ballroom C-J
ICS | VCS
Hope to see you there.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 9/29/2009 9:09 PM | Netcast | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 9/22/2009 1:55 PM | | 0 | | | | Todd O. Klindt | 9/22/2009 1:52 PM | | 0 | | In this week's netcast I talk about the Admin Toolkit that really came out. I also discuss some of the public information about SharePoint 2010. Finally I cover why it always seems one leg of a card table is shorter than the rest.
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Running Time: 37:26
Links:
SharePoint Admin Toolkit
SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peak
Bandwidth for my netcast downloads is generously provided by RackSpace. Check them out.
See you next week, where my topic may very well be SharePoint Training. I'll be at the Microsoft Project Conference next week, so I may or may not be broadcasting at my regular time.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 9/1/2009 8:38 PM | | 0 | | In this week's netcast I talk about the CU and Admin Toolkit that almost were. I also talk about little C Drives and the admins that hate them, as well as transaction logs the size of a house.
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Running Time: 35:14
Bandwidth for my netcast downloads is generously provided by RackSpace. Check them out.
See you next week, where my topic may very well be SharePoint 2010.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 8/24/2009 11:56 PM | SharePoint | 0 | | In this week's netcast I extol the virtues of the Best Practices Conference and I walk through the SharePoint patching process with excruciating detail. I also cover why dogs are always so gosh-darned happy.
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Running time: 35:01
Links:
SharePoint Team Blog
SPTechCon
SharePoint Conference
SharePoint Saturday
Bandwidth for my netcast downloads is generously provided by RackSpace. Check them out.
See you next week.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 8/19/2009 7:46 AM | | 0 | | In tonight's episode I cover a maddening permissions problem with SharePoint as well as how to get free SharePoint stuff from Twitter.
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Running time: 32:48
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See you next week.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 8/15/2009 2:22 PM | | 9 | | I stumbled onto a weird problem this week and I wanted to share it with you all. The problem itself is kind of weird, but that's not really what surprised me about it. What surprised me is that it took so long to find and more people aren't having it. Here is the most succinct way I can describe the it:
"When a default quota template is defined for the web app if a Farm Administrator that is NOT the System Account tries to create a site collection where that Farm Administrator is NOT a site collection administrator the creation will fail with an 'Access Denied' error."
That's a mouthful, so let's walk through the steps to reproduce it, which might help explain it some. To reproduce this error you'll need three accounts:
- SP_Farm – This account is used for everything except content crawl. Bits were installed as this user, PSConfig was run as this user. The Timer Job service runs as this user, and all your app pools run as this user. When you log into a SharePoint page with this account the Welcome banner on the top right says "Welcome System Account."
- Todd – Obviously this account can have any name. What's important is that this account is in the Farm Administrators group in SharePoint, and it is used for day to day SharePoint administrative tasks instead of SP_Farm. When you log into a SharePoint page with this account the Welcome banner on the top right does not say "Welcome System Account." It welcomes the user by name instead.
- Jill – This account must be named this. Okay, I'm kidding, it can be named anything. This account is a regular old user account. This account represents someone that called the helpdesk or used whatever process you have for creating a Site Collection. To reproduce this bug you don't actually have to log in as this account, it just must exist.
Now that we've got all the accounts created, let's get down to reproducing the error. Verify the Todd user is in the Farm Administrators group by going to Central Admin > Operations > Update farm administrator's Group. You can make this user a farm administrator by adding them individually, or adding a group they are in. Either way works. Now verify you're logged into Central Admin as this user. You should see this in the upper right hand corner:
If you see "Welcome System Account" instead you're logged in with the wrong account and the problem won't exist.
Next go to Central Admin > Application Management >Web application general settings. Make sure you take note of which Web app's general settings you're changing. I recommend your portal or main content web app for this demonstration. In the Default Quota Template area select a quota as the default. If none show up in the dropdown go to Central Admin > Application Management > Quota templates and create one. The name and the sizes don't matter. Put anything in there. Now go back to Application management and click Create Site Collection. Make sure you're creating this site collection in the same web app that you just assigned the quota to. You can put whatever you'd like as the title, though I've found "Todd is cool" seems to work the best. Same goes for the URL of the new site collection. The important part is that you assign the Jill account and only the Jill account as a site collection administrator. DO NOT put the Todd or SP_Farm accounts as an administrator. Verify at the bottom of the page that a default quota is being applied. You page should look something like this:
I've pointed out the parts that are most import. It's important that a non privileged account is the only administrator, and that a default template is being applied. When you hit Ok to create the site collection you should be greeted with this:
Huh? Todd is a Farm Admin, he should be able to create site collections. What gives?
Well, honestly I don't know what gives. I've pored through the ULS logs and I have yet to determine exactly what Todd doesn't have access to. Here's what I do know, if I hit the back arrow and add Todd as a site administrator, the error goes away. I also know that if SP_Farm tries to create a site collection with just Jill as an administrator, it works. I also know that if I go back to the web app general settings and remove the default quota template, now Todd can create Jill's site collection. I have no idea what triggers that error. I have confirmed it on SP2 (build 6421) and the June CU (build 6510). I also know you get this behavior whether you use Central Admin or STSADM.
A couple of other notes. It seems the site collection creation process gets started, but is interrupted before it can complete. You'll notice the site collection you tried to create does not exist if you try to browse to it, or list the site collections in Central Admin or with STSADM. However, enough of it is written to the content database that if you detach the content database it was going into and reattach it, the site collection is now there. It doesn't have a template, but it's there. Go ahead, try it, I'll wait…
This is because the entries for the site collection are created in the ContentDB's Sites table, but are never written to the ConfigDB's sites table. When you attach a ContentDB SharePoint walks through its Sites table to see what site collections exist in it, and it adds them to the ConfigDB's Sites table. I mention this because your Site Collection count will jump if you ever detach and reattach this ContentDB. Also, it doesn't matter what quota template is picked on the site collection page itself, it only matters if a default has been chosen for the web app. If you DO have a default chosen but set it to "None" when you create the site collection, it still fails. If you DO NOT have a default chose, but chose a quota at site collection creation, it does not fail. I have no way to explain this.
While this problem is completely nonsensical that's not what was the most surprising to me about it. I'm surprised that after three years of using the product I've never stumbled across this. It's the meeting of several best practices I preach. I tell people to always set quotas from the beginning, even if they think they'll never need them. I tell people not to use the SP_Farm account for day to day tasks. I tell people to put the user in charge of the site collection and not to make IT manage things at that level. Somehow though, those things have never converged to create this problem before this week. Weird. I did find one forum thread about this problem as I researched. When I scrolled down and saw that one of the guys trying to help the poster was me, I knew he and I were both in trouble. J
This doesn't seem to be a big problem, and the workarounds are easy. Any one of the following things will get you around this issue.
- Don't set a web app default quota
- Create site collections as the System Account
- Add your farm user as an administrator when you create the site collection, then immediately remove them
Any of those will get you around this. I spent the better part of four days trying to get this figured out. I hope this blog post helps at least one person and saves them some time and frustration.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 8/12/2009 9:35 PM | | 1 | | In this week's netcast I talk about file upload issues, Booting Windows 7 a few different ways, and my secret recipe for chicken tartar, without chicken or tartar.
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Running time: 30:49
Next week's netcast should be recorded at the normal time, Monday 8:30 PM CDT. Hope to see you in the chat room on Stickam.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/30/2009 11:13 AM | | 6 | | Time for me to wax nostalgically. I remember the good old days when the only thing that really kept users from uploading files was the "Max Upload Size" setting in Central Administration. But alas, times change and things get more complicated. Now when files won't upload there's a whole laundry list of things to look at. And if you're like me, laundry lists are not your forté. Just ask my wife.
This came up this week as I was trying to upload my netcasts to my shiny new hosted web space. The rock stars at Rackspace have graciously agreed to host my media files. While I'm sure it's because they're great people, part of me thinks it's self serving so they don't have to suffer through the slow downloads of getting the files from my current setup. J
Once we got the site provisioned I started the task of uploading all of my previous netcasts to the new spot. That's when the hilarity began. I won't take you through every single foible, but here is a list of things to check if you're having problems uploading files to SharePoint:
- Web App upload setting: This is the most obvious thing, and the one you should check first. Go to Central Admin > Application Management > Web App General Settings (/_admin/vsgeneralsettings.aspx). You should always start there.
- While we're in the Web App general settings, take a look at your Web Page Security Validation settings. If you're uploading large documents across a slow connection, the page security could time out before the file gets up there. Increase that value as needed from its default of 30 minutes.
- While we're in Central Administration, let's make sure your file type isn't blocked. Go to Operations > Blocked File Types (/_admin/BlockedFileType.aspx) and make sure your extension isn't listed. This is a web app specific setting, so make sure you're changing the setting for the correct web app.
- Now we're going to hit some obscure settings. By now you should be using Windows 2008 (and it better be 64 bit, too!). With Windows 2008 came many improvements, including IIS 7. While IIS 7 includes all kinds of great improvements, it also quietly brought with it an upload limit. Regardless of what you do in SharePoint, IIS 7 out of the box limits you to around 30 MB uploads. KB 944981 covers how to increase this. However, the instructions aren't completely correct. Make sure you backup your web.config before changing it. My experience has been that you need to make the recommended additions between the </configSections> and <SharePoint> tag. Otherwise it'll break your web app. Also keep in mind this is a web app specific setting, so make sure you're editing the correct web.config.
- You can also change the IIS connection time out for your web app. In IIS 7 find your web app's site in the IIS Manager and click the "Limits" link on the right in the "Actions" pane. The default is 120 seconds. Feel free to make that much longer.
- Finally, since upload.aspx is an application page it has its own web.config settings. You can read how to increase its timeout settings in KB 925083. This is one I've had to do a lot.
That's about it. That last KB article has some other guidance on how to troubleshoot upload errors. This blog post is better, of course. J If you've had to do other stuff to fix file uploads, leave me some comments. I will cover this in more detail in next week's netcast. Thanks again to the fine folks at Rackspace for putting up with me.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/28/2009 10:19 AM | | 1 | |
In this week's netcast I cover a few installation issues I've encountered in the last couple of weeks. I also cover some of the rules of the "TK's Netcast Drinking Game." Finally I talk about a sure fire way to avoid poison ivy.
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Not sure what time next week's netcast will be recorded as I'll be on the road. Keep an eye out here and on Twitter for updates.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/26/2009 10:27 PM | | 0 | | The people have spoken, and it seems like Monday evenings are better for the live recordings of my Netcast. Your wish is my command. My next netcast will be recorded Monday July 27th at 8:30 (or so) Central Time in the US. As always you can join in live via Stickam and you can grab the old recordings here. Thanks to everyone that commented, tweeted and emailed me.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/21/2009 7:57 AM | | 6 | | In this week's episode we try, and fail, to solve a viewer's problem. We also discuss the June CU and what to do when planning a SharePoint deployment. Finally we cover why kids say the darnedest things.
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tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/14/2009 7:36 AM | Sharepoint | 0 | | In this week's netcast I cover the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peak that was released by Microsoft. I also cover automation techniques that SharePoint admins can use. It promises to be more entertaining that watching grass grow.
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tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/9/2009 11:13 PM | Sharepoint | 6 | |
I got a tweet this morning from Laura Rogers about STSADM. She wanted to know if a site template had to be added with "stsadm –o addtemplate" before you could use it with "stsadm –o createweb." I have to admit, I didn't know the answer off the top of my head. I could convince myself either way. I ended up having to test it before I came to a conclusion. Before I get to whether it works or not, some background on why it's even a question…
If you've been to any of my SharePoint admin sessions or classes you're familiar with me preaching that Site Collections are the administrative and security boundary in SharePoint. This means that a user given permissions to one Site Collection cannot automatically get into another Site Collection without being given permission to it as well. Site Collections also are boundaries for resources kept in Site Collection galleries, like web parts, content types and site templates. Because of this boundary it's possible for administrators in one Site Collection to create resources that are only visible in their Site Collection. How does one do that? First, we have to be clear about the terminology we're using, because it gets confusing here. First we have the Site Collection. That's the boundary, the bag. Then we have the things that go into Site Collections. Here's where it gets confusing. Sometimes the SharePoint interface calls those things Sites, and other times it calls those things Webs. They're the same thing. This blog will be particularly confusing because it's one instance where the name changes frequently. Assume if something is not called out as a Site Collection, it's a web. Back to the question, how does a Site Collection administrator add new Site (really web) templates to their Site Collection? They take an existing Site (still really a web) and mock it up the way they want it. Maybe they add some pages, drop some web parts on some pages, maybe even upload a document or two. Once they get it juuuuust right, they save that Site (did I mention these are webs?) as a Site (web) Template. When they do that it's added to the Site Collection's Site (web) Template gallery. From that point on, anyone in the Site Collection that has permissions to create a Site (web) in that Site Collection can use that new Site (web) template to do so. The beauty of this is that no one outside of that Site Collection can see that Site (web) template. If you go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Galleries > Site Template Gallery you can see the Site (web) templates that have been created.
That's all fine and dandy, but what if that Site (web) Template is so awesome that someone else wants to use it? SharePoint's got your back, and provides a way to share Site (web) templates. If you have a Site (web) Template in your Site (web) Template Gallery, hover over it. You'll see it's a hyperlink. If you click it, your browser will try to download an STP file. That STP file is a Site (still typing web here) TemPlate file. You can give that STP file to an administrator for another Site Collection. If they upload it to their Site (you guessed it, web) Template Gallery now they can use it too. Pretty nifty, eh? So far this setup is working pretty well. But what happens if you have hundreds, nay, thousands of Site Collections? This approach doesn't scale very well at all. Once again, the fine folks at Microsoft were thinking ahead and they provided a way for you to take that STP file and make it available to the entire Farm in one step. How do you accomplish such a Herculean task? I'm glad you ask. First you download that STP file. Then you give it to one of your Farm Administrators. They log into one of the SharePoint boxes and use the STSADM operation "addtemplate" to add your template to the farm. Now everyone will see it when they create a Site (stick with me here, web) in the interface. The bottom line is that SharePoint allows you to keep Site (web) Templates private to a Site Collection or make them available to the entire Farm, whichever suites your needs best.
Back to Laura's question. She wanted to know if she could specify a custom Site (thanks for sticking with me, web) Template if she was creating the web not through the UI, but with "stsadm –o createweb" (see, they call it 'web' here. I told you!). I know that when the Site (do I need to keep typing 'web' here) Template is created it's added to the Site Collection, so it's in the Content DB. In theory STSADM could look for the Site (yup, web) Templates the target Site Collection had when creating the web. On the other hand I knew that the "addtemplate" operation put them someplace else, and maybe that's the only place STSADM looked when executing "createweb." To solve this I tested it myself. I created a custom Site (almost finished here, web) Template and then tried to use it when creating another web in that Site Collection with "stsadm –o createweb." It failed. It said that was an invalid template named. Executing "stsadm –o enumtemplates" showed me what template names were valid. Of course mine was not in that list. Once I added my Site (last time, I promise, web) Template to the farm with "stsadm –o addtemplate" I could use it with the "createweb" operation.
I hope that all made sense. The fact that Microsoft chose to refer to these objects as "sites" in the UI most places and "webs" in other places makes this very difficult to explain. I hope it all made sense.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/6/2009 2:55 PM | | 5 | | In this week's netcast I talk about the June CU and the LSASS loopback checker as well as why I have no business doing Internet video broadcasts.
Next week's netcast won't be recorded on Monday morning. Right now I'm not 100% sure when it will be. Stay tuned her and on Twitter to find out when I decide to record it.
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Enjoy,
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/3/2009 8:47 PM | Sharepoint | 1 | | Last year I did a blog post on how I use Log Parser to peruse the IIS logs from this site to see how many people come here, what they look at, where they come from, etc. Those of you that have seen me at conferences or talked to me in person have no doubt heard the hilarious byproduct of that. Seems a few images on my web site are very popular with the kids at MySpace. They really like that yellow bird image as their background. While I'm flattered by the attention, honest I am, they seem unable to copy it down, so they're all hotlinking off of my site. That's right, these hoodlums are stealing bandwidth right out of the hands of you hardworking SharePoint enthusiasts. Every time you go to download one of my blog posts or a netcast recording those guys are slowing you down. I decided I wouldn't stand for it anymore; I was going to do something about it to defend your honor. In the past I've gone through my IIS logs to see which MySpace pages are stealing my images, then I swap something hysterical out in its place. Hilarity ensues. Unfortunately I only remember to do it every few months and it results in a bunch of renamed images and trash on my site. I needed to be proactive, not reactive. I needed to find a way to handle traffic from MySpace automatically, not by hand like I had been. Our Apache using friends have been using mod_rewrite for years for this functionality. (we get SharePoint, they get mod_rewrite, seems a fair trade to me) In the past there has never been a good mod_rewrite module for IIS. Until now, that is. A few months ago I moved all of my SharePoint servers to 64 bit Windows Server 2008. This means my servers are running on IIS7, which has a modular design that IIS6 didn't have. In cruising around on IIS.net I found an IIS URL Rewrite Module. That's perfect!
I downloaded the module, and like a good SharePoint admin, I tested it in a VM to see if it did what I wanted. The first time I installed it, it killed the VM. L To avoid that, pay close attention to the "Important" instructions on the download page. Make sure and stop the services they suggest. To be safe the second time I stopped all IIS and SharePoint related services and it worked. Fortunately my test VM and my production server are VMs in Hyper-V, so I made snapshots before I installed it. If you've got that opportunity, I recommend taking it.
After I got it installed configuring it was pretty easy. It shows up as a module called "URL Rewrite" in IIS Manager. Double-click it to open up the rules page. It should look like this:
From the screenshot you can see that I've got one rule defined right now. Let's walk through creating another one. For now, I just want to block any requests that have a referrer from the Myspace.com domain. To create it we'll start by clicking "Add Rules…" on the right. You'll get a dialog box like this:
We want "Request blocking" so click that and hit OK. We want to block requests based on the referrer, so select that from the dropdown. Leave "Matches the pattern" for the requests that are blocked. For referrer pattern put in http://*.myspace.com/* and leave the Using as "Wildcards" and set "How to block" to "Abort Request." The finished dialog should look like this:
That's all there is to it. You have a lot of options when editing the rule. Feel free to poke around and see what you can do. You can do some pretty amazing things. If you want to test the referrer rules you can use Quick Spoof to spoof referrers on URL requests. The details of the rule will show up in the web.config file for your web app. If you're curious how they're defined, pop it up and take a look.
You may be wondering how well this works with SharePoint. I can saw that it's worked great for the last 24 hours. J The module has support for rewriting and redirecting URLs, but I didn't have much luck with them. I would have loved to have the image requested from the MySpace users be replaced with something more…racy, but in the time I spent playing with this I couldn't get it to work. If you have better luck, let me know.
I hope this helped some of you fight off those evil bandwidth stealers.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 7/1/2009 2:13 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 0 | |
While I was out at SPTechCon Laura Rogers and Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint did a quick interview of me. They were really bored that day. It's a pretty short watch, about 6:30.
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I also got the word today that I was reawarded the MVP award from Microsoft. It's been a great ride and I'm very grateful to have been given the opportunities I've been given. Congratulations to all the other MVPs that have gotten the nod today.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 6/29/2009 3:14 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 0 | |
In this episode I talk about the topics that came up at SPTechCon and announce some sessions at the SharePoint conference. I also discuss the physics behind why a watched pot never boils. The video is jerky, it's not just you. (Unless you're listening to the MP3 version, then the video is great and I might be more handsome than ever)
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tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 6/26/2009 10:11 AM | | 6 | | In last week's netcast I hinted that I'd be at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and had something to announce. The story broke earlier this week. Shane and I will be doing a post conference workshop on Friday October 23rd. We will be covering, in excruciating detail, SharePoint 2010 installation and upgrading to SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint 2007. There will be lecture as well as a couple of hands on labs. If we have time we may even cover how to stick Teflon to a pan when nothing sticks to Teflon. Here's the abstract we submitted:
Prepare yourself for the upcoming SharePoint Server 2010 Public Beta! Come and spend a full day with SharePoint IT Pros and Microsoft MVPs Todd Klindt and Shane Young as they cover install of SharePoint Server 2010 as well as upgrade scenarios from Office SharePoint Server 2007. They'll cover the gotchas of the install as well as potential pain points you might encounter when upgrading in your organization. After this session you'll have all the information you need to wow your boss and coworkers as well as get SharePoint Server 2010 beta up and running in your organization.
Space is limited to 150 people and the cost is only $400. If you've already signed up for SPC you should have gotten an email about this with instructions on how to sign up. If you haven't already signed up for the SPC this sounds like a perfect reason to do so. J If you're the developer type and are afraid to come into our session, don't worry, you'll have a blast and learn a lot. You may be the butt of a few jokes, but it will all be in good fun. If you still don't want to come there is another option. Andrew Connell and Ted Pattison are doing a Developer Deep Dive workshop at the same time. You can't go wrong with either one.
See you at SPC.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 6/17/2009 9:52 PM | | 3 | | It just dawned on me that I have done almost nothing to let you folks know about the webinar I'm doing tomorrow for Idera. They have graciously allowed me to do another webinar on SharePoint and SQL for administrators as part of their Secrets of SharePoint series. It's 100% free. Just sign up and tune in tomorrow at noon Central time. I'll be talking about using SQL and doing stuff like mirroring, log shipping and how to move your SharePoint farm from one SQL instance to another. It should be a good time. Don't worry if you missed my last webinar, I'll recap the important stuff tomorrow.
I'll be augmenting the webinar by streaming live on Stickam. You won't be able to see the slides or demos there, but you'll be able to see my smiling face.
So please join us tomorrow.
Thanks,
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 6/15/2009 11:46 AM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 0 | |
Get it while you can, Netcast #13 is up. Get it while you can, who knows when this server is going to tank next. J
In this week's netcast I talk about recent changes to my website that have resulted in downtown. I cover the STSADM operation mergecontentdbs and I cover some community activities. I also explain where that lost sock goes.
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You may have noticed I jumped from #11 right to #13. Many places skip 13, not me, I skip 12. Seriously with the site outages 12 was going to go up late, and then when I listened to it I realized the audio was horrible. Just terrible. And I'm not just referring to Shane's voice. I put them up anyway, but it won't hurt my feelings if you don't listen to them.
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Sorry about 12.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 6/12/2009 11:46 PM | Sharepoint | 0 | | Once again I left my house and took my web site down. This time it was my old nemesis, the maxAllowedContentLength setting. After last week's meltdown I had to rebuild my farm. That means new web.config files all around. Before I tried to upload Netcast #12 (it really does exist, honest) I changed that setting so I could upload the file. I was in a hurry because I needed to get on the road for SharePoint Saturday Chicago so I didn't get around to uploading the file. Apperently I did have time to break my site. Those of you that suffered through my first few webcasts remember the hijinks from when I had to enter it the first time. Well, everything old is new again. I put it in the wrong place and screwed up my web.config. Since you're reading this now, you know I got it working. I just removed it, so there's still a chance for me to screw it up again when I add it. Fun, fun.
The good news is that I made it to Chicago and I'm stoked about SPS tomorrow. I hope to see a few of you there. Please stop by and say Hi if you see me.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 6/11/2009 2:17 PM | | 0 | | Some of you may have noticed that my site was down for a few days. I had a hardware failure that started about 30 seconds after I left the house for a trip to Seattle. I had my lovely wife do some troubleshooting for me and it turns out my SQL server blew a drive, the drive my databases are on of course, and it was stuck in Check Disk. I had her shut it down to hopefully reduce any damage that had been done. Practicing what I preach, I was mirroring my Content Databases to another SQL instance. I wasn't, however, mirroring my Config DB. That kept me from just setting up a SQL alias and bringing it all back up. When I got home yesterday I tried to recover my Config DB but it was dead. I rebuilt the farm and attached my Content DBs and I'm back up and going. I have the Netcast I recorded Monday morning, but I haven't edited it yet. Hopefully I'll get that online today.
Thanks for your patience everyone.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 6/1/2009 2:13 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 0 | |
In this week's netcast I talk about where different aspects of SharePoint content and configuration are stored. I talk about in the context of disaster recovery and what challenges can come up. I also cover why your keys are always in the last place you look.
As always, I welcome your comments. Next week I'll be recording the netcast at a different time. Stay tuned here for more details.
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tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/26/2009 2:28 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 4 | |
In this netcast I cover some Hyper-V gotchas that may affect SharePoint. I also cover a dirty little secret of SharePoint 2007 SP2 while extolling the virtues of the April CU.
This is the blog post to comment on for the contest I mention at the end of the Netcast. Good luck
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tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/23/2009 10:08 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 1 | |
Because of the Memorial Day holiday I won't be recording next week's netcast on Monday morning like I usually do. Instead I'll be recording it Tuesday morning instead. Same time, 8:45 AM Central Time. I will be doing some giveaways, so for an unfair advantage, watch the recording live at Stickam.
See you Tuesday, and happy Memorial Day.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/22/2009 8:44 AM | | 0 | | As you may have read on my blog, SP2 for SharePoint 2007 came out a month ago. The SharePoint Team Blog announced a teensy tiny little problem they've found with SP2. It seems that when you install SP2 on a SharePoint product that is licensed (MOSS, Forms Server, Project Server and Search Server) SP2 resets the license back to a trial license. Now, on the surface this might seem like a big deal, but I don't think it is. First, the trial is 180 days, so you have six months from the time you install SP2 to fix the issue. That's six months of everything working just fine. The other reason I don't think this is a big deal is because the fix is as simple as just reentering your non-trial license key. Overall, I don't think it's a big deal.
You can get the whole story on this at the SharePoint Team Blog. If you leave a comment, go easy on them. J
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/18/2009 2:55 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 0 | |
I've uploaded netcast #9 "TechEd 09 - We love L.A. (we love it)". In this episode I do a recap of TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles. I cover some of the topics covered. I also spend time talking about how to rescue yourself from a Basic Install, and how to break up Site Collections.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/13/2009 11:54 AM | | 2 | | Another fun filled day at TechEd. I had my first breakout session on Tuesday. Shane and I did a session on Disaster Recovery called "Saving one SharePoint installation at a time." The crowd was pretty lively and it went well, despite, or maybe because of me not having much voice. J Bribing them with books might have helped. Shane and I's TechEd Online video is now online. It's not too bad. I spent a few hours at the Office TLC and got to meet a lot of great people. If you're at TechEd I'll be back there today as well. Stop by and say hi.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/12/2009 1:00 AM | Sharepoint | 1 | |
Whew! Today was a big day here in Los Angeles. It started off with the keynote. A lot things were shown and talked about, but I'm not going to cover any of the non SharePoint content. The big news for us was the release of the software and hardware requirements for SharePoint 2010. This was also echoed on the SharePoint Team Blog by Rich Riley. It breaks down to this:
- SharePoint 2010 will be 64-bit only.
- SharePoint 2010 will require Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2
- SharePoint 2010 will require 64-bit SQL 2008 or 64-bit SQL 2005
We already knew #1, that's been on the street Since November of 2007. The last two points were new information. If you've gone to any sessions I've done in the last year you know I've been telling people to move to 64-bit now as well as Windows 2008. It's more important now than ever. You should up to speed on both of them now so that when the public betas of SharePoint 2010 come out you'll be ready to drop it into your environment and start playing with it. Don't forget your development and test environments will also be held to these requirements. If your developers are developing in virtual environments they'll need to be able to virtualize 64 bit guests to play with SharePoint 2010.
Rich also mentioned that Internet Explorer will not be supported in SharePoint 2010. The Tier 1 browsers will be IE 7, IE 8 and Firefox 3.x on Windows platforms. SharePoint 2010 will also support Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows OSes. For those of you with large installations running IE 6, you'll need to start looking at upgrading your desktops as well.
Shane and I recorded a short video for TechEd Online. It should be up under TechTalks under the Office and SharePoint channel. Once it's published I'll try to get a direct link. In it we covered some common SharePoint installation problems we see and how to avoid them. It's good information for both the new and seasoned SharePoint administrator.
Some of you have probably noticed there's new netcast this week. Never fear, I haven't given up on them. Two things have gotten in the way. First, I've been pretty busy talking to attendees and vendors. Second, I'm losing my voice. L I've caught a bit of a cold and I can hardly talk. It wouldn't make for a very good netcast right now. Hopefully my voice will improve over the next couple of days. I apologize ahead of them to anyone sitting in on my sessions this week.
Finally, the folks at Idera sponsored a book signing tonight at their booth. It was a blast. Thanks to all the people that stopped by. It was great talking to everyone.
It's late and I need to get to sleep. I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. Hopefully my voice comes back. I'll try to post updates to Twitter. You can also search using the hashtag #teched.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 5/11/2009 1:27 AM | Sharepoint | 0 | | Today was Shane and I's preconference session on Governance. We had a great crowd and we had a lot of good discussion. Thanks to all of you that put up with us all day. :)
You can download our slides here.
If you're at TechEd this week, swing by the TLC and say hi. I should be around all week.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/8/2009 11:10 PM | Sharepoint | 1 | | Tomorrow morning I hop on a plane for sunny Los Angeles California for TechEd 2009.I thought I'd post my schedule here. I'd love to hear from you if you're going to be at Teched.
Sunday 10:00 – 6:00 – PreConference Governance session
Sunday 7:00 – whenever - SharePint
Monday 11:00 – 11:30 – Tech Talk "SharePoint – What could possibly go wrong?"
Monday 7:30 – 8:00 – Book Signing at Idera vendor booth. They're giving away 40 copies of my book.
Tuesday 10:15 – 11:30 – OFC310 - Saving the World, One Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment at a Time: Backup and Disaster Recovery (Room 502A)
Wednesday 1:00 – 2:15 - OFC404 - Exploring Proper Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Installation and Topologies (Room 150)
Thursday 8:30 – 9:45 - OFC409 - SharePoint Admins, the Reluctant DBAs (Room 152)
I'll probably be hanging out at the SharePoint Technical Learning Center (TLC) when I'm not up on stage. Feel free to swing by and say Hi. I'll also be recording my weekly netcast sometime Monday. Not 100% sure when that's going to happen.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 5/4/2009 2:28 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 0 | |
Another week, another truly spectacular SharePoint netcast recorded. This week I cover SharePoint 2007 SP2. I cover what features have been added, like STSADM operations and FBA support as well as things that have been fixed and why we drive in a parkway and park in a driveway. I also introduce my new Intro in this episode, courtesy of Darvish Shadravan. Finally for each unique IP that downloads a copy before May 11th I will donate one item to a local food pantry. Tell your friends.
I have moved most of the netcast specific content to http://www.toddklindt.com/netcast. This is the last week the netcasts themselves will be stored here in /blog. Please update any subscriptions you have. I will continue to announce each new recording here though.
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enjoy,
tk
P.S. Looks like a production problem. :) Taking offline to fix. Will update here when ready.
P.P.S. All fixed. | | Todd O. Klindt | 4/30/2009 5:30 PM | | 2 | | By now you've had a couple of days to play with SP2. Hopefully the install went well. There's some new stuff in it that I want to show you. In this post I'll tell you about the new STSADM operations that are introduced. I did an "STSADM" on a box running SP1 and the Infrastructure Update (build 12.0.0.6318) and on a box running the hot off the presses SP2 (12.0.0.6421). There are six STSADM operations in SP2 that aren't there before. To make it fun, I'm going to list them in order of how excited I am about them.
#6 – variationsfixuptool
This operation alerts you to problems you might have with any variations like orphaned pages. It'll also force a variations timer job to run. You can find out more about it in this article on TechNet. I don't use variations much, so this operation while much needed, doesn't really get my motor running.
#5 – exportipfsadminobjects
Do you use Infopath a lot? Then this operation might be for you. It stands for EXPORT InfoPath Form Server ADMIN OBJECTS. I'm not entirely sure what this does, but it appears to backup forms and configuration that is uploaded to your farm. Unfortunately there isn't an associated IMPORTipfsadminobjects operation, so I'm not sure what to do with it. It sounds cool though. I'm an admin, I like backing stuff up.
#4 and #3 – setqueryprocessoroptions and listqueryprocessoroptions
I couldn't really split these two up, so they share an entry. These two options let you list and set five parameters of your search environment. The following settings are exposed: (blatantly stolen from 'stsadm –help setqueryprocessoroptions)
securitytrimmingcachesize <security trimming cache size>
securitytrimmingmultiplier <security trimming overfetch multiplier>
nearduplicatemultiplier <duplicate removal overfetch multiplier>
joinmultiplier <join discard overfetch multiplier>
sdidjoinmultiplier <missing security descriptor overfetch multiplier>
These settings are per SSP. Use listqueryprocessoroptions to see what your current settings are and use setqueryprocessoroptions to change them. Now that search is heavily integrated in WSS as well as MOSS, this is really handy. Descriptions of the settings can be found on TechNet.
#2 – enumallwebs
This little number is pretty cool. We already have an "enumwebs" operation. Why in the world would we need an "enumALLwebs" function, you might ask? Well, I'll tell you why. Before SP2 came around if we wanted a list of webs for a particular parent all we had was the enumwebs operation. Its major failing was that it didn't recurse. It only showed you the webs directly under the URL you gave it. It would not show you the subwebs of those webs. You only got one level. Enumallwebs gives you ALL the webs a given site collection. Heck, it gives you all the webs in a given database. It also gives you tasty nuggests like SiteIDs and WebIDs, Language and Site Template. I can't count the number of times I've gotten the question "How can I tell what template was used for a site?" Now I can answer with confidence "stsadm –o enumallwebs." You can find out more from TechNet.
Drum roll please…
#1 – preupgradecheck
The one we admins have all been waiting for, preupgradecheck. The one is worth the price of admission alone. Like its predecessor, prescan.exe, this operation walks through your farm and databases and alerts you to any problems you might encounter when it comes time to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. It supports external rule files, so you can tell it about any 3rd party software you've installed. It comes with a default rule file, so all you need to do is run "stsadm –o preupgradecheck" to see what it does. I have been assured that it makes no changes to your databases, so it's completely safe to run. I've run it on several of my systems and haven't found any indication otherwise. The official TechNet article gives a little more information. Hopefully time will permit me to write a whole blog post on it. There's a lot of cool things to see.
That's it. Those are the six new STSADM operations in SharePoint 2007 SP2. I'll be talking a little more in depth about SP2 in 8th weekly netcast. Be sure to check it out.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 4/28/2009 10:52 AM | Sharepoint | 3 | | The day has finally come. You can download SP2 for SharePoint 2007. Here's a couple of links to get you started:
Download WSS SP2
Download MOSS SP2
SP2 is all inclusive. It will install on the non-SP1 RTM of SharePoint 2007 and all build numbers forward. If you have MOSS, remember you need to install the WSS SP2 first and then the MOSS SP2 or you'll have problems. I don't recommend you install this in production today, but I do recommend you get it into a test environment as soon as you can. I have a couple of blog posts in the works on changes that SP2 brings for the Administrator. Hopefully I'll have them out in the next couple of days.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 4/27/2009 1:54 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 2 | |
This week I talk about using SQL with specific port numbers, editing the SharePoint ConfigDB, things you can do from STSADM but not Central Admin, noise word configuration, and why when a red sock gets into the laundry everything turns pink.
This is also the blog post you need to leave a comment for if you know the answer to the question to win a copy of SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery. There will only be one winner. Good luck to everyone.
There does seem to be some audio/video craziness around the 20 minute mark. I'm aware of it.
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tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 4/20/2009 11:29 AM | Netcast; Sharepoint | 2 | |
My sixth netcast is now online for your enjoyment. I'm a little disappointed, all the files uploaded the first try and everything went smoothly. I did watch some of the video and it looks a little washed out. Looks like I have too much light. I'll work on that for next week. In this week's show I talk about using Migrateuser to fix deleted user permissions, all the new stuff there is to know about SharePoint 2007 SP2 and SharePoint 2010 and I explain how to stick Teflon to a pan, when nothing stick to Teflon.
As always I welcome your questions, comments and suggestions.
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tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 4/17/2009 3:50 PM | | 0 | | And by "huge success" I mean they didn't cut me off 10 minutes in because of "technical difficulties." I imagined a huge digital hook like they used on the Gong Show pulling me offline after a few minutes. They very generously let me stay the whole time. I've gotten a few questions about getting a recorded version of the webinar. If you register here you can watch a recorded version of the webinar. I didn't get to all of the questions that were posted. I'm working through them now, so expect a post here in the next few days with the questions and some answers, correct or not.
More good news, the kind folks at Idera have agreed to let me do another webinar. Details are very tentative right now, so I won't go into them yet. Stay tuned here. Once it's all hashed out I'll make a big announcement.
For those of you interested in your free copy of SharePoint Designer, please look here for all the details.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 4/14/2009 10:42 AM | Sharepoint | 4 | | Tomorrow the folks at Idera are sponsoring a free webinar where I'll be talking about SharePoint and SQL. Along with the webinar itself I'll be trying to broadcast again on Stickam. To watch me while I deliver the webinar point your browser at my Stickam Profile page. I used Stickam yesterday when I recorded my weekly netcast and it pooped out part of the way through. I'm not sure what caused that. Just a warning if it does that again.
Hope to see you tomorrow.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 4/13/2009 5:16 PM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 2 | |
After much trouble uploading (again) netcast #5 is uploaded. This week I talk about incoming email, how to move databases, and why your reflection is only reversed side to side in a mirror.
Enjoy. And as always, if you have feedback, leave me a comment here.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 4/6/2009 10:40 AM | Sharepoint; Netcast | 1 | |
To help cure your case of the Mondays, I've uploaded my fourth netcast. I cover SharePoint Designer, Conficker and making your competition disappear. Enjoy.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 4/2/2009 8:48 AM | | 1 | | All the rumors you've been reading on bathroom walls for the last couple of weeks are true. Microsoft has graciously agreed to make the current and next versions of SharePoint Designer (SPD) absolutely free. You can download it this link. The good news is that you can download SPD for free. The bad news is that everyone can download SPD for free, including the users you may support. I've never really bought into all the fear and hype of users using SharePoint Designer and screwing up SharePoint. I've always been for user empowerment. However, if your organizer does not share my free spirited views, this blog post talks about ways to restrict SDP use at different scopes in your organization. It's worth checking out. I would also verify your backup and restore operations are working. It is true that SPD can be used to cause problems in SharePoint, so it's a good idea to be confident in your ability to recover things, should you have to.
I hope you enjoy SPD and all the fun it brings to your farms. J
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/30/2009 10:45 AM | Netcast; Sharepoint | 0 | |
Destroying my previous record of two in a row, today I've uploaded my third weekly netcast. Get it while it's hot. I cover some recent SharePoint topics as well as my fun install Certificate Services on Windows 2008 for use with SharePoint. Tell all your friends. Show notes forthcoming.
tk
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MP3 File | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/28/2009 12:31 PM | Sharepoint | 0 | | The Iowa SharePoint User Group is having a meeting on Wednesday. They're going to talk about how to use SharePoint with Social Networking. The best part, I'll be there! Meet me at DMACC in Ankeny Wednesday morning. You can get the full story and sign up Iowa SharePoint User Group web site.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/27/2009 4:00 PM | Sharepoint | 4 | | In November of 2007 I published a blog post extoling the virtues of a new STSADM operation, mergecontentdb. At the time, it was the coolest thing ever. Now, after 16 months of use, it's come out that in some, very rare circumstances, mergecontentdb may fail and may result in data corruption. Because of that the SharePoint product team has suggested using it with extreme caution, or better yet, don't use it at all. Their blog has a method using Batch Site Manager to do the same thing, but without the pesky data corruption. I would imagine there's a fix in the works, so if you can hold off moving any site collections, I would recommend it.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/24/2009 10:49 PM | Sharepoint | 2 | | The fine folks at Idera are sponsoring a webcast where I'll be talking about SharePoint and its love/hate relationship with SQL Server. I'll cover some SQL server basics the SharePoint admins that are forced to work with SQL. I will also cover some of the ways SharePoint uses SQL and how you can keep that relationship as happy as possible.
Register now, before all the seats are taken. You'll want to experience this yourself instead of hearing about it from your friends/
Hope to see you there,
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/23/2009 9:52 PM | Tech Stuff; Netcast | 3 | |
Defying all odds, I recorded a second netcast. I know, I know, I'm as surprised as you are. Below are the links to the audio and video files. I haven't written the shownotes, but I'll get them put up tomorrow. Enjoy.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 3/22/2009 9:06 PM | | 3 | | When I do my world famous SQL sessions I always warn people to autogrow their databases, to embrace whitespace. As a guideline I tell people to grow their databases to how large they will be in a year. In order to do that, you have to know what your churn rate is. By "churn rate" I mean how large your content grows over a period of time. That period of time may be days or months. As an admin it's a good idea to know your churn rate for a number of reasons. In this post I'll talk about a couple of ways to determine your churn rate and what to do with that information once you have it.
How to determine your churn rate
Before you can make any sizing decisions about your farm, you need to have a good idea how quickly it grows. There are a few ways to get that information. Being the cheapskate that I am, the two I demonstrate will be free with built in tools. These are by no means the only way to get this information.
Through SQL
Through SQL we can see the backups performed on each database, and how large they were. This gives us a great way to see how each database has grown. Remember, white space is not backed up, so your backups will reflect the actual amount of data you have, not the size of your MDF file. Run the following query against each of your content databases to see how they've grown over time:
select
BackupDate = convert(varchar(10),backup_start_date, 111) ,SizeInMBs=floor( backup_size/1024/1024)
from msdb..backupset
where
database_name = 'WSS_Content'
and type = 'd'
order by
backup_start_date desc
Change the database_name in line #6 to run it against a different database. When you run this query you will get a list of all of the backups run against that database by date and size. It should look like this:
This shows my most recent backups of this database were 48 MB, while the ones before the 19th were all 22 MB or so. I uploaded 25 MB then ran a backup in Central Administration. Since Central Administration actually does a SQL backup it shows up in this list. Backups made from third parties that don't do database backups may not show up in that list. If you would like you can change the heading in line #3 to "sizeInGBs" and add another "/1024" to the backup_size if that makes more sense for the size of your database. "backup_size" is in Bytes, so you can modify it accordingly. That's one way to get your database growth rate.
Through SharePoint
You can also get your churn rate from the SharePoint object model. I like this method because it will also let you keep tabs on individual site collection growth, should you choose to. This lets you be proactive on site cllections that are growing out of control, before they come to you because they are out of space. For this method I use the output of "stsadm –o enumsites." Fortunately for us enumsites not only lists out the site collections in your farm, it also gives us a ton of information about them. One of those tidbits being how much space the site collection is using. We can add that all up to see how much space our farm is taking, and compare it. To make this work you have to run "stsadm –o enumsites" peridodically, and you have to massage the output a little. Don't worry, I'll spell it all out for you. J
First we need to run "stsadm –o enumsites" to get the output. Let's take a look at what it looks like on one of my test servers:
The URL parameter is the URL of your farm, not an individual site collection. You may recognize the format of the output. It looks suspiciously like XML. Because of that we can do all kinds of fun stuff with it. I highlighted the output from one site collection, http://stockholm. We have a lot of information there. For this blog post we are only really interested in the "StorageUsedMB" value. That is what we will add up to get our total usage. We can simply pipe that output to a file with something like "stsadm –o enumsites –url http://stockholm > usage.xml" Copying this file to a document library and rendering it in a browser is a good idea. Putting it in the document library allows us to keep many copies and lets us see the growth over any period of time, that also makes it easy to view in a browser. To aid in the display of the XML data, we will use an XLS transform. The XSLT allows us to format the data in the XML file, as well as do some simple things like create sums. In order to make things work more smoothly, we will prefix two lines to the XML file. These two lines define the type of XML file we have, and which XSLT file to use. We could do it without these two lines, but it would be more work to view. You couldn't just click the XML file you want to view and have everything just link up. Here are the two lines we added to every usage.xml file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml:stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="usage.xsl" ?>
This tells your browser to use the file usage.xsl when trying to render the XML file when you click it. I've saved these two lines to a file called header.txt and I'll use the copy
command to combine the header.txt file and the usage.xml file created by STSADM. Here's the first couple of lines in action:
stsadm -o enumsites -url http://stockholm > usage.tmp
copy header.txt /b + usage.tmp /b usage.xml /b
This gives us a file that looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml:stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="usage.xsl" ?>
<Sites Count="6">
<Site Url="http://stockholm" Owner="STOCKHOLM\administrator" ContentDatabase="WSS_Content" StorageUsedMB="29.5" StorageWarningMB="480" StorageMaxMB="500" />
<Site Url="http://stockholm/dupes/spdtest" Owner="STOCKHOLM\administrator" ContentDatabase="WSS_Content_JohnRoss" StorageUsedMB="0.5" StorageWarningMB="0" StorageMaxMB="0" />
<Site Url="http://stockholm/lrcs" wner="STOCKHOLM\administrator" ContentDatabase="WSS_Content_JohnRoss" StorageUsedMB="15.5" StorageWarningMB="480" StorageMaxMB="500" />
<Site Url="http://stockholm/sites/Search" Owner="STOCKHOLM\administrator" ContentDatabase="WSS_Content" StorageUsedMB="0.2" StorageWarningMB="5" StorageMaxMB="10" />
<Site Url="http://stockholm/sites/spdtest" Owner="STOCKHOLM\administrator" ContentDatabase="WSS_Content_JohnRoss" StorageUsedMB="1" StorageWarningMB="0" StorageMaxMB="0" />
<Site Url="http://stockholm/ssp/admin" Owner="STOCKHOLM\administrator" ContentDatabase="WSS_Content" StorageUsedMB="0.4" StorageWarningMB="0" StorageMaxMB="0" />
</Sites>
Next I make a copy of usage.xml. I name it usage-<today's date>.xml. This lets us always click usage.xml for the most up to date usage, but it also gives us a history to look back on. The command looks like this:
copy usage.xml usage-%date:~12,2%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%.xml
That creates a file with the name usage-090322.xml for March 22nd, 2009. I made the date in the format of YYMMDD so that they would sort well.
Next I copy the resulting files up to SharePoint. I use a tool called Davcopy to do that. Here are the two lines:
davcopy usage.xml http://stockholm/Shared%20Documents /o
davcopy usage-%date:~12,2%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%.xml http://stockholm/Shared%20Documents /o
Now that all of the files are up there, all we need to do is upload the XSLT so the XML files can be easy viewed. Here is the text of the XSLT file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="html"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>SharePoint Storage Usage Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TH>URL</TH>
<TH>Content DB</TH>
<TH>Used space</TH>
</TR>
<xsl:for-each select="//Sites/Site">
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left">
<xsl:value-of select="@Url"/>
</td>
<td style="text-align:left">
<xsl:value-of select="@ContentDatabase"/>
</td>
<td style="text-align:right">
<xsl:value-of select="@StorageUsedMB"/>
</td>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
<tr>
<td colspan="3" style="text-align:right;font-weight:bold">
Total Space Used:
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&nbsp;</xsl:text>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&nbsp;</xsl:text>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&nbsp;</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="sum(//@StorageUsedMB)"/>
</td>
</tr>
</TABLE>
</BODY>
</HTML>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
You can see that the XSLT creates HTML based on the XML file. The sum command at the end is what gives us our total at the end. Here's what the XML file looks like when it is rendered in a browser with the XSLT file:
That is pretty bland, but you can use XSL to make things look better, even apply color coding if you would like. One idea would be to have site collections that are over their quota warning level have a yellow background.
That is it. You can run these files manually, or use the Task Scheduler to have it run every evening. I have attached all of the files referenced here, so download them and take a look at them. That will probably help it make more sense.
What to do with this information
Regardless of how you get your information, you should be able to calculate your farm's churn rate. Once you have that you can start pregrowing your databases. Like I said above, try to give yourself one year's worth of growth in white space. This keeps your databases from having to resort to autogrowing. It also lets you know ahead of time how much drive space you'll need in a year. This is handy for budgeting purposes. You'll know ahead of time whether you'll need new hardware, and you'll have good numbers to back up any requests you make at budget time.
Have fun, let me know what you think.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 3/16/2009 4:41 PM | Netcast; Sharepoint | 3 | |
All the cool kids on the Internet have a netcast, so I thought I'd have one too. I decided the world really wanted to know about the fun tech stuff I've done in the last week. So I strapped on a cool Britney Spears style headset, turned on the microphone and made some history. Now, I think we all know the chances of this lasting, or there even being a second one, are pretty slim. So they way I see it, this episode is already a collector's idea. Get it while it's hot. With that introduction here are a couple of links to get you started:
Audio Netcast (MP3)
Video Netcast (WMV)
Netcast Shownotes
Those are links to the libraries where the files are stored. Right now there's only one episode in each. I put the library links in so you could subscribe via RSS. If I get serious about this I'll make the RSS links compatible with Podcast Receivers like Juice.
Let me know what you think. Too long? Too short? Don't quit my day job? Leave me a comment.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/9/2009 4:04 PM | Sharepoint | 1 | |
After much anticipation, the February CU for SharePoint is now available. Yes, I realize it's actually March. You can read the full story at the SharePoint team blog. Long story short, you should install the patches in this order (and don't leave any out)
- WSS 3.0 SP1
- MOSS 2007 SP1
- WSS 3.0 February CU
- MOSS 2007 February CU
Notice the Infrastructure update is not in that list. It is included in the CU. The other important thing to take away from this is that you need to install the WSS patches, even if you're running MOSS. Also, don't install these patches unless they address an issue you're experiencing, and if you do install them, do a good backup of your SharePoint boxes and your databases. These patches will bring you up to build 12.0.0.6341.
Enjoy,
tk
Edit: fixed URL | | Todd O. Klindt | 3/9/2009 2:11 PM | | 1 | | It's sad, sad state of affairs when the SharePoint Podshow agrees to interview Shane and me, but that day has come. Hot off the presses is their latest Podcast "Administrating a SharePoint Farm." We sat down with Rob and Nick last week at the MVP Summit and tried to stay serious long enough for them to interview us. I believe we failed. Regardless it was a lot of fun and we did talk a lot about SharePoint and touched on a few Admin topics like mistakes we see, and how to get along with those damned developers. Plus you'll get to see if my voice is actually as sexy in person as it sounds in your head.
Grab a copy of the Podshow before they take it down due to complaints about how lame it is.
A big thanks go out to Nick and Rob for giving us the opportunity to be a part of the Podshow. It was a lot of fun.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/24/2009 11:27 PM | | 4 | | A couple of weeks ago I was reading through a magazine and I saw a review of site that let you upload files instead of sending them via email. Then the site sent your recipient an email and they downloaded it. You've heard the old saying about how when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, I'm a SharePoint guy, so every time I see something I think to myself, "How would I do that in SharePoint?" I'm not very smart, so most of the time I never figure out a way. Fortunately for me this was an easy one. J So here it is, how to use SharePoint as a replacement for email attachments.
For those of you that haven't just fallen off of the SharePoint turnip truck, what I described away is something that bares a striking resemblance to a workflow. I thought the same thing, so that's what I did. First, I created a standard Shared Document library. That's where the attachments will be uploaded. I added a few new columns that I needed to facilitate sending the email. The finished library looked like this:
As you can see I added columns for standard email fields; to, from, subject and a body. Not much to it.
The next step was to create the workflow. Since this isn't one of the out of the box workflows I had to create it in SharePoint Designer. I loaded up SPD and attached it to my site. I started by adding some SharePoint content to my list.
Then pick Blank Workflow
When you define your workflow you'll want to make sure it's triggered when new items are uploaded.
Now we need to define the workflow itself. There's not a lot to this. When starting the workflow we don't even need to define a condition, since adding the document triggers it. We just need to define some Actions. Obviously we want the "Send an Email" action.
I'm not going to show you as I added each and every field. The key to adding the fields is using the "Workflow Lookup…" item to get to the fields of the item. Here's how we define who the email is going to:
Then pick the "To email address" field
Repeat that for each of the fields you want to add. Certainly you can design your email however you'd like. Here's what I did:
That's it. Save it all out and you're finished. Now when you add a document to that library you'll be met with a page like this where you add the pertinent information about who will be getting the email for the attachment.
The resulting email looks like this (actually this was from a different document, but you get the idea)
Well, that's it. Pretty simple, isn't it. Now instead of emailing around large files, you can use this method to upload them to SharePoint and keep them out of your email quota. For extra credit you might find a way to get documents to be cleared out after two or three days.
Hope that helps, or maybe churns up an idea on how to use SharePoint for other less obvious things.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 2/24/2009 4:04 PM | | 0 | | Steve Ballmer broke a lot of hearts today when he announced that Office 14 will not be released in 2009. In the SharePoint circles I travel in everyone is asking "When will the next version be out?" Well, we've got part of our answer now. That doesn't mean a beta won't be available this year, but the final product will not be out until 2010. This doesn't mean you shouldn't go to the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. You should. You'll be able to get ahead of the class when it comes to SharePoint 14, and hopefully you'll be able to see me there. J
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 2/17/2009 11:56 AM | Sharepoint | 7 | | This has come up so many times in the last couple of days I just HAVE to blog about it. I was originally going to call this post "the best registry setting ever" but I realize that would make it tough for search engines to point people here when they need it. Here's the general problem description, you've got a SharePoint environment and you're getting an "access denied" trying to access something you KNOW you should have access to. In the cases I've seen this has been trying to crawl a web app, or trying to create a My Site. In both cases the App Pool ID has the correct permissions, and in the case of search the default content account has been given "Read only" permission to the web app via a web app policy. I was getting this error in the context of the My Site problem. No one could create a My Site. A user couldn't. A Farm Admin couldn't. A Domain Administrator couldn't. This really kicked my butt for a couple of days. Yesterday a friend of mine contacted me. She had the search issue. I walked her through some stuff and she had it all configured correctly. Despite all that, when she ran a crawl, she got a permissions error. I bounced this off of my side-kick, and search aficionado Shane Young. He asked if I'd tried the "loopback fix." Before yesterday to me loopback was only a network thing. It was a 127 address, or it was a phony network adapter I added. He pointed me to my favorite KB ever (or at least since yesterday) and told me to try Method #1. Without further ado, here is the greatest KB article ever.
You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6
Let's all take a moment to absorb the greatness.
Okay, now that we've got that out of our systems let's dig into this a little. While the KB references Windows 2003 all four of the issues I've fixed with it have been on Windows 2008, so don't let the "applies to" fool you. Both 2003 and 2008 have a security measure that disallows loopback communications in case your machine has any errant processes on it that are trying to attack it. That's good from a security standpoint, but it can break SharePoint if you have multiple things running on the same box. Using Method 1 in that KB and disabling the Loopback Check restores order to your SharePoint environment. Since I learned about it yesterday it has fixed problems in four different environments. Go KB 896861!
If you're getting weird permissions errors on your SharePoint farm this is worth trying. It's easily reversible if it doesn't fix your issue. If you have security folks in your environment you should probably run it past them too, just in case. J
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 2/13/2009 10:48 PM | | 0 | | It's been a week since I got back from the SharePoint Best Practices conference. It was a blast. I've gotten a couple of emails asking for the slides from my presentations. I think I've built up enough anticipation, so here they are.
IT320 Best Practices for Command Line Administration
This session covered using STSADM and its friends PSconfig and PowerShell to administrator SharePoint
IT324 Best Practices for SharePoint Admins, the Reluctant DBAs
This session covered some best practices on keeping your SQL servers happy.
Enjoy the slides. Leave a comment if you have any questions, or just want to tell me how cool they are. J
I also want to remind you all that I'll be presenting at TechEd this year. The most exciting session I'll be doing is the day long Governance session with my sidekick, Shane Young. Now, while Governance is a very hot topic these days, it can be a bland topic to hear about. Especially for a full day. Have no fear, Shane and I make Governance fun. If you go to this session I promise you'll learn a lot and there will not be a dull moment. Last year we gave away an Xbox and a Zune, as well as Shane making inappropriate comments about touching me. A good time was had by all.
You can find a full description of the session on the Seminars page of the TechEd site. We're Precon #15. It's not too late, so sign up today. If you sign up for the session and mention you saw it on my blog we'll give you a free hug from Shane.
tk
| | Todd Klindt | 2/3/2009 12:39 PM | Sharepoint | 6 | | I just finished my second, and last solo, breakout session at the SharePoint Best Practices conference. It was a blast. I've released a whole army of SharePoint admins that are now SQL dbas. Databases beware! I'll be around for the next couple of days, and will be sitting in on at IT Pro panel. Please stop by and say Hi.
In other news, the SharePoint Conference has just been announced for 2009. It will be the first place to really get your hands on SharePoint 14. The date is October 19th through the 22nd at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Hope to see you there.
tk | | Todd Klindt | 2/2/2009 10:55 AM | Sharepoint | 0 | | The keynote has just started at the SharePoint Best Practices conference. The conference looks really good. Lots of good vendors, lots of good speakers, lots of good attendees. I have an STSADM session at 4:00 and an SQL session tomorrow morning. If you're at SPBPC please stop by a session, or at least say hi in the hallway.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 1/30/2009 7:39 PM | | 0 | | The SPTechCon wrapped up yesterday. It was a blast. I got to meet a lot of great people and had a really good time. I expect their Boston conference will be even better. One of the people I met was Tiffany Songvilay, the brains behind the hysterical SharePointShirts. She was kind enough to give Shane and I shirts to model.
Sorry for the crappy picture. Tiffany's got a few other funny SharePoint shirts. Check them out.
Now I have a couple of days to wait until the Best Practices conference in San Diego. Hopefully I'll see some of you there.
tk | | Todd Klindt | 1/20/2009 8:32 PM | Sharepoint | 0 | | Mike Watson, buddy of mine and former Microsoft employee, has decided to grace the Internet with a new blog. He's the SharePoint Mad Scientist. Mike worked on Microsoft's internal SharePoint deployment and has some great insight on what makes large SharePoint installatoins tick. If you're a SharePoint IT Pro you'll find lots of great stuff on his blog.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 1/19/2009 10:37 AM | | 18 | | Recently on Twitter someone was asking about displaying blog posts from a subweb on the parent. This is pretty easy to do with SharePoint Designer (SPD) and its unsung hero, the Data View Web Part (DVWP). Here is a quick set of directions to get someone started. Once the DVWP is created any number of great customizations can be made. I'll leave that up for someone smarter than me. I'm not that good with DVWPs or SPD.
The first step is to create a new web part page in the parent site. The easiest way is through the Web UI. Log in as someone that can add content. Click Site Actions > Create:
You want to create a new Web Part Page.
Give the page a name and choose a template. For this I'll choose Left Column. You also need to choose where to create this page. I'll choose the Shared Documents Document Library:
After the page has been created, open up the root site in SPD. If you don't already have it, download the free trial. If you're doing any kind of SharePoint work, you need SPD. After SPD is open, open your root site's Shared Documents library and open the blogs.aspx page. A web part page should open up for you. Click the web part zone where you want the DVWP to go to give it focus. In my example I'll be placing the web part in the Body Web Part Zone.
Now go to the menu bar and select Data View > Insert Data View…
On the right hand pane the Data Source Library will be opened up. By default this will show all of the data sources in the current web at the DVWP can consume. Since the data we want is in a different web, we need to add it to the library. To do that click Connect to another library on the bottom:
When the Manage Library dialog box comes up, click Add. Give the library a name that makes sense to you. In my case I named it Blog. Under location type the path to the subweb that has your content. If you have opened this web in SPD previously you can also use the Browse button to find it.
Click OK a couple of times to get back to the Data Source Library. Now at the bottom of the list is an entry for the library we just added. Click the plus sign to expand the library. Blog posts are in a list called "Posts" so expand SharePoint Lists and click Posts. You should see a screen like this:
When you click Show Data your screen will change and you'll see the content of that list. To create the DVWP, drag the "Row [1/x]" line over to the Web Part Zone where x is the number of posts in your Posts list.
SPD will churn a little as it creates the DVWP. Once it's created it should look something like this:
Right now it's not very useful. The HTML isn't rendered correctly because of security concerns. Fortunately it's easily fixed. Click the first body entry to give it focus. Then click the > on the right side. Change the "Format as:" setting to Rich Text:
You'll get a prompt warning of the security concerns. Click Yes to clear it. Now all your blog posts will be rendered correctly.
That's where I'll stop for now. You'll probably want to alter how the posts are displayed. The web part as nearly infinite customization options like paging, sorting, grouping, the list goes on. To access them click the > for the web part and see the options there. Once you've done that you can also edit the HyperLink for the Title column to link users directly to the blog post. If there's enough interest I may do a blog post on that.
Have fun,
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 1/15/2009 5:32 PM | | 3 | | As a blogger I knew I had arrived, that my blog was hitting the big time once the spammers started hitting it. Here's how my Blogger experience has progressed in regards to spamming:
- I set up a blog on SharePoint and enabled comments so readers can leave feedback.
- Spammers find blog and start spamming comments. I don't want my readers to click the links, nor do I want to give the URLs any search weight so I go delete them as soon as they show up.
- Comment spam increases, so I turn on Content Approval. This way the spam comments aren't visible when they're submitted. Legitimate comments take a while to show up, but at least I can delete the spam at my convenience.
- Comment spam increases even more. Now deleting comment spam itself is a pain, so I put in steps to prevent comment spam. In my case I put in a date field, but some folks have gone so far as to put in Captcha or other methods. This is where I am now.
I was talking to a buddy today and he was only at step #3 and was trying to bulk delete a bunch of spam comments and was asking if there was an easy way. I told him there sure was, but it has a gotcha. Go to your blog and log in as administrator. Then go to the Manage Comments link. Alternately you can go directly to the Comment list. It will look something like this:
All of these insidious spam comments must go. Normally you're stuck clicking each spam comment, clicking the dropdown, then delete. It's quite a click intensive process. I've got a better way. Click Actions, then Edit in Datasheet.
Now you can select multiple comments. Use the Shift key to highlight a group or the Control key to select individual multiple lines. It looks like this:
We're almost there. You'd think it would be as easy as just hitting the delete key and leaning back and smiling. Unfortunately if you do that you're hit with this little gem:
Why would they be read-only? Well, if you look at the bottom of the list you'll see "This view is read-only." Why is it read-only? Once Content approval is turned on for a list (we did that in step #3 above) the All Items view is read-only. How do we get ourselves out of this funk so that we can delete these nasties? It's easy, choose another view. Go to "View" in the upper right hand corner and choose the "Approve/reject Items" view.
This will take you out of the datasheet mode, so after you get into the new view you'll have to go back to "Actions" and click "Edit in Datasheet." After all that you should be greeted with something that looks like this:
Now selected the offending comments and either hit the delete key or Right Click and "Delete Rows."
If you have the Recycle Bin enabled you'll get a warning about that. Once you say Ok, *poof*, all that spam is gone in one fell swoop.
I hope this helps anyone out there running their blogs on SharePoint.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 1/6/2009 10:20 PM | | 2 | | I've got a few speaking engagements coming up and I thought I'd mention them here so people can swing by if they're around. Here they are, in chronological order:
IADNUG meeting
The IA DotNet User Group is allowing me to talk to them again about SharePoint. This quarter I'll be talking about disaster recovery with SharePoint. Now that you've got all your important data in SharePoint, how do you keep it safe? That's what I'll be covering Wednesday January 14th. The meeting is in Des Moines. Find out more at the IADNUG web site.
The SharePoint Technology Conference 2009
The SP TechCon proves to be a great SharePoint conference. Along with two days of great sessions, Shane and I will be doing a day long workshop the day before the conference on SharePoint Administration. It will be informational and a whole lot of fun, with a few cow jokes thrown in for good measure. The SPTechCon is January 28th and 29th in San Francisco. You can sign up at the SPTechCon web site.
SharePoint Best Practices Conference
This conference s a little different than other conferences. This is less about how to do things and more about why you should do things. It's in San Diego February 2nd through the 4th. Find out more information on the Best Practices web site.
That's the immediate things I have going on. There are a few more events in the hopper. I'll post more about them as they come up.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 12/16/2008 11:08 PM | | 4 | | Last week while we were in Tampa, Nicola Young had a problem creating webs in a Site Collection where she was an Administrator. She got the creation page and was able to go through the motions. When she hit OK she got an "Access Denied" message on a page. Seemed weird, considering she was an Administrator on the Site Collection. Shane and I finally figured it out. (I can't remember which of us actually figured it out, so I'll take credit). Nicola was a Site Collection Administrator, but there was a Site Directory web that had broken inheritance and she did not have permission. So she could create the web, but she didn't have permission to add it to the directory, which was mandatory. After further investigation we found the web was getting created, it just looked like it wasn't, and it wasn't being added to the Site Directory.
This was just one of those annoying things that I thought someone else might run into.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 12/16/2008 8:22 PM | Sharepoint | 2 | |
In Shane and I's class last week, we were asked what SharePoint conferences were upcoming and what we thought about them. Here's a list of a few conferences coming in 2009. I'll be presenting at most of them, with one exception. If a conference isn't here, it's not because I don't think it's good, it's just because I'm not associated with it, so I don't know much about it.
SP Tech Con
January 27th – 29h, 2009 (San Francisco)
Shane and I are doing a full day preconference session on SharePoint Administration. If you haven't seen the Shane and Todd show before, you're in for a treat. We throw in lots of lessons we've learned in the trenches and we try our damnedest to be funny. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But we try. In addition to the preconference session, we'll both be doing several individual breakout sessions. It promises to be fun and informational.
Best Practices SharePoint Conference
Febrary 2nd – 4th, 2009 (San Diego)
This conference dares to be different. Instead of being about how you do things in SharePoint, if focuses on why you should do things in SharePoint. Writing my sessions for this conference has been very challenging and has really made me think about why I do things. I'll be doing a session on best practices administrating SharePoint on the command line. My second session involves SQL DBA best practices for SharePoint admins. Often SharePoint admins get reluctantly thrown in the DBA role without much training. This session gives us a fighting chance keeping SQL happy so we can focus on the important things, keeping SharePoint happy.
Microsoft TechEd
May 11th – 15th, 2009 (Los Angeles)
This is Microsoft's big enchilada. Four days of all things Microsoft. Shane and I will be doing a preconference session on SharePoint governance. Now, you might not think governance is a fun topic, and the thought of being in a room all day talking about nothing but governance might strike you as something that should be addressed in the Geneva Convention. I don't blame you. I can guarantee you this will be unlike any governance session you've been to. I promise you'll learn a lot, have lots of laughs and maybe win a prize or two. You don't want to miss it.
Microsoft SharePoint Conference
Unknown (Unknown)
The SharePoint conference is usually in the spring, so when word hadn't come out about anything I figured there wouldn't be one in 2009. Then, quietly, a small box showed up on the http://www.mssharepointconference.com site, "Keep me updated." It mentions a SharePoint Conference 2009. Hurray! As far as I know, they have not put out any requests for speakers, so I don't know if I'll be presenting at that one or not. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I'll post here as I find out more about this event.
There are plenty of other great SharePoint conferences this year. Joel Oleson has a very comprehensive list of the other SharePoint events going on. Please check them out and support your local SharePoint organizations.
tk
| | Todd O. Klindt | 11/26/2008 10:50 AM | Sharepoint | 3 | | I use Windows Live ID integration on this site and from time to time I get questions about it. Unfortunately I didn't write it, so I'm usually not much help. A buddy of mine, Eric Shupps, (who is much smarter than me) is doing a webcast on integrating Live ID with SharePoint. Those wanting to use Live ID with SharePoint should join in. I know I'll be there. It's December 16th. You can sign up from the link above.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/24/2008 5:38 PM | | 2 | |
I'll be at this month's Iowa SharePoint User Group meeting. You should swing by. It's in Des Moines on the 3rd of December. If the Inetium guys will let me, I'll be giving away a copy of my new book. Kirk Hofer will be talking about SharePoint development. It should be good.
See you there.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/19/2008 10:16 PM | Sharepoint | 0 | | The books have been shipped so it's time to reveal the names of the big book winners. In no particular order they are:
Ryan McCutchen
JD Wade
Jeff Tincher
Josh Flory
Kasi Krishnamoorthy
Congratulations to them all. Don't be afraid to put a glowing review up on Amazon. J
tk
| | Todd Klindt | 11/18/2008 6:33 PM | Sharepoint | 0 | | Well folks, that went fast. I have my five winners. Thanks to everyone that emailed in. I appreciate it. :)
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/18/2008 5:21 PM | Sharepoint | 0 | |
Today is a happy day at the Klindt household. I got my copies of the new book. Woo Hoo! That means it's a good day for my blog readers. As I mentioned before, I am giving away five copies of the book out to my blog readers. This the official giveaway post. I will send a free copy of my new book to the first five people that send an email to freebook@toddklindt.com with the subject line of "free book" and a link to the sender's favorite post on my blog. The email should look like this:
Emails without the correct subject line, or without a link to one of my blog posts will not be considered. This is also only open to people in the United States, sorry. I'm paying for the shipping myself, and shipping outside of the country is expensive. I will email the five winners back to get their shipping address. Sorry, I will not notify those that do not win. Winners also agree to let me at least mention their name on my blog when I announce the winners. After I receive five emails I will disable that email address. If your email bounces that means I already have my five winners. I have a couple of things going on tonight, so I will likely not get this blog updated immediately once the contest is closed.
Good luck everyone.
tk
Updated: I have my five winners. Thanks to everyone that emailed. | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/17/2008 9:35 PM | | 19 | | Last week a friend of mine asked a fairly innocent question, "Can I import a spreadsheet into SharePoint?" My answer to almost all SharePoint questions is, "Of course you can, and it'll rock!" Of course this is no exception. I thought I'd write up a quick blog post to show some of the ways it rocks.
I started out with this spreadsheet:
Pretty simple. Of course he could have just uploaded this spreadsheet to a document library, but then anyone that wanted to add vales would need to have Excel installed to open it. Plus there would be the added complexity of check in and check out to deal with, which aren't necessary for this. Instead, we're going to import this spreadsheet into a list in SharePoint. To do that go to the home page of the site where you want to create the list and click Site Actions > Create like below:
Under Custom Lists choose "Import Spreadsheet."
You'll get have to enter a list name and choose the XLSX file you want to import. This will fire up Excel and you'll get to choose which parts of your spreadsheet you want to import. In this example I lassoed the relevant information:
Click okay and let SharePoint work its magic. SharePoint generates a list like this:
SharePoint took pretty good care of this, and even used the header row for the column names. Pretty cool. But it made some general assumptions about the data. It added everything as a single line of text as shown here:
This doesn't work well. Fortunately you have a lot of flexibility. Let's go in and change the birthdate field to a date field. Go into the list settings and change the type.
These settings look appropriate for the data in the column. When I hit okay I got this dialog box:
Being the adventurous sort, I hit OK. Here's what was waiting for me:
Of course there was not a big pink question mark, but the Birthdate was missing for Harry. How come? If you look back to my original spreadsheet you'll notice the value for Harry's date was 12/31/174. Since it's not a valid date, SharePoint kicked it to the curb. Even though we lost a value, it was understandable and I considered it a success. I decided to try the Rank column and see what SharePoint could do. It made sense to make it a choice value. I opened of the list settings and changed the Rank column to a choice type. Look what SharePoint did for me:
It went ahead and populated the existing values into the dropdown choices. All that for no extra cost. Sweet.
Hopefully this blog will help if you want to move some spreadsheets into SharePoint lists.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/11/2008 10:38 AM | | 0 | | The Iowa Code Camp was a great success. I have made my slides available, as well as screencasts from my sessions. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to make the screencasts better. I need to make the presentation better. I'll work on that for next time.
My new book should be out any day now. When I get my copies I will be giving 5 away for free. Make sure to subscribe to my blog to increase your chances of getting one of the free copies. Remember, don't email me about the free book until I release the post saying I have them. And again, the free books are only available to citizens of the US, since I'm paying for the shipping myself. Good luck to everyone.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 11/5/2008 2:22 PM | | 2 | | This Saturday, November 8th, is the second Iowa Code Camp. This is 100% free, and 100% for developers. I weaseled my way in and will be doing two SharePoint sessions. The first one is lovingly titled, "What is SharePoint and why should you care?" It's essentially an introduction to SharePoint for developers. My second session is "SharePoint 2007 with Windows 2008 and SQL 2008." It's an overview of Windows 2008 and SQL 2008 with a bit of a focus on SharePoint. After they pull me off of the stage, Todd Bleeker will be doing two sessions on actual SharePoint development. They are not to be missed. To round out the SharePoint content, Paul Schaeflein will be doing a session on integrating custom applications into SharePoint. Paul's session is so good they're letting him in, even though his name isn't Todd.
I had hoped to have some copies of my new book to give away, but they haven't been returned from the printers yet. L
I'll be around the code camp all day, so please swing by and say Hi if you're around.
tk | | Todd O. Klindt | 10/24/2008 3:15 PM | | 4 | | Like a good Microsoft fanboy, I use their virtualization software. Until recently that's meant Virtual PC 2007 for demos on my laptop and Virtual Server 2005 R2 for a couple of servers at home. Now that Hyper-V is out and getting lots of attention I thought I'd better look into it. I have a lot of virtual machines. A lot. My laptop alone has 12 registered with Virtual PC with several more waiting in the wings. Any time I have something I want to test I fire up a new VM to do so. Because of this, several years I created a base virtual hard disk image I could use to get things started quickly. It has Windows Server 2003 with the most recent patches, a few tweaks I like and some software installed. It's also got scripts defined to automatically install IIS and SharePoint, things like that. I've been updating that image over time as more patches come out and so on. It's worked out really well until a couple of days ago. I was moving a couple of my VMs over to Hyper-V. I won't go into all of the details, but Hyper-V has some management irritations to it. Paul Thurrott goes over some of them in this blog post. One being getting the Hyper-V Manager on one machine to manager Hyper-V on another. The Hyper-V server I was accessing was not in the same domain as my Vista workstation, and for the life of me I couldn't get the two to get along, Hyper-V deficiency #1. I moved to Plan B; RDPing into the Hyper-V server to user Hyper-V Manager that way. That worked to get the VM imported and running. However, if you don't have the Hyper-V Integration installed in a guest then you can't capture the mouse if you're RDPed into the Hyper-V server; Hyper-V deficiency #2. Fortunately in this case I had physical access to the Hyper-V server, but that wouldn't always be possible in which case this story would have had a much sadder ending. I logged into the Hyper-V server and tried to installed the Hyper-V Integration only be greeted by a friendly message telling me the Integration can't be installed because Virtual PC additions were installed and that I needed to uninstall them first. While that was annoying, it was understandable. That is a feat that would have been nearly impossible without a mouse, which is why this story wouldn't have ended as well had I not had physical access. I jumped into Control Panel to uninstall the Virtual Machine additions. While doing that I was greeted with another error message telling me that the installer needed the location of file 1. Yeah, just 1. No extension, nothing. Just 1. To the mortal man this might have seemed like the end of the story, after a fit of swearing. How do you search for the fix for an error when the file is "1?" Fortunately I had seen this before, last year at TechEd EMEA. Shane Young and I were working on a session and my VM wasn't resizing correctly. Shane suggested that I reinstall the Additions to get the video straightened out. I got the same error then. Shane and I were able to scour the Internet and find the fix. (funny how deadlines will do that) The problem pops up if the VM ever had the Virtual PC 2004 Additions (version 13.306 in Control Panel) on it. Which my VMs all did. When I created my base image years ago it was on Virtual PC 2004. Of course I had upgraded the VPC Additions to VPC 2007, but the installer doesn't update it correctly. To uninstall the VPC additions you have to do it with the VPC 2004 install, not the VPC 2007 one that everyone has handy. I chased down the VPC 2004 install and pointed Control Panel at the MSI for it, no dice. I tried running the MSI manually, nothing. Next I tried mounting the ISO file that has the VPC 2004 additions on it, the way VPC does when it installs them. That took off and looked like it was going to work. Then another friendly error message popped up. Seems the VPC 2004 additions won't install unless they're in a VPC. Hyper-V doesn't look virtual enough for it, so it bombs out. I can't really blame this on Hyper-V, but I'm going to anyway; Hyper-V deficiency #3. I moved the VM back to VPC 2007, mounted up the VPC 2004 additions ISO and was able to remove them. Then when I moved the VM over to Hyper-V the Integration installed and everything was happy in Toddville.
The story part is pretty long winded, so here's the Reader's Digest condensed version of how to fix this problem:
- Download Virtual PC 2004 SP1
- Unzip it
- Extract the files with msiexec /a Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 MSDN.msi
- Find VMAdditions.iso in Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions
- In Virtual PC 2007 (this will not work in Hyper-V) mount VMAdditions.iso and run the install
- Reboot your VM
- If you're going to run this VM in Hyper-V copy the files over to your Hyper-V server and import it. The Hyper-V Integration should install now
- If you're going to run this VM in Virtual PC 2007 or some other virtualization software, load the VM in it and install their tools
Hyper-V, I've got my eye on you. You'd better straighten up and fly right, or I'm going to install VirtualBox.
tk
| | Todd Klindt | 10/21/2008 10:00 PM | Tech Stuff; Sharepoint | 0 | | Last year was the first time that TechEd US was two weeks, the same format Europe has had for a while. Everyone I talked to in the US didn't like the split format. We admins like to cross pollinate with our dev brethren. Even though we were told 2009 would be more of the same, Microsoft changed their minds. Today they announced that in 2009 TechEd US would go back to the one week format. You can read it in all of its wonderful glory here.
Start working on your bosses to budget the money now. I plan to be there, and I'd leave to see you there.
tk |
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