With the WSS/SharePoint April 2009 Cumulative Update, a new parameter was introduced for the “stsadm –o deletesite” and “stsadm –o mergecontentdbs” commands. I noticed it while reviewing some recently published/update TechNet articles and tweeted about it here, here, here and here. Because of that I wanted to summarize the content in one post, point out some other things I found while researching and point you to where you can get more detail. On The Sean Blog, Sean covers all the commands added in the April update.

Here are the things that jumped out at me:

1. There is a new property added which is where the SPTimer schedule for the deletion job is stored and marks the site collection for deletion so it can no longer be accessed.

2. To restore a large site collection (see the Note), you can use the gradualdelete parameter with deletesite and mergecontentdbs to help the process. This is the article that got me looking everything else up.

Also, a note I saw while doing this review…MS is recommending you install the April 2009 update before continuing to use the mergecontentdbs command (see the Important note).

To be the most current on your deployment, you will want to install Service Pack 2 and then the April 2009 Update.

This post was all over the place. I hope it was still helpful. Well…it has been a long time since I have posted so hopefully this post will get me back onto the blog wagon.

On Saturday, April 18, 2009, there will be an all-day MOSS Camp taking place in St. Louis, MO focusing on all things SharePoint and we are looking for speakers. The current plan is to have four tracks covering the following topics: Development, Infrastructure, Governance/Business, or End User. The session can contain 100, 200, or 300 level information.

Submissions for speakers are being accepted immediately.

Registration being open for attendees will be announced soon. More information will be posted on the St. Louis SharePoint Users Group site as it becomes available and you can follow the St. Louis MOSS Camp twitter account for updates as well.

Just a quick note to make sure everyone sees this item. As posted on the SharePoint blog, you do NOT need to apply the patch if you have already installed the SharePoint October Cumulative update. However, if you have not, go get that server patched with the December security patch!

In this post, I will do a brief review of the state of 64-bit PDF iFilters for the Microsoft platform (this effects SharePoint). There have been a couple things occur in the last few days that I just wanted to point out.

First, let me review the purpose of an ifilter briefly for those who may not be aware. For Microsoft search products, an ifilter allows the indexer to read different file formats. So a PDF ifilter allows a Microsoft search product to open Adobe PDF files so that can be indexed and searched. Also, if you are running the MS Search Product on 64-bit platform, you want to run a 64-bit ifilter for performance and supportability reasons.

Until this month, in my opinion, the only production ready option for a 64-bit ifilter was offered by FoxIt Software. There are two things that have happened that I wanted to point out for your review.

1. Finally, Adobe has released a 64-bit PDF ifilter. Their filter is free.
2. FoxIt Software has released an update to their 64-bit PDF ifilter this month. There is a charge for their ifilter if you are using on a server (free for desktop use).

So if you are using FoxIt already, time to update your filter next patch cycle. If you need an ifilter, you may ask, “Why on earth would I use the FoxIt Software solution I have to buy now that Adobe has a free version?” There have been tests done to show that previously, the FoxIt ifilters (even 32-bit) performed better than the Adobe solution. I know the FoxIt version is multi-threaded. I do not know the capabilities of the free Adobe version yet.

So for Production environments, I would ask you to still consider the FoxIt solution. But if you can’t afford it, there is an alternative now. As more testing is done with these filter solutions, hopefully we will have more information to make a decision.

If you need help installing the ifilters, here are some links that will help:

For SPS 2003: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555209
For WSS 3.0: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927675
For MOSS 2007: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/adir_ron/archive/2007/05/03/Just-Released-_2D00_-PDF-IFilter-for-x64-Bit_2100_.aspx

How to add the PDF icon

And if you install SharePoint updates/patches, remember that you need to reinstall the FoxIt PDF ifilter.

The Windows Media video version of my KC Office Geeks SharePoint Updates presentation is available for download now. This presentation reviews what is in SharePoint updates, additional recommendations for other updates to apply, and the 25 step process for properly and successfully deploying the updates:

SharePoint Updates – Standard Quality (37MB)

SharePoint Updates – High Quality (424MB)

UPDATE: My post with the PowerPoint presentation so you can follow along

I will be presenting on SharePoint Updates at the St. Louis Day of .Net on Saturday, December 13th. There is a great lineup of speakers for the one day conference.

As of January 13, 2009, standard (mainstream) support for WSS 3.0 and SharePoint 2007 RTM (SP0) ends. This is part of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle for their products. Now, I won’t claim to be an expert in the MS Support model so I will just state my current understanding. If I find out more or different information, I will update this post.

You have two options if you wish to be able to continue to be to receive hotfixes (non-security) for problems you have:

1. Either install Service Pack 1 (my recommended solution). You have to do this option if you want to submit a design change or feature request.
2. Obtain an extended hotfix agreement, purchased within 90 days of mainstream support ending

It was great to be able to present for the KC Office Geeks. Thanks for having me out!

My presentation has been posted so you can download a copy. You can get it from my company’s Community page. It is the November 2008 presentation. I video recorded this presentation and will have the video available for download soon. I will post again when it is available.

Also, if you listened to the MOSS Gone Wild podcasts where I was a guest, this presentation has all the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles that I referenced.

UPDATE: Video is available

I will be in KC on Thursday, November 6th for the Kansas City Office Geeks meeting to present on SharePoint Updates. They are a user group based out of Kansas City for people who work with Office Products, such as SharePoint, Access, Excel, InfoPath, etc. There is presentation information available on the Community page of my company’s web site with links to the group’s site:

http://www.hrizns.com/Pages/Community.aspx

They meet at Centriq Training at 8700 State Line Road, Ste 200, Leawood, KS, 66206 and the meeting starts at 5:45 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Here is the synoposis:

SharePoint Updates: The Tour Starts Here

JD will discuss the important aspects you will need to know to successfully deploy updates in your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment. The presentation will provide an overview of the contents of SharePoint updates released (including the latest cumulative update and security patches), new “stsadm” commands enabled, and new functionality you can enable as needed. You will learn recommended additional actions you should take while upgrading as well as additional recommended updates to apply along the way. Finally, you will learn the step by step process for proper deployment as well as how to create a slipstream install to make future farm deployments and changes easier.

Look forward to get to talk with everyone! Thanks Becky for getting things arranged for me to present!

SHAREPOINT NATION!

Justin Jackson and Todd Kitta are wonderful and allowed me to be a guest on their new Sharepoint podcast: MOSS Gone Wild.  In Episode 4, we sat down and talked about the steps you should be taking when you are applying SharePoint patches. In Episode 5 (to be published soon), we talked about the contents of the SharePoint updates since the RTM release.

Please feel free to post comments/questions either here or at their web site.

In the SharePoint community, I regularly hear a statement made that I myself use to believe was correct but I want to clear up the misconception. It is easy to understand why people believe this based on unclear wording in Central Administration.

The statement is made that if you do not set site quotas for the site collection, then your second stage (site collection) recycle bin will never be emptied because the second stage recycle bin is based on a percentage of the site quota. Therefore, your second stage recycle bin can grow uncontrollably because it will never be emptied. This reasoning is incorrect because it is based on some misinformation.

So lets clear up how the recycle bin works including the second stage. I will first explain how it works. Then link to documentation and provide tips if you wish to test this statement yourself.

In Central Admin, you can state the numbers of days items are to be retained in the Recycle Bin. The first stage and the second stage (site collection) are BOTH part of the Recycle Bin. Therefore, items in either the first stage OR the second stage will be deleted after the number of days set for the web application. However, an additional size limit can be placed on the second stage recycle bin by using a percentage of the site collection quota to limit it.

Therefore, I am still recommending that you set site quotas. Without site quotas, there is nothing to stop your second stage recycle bin from growing uncontrolled and increasing the size of your content database on the SQL server.

But you might say, if it is only there for 30 days (the default), why would I worry? Imagine you have many large documents libraries in the same site collection. Then, you have multiple users all decided to do cleanup in those libraries (deleting many files) and empty their recycle bins. Then, they add new documents to the libraries to “update” them. Then, a week later, they do it again. There is still the possibillity of your content database growing larger than you would want to manage or have space on your SQL server to hold.

So I have tested this scenario and I have confirmed on numerous client sites that there are no files in their second stage recycle bins older than the day limit placed on the recycle bin as a whole. If you read this Microsoft article, you will find following statement in the last sentence of the Overview:

Regardless of whether or not an item is sent to the users’ Recycle Bin or to the Site Collection Recycle Bin, items are deleted automatically after the number of days that the central administrator specified. 

If you wish to test this yourself, please be aware that in order for items to be emptied from the recycle bin, the Timer Job “Recycle Bin” has to have run. By default, this timer job only runs once per day usually early in the morning. I would recommend you use the stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname job-recycle-bin-cleanup command to set the job to run more frequently while testing.

We had some developers wanting to use a Data Form Web Part (DFWP) in a site and access information through a web service on the internet. They were able to connect to the web service WSDL but when they went to Show Data, they would receive the following error:

“The server returned a non-specific error when trying to get data from the data source. Check the format and content of your query and try again. If the problem persists, contact the server administrator.”

Well, the problem did persist, so they contacted us as instructed.   We spent quite a bit of time troubeshooting the issue. After lots of getting no where, we realized we weren’t in Kansas anymore (actually Missouri) so we opened a case with MS CSS. After several weeks, it was determined that is a bug and there was a work around. I am not seen any KB articles with this information so I wanted to review the exact setup that causes the issue, why it is broken, and how to work around it as learned from CSS.

First the setup that causes this issue.

• You have a standard web application setup with a url in the default zone, for our example, we will use http://default.mycompany.com.
• You add an additional URL for the web application through the use of alternate access mappings (AAM) to provide access to the same content through a different URL. For our example, we will use http://intranet.mycompany.com. In this case, you do NOT extend the web application. You only add an AAM.
• When constructing the data view web part using Designer, we do your development against the additional URL you added (http://intranet.mycompany.com). The DFWP fails to work properly.
• If you test against the default URL http://default.mycompany.com, the DFWP works properly.

So here is what is causing the issue. When you are using the http://intranet.mycompany.com URL, the DFWP code tries to go out to IIS on the server, find the web site for http://intranet.mycompany.com to verify if Kerberos is enabled, and that calls fails because there is no web site tied directly to this URL.

The Workaround: If you are needing to use Data Form Web Parts and use multiple URLs through AAMs, you are going to have to extend the web application for each URL you had so there is a real IIS web site (with a seperate web.config) created. This will allow the Kerberos check to succeed.

We had the issue added to the bug list for SharePoint and it will be addressed sometime in the future. I will update this article as I see more information about this problem appear.

UPDATE (12/03/2008) See updated presentation post

It was great to be able to present this topic at the St. Louis SharePoint Users Group. Everyone seemed to stay engaged and had questions along the way. Please feel free to provide feedback in the comments section if you were at the presentation.

The presentation can be downloaded from the Horizons Consulting, Inc. Downloads area.

If you have questions about your SharePoint 2007 SP1 deployment or the presentation, please leave them in the comments section below.

So running an stsadm command to backup a content database is not difficult in a WSS 3.0 or SharePoint 2007 environment. However, there are some other additional steps you should take when doing these backups which I have outlined here.

1. Run “stsadm -o setsitelock” with the “-lock” parameter of either ”readonly” or “noaccess”
This ensures no changes are made to the database while backing it up.

2. Run “stsadm -o preparetomove”
This breaks the relationship between the database and the SSP. This allows a new/updated relationship to be established with this database and any SSP, as needed, when it is restored. This allows you to avoid the dreaded error message “Failure to synch web application <guid>: A duplicate site ID…”

3. Run “stsadm -o backup”
No explanation needed.

4. Run “stsadm -o sitelock” with the “-lock” parameter of “none”
This removes all locks on the database after the backup so changes can be made again.

Please see TechNet or “stsadm -help” for detailed instructions on all parameters needed to run these commands.

UPDATE (May 2008): If you would like more information about why I make the recommendation about preparetomove or you are having the sync issue and need a way to resolve, see this blog post.

UPDATE (May 2008): The presentation is posted here.

I will be presenting at the May meeting of the St. Louis Users SharePoint Group. I will discuss the important aspects you will need to know to successfully deploy Service Pack 1 in your Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment.  The presentation will provide an overview of the service pack contents, new “stsadm” commands enabled, and new functionality you can enable as needed. You will learn recommended additional actions you should take while upgrading. Finally, you will learn the step by step process for deployment as well as how to create a slipstream install to make future farm deployments and changes easier.

Hope to see you there!

I can now post to my blog from Jott.com. listen

Powered by Jott

Forgot to mention like I have in the past, I will be attending the SharePoint conference in Seattle next week. Let me know in the comments if you are going to be there and would like to meet up.

Mark Arend has a great diagram at this post outlining the interaction between My Sites and My Profiles. I am working on a project at a client where I need this information right now so this is great to come across it.

Mike Volodarsky has posted a great blog post explaining what different actions (stop, start, recyling, etc.) do to either a web site or application pool in IIS 7.0. From a SharePoint perspective, this helps to understand the mechanics of what is going on when you are administering SharePoint on Windows 2008 servers and working with IIS 7.0.

Eric Charron has posted about estimating the index size for SharePoint Search.  The formulas are great and provide you a good tool set to walk through the estimating process.  However, I wanted to add the reminder that those formulas are only as effective as the data you use in the beginning.  The first item you need to provide is the size of data to be crawled.  Some time needs to be spent understanding the area you are going to crawl including how much of that data is really going to be indexed.  Without good information to start, all the other calculations will be meaningless and unhelpful.

For example, if you have a 1TB fileshare you are going to index and 3/4 of the share is applications and install files, you can seriously oversize your index space and waste money on unneeded disk space.

UPDATE (May 2008): If you are going to using SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 1, change Eric’s initial size number from 2.5x to 2.85x. They changed the requirement in SP1…see Known Issues: Error: The search request is unable to connect to the search service.

In doing a recent Search Proof of Concept for a customer, I ran into a couple errors along the way that needed some fixes and I wanted to document the ones I will be adding to my install documents in the future.  This was a farm environment where there were multiple servers (1 app and 2 wfe) and there were multiple service accounts for each of the different roles within the farm.

 First, when trying to create index schedules, “access is denied” errors were displayed.  MS KB 926959 allowed us to get past the error.

 Second, when trying to view Search Usage reports, we were prompted for credentials even though the account had permissions.  I found the solution in Jingmei Li’s Blog and it points to .Net 2.0 hotfix 913384 and we got past the error once we installed the hotfix.

UPDATE (May 2008): Now, I would recommend you install .Net Framework 2.0 SP1 rather than work to install the individual hotfixes.

There is a known, unfixed bug with the combination of using certain survey questions in WSS 2.0 or Sharepoint 2003 and trying to export them to Excel 2003 documented in MS KB 828809.

When doing the export, you may receive the following message from Excel:
This list has hidden columns or read-only columns that require data but for which no default value has been specified. Existing rows in this list may therefore be edited, but new rows cannot be inserted.

This same issue exists if you are using WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 and still trying to export the information using Excel 2003.  Once you try the export with Excel 2007, there are no issues.

Right now, I don’t have access to a 2.0/2003 environment…I would be curious to find out if exporting with Excel 2007 resolves the issue there too which would prove that the issue is with Excel 2003 and not Sharepoint.

Let me know in the comments if you test this out, know the answer, or I will post an update if I get the chance to test it.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint+2007, SharePoint+Surveys

I mentioned in a previous post that I would post an update on how to block the beta version of Outlook 2007 while still allowing the production version to connect.  I am late getting this out but wanted to post it anyway.  Using that post, the Outlook client versions you would need to block would be as follows:

 12.0.0-12.4518.1013

The 2007 RTM version of EMSDB32.DLL is 12.0.4518.1014 so this entry makes sure any beta versions cannot connect. 

Technorati Tags: Outlook+2007, Disable+MAPI+Client

Got my registration put in for TechEd 2007.  Here is my TechEd connect card information.  Hope to meet other folks who are heading to Orlando this year!

Technorati Tags: TechEd, TechEd+2007, TechEd+Connect

Included in one of the recent updates to Exchange Best Practices Analzyer (ExBPA) is a new recommendation for Exchange 2003 servers.  There is a Windows 2003 Post SP1 hotfix out for a Terminal Service-Working Set issue.  So you may want to just add this to your list when you do your next round of Windows security patching and go ahead and address it.

You will need to contact Microsoft Support to obtain the hotfix as it is not publically available.  However, you are not charged for cases where you are receiving a hotfix.

Technorati Tags: Exchange+2003, ExBPA, Windows+2003

Now that Outlook 2007 Beta is publically available…have you considered that your users may have downloaded a copy and decided to connect it your production Exchange server?  Did you know you can easily protect your server from these connections?

The Disable MAPI Clients entry can keep unwanted clients (old or new) from connecting to your Exchange server.  In the case of keeping Outlook 2007 Beta off of your server, your entry for this registry key would be:

12.0.0-

Of course remember, when the production version of Outlook 2007 comes out, you will either need to remove this entry or update it.  I will post again when we know the production version number of Outlook 2007 with an update entry.

Also note, that if you are going to try to lock down other versions using this registry key, NEVER lock out the 6.0.0-6.9999.99 range as this is the version number for server-side Exchange components mapi connections.  And you do not need to restart services…updates to the registry entry are looked for every 15 minutes.  Please check out the details in the KB article linked above if you haven’t used this registry key before.

UPDATE:  I have posted the updated version numbers to block Beta versions but not the Production version here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft+Outlook+2007+Beta, Disable+MAPI+Client, Office+12, Outlook+Beta

If you have Windows servers that are exposed directly to the Internet so that their Service service is exposed, make you you get MS06-040 that was just released applied to your servers quickly.  There is active exploitation and public exploit code being used out there.

UPDATE:  MS has posted Security Advisory 992537 related to this vunerability also.

Technorati Tags: MS06-040, Security+patch, Windows+server, US-CERT

The Exchange Team released version 1.0 of the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant.  They are putting out some great tools for making it easier to manage your Exchange environments.  Keep it up folks!

There is a post on You Had Me at EHLO and Jon Avner had talked about it.

Andrew Connell has posted about a great page he put together with links about Web Content Management in MS Office Sharepoint Server.  Check it out!

I ran into this issue a few months ago and now that I have my blogged kicked off, I have a couple things I need to catch up on posting here…so here goes another one:

We had just migrated some mailboxes from one E2K3 SP2 server to another E2K3 SP2 server.  A couple users reported that their free/busy information was not being updated and they were receiving the error “Unable to update your free/busy information” when creating new appointments or accepting meeting requests.

Well, normally, this is an easy fix.  You do one of 2 things:
1.  Run a /cleanfreebusy
2.  Manually remove the user’s Free/Busy folder

The issue came up when I did Step 1.  I received a message I had never seen and could find very little reference to it on the web:  “Unable to clean your local free/busy information”  The key word here is LOCAL.  This post doesn’t apply if you don’t have the word LOCAL.

So I proceeded to some of the more advanced free/busy troubleshooting steps:
1.  Check for uppercase characters in the free/busy message
2.  Check the SiteFolderServer setting
3.  Recreated the calendar folder

Still, not working…so I open a PSS case.  PSS had only seen a couple instances of this case and the final fix had been to exmerge the mailbox out, delete the mailbox, recreate the mailbox, and exmerge the data back in.  I didn’t want to go with that answer because we had several more migrations to go and this would be a lot of overheard if we had to do it regularly.

So worked with PSS some more and finally off of something they said, got a crazy idea…and it worked!  So here what is was…it appears to be some problem with the MAPI property PR_FREEBUSY_ENTRYIDS.

You can fix this problem with the MAPI Editor Tool (the tool formerly known as MFCMapi).  You will need to create an Outlook profile for the mailbox you want to repair:

1.  Choose Session and Logon and Display Store Table
2.  Choose the Outlook profile you created
3.  Double click the Instance that starts with “Mailbox -”
4.  Expand Root – Mailbox
5.  Click on IPM_SUBTREE
6.  In the right window, if there is a property name of PR_FREEBUSY_ENTRYIDS, right click on it and choose Delete Property (if it exists here…it may not)
7.  Expand IPM_SUBTREE
8.  Click on Inbox
9.  In the right window, if there is a property name of PR_FREEBUSY_ENTRYIDS, right click on it and choose Delete Property
10.  Exit out of MAPI Editor.
11.  Rerun /cleanfreebusy on the mailbox. 

This should resolve the issue…at least it did in our case.  I hope this helps someone else and please post a comment if you used this post…I would be interested to know if others experience this!  Thanks!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft+Outlook, Outlook+free/busy, local+free/busy, cleanfreebusy

First, I definitely want to start out this post by saying that I love what HP has been doing with their network teaming software on the Windows platforms.  They are doing a great job on building teaming software that works well and is intelligent on complicated networks.

However, there have been a couple bumps in the road along the way recently that I have seen effect clients.  I want to provide some information to get folks back unto stable ground.  HP has addressed the issues but action needs to be taken to make sure you are OK.

First, let me give you the information on the articles I have reviewed that seem like they could effect most environments if you are using HP NIC teaming 8 on a Windows 200x platform on HP Proliant servers:

Teaming V. 7.58:  SLB Teams need to be reconfigured (this can effect you even if you are on version 8.x)
Document ID:  CO050225_CW01

Teaming v. 8.00 or earlier:  NC series NICS may not join team
Document ID:  EM050819_CW01 

Teaming v. 8.10 or earlier:  With 802.1Q VLANs configured, blue screen may occur with gigabit adapters
Document ID:  c00571541

Teaming v. 8.10:  After reboot, may not be able to connect to server
Document ID:  c00573469

So after our experience with the problems and some input from HP, here are my recommended steps for getting stable.  All downloads would be available from HP’s Support website:

1.  For onboard gigabit ethernet cards like the 77xx, there is a firmware upgrade.  Check your cards and upgrade the firmware.
2.  Upgrade your NIC drivers.  This is especially important for the NC series NICS (see above).  As of the date of this post, this can most easily be done by installing SmartPack 7.51.
3.  Upgrade your NIC Teaming to at least version 8.37.  As of the date of this post, this is the current version and can be done most easily by installing SmartPack 7.51.
4.  If you are receiving Recieve Path or Transmit Path warnings in your System event log, change the Validation Timer Internal under the team’s Settings tab from 3 to 10.
5.  If you have an SLB team, delete and recreate your team.  NOTE:  Save your IP configuration properties (IP address, DNS server, etc) BEFORE deleting team.  You will need to configure your IP properties after the team is created and before you reboot the server
6.  Test your failover.  Make sure it is working in your environment.
7.  If your test fails for any another kind of team other than SLB, I would recommend doing step 5 before opening a case with HP just to make sure all your team’s configuration is written to the registry with the most current version of the teaming software.

Just wanted to get my blog kicked off.  I wanted someplace that I can easily share information about things I come across and I hope others will find helpful.  Most of it will be around the Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint products but knowing me it will probably be on other technology topics along the way. 

So here we go…